Posts
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The Blogging Gauntlet: May 15 - Harry Potter Compression Algorithms
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.
Two months ago, I was at a dinner where we started talking about character alignments. To explain why lawful-vs-chaotic was a different axis from good-vs-evil, we said “Umbridge is an example of Lawful Evil, and The Joker is an example of Chaotic Evil.”
There’s nothing a good character alignment chart can’t add to.
A month after that, I was relaying a story about bigoted geniuses. A graduate student wrote a compiler which automatically inserted anti-Semitic messages into any code it compiled. This behavior was then hidden under several layers of code generation, making it especially difficult to remove the anti-Semitic messages while keeping the rest of the compiling ability intact.
In response, my friend quoted Ollivander.
He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named did great things - terrible, yes, but great.
(Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. But you knew that already, didn’t you?)
I replied with this.
In my generation, it’s assumed everyone has read the Harry Potter books. They’re just that popular. Importantly, it goes further than that. The knowledge that Harry Potter is well known is itself well known. Almost everyone knows Harry Potter, and everyone knows almost everyone knows Harry Potter.
Thus, Harry Potter can be used as a compression algorithm for conversation. If you want to explain something that’s similar to something from Harry Potter, you can cite the relevant scenario/character, and people will usually follow you. And usually, this is much shorter than explaining it for yourself. The D&D Player Handbook spends two paragraphs explaining Lawful Evil, but in that dinner we explained it in a single sentence.
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You can apply a similar argument to anything that’s common knowledge. Memes, movie quotes, and world history are all fair game, assuming they are well known, and it is well known that they are well known.
What makes Harry Potter special is its perfect storm of length and popularity. Because it’s so long and has such a huge fandom, Harry Potter is an especially large source of concepts. If I wanted to explain test anxiety, I could quote how Hermione acts during final exams. If I wanted to explain the trope of the Enigmatic Old Wizard, I could use Dumbledore’s actions.
One of my classes this semester talked about impact evaluation. Paraphrased, the TA said, “In the ideal scenario, we would perform a study, measure results, use a Time-Turner, then don’t do the study and measure the difference between the two worlds.” This made me really happy, not just because it fit, but also because it validated my thoughts on Harry Potter compression.
(Although for the record, it doesn’t fit perfectly. Time-Turners only allow for stable time loops in canon. You wouldn’t be able to apply the study to the same group of people, because there is always only one timeline. Time-Turners would still eliminate a lot of confounding variables though.)
Now that I’ve thought about it, it seems obvious. Yes, this is how discourse works. People will use analogies to previous well known ideas to explain their points. I mean, no shit Sherlock.
Even when an idea is simple in retrospect, I still find it rewarding to think it through out loud. It elevates the idea from latent knowledge to common knowledge, and helps me identify it in other contexts. I just used a meme based off Sherlock Holmes, and I didn’t realize how much meaning I could pack into those three words until now.
(I have a lot more to write about this than I thought, so I’m stopping here. I may pick it up tomorrow, or I’ll save it from a longer post after the gauntlet is over.)
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The Blogging Gauntlet: May 14 - Your Next First Day
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 graduated from college today.
It’s not my usual style, but on today of all days, I’m going to try something different.
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Today is our last day as undergraduates of this university.
We’ve faced plenty of lasts this semester. The last midterm. The last final. The last time we had to dodge flyers on Sproul.
But this last is different from the rest. It’s been a long time coming, and yet for many of us it felt like it came too soon. As the days passed inexorably by, we realized, perhaps for the first time, that time was running short, and soon we would be walking different paths.
Our graduation is a symbol of everything we went through these past four years. It serves as a capstone of not just our academic achievements, but of our personal ones. Everything has been building towards this moment, and that gives graduation a weight that few moments can ever match.
We’ll remember it in different ways. Some will remember where they met the one. Others will remember the day their paper was accepted for publication. Or, there may be more tragic memories. The day we realized we were drowning in material, barely staying afloat despite studying day and night. The day we decided it was for the best if we stopped seeing each other. After spending years living and breathing college, it’s impossible to leave without one special memory.
There will be other last days, and they won’t all be pretty. It may be the last day of our job. Or, the last day we ever talked to a close friend. It’s part of life, that all things come to an end, and let me just say that it’s going to suck. (Although for the record, I hope your last last day never comes to pass. And that if you knew someone who had their last last day, I’m sorry.)
However, just as today is a day of lasts, today is also a day of firsts. Over the past four years, we’ve taken great strides to becoming the people we’ve always wanted to be. Like chickens, we incubated inside our little eggs, bouncing from class to class. We laughed at the worries we had in high school, sobbed when we were thrown more than we could handle, and did both when we climbed out of the hole we had fallen into.
Whether we want to or not, we must hatch from our shells, pierce the veil, and enter the real world. It’s like I said before. All things come to an end, and college is no exception.
And you know what?
We’re going to be the best goddamn people the world has ever seen.
We’ll keep walking down the road we lay for ourselves, brick by brick. We’ll keep living, and keep learning. We may not be in college anymore, but in our hearts we’ll always be students.
Together, we’ve grown into the people who will take the world by storm. After we’ve made our mark, the world will never be the same.
Tomorrow is our next first day. The Sun will shine down on a wild, unfriendly world. And we’ll look out on that vast landscape, baring our heads up high. Together, we march unflinchingly into the next page of our story.
I have no idea what it’ll look like, but it’ll be interesting. It’ll be beyond our craziest dreams. And I can’t wait to see what we’ll do.
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This borrows themes and phrasings from Greg Burnham’s speech at Mathcamp 2010, Sheryl Sandberg’s speech from today, and writers of inspirational speeches the world over. Thank you, to all of them.
Oh, and I promise to be less preachy tomorrow.
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The Blogging Gauntlet: May 13 - Appearing Skilled and Being Skilled are Very Different
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 am bad at chess.
When I say I’m bad at chess, I mean I’ve played at most 10 games of chess my whole life. Anybody who’s learned the slightest bit of chess will wipe the floor with me.
When other people say they’re bad at chess, it could mean anything. I’ve heard novices say they’re bad at chess, but I’ve also heard a master say he’s bad at chess. I’ve heard someone say they’re bad at chess, then play against that master and almost win. I’ve seen someone say they’re awful, then win with a handicap of a queen and two rooks.
When everyone says they’re bad at chess regardless of their skill level, hearing “I’m bad at chess” gives zero information. You can’t learn their skill level unless you watch them play a game.
Yesterday, I went to a board game cafe. One of the staff members recommended we play Dominion. I mentioned I played a lot online, and he said he played a few games back in the day. Two sentences later, I learned “a few” meant 1500 games.
I’m not going to talk about why people downplay their accomplishments, because you could read the imposter syndrome Wikipedia page instead. What I want to talk about is the consequences of this kind of behavior.
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One day, I was at a gathering in a friend’s house, and someone proposed playing Codenames. I hadn’t played Codenames before, but from the reviews it sounded great. I immediately went into teaching mode, setting up the board and explaining the rules.
We started playing the game, and on the 4th round someone mentioned an exceptionally good clue from a game she played last week. Someone else then wanted to clarify what variants we were using. Neither of them said they had played Codenames before; it was only revealed well into the game itself.
There are couple factors at play here. Once I got going, there was natural inertia to let me continue with my explanation. And during the game itself, everyone was focused on playing the game, not on explaining their experience with the game.
Still, I wonder how many of my friends are secretly experts in subjects I’ve never heard them talk about.
I feel this issue is exacerbated with introverted people, who generally don’t talk about themselves, and with women, who generally don’t play up their accomplishments as much as men do. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize most of my Khan Academy intern class had done more functional programming than me.
It’s shown up in this very blog. People have told me they liked my blog posts, but I don’t see them as especially interesting or special. I know people who have better thoughts, more insightful thoughts, relayed through private conversations and real life instead of posted on the Internet for all to see.
To quote Neil Geiman,
Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds… Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.
(From The Sandman)
The difference, then, is that I try to wear my thoughts on the outside. The outside world won’t know of a friend’s brilliant insights into the privacy vs security debate, or their research on post-quantum cryptography, but it will think I’m good at cryptography because I wrote one blog post on garbled circuits. It hides that I’ve only taken two crypto courses, had to struggle through both, and am woefully uninformed about the wider state of cryptography research.
The world is biased towards people who do things that make them look special, not towards people who are special. I’m worried about the gap between the two, and what it could lead to.
Finally, a closing thought. Turn these ideas back onto this post. Did this post give you a new perspective? Or did it only give words to ideas you already had?