Brutal Honesty, Broken English

I had something that I wanted to say about the science stuff I’m doing, but I started watching Mind Hunters and forgot. Mind Hunter really makes me feel things, though.

These couple of days I haven’t done much aside from reading papers and getting distracted from reading papers; my apple watch told me I was only sitting up for a minute once every three hours. That’s not good. But today I finally went outside. Bought groceries, made roasted vegetables (the pumpkin is PREMIUM. I guess so is the carrot but PUMPKIN) and chicken legs, felt the wow-I-live-alone mood sinking in. Now I should really go to bed soon, but I’m also trying to make writing a habit. Just an hour.

Mind Hunter

I forgot if there was something I ever thought was my spirit animal, but I think Holden Ford might be it. That’s a pretty exaggerated way of saying “I really relate to Holden Ford.” Here are some of the things that made me say, “dude same”:

• When he got asked where he was from and he was like “uh, it’s complicated”
• When other people are like “they are born that way it’s not that complicated” he was like no something must be happening
• When he said stuff “isn’t complex a good thing”
• Every time he says something that sounded too Shakespearean and the other cops look at him like he’s the idiot
• When he wrote “BOOK” in the notebook when Wendy said they could have a book
• When Debbie asked him whether he smoked her weed and he was like “no I just can’t help thinking about this thing we are doing it’s so exciting”
• When Tench was complaining about the murderers for lying, he said well but we never assumed everything he said was true, we’ll take what’s useful for us … we are using HIM.
• … and more

Clearly I’m just going off of memory here. If I rewatch it I’ll write stuff down.

The thing is, I guess I am both longing to be more like Holden because he has something I don’t seem to have, and a little jealous of him because he has something I seem to have lost. What those things are, I don’t exactly know yet.

One of them is probably the fearless passion, that’s something I miss dearly, and I think maybe I still have it, it’s just malfunctioning. It’s not that I’m less easily excited than I used to by — I think I’m still very capable of getting excited about things. But after that excitement, there’s something extra that I wish weren’t there: the insecurity, doubt, and cynicism, dressed up often as maturity and pragmatism. Perhaps they are there to protect me as well, but perhaps that’s just an excuse to control me. It makes me worry too much about the external factors — whether it’s doable, whether there are enough resources, whether it’s worth the time and energy, whether it’s the right thing to do. Whether expressing excitement will make people view me as weak and amateur, whether I’m overhyping, whether I will lose credibility. And I don’t like that.

I guess perhaps that’s one of the ways my year in Shenzhen has changed me. I’m using the passive voice here since I don’t know if I wanted that change to happen; perhaps I know didn’t. Before I was kind of spoiled by my professor who made me feel like my whimsical ideas are excellent scientific intuitions worth further exploration.

I knew I was spoiled, and that was part of the reason why I wanted to go see the bigger world. The thing is, I never really wanted a career in the industry. I was one of the kids who gag at the thought of a 9–5 desk job or selling myself out to the big money. Of course, that was partly because I didn’t really know what it would be like. Now that I know, I can’t really despise such ideas anymore, although I wouldn’t say I’m converted; perhaps a good way to put it is now the scorn has turned into the kind of fear and awe towards someone who is different but also powerful, as opposed to someone who is just different. At the company, which I think a lot of students my age would have felt very lucky to work at, I felt like an undercover. And I had a mission: to understand these people, who are so different than me, that they chose a life that I never would choose for myself. And I fit in the best I can while still being sincere.

Sometimes I wonder how people saw me there. I can’t say I don’t care, because I have a lot of respect and admiration towards a lot of the programmers there. Which is why it can be hard sometimes when folks get too “realistic”. In the industry, there is no time to explore, no time for poetry, no time for politics, no time for the human good. You must keep up with your work and if you mess up, the company could lose a lot of money. It’s good to be inventive, but only when it’s useful — when I first joined the company, I learned this after many “this is very interesting, but I don’t know what it’s good for.” (This is not to say that useless trash is always appreciated in the academia, but if there is a place where it is ever appreciated, let’s face it, it’s probably somewhere in the academia. Or the arts. Both of which I happen to feel very affiliated with.)

Most of them kind of look down on academia for its impracticality. A mentor-type was showing me some resumes that he was screening through, and made many jokes at the expanse of a self-taught data scientist who had a Ph.D. in astrophysics. This applies to outside of the company too; every Ph.D. entrepreneurs who I thought could offer some words of support just basically told me “unless you want to rot in the academia, you don’t need a Ph.D., just get a master.” I understood where they came from: these are the people who didn’t like where they used to be and now they were mourning the time they could have spent where they were. But their advice was still not helpful to me. All in all, it was not a good environment for either semi-romantic theoretical musing and ridiculously rigorous scientific testing. Excitement and passion are NOT enough; you have to prove yourself. It is an important truth that I already know, but learning it again in a somewhat dark way somehow took a toll on me.

Nonetheless, much like Jake Peralta after he comes out of prison, perhaps the time just mellowed me out and made me more cautious. There are definitely a lot of good things in that. I just need to separate them from the parts that make me anxious and don’t do me any good, if that’s possible.

A realistic idealist is still an idealist, though, that I’m sure of. I think for me, being (relatively speaking) an academic might be one of those things that’s not about what’s “best” or “better” but just something that I am. In college, I doubted it for a while because I was getting a little too much external validations and that shit really clouds your judgments. It’s not that I don’t like getting attention — to be honest, I quite enjoy it. But I attest feeling like I might be doing what I do because of the attention, almost like a mental purity thing. I needed to know that I like it because I like it, not because I want to be liked. Now after all this chaos, I’m becoming more inclined to think that I actually enjoy the idea of me as a scientist, maybe something along the line of a cognitive neuro-behavioral scientist. There are many kinds of scientists, and I don’t have to be exactly like anyone else, but the word just happens to describe me and what I want to do. That’s how identities work, according to my current thinking.

What Holden does is essentially what I want to do with, I guess what I would refer to them as “complex information systems.” Maybe machines, maybe robots, or maybe people. I believe there is nothing fundamentally different between anything that is a system that processes information, takes some kinds of inputs, performs some kinds of behaviors. And they change. And with their changes the bigger system changes. If they are reproduced somehow, perhaps some kind of selection guides this reproduction process. My hunch is that there must be ways to understand the systems that we often don’t consider understandable, or worthy of us trying to understand at all.

I just want to hop in the car and be excited and stubborn about it like Holden is with his idea. Reality is no TV show, but I hope the inspiration is informative at least.

Conference Calls With Ex-Advisors

Today was the day when the collaborators on my science project would have a videoconference call. I had 12 days to read 9 papers and do lit research, didn’t start until Sunday, and still haven’t finished two of them before the meeting. I don’t mean to blame myself, though. It did take time to get back on speed, after a few months of not really continuously running my school brain.

I really don’t like finding excuses and I always feel like I should be more prepared; if I didn’t, it’s on me. But I guess I’m also mature enough to know that if it’s what it is, then it’s better to just take it as it is.

It’s the first day of school today and my collaborators already seemed a little shaken. It’s strange to think of them as collaborators because one of them was my major advisor and the other was the first reader of my thesis, and I had taken multiple classes with both of them. So I’m practicing by calling them
“collaborators”. Now I have graduated, and things change, although I’m still figuring out how exactly they changed. Part of me doesn’t even want it to change — it’s easier to admire someone unconditionally when they are your mentor, and I relate very much to Santiago. But perhaps to admire someone truly takes less artificial relationships. I’ll need to think about if I still like them with these new positions on the chess board. Or, to be honest, I think I’m more worried about whether they still like me as a non-student. I know how to be a student that professors like, but I don’t know how to be a collaborator that other collaborators like, not yet. For example, as people who have seen my flakiness and struggles with health and meeting deadlines, would they still trust my ability to get work done? On top of that, I’m also worried about how the “whole trans thing” would pan out or change their perception of me or their interactions with me (for example, do I correct them when they forget to use the right pronoun?). The uncertainty makes me uncomfortable.

That aside, though, I trust my collaborators as collaborators and also as human beings. It is not news that I have a lot of reasonable yet counterproductive insecurities, and it’s on me to make peace with them.

Now that I am the project lead, perhaps it’s more justified to see my collaborators as unique humans who each has their own ways of handling life and stuff in general. [paragraphs of my observations of their personality and habits and social and working styles reducted.] I hope one day I can truly be friends with them, and that they can get to know me as who I. Not just as the awkward kid with some good ideas but also fell apart easily and was horrible with deadlines, but an upgrade version.

But that’s not something you can force. What I’m maybe more excited about is that even though today’s talk was a little rocky due to some technical problems, it reassured the meaning of some of my hunches about the advantage of the system we are using. I think we are on the right track, and I have some idea about where to look next. There is a lot to learn and understand still, and at the moment I don’t know what can come out of this, but I have a feeling that we are onto something, that we are in for an awesome revelation. Now, this is not an idea you can say to get funding or even respected, but it’s an idea that makes me kinda happy.

The Importance of Sleep

I feel pretty self-conscious about this, but I should confront it: I haven’t been as productive as I’d like to be. It’s not great, I tend to tell myself that I’m just taking things slow, but sometimes I tend to get impatient and wonder when would things start rolling. There are so many things that I want to do/say I would do/have planned to do that I haven’t been doing, haven’t even started, and that’s not very cool at all and it doesn’t make me feel very good about myself.

One reason for this is that my sleep schedule is very fucked up and I haven’t found a very good way to reconcile with it. Some people think it has to do with PTSD, and sometimes I think that’s possible, but I also don’t really think so. Maybe it’s sleep hygiene, maybe it isn’t that simple. I’ve struggled with my sleep schedule since I was in primary school, if not before that. I have loads of memories of falling in and out of sleep while walking to the school bus when I was in primary school. Or of feeling both pathetic and proud after I’ve slept through all of the five classes in the morning in high school. In college, this became much worse. Most nights I find myself sleeping less than 6 hours, sometimes even only 3. Then some days I just sleep the whole day off. Even when I don’t have to stay up, I still do. When I’m just chilling, I still often stay up until the sun comes up and sleep until the afternoon. Some nights I sleep for 5 hours, some nights I sleep for 15. The summer before junior year in college I did manage to maintain a very good and healthy schedule — both food and sleep, and I remember relatively little about that time (probably in a good way — we got a lot done that summer in the research project, or at least I learned a lot). The thing is, I did that partly out of insecurity and partly in order to spite/impress someone whom I was dating. Now I don’t subscribe that kind of motivation anymore.

Since I got over the sickness a couple of weeks ago, I have been trying to reconcile with my weird sleep schedule. For a few days, with the help of a possible slight overdose of melatonin, I fell asleep and woke up at more or less “normal people hours.” It was working out pretty great for maybe 5 days and I was very proud of myself. But then, perhaps because I didn’t have enough things planned out during the day, these couple of days I went back to my old patterns again. I’m a little disappointed in myself, but there are probably things I didn’t think through.

I’m pretty tired now though. A little before 4 am… that seems like a more reasonable time to go to sleep than 6 am. Baby steps.

There are a lot of health-related things I want to work on, and I guess maybe talking about them might help me remember this is indeed something I want to do. Keep a healthy diet, a healthy sleep schedule, work out in healthy ways, … And perhaps more importantly, keep my sanity and be chill but hopping, not too stressed, not too sedated. It doesn’t have to be “normal people healthy” but I want to do what’s best for me because I want the best for me. This year is about me really take a step a being me and constructing who I am, and I don’t have the old excuses to be self-destructive anymore. I don’t quite feel sorry for myself like I used to; it’s a weird thing to admit, but maybe it means something to me. But I’m still stuck in some of the old routines.

I understand though, that it takes time. At least as long as I’m trying, it means something.

Someone was shouting something, and now someone is sweeping. Now I hit publish and close my computer.