some identity stuff

there isn’t really a connection between the three subjects of this post beyond the title, and i’m not going to pretend there is

---

two sigma is okay. i guess i’m not allowed to say much about the work itself, so i’ll just write about everything else. i sign up for all the coffee chats, meaning that approximately once a day i get paired with random employees and talk to them for 20 to 30 minutes, which has probably been my favorite part of the experience so far as a lot of people have interesting backgrounds. there’s also a nice directory of all the employees with brief biographies for each person and it is easily searchable so i can eg. just search for every employee with nlp in their bio and schedule a chat with them or something. i’m hoping to meet one of the creators of google translate soon which would be super cool but they are quite busy

it took me a while to realize a lot of people actually care about finance. 5+ years of quant ads at math contests were not enough to convince me that predicting market returns is a particularly compelling problem so i’d always assumed that most people working in the field shared my sentiments and were primarily doing the job for the money, but no, it turns out a lot of people genuinely think this is an interesting and important problem. i guess i shouldn’t be shocked, but i still find myself unable to relate

in general i am skeptical of every college student who claims they’ll eg. work in finance for 10 years and then quit to do whatever thing they care more about. not just because of all the cliche about how the job changes you, but because executing on multi-year objectives that go against the status quo is extremely difficult and i see no reason to believe you’ll be able to execute your career plans properly if you don’t have a history of successful execution on long-term visions. am i being unreasonable? maybe a little, but it’s also true that almost nobody beats the planning fallacy in their first few tries. in my experience when my friends say they’ll spend the next year learning x or growing in y direction they usually fail spectacularly, and the people who consistently follow through are the ones with prior experience implementing complex and nonstandard plans over extended periods of time, like systematically revamping their identity or running away from home or whatever. of course this is a skill everyone can learn, but it must be actively acquired as nobody has it by default. i’d say i’m probably slightly above average in this department but still wouldn’t trust myself to be a quant for some fixed number of years

i’ve been revisiting the notion of impact and how the effective altruists believe that for most people in my demographic, maximizing impact comes by earning a lot of money and donating most of it, which seems reasonable to me if the only thing under consideration is career choice. so if i actually cared strongly about impact i’d have to be extremely confident in my ability to either do meaningful work or earn money in alternative ways to justify turning down finance? and yet despite knowing it has a high probability of being the “best” thing to do i still find it extremely difficult to imagine futures where i end up at two sigma and feel content with my role. i think the moral of the story here is that i am not an effective altruist even though i often sympathize with them

i was talking to a friend about jobs and they asked “is there no appeal to living in a  resort and playing games while making lots of dollars?” and currently the answer is no, there really isn’t, but when the question is phrased in this way that feels like such an implausible answer, like, dollars are dollars and resorts and games literally exist for the purpose of enjoyment and i’d need to have a very strange utility function to truly not see the appeal here

so it seems that i just have a lot of natural inclinations to avoid finance. this is not an inherently good or bad thing, but i do not yet understand whether these tendencies stem from healthy places (eg. if i genuinely believe i can do better work outside of finance or just like non-finance people more) or unhealthy ones (eg. if i want to feel like i’m making a difference while not actually doing so, or if i just enjoy making my life artificially harder)

---

the other day i hung out with a friend and they asked out of the blue if i was asexual. i wasn’t sure how to respond as it’s something i haven’t thought about in a while, and because this has been a somewhat fluid topic for me? i think the aftermath of a certain breakup pushed my preferences significantly in the direction of being less attracted to people, and i think other people also do a very good job of communicating and implanting expectations about sex, expectations that i did not realize i could let go of until i wrote about the subject a month ago

the next day cj sent some reddit links (namely this and this. which in retrospect was probably the obvious place to start, but as a person who does not use reddit i did not know the site contained actually useful content) and this helped me realize that, yes, i probably am (thanks cj). which is funny because some of my friends had told me essentially the same thing back in 2018 and i’d completely ignored them because i didn’t know the meanings of the words they were saying

---

a while back one of my friends mentioned how they were good enough at delayed gratification to the point where it would often backfire on them, eg. they would consume snacks at such a slow rate that the food would end up spoiling. and i couldn’t help but think wow, that used to be me in high school, but somewhere along the line i lost that level of control and became a mostly normal person

i am trying to rediscover that element of my character – i’m not really sure what the right term is, but it’s something along the lines of discipline or focus or intensity. it manifests in many ways – like, i have no idea how i ran a half-marathon in high school because i think i am completely unable to do so now despite being more fit overall. or for instance, i used to only listen to classical music and at some point i switched to pop; then the other day i was listening to the sour album and realized i was literally pouring toxicity into my brain and since then i’ve been a lot more conscious of what i’m listening to and have swung back towards classical. of course it is not the same classical music i listened to in high school; i was a much worse listener back then, and my favorite composers now are mahler and schubert, both of whom i barely knew anything about back in the day. and that is somewhat representative of how i want to approach my past – return to the parts of me i miss, but be much wiser about how i wear them this time around