anxiety and shallow copies

My first brush with graduate school was full of anxiety... in some sense, it's amazing that I managed to still get through.

There are so many pressures out there and in here, and it's funny to realize that not everyone feels anxious in the face of all that seeming pressure.

I think, for me, it's nice to be able to step back and think through a more global perspective, one that includes seeing how the world changes, how people grow up and have kids, how some things end and other things begin.

It's taken me a long time to realize some of these things. For example, how the efforts to improve class diversity (in academia, let's say) have seemed to focus on your parents' wealth, even though in some sense, your class is more determined by your grandparents' wealth (!).

And now that I've spent summers on TheIsland, in TheValley, in the Pacific Northwest, the cornfields, Cambridge, Florida, China, Thailand, Texas, and the Philippines, I've come to see more of how... there are many ways of living.

Through the lens of this theory of distributional ranking, I see how sometimes our parents parent us, but how sometimes we (as we get older) parent them. I see how destructive it can be to feel the need to be /always/ right rather than mostly right, or always strict in what you say or don't say.

There are just so many things to which we are blind, aren't there? And when we try to share that knowledge, we make the mistake of trying to share what we have learned rather than how we learned it.

(If I wanted to spread my ideas, I'd be better off telling stories with as many concrete examples as I can muster rather than pawning off some sense compressed sliver that only follows deterministically *if* you've read a hundred papers on the subject.)

When I was younger, I too, was afraid of being scooped. After all, They seem to tell you that you have to do something completely NEW and you're useless if you can't.

Well, what if we think about it another way? What if we're part of some greater virtual machine, some larger web that tries to heal itself and work out problems along the way?

From this point of view, one shouldn't mind being scooped. If others are thinking this way, perhaps you are on a fruitful path. In unhealthy consumption of what seems new, we seem to forget that there is nothing new under the sun, and if we simply search a bit, we will find the unwritten ties to older thoughts.

I think, too, that perspective has shown me more about balance. Not that I don't get off balance here and there, but walking is, if you recall, a way of falling forward.

For example, I have started to fight the urge to only work when I really want to get something done. I knew that being a workaholic had its costs, but I couldn't really articulate why until the last few years.

For one, it takes some time to develop one's identity in a "fault-tolerant" way. By this, I mean that it can be dangerous to understand our own "purpose" in a limited way. Although when we're younger, we may identify primarily as this or that, the world changes, we change, and our perceptions of the world as do the ways the world at large begins to see us.

Anxiety arises, it seems, when our body starts to learn too well. I struggle still to explain this, but a boolean-based logical model of how our mind and body work seems thoroughly incomplete. If we are anxious when we attempt a task, and this happens over and over, then how are we to ever enjoy what we do?

We might think to fight anxiety, but this only creates more anxiety...

I write here and again about my experience visiting graduate schools this time around, and the world had changed a bit, but I had changed even more. I was older than the other kids, in more than just one way, and as I reflect on it now, I see how much we, as students, tend to seem but shallow copies of our teachers. We latch onto that which we do understand, perhaps their language or their style, perhaps their attitudes or philosophy.

But, the truth is, they're still learning too. (But, in a determinstic hierarchy, such models are left unspoken.)

I realized recently that three out of the four advisers that I considered working with had children more of less my age. The fourth, I'm not so sure has kids, but is old enough to likely some sort of larger family.

I'm not sure why that is, although I have some conjectures.

Perhaps as we get older, we are forced, unwillingly, to see change and to, if lucky, come to accept some part of it. When we're younger, we don't see that change. Things are as they are, as we think they "should" be. And so, either we don't see how much our histories write us rather than the other way around, or we don't see how much these histories can differ from the array of histories that have been written around the world.

Besides these kinds of distributional complexity, I have been trying to think with the lens of statistical unlearning. I think we know a decent 'nuff about how humans and computers learn. How do we teach humans, societies, and their technologies to unlearn as well?

I spent the other night reading "Funding a Revolution" and besides being reminded how much graphics, systems, and AI/theory intersect through history (Licklider begat Sutherland, Robert Kahn begat Lynn Conway begat Jim Clark and SUN and so on, even if we learn quite quickly what is not this subsubject or that subsubsubject in school), I was reminded of something else that I forgot as I was writing this.

I do see how easy it is to become anxious, and to think that anxiety is a prerequisite for success. Perhaps the capacity for anxiety is a reasonable prior to assume, but maybe we'll grow out of our attachments to anxiety one day.

Thinking back, I remember wondering if, giving up anxiety would mean giving up some essential part of myself. Reflecting on this now, I think I let it define me then, but, you know, I have grown since then :)