for tomorrow

Posts

On AI Taking Jobs (and the World)

AI is good at a lot of things, and most of them are well-defined problems. These models are great at acing math olympiads and some of them have a higher codeforces ratings than me. But their performance stops at those well-defined tasks. One of the reasons for this is that it's hard to evaluate what isn’t well-defined. But by the same reasoning, it's also hard to optimize for it. I agree that AI is great at solving problems, but it isn’t great at figuring out what problems to solve and reiterating on the problem itself. Humans are really good at both of these things. We think of hacky ways around challenges and act on problems we see in our communities. “Thinking outside the box,” so to speak. Humans are good at this because we have been conditioned on a lifetime of experience doing cool stuff in weird ways. All while the best AI is trained to solve hard, but well-defined, IOI problems. I’ve talked to a few people deeply about my perspective, and a common response I get is abou...

Prioritize Risks

Everyone is prioritizing at every moment, it's impossible not to. On paper, we prioritize by taking into account a variety of factors to aggregate the “expected value” of doing something, and then naturally just choose what gives us the “most bang for our buck.” But in reality, prioritization is really, really hard. Most of my life, I avoided the difficulties of prioritization by doing things which have clear reward pathways, like olympiads or research in high school. This is not to say that I didn’t take risks, doing olympiads is a massive risk, most people don’t make it far. But, the decisions I took were calculated, and the time I spent doing different things was carefully measured. This only worked because there was a clear reward. Fast forward to this blog post . I’d achieved almost everything I’ve wanted to do with olympiads, and was trying to find the passion and motivation to move forward. This was just a problem of prioritization. Outside the contained world of high schoo...

Take Inspiration, But Value Yourself

I honestly first understood the purpose of close reading fiction just last year (something most people probably don’t know), in part because I started writing more but also because I had an excellent teacher that inspired me to explore literature deeply. People create stories to show their perspectives on the human condition, every book you’ve read, movie you’ve watched, and song you’ve listened to follows this trend. And this is also the reason we enjoy these forms of media, we get either relatable or unique ways to understand how the world around us works. I think this is a known idea that has been documented before, but there’s some subtle nuance that can decide whether interactions with media are overstimulating or transformational, and that lesson extends into almost every aspect of our lives, including in the ongoing ‘fight’ against AI. It goes without saying that we are heavily influenced by the media we consume, and this media potentially has a lot of power over us. When we sta...

Productivity is Overrated— Don't Hack It

I’m the type of person that is outcome-driven, even though I’ve said this isn’t a good thing . I feel like this is how humans generally behave, people go on fancy dinners when they are offered jobs or have parties when they graduate. And as much as you try to acknowledge what went into this success, we inevitably end up painting a straight line from start to finish. Rarely do we acknowledge the “unproductive” days, and even afterwards we look back and think about how much faster the journey would have been if we were just more focused or dedicated or hard-working. I think it’s generally true that 20% of work leads to 80% of the outcomes, and because of this we spend a lot of time doing things that don’t yield tangible progress, but rather set up success in the future. Even the best sports players inevitably have terrible games, and I’ve talked before about how the best of the best are those that use that failure to refuel their passion . But another facet of learning from failure is re...

How to Motivate Side Quests

Everyone’s born better at some things more than others. Some people are really tall, others really smart. People usually pursue what they are best at, and this works out in a couple ways. First, people generally have unique talents, so it balances out across the human population. More importantly, following what you are best at reinforces the motivation that drives continued dedication and thus progress. I think this idea is something often associated with passion— an unreal amount of dedication is usually only possible with reinforcement through progress. By seeing that you are better than others at something, you naturally feel that a continued pursuit of that will lead to more happiness. Thus, in a broad sense, passion is a byproduct of talent. Here we define talent as any ability largely inherent to birth. Most things I can say I’m passionate about, like programming or math, I’ve had lots of success in. Don’t get me wrong, it's very misleading to say that passion is solely depe...

How Experiences Define Politics

In high school, “success” is often based on very objective measures, like standardized tests, captaining a sports team, etc. But this isn’t true for everything, and the class that made me realize this was Dance 1. Aptitude in dance is well-defined in some loose sense, in fact my school has competitive dance teams that run merit-based, but the class offered by the school has to be different. Because of the nature of the subject, everyone comes into the class with varying levels of skill. Trying to find objective measures of skill doesn’t work anymore; it’s nearly impossible to compare a complete beginner to someone that has been dancing for 10+ years. The solution: grading effort. From a learning point of view, evaluating based on effort makes sense and it's almost the same as grading someone on how much they have grown in the subject matter. This is one of the ideas behind gradeless classrooms, the idea being it is more fair to grade someone based on the performance improvement ins...

Is Society Constantly "High"?

Biologically speaking, we feel good when certain chemicals are released in our body. We typically associate artificially stimulating this release system as “getting high,” through taking drugs or smoking or whatnot. Society has done a good job, at least where I grew up, of emphasizing the stigma around these things. Life revolves around feeling these “highs,” regardless of whether we induce them artificially or they arise naturally. You could argue that our goal in life is purely to feel good, and evolution has used this motivator to get us to do things necessary for survival: eat, sleep, fall in love, be social, etc. But as humans got smarter, everything shattered. One of the first things to fall was eating habits. Once people realized that sugar is what provides the “high” after eating, it became the center of all food. All these years later, we see the same thing happening with social media. Apps have targeted the exact part of social interactions that make them pleasurable (sp...