Plymouth pilgrims

For the last week or so, I've considered a move to Boston. I've spent my whole life on the West Coast and have never been to Boston in my life. I am aware that I am "in for a surprise" if I decide to move to Boston in the middle of December. 

I think I crave adventure, and this is sort of a "settling the frontier" kind of situation for me. I am also very intense and am seeking to start an intense project in collaboration with some scientists out in Boston. If I don't have an intense Manhattan Project to start, then I don't feel fulfilled for some reason. 

I think the considerations, of course, are that I will be starting fresh and have to make friends from scratch. That's obviously a "good for you" type of thing. I do think Nicholas Nassim Taleb's concept of Antifragility is pretty useful to life, and my hope is that a hard move will stimulate my friendship life, whereas in my current place things have gotten a bit stagnant and settled in their ways. Namely, I don't have any friends who want to collaborate with me on an intense Manhattan Project.

I also just graduated and realized that all of these post-grad people spend all their time working! For some reason I thought you're supposed to have more free time once you finish college! And if these people are so into doing their jobs all the time, then maybe I should make it a point to allocate myself to the most intense, exhilarating type of work that I envision, instead of thinking that some okay dayjob is a worthwhile trade for "beers after work." Because nobody's getting beers after work around here.

Why do I still use the same blog from 2009?

 Answer: My belief is that longevity breeds its own form of art

See also:

(Also for some reason Blogger got stingy and now the image upload sizes are super crap)

Books September 2022

 The Moon is a Harsh Mistress: 4/5

A beautiful society where everyone wears their heart on their sleeve and is quite loving 

The Innovation Stack by Jim McKelvey: 4/5 easy read, the language is simple, the humor is decent, the main insight about stacking innovations is useful, otherwise leans towards a motivational business book. You also learn that the founder of IKEA was a Nazi (literal Nazi). The book doesn’t waste stupid time repeating psychology studies. A pro-contrarian book a la Peter Thiel 

The Ministry for the Future: 4/5, personally it’s a 5 for me, and I read it cover to cover, but I realize not everyone will appreciate the subtle references which the book is trying to make, which is that it is parodying the neural routes that someone obsessed and particularly fixated on fixing climate change has gone through, including a sort of agnosticism for capitalism vs communism, growth vs. degrowth, technofix vs. political fix, etc. Because it surfaces a lot of these sort of arguments that are trite if you’ve thought long enough about how to practically solve climate change. This sort of reference-making is something that is likely to go over a lot of people’s heads. The book is also written from the perspective of “humanity” as a whole, which is why who the protagonist is keeps shifting until the later third of the book, but I heard that other readers found this style unsettling. I actually liked this of the book. As others say, I agree this book is by far the best imagery of what it’ll be like for humans and humanity to experience the consequences of climate change within this century. Read this in 2021 I think. 

The Uninhabitable Earth 4.5/5: A little bit dramatic, and the section on plastic I think is irrelevant, but surprisingly most of its views are justified because it’s simply a synthesis of all the bad things we know are going to happen because of climate change, and crammed into one book instead of shown to us one study at a time. Like I don’t actually think it exaggerated all that much. Each “doom” was something that can currently be backed by a scientific study somewhere. It’s that all the little dooms are real and do come together to make a big doom. Death by a thousand paper cuts. Warning: the book may increase your anxiousness or sadness, so you should only read this book if these tales of doom motivate you instead of demotivate you to work on climate change. Read this in January 2022.

The Rosie Project: 5/5, I already provided an earlier rating but I hadn’t finished the book by then. This book was an amazing page turner all the way through!!!

More advice on college admissions

 Another helpful advice on college essays I like to think of it is, it may be less effective to portray oneself as some perfect shape they have in their head; rather, a better way to think of college admissions is that you are trying to engineer the psychology of the person reading it. 

The admissions officer has drawn a psychological boundary between the applicants they are reading, and their admissions team aka their coworkers w whom they are passing notes back and forth

Part of the biggest psychological boundary is that the high school students are writing in a way that sounds like an A+ high school student writing an essay. But when these admissions people are talking to each other or writing notes to each other, they are just writing in simple English and giving reasons for why someone should or shouldn’t be let into the university. They basically translate the high school student’s writing into an argument that is more digestible within the body of the admissions group. 

It’s like the high school student essays have this foreign antigen on them

So one way to engineer their psychology is to write the essay in a way that is similar to the notes and reasons they pass to each other, if your essay subliminally sounds like this then when reading your piece they think youre their colleague giving good reasons for why you should be admitted. You have surpassed the immune system. 

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/disinterested

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countersignaling