non-Euclidean empathy

While I've been having fun the last few months, taking the sometimes unexpected opportunity to meet new peers and brainstorm my future possible, in the last few days I've tried consciously to close my mental aperture from wide, wide wide, to something far more narrow.

I can't dream forever, and I've already spent too much of my life, I think, living in the future. By "future" I don't mean the kind of future that's already here, just "unevenly distributed", I mean it in a meditative sense, in a "practice of" sense, in a sense of focus, presence, and attention.

I've been throwing out a Word doc full of ideas to Pat, and he's been kind enough to lend me slack as I figure out where to start going, but driving back from Quarry road, I thought of this about this abstract, entangling quandary of a meta-question: given these 'stormed of researchy questions, how should I decide myself which ones to work on, in the now and near future?

My head is swirling at this alternative meta-q, and I'm tempted to either stop and eat or keep going and try to make some sense of it as I write. Okay, write for ten or fifteen minutes, then I need some carbohydrates.

I spent a lot of time puzzling, as an undergraduate, at how (some of) my classmates would get obsessed with "things", something I'm still trying to explain, and I kind of knew I wasn't like the others, I suppose I thought I was The Other.

Gee, I'm not making that much sense. Let me just wrap up my makes-sense-to-me-but-not-to-you entry for the day.

In writing this, I just wanted to write about what it means to engineer with empathy, to engineer for someone else's happiness, and wanted to wonder if it's so different a thing from what it means to engineer with things instead, for a smaller group of not so representative peers.

And, to end, I'm thinking of a time on 12th Ave when I was waiting in reception and saw a middle-aged white man walk in through those dot com doors.

Hi, is this [dot com]? he asked the receptionist.

She sat behind her LCD, with print outs of [dot com] screenshots and signatures plastering the walls. They told of product launches, NEW! feature sets and deployments across the world.

Yes, said the receptionist. Can I help you?

Well, yes, said the man. I, well, I have a few suggestions on the website. Is there any one I can talk to?

The receptionist looked confused. I had a quiet laugh inside. If only Willy Wonka helped to run this dot com.

She said no, I'm sorry. Is there someone in particular you want to talk to?

I could tell, looking at the man's old school reaction, that a stellar customer experience this was not.

Still, he tried. It doesn't matter who, he said, I just want to talk to someone.

Obviously she had to say no, sorry, and got back to work. The shuttle came for me then, and the man and I left right after one another.

It's funny how the triangle inequality must work in social networks, not the additive triangle inequality, but the one that observes triangle-lovin' clustering and the inequalities of the network effect. It's something, I guess, I think about when I think of working at a corporation, or even doing research in academia, about empathy and distorted social triangles, picked non-uniformly at random, about social justice and engineering for others and for The Other(s), about finding +feedback stable communities and the way I stumble to find my way, like water charting its way downhill, and I think these days, perhaps I (being a droplet in the water) can't, shouldn't try to change my nature, but rather ought to try pick the hill and surrounding turbulence that would fit me and my slalom most naturally.

(Hmm, okay, note, this is the kind of entry I get when I write instead of eating dinner. If this were LJ, I'd have lj-cut text="ramblings", but this is not LJ. If you're reading this and it makes some sense, I think we both ought to marvel at how humans are often good at making sense in some mental stone soup way. Hurray!)