Posts
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The Blogging Gauntlet: May 21 - Fearful Symmetry
CommentsThis is part of The Blogging Gauntlet of May 2016, where I try to write 500 words every day. See the May 1st post for full details.
I was hesitant to write on this topic, because I care about it a lot and didn’t want to mess it up. Eventually I decided it was worth writing a beta post.
Last month, Anca Dragan gave a presentation on her work in human-robot interaction. Anca is one of those terrifyingly smart people that make you feel slightly ashamed about yourself. She did a PhD at CMU, was nominated for several best paper awards at top robotics conferences, and was hired straight out of her PhD to a assistant professorship at Berkeley.
The event was hosted by FEM Tech, a new student organization that, quote,
promotes gender diversity and inspires women from all majors to excel in technology careers. Through organized seminars, mentorship programs, training workshops, and networking events, FEM Tech will provide a supportive community for all majors to create meaningful connections with like-minded women. We hope to excite new interest in tech and provide support for women already in STEM majors.
(FEM Tech website)
The event was billed as open to everyone, but I didn’t go. I was very busy that week, and the event description sounded like it wouldn’t go into enough depth to be interesting to me. Or rather, that is the excuse I gave myself.
In truth, I walked towards the event, and saw almost everyone there was female. I wasn’t comfortable with that, so I turned around and went back to the library.
I only grasped the full implications when I was at the library doors. I wasn’t comfortable with an all-female room, at a time when many women in tech have to deal with an all-male room. Oh, so that’s what that feels like. Did deciding not to enter that room make me part of the problem?
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Several of my friends are worried about the reasonable chance Trump has at becoming president. Of course, the majority of my friend group is planning to back the Democratic nominee. (What, you were expecting me to know a Berkeley CS student who would vote for a Republican? Tell me if you find one of those, because that’s a rare breed.)
Some have semi-jokingly talked about finding ways to live in Europe next year. Many are seriously worried about the damage a Trump presidency could cause.
Meanwhile, I’m thinking about the 2008 general election, and the voters who gave their all to stop an Obama presidency. I’ve seen interviews from volunteers for the McCain campaign - some were truly frightened about how an Obama presidency would erode American values, destroy the economy, and send the US into a death spiral.
I listen to the conversation with a blank face. So now we understand what it feels like, to see a candidate we truly fear. A candidate who we believe will rip the nation asunder. That fear is nothing new. It existed before, exists now, and will always exist. This year, we get to see it with our own eyes.
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It doesn’t feel like I’ve had a tough life.
Yes, I went to a challenging high school, and a tough college. I’ve definitely had struggles. But, it doesn’t feel like I’ve had to work as hard as other people. I’ve never had to worry about failing a class. While students vent about a final’s difficulty, I walk out feeling like I solved every problem.
That has to mess with my empathy. How am I supposed to effectively cheer up a student for the class I’m TAing, if I got an A+ while they find mod math inscrutable? How am I supposed to understand implicit prejudice, when I’m a male Asian in Silicon Valley? How do I justify avoiding crazy working hours, when those in poverty have to deal with them out of necessity?
I view suffering as input-independent. It doesn’t matter if someone is crying because their salary is below $100,000, or if they’re crying because they didn’t have enough to eat. The inputs don’t entitle us to write off the suffering of a privileged person. Suffering is symmetrical, no matter the cause. Fixing those causes may have wildly varying costs, but we should still strive to empathize with that suffering.
We should try, and yet it feels like I don’t. I can walk to an artisan tea shop every day and ignore the homeless on the streets. I don’t understand what it feels like to view the police with fear, or my bank account with dread, and I never want to. I’m in a position where I can avoid these issues, and quite reasonably decide I don’t want to add pain into my life for the sake of having pain in my life. Suffering is symmetrical, and I choose to avoid it.
Tyger, tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?(William Blake, The Tyger)
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Yesterday, I lost. I didn’t finish my post in time. I have to donate $20 to some effective charity, and it feels like I lost. It’s going to help people, and it feels like I lost.
I don’t know how to reconcile that, and some part of me doesn’t want to.
On days like these, I have to wonder. Which is worse - always living with wool worn over your own eyes, or taking the wool off and pulling it back on by your own accord? And in the end, which will I choose?
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The Blogging Gauntlet: May 20 - Confessions of a Procrastinating Workaholic
CommentsThis is part of The Blogging Gauntlet of May 2016, where I try to write 500 words every day. See the May 1st post for full details.
This post was put online at 12:00:07 AM. As per the rules, the post was not completed before midnight, and I must donate $20 to charity.
This post was further edited on May 21.
Now that my NIPS submission is done, I have time to write a bit about my feelings towards the student lifestyle.
The thing about academia is that workloads are incredibly variable. The week before a deadline is hell on earth, while the weeks after it can be incredibly relaxing. When you’re a student, work blends into your life. The time you can do your work is very flexible, which makes it easy to put off until you have to pull an all-nighter.
For the last two weeks of classes this semester, I had two final projects to finish, and it was a nightmare. At some point, I was waking up, going into lab, and not leaving until midnight, every single day. Some point in this destructive cycle, I noticed it was 1 AM, and did some mental calculation. “Hm, so I got up at 9 AM. I’ve been working for 16 hours. But, I went to lecture, and also got meals, so really I’ve only been working for 12 hours! That’s not…so…bad…”
And then the penny dropped. Working until midnight every day was my new standard. Working at least 12 hours every day was my new standard. Mind you, this is including weekends - I’m pretty sure the only day I took off was Sunday, when I convinced myself I absolutely had to not work today.
I understood this was incredibly unhealthy for me, but I couldn’t stop. My project was due Thursday, meaning I needed the poster done by Wednesday, meaning I needed to finish my experiment code by Tuesday because it had to run overnight. The timeline of my work shunted everything else out of my life, and I didn’t see any way to push free time back in.
At Berkeley, I’ve never been able to get my life into a schedule. I’ll add things to my calendar, then not do them. Right now, I have a recurring event to write a post from 2 PM - 4 PM every day. I’ve never actually written a post in that block. It’s a glorified daily notification.
When I have the freedom to arrange work however I like, it all gets done at night, or right before meals. It’s too easy for me to push it down the line.
I know some people who argue this isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. Procrastination happens when you don’t have the motivation to get your work done. Thus, if you accept procrastination, you’ll work exactly when you’re motivated to.
That’s true, but if I had the choice, I’d much rather average my misery over my entire life, instead of having it all pile up right before a deadline.
What annoys me the most is that I could have that choice, if I learned to use proper scheduling. But, I haven’t done so. Every time I try to use a productivity hack, I only keep it for a week at most. Then, I drop it, because vaguely organized chaos is a lot easier to manage than structure. Somehow, I need to hack it to make doing productivity hacks fun. I haven’t figured out to do that yet.
So until then, here I am. A procrastinating workaholic.
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The Blogging Gauntlet: May 19 - Working Assuming Failure
CommentsThis is part of The Blogging Gauntlet of May 2016, where I try to write 500 words every day. See the May 1st post for full details.
Alternate title: This Was a Bad Idea.
I’ve been working all day on turning my final project for CS 281B into a NIPS paper. The submission deadline is tomorrow, 9 AM. I have no idea how I convinced myself this was a good idea.
First off, the odds that I actually get accepted to NIPS is almost nil. My final project has the bare minimum of algorithm design to make it even justifiable to write a paper in the first place, and the experiments I ran all gave negative results. Furthermore, I worked on this project entirely by myself, with little to no input from any grad students/professors. That means I’ll have no feedback from people who have experience with the submission process, and that I’ll be editing the paper entirely by myself, which is a huge recipe for disaster. Everyone I’ve worked with is busy attending ICRA, and the time it would take for me to explain what I’m doing and for them to read my paper isn’t worth it. Besides, even if this was the most well-written paper in the world, the combination of not very novel ideas and negative results feels like a death sentence.
What makes this an even worse idea is that I didn’t even learn about the NIPS deadline until 2 days ago. Sure, let’s submit to NIPS! Why not! It’s not like I’ve spent the past few days playing Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney in my pajamas all day, meaning I have to go through a super jarring context shift into the work all day mindset. It’s not like this is my last week staying at Berkeley, and I should probably be trying to meet up with friends before we all head away from one another. OH WAIT, EXCEPT BOTH THOSE THINGS ARE TRUE? YEAH, THEY ARE.
UUUUUUGGGGGGHHHHHHHH.
(Yes, if you couldn’t tell I’m a bit annoyed with myself. It was probably a bad idea to even write a blog post when I’m in such a mood, but here we are. On the raggedy edge.)
Look, I even did an estimation in my head, and decided it wasn’t worth sending my paper around for feedback, because it would take away time from people working on their papers, and the marginally improved chance for my paper isn’t worth diminishing the chances of people who actually have significant progress. Maybe this is circular logic I’m giving myself to not talk to people, but at this point I’m too tired for self improvement or internal consistency.
By the way, if you were expecting a post about existential risk and why it’s justifiable to act in situations where you almost always receive failure, I’m sorry the title baited you. See, that’s what I thought this post was going to be about, but my stream of consciousness decide to hijack it into a rant post and I don’t have the time to do that topic full justice. I’m writing this on an insanely short deadline because I need to both finish this post and finish my paper before midnight to give myself sleeping time for the CS graduation ceremony tomorrow morning.
Anyways this post is a huge pile of bullshit and I’m sorry you sat and read through it. I’m cheating myself for writing this just to make sure I don’t have to pay $20, but I set the rules! Only myself to blame if they let me get away with this!
If I had the time to write a decent post, here’s the ideas I would have tried to convey.
- The odds of me getting accepted are small, but I was always planning to refine my final project for my research page currently under construction. The NIPS deadline just gave me a good deadline to actually work on it and spring me out of my hedonistic haze.
- When the paper is done, I’ll get to say I submitted a paper to a top tier machine learning conference, which is actually a decently big deal. Of course anybody can do this, so it’s secretly not a big deal.
- I’m not sure how I feel about existential risk, but in this case the journey of finding the best way to explain my ideas to a curious but unfamiliar audience and the experience I get doing so is the big thing I’m getting out of it.
I didn’t have the time to find a good way to naturally bring all this up, so instead you get a bullet point text dump. Sorry!
Okay this is actually closer to 750 words, not 500. I’m outta here, I’ve got a paper to write.