On the fifth day of election Nov 09, 2020

I was woken yesterday by cheering and whooping in the streets.

(Which was overall great, though I think replacing the part of the day, [get enough sleep and then wake up and remember who you are and what you were doing and then do some familiar morning rituals while your brain warms up] with [abrupt emergence into city-wide celebration] was disorienting in a way that I failed to shake all day.)

After some music, Champagne, party hats, chatting with the housemates, and putting on our best red-white-and-blue outfits, my boyfriend and I set out for a walk in the city, tentatively toward b. patisserie, legendary and inconveniently distant producer of kouignoù amann.¹

Within a few blocks we found cars and pedestrians breaking into rounds of cheering and waving at each other, and a general sense that the whole street was a party to this. We still had our party hats, one with an American flag sticking out of the top, so there was no ambiguity for other street-goers about whether we were.

Where are the concept factories? Nov 08, 2020

Concepts are arguably critical to our success as humans, our recent success as rich and productive humans, and many of our individual successes at whatever we each individually do.

Why don’t we produce them in an industrial fashion?

Calling it Nov 07, 2020

In an atmosphere of general thirst for someone calling something, I’ll call some stuff.

In my experience and current judgment:

The best non-inert art is the musical Hamilton

The best place in the San Francisco Bay Area is the Essex Hot Tub, and the best place near it is Bodega Bay

The best undergraduate degree to wish you had done is computer science

Why Trump? A survey Nov 06, 2020

It felt strange going into this US election so hopeful for Biden to win while so at a loss regarding why comparably many Americans were badly hoping for the opposite. I heard people speculating about the possible motives, and I considered plausible steelmen. But why should I be guessing about what half of people think? I figured out how to survey some Americans beyond my vicinity.

Everyone headed to win Nov 05, 2020

Last night I was especially curious about why people vote as they do, and whether they were experiencing the election similarly to me. So I set up a survey in Positly and paid a bunch of people to tell me about such things.

I haven’t read all of the responses yet, but a notable feature of them so far is the extent to which people expected their own favorite candidate to win the presidency. If someone said both who they voted for (or would vote for if forced to vote) and who they thought would win, these were the same person 87% of the time.

Is this just ‘wishful thinking’ (whatever that is) or some more interesting phenomenon?

Election night Nov 04, 2020

Earlier in the evening, I reasoned that I should not ‘watch’ the election, since I will learn the result in the end and experiencing the uncertainty in the meantime doesn’t seem productive at all, let alone competitive with other things I could do.

This attitude somehow felt unfriendly though, or like being the kind of spoilsport who says ‘there is no reason to celebrate Christmas, or to celebrate anything for that matter’—both failing to add to the fun, and implicitly asking others to defend their own enthusiasm.

Why are bananas not my brothers? Nov 03, 2020

It is said that we share 99.9% of our genes with one another, 95% with chimpanzees, and 60% with bananas. (It is also said that this isn’t quite right about bananas, but reading about that did not quell my confusion.)

It is further said that I share 50% of my genes with my brother, and that this is why I like him.

And yet, I seem to be more closely related to my brother than to a banana.

Questions of the afternoon Nov 02, 2020

Today I spent about three hours chatting with eleven of my closer friends who I’ve mostly hardly seen this year, as a virtual birthday party. I thought the discussion was pretty interesting—so I record here some of the questions that came up (aloud or my mind):

1. Did various of us err by not doing technical subjects in undergrad? Or should we have tried to do ‘cool’ seeming subjects, technical or not?
2. What is ‘coolness’? Is coolness always about power? Why is a big, fast train cool? Can you be cool if you are not relaxed? If you are small and scared? If you are mediocre in every way?
3. Is etymology deep? What do people get out of knowing the origins of words?
4. What is going on in history, at a high level?
5. Can history be understood at a high level, or to have a real understanding of ‘what’s going on’, do you need to know about the detailed circumstances in each case?

Automated intelligence is not AI Nov 01, 2020

Sometimes we think of ‘artificial intelligence’ as whatever technology ultimately automates human cognitive labor.

I question this equivalence, looking at past automation. In practice human cognitive labor is replaced by things that don’t seem at all cognitive, or like what we otherwise mean by AI.

Some examples:

Study of a 34th birthday Oct 31, 2020

It was recently my birthday. I started the celebrations by sleeping in so late that I probably wouldn’t be that sleep deprived. My boyfriend continued the celebrations by making me breakfast in bed and setting aside his work, donning a hat, and singing to me when I woke. He actually always makes me breakfast and it is usually in bed, but that didn’t really detract from it.