There were two examinations: a midterm, and the final. Each involved stating some definitions, identifying some propositions as true or false with a brief justification, and writing two or three proofs. A reference sheet was allowed, which made the definitions portion somewhat farcical as a test of anything more than having bothered to prepare a reference sheet. (I objected to Prof. Schuster calling it a "cheat sheet." Since he was allowing it, it's wasn't "cheating"!)
-I did okay. I posted a 32.5/40 (81%) on the midterm. I'm embarrassed by my performance on the final. It looked easy, and I left the examination room an hour early after providing an answer to all the questions, only to realize a couple hours later that I had completely botched a compactness proof. Between that gaffe, the midterm, and my homework grades, I was expecting to end up with a B+ in the course. (How mortifying—to have gone back to school almost specifically for this course and then _not even get an A_.) But when the final grades came in, it ended up being an A: Prof. Schuster only knocked off 6 points for the bogus proof, for a final exam grade of 44/50 (88%), and had a policy of discarding the midterm grade when the final exam grade was higher. It still seemed to me that that should have probably worked out to an A− rather than an A, but it wasn't my job to worry about that.
+I did okay. I posted a 32.5/40 (81%) on the midterm. I'm embarrassed by my performance on the final. It looked easy, and I left the examination room an hour early after providing an answer to all the questions, only to realize a couple hours later that I had completely botched a compactness proof. Between that gaffe, the midterm, and my homework grades, I was expecting to end up with a B+ in the course. (How mortifying—to have gone back to school almost specifically for this course and then _not even get an A_.) But when the grades came in, it ended up being an A: Prof. Schuster only knocked off 6 points for the bogus proof, for a final exam grade of 44/50 (88%), and had a policy of discarding the midterm grade when the final exam grade was higher. It still seemed to me that that should have probably worked out to an A− rather than an A, but it wasn't my job to worry about that.
#### "Probability Models" (Fall 2024)
(I suspect Prof. Lai would have allowed LLMs on the midterm if I had asked—I didn't get the sense that he yet understood the edge that the latest models offered over mere books and websites. On 29 April, a friend told me that instructors will increasingly just assume students are cheating with LLMs anyway; anything that showed I put thought in would be refreshing. I said that for this particular class and professor, I thought I was a semester or two early for that. In fact, I was two weeks early: on 13 May, Prof. Lai remarked before class and in the conference room during Prof. Schuster's office hours that he had given a bunch of analysis problems to Gemini the previous night, and it got them all right.)
-I got a 73 on [my midterm](http://zackmdavis.net/docs/davis-theory_of_functions_of_a_complex_variable-midterm.pdf). Even with the (static) internet, sometimes I would hit a spot where I got stuck and couldn't get unstuck in a reasonable amount of time.
+I got a 73/100 on [my midterm](http://zackmdavis.net/docs/davis-theory_of_functions_of_a_complex_variable-midterm.pdf). Even with the (static) internet, sometimes I would hit a spot where I got stuck and couldn't get unstuck in a reasonable amount of time.
There were only 9 homework assignments during the semester (contrasted to 12 in "Measure and Integration") to give us time to work on an expository paper and presentation on one of either the Gamma function, the Reimann zeta function, the prime number theorem, or elliptic functions. I wrote [four pages on "Pinpointing the Generalized Factorial"](http://zackmdavis.net/docs/generalized_factorial.pdf), explaining the motivation of the Gamma function, except that I'm not fond of how the definition is shifted by one from what you'd expect, so I wrote about the unshifted Pi function instead.
But the reason I had come back was that I could recognize the moral legitimacy of a command to prove a theorem about uniform convergence. For this class, while I could have worked harder if I had wanted to, it was hard to want to when much of the content was so impossible to take seriously.
-Asked to explain why the author of [an article](https://www.sfgayhistory.com/2014/10/28/sf-halloween-was-never-just-for-kids/) said that Halloween was "one of the High Holy Days for the gay community", I objected to the characterization as implicitly anti-Semitic and homophobic. The High Holy Days are not a "fun" masquerade holiday the way modern Halloween is. The יָמִים נוֹרָאִים—_yamim noraim_, "days of awe"—are a time of repentance and seeking closeness to God, in which it is said that הַשֵּׁם—_ha'Shem_, literally "the name", an epithet for God—will inscribe the names of the righteous in the Book of Life. Calling Halloween a gay High Holy Day implicitly disrespects either the Jews (by denying the seriousness of the Days of Awe), or the gays (by suggesting that their people are incapable of seriousness), or the reader (by assuming that they're incapable of any less superficial connection between holidays than "they both happen around October"). In contrast, describing Halloween as a gay Purim would have been entirely appropriate. "They tried to oppress us; we're still here; let's have a masquerade party with alcohol" is entirely the spirit of both Purim and Halloween.
+Asked to explain why the author of [an article](https://www.sfgayhistory.com/2014/10/28/sf-halloween-was-never-just-for-kids/) said that Halloween was "one of the High Holy Days for the gay community", I objected to the characterization as implicitly anti-Semitic and homophobic. The High Holy Days are not a "fun" masquerade holiday the way modern Halloween is. The יָמִים נוֹרָאִים—_yamim noraim_, "days of awe"—are a time of repentance and seeking closeness to God, in which it is said that הַשֵּׁם—_ha'Shem_, literally "the name", an epithet for God—will inscribe the names of the righteous in the Book of Life. Calling Halloween a gay High Holy Day implicitly disrespects either the Jews (by denying the seriousness of the Days of Awe), or the gays (by suggesting that their people are incapable of seriousness), or the reader (by assuming that they're incapable of any less superficial connection between holidays than "they both happen around October"). In contrast, describing Halloween as a gay Purim would have been entirely appropriate. "They tried to genocide us; we're still here; let's have a masquerade party with alcohol" is entirely in the spirit of both Purim and Halloween.
I was proud of that answer (and Prof. Goldberg bought it), but it was the pride of coming up with something witty in response to a garbage prompt that had no other function than to prove that the student can read and write. I didn't really think the question was anti-Semitic and homophobic; I was doing a bit.
In April, the usual leftist blob on campus had scheduled a "Defend Higher Education" demonstration to protest proposed budget cuts to the California State University system; Prof. Moore offered one point of extra credit in "Philosophy of Animals" for participating.
-I was livid. Surely it would be a be a breach of professional conduct to offer students course credit for attending an anti-abortion or pro-Israel rally. Why should the school presume it had the authority to tell students to speak out in favor of more school? I quickly wrote Prof. Moore an email in complaint, suggesting that the extra credit opportunity be viewpoint-neutral: available to available to budget cut _proponents_ (or those with more nuanced views) as well as opponents.
+I was livid. Surely it would be a breach of professional conduct to offer students course credit for attending an anti-abortion or pro-Israel rally. Why should the school presume it had the authority to tell students to speak out in favor of more school? I quickly wrote Prof. Moore an email in complaint, suggesting that the extra credit opportunity be viewpoint-neutral: available to available to budget cut _proponents_ (or those with more nuanced views) as well as opponents.
I added:
I was able to satisfy the "Area E: Lifelong Learning and Self-Development" gen-ed requirement with an asynchronous online-only class, Prof. Mariana Ferreira's "Self, Place, and Knowing". Whatever expectations I had of a lower-division social studies gen-ed class at San Francisco State University, this felt like a parody of that.
-The first few weekly assignments were quizzes on given readings. This already annoyed me: in a synchronous in-person class, a "quiz" is typically closed-book unless otherwise specified. The purpose is to verify that the student did the reading. It would be a perversion of that purpose for the quiz-taker to read the question, and then Ctrl-F in the PDF to find the answer, but there was no provision for stopping that eventuality here.
+The first few weekly assignments were quizzes on given readings. This already annoyed me: in a synchronous in-person class, a "quiz" is typically closed-book unless otherwise specified. The purpose is to verify that the student did the reading. It would be a perversion of that purpose for the quiz-taker to read the question, and then Ctrl-F in the PDF to find the answer without reading the full text, but there was no provision for stopping that eventuality here.
-The first quiz was incredibly poorly written: some of the answers were obvious just from looking at the multiple choice options, and some of them depended on minutiae of the text that a typical reader couldn't reasonably be expected to remember. (The article quoted several academics in passing, and then the quiz had a question of the form "[name] at [university] expresses concerns about:".) I took it closed-book and got 7/10.
+The first quiz was incredibly poorly written: some of the answers were obvious just from looking at the multiple choice options, and some of them depended on minutiae of the text that a typical reader couldn't reasonably be expected to memorize. (The article quoted several academics in passing, and then the quiz had a question of the form "[name] at [university] expresses concerns about:".) I took it closed-book and got 7/10.
I posted a question on the class forum asking for clarification on the closed-book issue, and gently complaining about the terrible questions (Subject: "Are the quizzes supposed to be 'open book'? And, question design"). No one replied; I was hoping Prof. Ferreira kept an eye on the forum. I could have inquired with her more directly, but the syllabus said Zoom office hours were by appointment only at 8 _a.m._ Tuesdays—just when I was supposed to be out the door to be on time for "Measure and Integration." I decided not to bother.
-You might question why I even bothered to ask on the forum, given that I could just adhere to a closed-book policy unilaterally and contemptuously eat the resulting subpar scores. But I had noticed that my cumulative GPA was sitting at 3.47 (down from 3.49 in Spring 2013 because of that C− in "Queer Literatures and Media" last semester), and 3.5 would classify my degree as _cum laude_. Despite everything, I think I did want an A in "Self, Place, and Knowing", and my probability of getting an A was lower if I handicapped myself with moral constraints perceived by myself and probably not anyone else.
+You might question why I even bothered to ask on the forum, given my contempt for grade-grubbing: I could just adhere to a closed-book policy unilaterally and eat the resulting subpar scores. But I had noticed that my cumulative GPA was sitting at 3.47 (down from 3.49 in Spring 2013 because of that C− in "Queer Literatures and Media" last semester), and 3.5 would classify my degree as _cum laude_. Despite everything, I think I did want an A in "Self, Place, and Knowing", and my probability of getting an A was lower if I handicapped myself with moral constraints perceived by myself and probably not anyone else.
-My forum post got no responses. I also did the next two quizzes closed book—except that on the third quiz, I think I succumbed to the temptation to peek at the PDF once, but didn't end up changing my answer as the result of the peek. Was that contrary to the moral law? Was this entire endeavor now morally tainted by that one moment, however inconsequential it was to any outcome?
+My forum post got no responses. I also did the next two quizzes closed book—except that on the third quiz, I think I succumbed to the temptation to peek at the PDF once, but didn't end up changing my answer as the result of the peek. Was that contrary to the moral law? Was this entire endeavor of finishing the degree now morally tainted by that one moment, however inconsequential it was to any outcome?
-[TODO— One could argue that it was genuinely unclear whether closed-book was an expectation, such that I did nothing wrong!—that even my good-faith attempt to clarify on the class forum was supererogatory. If she expected closed-book on the honor system, she probably should have said that on the syllabus, right? The syllabus was very clear about AI plagiarism. Part of the reason I peeked—even though I would have never peeked at another student's paper duing a math exam—is because I sensed that "Self, Place, and Knowing" was not a place where the moral law applied. In a math quiz, it's _clear_ to everyone that peeking is wrong. Here, no one clarified what the rules even were, even after I asked in the most obvious place—and no one would clarify, because no one cared.]
+I think part of the reason I peeked was because, in that moment, I was feeling doubtful that the logic of "the word 'quiz' implies closed-book unless otherwise specified" held any force outside of my own head. Maybe "quiz" just meant "collection of questions to answer", and referring back to the reading was expected. The syllabus had been very clear about LLM use being plagiarism, despite how hard that was to enforce. If Prof. Ferreira had expected the quizzes to be closed book on the honor system, wouldn't she have said that in the syllabus, too? The fact that no one had shown any interest in clarifying what the rules were even after I had asked in the most obvious place, suggested that no one cared. I couldn't be in violation of the moral law if "Self, Place, and Knowing" was not a place where the moral law applied.
It turned out that I needn't have worried about my handicapped quiz scores (cumulative 32/40 = 80%) hurting my chances of making _cum laude_. Almost all of the remaining assignments were written (often in the form of posts to the class forum, including responses to other students), and Prof. Ferreira awarded full or almost-full credit for submissions that met the prescribed wordcount and made an effort to satisfy the (often unclear or contradictory) requirements.
In contrast to my negligence in "Queer Literatures and Media", I mostly did the reading for "Philosophy of Animals"—but only mostly. It wasn't important to notice or track if I missed an article or skimmed a few pages here and there (in addition to my thing of cutting class in favor of Prof. Schuster's office hours half the time). I engaged with the material enough to answer the written exam questions, and that was the only thing anyone was measuring. It was fine; I was fine.
-[TODO—
- * listing Heald on admissions, aftermath
-]
-
-I was fine now, but I hadn't been fine at Santa Cruz in 2007. The contrast in mindset is stark and instructive. Recall that the precipitating event of my whole anti-school crusade had been the hysterical complete mental breakdown I had after finding myself unable to meet pagecount on a paper for "Introduction to Feminisms".
+I was fine now, but I hadn't been fine at Santa Cruz in 2007. The contrast in mindset is instructive. Recall that the precipitating event of my whole anti-school crusade had been the hysterical complete mental breakdown I had after finding myself unable to meet pagecount on a paper for "Introduction to Feminisms".
It seems so insane in retrospect. As I demonstrated with my malicious compliance for "Self, Place, and Knowing", writing a paper that will receive a decent grade in an undergraduate social studies class is just not cognitively difficult (even if Prof. Aptheker and the UCSC of 2007 probably had higher standards than Prof. Ferreira and the SFSU of 2025). I could have done it—if I had been cynical enough to bullshit for the sake of the assignment, rather than holding myself to the standard of writing something I believed and having a complete mental breakdown rather than confront the fact that I apparently didn't believe what I was being taught in "Introduction to Feminisms."
-I don't want to condemn my younger self entirely, because the trait that made me so insanely dysfunctional was a form of integrity. I was right to want to write something I believed. It would be morally wrong to give up my soul to the kind of cynicism that scorns ideals themselves, rather than scorning people and institutions for not living up to the ideals and lying about it.
+I don't want to condemn my younger self entirely, because the trait that made me so insanely dysfunctional was a form of integrity. I was right to want to write something I believed. It would be wrong to give up my soul to the kind of cynicism that scorns ideals themselves, rather than the kind than scorns people and institutions for not living up to the ideals and lying about it.
-Even so, it would have been better for everyone if I had either bullshit to meet the pagecount, or just turned in a too-short paper without having a total mental breakdown about it. The total mental breakdown didn't help anyone! It was bad for me, and it imposed costs on everyone around me.
+Even so, it would have been better for everyone if I had either bullshitted to meet the pagecount, or just turned in a too-short paper without having a total mental breakdown about it. The total mental breakdown didn't help anyone! It was bad for me, and it imposed costs on everyone around me.
-I wish I had known that the kind of integrity I craved could be had in other ways. I think I did better for myself this time by mostly complying with the streams of natural language instructions, but not throwing a fit when I didn't comply, and writing this blog post afterwards to clarify what happened. If anyone has any doubts about the meaning of my Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics for Liberal Arts, they can read this post and get a pretty good idea of what that entailed. I've put in more than enough of an effort to be transparent that it just doesn't make sense for me to be neurotically afraid of accidentally being a fraud.
+I wish I had known that the kind of integrity I craved could be had in other ways. I think I did better for myself this time by mostly complying with the streams of natural language instructions, but not throwing a fit when I didn't comply, and writing this blog post afterwards to clarify what happened. If anyone has any doubts about the meaning of my Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics for Liberal Arts, they can read this post and get a pretty good idea of what that entailed. I've put in more than enough effort into being transparent that it doesn't make sense for me to be neurotically afraid of accidentally being a fraud.
-I think the Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics does mean something, even to me. It can simultaneously be the case that existing schools are awful for all the reasons I've laid out, and that there's something real about some parts of them. Part of the tragedy of my story is that because having wasting too much of my life in classes that were just obedience tests, I wasn't prepared to appreciate the value of classes that weren't just that. If I had known, I could have deliberately sought them out at Santa Cruz.
+I think the Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics does mean something, even to me. It can simultaneously be the case that existing schools are awful for the reasons I've laid out, and that there's something real about some parts of them. Part of the tragedy of my story is that having wasted too much of my life in classes that were just obedience tests, I wasn't prepared to appreciate the value of classes that weren't just that. If I had known, I could have deliberately sought them out at Santa Cruz.
-[TODO—
- * I think I'm latching on to math as something legible where the school model is tolerable; non-math school _could_ be real; it just isn't, empirically; math is so unnatural and writing is natural
-]
+Separately, I think I've latched on to math as something legible enough and unnatural enough (in contrast to writing) that the school model is tolerable. My primary contributions to the world are not as a mathematician. If I have to prove my intellectual value to Society in some way that doesn't depend on people intimately knowing my work, this is a way that makes sense, because math is too difficult and too pure to be ruined by the institution. Maybe other subjects could be studied in school in a way that's not fake. I just haven't seen it done.
-None of this is to justify credentialism, of course. Chris Olah never got his Bachelor's degree, and anyone who thinks less of him because of that is telling on themselves.
+My grudging admission that the degree means something to me should not be construed as support for credentialism. Neural net interpretability pioneer Chris Olah never got his Bachelor's degree, and anyone who thinks less of him because of that is telling on themselves.
-At the same time, I'm not Chris Olah. 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 finishing is not an admission that the credentialists were right.) Obviously, I know 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 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.
+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 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).
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.
-[TODO—
- * without justifying the credentialist menace, the fact that I was ill-calibrated, is why coercion is functional; it's possible to do worse
- * it was chance that I ended up deciding to finish before moving; finishing at Reno would be harder
-]
+It doesn't justify the scourge of credentialism, but the fact that I was ill-calibrated about the reality of the mathematical skill ladder helps explain why the coercion of credentialism is functional, why the power structure survives instead of getting competed out of existence. As terrible as school is along so many dimensions, it's tragically possible for people to do worse for themselves in freedom along some dimensions.
+
+There's a substantial component of chance in my coming to finish the degree. The idea presented itself to me in early 2024 while I was considering what to work on next after a writing project had reached a natural stopping point. People were discussing education and schooling on Twitter in a way that pained me, and it occurred to me that I would feel better about being able to criticize school from the position of "... and I have a math degree" rather than "... so I didn't finish." It seemed convenient enough, so I did it.
+
+But a key reason it seemed convenient enough is that I still happened to live within commuting distance of SF State. That may be more due to inertia than anything else; when I needed to change apartments in 2023, I had considered moving to Reno, NV, but ended up staying in the East Bay because it was less of a hassle. If I had fled to Reno, then finishing the degree on a whim at University of Nevada–Reno would have been less convenient. I probably wouldn't have done it—and I think it was ultimately worth doing.
+
+The fact that humans are such weak general intelligences that so much of our lives come down to happenstance, rather than people charting an optimal path and not deviating from it, helps explain why there are institutions that shunt people down a standard track with a known distribution of results. I don't like it and still think it deserves to be competed out of existence, but I can respect it a little more now.
#### It's Going to Be the Future Soon
projects / An_Algorithmic_Lucidity.git / commitdiff