Unfortunately, The Most Important Thing did not happen: death remains undefeated. To the best of my limited ability to measure, my health is more-or-less unchanged.

:(

Wheelchair recap

In my last post, I said that I was planning on basically “building my own wheelchair” in order to force myself to stay within my limits, while continuing my normal activities as a student. I did this for most of the fall semester, but saw little improvement. I basically followed a two-week crash cycle, where I would spend about a week recovering alone in my room, a week feeling alright and catching up on work, and then eventually go out for some social event (ie, a dinner with a friend in town), and somehow end up back where I started despite my precautions

After a couple of months like this, I decided that it wasn’t really helping me feel any better. Rather, the self-enforced loneliness and isolation was making me feel worse. I’d also felt like there were a lot of holes in the wheelchair hypothesis, where if I was having enough fun I could occasionally do something pretty hard without crashing. So in early December I decided that it was time to set aside the wheelchair paradigm. It clearly was not possible to rest my way to recovery while at MIT, so I decided to just try and get the most out of my remaining semester of college.

Of course, I was still quite sick. Constant disassociation, weird memory holes, headaches, trembling hands, blurry vision, bouts of total confusion and forgetfulness, and exhaustion. As I’ve learned many many times, ignoring ME does not make it go away. I spent most of the rest of my time at MIT wrestling with two contradictory pieces of truth:

If you’re feeling bad, get out of your room. Go outside. See people. Isolation makes everything worse.

If you’re feeling bad, stay in your room. Rest. Don’t push yourself. Activity makes everything worse.

Both are sometimes true, the difficulty was knowing when. I’m not sure how much better I got at discerning this, but just accepting that both of these things were true made things a lot easier.

I think I was able to enjoy the semester about 20% of what I would have normally. But 20% of normal is still a lot, and I had a pretty good time all things considered.

The plan (this one will work I promise)

At some point last June, I very nearly backed out of returning to MIT. I had spoken to a few people who’d recovered, and most of their stories looked something like “I kept trying to keep pushing through my life and kept crashing over and over, but eventually I just moved back in with my parents and completely cut out any activity, and after a few months I gradually re-entered life.” It felt like going back to MIT was a continuation of the same mistake I’d been making for years, and I needed to just go home and rest.

In the end, I decided that I would rather go back to school, even if it wasn’t the best decision for my health, because I’d been looking forward to this senior year for so long, and I thought I would regret it for the rest of my life if I missed it. I told myself that if I still wasn’t better after I graduated, I would come back home and finally put in the rest I’d been putting off for so long.

So now, it’s time to rest.

Convalescence on a House Boat

My parents are recent retirees and need to downsize. My dad loves the water, and has always dreamed of living on a floating home (he lived on one for around a year in his early 20s and really enjoyed it). So, it wasn’t much of a surprise when a couple months ago I got a call from my dad informing me that they’re selling my childhood home and moving into a two-bedroom floating home located one mile away, on the Willamette river.

I love the Willamette, and while I’m a little bit sad to lose the home I grew up in, this is a huge stroke of luck. For one, when people ask me “hey Will what are you up to after graduation”, instead of having to say “I’m moving back in with my parents to sit in the dark and pray that I feel better” I can now say “I’m gonna spend the summer on a house boat!” Even though the basic facts of the matter do not change significantly, it sure sounds a lot better, and personal narratives are important!

The main goal of the summer is to rest. However, I’ll need something to keep me occupied.

There are also more tangible benefits to the move. It offers the perfect opportunity me to finally follow through on my lifelong ascetic escape fantasy, and spend a period fully disconnected from the material trappings of the world while I rest. There’s no Wi-Fi, and I’ll be leaving all of my devices out of reach at my old home. I’m well stocked on books and notebooks, and have a couple of woodcarving tools I might play around with. I’ll also be fasting!

I’m also finally biting the bullet and getting into meditation. In July, I’ll be doing a 10-day silent meditation retreat at the Dhamma Manda in Kelseyville, CA. I’m trying to stay realistic, and don’t expect it to dramatically improve how I feel, but it seems like a worthwhile thing I can spend my time doing in my present condition.

Future communications

Since I won’t have a phone or computer, and in the spirit of this ascetic bit that is the only thing keeping me going at this point, I’ve purchased a stack of envelopes and postage stamps, and am collecting as many addresses as I can. If you’d like to hear from me, send me your address in the next 24 hours and I’ll write you!

If I’m already on the houseboat by the time you want to reach me, you can write to me at

100 SE Harney St
Slip 11
Portland OR
97202

If all goes according to plan, I’ll post again from San Francisco in the fall.

If not, you know where to find me.

I have come to reassure you that this is not the case. Although recovery rates are in the single digit percentages, this is no reason to throw in the towel. I’ve spent most of my life beating odds like these, after all. There are also many, many, many reasons why I ought to recover from this: I’m young, have plenty of disposable income, great access to doctors, comparatively mild symptoms, the option to drop responsibilities, and plenty of reasons to recover.

So here is the plan.

A bit more about ME/CFS

I still haven’t written a lot about what this disease actually is. This is partly because no one really knows anything about it. ME/CFS cases are fairly heterogeneous in symptoms and triggers, and there are likely several distinct versions with different causes which we aren’t able to distinguish. Despite huge ongoing uncertainties, here’s what we know:

• Most people develop ME/CFS due to an acute infection (often COVID or EBV) that is coupled with stressors like sleep deprivation or chronic stress. Despite the viral onset, it’s unknown if the disease’s chronicity is caused by viral persistence, or if this is just a trigger.

• The clinical definition of ME/CFS is consists of the following symptoms: cognitive disfunction (brain fog), un-refreshing sleep, and post-exertional malaise (PEM). Other common symptoms include pain/tingling, headaches, and blurry vision.

• The consensus view is that ME/CFS represents when the body’s combined systems have, due to a variety of stressors, entered a particular bad state that it is unable to recover from. The body is normally very good at self-correcting (a process known as homeostasis, so the mystery is what’s preventing this recovery. Theories include gut dysbiosis, cycles of inflammation, mitochondrial dysfunction (see the itaconate shunt hypothesis), ANS hyper-activation, ongoing viral presence, and auto-immunity. It’s likely a combination of all of these.

• Somewhat orthogonal to the root cause, there is a common belief that PEM is

  really bad, resetting your body to the bad state. A key part of recovery, therefore, is avoiding crashing at all costs, and allowing your body to repair itself.

I’ve sort of been thinking about this as I would a sports injury, such as a stress fracture or broken bone. I have to wait for my body to repair itself, although it might be possible to speed up recovery if I do everything right. On the flip side, if I push it too early, I risk re-opening the injury and having to start from scratch.

This is also part of why I’ve been so terrified of delaying treatment/rest here. With sports injuries, the longer you have them, and more you mistreat them, the greater the probability it will plague you for the rest of your life.

Treatments

There are no approved treatments for ME/CFS. That hasn’t stopped people from trying. If you scroll through related subreddits, you will find people reporting results from hundreds of different supplements, antivirals, immune-regulators, mindfulness exercises, injections, TCM approaches, diets, surgeries, apps, and more. Most of these are implementations of early-stage papers, though some are cranks. It’s likely that a very very small number of these would actually help me.

It would be nearly impossible to try all of these, so I have to filter through the noise. Treatments enter my pillbox/schedule in one of two ways:

1. A patients experiences survey with a large sample size points to it being a good treatment.

2. I read a paper that convinces me it’s worth trying.

The general theory of most treatments is to try and support your body, giving it a kick to jumpstart it’s natural healing process. Here is what I am currently doing:

1. Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (60 min sessions at 2.0 atm, 5x/week).

   1. A Tel Aviv study found it very effective for Long Covid patients, and the benefits seemed to persist.

   2. According to the patient experiences survey, this was the most effective intervention, with the least downsides.

   3. I agree that this treatment has weird vibes around it, I’m just looking at the evidence though.

2. Extended fasts (40-60 hrs, 1-2x/week)

   1. An independent researcher found sizable improvements for long covid patients.

   2. It also did well on the patient experiences survey

3. Low Dose Naltrexone (3-4.5 mg nightly)

4. NAD+ injections

5. Traditional Chinese Medicine (Acupuncture and Herbs)

   1. Epistemic humility

6. Probiotics + supplement blend

   1. Found to have significant improvements for LC patients, study conducted by company who manufactures the blend.

7. CoQ10

8. Metformin

9. NAC + Guanfacine

   1. A study found it worked for brain fog, it didn’t really work for me unfortunately, so I discontinued the Guanfacine (it gave me a dry mouth)

10. Two different immune-regulating peptides: Tα1 and Tβ4

11. Daily meditation.

If there’s anything else you think I should try, please reach out and let me know.

Building wheelchairs

There are many, many conditions that are “worse” than ME/CFS, but have much higher recovery rates. I think the main issue with ME/CFS is that unlike most of those conditions, we don’t have a good protocol to keep ME/CFS patients from injuring themselves further.

For example, a friend of mine once fell off of a cliff and broke their back, losing the ability to walk. They had to spend nearly two years in a wheelchair as a result of this, but now can walk normally.

Now imagine if wheelchairs didn’t exist, and nobody knew how to treat severe back injuries. My friend would probably have lain in bed for a couple months until things stopped hurting, been cautious for a couple of months, and then re-injured themselves reaching for a frisbee, or jumping on a trampoline.

In this world, how many people recover from injuries like my friend’s? I imagine recovery rates would look much more like they do for ME/CFS.

The difficulty with ME/CFS is that no one will give me a “wheelchair” to sit in. So I will have to construct my own. Not a literal wheelchair, of course. I need a mechanism that, similar to a wheelchair for a back injury patient, prevents me from pushing myself too hard too early and getting worse. It doesn’t matter what treatments I do if I’m not able to avoid PEM.

Here’s how I’m doing that.

The key principle is treating failures like plane crashes, rather than car crashes. If a car crash happens, and someone dies, it’s a tragedy, but expected. If a plane crashes, there is a rigorous investigation to determine the root cause, and a series of steps are taken to ensure that whatever unfortunate series of events led to the crash can’t happen again. We as a society have decided that car crashes are acceptable, but plane crashes aren’t.

Since August 10th, I’ve had two crashes: one of the 13th, and one on the 31st. I’ve come out of these with a number of takeaways:

1. Avoid caffeine like the devil; it gives me energy I can’t afford to spend.

2. Be cautious of dinners. Large-scale social interactions are draining, and I tend to be especially susceptible to going past my limits at the end of the day.

3. Build in a lot of redundancy with sleep. I aim to sleep around 10pm, so that if something wakes me up in the middle of the night, or if I have to deal with something, I am still able to get >8hrs.

4. Avoid being uniquely responsible for anything important.

5. Make sure that people around me are aware of my situation, so it’s easy for me to bail if I need to.

6. If I go several nights with poor sleep, be EXTREMELY CAUTIOUS until I have managed to catch up.

7. If I develop a sore throat, or feel weirdly sick, that’s a sign that I’m about to crash and should immediately abort.

8. Every morning, write down everything I have to do that day. It’s easy for busy days to creep up on me without me noticing.

9. Lots of people report having mild ME/CFS, and then getting COVID and it making them much worse. I’ve been wearing face masks in an attempt to pre-empt this.

There’s definitely still much work to be done, and there are a few things I left off, but you get the gist.

I’m currently on day 16 without any crashes, and if I make it another 14 days, this will be the first time I’ve ever gone a month without crashing. This all sorta feels like I’m playing some impossible level of a video game, where I keep dying and having to restart. I’m currently the furthest I’ve ever made it. I feel better than I have in several months. Hopefully, the hard part was at the beginning, and I’ll one-shot the rest. But if I die again, I will restart, armed with the knowledge of how to make it just a little bit further.

Like this, we shall defeat death.

I have come to report this was a disastrous failure. Rather than being blown away by the wind as I motorcycled through the Himalayas, the brain fog settled in as a permanent feature. I'm writing this at the tail end of a seven-month stint working at OpenAI, during which I pursued dozens of treatments and doctors, all to no avail.

Left with no alternatives and struggling through the haze to make some really hard life decisions, I decided to leave OpenAI, returning to MIT —hoping it will be more conducive to recovery and to make good on some promises I made to a younger version of myself.

I hope that this serves as an explanation for the decisions I’ve made and the shadow of a person that I seem to have become.

Catching up

In early September 2024, I became aware of a condition that matched mine eerily well: ME/CFS, probably the result of a four-year old Epstein Barr infection. I have spent most of the last 12 months finding ways to deny this.

Part of this is because it’s a terrifying diagnosis: it tends to destroy every aspect of one’s life, and full recovery is uncommon. An even bigger reason, though, is that ME/CFS doesn’t feel like it belongs in my world.

For context, ME/CFS (myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome) is an extremely poorly understood syndrome defined by brain fog, chronic fatigue, and post-exertional malaise (PEM). As debilitating as the first two are, PEM is the worst. If I push myself even a little bit — half a beer, a run around the block, or less than seven hours of sleep — I “crash” for days. During this crash, my symptoms become significantly worse, sometimes to the point where I literally cannot get out of bed.

The other issue with PEM is the long-term impact of a crash. Every time someone with ME/CFS crashes, they risk the illness progressing to a severe state. Many people with severe ME/CFS physically cannot get out of bed, and never fully recover.

This is hard to reconcile with my Romantic World. Here, my life is a story, and every problem is just one narrative arc away from being solved. “Long COVID” and “Chronic Fatigue Syndrome” are psycho-somatic diseases people make up in order to excuse why they stopped trying. In this world, my symptoms are the cause of some character flaw, or due to burnout from working too hard; explanations that are easy to craft into morals.

In the Romantic world, the proper way to solve this is to take dramatic action to shock my disrupted psyche back into a better state. In narrative terms, I need a climax that finishes this shitty chapter of the book so I can return to the main plot line.

The Modern World, on the other hand, needs no introduction: it’s the one you were probably raised in, where you’re a small cog at the mercy of a machine. It’s a much less fun place to live. In this world, I basically have some off-brand version of long COVID, which is a real, chronic condition that you should probably treat as you would any other health ailment.

The last update I posted was written squarely in the Romantic world.

I was in Seattle, waiting for a Fred Again concert to start, having just emerged from a week-long expedition through Olympic National Park. In that post, running away seemed to be working; I was feeling myself again. But it didn’t last — literally that night, something about the flashing lights, insane bass, and two-hour drive home at midnight scrambled my brain, and by the next morning, the lucidity had vanished.

This state continued, in varying degrees of severity, throughout the rest of my adventures. It didn’t stop me from doing some cool stuff: I got my motorcycle endorsement, lay on the beach, rode a motorcycle around the Himalayas, swam in the highest lake in Nepal, and learned to surf from a Mexican fisherman.

Despite this picture-perfect story of self-discovery, each of these highlights was followed by ever lengthening bouts of mysterious exhaustion, where I lay in my hotel/hostel/tent/sleeper car/Airbnb, unable to manifest the energy to interact with the world. These were scary times – imagine unexplainably lacking all cognitive and physical capacity, while alone in a developing country surrounded by strangers who don’t speak your language.

Three months of sleeping my way through exotic locations around the world began to undermine my faith in the Romantic world. I decided my next phase had to be one where I could explore the medical system. I settled on a Pareto-optimal solution: working for OpenAI in San Francisco, which had the bonus of furthering the original plot-line (something something saving the world).

Work started January 14, 2025. I joined the API Model Customization team, which is mostly responsible for fine-tuning. This was a broadly positive experience. There’s a lot to say about working at OpenAI, but that isn’t the point of this post. You can check out Calvin’s post if you’re curious.

Despite what you might think, OpenAI is not a terrible place to be sick. The hours can be crazy, but in return, you get flexibility — as long as deadlines are met. My manager knew about my health issues, and I was never questioned for taking an afternoon off each week to go to the latest doctor’s appointment. The health insurance is also great.

The main goal during this period was to disprove that I had ME/CFS. Not expecting anything to come of it, I started making doctors’ appointments to try and figure out whether there was anything else that could explain my symptoms.

To my surprise, they did find something wrong with me — several times, in fact. Each time, I had a complete explanation of my symptoms. I bolted to the pharmacy to obtain my pills and began plotting a generational revenge arc. And every time I completed the treatment, and nothing changed.

If I listed every medical event from this period, this post would be twice as long. Here's the one-pager I give to new doctors if you’re curious. But long story short, by August 2025, I can confidently say that ME/CFS is the only diagnosis left.

Well shit

It’s hard not to feel like my life is over. I feel an impending dread as I map my life onto the stories I've read, and forecast the months and years to come. A year ago, I could go on a 12-mile run and feel a little groggy the next day; now, running around the block will set me back for a week.

If at some point in the past year I told you I was recovering, that I was getting better, I'm sorry, but I lied. To you, but also to myself. I have to be getting better, because if I'm not, what the fuck does that mean?

I'm sure there are worse things that could happen to me, but I also would be hard-pressed to imagine a disease more tailored to my weaknesses and resistant to my strengths. The fact that pushing when things get hard is precisely the wrong thing to do, and that intense cardio (my usual psychological escape) is now fully off-limits, makes this really hard for me to deal with.

Even giving up my old masochistic tendencies isn't enough -- I now have to crush the part of myself that volunteers to drive someone to the airport at 1 a.m., or go on a midnight walk with a friend who's trying to make a hard decision, or pushes hard to finish an essay before a self-imposed deadline. I worry that I’ve receded into a caricature of my former self, lacking the energy to dynamically interact with and grow from the world around me.

I’m writing this from East Campus, my old dorm at MIT. In a final spell of Romanticism, I moved back in, as an homage to a freshman version of myself who promised not to let this dorm die during its two-year renovations. My sickness prevents me from being a main character in this battle for the soul of MIT, but I shall keep fighting nonetheless.

While not working on our 200 foot roller coaster, I’m doing everything I can to get better. As I work on this, I’d like to make two asks of the people around me:

1. If during our encounters (or lack thereof) I seem distant or avoidant, I hope you’ll understand that this isn’t who I want to be. I have learned many, many times what happens when I try to ignore the limits this illness places on me, and have to respect them.

2. If you know anything about this illness, or have gone through something similar, I’d truly love to hear from you.

In late July, 2023, I went on a one night, solo backpacking trip. I had realized that, despite being a serial inviter and group trip planner, I’d never actually planned something just for me. Part of this was driven by having recently read The Fountainhead, and feeling an urge to prove that I acted out of some innate drive, rather than for other people. So, using a family vacation to Southern Oregon as a launching pad, I planned a brief getaway to Siskiyou National Forest, a mountain range that spans the Oregon/California border. I was looking forward to a fairly chill hike, where I could spend some time with my thoughts, disconnected from the outside world.

I was also looking forward to reading a book I’d had for a while but never gotten around to: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Persig.

The hike in was pretty, albeit uneventful, and around 1:00 PM, I crested a slight hill and set down my bag to admire the tranquil, crystal-clear mountain lake that was my destination. This moment, however, was spoiled by the discovery that my idyllic mountain outpost was corrupted by a terrible taint: on the near side of the lake, there were a collection of tents.

I paused briefly, considering my options. I could head back down the trail and look for a different campsite. Or, I could stay put. I decided to remain where I was, and not to let the other campers bother me — after all, it was ridiculous to demand perfect solitude when in nature. I set up camp, took a brief swim in the lake, and then sat down to enjoy my book.

But, as soon as I sat down, a nagging worm inside me asked a question:

“Are we really going to settle for this? You came all this way to be alone, in this huge wilderness, and you settle on a place that’s 50 feet from a group of noisy rednecks? It’s still only early afternoon — you can do better.”

Thus begun the process of losing my mind.

I packed up my bag and began my search for a better place to chill. After spending around 30 minutes climbing up some loose rocks, I made it to a small, mossy overlook, a few hundred feet above the lake, and out of earshot of the tents. Having finally made it to my perfect spot, I resumed my book.

But once again, a few pages in, the worm reappeared.

“Yeah the view is nice, but this is too far from the water. You’re not going to want to spend the night here. You should find your final campsite, and then you can unpack, set up camp, and truly relax.”

So, now unable to enjoy the mossy overlook, I set off back down the hill.

This cycle of events continued several more times.

First there was a spot next to a creek, which had a pool that would be perfect for a solitary swim (I was looking forward to skinny dipping). But there was no view of the valley, and this slight failing itched at me until I could no longer focus on my book.

Then, there was a place on the edge of a cliff. It was perfect — a valley view, a creek to refill my water with, and perfect isolation. I even went so far as removing my cookware and eating my dinner (a packet of Trader Joes Madras Lentils over rice. But as I looked out over the valley in the fading light, I realized the trees in front of me would partially block the view of the sunrise the next morning. A tiny imperfection, but it grew, and it grew, and for the fourth time, I packed up, and left to find a new spot.

I was fully aware of the mistake I was making, while I was making it. I kicked myself for not letting myself just settle and chill, then kicked myself for kicking myself. For being so obsessive about finding the perfect place to watch a sunset. My peaceful getaway was turning into a neurotic episode as I repetitively packed and unpacked my backpack. There was no escape.

I eventually settled on a campsite on top of a hill, right next to the trail. It was alright, I guess. It definitely wasn’t any better than the previous spots though. The only reason I stopped was because the sun went down. Book barely begun, I fell asleep.

Learning how to chill

This was a fairly bizarre short circuit. If you didn’t know me, you could easily just chalk this up to me being a perfectionist. But this doesn’t capture the full story. Instead, this is an example of what happens when I try and improve things I can’t measure.

The reason the perfectionist explanation is incomplete is that when I’m with a group of people, even if I’m nominally “in charge”, this doesn’t happen. The second other people become involved, I become a decisive, direct leader. In my social circles, I generally tend to be the guy who plans things, and I have a reputation for running fun, successful trips.

The real reason this happened is I don’t (didn’t?) know what makes me happy. I’m pretty good at predicting what makes other people happy, but once I don’t have others around me, I lose my strong decision making metric, and end up in a signal-less void. To use the analogy of the multi-armed bandit problem, I kept pulling levers, and kept getting NaNs, so kept exploring until some external constraint (the sunset) made me stop.

I think that for those who don’t have it innately, developing this sense is one of the best things you can do for your overall wellbeing. It’s surprisingly easy to go through life without learning very simple things about yourself, like what types of activities you find relaxing, or how you like to do your work.

So consider a trip to the Siskiyous.

Addendum: Zen

When I first wrote this post, It was supposed to be a meditation on Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the book I brought with me on the trip. Sadly, I wasn’t able to fit it into the narrative, but I wanted to spend a little time on the book, since it did influence a lot of the thoughts on the trip.

I blamed the short circuit on a personal lack of romantic quality, which I understood to be a subconscious filtering heuristic for what is good and what is bad. When describing motorcycle maintenance, Persig states that “you have to have some feeling for the quality of the work. You have to have a sense of what's good. That is what carries you forward. This sense isn't just something you're born with, although you are born with it. It's also something you can develop.”

If you haven’t developed your sense of quality, you’re lost. This is the fundamental difference between the individual and the group. Groups of humans are robust, and can self-correct without a strong individual instinct for what’s right. But an individual is fragile to being led astray, and without a strong internal filter, it’s hard to make progress on anything. Your mind wanders, and gets lost in the signal (objective reality) and the analysis (subjective reality).

Or at least this is how I interpreted Persig’s definition, and I think it’s a nice characterization of my problem, so I’m going to use it. I’m not sure how accurate it is to what he was trying to say — Pirsig famously got fired from his job, lost his wife, and went clinically insane trying to prove that you can’t define Quality.

But no regrets. So, I’m trying to recast this as a win for my sore and broken knees and ankles, who have been carrying my 60 pound pack up and down 5 different mountains in as many days.

I’m kinda sitting with what the last couple of days have taught me. Strangely, with the newfound lucidity the mountains have brought me, the strongest feeling right now is one of FOMO. I’m catching up on all of these school group chats I’ve been away from over the last week, and somehow feel surprised that

1. Life is moving on without me

2. Playing hooky gets old pretty fast when you do it alone.

But, I say “somehow feel surprised” because I did know this would happen. Everyone tells you it will. I was in a bad situation, and still think I chose the best option given the circumstances. And of course, the age old Life vs Impact dilemma makes the situation even more complicated.

And yeah. “Lucidity the mountains brought me”. So I’m fixed, at least a little bit. My main datapoints backing this up are that I don’t feel a crippling empty pressure inside of my head at all times, I don’t feel like I’m living life in the 3rd person, and I’m able to write this journal entry (which is quickly becoming a blogpost) passably well. I may write more on this at some point, but I want to wait until everything is definitely settled down. There have been too many ups and downs to this “condition” in the last couple months to say anything definitive just yet.

So that leaves me with about 2 months of free time to explore the world with a mostly working brain and the tidy sum this summer has left me. What do I want to do with this time?

I want to get good at somethings. My friend Julian once mentioned going to South America for 6 months and becoming an expert Salsa dancer. I want to do something similar. Skill-first travel.

But what should *it* be? The most obvious thing at this point would be to continue down this motorcycle fixation of mine and actually become good at that. Figure out how to do the maintenance, and the zen. Yes I read that book. I could get involved with some biker gangs, and see what that stuff’s all about.

I could go work some random job in a different country, try and expand my worldview. What’s construction like in New Zealand? Teaching elementary schoolers in Thailand? Unloading ships in Italy? It’s a bit of a troubled white boy cliche thing to do, but maybe there’s a good reason for that.

I clearly have some homework to do before I can figure anything out for certain. So I’m going to try and come up with some broad principles and requirements I want whatever I do to follow:

1. It needs to involve people. Social anxiety is the mind killer, and there’s only so much that mountain time can do to fix that.

2. New skill, unrelated to my work. It’s been a while since I got good at something new. It’s nice to have a broad repertoire of these things, otherwise I feel a bit one dimensional.

3. It has to have at least some non-USA component. I truly love this country, but have spent a disproportionate amount of time comfortably exploring its corners, and my US-centricity is approaching caricature levels.

4. I want to make it to Boston for a few highlights in November. This adds some constraints to the days I can travel.

5. I prefer journeying over touring. If I’m going to be exploring a region, my preferred level of structure is “start here, end here, with this mode of transportation”. Anything else is best figured out spontaneously on the fly.

6. I need to feel ready for OpenAI. Although most of the time will be spent on strictly non-work related things, I think there are some projects I could do that would make me feel more prepared to start a full time position. More on those at some point.

Well that’s about all I’ve got time for right now. The opener’s been finished for 25 minutes. The lights are starting to change. The stage is set. The crowd is restless.

It’s time for the show.

If I became extremely depressed — my career failed spectacularly, or all my friends disowned me, or I got addicted to opiates — I would get up, pack my backpack, and walk off into the woods, never to be seen again. I would escape all the foils of modern industrialized life, and become an enlightened wise old man of the forest.

I may end up using this plan sooner than I expected. Not because I’m depressed, but because it’s the only story that I am capable of living in a compelling way right now.

But first, some context:

Over the course of the summer, I (with the help of some friends) managed to get an internship at OpenAI. We showed enough promise that the company extended full-time offers to all of us, with a negotiable start date any time between now and July.

It’s probably impossible to overstate how big a deal this was to us. In my social circles, OpenAI engenders similar emotions to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate factory. A fantastical, mysterious place that produces seemingly magical things. Except instead of making children’s treats, it’s making something that will likely save (or destroy) the world.

For a long time, working at a big AI lab had been a career end-goal for me. I think that AI will be hugely transformative, and inside of a lab seems to be one of the highest-leverage places to be in the coming years. I’d been planning on grinding the last two years of college to try and get a seat on this rocket, and here it was, right in front of me, several years ahead of schedule.

The other option would be continuing my education at MIT. I could decline the offer, spurning the promise of hundreds of thousands of dollars, infinite career capitol, and a a front row view of AGI.

I probably would have chosen the latter — I’m too contrarian to take the choice that pays more, and I honestly think I’d grow more at MIT than OpenAI. With a newfound confidence that career capitol wasn’t an issue, I could focus on exclusively doing the things I wanted to do. I could build a motorcycle. I could program quantum computers. I could get into biohacking. All of this while surrounded by the coolest people in the country.

The other reason I would go back is because if I’m at MIT, I get to be a part of East Campus. Specifically, a hall within East Campus called Putz. I value this a lot. For one, it’s a super super cool place. We build a rollercoaster every year (from scratch), do insane hacks, and throw crazy parties.

But the main reason I want to be a part of EC is because I want to throw a revolution. For the last couple of decades, the administration has been cracking down on student life. They’ve banned traditions, changed rules to give halls less autonomy in selecting members, and literally destroyed dorms that didn’t comply. This represents a pattern I hate — a softening of cultures due to faceless bureaucracies and cowardly liability concerns, a rejection of uniqueness and excellence in exchange for safety and conformity. If we can win this fight, in this one place, at this one time, maybe there’s hope for the world.

So I can either save the world from AGI, or take part in a revolution. Both good options.

Except now, I’m not going to do either. Because I’m not able to.

This is because for the past 5 months I’ve been afflicted by a strange medical condition. For reasons still unknown, every cognitive task — programming, writing, even conversations with friends — has been accompanied by an intense brain fog. It’s the mental equivalent of swimming through molasses — a similar sensation to getting way too high, or having just woken up, except it’s constant. I’ll start a sentence, and over the course of it, forget why I’m saying it, where it started, why I’m here, and the next word I wanted to say. Then, there’s the disassociation — my emotions are muted, I don’t care very much about anything. As someone who’s usually fairly emotional, this is hard, and makes me a worse person.

I’m still pretty functional. I did the whole internship feeling like this, after all. But I’m a shell of my normal self. So rather than choose to do either of these options mediocrely, sealing my fate as a side character in someone else’s story, I’m going to reuse the plan I came up with back in high school. Because I know I can do it well. And I think it’s the choice most likely to lead to a life that I’m proud of.

That’s about all the explanation I can give. Until I feel better, I’ll be on an adventure. My next stop (after I rescue my car from a San Francisco mechanic) is Olympic National Park, which I’m going to disappear into until I can get my motorcycle license. With that, I’m going to ride across a country — currently considering Vietnam and Tajikistan. I’ll try really hard to keep in touch with my school friends — I’m planning on making it back into Boston for a few highlights/long weekends, and will contribute what I can to The Culture.

I’ll stop this at some point — probably when I feel normal again. Given how things are trending (I’ve been away from work for about a week), I don’t think this will take more than a month. When this happens I’m planning to take the job at OpenAI, and work there for at least the rest of the school year. I’ll work my ass off, and try to move the needle on some important safety stuff.

I’m still not sure what comes after this. I still really want to come back to MIT to be there for EC’s reopening. But maybe I’ll decide that the work I’m doing at OpenAI is too important to neglect, and stay there for the long haul. Or maybe some third option that I can’t even imagine right now — if there’s anything the last couple months have taught me, it’s that it’s impossible predict where I’m going to be more than a few weeks ahead of time.

Haven’t written a book review on here before. I think it’s a good idea, in general. Makes you process the book, turn it into a new narrative to fit into your life. I often complain about the number of books I’ve read which I can barely remember two things about, much less apply to my life, or bring up in conversation, or whatever reason you read books for.

But enough meta shit. I’ve been thinking a bit about how AI will interact with the internet, and was curious how the internet was developed, especially the early days. Questions like, how do you get people to agree to a new standard? How do you develop the standard, do you implement it gradually, or design it completely, and only release it when it’s finished?

My guess is that this will be less of a review and more of an analysis of the history. I don’t think this book was amazingly written or sourced, but I read it on a plane ride when it was all I had, so I may have given it more time than I normally would have.

(D)arpa managed bureaucracy

One thing I was surprised by was how heavy a role that government had in the development and implementation of the internet. I’d always heard that it was created by a bunch of universities who wanted to be able to communicate with each other, but really, it was incredibly top down, almost entirely led by ARPA (which has sense become DARPA). Although I think it’s currently pretty heavily associated with secretive defense projects, before it had the “D”, the Advanced Research Projects Agency was started by Eisenhower in 1958, and explicitly made a separate body from the military, which Eisenhower notoriously looked down on.

The first director of ARPA, Jack Ruina, was really good at doing government funded research. He gave his program directors a large amount of free reign, and only focused on giving them as much resources as he could to make their projects successful. He also had a unique approach to getting talent:

Ruina had a theory that truly talented people wouldn’t normally choose to hang around long in a government bureaucracy but could be convinced to spend a year or two if offered enough flexibility and large enough budgets. Turnover didn’t bother him. The agency,, he believed, would benefit from frequent exposure to fresh views.

This explains a large part of why the internet has so many different “creators”. First theorized by J. C. R. Licklider, an MIT professor who became the first Information Processing Techniques Office head, and then carried along by various people like Bob Taylor, Larry Roberts, and later Tim Berners Lee. This is a good example of how a good research project can be run at such a large scale.

It was really easy to get funding for the project. Bob Taylor walked into the head of ARPA’s office, and within 30 minutes, had secured a few million dollars. I don’t think anything in this section is super profound, like everyone agrees that bureaucracy bad, but I think the degree to which it didn’t exist in early ARPA is pretty impressive.

One sorta-downside about the way they did this was that there were occasional gaps in between people. Because each person was only there for a few years, the project would occasionally pause while a replacement was being found, or convinced to join. For example, Larry Roberts.

The roots of open source

The development of the internet is notoriously distributed, which has extended to the pretty influential and health open-source community that exists today. But this definitely didn’t need to happen.

The open source nature was definitely helped by the fact that things were developed for university CS departments, so that the people in charge of the nodes were also the people developing the technology. This familiarity and knowledge of the technology actually posed a slight issue in the early days of the internet, with BBN having to source their IMPS (nodes on the network) from military, steel-clad computers, in order to keep curious grad students from tinkering around inside the machines and bringing down the network.

But because of this, there was a huge amount of discussion, etc around how these things should be developed. This discussion was boosted by the creation of email by the scientists, which was basically bootlegged on top of the existing file-sharing protocols. They developed the proper formatting for email, etc, in the first real open source internet community.

All of the early open source spirit could have been crushed once the internet was leaving it’s infant stages and emerging as an actual important technology. There was an attitude by the International Organization for Standardization that it was “Time to roll up your toy academic network” and have a new implementation put into place. Curious here, what did it actually look like?

In addition to the stuff by the IOS, the infrastructure running the internet could have been monopolized by AT&T, who were the only company responsible for telephone cables in the US at the time. However, AT&T executives really didn’t like packet switching, thinking it impractical and incompatible with their systems.

This failure to commercialize the internet was a running theme. For example, similar to AT&T, BBN blew a huge lead to be the primary internet modem/router provider. They built the first IMPS, which were the nodes of the early internet. However, they chose not to do this, which has sense become a multi-billion dollar industry.

I’m unsure how significant this was. It’s possible that, like any public utility, monopolies would have been broken up, and things would have stayed fairly public. But, I do think that it’s possible that companies would have been able to make decisions about how the internet functioned that would have lended well towards their own profits, I’m not sure what any examples here would be.

Miscellaneous design decisions and engineering strategies

In addition to the decisions that caused TCP/IP to win out in the end, there are a few other really specific design decisions that were made that I think were key.

Outflanking

The network we have today is basically a story of expanding standardization of interfaces between non-standard pieces. First, different machines used different langauges, protocols, etc, so the IMPs were built, which any of the machines could interact with, if they followed specific rules.

But then, as this network grew, there were also other, rival networks. So, to accomodate these, a broader class of standardization was invented to make a “network of networks”. This just said how two different networks had to interact.

Packet switching/distributed systems

I’m not gonna go into a lot of depth on this. But basically, packet switching was motivated by the fact that sending a single, large file over a phone line was very inefficient, because it meant that most of the time, most of a phone line’s bandwidth went unused. Although this wasn’t really a bottleneck back then, this meant that the internet would be able to scale elegantly.

They were targetted in the parts of the system that they made scalable. While the underlying theory behind the network scaled very well, the actual implementations of the network didn’t scale. They created the ARPA net, which was always only going to be for defense related stuff, and at the university level, knowing that this would never be the end-all, be-all answer to creating the web.

Other interesting anecdotes

• Remote operability. Operating a cross-country network of unreliable computers would have been impossible if BBN didn’t have an easy way to take remote access of them, and get regular reports. The nodes of the network always sent back status reports on how they were doing, which let BBN send preventative maintenance, and quickly find issues

I feel like there weren’t any super earth-shattering takeaways from this. This book review has been a bit of a slog to write, and I’m not sure that I’ve focused on the most important or interesting parts. Curious to think about this more, and how to do this properly.

I’d like to polish these more than this is. But this has been sitting in my draft box for too long, so I’m going to publish.

I think I’ve always struggled to tell this part of my story. Because I don’t come from a rich background, or a poor background. I didn’t go to an elite school, or have some traumatic event that struck me when I was young, driving me onwards. The place I come from is on the upper end of average. A neighborhood on the edge of the 26th largest city in America, with decent public schools, two (married) parents (a teacher and a finance manager), who raised me with no pressure to accomplish anything great, but provided lots of support at key moments that made me who I am today.

But somehow, out of this fairly innocuous beginning, I have some unbridled desire for greatness.

I could go into detail about how this actually came about, but that’s now what I want this (short) essay to be about. Instead, I wanted to talk about how I’m able to lean into this story for motivation.

Because I was given such an open life, this means that everything I am, everything I chose to be, was my own choice. I was not forced into this by my environment. As my friend Spruce would probably say, I “derived motivation from first principles”. Out of a blank canvas, I decided to shoot for huge stuff.

This gives me a certain strength. Before, I felt somewhat attacked whenever I heard some incredible story where someone came out of really rough conditions to end up where they are. But with this mindset, I’m able to create this uniqueness in my story, despite my totally non-unique beginnings.

It’s sorta like how, there’s an idea, and it’s opposite, but there’s nothing that’s exactly in between, because the thing that’s exactly in between is actually significant to the idea, since it’s the thing that’s exactly in between.

If they’re right, how would I spend those five more years?

My most immediate reaction is that I would stop doing bullshit. But this is almost a cliche thing to say, and it’s a little bit unclear what it means. One man’s bullshit is another man’s calling. But I think I would try and cut out a lot of the fat in my life, removing the things that sap my energy and tag along everywhere I go, giving me nothing but inertia.

Then, the most pressing decision I must make is: do I spend those five years trying to save the world, or taking advantage of everything it has to offer? I could grind my ass off, doing anything I could to leave my mark, and push the needle towards a safer future. Or, I could drop away from all responsibilities, and figure out what kind of lifestyle my basest desires would carve out for me. My guess is that it would look something like Chris McCandless.

And this dilema is where I run straight into a philosophical brick wall. The great unanswered question, of whether you are in total ownership your own life, or if you have a duty to your community, your country, your species.

Let’s try turning to trying to be cool. This is a philosophy that got me out of a similar philosophical rut over a year ago. I decided that I should live my life according to my own, arbitrary, un-justifiable perceptions of aesthetics, and act in such a way that I always move closer to a more realized, “cooler” version of myself.

I think this works reasonably well here, but it comes into conflict with the only other philosophical rule I’ve layed down for myself, a rule that inspired the title of this blog (no, it’s not about drugs), and one which I consider so fundamental I consider it nearly a complete axiom for how to live your life. The rule is simple: you must try to be happy without lying to yourself.

This rule means that your happiness only counts if you’re living in the true world while you experience it. You must be aware of true reality, and not delude yourself in any way. Thus, whenever you are at your happiest, you must constantly question whether there is some massive lie you had to tell yourself in order to feel like this. As much of a killjoy as this may sound, this is the tax you must pay in order to get to live as a true hedonist.

Attempting to resolve it

I think the axiom is the most fundamental (as axioms have a habit of being), and the coolness must come second. You must make sure that your standards for coolness do not arise from lies. Thus, we’ve resolved this conflict, but made no progress on our dilemma between saving the world and experiencing it.

I’ve always told myself that I would give the world my twenties, selflessly grinding away at it’s greatest problems, and afterwards, I would retire to become an adventurer/husband/father. And this is really where my conflict is coming from. This life plan sounds super duper boring if I never even get past twenty five.

Ignoring the problem

I’m not shy about my dislike for philosophy, and it’s proven inability to solve my problems. Therefore, I will mostly move past the conflict without resolving it, leaving it up to my future self to decide in-the-moment.

I will make one caveat before I move on: I think there are a few ways to approach the conflict between personal enjoyment and your goals. A bad mindset I’ve fallen into in the past has looked at self-sacrifice as necessary, almost directly tied to, any success in other areas of my life. I would tell myself that I would suffer in the moment, missing out on countless opportunities, but it would all be worth it in the end when I achieved my greatest dreams.

I think this is a bad mindset. It’s self-defeating, leads to burnout, and is often simply not true. Pain is not the unit of effort.

Instead, I want to discuss a different approach to life. Although in many ways, this will sound like having your cake and eating it too, I think it’s a better way to do it, or at least, the way I prefer to do it. The most cliche way to describe this is as “work hard, play hard”. You must live your life to the max, living the extremes, alternating between periods of monk-like, single minded focus, and extreme hedonism.

GO GO GO GO GO GO GO GO GO GO

Sometimes this manic energy comes to me which causes me to feel an extreme need to SPRINT through life, pushing through tasks and fun activities at tremendous speed. I think mania is not sustainable for a period for as long as five years, but the energy I feel when I say this comes from a real place, and I want to direct it somewhere it will actually push me forward.

What I actually wanted to say.

I had some thoughts I wanted to say when I started writing this, which I was hoping I would segue into naturally. It seems my keyboard took me in a slightly different direction, but I think the things I wanted to say are important, so here it is

1. No more bullshit. This counts especially for relationships. I can’t afford to sit on my hands and wait for the perfect opportunity to present itself. After reading David Sedaris’s “Guy Walks Into a Bag Car”, I’ve promised myself that I would never be the type of person to let Bashir leave the train without kissing him.

2. Seriously no bullshit. I would probably kills myself before the AI’s do if I found out that I spent the majority of the five years I have left on this planet trying to achieve something simply because society told me I should, despite it not ending up being important to anything I care about. This could be a college degree, although I like college for other reasons.

3. Shoot for the moon. Every spring break, every big road trip, there comes a moment when you are able to make a decision to do something really hard. You can climb the crevasse-covered mountain you’re completely unprepared to climb. You can attempt to hitch hike the two hours back to Phoenix rather than paying for the shuttle. You can jump in the ocean in January. You can wake up at 1am to try and find the childhood friend you left behind in the city you haven’t lived in since you were eight, who the only thing you know about is an address. Whenever you have to make this decision, you must take it. Because you’re really never going to get that chance again.

I guess there’s nothing too profound here. This basically all just boils down to “live true to yourself, and live life to the max”. Living like you only have five years to live can be scary, but it can also be quite freeing, and a bit fun, too. It’s something you can fall back on anytime you feel weak, or uncertain about what you should do. Because even if “they” are wrong, and I still have a full life ahead of me, I’ll have had a pretty incredible start to my twenties.

Classes

8.044 (Stat Mech): Statistical mechanics is a really cool subject about studying macro systems with a huge number of smaller components. Hyped, lotta friends in the class, and I need it for my major.

Modern China: I took Dynastic China last semester with the same guy. Fun and chill. Need it for history concentration. Also I love history

4.032 (Information Design and Visualization): I’ve always wanted to do Data viz stuff. May drop this if I don’t have enough time, because the labs are pretty intensive.

18.065 (Matrix Methods In Data Analysis, Signal Processing, And Machine Learning): Chill, survey course on a bunch of cool things you can do with computers and Linear Algebra.

Writing and Reading the Essay: Pretty intense, but well taught and lots of writing + peer feedback. May drop, deciding between this, matrix methods, and 4.032.

I really don’t want to take 5 classes.

Room

The housing gods blessed me with a massive single this semester. It’s supposed to be a double, and a large one at that. I want it to become a really cool space. I want to

• Build a bar in my room

• Host a few (more) parties

• Modify the light setup to make them sound reactive

Run an Ultramarathon

I’m signed up for one in April. Might end up not doing that because it’s a crazy busy weekend, but I’ll definitely do something. It might just be on my own.

Putz

My hall from East Campus. I want to

• Organize and run a hall retreat (end of April). I’ve gotten pretty good at doing these, and I really enjoy doing a good job at these (making them cheap, efficient, and fun).

• Make a sign/crest for Putz (with LED backlight).

• Go to more Putz events (I feel sorta divorced from some of the new social scene, been too busy).

• Make Saturday build nights a thing. My hall used to build a lot more, now they don’t. I think an organized thing for this would be great. I can get someone else to run this probably.

• Planning 3 mixers. I’m planning 3 mixers with different groups.

• Commonwealth V Putz. My hall is throwing a huge party this year (several thousand dollar budget). I’m not leading this, but I want to help out a good amount.

• Become a keyholder at MITERS

MAIA

I’m on the exec board for MAIA, MIT AI Alignment.

• Run biweekly socials, so people have social groups around the club

• Get lunch with most members of MAIA

• Run less frequent big parties with MAIA and AISST (Harvard’s equivalent)

• Make a crest for the MAIA office (like with Putz)

• Helping run a workshop in early April. Unfortunately this conflicts with Commonwealth V Putz, so will have to resolve this somehow.

I think the work I do for this club is very important.

Webteam

I’m part of this startup. I was there early, but don’t feel a ton of ownership over it. I’d like to feel more tied in with it, and really try and get it to succeed. It’s cool work in an interesting field, and I don’t want to feel like I was “just along for the ride”. I have a lot of specific goals for this that I won’t put in here.

Other

• Start a new hall of East Campus. There’s a hall that’s sortof died out, and I want to get my friend to start a new one in that place. This basically just requires talking to the old members and helping my friend get things rolling. This is important to me because I want more culture when my dorm re-opens

• Two blogposts/month. This is one of my resolutions.

• Painting club. I’m helping lead an effort to allow muraling in my old dorm (East Campus) when it reopens.

Writing day and night like you’re running out of time

This feels like it will be difficult to achieve all of. I feel like my life is racing faster and faster, and I need to race to finish my goals before I Run Out Of Time. I want to go back and edit these, but 12:20 approaches, so I must click submit.

Last year's Goals

I didn't do a comprehensive set of goals for 2023. Instead, I have "How to be cool, this semester specifically", where I wrote out a set of goals for the spring semester of 2023. On reading these, I feel a strange detachment. I'm surprised by how many of the things I currently value don't even appear on the list, as well as how many things are on the list that I barely remember. Although this partially reflects the issues with "set and forget" life steering (which I acknowledge in the first paragraph, I think that I also didn't put a lot of thought into the items. Several of them are also ridiculously vague, ie "Have more ideas", and thus don't lend well to evaluation of success. I will hopefully fix those issues with this year's goals.

I also tried to assign scores out of 10 rating how well I did. I'm not sure how much these numbers mean. Anyways, here we go:

Communication (6/10)
My goal was to be a more precise communicator. Both of my concrete goals (Speech and Debate and Social Hacking) didn't happen; the former because I didn't have time and didn't like the team, and the second because, if I'm being honest with myself, I lacked the courage and motivation.

However, I do think I've become a better organizer, and a more eloquent speaker. I've written a good number of emails I'm proud of, as well as a few impromptu speeches. I'm not as concerned about this anymore, though I'm considering trying to do toastmasters during the school year to become a better public speaker.

Math (4/10)
Funnily enough, I did not end up taking any of the math classes I mentioned wanting to take (18.102, 18.100, 18.065). In hindsight, the only one I regret not taking is 18.065 (Matrix Methods for Computation) because it would have been pretty helpful in some of the summer work I ended up doing.

I do think that I'm better at math than I used to be. I learned a lot about probability (something I was weak in but didn't acknowledge in the post), and I took Abstract Algebra this last semester, which gave me a taste for that kind of math class. I think I'm also significantly better at thinking about certain types of operators and Hilbert space as a result of taking Quantum Mechanics 2 this previous semester.

I've sortof decided that my "math is super cool" belief was the product of those around me, and isn't something I care about quite as much as I believed.

Coding (4/10)
I wanted to get more fluent in Python. I think I've done an alright job, but I don't think I've improved a lot. I think my skills have grown wider, rather than deeper, although that might just be the nature of the field. Although I don't think I'm much better at making large projects, I think I'm a lot better at bodging things together that work. I know a little frontend, I'm comfortable with AWS, I'm better at using Git, etc. I think taking 6.101 (fundamentals of programming) was a relatively good use of my time, though 6.120 was a terrible idea, and is probably the class I most regret taking.

Network (7/10)
I wanted to "meet and know more people without feeling like the most superficial person known to man." I think I was fairly successful in this goal during the semester in question, though I have more nuanced thoughts on this one. I have a lot of amazing friends, and the fact that I just consider them friends means it doesn't feel superficial. I slowed down getting lunch with people, and I probably could have a broader network than I do now.

There were some interesting components to this goal that I didn't remember. I wanted to do a better job at telling people my name (and about me in general), and also do a better job at asking people about themselves. I think I'm better at the first. I don't think I'm better at the second. I think I could have a lower bar for asking people personal questions about themselves.

Have more ideas (5/10)
I felt like my brain was too lazy. I didn't want to live like a passive observer, and instead analyze and dissect the world around me more. I think this is a fairly worthy goal. I'm not sure how I expected listening to less music to meaningfully change it though. I suspect a significant portion of it is a deeper aspect of my brain chemistry that would be too difficult to change. But, I do think that I've improved on it a bit as I've grown older.

I think I'm more critical of the media I take in. I also have strong opinions on certain ideas, and often share them. I'm not sure how much of this is having more ideas as much as suppressing less ideas. I think I've gotten more confident in my opinions.

Run really fucking far (3/10)
I basically failed. The longest run I've ever done is still 36.6 miles on July --- 2021. I spent a good portion of fall semester recovering from some shin splints, but don't really have any good excuses for why it couldn't happen over the summer (other than that I was effectively homeless and kind of sad). I did run 27 miles on my birthday in October, and did a few 20 mile runs throughout the year, so I do get some credit.

I think that this is something I still care about a lot, and one of the regrets of the year. I fell for the "I'm not ready" excuse, even though I've never been ready for anything I've done. Long distance running is a really useful prop for my ego, and something that correlates with my mental health.

Be a better friend (8/10) then (5/10)
This ended up being fairly similar to the network goal, though I'll still cover it briefly. I think I did a pretty good job of this during spring semester. I organized a lot of fun trips, and got dinner regularly with most of the people I cared about.

But, this last semester has not gone quite as well. I feel like I've been much less of a positive force, occasionally even causing something like drama, which I've never done before. I'm not exactly sure why. I think I've been more insecure, and that's led me to be less appreciative of others. I think part of it also just comes with the territory of being an upperclassmen. Many of the things that would slide as a freshman aren't cute anymore once you become a sophomore.

Become Filch (2/10)
The basic idea here was to know all of the secret spots around MIT. Although I spent a good number of hours

working on this with Spruce, I don't think I did much after I wrote this post. I got busy with other things, and couldn't afford to stay up till 4am trying to card every door onto the rooftop of a random building.

I also don't value this as much. I care much more about the health of the community as a whole, and doing cool, visible things, rather than just being the guy who knows how to get everywhere.

It's also worth mentioning that this was significantly curtailed between April and November for reasons I will not explain in this post.

Good summer plans (4/10)
I don't think I did that good a job of this. I didn't want to miss out on opportunities just because I didn't think ahead enough. But, everything I did basically required no planning, so I don't think I did a great job of planning. I wanted something to put on my resume by the end of the semester, which didn't end up happening.

But, I did do some interesting stuff which has carried over nicely into this last semester, and I went some cool places and had fun. So it wasn't a total waste, especially given what else I could have done.

A year of fun

Despite my best efforts to do nothing but grind all year, I ended up having a little bit of fun. Here are my 5 favorite things I've done this year in no particular order:

Spring Break Trip

Me and 6 friends rented a tiny wooden cabin in NH for spring break last year. This was an incredibly good experience. I became much closer with everyone there, and got a lot of great stories out of it. 10/10 would recommend doing this.

Summer Road Trip

I went on a 2500 miles, 10 day road trip with two of my best friends from high school. We went to 5 national parks, literally almost died climbing a mountain, accidentally crashed a Canadian teenager’s punk-themed birthday party, volunteered at Montana State freshman move in, and stumbled across the world’s first nuclear reactor on the side of the road in Idaho. It could be a whole post in and of itself, but I am not a travel blogger. Truly one to remember.

Three Points

EPIC music festival in Miami that I went to with my friend Spruce. Saw Grimes, Fred Again, Skrillex, Nia Archives, Iggy Pop (somehow he’s still touring?), and a bunch more. Had never been to a music festival at that scale before. Cost a lot of money, so I probably won’t be doing it too often till the big checks start hitting though.

Painting my room

On of the best nights of the year started during a hall party. After a few drinks, I decided it was finally time to paint the inside of my room. Which I proceeded to do over the course of ~8 hours. Spilled so much paint, and accidentally dissolved a plastic solo cup with paint thinner, but this was insanely fun. In general I had a ton of fun doing room modifications, but this one stands out.

Solo backpacking in the Siskiyous

I went on a solo, one night backpacking trip in the Californian Siskiyous over the summer. This stands out because I think it was the first time I’ve ever planned a trip just for me. It was an interesting experience for me, because I usually always make decisions based on what’s best for the group, so I had to be more in touch with what I actually wanted to do. Was really freeing, and I hope to do more stuff like this.

I did a ton of other fun things with a ton of other fun people, but again, I’m not a travel blogger, and this post is at 3500+ words. I enjoyed a lot of the outdoor stuff I did, and hope to do more this coming year! Considering buying a car to make this stuff easier to do.

A dangerous pit of self-loathing

After writing the initial review of last years’ goals, I decided it would be a good exercise to criticize the previous year as harshly as possible. I then proceeded to tear into the previous year with such fury and self-loathing that I sunk into a depression and nearly gave up on this post altogether. In hindsight, I’m not sure that this was a useful exercise.

I will spare you the raw draft of this part, but will provide a summary for completeness:

• I didn't succeed in most of the goals I listed for one semester, despite having two.

• My blogposts have dropped off.

• The projects that are going well are not solo-endeavors, and I feel like I'm being carried along in them I'm probably more selfish than I've ever been before.

• I'm failing upwards, and my over-inflated ego will never let myself return to a more appropriate level for my skills, which would be the only way to feel like I've earned the things I've achieved.

• My romantic life is a mess, I lose interest in dating apps and choose bad people to chase.

• I'm not very responsible with my finances, and have started spending money on things I would never have in the past (despite not making very much more money).

• I’ve read maybe 5 books.

• I'm insecure in friendships that used to feel very solid.

• I hardly see my parents, treating their best efforts to make even the least intrusive plans like shit, cancelling on short notice.

• My summer plans are still nonexistent, and I missed all the deadlines for a lot of good options.

• Despite this decade being the most important period of human history, I preoccupy myself with things like whether a specific floor on a specific dorm in a specific school keeps a few specific traditions alive.

• Despite plenty of opportunities where I could rise to the occasion, I consistently feel like I settle for mediocrity, the result of having too many fingers in too many pots.

Praise

Ok, enough of that. Most of those bullet points aren't things I fully believe. But I think there are some half- truths to a lot of them.

Now I will attempt to give a more positive review of the year. Even though it's just one "specific floor on a specific dorm in a specific school", I'm so fucking proud that Putz isn't just alive, but is going strong. My floor in East Campus is fucking killing it. I think we're doing better than when we had a dorm. Although there are areas I think we're still lacking in, the energy is there, and it's only a matter of time before we reach a level of activity and Doing Shit we haven't seen since before COVID.

I'm proud of the unexpected revolutionary work I've done at Burton Conner, the dorm I'm living at while East Campus is being renovated. Long story short, there’s been a lot of drama with the Mural Policy. Over the past decade, MIT administration has attempted to take a new position in their treatment of dorms. Where previously, students had near complete autonomy over dorm governance, many of the freedoms previously held have been stripped in the name of "emulating peer institutions". One of these was the privilege to paint murals directly on the walls of the dorm. After a series of "renegade murals" appeared around the dorm, I became obsessed with organizing the disorganized acts into a directed front at the correct people. Although I'm still questioning if all the decisions were correct, I got a lot of useful experience for when I move back into EC in the future.

This semester has, more than anything else, been about building communities. Whether this is interviewing candidates for the Webteam, recruiting new members to either of my halls, or trying to make MAIA a better and more streamlined club, I've had to spend more time then ever trying to create communities. I still honestly don't know how naturally good at it I am, but It's something that feels really important, and I hope to continue it. I learned that interesting people don't necessarily make a good addition to a community, and that I need to filter for some quality of caring about community as well.

Here's a disorganized list of ways I'm better than I was a year ago.

• I know what group theory is, and I think I'm able to think in this mindset.

• I understand a lot more about probability. I'm better at combinatorics problems, and I have detailed notes about really important concepts in the field.

• I know a lot more about how MIT admin works. I know the whole structure, and I know a lot more people who have influential roles in the ways things get carried out.

• I’ve maintained really solid friendships with all of my friends from home!

• I know my drinking limit.

• I'm way better at asking people out (which is not saying that much, to be fair).

• I actually know Quantum Mechanics! Although I've only taken two semesters of it, I think I have a really solid understanding of how it works at both the coarse-grained mathematical level, as well as the higher level stuff. I think this is really cool!

• I've started organizing things again! I think I took a break on trying to be social glue, since I was new to school and sort of forgot that that was a really useful social strategy for me in high school.

• I'm a lot more confident in my ability to just build things. I made a really stupid web thing in a few days, and it mostly worked! I think this is partially a result of ChatGPT, but I think I also have a mindset of expecting things to be easy, which I didn't use to have. Regardless of if things usually are easy, believing that I can do it makes me much more likely to actually do things.

• I know so fucking much about AI. I’ve read dozens of papers, and think I have at least a rudimentary understanding of most aspects of the field.

• I know so much more about the history of China! This is a class I took last semester which I really enjoyed. Though I didn't do as many of the readings as I wish I did, I'm really glad I'm able to enjoy this subject the way I did in high school.

• My general life maintenance has been a lot better. I’ve figured out a work schedule that works for me, I’m more on top of my school work, and I consistently go to bed by 2am. Maybe I’ll go into more detail on this in another post.

• I’ve learned (through experience) a lot about what it’s like to start a company, and how to interview people effectively.

• My leg is no longer broken!

• I’m really excited about all the projects I’m working on, and don’t feel the pressing “is this the right thing for me to be doing right now” question that I always used to feel.

• I'm just a lot better at organizing events. Though I still have a lot of work to do, and make the same mistakes more often than I wish, I think that I'm able to be more organized and hit the deadlines I have to hit

Goals

First/Cofirst author a paper

This is probably the most ambitious goal on this list. But I think it's the right one for me right now. Research along an AI safety adjacent direction is currently my most likely career path. I believe that testing this, by fully owning a project, would give me invaluable experience as well as information about whether this is something I actually want to do.

Become a Keyholder at MITERS

MITERS is a student-run maker space at MIT. Putz used to be very active there, but that has decreased significantly due to COVID. Becoming a key holder requires being competent in using all the tools, and gives you 24/7 access to the space.

Write 20 blogposts

I wrote 14 blogposts in 2023. Most of them were concentrated around the beginning of the year. If I maintain a pace of approximately 2/month, I should be able to accomplish this. Blogposts force me to fully flesh out the ideas I'm thinking about, and force me to see something through from start to finish.

Be more cognizant of what I'm learning

I'm not sure I'm always a super active learner. I learn things, but don't always fully follow them through, or connect them to other ideas or applications. In an attempt to address this, I'm going to start posting daily tidbits, which are one thing I learned every day. I'm taking this idea from Kenny Gu. We'll see if it works for me, and how consistently I'm able to do it. I'd like to post daily, and my scoring at the end of the year will reflect this.

Do more things for myself

I really enjoyed my trip to the Siskiyous. I think planning solo trips is really good for me. It forces me to live in the real world, since there’s no one else’s bullshit to deal with. It’s really hard to get myself to do this, since wanting to do things with others is the primary reason I plan events. I did one solo trip this year, I’d like to do at least three solo, overnight adventures this year.

Have stronger opinions on the state of AI

As someone who is planning on spending a career in this field, as well as someone who has a fairly large lever to pull in the field (through MAIA), I think that it’s embarrassing how few takes I have on the field. Do I prefer empirical or theoretical research? What governance approaches am I the biggest fan of? What’s my elevator pitch on why we should be worried about AI X-risk? Do I think RSP’s are going to do anything? What are my timelines? I’ve avoided answering a lot of hard questions for a long time, with cop-outs like “I don’t have timelines” (said with a superior smirk). Time to be an adult. I’m planning to write an AI safety position paper, which will hopefully help with this.

Leave a comment

However, since the semester is not yet over, this will not be a comprehensive story. After the debacle that was last year, I’ve decided I have to rigidly schedule my moments for existential reflection, and I have that booked out for the first week of January. So, here’s a bulleted list. Think of it like a shout yelled from the window of a car while at a red light: I’m not sure when it will end, and I didn’t really have time to compose my thoughts beforehand.

So here we go:

• I’m currently taking 8.05 (Quantum 2), and it’s really kicking my ass. The exams are long and impossible to finish, and the class moves fast. This feels like the 3rd time I’ve “Actually had to learn how to study”. Hopefully it’s the last, but 8.06 is beckoning, so this is doubtful.

• I’m working on a project to use embedding models to solve institutional inefficiencies. I’m perpetually surprised by how easy it is to do well in ML. I’m definitely not giving it as much as I wished I was, but making useful tools comes pretty naturally.

• I’m thinking a lot about what type of community I want to shape for myself. As the last generation to live on my hall in East Campus, I feel a responsibility, as well as an opportunity, to revitalize and reshape a culture. I’ve concluded (as per usual) that I’m thinking about things too much. Rather than trying to get people to be more like the East Campus I wish we had, I’m just going to be that change, and hope people follow.

• The spirit of revolution is in the air! Clashes with admin have never been more frequent, whether it’s surrounding the war in Gaza, updates in the mural policy, or trying to get a party approved. I’m in a lot of undercover signal chats about these subjects, and (stepping away from the actual issues at stake) I think that the state of revolution is the one I excel in the most.

• I recently turned 20. This felt pretty significant. In the lead up to the day, I was worried that I’d do something major. Last year, when I turned 19, I made a lot of drastic life changes. But this year, I feel much more solid in where I am. I’m a 20 year old, after all, and 20 year olds have their shit together (I’m manifesting).

• Still not sure what to do about all the AI safety stuff. I’m trying to spend more time with the arguments, and get a first-principles intuition on the subject. I think I eventually want to do work for MAIA (MIT AI Alignment), but am unsure how good I’d be. I feel as though MAIA and EC are two futures I see for myself, each pulling me in opposite directions. One is impact focused, scrappy, and keeps his eyes on the prize. The other is cool, spontaneous, resourceful, and Does Cool Stuff.

• I’m thinking a lot about EGO management. I think that having sufficient sense of self-worth is crucial for me to be successful, and this is a very reinforcing cycle. By occasionally doing things I’m good at (long distance running), I’m able to push myself for longer at the things I’m not good at (like 8.05, apparently).

Well, I just looked up and the light’s green. I guess that explains where the honking’s been coming from. See ya later!f

I rowed on this river every day, twice a day, for 7 years. Outside of practice, I walked on its beaches. I ran its paths. I swam it’s breadth. In middle school, I did a study about the insects in it’s riparian zone. In high school, I hosted bonfires on its shores. First as a COVID necessity (with 3 masked friends sitting around a fire in the middle of April), but then, as a traditional gathering place, where I’d throw crazy parties with upwards of 20 people. This was my social life.

I only went home for a few short weeks this summer, so, in order to reconnect, I invited everyone I could think of to a bonfire. A “one year reunion”, as sad and washed up as that sounds.

Things went fine at first. We made a ridiculous attempt to place a person onto a buoy in the middle of the river, and then started our fire to warm up. As the sun went down, we enjoyed our roaring driftwood-fueled fire, our toes in the sand.

Intruders

After the sun went down, and the wayward families went home for dinner, things started to ramp up. With the beach to ourselves, we could do whatever we wanted, and not have to worry about disturbing the peace. But something wasn’t quite right: the number of adults in our part of the beach was dropping off as expected, but the number of teenagers remained constant. It might have even been rising.

This could only mean one thing: there was a dock party tonight. These decentralized parties involved hundreds of high schoolers, loud speakers, and sufficient weed and alcohol to make half of them forget the whole thing. As the groups began to coalesce, and their rival music started, we began to feel uneasy. But we decided to stand our ground. I’ve been here long before any of them, I thought.

I began introducing myself to everyone who walked by, and hyped up my friends in front of the youth. As more and more arrived, and my little Wunderboom 2 portable speaker began to be dominated by huge boomboxes, we became a tiny island of light surrounded by a sea of people. 

This period of time is a blur in my memory. Repetitive conversations, hands dapped up, old faces remembered. 

Then, somewhere in the  commotion, a fight erupts. Two kids, barely out of middle school, wrestling on the ground. One is short and chubby, the other tall and skinny. He has braces. A croud forms around them, cheering them on. Me and my friend Oscar watch from the side. Phones record, people yell, and finally it disperses. I walk closer to the teenagers on the ground, curious how the fight ended.

They stood up and to my surprise, the look on the fighters faces wasn’t one of anger, or sadness, or victory. They both showed kinda sheepish smiles, as though they knew each other and were both on an inside joke. Then, they blended back into the crowd and another duo took it’s turn.

Maybe it was this revelation about the nature of fighting, maybe it was the testosterone in the air, or maybe just some part of me wanting to prove I was still young. Whatever it was, before I know it, I’d grabbed Oscar from behind, and dragged him to the ground.

A crowd reforms. Coated in dust and sand, I strain to get my arm around his neck from behind, forcing a chokehold. He fights back, and twists hard to the side. Now I’m in front of him, trying  to turn him back around. He raises an arm against me, and we lock into position. We heave in exhaustion, staring wide-eyed, unable to move, and after ten, frozen, seconds I relax my grip, and the yells of the crowd fade away.

We fall back, arms still tangled, stare at the sky, and quietly laugh. 

Maybe Fight Club had something figured out. 

The mood changes

We stand up, and his smile goes away. He can’t find his phone–it must have fallen out during our wrestling match.

We search, and as we scan the sand, the vibe shifts from boyish exuberance to teenage degeneracy.

I watch fifteen year old girls walk up to random boys, desperate for someone to make out with them. I stumble past a kid lying on a bush at the edges of the party, staring into nothing, unresponsive to his surroundings. Overwhelming clouds of weed smoke make it hard to even breathe, much less find a phone. There are now multiple fights at once, and what once sounded like yells of excitement now sound like jeers and whistles.

Off to my right, there’s a disturbance in the crowd as people’s bodies move away from a patch of sand. I walk over, hoping it’s my friend’s phone. But it isn’t. Instead, there’s a kid who looks around 16, waving something around. He points it at me, and asks if I’ve seen a holster. I shake my head, confused. And then finally I realize what he’s holding.

a black pistol. 

damn.

Reflections

I turned away, Oscar found his phone, and our group left pretty soon after. Everyone was fine, but I still have a sour taste in my mouth.

I keep thinking about what could have possibly led that guy to bring a gun to the river. The petty politics of high school life, excessive substance use, scared kids, people in way over their heads. It all feels so distant to me. I wondered how these people will look at these times five years from now. Will they look at themselves the same way I look at them now, as scared, scary, messed up kids? 

Or, will they look at themselves the way I look at that version of myself. Burgeoning, meeting new people and being exposed to new ideas. Do the smoky crowds, random fights, and pointed guns fade with time? 

The river, and the bonfires that came with it, were a formative time for me. I went from being someone who never really got invited to parties to being the guy who throws the parties. They’re when I discovered the power of organizing things, and the freedom that provides. A huge amount of who I am today came from events surrounding that river. I’ve decided to leave the Willamette to the high schoolers from now on. That’s their battlefield to fight on.

Update: July 2024

A lot of people I know struggle with social media addictions. Here’s a strategy that I think has worked fairly well to reprogram my brain to not waste as much time on mindless media.

Basically, I realized that the reason I don’t endorse the time I spend watching dumb shit on Youtube is because I won’t remember it. If I don’t remember the content I’m imbibing, all it does is subtract another 10 minutes from my life.

According to my whole repetition/compression theory of memory, repeated events get forgotten. So, a good test for whether seeing something will actually give me new information (which I’ll remember) is the following:

Whenever I want to watch something, I try to imagine what the video will look like. I’ve found that, for a surprising number of things, I can predict it pretty well.

Take this Youtube video as an example:

Now, I haven’t seen this video. But, just from the thumbnail and title, I’m pretty sure that it will go something like this:

1. Clever intro for how he came up with the idea to use power washers to fly

2. Brief thing about Newton’s third law, etc

3. Some brief calculations for how many pressure washers he’ll need

4. An initial test that fails

5. An series of tests with increasingly absurd numbers of power-washers until either he A: succeeds, but only barely, or B: fails, then explains why he thinks it failed.

So, if I’m able to predict with decent confidence what I’d get out of watching this, why do I need to spend 16 minutes of my life on it? Instead, I could do something I value so much more. Something like writing this blogpost.

This also works for those clickbaitey, “satisfying videos”. Like power washing time lapses, ants eating things time lapses, slime videos, cheating-partner stories, etc. Pick your poison. By predicting what I think it will look like, and what pleasure centers it will hit, I’m able to step out of it. This extra, split-second of conscientiousness can mean the difference between an extra hour of sleep and a literal hour of my lifetime stolen.

I've kept a journal for a while. It comes and goes, and I definitely have skipped long portions of my life, but for the most part I have a rough summary of who I was and what I was thinking about from about freshman year of high school onwards.

One of the frustrating parts about looking back at this is seeing how many fucking circles I have gone into. For example, every 4 months, I'd go through the exact same injury process. I'd do something stupid, like work too hard or lift too much, and tweak something. I'd take the day off, come back two days later with my body feeling 90%, tell my coach "Yep, no pain", make it worse, and then miss two weeks.

Another example is commitment. I get scared of not doing the right thing, so I don't do anything. And every time, afterwards, in order to justify failure, I tell myself that I've learned my lesson. That I need to just do things. And, I think I do. Because next time I fuck it up, I've forgotten I ever even learned that lesson in the first place.

Ok, but blogging. The reason I love writing is that it forces my thoughts into a linear structure. I find it incredibly difficult to actually string thoughts together inside my head, without the help of a pencil or keyboard. I've known this for a long time, and enjoyed journaling for this reason.

But I think that publishing things has the same effect, only on a larger, meta scale. You see, every time I have an existential crises, I come out feeling rather silly. Like, what was I caught up on again? And how much did it actually change my life decisions? And how many psets do I have to makeup now?

So, I tell myself I learned something from it. That I explored that pathway all the way to the end, and now, I'm a better person because of it. That next time, I'll recognize the path when I'm only a few feet in, and know to turn back. Because I already know what's down there.

But a recent fear I've had is, what if I'm not?

And that's what blogging is for. Because the second I turn something into a blogpost, it exists in the real world. And when I scroll through my posts, I remind myself of the place I used to be in.

And I can confirm that I'm moving forwards.

1. You are too fat.

2. The audacity you have to ask me to tell you every 15 minutes I'll be available to do your stupid zoom call for the next two weeks

3. You suck on my phone. It's too small

4. When I try and drag to make a selection but, but then the whole screen drags, and I have to get back to the part I was looking at without accidentally pressing the wrong time

5. When I inevitably press the wrong time, you don't let me just unselect one 15 minute chunk, instead I have to make a whole, bigger block green, and then unselect the whole thing

6. You are in interest forms??? Why do people plan a whole event for random people and don't have a time set already? Either I can make it or I can't, please don't adapt for me

7. The way you that every time I open you up and try and click on the green part to select my time but then I can't click on the green part and have to put my name in to the thing above the password box to make the separate box for me

I am unable to square your continued existence with the efficient free market hypothesis.

This is pretty cringe. Not only was the post unoriginal, but it wasn't even something I endorse. The last thing that this world needs is more mediocrity. People truly trying is exceptionally rare.

I want you to ask yourself, how many times in your life have you really tried your hardest at something. Not "stayed up all night to finish something". Not "got up at 4am for a while". No. I'm talking about movie shit. I'm talking about 100 hours/week. I'm talking about tried so hard that you felt like you'd die if you failed. Extra points if it was self-directed.

Given the people I know are reading this blog, I wouldn't be that surprised if a some of you said more than once. But for me, I think I only have a one situation that even comes close to this standard.

But this standard is the only one that actually matters. The things you'd die for are the things you live for. Trying, not to enter the top 3.956%, or even 0.01%, but the literal peak of human achievement, with no one above you, is almost beyond cool. Not only for your own ego. But for the good of the human race.

I'm realizing more and more that there are not that many things I truly value. This is not a bad thing. It gives me focus.

I was just talking to my friend Dakota, and how we feel like there are certain things we want to have on our blogs as "disclaimers" of sorts. This is one of those. I think it comes from a place of insecurity. I'm worried people will judge me because of some running aspect of my posts. But this is an insecurity I endorse. The whole point of this blog is to be representation of myself for other people to understand me better. If I don't care what others think of my, I should delete this blog.

Therefore, here's my disclaimer: when confronted between posting something imperfect now, or posting something perfect later, I will almost always tend towards posting it now. This largely because of this tumblr post:

For the purpose of this blog, functional is all I need. Actually making a blogpost is really hard to do. You have to find time to work on it outside of all your other responsibilities, and there is little outside pressure to get you to do it. When the writing gets boring and tedious, it is very very very easy to just... not make the post. My "drafts" bin on Wordpress is a testament to this. So, whenever I get into the position where I have something that is not that great but at least addresses the things I want it to address, I'll post it.

"Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough"

My Dad

All of this said, I do not believe in mediocrity always. Perfectionism is incredibly beautiful and valuable. It's a battle against entropy that most people don't choose to fight. This is because many things are very heavy-tailed in terms of impact. It's the flip side of the 80/20 rule. Although 80% of the quality might come from 20% of the work, what if only the top 20% of works produce 80% of the impact?

Here, it makes sense to put in wayyy more effort in order to perfect an idea. Careers and battles aren't made and lost in the 80% range. They're made and lost in the 99.9% range, where the last, fleeting amount of value can be the difference between an ascendent, transformative project and another irrelevant addition to the corpus of human endeavors.

But, the issue is, you can't be a perfectionist about everything. Your time is limited. This is why I you should choose very few things to spend a lot of your time on, and half, or even quarter ass the rest. And this blog is one of those things. Maybe one day I'll decide to actually make this blog into something more than just a scream into the void, and start trying to perfect my posts. But for now, I'll have to settle for good enough.

It's the kind of thing where you always had a vague sense that this dichotomy exists, but once you hear a word for it, it all crystalizes inside your brain.

I think the words match the concepts pretty well, but I'll give a brief explanation.

I'll just steal the definition from LessWrong:

Object level vs Meta level is a distinction between levels of abstraction, with the object level being directly about the specifics of the issue at hand, while meta level is concerned with the general principles which apply to a wider range of examples. It is often useful to move up and down the ladder of abstraction to get points across clearly, with the object level providing firm grounding and concrete examples for a person to grasp, while the meta layer allows them to generalize a new concept to a broad domain.

I think I spend too much time in the meta level domain. If you look through my past blogposts, I think you'll find most of them falling into a fairly meta-category. This one included. They're all huge, life reflections, that fall primarily under the blanket of philosophy. I think that meta-level posts are important and cool. But like many things in life, meta level posts should rely upon a broad base of object level posts. If all you do is meta-level things, you'll spend your whole life talking about doing things and never actually do them.

If you aren't doing anything in your life, what do you have to reflect upon? I think part of this ties into my general alignment with Nassim Taleb's views on the importance of Empiricism. Talk is Cheap. Theories are fake. What you say doesn't matter, all that matters is what you do. I think that the most interesting and valid philosophical opinions come from those who have lived the most interesting object-level lives.

I think that this is one of my biggest issues with EA. It's all meta. EA's would defend this by saying that it's worth spending a lot of time planning out what you're going to do for the rest of your life. Which I agree with. But if you spend sooo much time planning and reflecting on things that you're never able to stay your course and finish anything, you're never going to make an impact.

So, my goal for this semester (a slight readjustment, but not entirely so), is to get more interesting things done. I want to have projects, and research, and make cool plans for the summer. I want to learn all the math and computer science. I want to be competent at the object-level.

The irony of talking about how I "want" to do more object-level things in a post is not lost on me. I have a few plans to do this. One is to keep doing stuff with firelight. The other is to start doing research again. The last is to start a cool CS project.

This post is about giving my brief takeaways from all these classes, in a style similar to one done by a blogger on the MIT blogs that I would link to but I just spent 10 minutes looking and I couldn't find it so now I only have 13 minutes to finish this post. I may come back and add it later.

Here are all the classes I took, along with a brief note about each of them.

6.101(aka Fundamental of Programming aka .009)

This is one the the 5 classes I ended up taking. It's pretty useful, I think, and required for most later CS classes. I don't really go to the lectures (they're basically just recitations), but that's more or less the expectation for this class. Every week, you're assigned some big thing you have to implement (Snokoban, 7 degrees of Kevin Bacon, Image Processing etc), and every one teaches you something (hopefully) new about programming.

6.120

Also one of the classes I ended up taking. It's not that great. Mainly basic math concepts (counting, induction, sums) gone over in confusing language that makes them sound much harder than they actually are. Not sure how much I learn from this class, but it's sortof nice to go over concepts I already knew. This class makes feel much more elitist as a Physics major.

6.121

I only ever went to one thing for this class, and it was a recitation. I quickly realized upon talking to others that there was no change they would let me take this without having fulfilled the prereq (6.120), so I dropped it.

6.190

I really regret not taking this class. It seems super cool to me (buildign your own computer one a breadboard, programming in languages I've never used). Luckily, it's a quarter long course, so I'll probably take it 2nd quarter. Sadly most of my friends took it first quarter though.

8.03

This may have been the most basic lecture I've ever attended at MIT. I was already leaning pretty strongly towards just skipping 8.03 and going straight to 8.04 before this lecture, but going to it made it obvious. After 8.022, it felt like a joke. I guess they have to moderate it for all the kids coming from 8.02 (the regular track option).

8.04

This will probably be my most difficult class this semester. It's pointed out a lot of the holes in my calculus knowledge, and made me painfully aware of what math can look like in physics. So far it's not been as fun conceptually as 8.022, but it's still pretty cool.

18.065

I just dropped this class. I wish I took 18.102 instead of it. I think I'll end up taking it, but it felt like a class I really wouldn't

18.100B

I only went to the first lecture for this class. I've techinically alreadfy taken a baby form of analysis (Intro to Analysis at a local college my senior year), so it felt fairly like review. I'm probably being too cocky assuming I don't need this, but the lecturer seemed mid and I decided that it wasn't worth my time. It was a sad cut to make though

18.102

I think that this is the number one class that I wished I took this semester. But I understand why I dropped it. I signed up for it because my friend Shreya said she was taking it, and I wanted a challenging math class. But, I didn't even know what functional analysis was. I felt pretty good at the first few lectures (the lecturer was a 70 year old British man with an S-tier sense of humor). But, when I opened the first pset, I was immediately lost. I decided my proof knowledge was insufficient, and I asked for an extension. The other classes I was taking were piling up, and against Shreya's best efforts, I decided to drop it.

I've since grown to regret it. The rest of my classes have gotten much easier, and I feel like I'm missing cool math stimulus. I've also used the few math concepts I learned in the first few lecturers over a dozen times since (norms and metric-spaces), and decided that this is a class that's really fundamental. I will likely take it next spring.

18.200

I never went to a lecture. In hindsight, wish that I'd at least considered it over 6.120.

18.600

I'm currently taking this class. Probability is something that I think I have very bad intuition for, and I want to become better at this. I had some reservations about taking it this semester because the professor gets bad reviews. But, in the end, I decided it was too important to wait, and to just take it. I still don't know if this was a good idea. I definitely think I'm learning a lot from this class though.

Humanities

17.S917

This is another class that Shreya tried to get me to take. It's a special subject Poli-sci class that's more of a book club than a normal class. I went to the first meeting for it, and although the subject matter is interesting to me, the reading schedule (1 book/week) felt like more than I would realistically do. I pictured myself showing up to class every week, having barely done the readings, and feeling like total shit as I did my best to not let others onto it. This felt like it would be a waste of my time, so I dropped it.

21G.071

I only went to the first class for this. It was alright. Small and hot classroom.

21L.024

I didn't end up getting into this class.

Reflections

I didn't end up