Today’s Inkhaven post is on the EA Forum. It lists the motivations that drive me to work and donate with effective altruism in mind — from the standard empathy and guilt to underrated factors like schadenfreude and revenge.

My assistant cross-country coach used to bribe me. If I ran for 20 minutes in agony, she’d give me a Clif Bar on the bus ride home.

The bribery worked, because I was, and remain, a fiend for food in bar form. I even made my own to save money, mixing whey and eggs and oats — they were great, aside from the part where they grew mold at room temperature and I didn’t know until I’d eaten two. I think it’s the last time I ever vomited. So that was it for me and homemade bars.

Most of my disposable income in college went to feed my obsession. An excerpt:

I bought most bars from Amazon, but they didn’t stock one of my favorites: Detour Peanut Butter Cream, which I got from a little convenience store behind the dorm. It was run by an Israeli couple who got to know me and my standard order (the bar, plus a diet ginger ale). We had many brief, sincere conversations across four years. I knew them better than most of my professors.

Half a lifetime later, those bars are still among the best I’ve had. They aren’t manufactured anymore.¹

Here’s to the five-star bars I had to mark “Discontinued” in my personal protein database:

• RXBar Layers Peanut Butter Chocolate
• Optimum Nutrition Cake Bites
• Optimum Nutrition Chocolate Sea Salt Bites
• The emperor of bars: Supreme Protein Peanut Butter Crunch. I still remember the feeling of that first bite, and the smell of a freshly opened wrapper. The nuts embedded in the chocolate shell. Fuck!

Did you say “personal protein database”? 

I did. This is the official public launch:

I might fill in more stats someday. But I don’t feel the need to make it comprehensive — I see it as more museum than buyer’s guide. (Something tells me my tastes aren’t typical.)

That said, if you’re just getting into protein bars and want a spiritual guide — or a few recommendations — I’m available.

What country has the best protein bars outside America?

Australia. And I might drop “outside America”.

I visited five convenience stores — three in Sydney, one in Sydney Airport, and one in a small regional airport. They all had vastly better selection than comparable stores in the U.S. I didn’t have time to visit the Aussie equivalent of a GNC, but one day, I will return. Keep your shelves stocked.

That’s Harbor Bridge in the background. I took a tour later. Their gift shop was the one sad exception: no bars.

Why protein bars?

In college, I realized that no one would make me run for 20 minutes ever again. I celebrated by gaining 40 pounds of muscle. The dining hall couldn’t keep up; it was a year of bars and basement barbells.

I got in the habit of trying new bars whenever I found them. Some became staples. Some were the worst things I’ve ever chewed. But even a bad bar makes a good story.

Now that I’ve crossed 150 bars in the database, it’s fun to think about reaching 200, maybe 250, before the singularity hits and I can synthesize a new bar for breakfast every morning of my life.

Media, social or otherwise, tends to surface bad news: things you don’t normally notice that make you sad or angry when you do.

These three stories are the opposite: good news I rarely notice. They also apply to most people reading this.

My friends aren’t dead

One night in Wisconsin, I dreamed my friend Xuan was dead.

The sky was dark gray and cloudless. A crowd of silhouettes whispered the news. I talked to them yesterday, I thought. Why are they dead? How are they dead?

I woke up in a panic and checked Facebook. As Xuan’s page loaded, I remembered that dreams weren’t real. Death was real, but not this particular death.

I felt amazing the next day. I kept thinking about whatever Xuan was doing at that moment: studying, rehearsing, eating lunch. We weren’t even all that close, but it was amazing to know they still drew breath.

If I dreamed about another friend dying tonight, I think I’d wake up feeling the same way: profound gratitude for their existence. 

Therefore, I should feel that way now.

I just spent a few minutes meditating on the existence of random people I know. They are all out there, somewhere, being themselves. Andrew is repairing someone’s nose. Dan is playing with his baby. Britney is collecting adventures to blog about. What fantastic news!

I wish I could more easily tell my friends that I love the fact of their existence. This essay is one attempt; so is this one.

My neighbors would fight ICE

My wife and I wanted to get ice cream, but the line was too long. San Diego has a lot of long lines. The beaches are crowded. Rush hour starts at 3:30. People people people.

Despite my self-professed humanism, I still get antsy in crowds. But that night, as we gave up on ice cream, I thought about the crowds of Minneapolis. Masked gunmen invaded the city and shoved people into unmarked vans, but the crowds of Minneapolis slowed them down. They stood in the snow and blocked the streets. They whistled and filmed and followed vans full of people who might kill them.

San Diego, like almost every U.S. city, is a liberal place. If ICE came here tomorrow, it would look like a sunny Minneapolis. Instead of hogging the ice cream, the crowds would be making ICE scream. (I’m not sorry.)

Just like I know my friends are out there, I know my neighbors would step up if times became extreme. This isn’t true of all times and places, but it seems to be true more often than not, and I certainly think it’s true of my 21st-century American city.

You’d like most people if you got to know them

If you traveled to most places, and spent some time living with the locals, you’d probably come away liking those places and people. Some of this is the mere exposure effect; some of it is because most people are friendly and hospitable.² (“We treat guests well” is one of those things every culture thinks about itself, but that just makes it a human universal, like storing sewing supplies in cookie tins.)

More than any generation in history, we live surrounded by strangers. It doesn’t help that the most visible strangers are often people living on the street, in situations that make it hard to be hospitable or pleasant.

But so often, a stranger is a friend you haven’t met.³ Or at least a person as real and important as the people you know. If circumstances brought you together — ICE invasion, AA meeting, playoff game in a bar — you’d probably get along fine.

Conclusion: You should like most people now.

I wrote more about this idea here, as it applies to charity.

In 2013, I pitched a story on middle school math to America’s finest magazines. I failed.

I wrote the story anyway, hoping to sell it somewhere. The most normal 1500 words wound up, unpaid, in a magazine for middle-school math teachers.

This is the rest. (With a few notes from 2026.)

When you reach the finals at MATHCOUNTS, you face your first level playing field.

You’ve been the best forever. Best student in your class, your school, your state. Now you’re on a stage with 11 other kids, just as best as you are.

But that’s not true. There is equality in math, but not MATHCOUNTS. It ends in a series of head-to-head competitions. 11 of you are about to be worse than someone.

The other kids don’t look as scared as you feel.

This image took me way, way back. Apparently they do an esports version these days.

I’m in the audience, trying to impress an eighth-grader.

The average age of three members of a quartet is 57 years. What is the age of the fourth member, in years, if the quartet’s overall average age is 62 years?

David Zhu, finalist, hits the buzzer.

I’m faster. I’ve already whispered the answer to my seatmate Arjun: “77.”

“77,” Daniel announces. It’s the winning point. His opponent, Nicholas Sun, has set. Daniel advances to the round of 8.

“Nice!” says Arjun. He’s from team Virginia. He saw me taking notes, got curious, and soon became the best friend I’ve made in this place.

I needed a friend. As a student journalist, I’m used to blending in — either with students or with journalists. At MATHCOUNTS, I’m too old to compete and too young to be a teacher. I don’t fit.

This isn’t the fault of the MATHCOUNTS Foundation: they’ve been excellent hosts. Any chance for public attention, even the faint hope I represent, is unusual. The competition’s a tough sell: rustier than the Intel Talent Search, sweatier than the Scripps National Spelling Bee. No one wants to watch algebra on TV.

But even if MATHCOUNTS isn’t relevant, the kids themselves are. This is the smartest room in Washington, and Raytheon is watching. (Seriously: They’re sitting behind me.)

“You’re good,” says Arjun.

“I remember some of my old tricks. These will get harder, though.” I write a small checkmark in my notebook. So far it’s Aaron 5, Mathletes 3. I won’t stay ahead for long.

Arjun says he wants to apply to MIT. I ask if he’s hacked anything lately. He’s plotting to get Pokémon Fire Red running on his graphing calculator.

“The emulator is Linux, and the calculator is Windows”, he says. “So I’ll probably have to pull an all-nighter to get the code right. But it’s definitely possible.”

It was, in fact, possible.

In middle school, I went to MATHCOUNTS twice. The second time, one of my Delaware teammates finished 205th out of 224 competitors. We all thought that was pretty embarrassing. But he still made it to the Ivy League, where he studies mechanical engineering and computer science. Someday he’ll help design a car that several million people drive or an electric toothbrush that ends cavities or maybe a new missile.

For a few hundred thou, Raytheon gets three days of marketing to 250 brilliant kids. An Under Secretary of Defense stops in to give a speech about majoring in STEM: “Your country needs you.” Mathletes are pure potential energy, and someday they’ll convert it into something stronger than algebra. Who gets to use those brains?

Maybe it will be the second sponsor: Texas Instruments. I can’t imagine they need the marketing, but they paid up anyway, and gave out 250 free calculators — next to Raytheon, they’re saints.

Between rounds, I ask Arjun for his feelings on the military-industrial complex. He hasn’t noticed the vast forces tugging at his future. I decide to think about this later.⁴

If m is removed at random from the set {0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9}, and then n is chosen at random from the remaining numbers, what is the probability that x² + 2mx + n² = 0 will have two real solutions?

In my day, I was fast. At my first Nationals, I was whispering answers to teammates at the speed of 2006 champion Daesun Yim, who is now building software at Palantir Technologies to help the government fight terrorists.⁵

Even today, I could beat 3 or 4 of the finalists. Back then, it would’ve been 8 or 9, had I studied hard enough to ace the written test and qualify for the “countdown round”.

It would’ve been 8 or 9, I tell myself. Respectable. But even so, I see Ashwin Sah, and I know that I was never the best. I was never even close. The U.S. military can’t have me, but if they take Ashwin, they’ll still win their wars.

On the high stage, seated behind one of the adult-size podiums, Ashwin looks to be about 4’8 and 80 pounds. He annihilates his first opponent, and though his semifinal match goes to 3-3, every point he doesn’t score feels like a stroke of misfortune in a Shakespeare comedy. The end is never in doubt.

Alec Sun, who made the finals last year and also in 2011 as a sixth-grader, is tearing up the other side of the bracket. I can’t match his pace; no more checkmarks for me.

As a “fun fact”, the moderator told the auditorium that Alec hadn’t scored a single finals point in his first two tries. But the rude anecdote doesn’t slow him down. It’s like he spent the last year meditating on a mountain instead of studying math. He had the math already, and now he has the nerves, while Hongyi Chen can barely breathe and another kid cries upon defeat.

Before long, Alec descends the mountain to face Ashwin. Now we’ll see who’s best.

It’s not a real mountain, but the kids did set the Guinness World Record for “fastest time to arrange the first 25 rows of Pascal’s Triangle (Human Formation)”. Look it up.

David Foster Wallace once described a tennis match as “carnage of a particularly high-level sort… like watching an extremely large and powerful predator get torn to pieces by an even larger and more powerful predator.”

Alec and Ashwin are predators of equal size — once cheetahs, now jaguars. They stalk each other warily, buzzing in slower. These are the competition’s hardest problems, and no mistake will go unpunished.

A rhombus has sides of length 10 inches, and the lengths of its diagonals differ by 3 inches. What is the area of the rhombus, in square inches?

((x-1)! * (x+1)! )/(x!)² = 1.125. What is the value of x?

[I couldn’t transcribe this one, but it had a circle inside a square which was itself inside a circle inside a square. Someone answered before my brain could even process the problem.]

With the slower pace, I actually score a couple of points — though I need to be reckless, guessing wildly and getting some wrong. In spite of my errors, Arjun is impressed.

I’m feeling sorry for the parents, who have math genes but are thirty years removed from algebra; can they even track what’s happening?

But then, after a series of heavy blows, Alec and Ashwin are tied 3-3. Everyone understands that math: next answer wins. It’s Game 7, bottom of the ninth — and here’s the pitch!

What is the greatest integer that must be a factor of the sum of any four consecutive positive odd integers?

It’s an easy question for the finals. The boys read, think about sample digits, add those digits, and factor them in the span of four seconds. Ashwin’s hand is first to the buzzer. Fly ball, deep left field…

“Two.”

I drop my pen. Ashwin’s wrong. 1 + 3 + 5 + 7 is 16, 3 + 5 + 7 + 9 is 24, the pattern continues, and the ball falls into Alec’s glove. No mistake goes unpunished. He gets a leisurely ten seconds to check his work.

“Eight.”

When I watch the final question again on YouTube, the camera pans away from the boys’ handshake. That’s a shame: I found the handshake comforting. If the best of us couldn’t work together, we’d never have invented the electric toothbrush.

Speaking of reasons to brush one’s teeth: Raytheon sponsored our dessert.