### Past Prologue
-I wasn't always like this. Until I quit college the first time, I had had a pretty normal school experience for my social background: public elementary school, then Jewish day school from 5th to 8th grades, then back to public high school, then to the University of California at Santa Cruz before everything changed. It's only in retrospect that there were clues that something was wrong.
+I wasn't always like this. Until I quit college the first time, I had a pretty normal school experience for my social background: public elementary school in a good suburb, then Jewish day school from 5th to 8th grades, then back to public high school, then to the University of California at Santa Cruz—before everything changed. It's only in retrospect that there were clues that something was wrong.
It started out fine. I remember in first grade getting a sequence of arithmetic workbooks and going through them much faster than most of the other children, like being on chapter 30 when Chelsea was only on chapter 6. I needed help from the teacher when I got to multi-digit subtraction with borrowing. I remember in second grade, Mrs. Wright had a practice of "reading stars"—for every so many minutes of reading, the name of the book would be written by one of the points of a yellow construction paper five-point star. I earned _so many stars_.
-At some point, they stopped giving me workbooks and reading stars, and just had classes, which was obviously worse
+At some point, they stopped giving me workbooks and reading stars to race through and just had classes with all the children listening to the same teacher and obeying the teacher's commands at the same pace. In retrospect, this seems obviously worse and insane, but at the time, I had no standard of comparison from which to object to anything.
+
+A crucial part of my complaint that schoolbound souls might not understand is that when I complain about being expected to obey the teacher's commands, I don't mean in contrast to not doing any intellectual work at all, and only doing frivolous and "fun" things. I'm saying that the arithmetic workbooks (offering me a choice of pace) and reading stars (offering a choice of book) were a superior form of intellectual work.
+
+I don't look particularly fondly on "fun" school activities lacking substance. In Jewish middle school, they gave us an occasional period to play games, which I remember looking down on. I didn't look down on recess, during which the other boys and I would often play basketball or football—but that was understood as _recess_, not a class period.
+
+In January 2005, my 11th grade English teacher had a class party at the conclusion of our unit on _The Great Gatsby_. I wrote in my Diary: "Fancy that all this happened during hours when we were supposed to be, you know, learning stuff! Sometimes I feel guilty that my life, this high school life is too easy." I was not wise enough to spontaneously generate the obvious followup thought, that I could and should have been doing harder work.
+
+I did read a lot: books, and then blogs and _Wikipedia_. I liked Isaac Asimov and Ayn Rand, and later, Greg Egan. In high school, I started keeping little pocket notebooks and writing in them in preference to paying attention in class—nothing very structured, just rambling and observations and scraps of dialogue. I tried to write fiction, but never seemed to finish any stories.
+
+
+"The Greater Glory of Our Humble Academy"
+
+The theme of intellectual ambition
+
[TODO—
- * I had accepted the necessity of school==education because everyone said so; looking back, there are clues.
- * Reading stars and workbooks in 1st–2nd grade (they should have kept doing that!)
- * Time in middle school where they let us play games and I thought less of it; the time in high school where he had a class party and I described high school life as "easy" in my Diary
* The theme of intellectual ambition in my juvenillia: "The Greater Glory of Our Humble Academy" (and also, after my anti-school reformation, "Rusting in the Rain")
* The time my mother asked if I was OK at Santa Cruz and suggested the idea of DVC at home, and I said, are you _trying_ to sabotage my education?
* The time I thought I didn't want to go to college and wrote about it in my Diary (September 2005); "I could buy college textbooks and read them, all by myself"
I inquired about Prof. Goldberg's office hours, which turned out to be directly before and after class, which conflicted with my other classes. (I gathered that Prof. Goldberg was commuting to SF State specifically to teach this class in an adjunct capacity; she more commonly taught at [City College of San Francisco](https://www.ccsf.edu/).) I ditched "Probability Models" lecture one day, just to talk with her about my whole deal. (She didn't seem to approve of me ditching another class when I mentioned that detail.)
-It went surprisingly well. Prof. Goldberg is a butch lesbian who, crucially, was old enough to remember the before-time prior to the hegemony of gender identity ideology, and seemed sympathetic to gentle skepticism of some of the newer ideas. She could grant that trans women's womanhood was different from that of cis women, and criticized the way activist tends to glamorizes suicide, in contrast to promoting narratives of queer resilience.
+It went surprisingly well. Prof. Goldberg is a butch lesbian who, crucially, was old enough to remember the before-time prior to the hegemony of gender identity ideology, and seemed sympathetic to gentle skepticism of some of the newer ideas. She could grant that trans women's womanhood was different from that of cis women, and criticized the way activists tend to glamorizes suicide, in contrast to promoting narratives of queer resilience.
When I mentioned my specialization, she remarked that she had never had a math major among her students. Privately, I doubted whether that was really true. (I couldn't have been the only one who needed the gen-ed credits.) But I found it striking for the lack of intellectual ambition it implied within the discipline. I unironically think you do need some math in order to do gender studies correctly—not a lot, just enough linear-algebraic and statistical intuition to ground the idea of categories as clusters in high-dimensional space. I can't imagine resigning myself to such smallness, consigning such a vast and foundational area of knowledge to be someone else's problem—or when I do (_e.g._, I can't say I know any chemistry), I feel sad about it.
At the same time, I'm not Chris Olah. For those of us without access to the feedback loops entailed by a research position at Google Brain, there's a benefit to being calibrated about the standard way things are done. (Which, I hasten to note, I could in principle have gotten from MIT OpenCourseWare; my accounting of benefits from happening to finish college is not an admission that the credentialists were right.) Obviously, I knew that math is not a spectator sport: in the years that I was filling my pages of notes from my own textbooks, I was attempting exercises and not just reading (because just reading doesn't work). But was I doing _enough_ exercises, correctly, to the standard that would be demanded in a school class, before moving on to the next shiny topic? It's not worth the effort to do an exhaustive audit of my 2008–2024 private work, but I think in many cases, I was not. Having a better sense of what the mainstream standard is will help me adjust my self-study practices going forward.
-When I informally audited honors analysis at UC Berkeley in 2017, Prof. Charles C. Pugh agreed to grade my midterm, and I got a 56/100. I don't know what the class's distribution was. Having been given to understand that many STEM courses offered a generous curve, I would later describe it as me ["[doing] fine on the midterm"](/2024/Mar/agreeing-with-stalin-in-ways-that-exhibit-generally-rationalist-principles/#it-matters-whether-peoples-beliefs-about-themselves-are-actually-true). Looking at the paper after having been through even SFSU's idea of an analysis course, I think I was expecting too little of myself: by all rights, a serious analysis student in exam shape _should_ be able to prove that the minimum distance between a compact and a connected set is achieved by some pair of points in the sets, or the product of connected spaces is connected (as opposed to merely writing down relevant observations that fell short of a proof, as I did).
+When I informally audited honors analysis at UC Berkeley in 2017, Prof. Charles C. Pugh agreed to grade my midterm, and I got a 56/100. I don't know what the class's distribution was. Having been given to understand that many STEM courses offered a generous curve, I would later describe it as me ["[doing] fine on the midterm"](/2024/Mar/agreeing-with-stalin-in-ways-that-exhibit-generally-rationalist-principles/#it-matters-whether-peoples-beliefs-about-themselves-are-actually-true). Looking at the exam paper after having been through even SFSU's idea of an analysis course, I think I was expecting too little of myself: by all rights, a serious analysis student in exam shape _should_ be able to prove that the minimum distance between a compact and a connected set is achieved by some pair of points in the sets, or the product of connected spaces is connected (as opposed to merely writing down relevant observations that fell short of a proof, as I did).
In a July 2011 Diary entry, yearning to finally be free of school, I fantasized about speedrunning SF State's "advanced studies" track in two semesters: "Six classes a semester sounds like a heavy load, but it won't be if I study some of the material in advance," I wrote. That seems delusional now. That's not actually true of real math classes, even if it were potentially true of "Self, Place, and Knowing"-tier bullshit classes.
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