for tomorrow

Posts

Earn Respect, But Don't Force It

At some level, almost everyone values being respected, but what does that actually mean? Respect is a complicated idea, and I don’t think the dictionary definition of “deep admiration” does it much justice. Respecting someone is positively acknowledging something that they have done, and continue to do. You can respect your boss for being dedicated to his work, just as you can respect your friends for being there for you. But the core idea here is that this respect is earned, not taken for granted. And this is the most clear when talking about self-respect. In my experience, the person whose respect it is the hardest to earn is your own. This is not to say most people don’t respect themselves— we inherently have to, otherwise life would be pretty miserable. But the problem is that in earning that respect, it's really easy to lie to ourselves. Now, this complacency is obviously good at times, like I said, we have to live with ourselves. But it can go too far when we start needing ...

Don’t Follow Your Dreams...?

One of the most cliché pieces of advice is to focus on what you’re passionate about. I’ve taken this advice to heart for most of my life. Honestly, I was never forced to do anything I didn’t actually enjoy. I quit piano lessons because I didn’t like them. I enjoyed solving Rubik’s Cubes, so I grinded towards that. Programming was fun, so I wrote code. And this seems like such an ideal childhood, but it's a double-edged sword. There were inevitably times where I had to do things I didn’t enjoy, like study for a history test or memorize Spanish vocabulary. And in general, you’ll eventually have to do things that feel more like means to an end instead of intrinsically fulfilling. I associate things that you are forced to do, but don’t enjoy, with having an end goal. Let’s say you want to become a doctor—you have to take so many different science courses, and it’s extremely unlikely that you like all of them. But these are almost necessary evils, things you have to push through in ord...

Chase Dubs Not Dreams

This blog aims to tackle the difficult question of why we are motivated to do things, and how we can maximize this motivation. Whenever we start something new, we are either inspired to, or forced to. Both are completely valid reasons for doing something, and life will definitely hit us with both constantly. But after the impetus, maintaining the desire to continue doing something is much harder. Here we come to the idea of dubs, which is short for W (double-u), which is then short for Win, or the term I prefer more: Victory. Victories are times when we accomplish something hard, like doing a new skateboarding trick or solving a hard math problem. But the most important part about a Victory is that it should be repeatable ( otherwise it becomes a dream ). A repeatable victory is something you can incrementally improve on, like a progression of skateboarding tricks or finishing a math problemset. Having small victories you can that you can repeat keeps motivation running for a lot ...

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...