Diary, I am writing to you because I am humiliated. I’m taking a class on differential equations at Diablo Valley Shithole (“I mean College—no, wait, I might have had it right the first time”), and I failed the first quiz. There are a number of plausible excuses I could make—some of them are even true (for example, obviously I merely misread as , which is just a silly oversight that anyone could make, so the fact that I bombed that particular question is extremely weak evidence against my beauty)—but I don’t want to be the sort of petulant student who comes up with excuses; I want to know what actually went wrong. The quiz is evidence against my beauty; it might be outweighed by a mountain of other evidence supporting the thesis of my beauty, but I can’t brush it away as if it were nothing.
Failing the quiz is a disaster, because it means there is a sense in which I can’t quit. I decided to take this class thinking that it would be a cheap way to test the waters, but now that we have evidence that even math classes won’t be easy and automatic for me, it means even more than before that if I don’t finish a BS, then someone could have reason to believe that I couldn’t hack it. The two years I studied on my own officially do not exist.
I notice that I am confused. What subskills are important, and what studying habits successfully cultivate them? Patrick “O.” LaVictoire from the blog moved to Madison to take an assistant professorship after having finished his PhD on Fourier analysis at Berkeley, and I met him in June so that I could take his bicycle. I told him about how I was confused about the proof of the fundamental theorem of algebra using Liouville’s theorem, and he said that a lot of his students couldn’t have given the explanation that I had. And driving Lucas home the other night, he affirmed that he respected me even though he probably stands more than a sigma above me in general intelligence, that he would trade most of the smart people in the world for my curiosity. And didn’t I generalize Euler’s rotation theorem up to a small and probably patchable gap in my proof? Didn’t I eloquently describe the flaw in Michael Anissimov’s ad hominem argument and get him to see it? Doesn’t Anna respect me? So I have evidence of my being intellectually competent, but if it’s not a stratospheric IQ and it doesn’t show up in schoolwork, then what is the nature of my X factor?
I guess the obvious strategy is to reflect—I want to say diagonalize, but I’m not sure that really makes sense. It seems like I’m very good at some mathematical subskills, and not particularly good at others, nor yet particularly good at efficiently allocating my time. These things can be described and analyzed in more detail.
Part of the problem is that it took me a while to get a cheap copy of the course text, and even after that, I tended to allocate a lot of my study time towards mathematics that wasn’t in sync with the course: I studied from Earl A. Coddington’s book on differential equations (which overlaps with the course, but doesn’t cover the same things in the same order with the same terminology), and from Claude Berge’s The Theory of Graphs (which was mostly above my level), and from Tristan Needham’s Visual Complex Analysis (which includes a lot of useful intuitions). Still, my performance on homework has been disappointing. I should say more; I should be able to explain what I know and don’t know. I’m really hurt today. I hate school as much as ever, but surely if I were a competent autodidact (a rationalist), I would have done the studying I needed to do to ace that quiz. I should have figured out earlier how to make myself useful to the greater economy so that I wouldn’t be dependent like this.
I helped Mother with some chores and I talked to Hannah and then Mike over IM.
The fact that I did poorly on the test and had trouble completing homework assignments properly in a reasonable amount of time suggests that I’ve been doing something wrong in my personal studies. The sooner I find out what it is, the sooner I can correct it, and the more I’ll end up knowing. That’s the most important thing, knowing.
I’ll probably do better if I relinquish my anger at those miserable
creatures who don’t seem to even know that there exist such
things as theorems which are true for understandable
reasons and let us model reality in ways that wouldn’t be otherwise
possible. Let them sneer; I know something they don’t. And soon—I will
know more. I remain,
Yours,
Zack M. Davis
I still don’t understand the nature of my X factor, and I’m not sure I know how to talk to normal people anymore. I’m still angry and offended at the dominance of schools. Why doesn’t anyone else see that they can’t possibly work? Knowledge comes from studying, skill comes from practice, and yet we spend so much trying to improve the schools and yet still furthermore somehow no one thinks of also telling people directly: study!—practice! Maybe I’m wrong, but I could not live in a world where I was wrong, because I don’t know what it could possibly look like. And I know (I know) how dangerous that feeling is: there are theists who can’t imagine what a world without God would look like, and egalitarians who can’t imagine what a world with psychological sexual dimorphism would look like. It probably helps to have a contingency plan if you turn out to be living in a nightmare world: the theists seem to be mostly out of luck, but the egalitarians can at least hope for transhumanist futures with arbitrary subcultures.
And myself? I can live without God, and I can even live with being male, but can I live with the devaluation of my glorious curiosity?—I’m not sure, but I still don’t seriously expect it to come up. I am right, in broad outline. And yet my quiz and homework performance is evidence against that: it’s a small amount of evidence, but evidence just the same. That I learned from Yudkowsky; it doesn’t seem to get taught in schools. Nicole might not know it, for instance: I can easily imagine those like her seizing on my failure, holding it up to deny all the good things I’ve ever done. Those people probably wouldn’t spontaneously notice that there are people who get decent grades in years of high-school language classes, and yet who cannot fluently speak the language.
Surely the nature of my power as a rationalist is that I can think about all this. There are probably a lot of students who get poor marks and end up psychologically damaged forever. They think: oh, I’m no good at this subject—and they graduate or fail to graduate and never give the subject another thought again; following Erdős, I do not think it an unfair metaphor to consider them dead. I, however, have been granted vision of another world. I consider the lack of curiosity to be psychological damage not because it says so in the DSM-IV-TR (it probably doesn’t), but because I value knowledge and know a little decision theory: more knowledge is better, and so to a first-order approximation, it doesn’t matter whether anyone else is doing better or doing worse. On closer examination, it matters a little bit: given a choice of worlds with similar global distributions of ability, I prefer ones where people with my values are on top.
The measure of my power as a rationalist is the extent to which I can turn even the disaster of this life to my advantage. If I really understand the power and methods of active inquiry, then I should be able to demonstrate some achievement that schoolbound minds do not typically match—a program, a novel—even finishing my planned fanfiction Dagny Taggart and the First Welfare Theorem would mean something. I took reading privileges at Less Wrong recently, but I need to prove my worth before I have the right to log in.
School might continue to hurt, because in my state of knowledge [it] carries an inherent asymmetry: if I do poorly on an assignment, I feel bad because it’s evidence against my beauty, but if I do well, then I can’t feel good about it because it was fundamentally an assignment.
I have to be honest: I have been doing something wrong, if my problem-solving skills are still so weak after two years. I can admit this, without tarnishing the beauty that I have created. I have to be wary of being biased to appear consistent; some disgusting intuition within me doesn’t know whether I am allowed to do well after having failed immediately before, as if other people would insist that life is more [Lipshitz]-continuous than that and that therefore my beauty must be a fraud. This fear should be easily disabused. Firstly, the fact of my beauty is far more important than whether others will believe in it. Secondly, I predict that people won’t object to my doing better. The other students don’t care and very few of them if any even know that I did poorly on the first quiz. I don’t know what Prof. Alabovskaya will think of the anomaly in her gradebook when an F is followed by a string of As, but on the other hand, I have no idea how common or uncommon that sort of noise is. Anyway, I don’t care very much what she thinks, and if I hound her with enough questions that go beyond the scope of the course, she should understand that I’m smart.
I was offended by the typesetting of the first quiz: the superscripts on the original had been handwritten. How could Prof. Alabovskaya have been teaching for so long and never bothered to learn to use superscripts in Microsoft Word, let alone proper math typesetting software? I should take to heart how easily analogous criticisms could be made of my habits.
It’s not over yet. I am nowhere near my baseline potential. And if my baseline potential is not enough?—then we have dual n-back. I remain yours.
ADDENDUM— Even the Clayton library was closed, so I tried to extract intuitions from Visual Complex Analysis at a nearby coffeeshop. I forgot to tell you that my recent humiliation may have strengthened my determination to write that vague but possibly workable novel idea I’ve been thinking about occasionally since last October (compare inter alia 396, 397, 398). There’s so much that I want to express about gender and personal identity and mathematics and schooling and failure. I remember that Boyd (beautiful, beautiful Boyd whom I wish I had invested effort in getting to know) once posted a Facebook status update to the effect that she hoped she would be accepted into the screenwriting class she had applied to, because she wanted to finish the the story she started for the application. I seriously considered posting a comment along the lines of “You’re not a slave to the University! If there’s a work that you think ought to exist, then write it! Don’t wait; start now!”
But that would have been rude. —ZMD
SECOND ADDENDUM— The latest update to Harry Potter and the Methods was even more awesome than usual.
It occurs to me that I’m not particularly attached the the surname Kowalski for my nascent protagonist (contrast 473), to the extent that the mere fact that Kathryn Kowalski is too similar to Katie Kolodzie (compare inter alia 199) is reason enough to pick something different. The new desiderata are that it should be something that is not also commonly used as a given name (alternatively, that it should be exclusively feminine when used as a given name), that it should be something not-weird, and that it should ideally contain the letter y. —ZMD
Of course, the obvious hypothesis is that there is no X factor and I’m just not nearly as smart or creative or truthseeking as I thought. The technical outpouring of my purity born of pain began on 20 August 2008, and I’m partway through page 634 of my STEM notes, which works to roughly 0.85 pages a day. If we credit me for 1.75 hours per page (which might not be as ridiculous as it sounds), that’s around 10.4 hours a week. Respectable?—perhaps. And I have skills and interests outside of mathematics. It’s still not good enough. I’m sick of losing, and losing to such despicable creatures. I haven’t been in peak studying mode recently. I think I filled less than three pages last week. I could curse: O terrible school, discouraging me, making me doubt my brilliance, stealing my love and joy! But at this point it doesn’t matter whether or not the curse is true. I’ve lost my right to quit; I have to get a degree.
Today started out good; I ran in the morning, and such. Then I was ashamed at the family meeting when Mother asked me what I do during my hours in the office and I didn’t immediately have an answer. And then I lost the day to a personality collapse. I watched episodes of My Life as a Teenage Robot that legally shouldn’t be online. Should I feel guilty? I’ve already bought the first season from iTunes because I started writing a work of fanfiction. I talked with Hannah via instant messaging because I was sad.
I really shouldn’t exist. Even if I get better, my history is sufficiently ugly such that I would prefer a benevolent superintelligence to kill me and use my resources to write a new person from scratch on behalf of my values.
I wish I knew how to keep the aspirational part of my brain in control. I felt so right studying at the University last week. I need to consistently get into a state of mind where success is more important than consistency. I had it early this morning. I don’t have it in this moment, but I remember that it exists.
Nicole dedicated her thesis to her family. I decided perhaps some weeks ago that mine will be dedicated “to the triumph of human curiosity, and the merciless annihilation of its enemies.” It is in this spirit that I remain yours.
Prof. Alabovskaya’s policy lets students correct errors on graded quizzes for half-credit. Yesterday, I made my corrections, got them printed at the copy shop, and then went to actually do the day’s homework assignment at the DVC library. It should have been fine. It does not take three hours to complete a homework assignment.
I attempted the first few problems and got them wrong. I wasn’t about to submit yet again to the indignity of turning in sloppy work hacked together at the last minute, and I might have been emotionally weak, so rather than continuing to study, I spent some time reflecting, or perhaps just moping. I’ve been studying for two years. How could I still be so weak? I hypothesize that I didn’t set up enough of a feedback system: I would read textbooks and take notes and attempt to work the exercises, but without noticing or caring too much whether actually I got the exercises right. It was not rare for me to feel the emotion of surprise when the back of the book confirmed my answer. Even without having compiled the numbers of how many exercises I did correctly and incorrectly, the memory of the emotion should be a huge clue that I’ve been doing something wrong. Getting the right answer shouldn’t feel surprising. Being predictably right is the measure of whether you know what you’re doing. I’ve certainly been exposed to lots of math and how it fits together on a high level, but my understanding is shallow and fragile.
Is my purity born of pain all for nothing, then? Were the schoolpeople right all along? Would they be right to taunt me? Ultimately I think not. The fact that I’m noticing this problem at all is a facet of my power as a rationalist, which I never got from school. I ostensibly passed three years of high school Spanish and yet did not emerge with a working knowledge of Spanish. It didn’t seem to bother me then, as if I didn’t even notice. I notice it now. Let me sort out my preferences in a little more detail, form the most accurate model I can, and clean up. There’s more to say, but until such time as I actually say it, I remain yours.
Yesterday I worked on the take-home exam for my class, but there were some prompts that I didn’t know how to answer. (I say prompts because I hold with the tradition that reserves the word problem for the sense of open problem: a mystery that requires a new idea to solve.) My humiliation was deepened and completed; I cried and screamed. I sent an incoherent expression of my wretchedness to Anna, and a coherent one after I got home from class. Today I sent up an appointment with a professional from Kaiser, at Mother’s suggestion; I cried while talking to the triage clerk. I drank a solid majority of the Freefall archives (compare 446). Mother complains that I stay in the office and she doesn’t know what I do all day.
Failing in math class hurts because it strikes at one of the few things I have left to be proud of. I betrayed SingInst, I’ve been unemployed for more than half a year (not least because I’ve gotten so discouraged or lazy that I stopped searching), but at least I can take pride in my intellectual competence, my Spark.
I predict that tomorrow will be a good day, because I seem to have stumbled into a new (or forgotten) framing for something I’ve known a long time. I should be able to think about the flaws of this—vessel, without being ashamed, by defining myself to be the Spark. The knowledge that this vessel has been lazy shouldn’t hurt to think about, because we already knew that humans can be lazy. It’s just another part of the environment, yet more fodder for optimization. The vessel remains yours. Really.
Today was a bad day. I am still unnerved by my recent failures. I thought I would leave before Father got here, study at my preferred coffeeshop, and then study at the library. I saw Father briefly before leaving and exchanged pleasantries with him. I went directly to the library and when it opened, I used the library computer to send some distressed emails to Anna. Having exhausted my computing quota at the library, I read from Evidence-Based Practice of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. Then I ate at the Burger King that’s in the same strip mall as my preferred coffeeshop and went to the Clayton library, hoping that I would be able to use one of the computers there. No luck: apparently they keep track of computing quotas across branches. I went home. I IMed with Hannah “A.” Finley, talked with Anna Salamon on the telephone, bought some items at Safeway, generally got netsick, and IMed with Hannah some more. I wrote a little bit of Jem fanfiction.
Anna raised the possibility of withdrawing from the course; she thinks that establishing my emotional stability is more important than anything else. She is right that sanity is important, but it would be too humiliating to withdraw from the course; it would be better to get a C. I don’t want the Prof. Prapavessi to be skeptical of future autodidacts who are sent before her in their quest to enroll.
I guess it’s not surprising that I’ve been doing poorly in the course, because I haven’t been treating the official course text as one of my own textbooks; I have been averse to studying from it, presumably because I have so much negative affect around school. Now that I’ve realized this, now that I’ve named that feeling, I should be able to counteract it, study, and do well from now on. I haven’t pulled out a spreadsheet yet, but if I do really, really well, I think I should still get a B—and surely I can manage a C. I don’t need to worry about appearing inconsistent if I suddenly start doing better, because I can just tell people the truth: I struggled in the first month because I have psychological difficulties with school, but then I dealt with them and I got better. Conditional on getting better, that’s the most plausible explanation given what we know about my life, so all I have to do is get better and it will therefore be true.
You know, on the tenth, I worked out an apparently correct induction proof generalizing the procedure that the course text gives for a type of differential equation called exact. When I showed it to the Prof. Alabovskaya at office hours on the thirteenth, she said that it couldn’t possibly be correct. During that day’s lecture, I think I came to understand what she had said at office hours, and I thought I also spotted a flaw, but rederiving the key steps again yesterday, I again think the proof is correct. I started writing a Sage program to check the calculation. This sort of thing probably never even occurs to most of the other students. That’s not enough, though.
I want to say that there are two types of recommendations: real recommendations, like when Silicon Valley insiders refer talent to each other and collect finder’s fees, and sham recommendations, when you arrange for your friends or coworkers to say nice things about you to strangers who call. Anna is willing to say nice things about me to strangers who call, but she’s not willing to genuinely recommend me for anything important, because she expects me to have another nervous breakdown.
Maybe I’ll just start carrying around the CBT and differential equations books wherever I go. Again, I need to make friends with the Zill and Cullen text, start treating it like my textbook.
Patri Friedman recently wrote a Less Wrong post accusing the community of being detrimental to instrumental rationality. In the comments, he mentioned (as I recall) that if he didn’t want to run the Seasteading Institute, he could have multiple offers for 100+ $/hr positions. What is it like to be wanted like that?
I had thought that I might end up coming out the better for my recent distress, that this small tragedy would serve as a reminder and inspire me to work harder. However, if that mechanism exists, it didn’t show up in my behavior today.
Oh, Diary! I won’t relinquish my birthright! I won’t! The vessel remains yours; you remain mine.
I feel better today. I went to the coffeeshop and the Clayton library. I haven’t finished making friends with Zill and Cullen and I still have homework to do, but I don’t feel hopeless anymore. I checked out a trashy novel. I did check Less Wrong at the library, but I think I might have gathered the clarity of intention needed to cut my internet usage way down. I am rational enough to notice things that I have done horribly, terribly wrong without relinquishing my vision. I didn’t study hard enough during the school-free years of my purity born of pain, and I should have done what was necessary during the first month of Prof. Alabovskaya’s class to get off to a good start. However, the situation is still salvageable, and I will salvage it. The vessel remains yours.
I spent a long time at the library yesterday, ostensibly finishing up my homework. However, I had trouble concentrating, and the fact that I had to urinate so many times suggests that I was nervous (he said, lacking expertise in physiology). A lot of the prompts exhorted the reader to confirm some fact by means of routine operations that should have gone quickly, but somehow didn’t for me. In the middle of a particularly tedious calculation involving a lot of collecting of terms and application of the product rule, I found myself resentful of having to spend so many clockcycles on menial computations that involved no new insights and arguably had little to do with differential equations. But the complaint must not be voiced even if it is justified: I don’t want to be mistaken for one of those awful creatures who asks why they have to learn this-and-such.
The homework assignment that was due the previous class was short, and I finished it. The homework assignment that was due immediately was long, and I didn’t finish it. I turned in the previous homework assignment at the Prof. Alabovskaya’s office hours, lamenting my poor performance thus far and vowing to study harder. The Prof. Alabovskaya told me to just focus on what was in the book and not try to invent things for myself. I meekly agreed—I was in no position to do my Paul Lockhart impression. After that interaction but before the actual class, I cried a little bit, and a black woman passing by stopped to ask if I was okay.
It turned out that I posted a 52% on the take-home exam. The Prof. Alabovskaya also returned my paper on exact differential equations; she thinks I don’t know what I’m talking about. I certainly agree that I’m confused about whether or why it is necessary that all variables can be said to be dependent xor independent, but I’m rather confident that the method still works—the generalization is too clean and too obvious to be meaningless. If the teacher thinks I’m a crank, it’s a failure of communication, not a vindication of authority.
I’m still confused, still don’t know where I stand. During lecture, the Prof. Alabovskaya said that we don’t have any way to solve the cubic equation, and I muttered that we do have a cubic formula. That drew attention to me, and I explained that there is a cubic formula, it’s just that it’s very big and unwieldy. The Prof. Alabovskaya just said, “No cubic formula.” I’m not sure what that means. Does she somehow not know that the cubic formula exists (doubtful), or (more likely) was that just her way of saying that since we’re not using it in class, there’s no reason to mention that it exists? I agree that I should spend more time drilling problems in order to get better at rigor and calculation, but I despise and fear this sort of pedagogy that doesn’t explicitly recognize the power and importance of insight. In early 2007, I was happy to get an intuition pump for why the zero vector is never part of any basis (see 267): it’s a lot like how the empty product is unity. Similarly, in the study of linear differential equations, the zero function is never part of any fundamental set. So I count myself happy that my intuitions about linear algebra have now been tied a little closer to my intuitions about differential equations, but I want to see the Spark in everyone’s eyes when the fact gets mentioned in class.
Again, all my anger must go unvoiced until I am winning; otherwise I just look like a crank.
After the conclusion of lecture, I muttered (as if to myself, but probably pretty obviously trying to attract attention) something about how we really don’t have a quintic formula. I managed to get into conversation with a student named Daniel, to whom I related my troubles. He said I sounded really smart from the few things that I had said in class (I think he actually used the word genius), and was surprised that I wasn’t doing well. He said that I was a pure mathematician, whereas the others were scientists or engineers. He advised me to drill exercises, which I agreed to do. It felt good to have a conversation were someone treated me with respect. Perhaps I am doomed to finish up the rest of this particular class as an ordinary student, but I will have my revenge.
I have to earn my mathematics BS now, because after what’s happened, I wouldn’t feel comfortable writing A Modern Approach otherwise. I will learn to solve problems, and I will have my revenge.
I guess programming has its advantages: a tighter feedback loop for the investigator (if you get the wrong answer, you notice), and easier verifiability to outsiders (your program does stuff that they can see). The vessel remains yours.
I’ve been overconfident. I’m smart and I know a lot of math, but I’m not that smart and I don’t know that much math such that I can do well in a college-level math class without taking it seriously. I’ve done a significant amount of the homework due tomorrow night (in my STEM binder, so that I still have to type it up as well as finish), but it’s taken a long time. It’s as if I’ve forgotten: mastering a technical discipline is hard. Hard is good, but its goodness is not of the most visible kind; it is easily obscured by damage and madness.
I’ve done pretty well for myself in the autodidactic romance of my purity born of pain, and I think myself a reasonably competent aspiring rationalist. And because I am an aspiring rationalist, I should be able to say that it would not be a betrayal of that great romance if it turns out that taking school seriously will help make me a better mathematician. The intelligent version of the autodidact’s complaint is not that everything remotely associated with school is irredeemably evil. Rather, the objection is that knowledge is precious, and that it is harmful and cruel to arbitrarily privilege actions done in school over everything else anyone has ever done. If it is virtuous to read the book if the teacher assigns it, then it must be virtuous to read the same book even if the teacher does not assign it. What stupid revolutionaries in their great zeal too easily overlook is that the converse is also true. You can obey the powers that be for your own purposes, and it doesn’t mean that they own you. They might think that they own you, but we don’t necessarily need to care what they think.
It still feels like I have an unbalanced skillset: I know things and can see things (like obvious induction proofs) that probably would have never occurred to most of the other students, but my on-the-spot problem solving ability is nothing special and in fact needs improvement. I am frustrated because it is hard to communicate the things I do know; it often seems like most of the others just collect their grades and don’t even think or talk in terms of the space of underlying cognitive abilities.
I’ve probably given myself too much credit for shallow or popular-level reading. I am proud to be the sort of person who knows that Maxwell’s equations exist (surprisingly, not everyone does), but there’s an unimaginably huge distance between having read a few popular- or semipopular-level works, and the gold standard of actually being able to use the equations to constrain anticipation. (I say unimaginably huge because humans are bad at imagining things; I am not making any quantitative claim about distances in knowledge, for I have no way to quantify this.) This goes for cognitive-behavioral therapy as much as physics. Did I think I would be somehow cured of my madness just because I read or skimmed one-and-a-half books and a paper or two? The human mind is much more complicated than the structure of Euclidean space, therefore we should not be surprised if emotional stability turns out to be more difficult than linear algebra. And can I say that linear algebra is harder than it looks?
I tried treating the Prof. Alabovskaya’s class as an afterthought to my own books, and it didn’t work. If I want to do well in school—and it indeed seems like that would be useful—I need to incorporate the class into my personal study, to undo my alienation somehow. Like at Safeway, I took my work in the booth seriously, even if I had no love for James or the company. I had loyalty, but my loyalty in its brilliance was not to Safeway, but rather the economy, or the principles thereof. It is good that people should be able to buy food and that the sellers of food should know where all their exchange tokens are, and it is good that people should be compensated for making these things happen. I don’t know what comparable stories my coworkers told themselves about their work, or even if they had comparable stories at all, but that was mine. And in a similar (but by no means the same) spirit, I can go to school and do well for myself—I can even (it is very important to remember) do better than I would have done alone in the library—and it won’t be a betrayal of my great romance for the same reason that we do not say I was a slave owned by Steve Burd.
“People can stand what is true, for they are already enduring it.” I was overconfident; I’m not as competent in school as I expected to be. I can admit this if and only if it is true, and it shall not be construed to deny or disparage all the beautiful things that I have learned, that I can do, in mathematics or anything else. The vessel remains yours.
ADDENDUM—“Aretae’s First Law”— I should probably consider having a crisis of faith (in the Yudkowskian sense) on education. My curiosity is virtuous, my reflective endorsement of my curiosity reflectively endorses itself as virtuous, and obviously many individual components of my criticisms of schooling are correct. But some components of my beliefs could be wrong. They could be big components, and they could be disastrously wrong, and it’s better that I find out now rather than later. Given what I know about human psychology, it is entirely plausible that having to turn in assignments might induce me to work harder than I could on my own. Insofar as I actually want to get better, hypotheses like these are really in fact worth paying attention to. I have so many ideas—I bubble with ideas—and yet I don’t have a history of finishing projects. The only decent work of fiction that I actually finished was “Pastime”—and that, I did for school (which is disgusting). I have spoken of programming for many months now, and yet here we are in the latter part of 2010 and yet I am not a real programmer. I should notice these things—actually notice, and actually do something, like set up some better sort of feedback system. The Spark is more important than my pride. The vessel remains yours.
Diary, today I was able to think clearly for the first time since approximately the last time I wrote to you. It was my intention to finish cleanly copying out and correcting the homework exercises on Monday the twenty-seventh. Why did it seem like a reasonable idea at the time? I must have somehow thought that between waking and nineteen, I would be capable of dropping off Visual Complex Analysis at the University Library, studying for the quiz, rendezvousing with Elizabeth “R.” Ellis to receive the pin that I had ordered from her on a whim, filling out paperwork at Robert Half’s Walnut Creek office, and finishing up the homework. How could that be too busy of a day?—and yet I am predictable, Diary. You could have guessed that I would be in tears by the middle of the afternoon. I went up to the librarian and asked if he could recommend a novel. He mentioned that Dan Brown had a new book out, and asked what sort of novel I was looking for more specifically. I said that I didn’t really want a novel and that I was only asking because I desperately wanted to talk to someone. I cried (compare 348—same guy), and I asked him what his PhD dissertation was about.
My new habit of despair seems to be instant messaging anyone I can get my virtual hands on. One of the people I got in touch with that afternoon in the library was Tom McCabe. I told him about my school troubles, and he asked what I would do with a degree. I said that for one thing, I was given to understand there were people who did things with statistics in industry for large salaries, and for another, I wanted to write a beautiful thesis in several complex variables because I wanted to know how the family of Stokes-type theorems generalizes to that context (compare 378). Tom said that the latter was an awesome idea and that I should JFDI—Diary, you understand that this is an initialism for “Just Fucking Do It”—and seemingly in that moment, I felt so much better. Finally someone was paying attention to the existence of such a thing as inquiry; contrast Nicole sneering at me that it’s useful to have collaborators and saying nothing of the ideas themselves (see 487). I saw that I didn’t have to go through three years of school if it was going to make me so desperately unhappy; I could just focus on making money directly. Hannah “A.” Finley sent me notes and code for her PHP potions game for me to reimplement.
Tom’s blessing, however, did not grant me a magical aura of serenity. At class that night, I turned in my quiz mostly unfinished and told the Prof. Alabovskaya that I thought I would withdraw from the class. I wasn’t crying then, or even about to, but I was pretty badly disturbed.
I think on Tuesday I chatted with Lucas Sloan. We wrote of Harry Turtledove and paraphilias. He brought up another one of Michael Vassar’s wacky theories and suggested that I should write a lot when I’m happy, in the hopes of getting more desirable memes to cycle in my phonologic loop.
Yesterday, I met with the Dr. Walker as part of the renewed efforts to cure my madness. I asked what her PhD thesis was about (I think something about the use [of] drawing in the treatment [of] children of alcoholic mothers) and how often other people asked her what her thesis was about (rarely or never). I cried and complained.
I chatted with Laura Fettig and said interesting things about missing vocabulary, and she made the sorts of responses you would expect from an intelligent person without a proper scientific education, and I told her about my school troubles. I chatted with Mitchell Owen, whom I met at UCSC and who is now a graduate student in mathematics at the same. I told him about my school troubles, and we discussed my alleged induction proof on exact equations. He said some things that would probably have hurt coming from (say) Father, but that I could accept coming from him: “honestly / you are so upset all the time / it can be hard to figure out which parts of you one is supposed to like”. It seems as if don’t get hurt or offended when Less Wrongers criticize me, because I can trust they understand. I said that I was sort of surprised that he remembered me that well and he said, “haha / well / I could hear you crying across the hall / pretty often”. He said that I’m smart and care about getting things right, but that people won’t know that unless I do the homework.
I was planning on cutting class that night anyway, on the grounds that it was more important to preserve my emotional stability for my temp job the next day, but I got lucky: an email notice declared that evening classes were canceled due to a power outage.
The temp job could be said to be a very mild form of tech support. I think I was visibly competent, but they hired way too many people; call volume was low and a lot of the day was just spent sitting around. I should be wary of complacency: it is not morally acceptable to sit around, scribbling a stray sentence in my notebook occasionally, idly checking blogs. I should be frantically writing in my notebook, seeking out true structure.
I’m still feeling a little bit unstable right now, and lonely. I’ve done a lot of instant messaging recently, and you’d think that would satisfy needs for social contact—it reputedly works for Hannah “A.” Finley, the extrovert who doesn’t leave the house—but maybe I require voice or personal contact.
I should figure out exactly how ruined my grade is: is a C still feasible?—I could live with a C. And I should write a properly deferential email to the Prof. Alabovskaya, perhaps with a line explicitly saying that I know my grade is trashed, but it’s okay because the important thing is the acquisition of mathematical knowledge. And I should study. Diary, you believe that I truly want to learn math—Diary, I’m so alone and so hurt.
I face a deep test of my power as a rationalist. On Sunday, I was able to consider the hypothesis that my personal study has been flawed, that school could offer me something genuinely valuable that is not easily picked off any nearby tree or library stack. It’s a hypothesis that at least bears sober consideration, considering how much I have not achieved in the last thirty-some months. And yet it’s not at all clear that I am capable of sober consideration and analysis. I spent most of three days this week in abject madness. I have suffered violent preference reversals. I had expected—perhaps genuinely expected in the rationalist’s sense—to kick everyone’s ass in the course, which has quite dramatically failed to happen. These are not subtle mistakes, Diary. My fate depends on my ability to cut a continuous path from where I am now to general intelligence. I have to protect my Spark, but how? The vessel remains yours.
Diary, I should notice patterns. In my spring quarter at the University (there was only the one) I had section for my vector calculus class on the other side of campus, and I got in the habit of not-going. I remember apologizing to the TA and promising that I would get it together, but I never did. Or in my weeks at Heald, I could never bring myself to read the business textbook, or yet still the psychology textbook. I obviously wasn’t stupid—not even then—and it’s not as if I wasn’t interested in psychology. The obvious hypothesis is that in school, domain knowledge won’t save you. Deep knowledge and insight don’t translate into high quiz scores if you didn’t read the same text as the rest of the class. However, you would expect this school-specific effect to be greatly attenuated in math. One literature class may cover Shakespeare and another Milton, but the calculus is universal and notation is standardized.
It keeps happening: I procrastinate on my schoolwork, and have a nervous breakdown just before the deadline. I can recall at least three such incidents in my senior year of high school (my presentation on the Ninth Amendment, my Senior Project, and Issue 8 of The Page). It happened at University many times; it’s worth noting in particular the breakdown that sparked my purity born of pain a little less than three years ago. These are real problems: both the procrastination, and the psychiatric emergencies. And maybe it’s the real reason I have to finish my BS. Even if all my complaints about school are perfectly true and “academic” material can be learned much more easily without classes, it remains the case that being able to finish things when you said you would is a very useful skill, and it’s understandable that you wouldn’t want to hire someone in a professional role until they have demonstrated that skill, for example, by earning a University degree.
I was right when I said that a lot of schoolwork is useless as work in itself, and that genuine work is a better motivator than fake work. There is something deeply unfulfilling about honing one’s get-it-done skills on fake work. But I really do need to develop get-it-done skills, and if our society uses fake work as its filter—I’m not strong enough myself to object that it should be done some other way. I really do need to develop get-it-done skills, because sometimes it does really matter. What happens when you need to fix a few critical bugs so you can ship code as soon as possible, but you can’t because your lead developer is having a crying fit? Or what about the paper I tried (“tried”) to write with Kaj Sotala?
I bought kava pills and studied from the Zill and Cullen text. Peter Thiel is going to be offering grants for ambitious young people to not go to school. The vessel remains yours.
I forgot to tell you: I’ve spoken in abstract philosophical terms about preferring not to exist, but one morning last week, I actually felt it. I awoke from an engaging dream and the sudden apprehension of my recent humiliation made me intensely disappointed to be conscious. I don’t think I’ve felt like that today, but it is perhaps no coincidence that this morning I slept nearly until it was no longer possible to sleep.
I seem to be getting more comfortable with the idea that I’ve been overconfident in my autodidacticism, that I am not special, that I belong in school. But what about the palpable first-person experience of my Spark? Is it an illusion, or is it just that I have an unbalanced skillset compared to the other schoolstudents? There have been times when trying to work homework problems that I come to a step requiring integration by parts, and my brain just shuts down and refuses to think. It’s not that I don’t remember that ∫u dv = uv − ∫v *d**u*, but I guess I haven’t drilled it to the point where it doesn’t feel like a step anymore, in the way that the distributivity of multiplication over addition is so introspectively obvious to me that it hardly feels like a step.
My individualism rails against hierarchy and central control, but my skepticism lobbies for testing and majoritarianism. I have to understand that I’ve just been hit in the face with a chunk of evidence for majoritarianism: I expected this class to be easy, but it’s not. The champions of schooling have made a correct prediction where I have not. This means I need to downgrade my confidence in my own vision, but by how much?—and where does that leave me?
Diary, I’m not a special snowflake. The fact that I know a little bit of science does not make me a special snowflake. I am an output of a stochastic process. The fact that I know I’m not a special snowflake, does not make me a special snowflake. Maybe most people don’t know, but that’s not nearly as relevant as I think it is.
Father came by the house today and I spoke to him.
I keep getting attached to such beautiful ideals which I’m not strong enough to practice. I want to see more androgyny and more autodidacticism in the world, but I don’t seem to be brave enough or smart enough or strong enough to bring it about. I cherish the sense of life that I got from reading the feminist blogs and authors like Kate Bornstein. And I cherish the mathematical and scientific knowledge that most of those who dare to question gender have not got. I wanted to bring them together, along with so much more; there are many great books yet unwritten. And yet—I’m failing a differential equations class at DVC. Something is wrong with my model of the world. I am confused. I am confused and hurt.
I wish that things were otherwise; I wish that I didn’t exist. The vessel is cracked but remains yours.
Diary, I’ve felt surprisingly sane in the past couple days. Happy, even. I seem to have made friends with Daniel (see 496). On Monday I was pacing in the vicinity of the DVC math lab and may have been considering the possibility of strategic withdrawal when Daniel and I chanced into each other. I got the chance to interrogate him a bit in the math lab. He’s an aspiring electrical engineer. I was surprised when he hadn’t heard of complex analysis or Turing machines. He’s also skeptical of what he called Darwin’s theory—actually abiogenesis, when I pressed him on it; I doubt he’d deny things like antibacterial resistance. I dropped in on the Prof. Alabovskaya’s office hours to apologize for my disrespectful behavior during the quiz the previous week. I guess I must model the Prof. Alabovskaya as an alien intelligence. I don’t feel like I can meaningfully communicate with her, and not only because her English is not so great. A few bits of information can cross the gap. I confessed that I’m starting to understand how my studying habits have been wrong, and that she should not be surprised if I suddenly start earning As. She said she would not be surprised, so I guess I don’t need to worry about consistency effects so much now—although really I shouldn’t care what she thinks, the alienness is too great. She did say that I would be allowed to submit corrections for the quiz, which surprised me, as it contradicted her standing policy. Perhaps the fact that I have come to office hours several times shows that I care, even if I am somewhat incompetent?
Yes, I said incompetent. In truth, we both know that I’m brilliant, but that truth isn’t enough to satisfy me, because it’s only true in a sense. Even if there is a g-factor, human cognition is a very multifaceted thing. Ordinary smart people can be truthfully said to be one-in-106, if you selectively pay attention to the particular dimensions along which they are one-in-106. This is not trivial, Diary. I value my Spark, my epistemic rationality, my notebooks, my STEM binder, my fierce independence, my deviance. But in the ways society knows how to measure, I’m not as special: closer to the order of one-in-102. It may be possible to do great things with only a one-in-102 g-spark, but I should remember that it is not going to be easy.
On Wednesday, I handed in the homework with the last few problems incomplete. It shouldn’t be so psychologically difficult to solve a few systems of (linear!) equations in order to pin down some constants, and yet somehow my brain sometimes refuses to do such routine tasks. It is puzzling—and yet I don’t feel terrible about it right now. There was an exam, and I did poorly, but not outrageously so, solving I think four prompts with high probability, and making a clumsy but not completely humiliating attempt on the remaining two. I talked more with Daniel after class. It turns out that he is a passionate Christian, which I find somewhat hilarious, but the feeling appears to be mutual and friendly.
So, fine. I’ve been suffering from a mild case of illusory superiority; I’m not as good at math as I think I am, even after my justified complaints about rote computation are taken into account. I think part of the problem is that I’ve been inclined to move on when I feel like I “basically understand” something, without paying enough attention to the fact that my intuitive sense of “I basically understand this” is not sufficiently reliable. You can’t just eyeball a prompt and say, “Yeah, I can do that,” because in that glance, you are not seeing all the detailed steps required to solve the problem, some of which you may not know. You need a test. No, really, you need a test.
This does not mean that the schoolpeople were right all along. It would be a perfectly legitimate [thing] to say, “Well, I guess I’ll just have to incorporate more testing into my self-study routines, then.” And yet—if our society already has a testing infrastructure set up in the form of college classes, it is not wrong to take advantage of it, and pick up some goddam respect along the way. Going back to school and relinquishing my contempt doesn’t mean giving up my autodidactic romance. I will still be curious, and have my stack of nonschool textbooks, and keep everything in one binder. I can have my soul, and get As. I will just have to work harder—but we already knew that. My original plan for trying school again was that I would show up, and turn in homeworks, and take tests, but the center of my life would be knowledge, not school. That plan still seems basically correct, it’s just—the class is harder than I expected. On my honor as an aspiring rationalist, I should be able notice that sort of thing without combusting. I am not yet so awesome such that everything offered at community college is beneath me. I will be a good schoolstudent, not because I am the slave of any institution, but because I am the sort of person who changes her beliefs and plans in response to new evidence.
Today I studied Zill and Cullen a bit in the math lab, with Daniel sitting across from me. I spent a long time with Russell and Norvig, which felt good, although I really must focus on Zill and Cullen this weekend. I met a man in the library who might be able to use my design services—I doubt anything will actually come of it, but maybe it was good practice for me to take such initiative.
At the old store, I talked with Cody Pratt, who still works there. I want my calculus book back from him (see 342), and we agreed to rendezvous tomorrow morning. Cody is an interesting case. I suppose he must not be unusually insane compared to the general populace, but his insanity is of a sort that is particularly transparent to me. I can model nonintellectuals as alien intelligences with whom I can’t expect to meaningfully communicate with, but Cody and I are just barely similar enough such that I must instead regard him as broken. He says he wants to study quantum physics and engineer weapons, but talking to him, it seems clear that he has no idea what a technical discipline requires, and much worse, that he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know.
I really should spend more time with people, partially because it makes me happier than I like to admit (on that note, being happy ranks higher in my preference ordering than I like to admit), and partially as Science. If I am going to write fiction, I should know what people are like. Daniel is at least noticeably competent, if not an epistemic peer. Cody seems to think that World War III and a new world order are near, based on the predictions of an attorney and Confederate soldier named Albert Pike. It would be nice to know how (e.g.) Nicole perceives my contrarian beliefs. The vessel remains yours in Science.
Even without pouring over lists, I thought of a new provisional surname for my nascent (“nascent”) protagonist: Stacy. It’s probably not the optimal solution, but it satisfies the primary desiderata (see 490A2).
I guess it’s been an emotionally intense week so far. Perhaps I should take care in writing about it, remembering Lucas Sloan’s advice to flush negative thoughts from my self-narrative (see 498).
On my way back from class on Monday, a car was trying to turn left into the lane I was in, and I abruptly changed lanes, even though I there wasn’t actually a danger of colliding with the other car. A cop pulled me over and yelled at me; he said that I almost hit him. Abased and apologetic, I mentioned the car turning left, and he yelled that he didn’t want to hear any excuses. I groveled and apologized more, but overall, I was surprised at how calmly I was taking it. It wasn’t until the cop came back with the written ticket that I suddenly burst into tears. The cop, calmer by this point, asked why I was crying and whether I had ever gotten a ticket before. I said it was unrelated and promised to calm down before continuing to drive. I haven’t told Mother yet.
On Tuesday, I met with Lucas at the University, where he is a student. We think Lucas has a higher g-factor than me and we’re the sort of people such that this comes up in conversation more than once. I expressed dismay that Lucas has not made pilgrimage to the libraries on campus despite living there for a number of weeks. Even worse, he said that he doesn’t read nonfiction books, and he did not seem ashamed of this. He said that there was hardly anything in print about SL4 issues (Diary, you understand shock level four, stuff about the intelligence explosion), and that nonSL4 stuff could be left to ordinary scientists. I told him that he sounded wildly overconfident. We had a lot of good discussion, including about my school troubles, and of course I ended up crying.
On Wednesday, I still had a lot of exercises due at the evening’s class, and I went to DVC before noon, thinking I would be able to finish them. Eventually, I signed my name on the clipboard for tutoring, and when an instructor became available, I related my school troubles to her, and of course I started crying. The instructor, Patricia Leitner, took me into an unused room; she was sympathetic and valued my Spark. I confessed that I had trouble caring about the homework problems, that I love math, but I don’t have the patience to apply the product rule so many dozens of times, and that I know that I’m a horrible person for saying that, because I know one needs to internalize those skills in order to prove interesting things later. I verbally sketched the proof of the fundamental theorem of algebra using Liouville’s theorem. She said that I should consult with the Prof. Prapavessi, that going back a semester or even two into calculus was a good idea, and that I might contact Robert Hasner to set up some sort of independent study project.
I went to the Dr. Alabovskaya’s office hours. Again, the communication gap between us seems insurmountable. I asked if it was okay that I used a software tool to check my answers on the quiz corrections—I think the only thing I ended up changing was a sign error that I had originally made—and she disapproved of the practice but said that she would accept the exam corrections. (My moral sense wasn’t convinced we had reached an understanding, so I asked for verbal confirmation again at the class break.) I also asked if it was okay that I had been using my calculator’s matrix row-reduction function to solve linear systems. She complained that I am too dependent on technology (I agreed), and expressed disdain at the notion of raising the question when dealing with two-equation (!) systems. She certainly has a point, of course—my slowness at computing really does make me a horrible person.
Still, talking with the Dr. Alabovskaya makes me want to draw a distinction between dull and unintelligent, if I didn’t before. There is a legitimate argument to be made that if a machine can save you thirty seconds carrying out a routine computation, then that’s thirty seconds you can spend thinking about other things. On the other hand, perhaps we value computing skill enough such that the tradeoff isn’t worth it. What continues to bother me is that those with an institution-bound mindset, like the Dr. Alabovskaya, don’t see this kind of cost-benefit analysis as something a student and teacher might usefully discuss. They really seem to see the world in terms of lazy students who don’t want to work and beleaguered teachers whose duty it is to make them.
I was stupid enough to mention that I liked to take an exploratory approach. The Dr. Alabovskaya said I am creative (she said it like a derogatory term), and impressed on me the importance of doing what the book says, and that everything about differential equations has been discovered long ago. I tried to explain that an exploratory approach could still be beneficial; I offered as an example my insight of the other year about genetics and the multinomial, but she didn’t understand.
At least I have the solace of not looking stupid exactly. I probably came off as smart but somewhat lazy and extremely misguided. It wouldn’t be a total surprise if I suddenly start doing well on exams.
I never told you: one day some weeks ago I discovered while browsing Facebook that Josh Sternin-Moser is listed as being siblings with a Robby Sternin-Moser. I have two questions, both of which must be rhetorical because they are so easy to answer. Why do I always find out about people’s sex changes via Facebook (compare 355)? And why couldn’t Rachel Sternin-Moser and I have just traded bodies? The vessel remains yours.
I had thought that school would be an emotionally one-sided proposition for me: if I did poorly, it would hurt, but if I did well, then I wouldn’t feel good about it, because it would just be school, not the acquisition of true insight. I was wrong. It turns out that I aced the quiz that had been administered on the thirteenth. It feels good to ace quizzes; it’s not as if I play tennis and have plenty of other opportunities to use the verb to ace. Maybe it shouldn’t feel good, but given the general wretchedness of my condition, I don’t think I’m in a position to refuse extraneous things to feel good about.
I might be coming around to the position that I’ve been overconfident, that school really does have things to offer me that I don’t know how to take directly from books. I’m an aspiring rationalist and (moreover?) a grownup; I can decompose an issue into components and analyze them separately. My purity born of pain has been extremely valuable, and I was right about a lot of things, but without in any way contradicting that, I may be coming around to the position that school can teach me things that I don’t yet know how to take directly from books. There is no inherent virtue in doing boring and difficult things simply because they are boring and difficult, but there is often an instrumental virtue—and it’s one I’ve been lacking. Doing a ream of Laplace transforms on deadline will make me stronger, and I might as well get socially rewarded for it. As long as I keep my continuously numbered pages of personal notes, then it’s not a betrayal of Lockhart’s lament (the book version of which arrived in the post today, along with a machine learning book and the new Greg Egan novel).
I’ve been deluding myself and protesting too much. The important thing is protecting my Spark; the personal pride of this inferior vessel is irrelevant. I mustn’t let the social role of student poison my Spark, but it’s not as if everyone needs to know. I will have to be very careful because the vessel really is inferior: I am not emerging from my purity born of pain with a completed novel ms.
Does it make sense to say I’m emerging from my purity born of pain?—emerging into what? Perhaps “the victory born of my purity born of pain.” I was right to be angry at schools then, and now it is time to do something that actually works. I’ve still been really neurotic lately: crying and sending strange or whiny emails. But that loop is to be flushed.
Diablo Valley Shithole—although I’ve probably lost the right to call it that—actually has a pretty good library. I had already checked out their math and compsci section weeks ago—they have Knuth’s Art of Computer Programming—but yesterday I checked out the economics section and got the sort of spiritual experience that I sometimes get from library stacks. (I decided that same evening that there should be a world in which spiritual and technical are synonyms.) The stack directly across the aisle from the economics textbooks contains the evopsych books, and it pleases me more than I can say to browse such shelves and recognize titles and authors. Can you believe that I haven’t yet read The Red Queen? (I checked it out.) Oh, and they have Wilson’s On Human Nature, and Julian Simon’s The Ultimate Resource, and look—here’s Walter Block, that rascal!
Or later, pacing an aisle in a different part of the library, I spotted a book titled The Cult of Statistical Significance, and I already knew it was by Deirdre McCloskey, who used to be called Donald and whose memoir I skimmed once (compare 320), and who, along with others including Lynn Conway, was very critical of J. Michael Bailey’s popularization of Ray Blanchard’s autogynephilia theory in The Man Who Would Be Queen, which I remember reading from in the Saxby’s coffeeshop near Civic Park. (Actually, Cult was coauthored by someone else along with McCloskey, but you can understand why I’d remember McCloskey but forget him.) And I noticed the amusing coincidence that the stack directly across the aisle from the McCloskey and what’s-his-face book had books on transsexuality: you know, John Money, Second Serve, As Nature Made Him, that sort of thing. (I once joked that if I read one more sentence about David Reimer, I would scream.) Only it turned out that this coincidence was not one of Library of Congress numberings: McCloskey and what’s-his-face was misshelved, an HB 137 sitting on a shelf in the R 700s for no discernable reason.
If I ever have doubts about the righteousness of my vendetta against schooling, it is sacred moments such as these that put them to rest. Why doesn’t anyone seem to talk about this rich tapestry of experience, the actual information flows of human civilization? Contemplating the transmission of knowledge through books and blogs makes me wish I knew more graph theory so as that I could model it better. It is righteous that I should be disgusted that most people’s relationship with graph theory, if they have one at all, is probably closer to, “Oh, yeah, they mentioned that in the discrete math course I had to take to get my degree in Computer Science.”
But this is an extremely dangerous position to be in, because being righteous is not the same thing as actually being right, and the mere knowledge of this fact does not protect you from it. To wit: I posted an 84 on the recent take-home (!) examination, which I worked on for so long. Of what use in my moral superiority if it only brings average results when we try to measure it? My new friend Daniel Anderson confessed to doing worse than me, while refusing to divulge an exact figure; my homophonic doppelgänger Zach posted an 80; I seem to recall glimpsing that some guy who does not strike me as at all scholarly posted a score in the high 90s.
At this point, I need to learn to shut up about the glory of my autodidacticism. I really do have some serious skill deficits compared to good schoolstudents. I could accurately complain that good schoolstudents also have some serious skill deficits compared to me, but when operating in such a high-dimensional space, that’s not a very significant claim. The fact that most good schoolstudents do not spontaneously speak of their personal problems in terms of high-dimensional space does not, in fact, help my case.
I’m doing something wrong. I’ve been familiarizing myself with topics without mastering them. I know some cool complex analysis facts, but could I do well on a university-level test in the subject? The answer, the honest answer, has to be no. I know what a Turing machine is, but I can’t actually program one. I know that the Hicksian demand function exists, but I have no memory of how to even begin the decomposition. I’ve taken notes from the new edition of Russell and Norvig, but yesterday I found myself unable to extract a probability from a four-node Bayes net, because I could not calculate the likelihood that three flips of a biased coin would result in two heads and one tail.
I have been stupid and it is wrong. Moral fury and purity are much weaker forces than I have preferred to believe; it is not surprising that institutions should own the world instead. On Tuesday, I read Switch, a good popular-level book on how to achieve change. I found it useful; the accounts of beautifully humiliating psychological studies might have helped me update. For instance, giving people clear instructions on how to donate food has a larger effect on actual donations than the subjects’ charitable or stingy dispositions.
It’s this kind of absurdity that lets me appreciate how schools work, even when they can’t possibly work. Without institutional pressure, most people won’t study, and of the ones that do study, without an empirical test to face, most of them won’t study effectively, even—and this is the humiliating part—even if they’re the sort of relatively self-aware aspiring rationalist who knows about these sorts of things and tries to correct for them. It was so obvious, too—at some level I knew that I was exposing myself to shiny ideas more than I was training myself to quickly and reliably solve problems—but it was too easy not to care. I knew that MIT OpenCourseWare had examinations; why didn’t I realize that examinations are actually useful?
Or I occasionally have these glorious fits, daydreaming of my glorious novel about K. G. Stacy and how it’s the most important thing in the world. And yet I don’t write. The one decent story that I actually finished, was finished for school, nearly four years (!) ago. I let four years go by with hardly anything to show. Why didn’t I notice? Why didn’t I panic during those occasional moments when I asked why I didn’t notice?
I’ve been paying more attention during lecture. The Dr. Alabovskaya expressed her indignation at those who left class early; she likes students who work. It is wrong that so many people have no conception of mathematics existing outside of that kind of hierarchical mindfuck, that the Dr. Alabovskaya seems to have no conceptual distinction between students working and students working for her, and that the students themselves seem to have no such distinction, either. And I was wrong, too, for being so weak and ineffectual, when my cause is so obviously and gloriously right.
It’s been years since I stopped believing in the stupid version of free will, but I’ve still been clinging to more persistent delusions—lately I’ve dressed them up (how I do love to play dressup) in the language of rationality. But Lucas Sloan reminds me that I’m not a Klingon; the human art must be one of bounded rationality. Seanan Fong once told me that I should figure out exactly how much work I can do in a day. I disagreed, on the basis of my maxim that one should have a continuous utility function rather than discrete goals. I was wrong: it is a non sequitur to conclude, given the fact that life is continuous, that life should not be measured. “Do as much as possible” may be the true law of decision theory, but it’s not humanly actionable; you can’t maximize when you are still actively shooting yourself in the foot and don’t even know what satisficing would look like. Better to measure exactly how much work you can do in a day now, and constantly scheme how to gradually drag that number upwards—not because the ascent has to or should be gradual, but because it will be.
My name is Zack M. Davis, I’m am a twenty-two-year-old (gross) male (double gross), and I don’t know real analysis. I am going to learn to be a good schoolstudent, not because I am in any way relinquishing my purity born of pain, but rather because I am the sort of person who updates her beliefs and plans in response to new evidence. (Lucas objected that her was inappropriate; I claimed that “the sort of person” was generic, that it was the generic feminine.)
Furthermore, I remain yours. In Science.
ADDENDUM— As part of my quest to actually do stuff instead of just being proud of myself for being a Smart Person who Has Good Ideas, I added to the [work] of Questionable Content fanfiction that I had started recently. Then I IMed with Hannah “A.” Finley. Hannah thinks I was wrong to have emailed Jeph Jacques a few months ago about his abuse of hyphens where an em dash would be correct mark, and that sentiment alone is enough to make me want to scrap “Hannelore Ellicott-Chatham and the Independence of the Continuum Hypothesis.” That’s fine; ideas are cheap. What I did today counts towards my million words (compare 30).
It is very close to NaNoWriMo. I don’t think I’ll make an attempt at Dagny Taggart and the First Welfare Theorem as I had previously intended (I’ve already broken my purity by writing a bit), but I do have another vague shadow of an idea that is terrible enough for the occasion. Call it Kevin Levitin and the Special Snowflake Syndrome.
The homework assignment due Monday is big, but you know, I’m going to actually do it. If I am efficient and don’t dawdle, then I’ll still have time this weekend to meet Mike Blume and explore the theoretical underpinnings of partial fraction decomposition and how it connects to complex-analytic ideas—I had an induction proof about this buried in my notes from earlier this year. But the mundane practice of the decomposition comes first.
The Dr. Alabovskaya awards extra credit for solving homework problems on the board. I bring my own whiteboard pen and I snapped up the opportunity, although with a little bit of moral ambivalence at first (you will recall my overcalibrated moral sense) because I had peeked at the Student Solutions Manual for reassurance a couple of times while originally solving the problem. I made a few mistakes in my presentation on the board, one of which was mathematically significant. I promised to be more careful, but I “looked stupid.” Well, what of it?—you can’t do anything intelligent if you’re constantly terrified of looking stupid. More to the point, if I get a C in a differential equations class at community college, will I ever get any respect? But maybe I’ve already lost that game, and I’m playing something else now. I do want to write a beautiful thesis, perhaps in several complex variables, and it will help to have a professional adviser. This is sufficient to generate a decision: stay in school. The vessel remains yours. In Science.
Diary, it is probably fair to say that I spent today avoiding my homework. I’m still angry at the idea of schooling, but my impressions are so volatile from hour to hour that I don’t know which intuitions to trust. I’ve obviously been doing something wrong, and school does have certain benefits, not all of which are entirely to do with signaling. It’s hard to calm down and practice the Laplace transform when I get caught in a creative fugue state, my consciousness brimming past its capacity with arguments and insights. I agree that it’s important to practice things like the Laplace transform, but I’m still angry. I consider my creative fugue state morally valuable—and society just goes on assigning homework. It would be too much to expect people to value my private thoughts, my personal Spark—but why don’t they value theirs? Why doesn’t our culture have a concept for autotelic study?
But I have not earned the right to express my anger in its full fury, because I’m still doing something wrong. I may sparkle in conversation, but I’ve never built anything awesome.
I got pulled over by a cop again (compare 502), but she didn’t give me a ticket. The vessel remains yours.
The use of commitment mechanisms to help achieve goals shall not be construed to deny or disparage other goals achieved without use of such mechanisms.
I signed up for stickK.com today and registered some commitments: I will publish “Seriousness” by the end of the year, win NaNoWriMo, turn in my homework, and write weekly book reviews. Failing at any of these will result in a donation to the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy.
For a long time I’ve been clinging to this idea that rational agents should decide what the right thing to do is, and then do that thing for that reason. I thought it was nobler to have a continuous utility function rather than discrete goals (compare 359, 365, 369, 435). I still cherish this viewpoint, which is in accordance with standard decision theory and is without a doubt morally true. Moral truth is fine, but I should take notice of the kind of truths that we can actually use. Like this: I’m not an expected utility maximizer. I’m really, really not. Any plans to secure more optimization power for my Spark has to take into account the fact that the vessel is human. It would be better to have a mind that could reliably do the right thing for the right reasons, but you don’t have that, then you might as well try things like storing commitment mechanisms in the environment. It’s degrading, to be sure, but the point is that it might actually work. If you’re not smart enough to think for yourself, then don’t try.
I cherished my moral superiority over such disgusting creatures as Nicole or Helen Yamamoto, who are publicly successful students but don’t seem to have any spark of curiosity. But what good is moral superiority while I am still so weak?
I will still have my private cache of textbooks; I will still be noticeably different from normal schoolstudents; I will still sing the glories of private curiosity. But I have much to learn from formal methods. The vessel, as always, remains yours.
I was disappointed by my performance on the quiz administered Monday, to the extent that I think it contributed to my melancholy and lethargy of the next two days. But I expected to post something like a 70, not a 46! The score triggered a bit of temporary insanity during which I cried and thought colorful lies about suicide. The Dr. Alabovskaya asked why I was crying, and I said that I was disappointed in my performance. I stayed for the whole class and was probably not too disruptive, although surely I’ve ruined my reputation. I[’ve] had some interesting ideas while trying understand why partial fraction decomposition works, but I didn’t come up with a proof, and no one cares. Even if I had come up with a proof, no one would care or believe me, because you have to get As in all your classes before they’ll let you do anything interesting. Except by that time, the people who did get As have been mindfucked so hard that they don’t have their own ideas any more; they just do their schoolwork and then go climb rocks.
I know, I’m being unfair. In order to stay true to the ideals that sparked my righteous anger, rationality must take precedence. My own self-study methods have been deeply flawed, and I have been working from a terrible theory of human motivation. I stopped reading books and didn’t notice. I similarly failed to notice that the subjective experience that my novel is the most important thing in the world does not actually result in writing. Or I noticed, but I didn’t care; I didn’t drop everything and shout: “This is wrong!”
I don’t want to be hurt again. I want to regularly ace tests.
I’ve been protecting my ego, protesting that my difficulties have been emotional rather than cognitive, that I have lots of cool skills that the other schoolstudents don’t. This is all still true, but saying so is pathetic; it doesn’t matter and no one cares. I need to direct my attention towards the truths that don’t come so easily: I’ve developed some bad study habits. Good intentions do not themselves protect you; enthusiasm and actually caring do not themselves protect you.
I’m sick of losing; I’m sick of being hurt. I hate the schoolteacher’s complaint about lazy students, and yet I left myself vulnerable to it. This is insane. I’m not going to let myself be hurt like this again.
In my depression, I’ve fallen behind on NaNoWriMo.
I was intending to read Made to Stick and write a few words on it before the week closes, but I might not get to it. I won’t suffer financially for this sin because the StickK contract hasn’t started yet.
Again, Diary, we must be very explicit about it: I’ve been dumb. I have to accept this in my heart before I can grow stronger. There is no use protesting with a list of all the ways in which I haven’t been dumb, any more than a murderer’s lawyer should plead that the defendant paid his taxes and never littered.
I still hate the school mindset wherein an authority gives you assignments, and everything that was assigned that you didn’t do gets counted against you, but all the good things you do that weren’t assigned don’t count. But it was a mere reversal of stupidity for me to have thought that I then should not set explicit goals with deadlines, but rather (e.g.) cultivate my love of reading and read as much as possible. As much is possible is not humanly actionable, in part because possibility itself is a very subtle and sophisticated concept that few humans understand well enough to apply. Consider again the experiments in which it is shown that clear instructions have a larger effect than good intentions.
Perhaps the most important point is this: concrete goals and commitments are not additional constraints imposed upon an otherwise well-functioning intelligence. For a human, concrete goals and commitments are a fundamental part of your planning mechanism; what you don’t plan explicitly just doesn’t get computed anywhere. No matter how much I chant, “I want to know, I want to know,” I can’t literally spend every waking moment studying. (If you doubt this, ask yourself why I should limit my quest to waking hours.) A tradeoff has to be made somewhere, and if I don’t make it explicitly (preferably on paper), it just gets made automatically by some part of my brain that doesn’t share my deliberative verbal goals. That’s how it’s possible to self-identify as an intrepid intellectual and yet not notice when you get out of the habit of reading books.
It is certainly better than nothing to go to the library and read and do math until it closes (or you otherwise feel like going home), but the vagueness of this method has real costs. You do get some cool stuff done, but you won’t know if it was the right cool stuff unless you explicitly say what skills you want to train at what times and how you’ll know if it actually worked. My Spark is real, but my subjective experience of it is systematically unreliable.
Expected utility maximization operates over the space of possible plans. A plan is a specific sequence of concrete actions. “Be more like an expected utility maximizer; try harder; do more” is not a plan. That’s right; I’ve just lost two years of my potential to a type error.
If I don’t know as much as I think I do about math, then I certainly don’t know as much as I think I do about sex differences.
It seems that the theory alluded to [here] neatly accounts for much of my experience: how I can be so brilliant and yet laid low by something so simple as school, as well as why school itself works, despite being evil. What aspects of my experience does it not explain? What do I not expect to see?—these are questions to consider further. (When specifically?)
It might be protested: “But Zack, all this is obvious; how could you just be figuring this out now?” To this I reply that it’s only about as obvious as atheism. The vessel remains yours with a working hypothesis.
Diary, I don’t have a general policy on when and whether it’s better to tell people events in chronological or antichronological order. I have a lot of catching up to do on NaNoWriMo. Writing fiction isn’t hard when you set your quality threshold sufficiently low, but it does take time. I also can’t set my quality standard arbitrarily low, and even if I could, my typing speed still sets a tight bound on my progress towards the summit. I also have to finish Made to Stick and write about it on pain of losing [five] dollars to the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy. And of course I must study math—it is distasteful and immoral to think of it as having to do homework for school, but I must confess that being coerced to turn in assignments is a real pull on my motivation that can get me to do good things that I probably wouldn’t do otherwise. It is disgusting, but pretending it’s not true can’t possibly help, either.
Despite all this stuff to do—not just things worth doing, but things that I must do by contract—and I really must learn to get used to this awful idea of obligations and standards if and only if human psychology is such that it will actually help get things done—today I was feeling slow and lethargic. I thought maybe I could jolt myself out of it by getting an ice coffee and a snack at Burger King and reading in the library, but that didn’t work, and the library was closed anyway due to what I wish was still called Armistice Day. However, I did chance into a conversation with my acquaintance M. L. Pinkard. Marcy and I are both in the Walnut Creek library frequently, and I met her one day when she introduced herself to me and she said she liked my ponytail. She thinks I am an innocent, like a deer. It turns out that she’s very politically passionate, but not in a mainstream way: she believes that you can’t get something for nothing (I was unable to convince her that this is not really the same thing as physical conservation of energy), and is convinced that we live in a totalitarian state in which the power elites are bringing in illegal immigrants and stealing from people like her. She got very loud, and I imagine normal people (“normal people”) would classify her as a crazy lady—and she is crazy, of course, but it’s not obvious to me that her brand of craziness is any worse than the mainstream. It did feel good to talk to someone in person, and I may have been somewhat inspired by her passion and her pride in her own self-sufficiency: my lethargy seemed to dissipate.
There was an examination on Wednesday. I did not do well, but neither was I unprepared: we will see what score I ended up posting. With the opportunity to submit half-credit corrections, I should receive my C in the class, which is mortifying in the sense of being embarrassing, but not in the sense of actually being deadly. I had been looking forward to that Fields Medal, but I’ll live.
By contract, I lost five dollars because I did not submit the homework on Wednesday: I had intended to do it the previous day, but first I got caught in a creative fugue state (good for having lots of ideas, very bad for algebra), and then I had an emotional breakdown. I was able to get Anna to tutor me per our agreement, and then I felt better. Perhaps another day I will tell you about some of the details that disturbed me in my madness—I jotted down a few notes, thinking that I would tell you today.
But today, those details don’t seem so salient, and that’s probably a good thing. End this.
It turned out that I posted a 66 on the recent examination. You would expect that as someone so ostensibly enthusiastic about Bayesian reasoning, I would have updated by now, if not by studying better and posting a good score, then at least by recalibrating my expectations such that I could take the news without bursting into tears at the class break.
I aspire to reflectivity: I don’t want to be operated on by schools and shrinks; I want to do the right thing for the right reasons—or so I think. Really the most I can say is that some part of my brain generates such professions of good intent. If my self-model were accurate enough to offer greater assurance than that, then I wouldn’t be in this mess; I wouldn’t be in this house; I would be off somewhere else, doing the right thing for the right reasons.
I do not think that this most recent failure invalidates that dream of a novel, A Modern Approach. The entire idea (my best yet) was itself inspired by the failure of my rebranding attempt; the entire theme is about the will to maintain a constant utility function in the face of unpleasant truths about human nature. One more failure, one more unpleasant truth could only heighten the drama. I imagine our hero K. G. Stacy requesting a meeting with a local unschooling family, only to be horrified by their son: curious, creative, spirited, happy—but not at all strong in reading or arithmetic.
I pine for a world where my analogues won early and hard. At this year’s Singularity Summit, I met Danielle Fong, a Science Person far more accomplished than myself. I remember her being unusually tall and there being something odd about her face, with the combined effect of making me at least wonder if she was trans. She probably isn’t, and it would be an egregious instance of base rate neglect to think otherwise, but if it were so, wouldn’t it also be possible that Danielle Fong would be in some sense better at being me than I am?
I had to go to jury duty today, but I got lucky and was dismissed randomly. I am to see the Dr. Hawkins the psychiatrist tomorrow and will be sure to ask about drugs.
I wanted to be intelligent. Why do I always lose? People have told me that I’m taking the hardest math course in the school, as if that were any consolation. They don’t have any conception of math outside of school; they don’t get personally offended when they see an idea presented in only two or three variables.
If I had been more careful, I might still have the right to hate them. But now I’m just confused.
I won NaNoWriMo tonight. I think I’m on the verge of learning something very important about what men call discipline. My NaNoWriMo project is unspeakably awful—perhaps even more awful than last year, if such a thing is possible—but the point is that it’s something that I got done. And I didn’t get it from the fury born of my purity born of pain, either: it was the pretty graph on the website and the fifty dollars on the line that kept me typing when typing was uncomfortable. Intrinsic motivation is the weak interaction: it may be the most important thing in the world, but in humans, it’s not powerful enough to finish big projects.
My Spark has bought me deep insights and colorful notes, witty conversations and incisive blog comments, and as a consequence of all this, a reason to go on living. What it has not bought me is a novel. I’ve prided myself too much on knowing that I can love work. What I have overlooked (though I had seen it written) is that no one can love her work all the time. Sometimes it will be a little uncomfortable.
I hate how I’ve fallen out of the habit of reading paper books. It’s so strange: I read just fine on the internet, where text is just what real life is made out of. And yet picking up a book is much harder than opening a new tab. I don’t know why, and it has caused me some amount of vexation of late. Today I suspected that the advice about tracing lines might be wrong, but then I noticed myself doing a similar thing with Firefox when reading the new chapter of Alicorn’s story, and it felt right then. I am confused and forlorn, for there is a sense in which I don’t know how to read. I can read (obviously), but I don’t know how I do it, and I don’t know if I’m doing it wrong or how I could do it better.
I’ve starting taking aripiprazole (trademarked as Abilify) on the prescription of the Dr. Hawkins. The vessel remains yours.
Diary, I apologize for being arrogant. I thought I understood the boundary-value problems well enough, but today’s library session did not go so well. My sword is shattered; my pride as an autodidact is broken; I’ve lost my strength to object—or rather, the delusion thereof. I guess my pride as been broken for weeks, but the salience of this fades in and out; my revolutionary fervor has a tendency to come back in spurts.
It is necessarily true that there should exist some courseload difficult enough to defeat my pride, but that one differential equations course at Diablo Valley Shithole should do it is outrageous. I was wrong; my model of work and math and life is wrong.
I caught myself trying to guess the teacher’s password the other day: responding (incorrectly, it turned out) to Dr. Alabovskaya’s prompt pattern-matching on a previous prompt, rather than actually understanding what I was saying. The New York Times had an article recently about how some schools are reforming their grading policies to focus on mastery of course material, rather than compliance and good behavior. I applaud the effort, even as I violate its spirit by asking questions in class not because I genuinely want to know the answer, but to signal to the Prof. Alabovskaya that I was listening, the hope perhaps not far from my mind that this display might result in my getting a C– rather than a D+. (Do they actually give dee-pluses?—they really should.)
I need to be less ideological and do something that actually works, in the service of the things I really care about.
My will is broken; my sword is shattered—but was it a sword of fiery justice, or merely of misplaced contempt? Only time will tell.
I am honestly struggling with the boundary-value problems, and I went to the DVC Math Lab and the Dr. Alabovskaya’s office hours, attempting to untangle my confusion. I paid attention and took notes in lecture, and I think it was genuinely useful; it bought me things that I don’t know how to get directly out of the textbook.
I’ve been listening to Jane Austen’s Emma on cassette in the car and it’s almost done. The prose is adorable. And Austen didn’t even have a typewriter. I hate myself for being lazy, just like I did in high school. When I wasn’t holding myself to standards, I was happier and I got some stuff done—but it wasn’t the right stuff, and it wasn’t enough stuff. I didn’t seem to notice. Whereas now the fact has been shoved in my face: I’m not smart; I’m not strong; I’m just a guy who stumbled across the right blog. And that’s not enough to save you. —ZMD
Mother and I went to a Chanukah party hosted by the Goldhabers last night. I got to meet up with Sam and Chuck, but not Ben, who is presently in Santa Cruz (unlike me, who only might have been there, in a nearby Everett branch). My witty banter was in top form as I told Sam that theoretical computer scientists don’t actually write programs, and defended my scientific materialism against Chuck’s Kantian madness. A girl named Emma was present, who said she couldn’t understand what Chuck and I were talking about.
I was with Sam longer than Chuck. But when Chuck and I were apart from the others, I told him that it was great to see him, and Sam, too, but in some sense especially him, because (I dropped into a whisper:) “You’re smarter.” Chuck, sounding for all the world like Anna Salamon, admitted that he had more worked-out ideas, and [ ] speculated a moment later that that could be a component of intelligence, not denying the comparison, but preferring to phrase it in this gentle way.
I think I have been broken of the belief that I am Special. I thought I was a glorious autodidact, but it turns out that I’m just a guy. Maybe a moderately smart guy, but I am in no way on any Special Mission of Destiny; I’m just struggling to get through college. I read Yudkowsky and Alfie Kohn, and I felt Special, but I’m not—I haven’t done anything. Hannah “A.” Finley at least has the distinction of her excellent Twilight fanfiction, whereas I have—you?
I can still respect human virtue, even if I don’t embody it. O glorious for the stochastic process that is our civilization, that output me as well as many other people according to a particular joint distribution of traits! I thought it was wrong that people should say openly that not having a job does this-and-such to them, when there are entire worlds of work and play and study that could be undertaken in the absence of a job. But now I understand. For humans, the thing we have to allocate is not time so much as it is effort. Left to my own devices, I don’t automatically write a novel, and pretending otherwise doesn’t make it so. Whereas if you put me into a creative writing program at a posh school, I very well might write a novel, assuming I didn’t have a nervous breakdown and quit.
The boundary-value problems are starting to make more sense.
I don’t know how to manage the trading between the parts of me that want to work, and the parts of me that don’t. I wish I could be a unified person with unified desires, instead of these fighting fragments that one day could very well tear the whole machine apart—they already have, on many occasions. And so I am unhappy. But I want to get happier; I want to get better. Not so much because happiness is a terminal value for me, but anything to end this suffering. If happiness involves the absence of suffering, then I will take it. I will take it. But the vessel remains yours.
The final examination is tomorrow night, and I shall be glad to be done with this trainwreck of a course. Today I have felt some anxiety over the fact that there may have been a grading error in my favor on a quiz two months ago (the one I ostensibly aced, see 503): I used my graphing calculator to solve the prompt (calculators were allowed equipment), and at the time I honestly did not see any other way to do it. However, a recent lecture has made clear that the Dr. Alabovskaya wants us to use a more elegant and thoughtful method that I didn’t know about then. The markings on the quiz made it clear that she deliberated and changed her mind before deciding to award full credit, but I can’t help but think that if she knew more and thought faster, she would have marked me down for not showing my work.
Part of me wants to point out the possibly-an-error, but the last at least two times that I’ve tried to alert the Dr. Alabovskaya to something I did Wrong, she didn’t understand what I was trying to say. Plus I should probably not trust these kinds of moral intuitions; I seem to be oversensitive compared to everyone else. Think of it as a sort of moral Aumann agreement: if Nicole and Anna both say I shouldn’t worry about this thing, then I should replace their judgment with mine wholesale, because they know how colleges work, and I don’t. It’s the same reason I trust the Physical Review C more than my own lying eyes. And it goes the same if I can predict approximately what Nicole or Anna would say, without actually asking them.
This is madness. It is a waste of cognitive resources to worry about such matters; I could be working on “Dagny Taggart and the First Welfare Theorem,” or studying for the final (“for the final”). Why do I intend to continue onward at Diablo Valley Shithole if it gives me so much pain?—there are several reasons. It will help me learn math, and I have to prove to everyone that I am capable of earning a Bachelor of Science, and it would be nice to get over this illness. And there is the most important thing, the vision of a thesis. I have to get better at math and at school so that I can write a thesis on (e.g.) how the family of Stokes theorems generalizes to several complex variables.
I studied with R. Tad Heydenfeldt yesterday, and have plans to meet him today at the Orinda library. The vessel remains yours.
ADDENDUM— Anna replied to my email[,] saying that it is more in line with etiquette that I don’t say anything about the quiz. I read the email in Orinda and then I felt better; I could actually study, instead of moping about eating a silly number of caramels. So Tad and I worked and went over exercises, and we talked. I am always surprised when normal people haven’t heard of things; no doubt some part of this is me privileging the things that I happen to know about, but I suspect there is still a sense in which I am larger than most people. Tad, for instance, is in his late forties, has taught math in high schools, and has applied for a patent on a mobile app, but he had not heard of the Banach–Tarski paradox, Bayes’s theorem, Turing machines, Cantor’s diagonalization, or Python.
I hate the way people talk, openly, in terms of classes and teachers, and I will carry this hatred in my heart until the end of my days. Of course, in studying for the exam (“for the exam”), I too found myself playing the guessing game of What Are We Going to Be Tested On—but it’s not right, it can’t possibly be right, and I wish someone else noticed.
Only what I’ve been doing can’t possibly be right, either, or I would have gotten an easy A in the course; my theory predicted that I was more than prepared, and I was wrong.
The hypothesis space isn’t binary, though: I can’t go back to thinking in terms of classes; it is a cognitive impossibility. My salvation lies in analytics: I need to figure out what schools are doing right that I’ve been doing wrong, both in methods and in motivation. And it is not until then that this vessel will truly be mine.
SECOND ADDENDUM— I posted a question on the mathematics Stack Exchange about the last gap in my proof of the generalized rotation theorem (compare 274, 451, 474A2, 475), and I got an answer from several people within minutes.
I’ve felt pretty nihilistic for much of today. My pride is shattered. I thought I loved work, and that I wanted to do good work, but part of me is lazy. I thought I was Special, but I’m just an ordinary schoolstudent. I guess there’s ultimately no sense in despair. My Spark of curiosity and epistemic rationality was not entirely a delusion. If it turns out that part of me is inherently lazy, then at least the lazy part and the ambitious part can strike positive-sum deals, and at least I’m self-aware and reductionist enough that I can think in terms of subagents striking deals, rather than raving and obsessing about free will.
I patched up the My Life as a Teenage Robot fanfiction I’ve been sitting on (now retitled “Rusting in the Rain”) and published it on fanfiction.net. I posted a link on Facebook, and I got a “Like” from Tom McCabe—I don’t know if that means he actually read it.
I was proud of what I thought of as my Spark. But on the margin I really need to focus on getting good grades and feeling better. I’m sick of being sick. The vessel cannot remain yours, because ownership is a legal fiction.
A couple of decent library days have restored my cheer and vigor. Today I hit the University and got Reasons and Persons, The 10,000 Year Explosion, and Humanity’s End. I talked to Marcy at the library and took notes from Axler.
I just read a pro-copyright book (Mark Helprin’s Digital Barbarism), and it’s made me the slightest bit nervous about the ethics of writing fanfiction. I do have plenty of nonderivative ideas to work on. But there’s a competing moral intuition that says that good ideas ought to be written, and “Dagny Taggart and the First Welfare Theorem” is too good of an idea. It deserves to exist, whether or not it’s “just for practice,” whether or not I publicize it. Copyright is a social mechanism that exists because it is allegedly useful; creative fanfiction makes the world richer, not poorer. But what about the rule of law? Or should supporters of conspiracies to take over the world not be talking about the rule of law?—&c.
The most important thing for me to realize about these dilemmas is that they are resolvable. I can read all the articles I can find about the legality of fanfiction, and then decide what I want to work on.
I did end up getting a C in the class. It is a disappointing outcome, and while of course I have regrets (for in the human realm, a lack of regrets implies a much greater lack of imagination), the experience quite likely was better than the null outcome of not having enrolled at all. I learned some things about how to solve differential equations, and I’ve started to get over my hatred and fear of school. During the semester, I spent a lot of time being quite terrified about things that I’d done wrong. But now that the semester is over, these claims of wrongness can be viewed at a distance. I turned in shoddy homework, but got full credit for it anyway, and maybe it isn’t an indelible mark of sin upon my soul. Of course I don’t intend to let it happen again, but I shouldn’t let it drive me mad, either. I can’t say how much of this is the aripiprazole talking.
I had supper with Father and his friend on Monday evening. He gave me $800 to help with school books and tuition. He was surprisingly kind, actively encouraging me to enjoy myself over the long break (as opposed to prodding me to find work).
I met with Seanan yesterday, and got him to agree that we should send each other our writing (or notice of lack thereof) every week.
I’ve done some reading online, and I still don’t know how I feel about the ethics of fanfiction and how it relates to what I should do about my bubbling visions of “Dagny Taggart and the First Welfare Theorem.” I am in no way conflicted about the aesthetic virtue of creative derivative works, but I am too easily intimidated by those who would sneer infringement. I am a moral coward at heart; I would have turned the dial all the way in the Milgram experiment. My moral intuitions are transparently crazy: I’ve actively contributed to a real-life conspiracy to take over the world, and yet I’m worried about the copyright implications of writing fanfiction? It is not at all proportional.
ADDENDUM—“Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music and My Recent Madness”— I contined to be sad today, worrying about the ethics of fanfiction. I biked to the park and halfheartedly tried to read from Reasons and Persons; I bought cookies at Safeway and ate too many of them; I played a Flash game; I called Anna and chatted with Lucas.
I deleted my story from fanfiction.net, not because I’ve decided that fanfiction is wrong, but simply for my own sanity and peace of mind. I would prefer to live in a society where fanfiction is legal and celebrated, but I’ve got other things to think about; I don’t want to get personally involved.
I am safe. The last time I checked the stats page, my hit count was still in the double-digits, and surely a good fraction of those people didn’t read it. The worst thing that happens is that I disappoint three of my friends and a dozen strangers.
I’ve still been upset today over the fanfiction debacle—what about my precommitment to publish by the end of the year (see 506)? I am going to argue that I satisfied the precommitment when I published on the fifteenth, and the fact that I changed my mind and took it down a week later is irrelevant. I said as much in an email to my stickK.com referee Hannah “A.” Finley, and that I want to become happier. And if I do want to become happier, then I won’t let this madness tear me apart: my overall sanity is more important than making either choice, and if Hannah somehow were to disagree with my argument, then I must maintain stability even as I lose $100.
I’ve also been worried today about the morality of building up a homework buffer in a college class. Maybe I should just accept, really accept that my moral intuitions are hopelessly miscalibrated, and consciously substitute my prediction of what Anna Salamon would recommend in place of my own judgment (compare 514).
I also sent an email to Katie Kolodzie (ccing Seanan), inviting her to join our no-shame, minimal-commitment writing club.
Surely Hannah will reply to my email soon, and there’s no point in being sad in the meantime.
ADDENDUM— I have played Flash games and generally been sad and worthless. I shouldn’t even know the rules of football, but I do. Maybe I should repost the story—in another light, my earlier concerns seem silly and trivial. No one cares if I have one piece of fanfiction online. Honestly no one cares. And then I can fulfill the terms of my contract. So why did I freak out and remove the story?
Diary, I am not very sane.
On the twenty-fourth, I met with Anna. We had breakfast at Starbucks, talked, and made plans to collaborate on a YouTube version of “Shaping the Intelligence Explosion” and a presentation on rationality. On the evening of the twenty-fifth, I went to the Less Wrong Newtonmas meetup. I did think that the video game detracted from the social activities (“Video games are dross,” I said), but I had a good time and was very happy. I do need to get out of the habit of projecting low status—in retrospect, there was obviously no need to tell people that I am ashamed because I got a C in differential equations class. Eliezer said I seem to be having trouble with the Hufflepuff parts rather than the Ravenclaw parts. I got to expound on personal identity; sometimes I hope that Eliezer is being deliberately obtuse.
I am glad that fanfiction.net offers an option to change one’s penname; I’ve changed mine from ZackMDavis to gemstoneofscience; I might end up changing the associated email account, too. Of course Google knows everything, but I feel a little safer not being so open about the matter: that which has once been on the net can never be secret, but it can at least be nonobvious. I’m imagining finishing and posting my Jem and Atlas Shrugged ideas, without telling anyone. Then, when I return to Less Wrong, I imagine burying a link to “First Welfare Theorem” (“I may or may not be responsible for” …) in an old Open Thread. That way, a few people will see it in Recent Comments, but it would not be what you would call a promotion push.
Today’s studying did not go well; I continue to be disastrously error-prone. The vessel remains yours.
Diary, I need a morality that will actually let me make decisions, instead of just feeling bad about everything. I should either write or not-write “Dagny Taggart and the First Welfare Theorem,” and if I write it, I should do so with the optimal level of openness, whatever that may be. Although it probably makes sense to mention my moral qualms in my email to Seanan and Katie tomorrow and include what I’ve written: surely I am free to think and speak in the context of a private email. My intuitions continue to flitter back and forth.
Anna said that I am beset by fake goals, habits of thought that make me weaker, not stronger.
Further evidence of my continuing insanity comes from the fact that today I drove to Emeryville hoping to purchase a book. I wanted Lawrence Lessig’s Remix, and I wanted it ASAP, on the hopes that it would help cure my fanfiction-related madness. The Barnes & Noble website said they had it in Emeryville, except I missed my exit and ended up going to San Francisco (losing five dollars to the bridge toll), and when I finally found my way to where I actually wanted to go, I couldn’t find a safe parking space. So I came back to this side of the tunnel empty-handed. I bought a coffee and a scone at Starbucks, but it was crowded and unpleasant, so I didn’t stay to study. I bought a printer cartridge, paper, and a 2011 planner at Staples.
I sent a request for the Borders in San Ramon to kindly reserve a copy of Remix for me, but it turns out that they don’t have it after all; I’m getting the two-day service from Amazon, instead.
I did write a paragraph about my ethical dilemma in my Saturday email to Seanan and Katie. That was probably a pretty reasonable thing to do; when you genuinely don’t know what to do, it makes sense to seek advice. Somehow part of me wants to still write a stripped-down version of “First Welfare Theorem,” but not mention it in the weekly emails, except maybe to include the fanfiction.net link when it’s all done and posted. That means I need to do more writing on some of my nonderivative ideas in order to have something to put in the email. That’s probably a good thing: I want to do good work; it will be an outpouring of creativity that will wash away all sins.
What exactly am I afraid of, anyway? That someone, somewhere would think me uncreative? Well, I agree that in certain respects, fanfiction is less creative than nonderivative fiction, because a lot of worldbuilding and characterization has already been done for you. I agree that I’m not creative, compared to someone more creative than me. It does not follow that fanfiction should not exist.
Am I worried about not having enough nonderivative ideas? But I already have three ideas that I’m pretty confident are workable: “Blindspot,” “Freakshow” (which will have to be retitled and reworked to excise the Stretch Princess reference and quotes—surely I can make up my own lyrics), and a rewrite of “Pastime.” I have a number of older ideas which I’m not sure are as workable (I’ve grown up since), and then there’s A Modern Approach/No One Told You. Still, a floor of three stories: not great, but enough to seed a personal website.
The repost of my Teenage Robot fic got a review recently: it said that Sheldon’s dialogue must have been a pain to write (it wasn’t), that I have a large vocabulary, and that I have a lot of talent. Also, my beliefs about causality and software make me doubt very much that the “10/10” at the end indicates a review date of tenth October.
There are “liberal” arguments for respecting copyright law. Even Creative Commons licenses have a “No Derivative Works” option. And if I expect people to respect the GPL’s share-alike clause, then there’s a sense in which it’s only fair to respect the niceties of copyright.
Look, Diary, the most important thing is my health. If my remaining doubt after considering some of the relevant literature (Salinger v. Colting and some scholarly opinions) is such that I could not spend ten weeks on “First Welfare Theorem” and expect to be stable throughout, then I can scrap the idea and move on with my life. I could redelete “Rusting in the Rain,” or I could leave it up and forget about it (it is beautiful)—the important thing is to move on and be productive. The vessel remains yours.
Diary, there is nothing like a precommitment to make you notice what it is you really value. It’s possible that I don’t actually want to write fiction. Before I proposed weekly emails, I was free to conveniently not-notice that I rarely write fiction, but now my not-writing is made salient. What if I decide that it’s not worth it, that I don’t care that much, that it’s better to devote my time and creative energy to programming or something? All cultural mythology aside, giving up on some specific endeavor isn’t always the wrong decision; one vessel can only hold so much. Of course, it is far too premature for such thoughts to apply to me yet. If you decide that writing is too hard, then next you might say that programming is too hard, and math is too hard—eventually there’s nothing left to do but die.
I was sad for a lot of today, perhaps dwelling on the facts that I’m not actually that smart and not actually that hard-working. Talking to Josh Meltzer on the phone made me feel better. The vessel, as always, remains yours.
But it’s good that I proposed weekly emails, if nothing else than as a test to find out whether I actually want to write fiction or not. If the answer is Yes, I should write, and if the answer is No, then I should know that ASAP, so I can devote myself to some other endeavor, or settle in for a quiet life with a nine-to-five and my library books, or something. And our impromptu club is minimal commitment by design. I could commit to going through my notebooks and extracting the good bits, which is something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time, and afterwords I could see whether there was a novel lurking in those pages. Or now that I’ve resigned myself to the fate of being an ordinary schoolstudent, I could submit a column to the Diablo Valley Shithole student paper.
I may not be very smart or creative or hard-working, but it really seems like my ideas deserve at least one novel. I have built so many connections: who else would have imagined arguing that the economist’s notion of convex preferences means that you should prefer balanced bundles of masculine and feminine virtues? I could not write nonfiction based on artistic insights such as these, because I don’t believe them. The reason to write fiction is to convey all the beautiful ideas that deserve to be thought, despite being neither true nor false.
I do have a few ideas. Even though my original not-even-an-outline for my first gender novel turned out to be unworkable as I grew up, there’s no reason I couldn’t still spin a novella out of the middle. And if the thought of K. G. Stacy going by her initials is too personal to bear, then I can just give her a different last name (I’ve been thinking Blake) and let her go by that; consider Boyd.
I haven’t even read lots of books about writing, which is obvious low-hanging fruit. Fiction writing is a skill that ought to be learnable, like math or ice-skating.
I can just sit down and write a Diary entry with very little resistance; why can’t (why don’t) I do that with fiction? When it comes down to it, even my Jem and Atlas Shrugged fanfiction ideas are better than nothing, assuming I can get over my copyright neurosis. And nothing is identically the default outcome.
Sometimes life does seem good, and things do seem worth-doing; I probably just need to break out of this sadness.
Today I got up at a reasonable hour, but I was slow in the morning. I got coffee at the Peet’s on the way to the Clayton library, but I wasn’t very productive at the library. I paced around outside, came up with a poem to recite to Hannah “A.” Finley over AIM, noticed that trochaic rhymes with algebraic, and daydreamed about my Jem fanfic idea. I imagined writing an email to Seanan (from whom I received nothing on Saturday), proposing to disband our impromptu writing club, but when I came home I had an email from him, confessing that he wrote nothing. I guess it’s better not to disband; I had thought of saying that I had thought of ways to self-motivate without cluttering other people’s inboxes, but maybe that’s not true. Without regular habits or an explicit, concrete, actionable plan, things just don’t get done. I have a tendency to delude myself into thinking otherwise, that Some Day Real Soon Now I will just magically pull a novel out of the air.
Well, no. Pulling a novel out of the air takes time and labor. I might or might not be willing to do that; I’m certainly not ready to do it now, at my current level. But maybe I can become more competent?—it remains to be seen.
Maybe I should dwell more often about how relatively good I have it, or how we are all going to die, on the grounds that it will salve my personal suffering.
I have felt lousy for much of today. Last night I added a little to “First Welfare Theorem.” I thought about finishing up the scene, calling it the first chapter, and posting it to fanfiction.net. Then today I seem to be leaning towards scrapping the entire project, but I’m not sure why I feel so ambivalent. I thought I had settled the ethical issue (such as it was) to my own satisfaction. Maybe I’m still afraid of being or seeming unoriginal, even if not in a sinful way? You will recall what I had taken to calling my recent madness.
Or I’m worried that if I post one chapter, then I’ll feel obligated to finish the project, especially if someone liked the first bit. Normally that would be a good thing, but because I still feel ambivalent about writing fanfiction, it doesn’t seem like a good thing. It’s as if I want to write, but I don’t want to show anyone, but I don’t want to write all that badly, such that if I’m not going to show anyone, then it seems better that I not write.
I suppose there is a case to be made which says, “For mental health reasons, don’t do things you feel deeply ambivalent about.” I’m proud of “Rusting in the Rain,” but I don’t want to be a fanfiction writer. It’s possible that that’s something I should want to get over: after all, in 2002, I probably didn’t want to be an autogynephile.
I am disappointed because I thought I was a Smart and Creative Person, but then it turns out that I currently have only a couple of workable story ideas, and (even worse) I don’t actually like writing fiction in the sense of revealed preference. Although—whatever it is about me that got me daydreaming about “First Welfare Theorem,” is likely to be adaptable to having more original story ideas.
What do I want to do? Even in the absence of some grand creative endeavor, we have as a floor that fact that there are always more books you haven’t read and more math that you haven’t studied—standard out-of-the-box tools to play with. It’s not a bad floor. The spotlight was never mine to hold.
I was glum earlier today. Then I went to a coffeeshop and read a little from Rebecca Goldstein’s Properties of Light and paced around in the parking lot daydreaming about fanfiction ideas. Now I feel better.
ADDENDUM— I finished up and posted the first chapter of “First Welfare Theorem” (this shall not be construed to suggest that there will be further chapters) and Alicorn thinks it is nonterrible. I am happy to have created something but also a little bit hurt or scared somehow. I guess writing is like that and I should try to get used to it. The part of my brain that thinks fanfiction is immoral might be acting up a bit now, which is a good reason not to link the story from Less Wrong. Or maybe I’ll link it while saying that I probably won’t add more, partially because other projects have higher priority, and partially because of the repeated protests of the part of my brain (link Yudkowsky on “Which Parts are ‘Me’?”) that feels guilty about writing fanfiction. Oh, and partially because it’s terrible.
The Dr. Walker had a cancellation and I was able to see her yesterday. Today Mother and I went to Berkeley and she paid for the renewal of my library privileges—it’s cheaper now that I’m actually a schoolstudent. I continue to be sad about not wanting to write, about not being an endless fountain of good ideas. I misbehaved in the #lesswrong IRC channel, apologizing for being bad and wrong and attention-seeking. Someone told me to shut up, so I thanked him and left. I don’t know why I give into such transparently self-destructive impulses—better to save my reputation by not joining chatrooms at all when I am sad; it never helps. I worry a bit about how I will be perceived if I post those two stories or my case against personal immortality in the discussion section (conditional on my actually writing any of these things)—will I be written off as an obnoxious depressive case, like the way P. J. Eby dissed CronoDAS not too long ago? But it is written that what’s true is already so. If someone were to tell me that I’m full of shit, what could I do but calmly agree?
It ought to be relaxing to view the world objectively. If I myself am not sufficiently Smart and Creative, at least there are Smart and Creative people somewhere. There are other people who love rationality, self-study, and even the titillating but ultimately untrue thought of oneself as a woman. Still, I should learn to be happy.
On the twenty-second, I buried a link to that chapter of “First Welfare Theorem” in an old Open Thread, where it was appropriate. The comment got two upvotes and the story seems to have gotten about a dozen visitors, so I guess now I know about how many people click on links in the Less Wrong recent comments feed. The comment generated no replies, so I deleted it next day when I felt shy.
Classes at Diablo Valley Shithole have started. Nicole is visiting. Hillary Hernandez from Robert Half thought I would be a good match for a job, but the client rejected my resume.
I seem to have felt unmotivated lately, but I don’t know why.
Maybe I’m sad because it’s starting to look like my novel just isn’t going to happen. But why shouldn’t at least a draft happen, even if it’s not-good and shouldn’t be published? Even if I’m losing my rebelliousness about school and coming to terms with the nature of my own laziness, it doesn’t mean I have no right to portray rebelliousness in a fictional character. I can take it as my quest to find out if there’s a novel in me. What am I afraid of?
I promised Seanan and Katie that I would pay each of them ten dollars if I didn’t have my ms. of “Blindspot” up to 2500 words by Saturday. It is Wednesday and I haven’t written. Today someone on the blog asked if there was an ebook version of Alicorn’s Radiance, so I spent some time playing with tools until I had a MOBI file to post.
I wish that my life—or some life, doesn’t matter if it’s “mine”—had gone better such that my aesthetic vision would be realized.
I have continued to feel unmotivated. “Ayn Rand didn’t even speak English at my age” (compare 165) was never a good excuse, and in any case it is no longer true. A better comparison: when Dan Shive was my age, the (beautiful, beautiful) Grace’s birthday party arc was well underway.
Going out to lunch seems to have helped somewhat.
I still don’t seem to be as motivated as I used to be. Maybe my brain is anchoring on the light demands of school? I am somewhat annoyed by how many gen-ed classes are required by the CSU system—it is seeming like I’ll have to stay at DVC a semester longer than I had previously planned.
Anna agreed to tutor (“tutor”) me on the eleventh, and I confessed that I felt bad about the B+ I received in Prof. Aptheker’s class that I did not feel that I deserved (compare 265).
The Less Wrong meetup on the fifth was splendid, as it always is. There was a transwoman in transition there named Cayenne; at first I thought she was a guy. At one point, she asked if Gödel’s theorem could be applied to probability theory in order to arrive at a probability of Bayesian reasoning being true. I said that it didn’t seem like a promising line of thought. (My unvoiced intuition: what probability would you expect to get?—any particular number seems absurd.)
There was a singularity skeptic named (I think) Anand with (I think) Harvard Business School ties, to whom I recommended Robin Hanson’s “Economic Growth Given Machine Intelligence.”
My earlier novel idea went up in flames when it turned out I didn’t believe in it anymore; will my recent novel idea suffer the same fate? I’m not in a position where I can give people advice. I’ll always have license to portray a character quitting high school, but it’s not clear that I have license to endorse quitting high school until I can present in exquisite detail how to do better. And it’s not clear that I do know how to do better.
I think I’m one of the least competent people in my social circle. Lucas is smarter than me; Anna is smarter than me and has academic skills; Hannah “A.” Finley is smarter than me and is soon to finish her second novel in less than a year; Mike Blume is smarter than me and is a programmer. I haven’t built anything; I haven’t done anything; I am just an ordinary college student, and I don’t know how to become something better.
I have felt shame and regret over all sorts of things—about the debacle over my nickname, about blog comments.
I’ve made a fool of myself on the #lesswrong IRC channel again. Why do I do that? Shouldn’t I know better now? And I use my real name online; any reputational damage I incur is not confined to the series of tubes.
I should know better. If I’m not going to be a writer, then fine, I can do something else. But let me be smart for once, let me optimize in advance for once.
It’s possible that not-being-a-writer is not such a terrible fate. The Muse speaks to a lot of people, and it’s sad that most of them are not talented or dedicated enough to bring their visions to fruition, but it’s better than the Muse not speaking to them at all. If we cannot have the grand work, then at least we will have our vague daydreams.
I’m still not so happy with the way my life has gone so far.
ADDENDUM— The problem with not-being-a-writer is that it’s not clear what else I’m supposed to do with my life instead. There exists beauty in math and programming, but they’re not means of self-expression. I’m glad some people can have their lifework in such fields, but I can’t; my soul is too humanistic. For me, if it’s not fiction, then it is nothing. But surely it is not fiction, because I should notice that in the days of my purity born of pain, I produced more than 600 pages of technical notes, but I did not produce 600 pages of fiction. Then by modus ponens it is nothing; I stare into the void unblinking. I don’t even read that much fiction, which is surely a prerequisite.
I have an assignment to finish for class tomorrow, but I’ve been incredibly preoccupied. I have done walking meditation and thinking about writing and embarrassment. In recent days I had felt deep shame and embarrassment over things I had done wrong in the dead past. It seemed to have helped to say to myself that humiliation is in the map, not the territory. There was a Less Wrong meetup on the twenty-sixth, but it was less fun than average. Alicorn is almost done with Radiance, her second novel (!) in less than eight months (!!).
Don’t tell me it’s Diary Day again. In seven years, I’ve changed in ways I would not have guessed beforehand (as evidenced by the observation that I did not, in fact, guess), but it is not enough; I remain stricken by several core weaknesses. Most notably, I am still emotionally fragile and I am still incompetent.
I saw the Dr. Walker on the tenth. I told her that I’ve been functional in the sense that I can go to school without having crying fits, but that I haven’t been happy or productive, but that this is about normal because I have never been happy or productive. I lamented the fact that apparently I don’t actually want to write: surely if I wanted it badly enough, I would be doing what Alicorn or Luke Muehlhauser is doing. And because Creators are more valuable than nonCreators, my life is less valuable than it might have been. The Dr. Walker said it sounded like I don’t know what I want out of life, which is an apt description that I never would have thought of, despite its being a cliché.
On the ninth, I helped put together a compilation of articles on existential risk to possibly be given to Bill Gates the next day. Anna said she was willing to pay me in tutoring (“tutoring”) or money. Of course Anna’s attention is more valuable than me than money wage, but I toyed with the idea of not contacting her for the tutoring, but rather waiting to see how long it would take before she contacted me. Today I caved and emailed her, asking to talk for [a half-hour].
I think I’ll hit the University library tomorrow on a book run.
I continue to be beset with shame over things I’ve written years ago, but it’s not even in a logical manner. The other week I was ashamed to have argued the hereditarian position on the race and IQ question in an email to Caitlin Casey, perhaps in 2008. (How did the subject even come up, anyway? I’m certainly not ashamed of having considered the position, but what did I hope to gain by telling Caitlin?) But today I can remember this without pain.
More recently, I’ve been ashamed of the unfinished fiction I sent to Hannah “A.” Finley in 2009—not “Greater Glory,” actually, but my masturbatory metafanfiction, “The Devotion to Something Afar” (see 401A2). I guess I’m not ashamed of writing it, as such; I’m ashamed that I had the poor judgment to show it to Hannah and to think that she might like it.
I had an unusual spell of happiness yesterday, sparked by daydreams about starting a blog; I thought of calling it The Glitter of Generality.
I sent a message to the Dr. Walker asking if it’s better to read or burn something one is ashamed of. I could try forcing myself to read “Devotion,” and Hannah’s comments, and Caitlin’s rebuttal, in the hopes of getting my brain to understand that it’s not so bad.
Diary, why must I be so continually hurt by such trifles? So I wrote something dumb and showed it to Hannah “A.” Finley in late 2009—I didn’t show it to anyone else. Hannah isn’t teasing me about it, and I don’t know how much of it she even remembers. The distress is all in my head: if I could just forget about it, then life would continue as if the embarrassing thing had never happened.
What seems like oversensitivity is really just sensitivity to the wrong things. Why aren’t I sensitive to all the time I’m wasting being hurt, when I could be doing interesting things instead? I’ve chatted with Hannah today and seem to feel a little bit better. I’m still not very smart; my life is as a trainwreck.
I glanced briefly at my electronic ms.s for “Devotion” and “Congress Shall Make No Law” and deleted them. I deleted my records of the October 2009 email exchange between myself and Hannah “A.” Finley re my fiction. I made a new backup tarball of my “Documents” folder and deleted the old ones. I emptied the trash on both the USB drive and Memoryless Distribution itself. O blissful memory hole!
Maybe I should swear off fanfiction: meaning to not even think about finishing “Dagny Taggart and the First Welfare Theorem” or writing “Click / Clash.” The reason I’m so ashamed of “Devotion” is not because the writing was bad but because it was so fannish.
No doubt sociology as a discipline is a fascinating field of endeavor, teeming with deep insights into the structure of society. My “Intro to Sociology” class, however, seems to be bullshit: vast numbers of words are used to make what seem to be trivial observations. But I sat through it yesterday; I will collect my A and my three credits. Afterwords (after a small internal debate), I ate at Jack in the Box. Then it turned out that the Borders in Pleasant Hill was closing (the company is bankrupt), so I stopped in and looked around. O glorious bookstores!—I think I wanted to cry, not in sorrow at the passing of Borders, but in joy for publishing and literacy.
Over AIM, I mentioned to Hannah “A.” Finley that my Old Shame episode of this week was specifically about “Devotion,” and she said that the title didn’t ring a bell. I edited and posted the prologue to “Click / Clash.”
I was up late finishing Nancy Kress’s Beggars and Choosers. Diary, do you suppose fiction writing is learnable in the way that math is learnable? What would it take to write like Nancy Kress?
I really, really need to get on a schedule; maybe I’ll take out a StickK contract for this.
I ate supper with Father on Sunday and enjoyed talking with him. I’ve given a lot of thought yesterday and today to my vague-daydream-of-a-novel but without reaching any firm conclusion. Sometimes it seems like the thing simply isn’t going to happen, and that I should focus on making money instead. And sometimes it seems like I owe it to myself to at least try. That’s qualitative thinking, though: the real question is not, “Should I try?” but rather, “How hard should I try?” for it is this second question that lays bare to the terrifying light the essentially conserved quantities of the matter. Every minute that you spend thinking about one thing is a minute that you didn’t spend thinking about some other thing; writing a novel has opportunity costs, and they are not small.
And then there’s the small matter of how my recent novel idea touches on (and in point of historical fact, grew out of) that retarded identity crisis of mine. Maybe it would be better not to write anything that touches in any way on the changing of names. My name is Zack, I am male, and I like my mistakes buried.
But then the project of intentionally striving towards androgyny seems like something genuinely worth writing about, and taken seriously this has to involve names (although now I’m thinking Clarke rather than Blake). If I can’t have an unschooled androgynous life, then can’t I at least give that glory to a fictional character? Ultimately such concerns are (wait for it—) selfish; I remember reading in a column of writing advice that writing is not therapy nor self-expression, but rather that writing is for the benefit of readers.
Moreover, I think we overestimate how much other people remember and care about our past mistakes. No one else is trying to make me suffer for my identity crisis; all the pain lies in my own reactions to my own memories. Barack Obama used to be called Barry, but it doesn’t occur to anyone to tease him about this.
The meetup yesterday was really helpful; I had been stuck in a loop of low-motivation paralysis since Thursday morning, when I said something stupidly political on Less Wrong. Vladimir Nesov called me out on it, so I edited away my remark and in a bit replied to Nesov, “You’re right.” Still later, I apologized via PM to Vladimir “C.” Slepnev, and the next day I still felt embarrassed, so I impulsively deleted both my comments, leaving no public trace of my involvement. All in all, a minor incident that can’t reflect too poorly on me; I actually gained karma (four points for “You’re right”). Still, it is mortifying because I should have known better by now: you do not get offended on Less Wrong.
But the meetup was splendid!—and having said the wrong thing on the blog doesn’t seem so important anymore. Diary, what general lessons or techniques can be learned from this?
Diary, a fortuitous coincidence: I recall having recently fantasized about asking Boyd to review a draft of No One Told You, and on Thursday, Boyd posted on Facebook that she’s considering trying to be a grammar and creativity consultant. That means I actually have a pretext to talk to her. I wouldn’t even need to bring up my ulterior motive; I genuinely am having problems shipping text. Am I brave enough to comment or message her?
The boost from the meetup was temporary; I spent some time with Flash games yesterday and today, which is no doubt evidence of sin. It felt good arguing with Prof. Huff after class today, but then I sunk into sinful torpor at home. I felt better after buying a coffee and chatting with Lucas.
Boyd comments that she is a part-time muse; she asks the right questions to get people out of creative ruts. Right now it seems like I should be brave enough to talk to her about my vague-daydream-of-a-novel.
Diary, events: I went to the weekly meetup on the thirteenth, but my social performance was poor; it would have been better to stay home. I’ve been introduced to a new cute cartoon: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. I even spent some money on it (I have copyright scruples, unlike some of my contemporaries) and have a fanfiction idea. I started writing a program for Hannah “A.” Finley to convert between fictional calendars, but I didn’t finish it yet. Yesterday I went to a Pesach seder at the Goldhabers’; Chuck is still insane (compare 513). Today I was scheduled to see the Dr. Walker but she was sick.
And nonevents: I still haven’t messaged Boyd to set up a creativity counseling session. I don’t know Boyd very well, but I would like to know her, because simply by virtue of the way she presents herself, one can infer that she knows important things that I don’t know. That I can’t know?—but such questions are exactly what I (thought I) wanted to write about. Enough.
I actually wrote some fiction yesterday and the day before. It’s terrible, but perhaps not quite so terrible as the utter lack of writing which is much more common. Maybe I should get used to forcing 500 words a day. Without some sort of word counts or working hours, I just don’t do anything. (This is contrary to my self-image but seems to be empirically true.) Writing a novel seems like an impossibly distant goal; there are just too many problems to solve.
Yesterday I also finished the date converter script I was working on for Hannah “A.” Finley.
On the whole, it has not been a productive Spring Break—has it ever? Have I ever really known how to work? But I’ve been surprisingly stable lately. I have a lot of regrets in life, but right now they’re not dragging me down into madness. I was wrong, and my past will always be stained with my having been wrong—but I can live with it.
ADDENDUM— Actually, I ended up getting caught in a loop of melancholy today.
I met with Anna on thirtieth April. I mentioned to her that I feel like my personal development has been stalled since 2009.
On the second, I joined the local crossdressing group, the Diablo Valley Girls.
On the tenth, my school-hatred flared up again, sparked by concerns about signing up for future classes. I also wasn’t as prepared as I should have been for the statistics test, and I was so upset that I made a little bit of unnecessary noise during the test. On the twelfth, a black woman in the class reprimanded me for this, and I apologized and said she was right, because she was, in fact, right.
It seems like I always end up regretting getting angry or offended. So what if I can’t get the classes I want? Cool cynicism is better than revolutionary passion. The school bureaucrats are not my friends; I don’t care what they think. My education is up to me.
I started writing a fanfic in which Twilight Sparkle proves P ≠ *N**P*. I remain yours.
Diary, I don’t understand this subjective feeling of ambitiousness that doesn’t connect to actual actions. I have thought that I want to learn to write—you can tell that I am practically illiterate—but the desire doesn’t seem to connect to anything. It’s easier to daydream about all the bronies at Equestria Daily loving my story than it is to actually fill in the gaps in my vision, and actually building an instantiation of the vision out of words is a more difficult task still.
I have a huge amount of schoolwriting to do for the end of the term. Anna called tonight, and we might be able to meet next week conditional on my getting lots and lots of writing done this weekend.
I’ve let schoolwork get in the way of my personal studies in recent weeks, and it is shameful—moreover, I’m self-aware enough to notice that it’s probably not fair to blame the schoolwork when I can just say that I haven’t studied enough. I think I’ll reboot my mathematical endeavors with a serious study of statistics (from Jaynes and Wackerly et al.).
I have secured classes for the Summer and Fall terms. For the summer, it’s discrete maths and the history of the U.S. since 1877. For the fall, it’s speech, Java, women and social change, intro physics for engineers, and politics.
But Diary, have I ever got an outrageous amount of schoolwriting to do this weekend!
Diary, it’s not being stupid that hurts; it’s being predictably stupid. I should have known better than to leave the traditional cultures report until the end. I did know better. So why doesn’t knowing connect to doing? My cynicism is such that I won’t have a nervous breakdown this time; I can turn in a low-quality report below the length guideline without combusting from shame, nor yet crying and screaming “I betrayed them” for hours. However, my failure to do the right thing is still morally shameful; it is still evidence against my beauty.
My aftermath report for the Prof. Mickey Huff’s class was terrible, too; I explicitly told him that it was terrible and deserved a D.
I have to finish my degree in order to prove that I can.
ADDENDUM— After class, I told the Prof. Gallin that I was ashamed of myself for not having started the report earlier, but that’s it’s not about grades; it’s about scholarship.
My anthropology report was not very good and significantly under the length guideline, but I can live with that. The Prof. Gallin told us to put a star by our name on the sign-out sheet if we wanted feedback on our paper, and I did so. I asked her if she had any general-purpose advice for writing academic papers and she said to take a writing class at DVC. I held my tongue.
My behavior on the statistics final caused me some emotional distress later. When I got an implausible result computing the variance of some data using the definition, I just entered the data into my TI-83 and had the machine give me the variance automatically. I also used the automatic test function rather than computing for each table cell individually. While handing in the test, I even asked the Prof. Fuller if it was okay to use any of the calculator functions and I think I got a nod, but I still ended up feeling horribly guilty later about the business with the variance: if the motivation was to test that we could apply the definition of variance, then surely I violated the definition of the prompt. It wasn’t for a few days that I realized why I had gotten an implausibly large answer; the sample variance is , not . Anyway, I confessed this (about the variance) to Prof. Fuller yesterday and everything is fine; I didn’t do anything wrong.
I’ve made some slides for Anna and rationality minicamp this week.
I received all As in my spring courses. It is not a matter of complete indifference to me, despite my contempt. Whether I deserved all the As is another question that depends greatly on what standards one chooses to hold—my performance was not stellar in all aspects—but apparently community college does not expect much. This is another reason why my private endeavors are so vital; I must not be dragged down to the level of the institution.
Summer session has gone reasonably well. I posted a solid seventy-seven points from eighty on the first discrete maths test (although with the professor being to my thinking lenient in awarding partial credit). I did poorly on the second test, but the score hasn’t been posted yet.
History class has been as well as can be expected. I like the Prof. Katie Graham, who doesn’t bother to conceal her contempt for grade-grubbers. The homework assignments are to write two paragraphs on one of the key terms from the textbook chapter, explaining the meaning and significance of the term. I’ve had some fun being over-the-top with some of these, looking up outside sources and writing more than necessary. (Summarizing a textbook section in two paragraphs isn’t going to make me a better writer.) My “On reform Darwinism” breaks four pages; my “On the Scopes Trial” runs for eight.
I cherish the reaction the earlier outrageous efforts got. It was 30 June, the day of the midterm, and I was sitting in the front row, and I could see that the Prof. Graham was marking my papers. (Perhaps it would have been purer not to look, on the grounds that one must keep one’s eyes on one’s own paper when taking an exam, even if one gains no advantage on the test by one’s looking elsewhere, as in this case. I’m not going to torture myself about it.) When I handed in my exam, the Prof. Graham returned my papers and pointed out the comment she had written on the reform Darwinism minifesto, which I quote verbatim: “Why are you taking a community college summer session course? Aren’t you bored silly?” In the brief conversation that followed, I felt justified in mentioning that I don’t like school. The whole incident really made my day.
On 18–20 June, I went on a road trip with Mike Blume, Steve Rayhawk, Will Newsome, and (from Irvine) Hannah “A.” Finley to attend Anna’s wedding in San Diego.
On Wednesday the thirteenth, I was very embarrassed because I posted an outrageously stupid idea to the discrete maths class forum and someone called me on it.
Yesterday I felt very inspired and brave reading Ralph Keyes’s The Courage to Write, but the feeling didn’t last. Today I did finally message Boyd about her creative consulting services (see 541, 542); we’ll see what comes of that. And the vessel remains yours.
Summer session is over; I have an A in history and expect another in discrete maths. Now I have threeish weeks to myself, or the vessel has three weeks, and the fraction of them that belongs to me depends on how the self is defined—and events to come.
Oftentimes when I’m at the library, I feel an urge to go home and continue studying there, but I don’t get nearly as much done at home, which makes me suspect that the urge to return is just a ruse by the part of my brain that wants to be lazy. I don’t know how to do with myself what I say I want to do with myself. It’s fun to scribble in notebooks that one will spend an hour each day on writing, reading, archiving notebooks, topology, statistics, spectral graph theory, algorithms, Python, and cognitive neuroscience. That’s nine hours—significantly less than the waking hours in a day, but, one fears, significantly more than one is actually likely to do.
Boyd writes on “Rusting in the Rain” that my vocabulary is fine, but that I need a lot of work on character depiction and storycrafting.
I’ve fantasized about writing an undergraduate thesis and taking a Master’s degree online from the Open University, but today another wave of school-hatred washed over me, and now I’m thinking I should just get my BA as quickly as possible. Assuming I’m reading the documentation correctly and a few other things, I would only have to take twelve math classes at San Francisco State. If I take six classes a semester, that’s doable in just 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 had a really good math day on the twenty-sixth, and it was good to talk about math with Nisan before the blog meetup on the twenty-seventh. We’ll see how much topology I can learn by the end of the year.
Diary, no doubt you have heard some form of the lament more than a hundred times, but I note here yet again how tragically easy it is to not do things. Humans are stupid enough such that it is not to obvious to say that unless you explicitly make sure to get around to something at some definite time, it just languishes undone for weeks, months, years, ever. I have two magazines about writing dated April 2004 and August 2006 that I’ve never read—I think I idly flipped through them once. I owe [redacted] an email more than a year after the fact. I’ve been merely intending to learn to code better for so long—and I don’t write fiction.
I had an important IM conversation with Hannah “A.” Finley on Sunday. She has moved to Berkeley primarily to be with Mike Blume, who has now declared himself polyamorous, and accordingly, Hannah has said that she’s self-modified to be poly. She has also said that we could possibly date as long as I wouldn’t be 100% of her boyfriends. So I brought up the subject, initially expressing the opinion that we shouldn’t date. You see, Diary, I don’t actually think we’re that great of a match (although my standards could be too high). Then there’s the strategic considerations: entering an open relationship would damage my desirability to women who aren’t cool with poly, further limiting my already-small pool of potential matches, so therefore being with Hannah would be strategically unwise unless I thought I were already maximizing by being her fractional boyfriend. Furthermore, I thought it would be unfair and exploitative to join even an open relationship with an explicit thought along the lines of This is just to tide me over until I meet someone better. Anyway, we talked it over—there was input from Mike and Scott “Y.” Siskind, for I agreed that Hannah could do what she wished with the transcript—and the result was apparently the upgrading of our relation to that of friends-with-benefits. We’ll see what comes of that.
Yesterday Anna Salamon came over, and we collaborated on presentation slides for the AGI conference this week.
Mother criticized me today for failing to adequately clean the bathroom. When I have my own place, I won’t clean the bathroom except when I genuinely think it needs cleaning—or if any roommates have other ideas, I’ll at least have bargaining power. My present state of dependence is sickening.
I had thought, and even told people, that I would follow the MIT OpenCourseWare curriculum to accompany the Introduction to Algorithms book, but maybe I’ll just set aside hours every day specifically for programming. I’m allowed to change my plans, as long as I actually do it.
Diary, events. I had a small outburst about schooling a few hours before Lauren Shapiro and J.D. Zamfirescu-Pereira’s wedding on the seventh, and I felt guilty about it through the reception and after—I was wrong to have distracted Nicole even for a moment while she was getting ready for her friend’s wedding. After the outburst, I drove to town and bought myself a Dr. Pepper float in order to cool myself down.
The wedding was at the Lawrence Hall of Science. Lauren’s dedication was beautiful. The poster of seating arrangements seemed to be in Garamond, which pleased me; the tables were named after species of dinosaur. Father and I were seated at a table with some of J.D.’s friends from MIT, so I used (abused?) the opportunity to talk about my finite-state automaton intrigue with people who would understand. I especially talked with one David “Pdox” Meyer, who posed brainteasers that I couldn’t solve. At the end of dinner, he suggested that I email him, and he would send me Python challenge problems that Google (his employer) uses to evaluate potential interns (!).
On the eighth, I saw the Dr. Walker, who said something that made me feel more acquiescent towards school. I don’t think it stuck.
David did send me challenge problems, and predictably, I didn’t do very well. One of the problems was to write a script to display an ASCII representation of a binary search tree. I submitted an almost-correct nonrecursive version, but my code was ugly and I didn’t get the spacing quite right. Said David, “You can code, there’s no doubt about that. However, it is also clear you have much to learn about Python and software development methodologies.” I agreed. I don’t think he will (and moreover, I don’t think he should) recommend me for the internship—at least, not right now. We’re still emailing back and forth; I owe him an email that I hope to push out the door tonight.
The fall term has started. One of the assignments for the “Women and Social Change in the United States” class is to write a fictional autobiography of a woman of interest; within a few minutes of thinking about it, I decided I wanted to write about Emmy Noether. I asked the Prof. Stewart if it was okay if our woman of interest only immigrated to the United States late in life, and she said it was okay, but I mentioned that Emmy Noether was a mathematician, and a few minutes later the Prof. Stewart said she wasn’t sure that was appropriate—at any relate I would have to take pains to make the connection to social change. Really, Diary, I should have known better than to ask—surely, in my endeavors to make school bearable, it is better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission. I am going to write an unnecessarily long work of historical fiction about the genius and struggle of Emmy Noether incorporating many of my accumulated thoughts about sex differences, and if I get a bad grade, it will have been worth it.
I can’t get over how terrible the Java programming class is. During the first two class sessions, we completed the first two assignments. I’ve already done assignments 3a, 3, and 4 at home (the specs are posted on the class website). The professor rejected my done-at-home version of assignment 2 because I didn’t format my output in the requested way. I shouldn’t have been so resentful during the second class. I can finish the rest of the assignments at home and do other things during the class session while waiting to hand them in. Should I feel guilty because I like working with Gedit and the command-line compiler when the professor wants us to use Eclipse?—somehow my rebelliousness is bearable.
On the sixteenth, I visited the Prof. Leitner, who was kind to me once when I needed it.
My politics class turns out to be taught by the Prof. Huff; I wrote an 800-word post for the class forum yesterday.
I have visited Hannah “A.” Finley twice, during which visits we snuggled. I’ll probably see her again tomorrow.
From Facebook, we learn that Boyd has been reading Harry Potter and the Methods. The vessel remains yours.
I felt lethargic for most of today. I’ve been displaying addictive behavior: checking email, Facebook, the Huff class forum, and Less Wrong far too frequently. I wish more people in the class would use the general forum, or post their assigned story earlier; I keep checking only to have nothing to respond to. I seem to have felt at least temporarily a little less dysfunctional after going to a coffeeshop in the evening where I spent all the paper money I had on hand on a de facto milkshake and read a few pages from the Rebecca M. Jordan-Young book. I’ve got to be careful, though: I was surprised recently at how high my Visa bill had run, so I should not buy store coffee or fast food just whenever I feel like it. The other day I computed calories-per-dollar statistics for a few items: the chicken nuggets meal at McDonald’s registers at 148, grocery eggs come in at 318, and bread posts a 645.
Something I forgot to tell you about Lauren and J.D.’s wedding is that Amy introduced me to her girlfriend Melody (whom I had met previously at New Year’s 2009), and we briefly talked about math. Melody posed a topology exercise to me: give an example of a sequence of nested sets whose intersection is empty. After Melody and Amy had said goodbye but before the reception was over, I realized that the open intervals for n ∈ ℕ do the job. (Actually I should say “ℕ+,” as I usually consider zero to be a natural number, but in my email to Melody that night I in fact wrote “\mathbb{N}”.) Melody replied with more exercises about compactness, and after sitting on that email for a while I wrote back with a dumb message mentioning that I’d been distracted by school and hadn’t been thinking about topology.
I have a lot to finish for school tomorrow—I have another take-home test for the “Women and Social Change” class, faux-debate notes to write for the same class, and a speech to outline and prepare for. On the last take-home test, I did extra research, but apparently it wasn’t what the professor wanted, so I received a 77%.
Today I have felt hurt about the differential equations debacle of last year, but I think I’ll be okay. Inspecting my memories, I was stupid, but I didn’t do anything morally wrong, as far as I can tell. Why don’t I let it go?
So much for high academic standards. In “Women and Social Change” class Tuesday and today, we watched The Wizard of Oz. Today in small-group discussion, I said that I didn’t think the film was appropriate for a college-level class and that the discussion questions were bullshit (I actually used the word). I probably won’t suffer any consequences from my open contempt: my group-mates didn’t seem to care (also, at the end, I apologized for being negative), and I wouldn’t have spoken if I thought the professor would hear me. Still, I deeply regret it. I feel that as a male in a women’s studies class, I should make sure to be extra-Respectful.
The class isn’t what I would wish for. Ostensibly I want to write a novel about gender issues, and a women’s studies class could potentially be a source of insight and material for that, but this class isn’t living up to that promise. It’s like high school: the professor gives us assignments, and we do them, and we have superficial discussions, but not the deep, analytical discussions that I’m used to having on the blog.
I feel like there’s too much storytelling in the social sciences. In the bad old days, there was Oppression, and then there were movements for social justice, and things got a little better, but there is still Oppression to this very day. The story is true, but I want to see more, a reductionistic analysis rich with details and mechanisms.
I was wrong. But I mustn’t let the fact of my having-been-wrong get in the way of working towards goals. Enough.
Diary, I must be ever so busy! Anna is paying me to create spaced-repetition cards for a workshop she’s teaching (she teaches teachers), and I’m doing a few small things for the Singuarity Summit—ordering the promotional pens and notebooks, and laying out the badges. Also, there is to be a physics exam on the fifth that I am not yet prepared for. Even though the things for the Summit are small, I’m kind of worried and stressed about suddenly having responsibilities, so I told Michael Anissimov that I can’t take Final Responsibility for the programs—this even though Kamil Pełka is doing the design and not me.
I say that I must be ever so busy—whatever that is supposed to mean exactly—but I can’t say that I’ve been actually active every moment of every day.
I probably shouldn’t take school so personally. It may not be the optimal educational experience, but I must admit it’s much better than most jobs; I should be able to just treat it like an uninspiring job with good working conditions. Of course it would be better to magically be independently wealthy and pursue my own plans all day, but if my parents and Society are going to pressure me down this path, I might as well make the most of it by doing my schoolwork efficiently and not losing sight of my own plans.
Still, school hurts; I get bound up in the most obscure moral dilemmas. Let me describe the latest of these. You’ll recall that my “Women and Social Change” professor, the Prof. Stewart, gives take-home exams. It turns out that you don’t actually need to do all the readings in order to do well on the take-home exam; you can look at the questions, and then look at the appropriate part of the reading. I think I utilized this strategy to some extent on tests #2 and #3. But then I feel guilty—some part of my brain thinks it is dishonest to use this strategy, and this reaction has caused me a significant deal of distress. Test #4 was due today; I skimmed the reading yesterday before writing my answers in order to get my conscience to shut up. But then while I was writing my answers, there were a couple instances where I couldn’t remember everything that had been covered in class, so I looked up relevant information on the internet, but then I felt guilty about that, because looking up information for something that was called a “test” felt dishonest when I wasn’t citing my sources, and I wasn’t citing my sources, because when I did that on test #1, the professor said it was unnecessary. Again, to get my conscience to shut up, I ended up deleting two pieces of information that I wouldn’t have remembered if I hadn’t looked online.
I came to school earlier than I had to in order to see the Prof. Graham, and I am to rendezvous with her again next week, at which time she will return my final papers from summer session. Maybe it was a poor idea, I ended up complaining to her about how I had gotten a poor grade on test #1 which I put so much research effort into, and she advanced the hypothesis that my professor was annoyed that I gave her too much text to grade.
Talking to Prof. Graham made me feel better somehow about the take-home test situation, but articulating exactly how and why is not the easiest thing. I decided that I would speak to Prof. Stewart about the situation after all.
That might have been a mistake; my social presenation was horrendously poor. I said that I was confused, that I didn’t understand exactly what she wanted on the tests; I mentioned that I did lots of extra research for test #1 but that she didn’t seem to like it, and that I was lazy on subsequent test; I said that I had emotional problems with school and prefer to study on my own. I came far too close to crying than the situation merited. The Prof. Stewart accepted my test #1 and said she’d look it over again and that we would talk at office hours on Thursday. After the class had ended (we watched a film, like we do so often), I said that I didn’t need to come to office hours, that I had said everything I needed to say, and that I didn’t want to create more work for her, but she said that helping students is what she does.
I went to the first half of physics class; I was still a little bit emotionally trashed from all the drama and my social performance was again very poor. I hadn’t eaten all day, so I went to McDonald’s, where my order was taken by a woman whose facial features were odd in such a way that I half-suspect she’s trans.
I don’t know exactly what tack I should take for the meeting with Prof. Stewart on Thursday. At one extreme, I could listen to whatever she decides to say to me, express regret for having said anything at all today, and leave. At the other, I could explain everything—my attitudes towards the course and my thoughts about gender issues. I shouldn’t worry too much about it, because the worst thing that’s likely to happen is that Prof. Stewart won’t like me and I get a bad grade in the course. I could live with either of those.
I still haven’t done enough on the Anki project, and there’s not much time. Anna hasn’t exactly been emphasizing its importance, but it would still be better to do a good job.
Diary, I felt I did poorly on the physics exam yesterday (rescheduled from the fifth). I told the Prof. Nichol that I hadn’t studied hard enough and that I promised to do better next time. On the top of the exam, I wrote, “I NEED TO STUDY MORE” with a frowny-face and an elaborating note.
The meeting with the Prof. Stewart actually went pretty well. You may recall that this was the class for which I put a lot of effort into the first take-home exam and got a bad grade, whereupon receiving which I got discouraged and stopped putting effort into the class. The Prof. Stewart and I reached an explicit understanding of this, and I’m going to start actually trying again. I mentioned in passing the fact that my laziness extended to not doing all the reading. She said my writing on the first test was excellent and asked what my major was. “Mathematics,” I said. She suggested I consider taking on an English minor, to which I said that I’d rather graduate sooner. I mentioned my interest in gender issues, and tried to explain Lewontin’s fallacy with respect to sex, although I suspect she didn’t actually understand: most people aren’t clicky enough to go from Fausto-Sterlingism to the technical refinement of common sense just because someone sketched a graph.
Shortly later, before class was to begin, the Prof. Stewart came up to me and offered me a book—an instructor’s review copy of Psychology of Gender (4th ed.) by Vicki S. Helgeson that she didn’t want. I said that I had a huge stack of books in my room and wouldn’t get to it immediately, but I accepted the book and thanked her.
In speech, Prof. Storer has more than once called me out for using my notebook during class. Today after class, I explicitly asked if I wasn’t allowed to have my notebook out, and he said that he didn’t want me doodling. I didn’t argue.
I attended the first part of physics class. It turned out that I posted an 84 on the exam.
I am left with a vague sense of emotional fatigue tinged with guilt, as if I did something wrong in my interaction with the Prof. Stewart. Do I feel guilty accepting the gift of an unwanted book when I didn’t adequately make clear the full extent of my heresy? And probably I should have come to office hours earlier in the semester instead of disengaging with the course. I think I would have if not for my contempt for the institution of schooling itself. Diary, I guess—I guess I got away with it? The Prof. Stewart certainly seems to bear no ill will (she gave me a book). I can go on with the class and with my other classes, and there’s no reason to explain my heresy in detail, and soon enough the semester will be over.
It’s a little sad that I should live so much for the future—that I should think of this entire period of my life as something to be gotten over with rather than something to be savored. If I had been smarter, I would have found another way. As it is, the vessel remains yours.
I’ve been lazy last night and the first part of today. Today I had ice coffee and Pop-Tarts while watching the new episode of Friendship Is Magic, and I spent a lot of time walking around daydreaming. But enough of this not-unpleasant stupor: I have things that need to get done.
I was too lazy this weekend; we must not forget that I must earn the right to my hatred and contempt of school. Even if it were the case that Reddit or Hacker News are more wholesome than school on a minute-for-minute basis, they are certainly not optimally wholesome, and are in any case low-status. We know by now that my glory is to be won through writing and my independence through code.
Today I came to campus early in order to rendezvous with the Prof. Graham, but she still didn’t have my summer papers. I said again that it wasn’t important, but she said that she was insistent now, and I agreed to come again next Tuesday. In “Women and Social Change,” I turned in my assignment on Voltairine de Cleyre, which I thought was low-quality, but might be good by community college standards. Should I worry that turning in a low-quality assignment is some sort of betrayal of the understanding Prof. Stewart and I reached last Thursday? Should I similarly worry about the unwanted social-game-theoretic implications of my having openly yawned too many times during today’s class session? I do intend to rock the socks off of the upcoming take-home test #5.
The class lecture ran some minutes short, and I decided to cut both speech and physics classes. I ate at (terrible yet tasty) McDonald’s and bought a pair of pants at Goodwill.
NaNoWriMo is coming up at the alarming rate of one day per day. My intention is to bang out a draft of my primary daydream, A Modern Approach; maybe I should make an outline.
Diary, I don’t have the time nor strength nor will nor power to say everything that needs to be said—least of all to you. But perhaps I can say a few things. On the twenty-first, I visited Hannah “A.” Finley. We ate at an Indian restaurant (of course I paid, given that it was her birthday). After returning to the Outpost, [redacted …]
I made some expansion-pack Anki cards for Anna yesterday; there had been plans to do more today, but I ended up declining, given my schoolwork burden: it’s to the point such that I’m probably not going to start NaNoWriMo in earnest until the third. I had been worried about the physics exam on Wednesday; I’m somewhat less worried after doing a good deal of studying today. I was also intending to complete the portfolio assignment for the Prof. Huff’s class, but my motivation dissolved into the hatred at the center of my existence and I didn’t do anything. I had been planning to do a really thorough job, but I don’t have time for that now, so the thought was that I should just do a mediocre by-the-book job, but that’s not very motivating. I should resent this assignment less than most, though: I got to pick the topic! I suppose (he supposes) sometimes people just fail to get things done, even when it’s something they ostensibly want to do—when I visited Anna the other week, she was desperately far behind on that book chapter for The Singularity Hypothesis that she was coauthoring with Nick Bostrom. In my email to the Prof. Huff, I’ll mention that I yet again ran into time constraints.
Diary, I suck. I’ve been lazy. You (bearer of my true confessions) know that I’ve always been lazy, but I feel as if it’s gotten worse lately. True, I’m nowhere near my all-time low, but I’ve been better, too. You would expect that an aspiring rationalist’s life should get better monotonically, as she (generic feminine) gains more experience and more knowledge of how to do things right, but year after year I remain full of potential and only potential. I am inert, lifeless, inferior, subservient, propertyless (in more ways than one), and bad at math. I may be privy to deep secrets of existence the likes of which Amanda Marcotte never even dreamed—but if I don’t write for Slate and, in fact, never even got around to writing a single post for that WordPress blog I set up so many weeks ago, then who possesses any way of knowing, much less any reason to care?
I have my hopes of getting better, but I could not explain to you what they’re founded on. Our civilization never really got the hang of social science; we don’t know how human virtue is made. Some of our children turn out okay (I guess), but it’s mostly a matter of luck. I myself won a minor prize in the genetic and nonshared environment lottery: four numbers plus the Mega ball, an IQ probably in the low 130s.
Do I ever stop and think, What am I spending my winnings on? Well, yes; quite frequently. But you don’t get moral credit for asking the question, you don’t get moral credit for pointing out that you don’t get moral credit for asking the question, and you certainly don’t get moral credit for abusing self-reference for all the world as if you were Douglas fucking Hofstadter.
No, I’m not doing NaNoWriMo. How did you guess?
There were a few events I wanted to tell you about, Diary, but maybe I’ll tell you later, and maybe I’ll just let them pass off the record entirely.
I’m supposed to study physics, write a paper on the Occupy movement, and write a letter of submission to the mandarins at Berkeley, asking them to take me in. I want to believe that I don’t need them, that I can be successful without the ritual blessings from them or their less-respected counterparts in San Francisco. That hypothesis hasn’t been ruled out exactly, but it has not gone completely untested, either.
What grounds is there for hope? I failed at the University and I failed at SingInst. These might be excusable if I had some grand achievement of my own I could point to, some public mark of brilliance that for one reason or another never got institutionalized. But I don’t have any such thing to point to, not so much as a blog.
I suppose it would be worse if my continuous failure were not for lack of trying. If you only measure the most obvious outputs, smart-but-lazy may seem equivalent to dumb, but there’s so much splendor beneath the surface, where institutions can’t see it and neither can the market.
This weekend, at least, I’m not going to have a breakdown. I don’t really care if my Berkeley essay is bad, and I only care a little about getting an A in physics.
And I still have hope, somehow. Change can come suddenly, from unexpected places. Or (more likely) from really fucking obvious techniques, like ripping out the damn network cable already.
I often fantasize about alternative worlds where I don’t suck so much—or if you prefer, worlds in which I don’t exist and some less-sucky manifestation of my beauty appears. There are a number of junctures in my life where I like to imagine things having gone differently. What if I had learned about studying earlier and made better use of my high school years—or for that matter, not gone to high school at all? What if I started you earlier? What if I had written a novel, or a blog back when blogging was new? What if I had made friends with Boyd at Santa Cruz?
What if a more competent analogue of me took up an unpaid position at SingInst? Diary, you’ll recall what happened in our world: I had to leave within four months. To be sure, I wasn’t fired for incompetence. Fired connotes being terminated involuntarily. My supervisor and I mutually agreed that I should leave due to my incompetence. Which, you know, is so much less bad. It may be instructive to contrast my story to that of Luke “L.” Muehlhauser. He took up an unpaid position at SingInst, and within the year, he’s been appointed Executive Director. (You can read this as a testament to how awesome Luke is, or as a sad commentary on how desperate SingInst is for competent people.)
[…] As I’ve said about school, not-making-money would be fine if I were busy excelling at something else—let’s say, rationalist Friendship Is Magic fanfiction. But, well, I’m not.
Once again, things have happened that I might tell you about. But perhaps not today.
Dearest Diary, I wasn’t going to write to you today—oh, don’t be so shocked—but I just remembered that today is Diary Day, and maybe you deserve a small update. An update, because I haven’t written to you in two years and change and it’s been ten years on the day since you began. But a small one, because I’m a grown-up now and have better things to do than write in my Diary like some sort of neurotic teenager.
A few recent events: transferred to SF State. Had some emotional troubles early last year. Quit school again and did a special-purpose nine-week web development course. Got a programming job at SwiftStack. Been blogging pretty regularly at zackmdavis.net/blog since mid-2012 (the blog actually started not long after I left you). I remain your faithful correspondent—sort of.