So so many things to catch you up on. I really can’t think of any way to write this in an interesting way that could be unique, so I’ll just do a quick stream of thought. 

I’ll start off with a quick summary of the year and then like probably some things that I think are different about me than you. So the summary:

(okay this ended up being longer than expected so I’ll include my advice to past neel first then the summary)

So ummm… that was a long summary. So what would I say to the 2022 version of me? A lesson learned throughout the year?

There’s no such thing as favorites. Let me rephrase this a bit though, there definitely is such a thing as a favorite for most people, but ideally there shouldn’t be favorites.

Favorite foods, favorite colleges, favorite places to sleep, sure you can have them but most importantly—do they contribute to your happiness? Sure you can wish for them as much as you want and strive towards them, but usually favorites tend to make the present more dull. A favorite food for example might make the food you’re currently eating more dull; A favorite bed might make the bed you have at college a little less comfortable; A favorite toy makes the time you spend without it just a little more dull.

By embracing everything you see—whether it's the taste of a unique dish or a fresh scene—that should be your favorite at that moment. By devoting 100% of your time to the present, whatever is literally in front of your face, you can learn to enjoy more things in your life. Instead of dreaming about the time you were in the perfect place, with the perfect scenery, you should notice what makes the scenery you’re looking at perfect. All things are subjective, and anything could be your favorite.

People, places, things, they’re all infinitely complex beneath seemingly simple exteriors. There are so many things to actually enjoy about anything, yet people almost always just look at the first couple layers. If you love stable ground, enjoy the instability of shaky ground; if you love the sunny sky, maybe look at some rain clouds; favorites can either limit your possibilities or make you not realize what's literally in front of you.

Of course I’m not saying you shouldn’t have goals or want to do anything, or have preferences in what you want to do in life. All I’m trying to say to 2023 Neel is that favorites aren’t usually all they’re made out to be. I can like and enjoy programming, but I don’t necessarily need to feel compelled to do it 24/7. Same with research and same with messing around with friends. I might want to do something like have an impact on AI research, but I don’t think that necessarily counts as a favorite, maybe a meta-favorite?

I think this meshes with my long term goal of being able to do more of what I’m interested in—whatever it may be (hence why I absolutely love AI & CS as interdisciplinary tools). By not having any favorites, you can learn to enjoy the present moment.

Instead of sticking to a compass or any other of your favorite navigation tools… maybe use a sextant?

P.S: Here's a cool little wrapped site for my locations this year: https://neel-wrapped.vercel.app! I aggregate locations on my website so this is a cool visual that I thought would be fun.

P.P.S: Honestly I don’t know what to put here, I just really like the idea of putting lots of post scripts.

P.P.P.S: LMK any book recs you might have or any comments or anything you want to talk about! I’m always free and would love to hear how terrible or amazing my takes are (maybe you could be the reason I add a P.P.P.P.S about how terrible this advice is!)

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(said summary, some parts left out, its a lot...)

Submitted all my apps! Was slightly stressed out about where I would go but it was mostly fine. I honestly didn’t care too much about where I would go, mostly if I would go to the same schools as my friends. I knew this would be unlikely but it would still be fun. Worked on refining my independent research project idea and ran a couple tests to see if it would work.

Hung out with a lot more people now that I had time! It was honestly super fun compared to the rest of the year.

Presented at my first research conference! AAAI23 was honestly a blast where I got to try living by myself for the first time, and it was amazing. I did groceries, got lots of ice cream, had fun with friends, and just vibed in Washington DC. Of course the coolest part was the research (got pretty deep into federated learning/RL here, honestly the papers were the coolest), and meeting new people to talk to! I felt satisfied after this conference thinking I made full use of my time there to further my goals of 1) getting to know more people in the field 2) checking out if my ideas were interesting to people in the field. Met a very cool S and K.

TREEHACKS!!! This was honestly even more fun than I thought it would be. I made a lot of friends and got my first intro to a lot of new communities that I hadn’t interacted with! Shoutout to W, J, C, & V for super cool late night conversations (can’t say they were violently productive though), but I feel like they were hilarious. Got closer to K which was great and I feel like I finally got to see what he thought about life & different issues. Made a cool thing on the side too https://devpost.com/software/accessize

Birthday!!! Had a really cool birthday party that combined a lot of people from a lot of different places. It turned out really good and I’m glad I turned 18.

SO this was definitely the month of rejections. It hit pretty hard at the moment but now I guess it doesn’t? Maybe I’m also tricking myself into thinking that I’m in this mindset, honestly I’m not too sure. It was hard at the moment because there are mainly two downsides. The biggest one being friends—I’ve interacted with a certain subset of people throughout most of my life that would be going to more “prestigious” colleges (or “more prestigious”, I honestly don’t think the more qualifier would work because prestige can’t be quantitative), and I wouldn’t be able to interact with them in person day to day. Ideally I guess the best part of college would be meeting new people, but it just sounds much easier in the moment to say “yeah! me and my friends will live together for 4 years and just do fun things!” rather than “i’ll be on my own for 4+ years where there's a high probability i’ll make more, better, friends!”.

I finished up my independent research and qualified for the International Science Fair in March! It was my first time qualifying through the county, so it was honestly cooler to have people locally recognize my work and I feel like I got the best of both worlds here.

Factoring in the coolness from my research and the uncoolness (subjective still) of college rejections, I think I’d rate the month below average for a solid:

THE MONTH OF FUN EXCURSIONS—prom, suzume, new york, going to LA for debate tournaments, and so much more.

Met E for the first time and that was super cool! I also got to see a lot of people at random events as everyone was visiting colleges across the US, so that helped a lot with coping with the month before. Visited UCLA for the first time and though it wasn’t love at first sight it seemed like a place with lots of fun things to do (whether there IS a place without fun things to do is up for debate…). I met a ton of cool people there, and they were all amazing, so it made me much happier about my decision!

Overall a good month, I worked on my research a little more to make the paper & presentation, but honestly not a super productive month. School was going great and I didn’t have to stress for classes almost at all which was great.

Okay, key events in this month were probably ISEF, Angelhacks, and just generally going out a lot more.

I feel like my outings increased exponentially throughout the year, which honestly is how my ideal second semester senior year would go. 

Many iconic moments at ISEF, I honestly think the people were what carried it here though. In 2022 it was mainly focused on trying really hard and constantly practicing, but this year was a lot more chill. I talked with a lot more people, went out and explored Dallas! I loved going through random parts with other participants in the night and going on fun excursions. Definitely a net positive experience.

~~AngelHacks! Happened! Yes! And it was so fun! we had swords and many cool things.~~

AngelHacks was honestly an extremely fun experiment. We got to test out how a completely non-competitive hackathon would be—and I think it was a success! If the goal of a hackathon is to educate people, I think the current hackathon format is NOT the way to go here. I’ll probably write something on this later but humor is a much better incentive than large prizes, especially for people learning how to hack.

You want to cultivate a mini caring environment with low stakes prizes—swords, slime, a hundred packs of ramen—rather than high value prizes. This way people can take risks, more people get a reward, and it's an environment where people can explore their creativity/feel less downside to just learning something new. The vibes also become much better + more collaborative than other hackathons.

I think overall I went on a ton of walks this month and I loved it—thanks to everyone who went deep into the hills or any random park with me!

I think this is the month where the nostalgia definitely started to hit me. Before I didn’t really care too much about school or missing everyone—but “memetics” prevails once again. Surrounded by people reminiscing over their childhood and remembering the past, I could feel myself also looking fondly on random events I had done while younger. With everyone getting super nostalgic about their highschool career, I wanted to just get up and do more things to make it more memorable.

Graduation was amazing, very very fun, honestly nothing to complain about here. I loved the vibes and felt everyone was just enjoying themselves and the time.

After lots of hanging out, fun, and shenanigans, Calhacks rolled around! This was super fun because not only did I get to reconnect with people, I got to build something that’s been on my mind for a while—https://devpost.com/software/caddy-92l74v—and work with someone I’ve wanted to work with E, which I’ve wanted to do for a while. I found it super therapeutic, Calhacks was definitely up there in my memorable hackathons because of the deep conversations and overall just fun vibes.

MORE HANGING OUT. Lots of excursions and other things—highlights here are definitely spontaneous trips to SF and random hikes in the hills. 

New Hampshire: WOW I have never been so surprised to see the dark before. This had to be the first time I’ve seen the dark up close before. Truly not being able to see anything is and continues to be extremely scary. Met cool people though and that’s all that matters—https://notebook.neelr.dev/stories/kairos. The highlight definitely had to be my late night conversations with P and trying to build a compiler in Haskell.

Boston: This was super fun, I got to see C again! Boston is honestly a cool place to be, I love the architecture and just thinking about the history that happened there. Met a ton of cool people here and got another glimpse of what it would be like to be with your friends for extended periods of time (queue Japan…)

Cavetown: BEST CONCERT EVER! I love Cavetown and BoyWithUke so much, definitely the best concert of the year. The vocals, having Ricky Montgomery notice me was definitely the highlight though.

Vermont: I would probably define this as a blast from the past. A little context, I went to Vermont on the Outernet! It was an outdoors hackathon where people literally went camping for a hackathon. This had been my dream setting for a hackathon, and it honestly went amazing. I enjoyed being a participant, eating marshmallows, and sitting around a fire with people programming! Interacting with people just coming into the hacking community (as someone who’s been here for 5+ years), was super inspiring and reminded me a lot of how I used to be. (nostalgia +100 but also inspiration +80). Tested out a couple cool things with NeRFs and tried to build a text => 3d reconstruction pipeline and 3d printed a (pretty cursed) orpheus!

I feel like in this month particularly so much happened. Spending time with family was amazing, getting to explore Japan and honestly take in the amazing views/culture is the highlight of my year. Getting to just relax with family, explore random places, and see interesting things is amazing and something I might not get often afterwards—so I’m super grateful for that. Tried an onsen, lots of matcha, petted a deer, and talked to random people on the train!

The second half was spent with friends in Hakuba, honestly a crazy experience by itself. I didn’t meet too many new people, but of the new people I met, all of them were amazing. Getting to know U, D, & Y more was insightful because each had a unique story that I honestly related to so much. I was much more open (probably because of the crazy environment shift), which allowed me to have deeper/more meaningful conversations overall.

THIS IS PROBABLY the best environment I could ask for. Hakuba was in the middle of nowhere, with a 7/11 closeby to get amazing food, a forest behind to explore, and friends everywhere to talk to. The only changes I would make are 1) less humidity and 2) bigger hallways (spacious spaces are cool too).

Getting the gang back together w/ R & C was amazing, spending time in Tokyo was fun especially just enjoying the scenery. It really showed me a glimpse of what it would be like to just live in a small apartment with all your friends, and how enjoyable that life would actually be. 

Top highlights of Japan 2nd half (deserves a full bullet list just for itself)

Running around Tokyo station with C trying to find a place to put our bags

Walking around the house in Hakuba finding random (slightly creepy very Ghibli-esque) shrines deep in the woods and wondering if I’ll actually be able to find my way back

Wireheading D and quizzing him to try and see if he gets embarrassed

Late night conversations and hot tubs (even though it was hot and humid outside)

Rooming with R and still sleeping at completely different hours that barely overlapped

I worked on trying to classify EEG signals here, but honestly I got derailed 24/7 from messing around rather than doing actual work.

This was honestly a month full of flights too. Orientation was amazing where I met so many new people and went on amazing walks—super fun and met my roommate today! Going immediately from Japan to LAX though was pretty jarring, but still fun.

Davidson was a really cool weekend overall—met up with new friends and saw C again, had tacos with Bob Davidson where he asked a lot of hard hitting questions. Honestly the whole experience was a blast, but also not exactly what I thought it would be. After Japan it felt a little watered down?

Inbound to UCLA!!! Saying goodbye to everyone was definitely a challenge, but afterwards I spent the first weeks in UCLA in December. Met V, C, P, A, S, A and so many people I can’t introduce them all. Played a scavenger hunt game that was interesting and many many sidequests (redacted for “brevity”).

Built a bot to get concert tickets for Bruin Bash! Worked relatively well and secured floor tickets (was fun)

Attended lots of club meetings trying to get integrated into the UCLA lifestyle

Set up the infamous rope ladder in my room because room service was too slow

Got my dorm floor to be super social which is fun!

Met so many people and did so many serendipitous things…

One super big highlight I would point out here is classes vs fun. First quarter I took ridiculously easy classes—an introduction to programming (oh my days…), philosophy, and math. This way I could audit cooler and maybe more advanced classes like grad level reinforcement learning and parallel computing. This was really fun in general, made school more low stakes, and gave me breathing room to just have fun and let things happen. This was around the time I submitted my paper to NeurIPS for fun, and just relaxed after getting into college!

maybe favorite is just a word i shouldn't use as often

TLDR; Motivation is a push against inertia, so it's counterintuitive to wait for it. You have to be a little spontaneous, and actually make it a habit to gain motivation, or find external motivation through parents/friends/commitments.

## What is Motivation?

Okay, so now starting with the base question: What is motivation? I think a good place to start here is with most peoples dilemma, not being able to find motivation, and therefore never starting something. The way I see it, in most cases this would mean motivation is a push against ones social inertia, in one way or another. Let's look at picking up your trash for example. There is a great reason to pick it up, but some people just don't because they aren't "motivated to". This applies to almost any case, all the way to not wanting to learn something, which is the fundamental idea that there is no intrinsic reason to do it.

Now after defining it, let's take a look at most peoples reason to not do something, which happens to be "not motivated". Since we've defined motivation as basic social inertia, it becomes apparent that motivation can come from 2 ways, spontaneity, or through external means (a push from someone else, or to meet a goal). Spontaneity is a great way to try many things, and to be motivated to do "stuff". It could be almost anything they want. The second means can be seen in practice often when parents try to push small kids to do activities, which they may not be motivated to do at first, but after time they start to like it, and are motivated. 

This leads to the greatest sin, waiting for motivation. Since motivation is a push against inertia, by waiting around and building habits, you actively make it harder for yourself to get motivated, by gaining inertia. This often leads to a cycle of regret, where you wait for the perfect motivation to do something, but end up never doing it, or just forgetting about it all-together. A great way to imagine this, is to think of humans as advanced dogs. We love to follow patterns and ruts, but if we ever want to break the rut, no gut feeling will tell us, because internally we love these ruts. It really is a funny cruel way for life to act, but in the end, that would mean the spontaneous win out, while the people who wait for the perfect second end up failing. 

## So what?

So! How do we end up gaining motivation, and doing things that we want to do? One way is to become spontaneous. Act on every desire you have, and when you feel like something, just do it! It's a funny thing to say, but most often, the cure to motivation, is to just do it. You'll find motivation as the "inertia" to do the task lowers, basically meaning as you find it becoming a rut/habit (In a funny sense, that makes motivation counterintuitive, but meh). The only way to build spontaneity, is to be a little spontaneous in a sense (It sometimes doesn't even have to come from spontaneity, some people find it in motivational music or speeches).

The second way, is to find it externally. This could be a whole range of things, but the one I find interesting is to have a friend motivate you. This can be seen in many areas to work, like studying, where most people like an "Hours" type group, where they check in every hour or so, give progress checks, and share screens the entire time. I think this could be applied to a whole range of areas, with people reminding you to try something new and stick with it. Personally, this works with me by making commitments to show people things, which motivate me by not wanting to flake on them. Really, any means of motivation aside from yourself should work.

Now with your newfound knowledge what shall you do? Climb Mt. Everest maybe? Take on a pack of ravenous wolves? Take out the trash? Whatever you do now, just make sure to never wait for motivation to do anything, but try to apply some of the methods I said above.  You might even learn to incorporate tons of cool new habits, and isn't that really what motivation is for?

What is motivation, and how can people get more of it? Learn a bit about my perspective!

So... the education system. Its a given fact that almost every person has some qualm with it, from the capitalistic colleges, to the uninspired highschool system. This has been a huge qualm that almost every student has gone through, so why hasn't it been solved already? You would think that if every single person in the US was forced to go through a system, it would be polished to perfection from the sheer magnitude of people that go through it. Today I'll try and explore how, and why its remained unchanged for so long, and give my 2 cents on how to fix it.  

Starting with the first reason, is the way education is taught. The fact of the matter is that it's always going to be easier to make people memorize, than learn. Since every kid learns a different way, if you just make them memorize and test, they won't learn, but you may see some short term results. Students never really learn anything that way.  

The way people learn, is by personal teaching, and idea based learning, which is intrinsically going to be very hard if you just try to stick by a "curriculum". Some teachers do manage to do this, but its multitudes harder than just sitting in the back and putting on a slide show. There is no incentive for teachers to be "good teachers", because as long as students pass, they get paid.  

Secondly, for colleges and schools, there is no competition. Colleges know they can milk money from you for reputation, even if the actual learning experience is the same. If you ask a regular high schooler if they would go to MIT without learning, or community college with MIT courses, the obvious choice should be the community college. But at the end of the day, in our twisted world, people choose MIT, just for the prestige. Since people talented flock to colleges for the name, you can't really have any other competition, which makes the cost skyrocket. The fact of the matter is that almost any college could use endowments for tuition, or more, but they don't and they won't because they can make money off of you.  

The final reason for all of this, is the risk for students. Sure, I could try and drop out of high school, or I could take 0 AP classes and self study as much as possible outside of school, but that doesn't guarantee anything. I could take useless classes, pay thousands for college, and do good in life, or take the risky way and rely on myself. In an ideal world with more than one life, I might try and take the risky way, but since I'm good at academics, and seem to benefit from the system, I probably won't do anything.  

This type of system feeds into itself, because it's all built out, and trying to change it from the inside out is risky, and taking any other path is risky. When people leave the system, they see their success, and just take it as a "quirk of life". So my hope is sometime, someday, once I do make it out, I can change it from the outside in, and make sure no-one else has to choose between risk, and real education.  

So, the system is broken, and it's terribly hard to change. What do we do? First of all, I think we should invest way more into school, and specifically teachers. When you pay them too little, you end up getting unmotivated workers, and lose all the ones that love to teach, but can't live with the wage. Currently, if someone is a good teacher, they can most likely be paid better in another job outside of school. You can't get motivated, good teachers, that will deviate from curriculum and teach well, if you don't hire good teachers. And the only way to hire good teachers is with good pay. There is no real way around it, and people shouldn't have to choose between their passion and money.  

Another solution would be a decentralized way to rank colleges. This way, you can have something like critics for colleges, who are able to rank teachers and more. This means that if you can prove that a place like community college has a class on par with unmotivated teachers from a university, you're able to choose the community college. This would force colleges to lower tuition fees to attract students, as they know which places have good teachers. This could even be paired with a "standardized test" (not written, probably a test of real world skills), to judge someones skills without their degree. This would also make colleges provide quality education to stay on top.  

Thats basically my 2 cents and rant on education, and I hope you were able to take something away from it! I believe that the tech industry can (hopefully) save education in some way or form.

Here I take a look at why the education system as a whole is doomed to repeat its cycle, and how we need a strong force of change.

Why does capitalism sound so appealing? Logically speaking, it should be the best system, were anyone with an idea can make things and money, as well as places where people. can make money by investing in people and so forth. While studying for my world history class, I was drawn deeper into the capitalistic fantasy, where technically anything can be solved by the market, because of the idea that it's just the amalgamation of humanities desires. In poverty, need investments? It would be profitable to create income share agreements with people in poverty, as well as make venture capitalist firms. Rather than searching stuff up reasons on why capitalism is flawed (at least in our current society), I tried to think of reasons by myself.

After some thought, my main indite to capitalism, is that it requires everyone to be rationally evil, or perfectly greedy. That basically means, no one would really hate anyone, or like anyone, everyone would just want money. This would come before any relation you have, including family, friends, your city, and everything. Thus, the main thing that hold back capitalism, is tribalism, where we form groups within the human race, and try to serve them. These can be based on race, ethnicity, wealth or income. The reason people haven't already started an income share agreements is the pretense that "the poor" aren't as smart, or wouldn't be able to profit, as with other tribal assumptions. 

Some people may point out that these ISA companies have already started to pop up in tech, like Lambda School, among many others. Although they aren't marketed as much to people in poverty, it's a good example of how tribalism is slowly fading away. As people and lifestyles start to homogenize, and we find fewer things to find "different" about others, tribalism will slowly fade away, as we can see right now. Once that happens, I believe we could probably live in a utopian capitalism society.

So what should we do now? I hear some people talk about communism, but even though it may sound good, it's just a variation of the same problem, as it feeds off rational altruism. Communism could only work if everyone was the same, and if tribalism was conquered. If that does happen though, I still believe a capitalist economy with progress based off greed would progress further, without any of the drawbacks we see today, as they all stem from some form of tribalism. 

Thus I come to the conclusion of socialism, which is neither purely capitalist, or communist, but a blend of the two that match reality. Just as humans are neither perfectly altruistic, nor perfectly greedy, an economic system shouldn't be based on humans being either. Socialism is a great alternative that most societies use today (even the US with its welfare programs), where we can stay until we transition out of tribalism. After then, if we have the choice to choose between the two extremes, I would pick capitalism, as it wouldn't have many of the downsides that come with capitalism.

Overall, this is just a quick jot down of my thoughts on all three, and my opinion on what the main problem is that stops us from progressing as a society. But always remember, these ideas are always subject to change, as opinions usually are, and I'm happy to hear any differing thoughts on anytime!

Update April 2021: I've been thinking about this more, and the link between the capitalist free market and democracy, therefore justifying capitalism because democracy good. I agree with the relation, but its not always right to believe democracy to be the "100% best no questions asked" idea. The problem here, is the free market is like early total democracies, where every single person would vote for every legislation. There would be chaos, and people wouldn't be able to make proper informed decisions in every area (hence why the US is a representative democracy). This is the same reason why the free market is flawed. This can also be applied to socialism, which can be related to a representative democracy, where everyone may not get a direct say in everything, but can indirectly influence the market (ie. standardized healthcare prices). Just adding this in there as a thought I had recently.

The age old debate of whether capitalism is the best economic system.

Over the past few years, our country has been divided greatly, and just now we are seeing the consequences of this, with the storming of the capitol. This can be shown through so many examples, where we see two ends of the spectrum. Either someone is a huge left wing social justice warrior, or a right winged bigot. If you think about this logically, it would make more sense if these radical extremes are the minorities, but we see constantly with protests and other issues that it sometimes doesn't work that way. Along with the huge division, we see the difference of views in areas, from urban Bay Area, to the rural Midwest. How can it be, that in the same country, with the same laws, and the same president, we get two groups with completely different opinions, that can't agree on almost anything? That's what I'll try and tackle in this post, and my take on how it could possibly be fixed.

The most prevalent cause of political division has to be recommendation engines. Take our Twitter feed for example; people follow users who's views mesh with theirs, while tend to stay away from other opinions. This isn't just which people you follow, because Twitter uses impressions, likes, retweets, and so much more to find your political view, and show you more of whatever it may be. This essentially creates a bubble of sorts, where peoples own views get validated again and again, making it seem like a popular opinion, even though it might not be true. If we look at a "flat-earthers" Twitter feed we might see more of a bias towards that political view, due to liking and retweeting other flat earth tweets. This creates a constant affirmation of ones beliefs, which leads to more radical beliefs, such as QAnon etc. 

Now instead of Twitter, imagine this on a large scale, where every website you see is catered to your liking, and built for your biases. This makes your entire internet experience a bubble where out of billions of viewpoints you get shown the ones you like, causing you to get pushed to an extrema. Take this in opposed to life before the internet, were news didn't change its opinion to your preferences, and you were forced to look straight into the logic of the other side.

Now if you mix this with our human tribalism (simply explained, tribalism is the idea that humans form a tribe with great bonds, which was a great survival adaptation to work together), you get the toxic polarized environment we live in. Because of this tribalism, we tend to merge our political beliefs with our identity and livelihood. The problem with this, is that once you see your beliefs and your identity as one, once you see someone with a different political belief, that means that they attack your identity. An example of this can be taken from the generic "discord debate", where people debate without any real intention of changing their views. The reason for this is since their belief is their identity, they have to forsake their identity to actually believe the other person, which leads to why you still believe something when people have proven it wrong. I think CGP Grey's Q&A video says this perfectly --

> "The trick is to keep your identity separate from your opinions -- they are objects in a box you carry with you and should be easily replaceable if it turns out they're no good. If you think that the opinions in the box are *who you are* then you'll cling to them despite any evidence to the contrary. Bottom line: If you want to always be right, you need to always be prepared to change your mind."

The last reason I believe our system is so polarized, is because of the election system. If you think about our current political landscape, its pretty naive to believe that there are going to be two solutions to every problem, democratic and republican. So how did it become this way, with almost every issue being either democratic, or republican. The answer to this is the election system. I think Nicky Case explains this really well in their election simulator. I'll use their simulator for images in the rest of the article.

Currently we have a winner takes all election system, where each person can only vote once. If you think of the US as a diverse group of people on a political compass, and place each candidate on a compass, you get this.

Here, triangle wins with a small margin of about 10 votes, which means that they win the election. Now lets imagine this scenario with many candidates on the right.

Here, even though the right may be more popular, the left side won the election. This is because the right has many different candidates with diverse views, while the left only has one candidate. The same idea applies to real life, where a diversity of ideas, hurts political candidates. Each party, democratic and republican, try to take a stance on every single topic to influence a majority of voters, while trying to keep it as polarizing as possible to make sure they don't step on each others toes. This also is another reason why we only have 2 parties, because every other political part slowly merged into two opposing parties, themselves, against the enemies. 

Not only does this mean our political system is twisted in a way which makes it so we have two polarizing views, but since they are so different, they start to divide the country. Each election since the first has slowly pushed the boundaries, becoming more and more "left" vs "right", so much so that people's identities are no longer able to change with the president. That means that when a new president is elected, its so different from ones own views, that it starts to become an affront to their identity, and therefore themselves.

So, how can we dig ourselves out of this hole? One major idea is to disassociate yourself from your opinions, and realize when opinions are opinions. Instead of calling ourselves liberals, or some other identity, and then homogenizing ourselves try and formulate your own unique opinion on every topic. Left and right are very broad generalizations where realistically, you most likely won't agree with every single party on every single topic. What I usually do, is approach each question with an open mind, and try and hide any biases I may have from other issues. For example regarding abolishing the police, instead of saying I'm a leftist so lets abolish the police, I would look at the pros and cons of the topic, and slowly formulate an opinion.

Another thing you can do is as I said before, think of your opinions as not you. Imagine your opinions as a bucket of rocks you carry around, and if you find a better, shinier rock, you can place it in the bucket and throw out the old one. This ideology helps you get closer to the "truth" or "best solution", whatever it may be, because you don't associate yourself with any of your opinions, and can assess each one fairly.

The one major change that would be a great help to stop polarization would be changing the way elections are decided (not the Electoral College, though I think its outdated, it doesn't really contribute much to polarization). Again, Nick Casey explains this in much more detail, so I encourage you to take a look at their website, where they compare and contrast alternative systems, but in my opinion, score voting could be a good alternative (Take a look at their website, which explains why!)

Overall I think this was mostly a brain dump of what I've been thinking about for a long time, and something that has come in to light due to current events. I honestly believe that if this problem can get solved, and we can realize our own biases, the world can become a better place with many diverse views.

 I hope that this can help you in some way or another, be it in you actually incorporate it into your life, or if I've offered up an interesting opinion to think about.

My take on an increasingly polarizing political landscape, how we got here, and my ideas of how to get out of it.

With Thanksgiving coming around, and many people prepping for the inevitable family political debate, I started to think of how debates have digressed in the world. Taking a look at the political climate in fall 2020, you see that many political debates have degenerated to the point where no one gains anything truly useful out of the conversation. Because of that, I decided to analyze why people debate, and how we can improve them to become more useful.

### Why Debate?  
The main and most obvious reason for people to debate, of course, is to convince the other side of your position, which we see in most political debates. The second reason for debate is to explore new ideas and gather new perspectives on the world. The best way to imagine this is in a world without any clashing of views, or debate. No one would come into contact with new viewpoints, and we would all believe our perception of reality to be true which would mean that there couldn't be consensus or law, because no one agrees on anything. 

In a sense, debate brings people together, combines views into one which we can all agree on, and makes it so that we can act upon those views. The reason why debate is so important is that it brings to light that you may never be fully true, and forces you to accept flaws in your thinking.

### Political Empathy
This brings me to the first key deviation in the status quo from my definition, the lack of political empathy. Whenever I see people debating nowadays, they always focus on the aspect of convincing one another but never stand to think that they may also be wrong. This is where political empathy comes into play. We must be able to put ourselves in the opposing view's shoes, and go through the steps that they went through to come to that conclusion, and then find the specific point of deviation from both sides beliefs. Most importantly, you should then approach that deviation with an open mind, ready to be changed with a convincing argument.

This entails less offensive debate, more listening, and coming to an understanding with another side. When you usually listen to people, they usually always want what you do, the best for the people, and people just have different ways of achieving that. Take the topic of lowering taxes for example. Some people argue that we must increase taxes to help others, and more people, and therefore it is the most obvious solution.  

But usually when you go through the logic of another side that wants to decrease taxes, you realize they aren't saying that we should hurt people, or never help them. They also want to help them, but by providing them jobs through stimulating the free market. Once you come to that realization, you can focus on the key point of contention, whether or not the free market works better or welfare works better with an open mind ready to be changed, and not senselessly argue on another part of the topic completely.

### Framework  
This leads into the second point, where I believe that people should establish a framework for what you value, before a debate. This is because if one person advocates that they save millions of lives, versus someone else saying they help the economy, which one is necessarily better? The idea of a framework is that it lets you know what to value first and foremost and have everything link to that.  

For example, if before a discussion, people said that I value freedom and liberty, while another said, I want to improve the quality of life the most for existing people, you would realize the difference, and argue whether freedom or quality of life is more important. This way we can prevent senseless debates where in that same example, one would say a law restricts our freedom, and the other says it improves lives, where since both of these are true, we need a framework to weigh them. 

This is so important because every person has a different moral compass, and while some people believe killing to be wholly bad, some might justify killing 1 to save 5. In practice, the moral ambiguities of life can be fixed by defining a specific moral framework for when people debate.

### Conclusion  
Overall, the current way we debate has become so politicized that we forget that we may be wrong, as well as become senseless without specific moral guidelines. Being honest, some of these ideas have been wandering in my head for a long time, and I just felt the need to get it on paper to solidify them. Hopefully, we could see more civilized debate, and I believe that when we implement these in real life, we can make the world a better, and more civil place.


An in depth analysis on unstructured debates, and techniques to make sure you can get the most out of them.

Political Empathy and the Importance of Frameworks

**TLDR;** The education system is broken and doesn't achieve what its supposed to. My proposed way to fix it is to run simulations of the real world to prepare students, as well as teach game theory and philosophy to enrich our understanding of how society works.  




In [Indiana University's survey](https://www.nais.org/Articles/Documents/NCGS%2520Presentation-Jun2013.pdf) of 81,000 students, 73 percent said they didn't like the school, and 60 percent said they didn't see the value in what they were learning. In an education system, perfected since 1635, almost 385 years, how can so many students hate it, and not even know why they learn what they learn? Before engaging on my opinions on how these came to be, and possible solutions, let us start by defining the education system. Currently, almost every single person has differing views, but I'll settle on the one defined in Harvard Law Reviews, "Social, Emotional, Ethical, and Academic Education" by Jonathan Cohen. He describes an education system's goal to prepare people socially, mentally, ethically, and academically. These all combine for the one goal, to help the economy, and to become a good member of society. I would argue that our current education system only delivers academics and a half-assed version of even that. I'll try to articulate where and why our current education system fails, and propose some possible ways to fix it.
### Definition of the Problem
First off our current education system. First, let us take the basis of our education system. It relies on the fact that students can learn when given material to learn, and later being asked to repeat what they learned 1-2 weeks later. I would argue, that an efficient student, can learn to succeed in school by short term memorization, and never really learn. The reason this works is since mostly everything is based on how well you can remember concepts and regurgitate them, there is no incentive to learn. Without an incentive to learn, students repeat this cycle, managing to get rewards (good grades), seemingly to forget about it the next year.  

This system doesn't help education as defined in any of our goals. It affects students socially, by pushing friends and family away with heavy courseloads (which students are incentivized to do with grades and GPAs), and also negatively affects them emotionally with the constant stress and numerical grades. We can actively see some of the side effects of these negative emotions with suicide and depression rates of teens at an all-time high. Ethically, our system does not promote cooperation or foster a sense of community or cooperation.  

I would actively argue that with competition at its highest, people are forced to compete against each other, discourage kindness, and helpfulness. Academically, our students are learning, but actively seem to forget the information taught, swapping it out each year with a new set of things to memorize. Without active retention, most people forget the material, but it does teach us good study habits, and how to learn on our own.  
### Possible Solutions
After thinking for a bit about possible solutions to education, I thought of one that might do the job. After doing work with AI using reinforcement learning, I was thinking about how it could be used in real life. What if we taught the basics up to first or second grade, and made them simulate economies, and judge people based on their success. Not only this, but also teach them about game theory, philosophy, and how to act like a rational actor.  

These would truly prepare them for real life and teach them social skills from game theory. Socially, it achieves its goal by teaching them how to act in real life, and the best way to learn how to act in real life is to simulate it with lesser impacts. They would be able to work with others, and also gain valuable knowledge from game theory about why honesty and trustworthiness matter, and when to be honest. They would gain good mental health through economic simulations because it would be fun and provide rewards. With no real impacts, students wouldn't have to study, but work on things that they enjoy, and love.  

This is great ethically because currently, our school system enforces ideals without any logic to support it. Through learning game theory and philosophy, they can come to understand how we came to uphold freedom, why academic dishonesty is bad, and why bullying would be bad. Academically, would be where this would differ the most from our current school system.  

Overall, I feel that most of what we learn in school is never put into use, but the parts that we do need to know would be learned through the simulation. Students can now self learn through the internet, and would be able to pick up new subjects as they go. For example, I was able to do this with programming, which then became something that I excel in, where I learned almost everything from YouTube videos. This way, students would be prepared to self learn, and gain knowledge useful in the real world, with real tasks.
### Conclusion
Overall, I feel like our current education system is outdated, and not built to accomplish goals, but no one says anything about it because it is so normalized. A good way to test this would be to try this in a small sample population of high-schoolers and look at the outcomes. One place it might fail would be to give colleges a good metric of how a student does. The reason I didn't elaborate on this, is because I feel colleges already are starting to lean more on essays rather than numbers, and I feel like a simulation would give a more holistic view of a student, not including their economic background. I'm excited about this, and would love to look more into testing a solution like this in the future!


The state of our current education system, and reforms that might work

Once I got off the AMA with Elon, I started to think about the biggest and most interesting points that I heard, and compiled a few different points

The maker movement is a movement where people realize that they can actually make and create the things that they use. With all the amazing technologies we have from 3d printers, to computers, we can build and prototype anything that we see. When asked about the maker movement, Elon responded by saying that people don't realize that they can create things, and talked that people should not only focus digitally, but actually take a look at optimizing and innovation. This is because people focus a lot of effort on cranking out products with more resources etc, when you solve the base problems of production, then you can increase the output without needing more resources. The main gist of everything he said is that people shouldn't be disconnected from everyday products, but be interested in the supply chain etc, because that's where innovation is needed.

TLDR; People need to think about where products come from and look into optimizing supply chains and production.

As a debater, I've seen people debate that capitalism is inherently flawed etc, but what Elon said really strikes home. Basically what he said was that capitalism in a sense, is not flawed, because it completely depends on the rules governing it. For example, to solve climate change we would need to stop consuming plastics, but currently plastic and oil are profitable, and therefore will not be fixed. Also gas cars are cheaper and easier to ride, so people choose them. For capitalism to work, you need to set the rules right, which is why he supports a carbon tax. This way, you can set the system to favor people who actually care about the environment, and penalize those who don't. This will slowly but surely shift the tide, because in capitalism, people have an aversion to loss and hurting the environment will no longer be the easier way.

Another interesting point that he made about the government is that the government is nothing other than a large monopoly. What this basically means, is that it has a monopoly over all the money and people. The reasons for the comparison is that a company isn't a monopoly and is small (Confederate US), the feedback loop that companies have (demand of customers => what the company does), was strong, in that if the people didn't want taxes, wanted the right to form a militia, etc. the government conformed. But now that the US is large and is basically a monopoly of power and hegemony (I semi-believe this, because China, Russia, and other superpowers are there), the country doesn't have to conform to the wills of the people. This is why he said it's especially important that people work for change in the country, and to fully not reply on the goverment. Extending in this from my point of view, I think that Locke's Social Contract can be seen here, where in simplest terms, it has 2 parts. First, people give up rights and freedoms (like how people need to follow laws), to a government to maintain safe and protect our other rights. The second part, is that if people at any point become dissatisfied by the government, they have the right to overthrow and re-establish a new government. Here, we can see that if at any point, there becomes a true monopoly of a government, people need to take it upon themselves to overthrow the monopoly and establish a new government that truly serves the rights of the people.

TLDR; Capitalism depends on the rules of money flow, and the government can be considered a monopoly, which decreases its responsiveness to people. This should be solved by people taking things into their own hands, and to not rely on the government.

Another question that he received, was how to convince people of your ideas. The response he gave was amazing, which was that you shouldn't base any thoughts or judge ideas from the person it comes from. Whether or not someone is a Nobel Prize Winner, or just another student, you should evaluate ideas from the basis of knowledge. The best way to convince someone, is to rely on physics, and explain that it would truly work and is possible. During his response, he also talked about how when you start thinking of an idea, you need to strip it down to its bones. This is so that there are no wrong preconceived notions, and then you build up from there. That way you can truly figure out a solution to an idea, when you think of it from the basics or science, and then can you only find solutions to those problems.

TLDR; Ideas should be based on the feasibility from the laws of physics, and to find solutions to problems, you need to strip it down to its basics then build up.

Though I won't spend too much time on it, I love the way Elon put this. The fact that brain's themselves can be thought as extremely complex AI, and that they are simply very complicated circuits. From that viewpoint, he talked about inputs, and how technology and the internet are a large amount of input, and getting it from your eyes, and interacting with your muscles, is like trying to access an ocean from a straw. The idea is that, like an AI that can accept many inputs and can be trained, if a human received an input like the internet from the brain in a electrical signal, once our brains figure out how to decode it, we would be able to access information at unimaginable rates that couldn't be thought before. With this mindset, it wouldn't be impossible to integrate with AI, or other inputs.

TLDR; The mindset that your mind is a complex AI, and can interpret any number of inputs that it receives, means we can wire inputs directly into our brain.

I would like to thank Elon Musk and Hack Club for giving me this amazing opportunity to learn and grow!

My highlights from being on an AMA with Elon musk, and some amazing points that I took from it!

> "My [child] recently enrolled in your HTML / CSS class and had a blast. In his words, he learned more in 2 weeks than what he did from a coding academy he used to go to in 3 months." 
\- **A Happy Parent**

For the past few weeks, I've been teaching a modest class of about 28 students, going through the basics of HTML, CSS, and JS on [Hack University](https://university.hackclub.com). During those days of teaching, there was one main thing I went over on the first day. **The reason you learn, is to make and create.** 

This has been one of my core principles ever since I started to
program, and do much of anything in my life. From day 1 in 4th grade, I decided I learned Python, a language where I learned the basics of programming, and the logic of it all. I got bored of programming and gave up after I learned the basics. This is what happens to almost every budding programmer, be it from 4th grade to college. 

This all changed once I realized that I wanted to make something cool. I set my mind on building a testing application, to record people's reaction times. From then, I researched about [the Stroop Effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect) and other ways I could record reactions. Then I realized, that I needed to run python on my Chromebook (before I knew of repl.it), and proceeded to learn to chroot my Chromebook to allow me to run Linux and then eventually run a Stroop Effect reaction test in Python. Through the entire experience, I think I learned more than I ever could from reading books, and memorizing functions, and learned to apply my brain to try to find resources to learn based on a goal.

What I stated above is something I call **goals based learning** where you learn a new subject, be it a new language like Go, or parametric equations, by working towards an end goal. This is because, if you start to learn something, without actually making something on the way, you end up becoming disinterested, or just plain give up. Also what this technique shows you is the real meaning of learning, is to do. What that means is that the reason you learn anything in life, in essence, is to do something, either by furthering that discovery or by applying it elsewhere. There is nothing gained by someone who just learns and forgets.

Back to the first quote, the reason I've received multiple 
emails saying that their children liked the class and learned, is because I gave them space and a goal. The goal was to create a website, about anything cool that you liked, and then I shoved a boatload of information into their face and taught them how to google. This way, when facing an obstacle that they haven't faced before when creating, they can easily research and learn ways to fix the problem, and eventually complete their projects independently.

The best and foremost positive about this mindset and learning process is that it doesn't emphasize the idea you can learn anything, but you can make anything. Once people can look at a project, split it up into chunks of what to learn and do, and finish the project, they can manage to create anything in the world, where nothing is unattainable.

My take on how to teach people in general

#article

my "favorite" year recapped!

Motivation

Education Part 2: Why Nothing Gets Done

Capitalism

Polarization

Political Empathy and the Importance of Frameworks

Education

Elon Musk AMA

How to Learn

.css-4cffwv{box-sizing:border-box;margin:0;min-width:0;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;}#article

my "favorite" year recapped!

Motivation

Education Part 2: Why Nothing Gets Done

Capitalism

Polarization

Political Empathy and the Importance of Frameworks

Education

Elon Musk AMA

How to Learn

#article