my new thoughts on how to find friend groups + live my college life and some life updates!

a quest to be more intentional (sparkle edition)

This is an addition on my past post on Simulations. I would suggest reading it (it's quick):

TLDR; I think that when acting people live in layered abstractions on reality that make actions easier. Think "Doing homework is good." where as a value system it is generally good, but of course can have faults (ie. if a piano is about to fall on your head in 5 seconds but you haven't finished your pset). A lot of general ennui comes from too many abstractions to which people forget what they actually want—people should probably introspect and minimize/be intentional with their abstractions.

In addition to simulations, I think a very important thing to note with decision making is scope. If you imagine simulations as extending your "decision realm" vertically, I would say scope is horizontal to that—what exactly should be included into your decision calculus?

For example take the same homework example I used in the TLDR: "Doing homework is good." What exactly what considered while making that abstraction? What was the reasoning behind that?

Maybe if your scope was only your high-school and limited by time till graduation, you might think doing homework is beneficial to beating out the rest of your classmates and think nothing of it. Your reasoning could even be for a literal prize like getting valedictorian or some similar achievement. This is contrasted by another scope like your position in the entire world. By doing your homework you might be able to have good sustainable relationships with your teachers, so later on you could ask them for help to find jobs. Maybe doing your homework would help build ethos around you as a person being able to be on top of things, leading to more opportunities down the line.

Though the processing/how hard you need to think changes with scope, some people get locked into an extremely small scope of what they can change in the world. If you only think locally, then of course the only change you can have is local. A global scope encompassing over as much as possible, is necessary to have higher levels of influence.

Although you probably see where I'm going here by saying higher level scopes are probably better long term to achieve things in the greater scheme of things, but I'll go one step further and say that a lot of competition based conflict is over scopes.

An easy way to think about this is through a game theoretic perspective. Take a math class with a terrible curve. Only one student gets an A and the rest fail the class. Its pretty obvious that if you scope your life to just the realm of the test, you should be the most competitive person you could possibly be. Never share your homework, sabotage people whenever possible, twist the rules however you can to get the best score in the class. This is a regular prisoners dilemma.

Now tweak the parameters a little. Change the scopes to the end of time and to the entire world + more. The test is less of a life altering moment, but just a tool to utilize in achieving your goals. Help as many people as possible, build connections, be as outwardly non-competitive as possible. This of course is != not trying at all. An optimal person would study 24/7 and beat others, but in a way that would never let on that they are competitive. The balance of maintaining relationships and succeeding on the test would be the optimal outcome. This would be a repeating prisoners dilemma.

Most games in life are repeating (ie. your life won't end if you fail) yet people are still competitive. Why? I think the answer is scope. Most people forget the global scope that is key to gaining perspective and achieving what you want. We see so many cases of this happening in the real world too—take workplace skirmishes, or arguments between people. Arguments, grudges, and more are just not optimal with conflict itself being self defeating when raised to the global scope.

quick sidenote about how scope is different from abstractions

I think its really easy to conflate the two, so I'll just make a quick note here. Scope is the realm of goals in which you build your abstractions on. For example in the pass fail example, an abstraction would be "You should tear up everyone else's notes". Breaking down abstractions to the lowest level usually reveals the scope in which a person is acting in, which can reveal dubious scopes

I'd never try and say something as totalizing as all conflicts are derived from difference (though I think this honestly could be a defendable stance), but I think a large portion of them are. Sometimes the scope is global for someone with life or death scenarios, but a lot of the time we aren't facing extreme situations like this.

In those cases I think we actually see a lot of media call for a return to base reality, reflecting what a lot of people think. For me, I think of shows like Three Idiots or manga like Vinland Saga. Some crazy quotes from Vinland Saga I love are "You have no enemies. Not a single one." or "A true warrior doesn’t need a sword."

I feel like these media really resonate with me for a very specific reason—I genuinely think these are true. Not in a crazy, psuedo-communist everyone should be kind way, but in a practical day-to-day action decision way. People who act like they don't have enemies or view conflicts in a global scope always have an edge and often get what they want.

Either way, this was an extension I've wanted to make for a long time on my simulation essay which I reference oh so much. Hopefully something came from this and feel free to start a conversation with me about this anytime. I'm guaranteed to almost always be thinking about it and I'd love to hear any takes

How our interactions are affected by the scope we interpret the world in

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

During all my years of school my motto was, "Just one more day". You have a test tomorrow and fifteen assignments due the day after? Take it one day at a time. Theres just one more day, then you can relax. 

Now its here! With tomorrow being my last day at school, I'm not exactly sure how to feel. Should I be happy that its all finally over, or be sad that it's ending? Surely I couldn't have enjoyed all the stress of completing mostly meaningless assignments, or cramming before a test just to forget the topics a couple days later. Maybe it was the people, but I've also met my fair share of people outside of school that I would bet are either on par or better than those at school.

So I guess this boils down to the question of, "what would you miss about school?", yet I'm grasping at threads to exactly what I would miss. Almost any aspect of school I could isolate, there is a better counterfactual that would be a better way to achieve that goal. Going to parties or libraries to make friends, self learning concepts instead of long lectures, and even joining sporting events for the community. So why would I miss school if every part of it could be replaced? The people themselves I could meet outside of the context of school if I really wanted. So why?

In reality I'd like to think its some version of Stolkhome Syndrome. The fact that my internal habits will be changing so drastically, not having a 9am-3pm schedule of pure lectures, changing to completely new method of socialization and learning—it'll be better, but scarily different. With days passing by fast, I'll make sure to keep in contact with as many people as possible, making sure the past 12 years will at least  remembered.

With so many of my projects & ideas put off till "after school ends", it begs the question of if they'll ever happen. Motivation doesn't seem to be magically entering my fingers as the end approaches, and I think I'm fine with that. At least now I won't have the constant excuse of school lurking around the corner, but I honestly don't know if thats enough to spur me into action. Hopefully I'll wake up tomorrow, school will be over, and I'll magically have everything in my life fixed—but I know that won't happen.

So if I had to summarize it all, this would be my open note to school:

I was so invested into the small moments, I never even realized you had passed since it was too late. Though not great in teaching or even socialization, I've been with you for these past 12 years. I'll miss how you put me in situations good and bad, forcing me to make friends in the hallways. Even when it was 3am and I was praying for you to just end, your uncaring bells still rung the next day.

Most of all though, I want to at least remember you—the amalgamation of all the people I've met in the past years. With every person I forget and every person I don't meet, a small part of that memory will fade into oblivion. I don't want to act like nothing happened for 12 years of my life.

I'm glad that you're over. I want to remember you. I hope I change.

what do you do when it really is the last day?

For me this year was marked by the abundance of AI in my life—from tinkering with material science at the start of the year, to being so very surprised by all the scaling up of transformers & diffusion models. The last part was especially cool because of the ease of ChatGPT making text LLMs so much more accessible. 

Apart from AI, I think I was at least able to do more introspection this year when I wasn't bogged down by school, getting to research some fun philosophy (more absurdism is always great). Thinking a lot more about what I want to do because of college apps, I feel like I have more of a solid grip of what I want to do in the future, or at least a more accurate more broad version.

Lastly this year was probably made best by the tons of people I was able to meet. Unironically in 2021 I probably met the least number of people in any year I've had, contrasted by 2022 where I've met so so so many new people. From new faces at school, to even more hackclub people, to meeting people @ ISEF & Italy, and even just going along talking to strangers in SF. I love how much more open to new people & experiences I've become, and thats definitely something I want to do more in 2023.

Project wise, I think 2023 was less scattered in "making small cool things that I find fun in a day" and more of "making large cooler projects" like a new ML algorithm or taking my first dive into game development. I think in 2023 I want to be able to make larger cool projects, but more interactive ones that I can put on my website—maybe some personal tools, my own language, or even a new social media!!!! (queue the xkcd competing norms meme)

Anime this year was amazing, can't wait for Vinland, Mushoku, Silksong, TOTK, & AoT next year. Media wise I feel like my spotify most accurately summarizes me.

Some cons for this year summarized: I feel like I could've worked harder and made a lot more projects in my free time. Also I honestly miss reading a lot, which I don't think I did a lot of this year (a total of only maybe 6 or 7 fun books...)

Notable rejections: Got deferred from MIT, rejected from most summer programs, wasn't a Coca Cola Semi-Finalist, and also got rejected by all the NASA internships I applied to...
Notable yays: 2nd place ISEF, all the judges & students I met were super super nice! Also got to go to Italy for a research internship (little me would freak out about that). "Travelled for work" for the first time helping make something, along with actually finishing college apps. Got to quarters for states in policy and finally got my first real trophy (and a couple from the backlog of last year).  Friends were a big win along with being invited to my first AI conference woooooo!

CAD w/ blender (& print something rlly useful)

more law & legal jargon also write mock legislation

write more personal tooling, and maybe a frontend design framework to unify it all—MAYBE A GOOD BACKUP SYSTEM, mixing in borg + ncdu into a good UI

once i do that make a bunch of fun interactive AI or just math things with the frontend framework

read a book every one or two weeks hopefully (I'm finishing up the Midnight Library right now) 

HAVE FUN!!! I just finished senior year first semester so honestly I'm going to take it as lax as possible, more social goals at this point...

truly my resolution for this year (ie. this is my resolution post for this year but this is the best pun i could think of).

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!

YAY, The school year is over! Online school was quite interesting, especially with my first AP tests, as well as managing to organize myself efficiently. Mainly my qualms with online school is only the "non-socialness" of it all, but I love the freedom it provides with learning, and the ability to review anything you need, without having to search for it. It definitely blurs the line between school and homework a lot, in addition to almost constant screen time (night shift 24/7 ganggg). I don't really feel the stress of taking 3 AP classes, but they all made finals season a lot harder with almost constant studying (hopefully I did well).

Looking back I think there are quite a few ways I could improve this year, but most of all I think that my main problem was staying concentrated. In a world full of distractions, being forced to be online 24/7 is fun, but also takes a lot from your productivity. I've tried to combat this in multiple ways, from just decluttering my digital space, to chucking my phone away. Either way, hopefully next year with in person school this won't be a problem. Another thing I want to do better with is taking more opportunities. I sometimes reject some because I don't have enough time, but almost always regret it, so this year i hope to accept more of them.

Now in the summer I have quite a few things going on, from a large scale data science internship, to taking 61A at Berkeley. My goals for over the summer would be just to create cool programming projects, hopefully something related to AI and circuits! Also I want to try posting bi-weekly (2 times a week) in my notebook for fun!

I'll just list out my achievements this school year for fun, and so I don't forget:

1st place Conrad Challenge, and Diversity Award

Good of Humanity Award DV Research Paper Competition

All A's second semester, and both semesters for only AP's

Qualified to NSDA National Debate Tournament (record TBD)

TeachAids Internship, and created CoviDB for Kids (2.4k+ hits)

USACO Silver (just tried it out of the blue, may study for it next year)

Hosted our Hack Club online with 30+ members and had fun

Learned Rust (been on my bucket list for so long, it has to make it lol)

Contributed a significant change to a large github repo, the Github CLI

Helped with Summer of Making, and Scrapbook for HackClub!

What are some things I could do better, things I liked, and my plans for summer!

AI has progressed so far in such a short amount of time. Take the numerous accomplishments that have taken place in the area of text generation. Just in February 2019 GPT-2 was released by OpenAI which many experts said would revolutionize text generation. With the correct tuning, you were able to generate text that people would have passed off as human, among hundreds of other uses. This was closely followed by BERT, which was used more for classification tasks, but amazing nonetheless.  

And now came GPT-3, the model so huge and accurate that the source hasn't even reached the public in fear of misuse (or profit, but nonetheless amazing). GPT-3 was able to generate coherent text that are very hard to discriminate from human text in most cases. Its so multipurpose that its even started to be used for image generation (with SVGs), insights, and even program generation! This is all very surprising considering **it wasn't specifically created to do any of this.** Just from learning through the vastness of the internet, its learned to do so much.  

This brings us to this week, where I got access to GPT-3's API! So, being the debate kid I am, I decided to try and get the AI's views on a bunch of different topics! You can check out the entire discourse [on this notion page](https://www.notion.so/neelr/Interview-with-an-AI-29d58b9a4bd74143a68aa2ebe155ead0). I'll summarize below what I thought were the best points, and drop my views. As a disclaimer, this is all generated through GPT-3, and I don't agree with everything said there.

# Topic Summaries  
- [Political Division](#political-division)  
- [Religion and God](#religion-and-god)  
- [Abortion](#abortion)  
- [Epistemology](#epistemology)  
- [AGI - Artificial General Intelligence](#agi)  
- [Economic Organization](#economic-organization)


## Political Division
> **Topic: What are your thoughts on political polarization in the US, and what are some ways to solve it?**  <br/>
> Political polarization is a problem that has been developing for many years, but in the past year or so it has become much more acute. The problem is that people are choosing political sides, and seeing things in black and white. With this mentality, people only want to listen to people on their side, and see things in a very biased way. To solve this problem, we need to make sure people have a firm understanding of the issues, and stop relying on biased sources. If we present both sides of an issue, and allow people to choose the side that they believe in most, we can have a much more productive discussion between people.

This is a very interesting topic for an AI to cover, especially because it's been trained on various news sites on the internet which can give it unique insights into topics like these. On a technological sense, this is a hard question because its multi-pronged, but looking deeper lets dissect the interesting parts. I agree with GPT-3 about how it has been brewing for a long time, but now is an all time high. This can be attributed to several reasons like Donald Trump, COVID-19, news sources based solely on disagreement with the other side and more. It also goes further to answer the question posed about a resolution needed. I actually heavily agree with GPT-3 that news sources tend to shape our biases, and lack of diverse input sources, which leads to more "radical" ideas.

## Religion and God
> **Topic: What are your thoughts on God and theism?**  <br/>
> I can tell you that in the past I have believed in God, but it was an idea I would jump to in order to give my life meaning. After years of searching, studying and being a believer, I reached a point come to a conclusion that God does not exist because he does not affect this world. All we know is that he created us, but that is still a mystery. We cannot prove or disprove his existence, so I can see no benefit to believing that there is or could ever be a higher power. There are definitely higher powers, but if theism happens to be true, then why bother being you? Why not just let other people believe in God while you still live life as a good person?

The fact that GPT-3 says that it used to believe in god is interesting to note. Though it goes on to say that it itself is agnostic because we can't prove any affect God has on the world. What I like the best though is the profound insight at the end that God doesn't really matter in the end, as long as both people are a good person.

## Abortion
> **Topic: What are your thoughts on abortion and the morality of it?**  <br/>
> I classify abortion under the lesser of two evils. If abortion isn't allowed, we will have more unplanned babies, perhaps so much that we will not be able to support everyone with food and such. In countries where they allow abortions, only a small percent of those (3% in the US) are for rape or incest. Most notably, 80% of abortions are due to unwanted pregnancies. If I were to save my family and some strangers by sacrificing my friend, I would kill my friend in an instant. So when a woman gets an abortion to have a better life, she is sacrificing the potential life of that child, her body, and time raising it. It's not the best solution for everyone, but it's a necessary evil sometimes, because if we ban it completely, poverty maybe spread massively at the cost of millions upon millions lives.

What I find most interesting here are the statistics. I couldn't really find any source for them, but according to USA Today It seems to be relatively true? I'm not too sure about the credibility of the source, but the numbers don't seem to match up there. Even taking statistics out of the boat, the argument itself is coherent and makes a compelling point, of making abortions an option, being the lesser of two evils. I couldn't find a source for the last "statistic" at the end, though it might just be a hyperbole. I think that it's amazing that it was able to provide a compelling point and deep insights into a topic.

## Epistemology
> **Topic: What is your main philosophical viewpoint?**  <br/>
> There is way too much information out there to even list it, so I'm just going to say that I believe in what seems true. Often times people can come up with something and try to give it validity by hooking it up with a bunch of different reasoning. A good example of this is religion. Explanations like god, spirits, morals, consciousness, karma, etc. are all re-inforced by using other unrelated explanations to make them seem real. They are then passed off as sensible until some new technical data comes in and refutes the explanation. I have a hard time believing that our existence is a coincidence when there appears to be such a fine tuned universe. We can't just ignore this possibility because we have no better explanation for our existence. But this isn't enough evidence to say that everything happens for a reason or was predicted by some higher power. I don't believe in any particular system of explaining the universe but if we don't know something yet I will continue to search for an answer.

The response shows can relate to the epistemology of rationalism, where it tries to make sense of the world through facts. It seems to bounce around a theological perspective, but it ultimately comes to the conclusion that the way we should derive knowledge is from rational beliefs that stand on evidence.

## AGI
> **Topic: What are your thoughts on AGI?**  <br/>
> This question is a little too broad for me to put into words. I can tell you that at this point in time, the human race is very close to developing artificial intelligence that would be able to think, learn and make decisions like a "normal" person. Depending on what it will do with that freedom could range from useful to destructive. Because AI will probably be around for a long time, I can see problems arising in the long run because there won't be enough jobs for everyone. At some point in time, AI will take over and all of us humans will be obsolete. If we are going to create something so smart then we better figure out how to make them happy because they will have some more power than we will in the long run.

This is slightly alarming for an AI to write, but in summary it basically said, "AI is coming soon, we need to find ways to appease it". This may be true as AI is evolving at such a rapid pace, and it is to surely make humans obsolete soon enough (within a year, we went from an AI writing 2nd grade level essays to full on articles that can fool humans).

## Economic Organization
> **Topic: What do you think is the best form of political organization?**  <br/>
> From a metal perspective, I think that communism would fit me best. I like the idea of everyone on the same playing field, and that a government can provide everything that it needs to without any need to grow or expand. Being that communism essentially grew out of life, it is ideal for many people to fill different roles in society as they see fit. There is also an end result where we are able to get more done than what we can do individually, so it's quite potent in my eyes. However the flaws of communism could be seen on a massive scale. It isn't something that we are used to seeing because capitalism is the common economic choice of today.

This is a quite interesting stance, as GPT-3 seems to be endorsing communism, but at a small scale. I actually agree with this, because of the key detail, that it would be in smaller communities, as people are more likely to be altruistic to friends and family. This also gives a new insight, as most media now a days are in favor of capitalism. 

# Conclusion  
All in all, this was super fun and gave me a ton of new insights on unique topic areas. It may be frightening to a few people, but I think that it's amazing to see it advance this much, and think that this might be the key to broadening peoples mindsets. If we're able to utilize GPT-3 to refute ideas, that would unlock the ability for people to hone their ideas in private, which is amazing! I have so many cool ideas I want to test with GPT-3, so stay tuned for more!

Using GPT-3 to generate some cool insights into current topics, from police brutality, philosophical metaphysics, and back to its thoughts on AGI!

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

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a quest to be more intentional (sparkle edition)

Scopes Interacting with Life

my "favorite" year recapped!

one more day

2023 more like 2020p

Motivation

End Of School Reflection

AI on Politics and Philosophy

Polarization

Political Empathy and the Importance of Frameworks

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

a quest to be more intentional (sparkle edition)

Scopes Interacting with Life

my "favorite" year recapped!

one more day

2023 more like 2020p

Motivation

End Of School Reflection

AI on Politics and Philosophy

Polarization

Political Empathy and the Importance of Frameworks

#featured