by

The Words of Our Lives

Summary: We write a lot of words, and our words may serve as the truest expression of our personalities after we’re dead, if we keep them in a safe place. It might also be nice to have our present-day words around when we’re older.

*****

After we are dead, information about ourselves will continue to exist.

Some of this information won’t last very long; our bodies disappear quickly, rotting or burning to ash. But we’ve gotten rather good at keeping the rest of it stored in various places and formats.

How we look and sound, for example. YouTube features footage of tens of millions of people moving/speaking/singing, and many families keep home videos of some kind. Then there’s an entire universe of still photographs—both photos taken of us and photos we’ve taken of other things. And we’ll have electronic medical records, possibly even entire sequenced genomes, to testify to the physical facts of our existence.

Continue reading →

by

The Hapless Undergraduate’s Guide to Research

I’ve been part of the Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Lab for the last 14 months.

In that time, I’ve made lots of mistakes—and most of them weren’t even unique, interesting mistakes like discovering penicillin or inventing the chocolate-chip cookie. Mostly they were “should’ve asked more questions”-type mistakes.

That’s kind of embarrassing, so I’ve embarked upon my typical response to mistakes: writing an 18-page guide (unnecessary warning: 18 pages long) to avoiding them, filled with footnotes and jokes and sub-par MS Word design choices.

I also wrote out a one-page version that gives you the most useful information much faster.

I’d like to update both of these documents at some point, because I think it’s likely that a great deal of time is wasted on science that doesn’t work because newbies have a tough time adjusting to the laboratory environment, and it would be nice if we had a collection of stories from young researchers explaining how to avoid the most avoidable mistakes.

But for now, the guide is extremely specific to my own limited lab experience, and is mostly about filtering through papers rather than conducting physical science. Read it if you’re curious, and stop reading if you stop being curious.

*****

Meanwhile: If you’ve ever done research in any kind of lab, from computer science to chemistry to canine cognition, you should email me and tell me about all the mistakes you made, so I can add them to the next version! (Especially canine cognition. There are no puppies in the current version of the Guide, and there should be at least three.)

You can also tell me about someone else’s mistakes! I will attach no names to anything unless the person who made the mistake wants their name attached for some reason.

by

Book I’d Like to Write: “Our Lives in the Shadows”

Elevator pitch

“It’s The Breakfast Club meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

Plot

Sleepy town in semi-rural America. Small public high school, too small for any actual cliques to form. Some kids are more popular than others. Every one of them is an individual with goals, hobbies, and a detailed personal life, though they are not, on the whole, especially introspective or knowledge-seeking.

In addition, each member of the senior class spends much of their time fighting the forces of darkness.

  • A shy boy with controlling parents is also a sorcerer who deals with eldritch monstrosities whenever they rise from the town’s lake in the dead of night.
  • One of the school’s three cheerleaders woke up one day with impeccable hand-to-hand combat skills, which is good, because that was the same day the ninjas started showing up.
  • An aloof contender for the state tennis championship duels featureless, humanoid ghouls armed with a steak knife and a can of pepper spray.

And seventeen other stories, besides.

None of these characters has any inkling of the others’ struggles; teenagers are very good at hiding their secret lives from others. But one day, all the hidden stories intersect, and the senior class will have to band together if they want to save their town…

…and the world? No, probably not the world. The world is a big place, with millions of hidden stories. But one town is enough.

This might be a metaphor for the fact that everyone has a unique set of problems and we shouldn’t judge from outward appearances, but it’s mostly a way for me to deal with real high school social dynamics (few books do this well) and also write lots of supernatural fight scenes.

by

Solving Problems Without Markets

David Hansson, on protecting the improbable social structure of open source:

Take Ruby on Rails. More than 3,000 people have committed man-decades, maybe even man-centuries, of work for free. Buying all that effort at market rates would have been hundreds of millions of dollars. Who would have been able to afford funding that?

That’s a monumental achievement of humanity! Thousands, collaborating for a decade, to produce an astoundingly accomplished framework and ecosystem available to anyone at the cost of zero. Take a second to ponder the magnitude of that success. Not just for Rails, of course, but for many other, and larger, open source projects out there with an even longer lineage and success.

Some problems are tough to solve with market values, especially when they offer no immediate returns.

MIRI is one example of this. They survive by donations, because “defense against intelligent supercomputers” is not a short-term investment. Google Calico is another example. That project exists because Google can afford to invest in things (like radical life extension) that won’t make money for the next 10 years.

Many wonderful things are built because of the market. The chair I’m sitting in is one of them. So is the phone on my desk, and the equipment in the hospital six blocks from my house. Markets help solve a lot of problems.

But they are not always good at solving certain “invisible” problems.

Some are invisible because most people don’t care about them—like one of the problems Rails tried to solve, “programming is hard to understand”. (This was before most people saw building apps as a thing they could do themselves.)

Others are invisible because most people don’t think they can be solved—like the problem Calico aims to solve in the long term, “humans are mortal”.

It may not be obvious that these things occupy the set of real, solvable problems alongside hunger and disease. But they do. And whether it’s philanthropy or open source (they share many qualities), it’s worth preserving social values that lead us to solve problems in non-market ways—not because the work isn’t valuable, but because it’s hard for a single person or company to capture that value.

by

The Audience Member’s Dilemma

Last September, I had the chance to see a show by the Cambridge Footlights, one of the world’s best college sketch groups. The comedy was fresh, fast-paced, and full of surprising postmodern twists, one of which I found particularly affecting.

First, the Footlights took a volunteer from the audience and gave her a pad with a button to push.

“Every second you wait to push that button,” they announced, “you’ll earn a dime.”

One opened a briefcase, then showed us that it was full of money. At least a few hours’ worth. Another held up a large digital timer and turned it on.

00:01… 00:02… 00:03…

Finally, as we waited for the punchline, they held up a sign with the name of the sketch: “The Audience Member’s Dilemma”.

Continue reading →

by

Recent Work: Fall/Winter 2013

September

Unschooled: CT’s Most Radical Homeschoolers (in the cool surfer sense of “radical”)

Review: Janelle Monae, Electric Lady (the album was good, this review isn’t)

Interview: Chris Stedman, author of Faithiest (part of the launch of the Yale Humanist Community; I’m on the board of directors)

Making Believe: Religious Conversion at Yale University (includes this companion post)

“Witt’s religious awakening was outside my realm of understanding. I wondered if it was really a coincidence that her new relationship with Jesus began at a retreat where she’d begun new relationships with a few dozen Christian friends. Why would God wait to find her on a dock in the woods when she’d been going to church her entire life?”

October

Yale University Commencement Address, May 2014 (Yale jokes)

“As I look upon this crowd—with your narrow shoulders, your pimply foreheads, your dumb, bovine gazes—I almost pity you. You must have been overwhelmed when Yale opened its gates to you, for some inexplicable reason. Perhaps you were Australian, or a mediocre synchronized swimmer. Perhaps your mother was an especially talented applications-essayist.”

Levels of Hell Left Out of Dante’s Inferno

Indiana Jones and Printing at Bass Library (Yale jokes)

A Playlist for Your Worst Moments (Yale jokes, pop music, fourth essay down)

“Heaven has a plan for you, and the plan is that you will grow old and die, like everyone else.”

November

Long Day’s Journey Into Cambridge (Yale jokes) (alternate universes)

Profile of a Coffee-Shop Owner Who Bans the Internet

December

Gourmet Heaven, Wage Theft, and the Convenience of Indecision (warning: angst)

by

Tavi Gevinson and Lorde: Literally the Best Interview Ever

I haven’t read most of the interviews ever, so the title is hyperbole, based on this series of posts from Gevinson’s Rookie Magazine. But reading this conversation between two teenage girls at the top of their respective games and industries makes me feel better not just about Kids These Days, but also about my own recent past as a Kid, and about the power of journalism to create transcendent moments.

(If you don’t know who these people are: Tavi Gevinson, Lorde. They write their own stuff.)

Some choice excerpts:

TG: I want to start out by saying that what I want to do with this is…I’m in a unique position in interviewing you because we’re the same age–

L: Holla.

TG: And I feel like everything I read about you is like grown men writing—

L: Oh my god, that tweet you made where you were like, “She laces her Converse…” I was like, “This is so accurate!” There’s a definite viewpoint of the think piece by an adult writing about kids.

“She giggles, lacing her Chuck Taylors. She may be famous, but she’s still just a kid.” -end of every profile of a well-known young person

— Tavi Gevinson (@tavitulle) November 4, 2013

Continue reading →

by

I Declare Crocker’s Rules

Meant to do this awhile back, but since my two readers haven’t been especially active in the comments, the delay wound up not mattering.

 

These are the rules. An excerpt:

Declaring yourself to be operating by “Crocker’s Rules” means that other people are allowed to optimize their messages for information, not for being nice to you. 

Crocker’s Rules means that you have accepted full responsibility for the operation of your own mind – if you’re offended, it’s your fault.  Anyone is allowed to call you a moron and claim to be doing you a favor.  (Which, in point of fact, they would be.  One of the big problems with this culture is that everyone’s afraid to tell you you’re wrong, or they think they have to dance around it.)  

 

When I gave the first draft of this post to a friend—at which point it was a long essay—he respected the Rules and gave me a frank review.

“Why is this so long?” he said. “Who is supposed to care about this?”

It hurt to hear those words. But it hurt him even more to say them. Giving feedback is hard. Giving unsolicited feedback is really, really hard. So from now on, all feedback anyone chooses to give me is officially solicited feedback.

 

Thanks to my friend’s honesty, that’s the end of this post. Much appreciated, Leandro!

by

Writing: What I’ve Learned So Far

I composed this recently for a writing class I’ve been teaching (ages 13-16), and it came out surprisingly cogent. Posting with slight modifications, in case it comes in handy. If any writer who is better than me tells you something different, listen to them.

This list would not exist had I never encountered Anne Fadiman, Verlyn Klinkenborg, or William Zinsser. Buy Zinsser’s book and you don’t have to read any of this.

Oh, and also, I’m trying to make the blog easier on the eyes by embedding giant essays in PDFs. Click below for the thing I’ve been talking about!

Some Thoughts on Writing