mit is still a bubble

my writing professor says the Right Way to write stories is character-driven; you start with very detailed descriptions of the main characters you want to talk about, and if those characters are sufficiently compelling then their interactions will emerge organically and that naturally gives rise to your plot. we talk about how plot-first writing often leads to unmotivated character behavior, and how idea-first writing feels like it’s always bordering on propaganda. when i am in class this all makes perfect sense to me, but then immediately afterwards my friends point out that some of my favorite short stories, like the egg and story of your life, are very obviously idea-driven and plot-driven, respectively. these observations are not necessarily contradictory; for instance, it could be the case that character-driven writing produces the most consistently good short stories, but not the ones i like the most. regardless, this is confusing territory for me to navigate. i think this blog is a pretty even mix of all three kinds of writing though

in my computation structures class we are spending a few weeks programming in assembly language, specifically risc-v. some of my math friends simultaneously love puzzles and hate assembly, and i don’t really understand how this is possible, given that writing assembly is literally solving puzzles. so far i find it extremely fun, because it’s pretty cool how you can write any reasonable program using such a small set of instructions and registers, and the constraints involved force you to think harder about every line of code you write. some people tell me this means i have bad taste, because the whole point of modern languages is to think less about code details

i have been keeping up with all my classes and commitments and also successfully following performance engineering and cognitive augmentation, which is better than i was expecting. i’ve also been sleeping a lot by my standards, to the point where last saturday i got approximately zero sleep due to hackmit and was basically completely functional the day afterwards. so i guess the semester has been pretty good. but by far the most important thing for me to do right now (other than the obvious things, like staying healthy) is to get a better sense of what i care about and what problems i’m interested in working on, and i haven’t made much progress on these fronts. i don’t have significantly more knowledge about eg. the biotech or bci or crypto spaces than when i arrived on campus a month ago, and the list of companies i know i’d be happy working for after college has not gotten longer, which is a problem that i will try to remedy soon

speaking of hackmit, my team developed composing.studio which is pretty cool. most of the work was done by open-source packages (rustpad for collaborative editing, abcjs for text-to-note rendering and audio synthesis, monaco for syntax highlighting) and we just had to put them together in a nice way. i guess that’s ideal for a hackathon project, but people keep asking things like “how were you able to do this in one day” and the answer is very obviously that the hardest parts had already been done beforehand

i keep running into people who want to work in finance for non-altruistic reasons. i also keep running into stanford ea (effective altruism) people who are trying to help mit ea recruit new members as stanford has a strong ea community while mit does not. i also have friends who want to focus on impact but who think that ea has ineffective methods and ideology, so they are starting their own club which is simultaneously supportive of and adversarial to ea. there are also people like me, who were interested in joining said new club but decided not to because the club has very limited capacity which should go to other students

all of which is to say that if you talk to enough different kinds of people, it is impossible to ever tell what is happening on campus or who is the Most Correct about anything. as far as i’m aware, the only ways in which people ever hold stable beliefs here are by either having exceptional conviction in what they believe in, or by burying themselves in friend groups to protect themselves from the full diversity of thought on campus. i have already committed to trying to avoid the second option, which means i must embark on the first one

i’ve been meeting a lot of new people on campus, either via referrals or by sitting next to strangers in places like dining halls. many of them come from groups that i previously didn’t take seriously eg the business club, and they’re generally pretty cool. so far i think i’ve found everyone i’ve met to be interesting as long as they’re reasonably easy to talk to. i’m not saying people who are bad at conversations are boring; it’s just a lot harder for me to understand anything about them

it is difficult to comprehend how two people can meet the same new person, and one can think the new person is really cool while the other sees nothing of value in them, but this is the dynamic i keep encountering on a daily basis. i’m used to seeing this happen for organizations; for instance, i know a lot of people who think finance or frats or poker club are cool and a lot of other people who think they are utterly worthless, but it’s just jarring to see the same effect play out when the object in consideration is an actual person. of course i understand how this is possible — the same neural networks can be trained to learn anything, after all — but it makes me sad because i’d rather live in a world where everyone thinks everyone else is cool, you know? 

my vision is so foggy right now. it was this way freshman year too, but back then i was too near-sighted and too grounded in echo chambers to notice, whereas nowadays i can see the fog. i can see that everyone is giving me contradictory information about the content in my classes and the merit of ea and the value of other people and every other question worth asking, and i can see that the only solution here is to truly feel the things i claim to believe

i can also see that almost everyone is procrastinating on the question of what to do after college — and i mean this literally, as in, the number of college students i know who are spending large amounts of time, right now, doing things specifically targeted towards answering the question is in the single digits. a lot of people seem to think they’ll just figure it out over time by doing internships or taking classes (which in my opinion is equivalent to hoping that you can discover your favorite food via spoonfeeding), or that the question is not very urgent and a resolution can wait. maybe they’re right about that. but the reason i care so much about figuring this out now is that i agree with peter thiel and ben kuhn that the most probable scenario for people who procrastinate on figuring out what to do is that they slowly run out of time and end up feeling like they have no choice but to sell out, when in reality they had every opportunity to explore and simply never prioritized it enough. i don’t really feel like elaborating on this, but if you’re curious you should read the relevant sections of above links

it is difficult for me to recall the clarity i had back in alaska just a month ago, when nothing on campus makes any sense. it is difficult for me to remember which goals i think are important, when nobody seems to want to confront the primary question i am here to answer. i am handling the chaos better than any past version of me could, but it still does not feel good enough. sometimes mit feels completely absurd and i just wish i could see through it more clearly