From: Zack M. Davis Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2025 22:09:48 +0000 (-0800) Subject: tap "College" ... before an executive decision X-Git-Url: https://zackmdavis.net/blog/source?a=commitdiff_plain;h=73f3ee9099dd91323cb685d93cf3a327d0db48ad;p=An_Algorithmic_Lucidity.git tap "College" ... before an executive decision You know what? It's 31 December. I was imagining finishing the prologue, but in addition to it being expensive to confront the past, it's also plausibly not the highest value task. It's not "now or never"; I could pull it out into a prequel post, and having this post be narrowly focused on my return and triumph at SFSU is more cohesive. --- diff --git a/college_was_not_that_terrible_now_that_im_not_that_crazy.md b/college_was_not_that_terrible_now_that_im_not_that_crazy.md index e79bf43..ac6eff7 100644 --- a/college_was_not_that_terrible_now_that_im_not_that_crazy.md +++ b/college_was_not_that_terrible_now_that_im_not_that_crazy.md @@ -8,9 +8,10 @@ To be clear, "better than I expected" is not an endorsement of college. SF State But it didn't hurt this time, because I had a sense of humor about it now—and a sense of perspective (thanks to life experience, no thanks to school). Ultimately, [policy debates should not appear one-sided](https://www.readthesequences.com/Policy-Debates-Should-Not-Appear-One-Sided): if things are terrible, it's probably not because people are choosing the straightforwardly terrible thing for no reason whatsoever, with no trade-offs, coordination problems, or nonobvious truths making the terrible thing look better than it is. The thing that makes life under communism unbearable is the fact that you can't leave. Having escaped, and coming back as a visiting dignitary, one is a better position to make sense of how and why the regime functions—the problems it solves, at whatever cost in human lives or dignity—the forces that make it stable if not good. - ### Past Prologue +#### Prehistory + 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_. @@ -29,6 +30,8 @@ The contrast between my intellectual ambition (expressed in my reading and my no There were doubts. In September 2005, I wrote in my Diary that I felt as if I didn't want to go to college. I fantasized about getting a job and being independent as soon as possible. "If I were to stop my formal education after high school, would [that] really be a sort of intellectual suicide?" I wrote. "I don't think so. I could buy college textbooks and read them, all by myself." But that was just a passing fantasy; actually forgoing college was unthinkable given my social background. The next year, I enrolled at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and I was ego-syntonic about it. My mother once asked if I was doing okay at Santa Cruz, and floated the idea of living at home and taking classes at community college. I said, "Are you _trying_ to sabotage my education?" +#### University of California, Santa Cruz (Fall 2006–Fall 2007) + I was not doing okay at Santa Cruz. I cried a lot. I went through a period where I was terrified of either accidentally committing plagiarism or being falsely accused of plagiarism. We don't have introspective access to where all our ideas come from. How could I _know_ whether an idea I thought of as "mine", I might have actually read about somewhere and then forgotten that I had read it? @@ -45,10 +48,16 @@ Events came to a head at the end of the quarter of Fall 2007, when I found mysel I ended up getting a B+ in "Introduction to Feminisms." I wrote to the T.A. that this "puzzled me, because I thought it had been manifest that my performance merited an F or D grade." I concluded, "This email is just to alert you to this error." (She sent me a nice reply explaining that it wasn't an error, that she and Prof. Aptheker had valued my work.) +#### Heald Career College (2008) + In mid-2008, I enrolled in the network administration program at Heald career college, on the theory they could _just_ teach me job-relevant skills, without inserting their authority between me and the books of my real education. I thought that that wouldn't be torture the way that the University had been. I remember staff being surprised at my high scores on the entry test. (People with my IQ usually go to university, not career college.) The program had an elementary algebra requirement, which I imagined myself dominating and thereby attaining atonement for the sins of my failures to comply in my university math classes. They waived the algebra requirement on account of my UCSC calculus credits. In retrospect, waiving the requiement is obviously sensible and my vision of "atonement" was insane. Evidently, the career college staff had a more pragmatic understanding of the purpose of school than I did. (If someone is certified as knowing calculus, there's no reason for them to sit through an elementary algebra class.) The obedience test was all in my head. +[TODO: the union rep wouldn't waive the 24 hour entitlement] + Nevertheless, Heald was still a school despite the "career" focus, and the torturous obedience test in my head was still active. I had another crying fit and quit again before the first term was over. Part of the program would have involved taking the A+ and Network+ certification exams. I got the books and passed those on my own, but never ended up converting them into a job; maybe I could have if I had tried harder. +#### Independence 2008–2010 + In fall 2008, I got the idea that my autodidacticism should include mathematics and started studying linear algebra from the textbook I had used at UCSC. When I had had my fill of linear algebra, I followed it up with work from books on complex analysis and discrete math, and various other math and programming excursions I came across: I [figured out how 1/x can be the derivative of log x even though the latter isn't defined for x≤0](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2011/12/the-derivative-of-the-natural-logarithm/). I worked out a formula for the disjunction of independent events of probablity _p_ (and was later informed by a friend that DeMorgan's law gives a much simpler formula). I got a quantitative evolutionary theory book and tried to generalize the Hardy–Weinberg law to the science-fictional hypothetical case of a genome having three alleles per locus (in which case the famous Punnett square becomes a cube). I kept all my notes and exercises in a continuous sequence of numbered pages divided into two columns. In April 2009, I visited the UCSC campus to see my friends and visit the office hours of Prof. Patrick Tantalo (who had taught that linear algebra class) and Prof. Aptheker. I told Prof. Tantalo about my mathematical exploits, but disclaimed several times that I wasn't even a "math person"; he wisely asked what that even meant. @@ -57,20 +66,30 @@ In April 2009, I visited the UCSC campus to see my friends and visit the office I suspected I might have gotten more studying done than my friends during the visit. -[TODO— +[TODO 2009-2010— * anxiety about the idea of being a programmer * Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages and Computation for SingInst internship (Anna suggested just Turing machines, but I did the earlier stuff) * vector calc * microeconomic theory + * I read the PageRank paper; I had a UC Berkeley library card for the public and read Kevin S. Van Horn's guide to Cox's theorem ] -[TODO— +#### Diablo Valley College (Fall 2010–Spring 2012) + +[TODO "Differential Equations"— +In fall 2010, I decided to enroll in + * page number checkpoint before discussing diffeq. + * would my vector calc credits from Santa Cruz have sufficed? + * entry test * Fall 2010, tried to enroll in differential equations for fun, got "schooled", humiliating - * Then felt like I had to finish my degree in order to prove that I could (note that I have Diary coverage of this period and can quote it) + * quote Diary coverage ] -[TODO— +I got a C. At that point, I felt like I had to finish my degree in order to prove that I could. + +[TODO DVC— + * DVC didn't have any more decent math classes; I took Calc III for completeness even though my vector-calc 23A from Santa Cruz might have covered it * "Competing Accounts of the Events of September 11, 2001: A Simplified and Incomplete Bayesian Analysis" * summer history teacher, my objection to colored pencils, her bafflement that I was in her class (peeking at her reading my papers during the test while feeling guilty for not having eyes on my own paper) @@ -79,19 +98,29 @@ I suspected I might have gotten more studying done than my friends during the vi * including math in LyX in papers whenever possible * having to stay at DVC longer than I expected to cover the SFSU gened requirements (is there Diary coverage of this?) * "The Skriker and the Relativity of Aesthetic Value" - * "_Anarchy Evolution_ and Selection as an Optimization Process" ("THis is the best community college paper I have ever read") "Shakespeare Is Overrated", inviting Julia Galef as guest lecturer + * "_Anarchy Evolution_ and Selection as an Optimization Process" ("THis is the best community college paper I have ever read") "Shakespeare Is Overrated", inviting Julia Galef as guest lecturer, confessing that I read the Cliff Notes + * anthropology extra credit * anxiety over whether to include Heald in transfer applications * Calc III show-off +] + +#### San Francisco State University, the first time (Fall 2012–Spring 2013) + +[TODO SFSU— * no response from Schuster about "Real Analysis I" * bitterness and dejection at SFSU, Prof. Hosten being welcoming but not wanting to cover chapters ahead * Hayashi was nice, Putnam disappointment * a memory from 2013: he asked what a sequence was, I said, "A function from the naturals to the reals", he asked how I knew that, I said, "I know how to read" * obsessively doing lots of math in my private pages and neglecting my official schoolwork; B in "Probability and Statistics I", B+ in "Mathematical Optimization" (and I'm kind of suspicious of the grading curve there) +] + +#### Escape + +[TODO— * App Academy and rescue and happily ever after * Pugh informal audit ] - ### Doing It Right This Time (Math) The undergraduate mathematics program at SFSU has three tracks: for "advanced studies", for teaching, and for liberal arts. My student record from 2013 was still listed as on the advanced studies track. In order to graduate as quickly as possible, I switched to the liberal arts track, which, beyond a set of "core" courses, only requires five electives numbered 300 or higher. The only core course I hadn't completed was "Modern Algebra I", and I had done two electives in Fall 2012 ("Mathematical Optimization" and "Probability and Statistics I"), so I only had four math courses (including "Modern Algebra I") to complete for the major. @@ -415,7 +444,9 @@ The fact that humans are such weak general intelligences that so much of our liv Afterwards, Prof. Schuster encouraged me via email to at least consider grad school, saying that I seemed comparable to his peers in the University of Michigan Ph.D. program (which was ranked #10 in the U.S. at that time in the late '90s). I demurred: I said I would consider it if circumstances were otherwise, but in contrast to the last two semesters to finish undergrad, grad school didn't pass a cost-benefit analysis. -(Okay, I did end up [crashing Prof. Clader's "Advanced Topics in Mathematics: Algebraic Topology"](http://zackmdavis.net/docs/algebraic_topology-01.pdf) ("MATH 790") the following semester, but I didn't _enroll_.) +(Okay, I did end up [crashing Prof. Clader's "Advanced Topics in Mathematics: Algebraic Topology"](http://zackmdavis.net/docs/algebraic_topology-01.pdf) ("MATH 790") the following semester, and she agreed to grade my examinations, on which I got + +But I didn't _enroll_.) What was significant (but not appropriate to mention in the email) was that now the choice to pursue more schooling _was_ a matter of cost–benefit analysis, and not a prospect of torment or betrayal of the divine.