Everything is actually good

I. Against going to high school

There is a direction that my thoughts keep bouncing in — have kept bouncing in for years — that I want to talk about. It's something like, you could be so much more if you just thought a little harder and tried a little harder. Some part of me constantly imagines ways my life could be different.

Logan, why haven't you come up with interesting original computer science research yet? Why haven't you dropped out of school to take a weirder, more interesting life path? Why haven't you found the most interesting, most unconventional, most enlightened, strangest possible way to live your life? Why aren't you optimizing better?

I'm aware of my own agency. I know that I can just do stuff. This is hard to cope with in high school, because most high schools aren't designed for kids who want to shape their own paths — especially schools that serve a large student body. Larger schools develop a bureaucracy of their own, a "way of doing" that is rarely supportive of students who want to go beyond it. Special requests are denied; challenges to tradition are treated with exasperation and contempt, not enthusiasm.

School is at the same time kind of boring. The class content isn't really challenging; sure, you might have to put time in to study for tests or write good papers, but that's usually not because things are conceptually difficult; you're just not optimally efficient. Sometimes you need to memorize. Sometimes you need to go gather sources, and get distracted. The bottom line is that if you want a challenge, you have to find it on your own.

But doing that is difficult, too, because school requests that you spend at least 6 hours on campus, then a couple hours of homework, if you're taking advanced classes. Doing all the stuff that you "need to do" in order to succeed (according to the school) leaves you with little time or mental effort left. Your alternative is to take incredibly, mind-numbingly easy classes with people who will clown on you for reading books.

Literally you lol

(Which, like, if that's you, have fun idrc but hating books will not take you very far. There's lots of cool stuff in books.)

Aye, you can take somewhat interesting classes and have lots of work, or take mind-numbingly boring classes and have time to learn other stuff on the side.

But wait! Isn't there a secret third option?

II. Just drop out lol

I'm lucky to know some people with unconventional backgrounds. I knew someone who dropped out of high school to work on a Minecraft mods platform. I knew someone who was unschooled, didn't go to college, who just said fuck it and got a job at a supercomputing company. I knew someone who got money from Effective Altruists and hired a bunch of tutors with his friends, basically making his own school.

They remind me that I don't just have to sit in class and stare out the window wishing the teacher would let me open my laptop.

I know how to learn. I know how to teach myself; that's how I've gotten by all these years. Couldn't I teach myself so much more effectively if I just didn't go to high school? Like I could just read math textbooks, do the exercises, and probably learn it better than I would in my classes, faster. Here's the preliminary plan:

1. Drop out
2. Get a... homeschooling permit? or something?
   • if parents don't want to get homeschooling permit, get emancipated or something
3. Teach myself everything interesting and become cracked
4. Idk, get a job somewhere that doesn't care about degrees? Or just start a business of my own. I'm pretty smart, I could probably make a reasonable amount of money doing something right?

Ooh, I could just go work in a national park for a year and become cracked by reading a ton of math textbooks. Or I could become a digital nomad and exploit wealth inequality in Thailand to live for incredibly cheap. It couldn't be that hard, right? And life would be so interesting!

That is usually about as far as the planning process goes, if it even gets this far.

By default, I picked the "take work-heavy 'advanced' classes" option because it was well-defined and people thought I was the kind of person who did that, and because I liked the validation of easy number grades, and because the alternative was too aversive or poorly-defined. This means that I don't really have the mental energy to figure this plan out, because I have to finish this essay. Or do my summer homework. Or... idk, but there's always something more to do.

Plus, I don't know if I... actually want to? It's scary. My parents might be unreceptive, and then I have to figure it out myself. It's a lot of work for a poorly-defined idea. And I'm kinda tired. Planning stuff is hard. I don't know what I'd do with myself. I need to figure that out before I can drop out of school. But there's never enough time to figure that out, so I don't drop out of school.

Instead, I choose to find the local minimum. I pick the things in my environment that seem as close to interesting or worthwhile as I can: building a friend group. Becoming the Varsity soccer captain. Giving a TEDx talk. Winning the election for Student Body President. Having the highest GPA in school. Applying for summer programs. It all seems fun and challenging and meaningful at first, and then I start doing it, and then just keep doing it because it's "what I do," and because achievement motivation says I should.

It's like I'm stuck in this bowl, and I can't see anything above my y-level. I think I can see other places with steeper gradients, places with deeper bowls — life seems better over in that bowl where I took the leap for that National Park Ranger job — but I can't really see the hill I need to climb to get there, at least not with the amount of mental space I have remaining after all that damned work that I signed myself up to do voluntarily. (Nor would I have the willpower, consistency, discipline, or something to climb the surface anyway.)

Yup, looks like I entered the bowl when I enrolled in high school. I got nerd sniped, or rather, got status-anxietied and achievement-motivated into doing all these things that I'm not sure I actually care about. I don't feel at home with my soccer teammates, or with my student council peers; why do I even do this?

But I just keep grinding, because it's "what you do" and it's too steep to climb out, find another path. Months, semesters, years pass by. Suddenly it's college applications season. I committed to this high school thing, I guess I'll go to college too. At least there the classes will be interesting.

Shit, I should have figured out how to game the system. Agh, I should have thought a little harder freshman year. Should have become a nationally-ranked Squash player advocating for LGBTQ+ rights in the Squash community. I should have cold emailed sixteen obscure biology professors at UC Berkeley and spent my summer conducting publishable research in a fertility clinic. Whatever, it's too late now. I take the SAT, write my essays, send everything in. I guess we'll see.

Fast forward eight months. It's May 2024. I'm... incredibly happy with the person that I am? I'm going to a school I'm incredibly happy with, studying in a program better than anything I could have dreamed of for myself? I'm proud of the work that I've done and the life that I've led for the last four years of my life?

Huh?

Maybe I've been looking at this all wrong.

III. Guh, dumbass, you were actually optimizing well all along

The above is the narrative I trapped myself in for years. Now that I'm leaving, I can recognize that it's leaving out something really important.

Aye, high school is not the most interesting academic time of my life. It's not the place where I would go to learn everything, or to find my intellectual soul mates, or to actually contribute to science. I spent much of those four years of my life grinding, doing homework, commuting, writing emails, managing tasks. Academics were a time sink, and in terms of value it was pretty eh.

But all of this I knew going in. When I was applying to high schools, I had the following choices:¹

1. The only selective public school in San Francisco, known for being an academic pressure-cooker. Would spend my formative high school years in a place where everyone is suicidal idk
2. Catholic school, where everything is, like, fine I guess. Tuition is pretty reasonable, there's education there and it's, like, good ish. Would spend my formative years in a place where people are just... really normal?² Smaller than public school, much bigger than secular private. And go to mass every couple months.
3. Secular private school that I couldn't afford to attend. Would spend my formative years with all the rich people idk and also I'd spend all of my family's college savings and go into crazy debt 🔥
4. (don't go to school? I didn't consider this an option at the time tho and my parents probably wouldn't have let me)

I thought about this for a while. Education at the secular private schools was more flexible, more progressive, with smaller classes and quirkier teachers. Was it worth it, though, if it meant I grew up in (more of) a bubble? If it meant leaving college with many times the debt?

I decided I could wait to become extremely academically cracked. This is somewhat of a controversial choice(?) in the circles I run in now, but I figured I'd have great mentors in college who would support me (at the time, I was just confident in my future self's ability to ball out in college admissions), and in the meantime I could just teach myself, which I did. Plus, it's not like the education was horrible or anything, it was just not quite as cool as what the private schools offered.³

In return, I decided, I'd get something more valuable: I get to grow up around normal people, in a pretty normal environment that doesn't pit us against each other. I was aware that high school would be a critical period for development (though I didn't use those exact technical terms until I took AP Psychology) and I decided it was better to go to the place I'd be most likely to grow up to be well-adjusted and "normalish" relative to at least the median San Franciscan if not the median American. (I was strange enough already.) Catholic school means I get to learn how to lead people who aren't like me — I get to learn how to navigate cultural gaps, how to interact with people operating under a totally different value system (e.g. some of the athletes I played sports with had no regard at all for most of the things I valued — discussed more below); I get to develop cracked social skills, and I get to avoid spending formative years in a bubble around San Francisco's richest people.⁴

I'm really happy I did. Because while it was difficult, it was grindy, it was a local minimum, most of the ways that I suffered ended up forcing me to become awesome — forcing me to become someone I'm really excited to be.

I think the path I took is actually much closer to the global optimum than I thought.

We can look at how I spent my time — the extracurriculars and stuff — not as just "getting status anxiety'd" or whatever into doing stuff I didn't care about, but as doing the things locally available that seemed as close to valuable as I could find, and throwing myself into them. I did some shit that was really f* hard for me. But I did it because it seemed valuable,* and I grew a huge amount because of it.

Let's take a look at soccer, for example. Freshman year I was arguably the worst player on the freshman team, after more than half the freshman tryouts got cut. I resolved to be the varsity team captain by senior year, partly just to prove that I could do it.

Sophomore year I survived early-morning weight room sessions with upperclassmen who were better and stronger than me, and who very obviously looked down on me. I worked out 7 times a week some weeks, just because that's how the schedule worked out playing for club and school. I convinced my coaches to let me move to an entirely different club that had higher-level teams in order to get upward mobility, and then kept grinding hoping they'd move me up to a better team. (They didn't, but that's probably a good thing; a better team would have meant I actually entered the college soccer recruiting scene and would have lost a lot more time to a sport that I didn't love.)

I never fully fit in with the teammates I played with; I never really meshed with the culture that surrounded the sport. I did my best to make friends with people who valued almost none of the things I cared about — people who didn't give a shit about learning or doing cool things, who just wanted to survive the day and go to a Friday night party, who'd actually smoke before the games. It sucked. But I got stronger because of it.

Junior year I made varsity, played one game as a co-captain, and then lost my armband because I mentally collapsed under the pressure. My teammates didn't trust me — I mean, I didn't really either, who can blame them? — and I lost confidence in myself. I declined. By the end of the season I rarely played a full game, even a full half.⁵

Senior year I almost didn't play. My mom had to convince me to go to tryouts just to see how things shook out. I did, and I made varsity again easily, and I just... figured my shit out, I guess. Things felt different now that I wasn't in the shadow of older kids I wasn't close with. I figured out how to lead despite my differences, if awkwardly at times — my cultural fit wasn't always there, but that was fine, cause we had two captains. But was able to exert a positive influence in the end; I helped the program start rebuilding culture, and I served as a role model for younger kids who I knew I could influence. (A lot of them looked up to me because of my position on student council; I was a public figure and regularly made speeches.)

My senior season was kind of shit. We had our 3rd varsity head coach in three years. We placed near the bottom of the table. We had our moments, though — we beat our crosstown rivals in an unforgettable upset; I scored a goal for the first time in more than half a decade, an absolutely beautiful one. I won't forget those moments.

And after all the pain and suffering, all the awkwardness, all the grinding, I made it through to the other side much more powerful. Knowing I'm capable of the climbing that I did, even in an environment that I kind of hated, gave me self-assurance. Soccer itself is fun, and I'll probably start playing it again eventually, but it wasn't really about soccer. Even if the activity itself wasn't super valuable (as would be e.g. producing research or building something cool) the experience (often the suffering) did build character, a lot of it. I know I can do hard shit, miserable shit. With that knowledge comes a sense of great power.

And likewise, for the rest. All the things that I was frustrated made me either more grateful for things when I have them now, or made me stronger.

IV. Suffering and beauty

I kind of hated high school. I was mostly miserable for its duration. I wasn't academically challenged enough — usually — so I usually felt oppressively bored or like an academic robot when the workload got harder. Socially, something always felt missing; I never quite found "my people," people I felt at home with regards to values and interests. I struggled to figure out my identity. I went through a couple extremely difficult relationships and friendships.

Everything bad turned into something beautiful.

I wasn't academically challenged enough, so I (at least sort of) figured out how to self-teach most of the interesting stuff I wanted to learn. Socially, something always felt missing — but that forced me build new friend groups, and when that seemed only partially fruitful, to keep searching in other places; it led me to PAIR, which meaningfully altered the course of my life positively and gave me access to an ungodly amount of amazing people. I struggled to figure out my identity; out of that came one that feels genuine and meaningful. I recognized a place for myself in the world, in a large part due to being out of place.

I went through various painful friendships and relationships. I won't go into much detail about what happened, for obvious reasons, but in the process I learned how to be attentive to people, all the ways that are important to care about them, from experiences where I didn't feel cared for. I learned what relationships are and aren't supposed to feel like, and how they're supposed to progress, from those that didn't work. I learned about myself — what I need, what I care about — and, idk, how to love, from falling for the wrong person.

Even graduation was frustrating — at least, at first. Many of the awards at graduation were offered as a sort of consolation prize, to people who hadn't been recognized or had platforms throughout their high school career; this meant that I didn't get anything save the things they were forced to give me (e.g. the academic excellence award, a.k.a. "you graduated with a 4.0 good job"). I wasn't valedictorian,⁶ wasn't allowed to speak as the student body president either, blah blah. But then I realized that my unhappiness was literally a skill issue — that the suffering was caused by a difference between my expectations/desires and reality; I thought graduation would be more validating (read: more about me) and it wasn't. Then I learned that the root of suffering is desire and became enlightened because of it.⁷

For every unfulfilled desire and every miserable moment I've gotten something beautiful in return. I've learned more about how to learn, how to care, how to love unconditinally, how to communicate, and to lead, and to survive. I'll say that waxing poetic or dramatic here is appropriate to the importance these things hold for me internally, though I can't really express all of these things with the meaning they deserve. Obviously I'm not a complete person. It's just high school. But I'm surprised by just how much I got out of "just high school."

At the end of it all, the person I have become is one that I'm proud to be.

Blah blah status symbols, achievement motivation satisfied (varsity captain, student body president, high school research at stanford, summer scholarship for AI at cambridge, first in my class on GPA);⁸ I have smart, interesting friends at approximately every major university in the country, plus many outside of it. I know love, and I know how to love.⁹ And to care, and to communicate, and to lead, and to survive when necessary.

There was a light at the end of the tunnel, too: I got unbelievably generous results from college admissions, and had the privilege of saying no to institutions I could only dream of admission to a year ago. I didn't have a "dream school" going into the process¹⁰ but I did by the end, and it's the one I'm attending. (They call it America's dream school too :)

I get to study a major more perfectly suited to me than anything I could have dreamed of myself, at the school, and in the place, where almost everything in AI is happening.

All of this without bullshit, without wasting my life on fake resume items and collegemaxxing — no hooks, no blown-up fake diversity, no obscure athletic recruitment or big donor legacy status. I literally just did what seemed valuable and interesting, and then wrote essays that said true things, and I ended up here.

At the end of it all, I don't need to be better. I'll never be able to stop feeling driven to improve, like I could be better — but I can let those thoughts go instead of engaging with them. The person that I am today is someone I'm proud to be.

And in the end, it turns out there was, after all, a deep, systematic plan. I used to think that looked like an explicit, detailed document, describing every part of my life, every protocol, every system. I tried that, and it didn't work. The systemic optimization is in reality just called values.

I followed my values. I have circumstances that made that possible — a family that loved me and gave me the foundations for my success, economic stability, etc. etc. — but within those foundational circumstances, it was my choices that took me to where I am. I did what felt valuable, what felt right; I held onto my integrity, and got through shitty situations with my head high knowing I did everything I could. The world gave me what I needed — was it luck? skill? love? I don't know, but it worked out far better than could be expected from coincidence.

Following your internal values is a very good decision-making algorithm. We have them for a reason. You don't have to build complex life optimization from the top down — you're already doing it internally.

With all of this said and done, some things I learned in high school, all of which I'm still working on living by:

1. Follow what feels true and authentic, and difficult. You know what that feels like. The world will give you what you need if you do.
2. You can only really love someone if you love them unconditionally, without attachment or clinging.
3. You can only really love the world if you love it unconditionally, without attachment or clinging.
4. It is ok to suffer; the way that you bear it will define who you are. Do everything you can and then leave the rest up to \<fate or whatever>. Let the suffering exist, understand it, and keep living.
5. Pain and suffering are not the same thing. You can have pain without suffering; suffering occurs when you resist pain, you resent it or obsess over it. Pain is a part of life. Suffering does not have to be. (The twitter self-help guru version of this is "Suffering = Pain * Resistance")
6. Relationships are simultaneously that deep (in importance and complexity) and not that deep (in terms of what to do). Communicate clearly and simply, about everything (well, to a reasonable extent obv)
7. Details matter, a lot: how you carry yourself, how you listen (or choose not to); whether you let them in to the conversation or shut them out whether you send a text reaching out, whether you make sure they're ok.
8. It is almost never worth it to keep your feelings silent.
   • see also things I've learned about relationships
9. Build friend groups when you don't have them.
10. Keep trying things; worthwhile success takes a lot of time to build, and it probably won't build in the way you expect it to.

V. Postscript: Speculations on moral and intellectual luck

One keeps forgetting to go down to the foundations. One doesn’t put the question marks deep down enough.

(Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 62c)

This section isn't very well-written (i.e. not clearly articulated/organized, also tonally weird and egotistical), sorry. I just wanted to include this discussion because it's interesting and as a reminder to myself that I want to think more on the subject.

I said that following your values is a good optimization strategy — I say that because it was for me, and because it probably would be a useful thing to hear for people who are younger than me but think similarly to me. There are two key sticking points with that contention, though, that don't sit right with me.

In all the moral philosophy I have done, I have always wanted an empirically or metaphysically-justified set of values, and have come to the (novel, groundbreaking, unprecedented) conclusion that you can't get one. :(

You can't justify utilitarianism over deontology or any other ethical system, except insofar as you do so with reference to other values, usually moral intuitions about edge-of-distribution outcomes; these are frameworks you put on top of your foundational principles, not foundations you build from nothing, and they can never act as the latter. Moral systems cannot justify themselves, by their nature. ¹¹ To put it another way, there is no "verifiably true value system" — there are only vibe checks, guesses, that seem true, which we can try and make more reasonable and internally-consistent.

Obviously, certain postulates seem self-evident: "human flourishing is good" is one, "killing people is usually bad" is another, etc.; these moral intuitions that I have seem to generally match with society's, and allow for effective cooperation (the closest thing we have to "objective morality") and produce meaningful choices. Therefore, I think it's reasonable to depend on value intuitions — this is what I mean when I say "pursue your values" — where they are relatively self-consistent and I approach them critically.

So let's take it for granted that as a result of doing this, I've become (1) happy, (2) connected with myself and the world, (3) conventionally successful (insofar as you can be such in high school).

Either I have really good values, or I'm very good at pursuing average-worth values(?), or I have above-average values and am above-average competent at pursuing them. These have uncomfortable implications.

Let's talk about the first option. It isn't obvious that "following my internal values" should result in the things above; if I was less curious, or less agentic, or whatever, I wouldn't have become the person that I am, and maybe would have been less successful or happy. One interpretation of the fact that I have become happy and successful is that my particular values are above-average good.

I bring this up only to discuss the fact that I didn't chose my values. I, like, made choices, but at the fundamentals I don't think the decisions in my head, the values that I believe in, are things that I picked. I had to get values from somewhere in order to make decisions… you could argue that I somehow improved my values, in order to improve my values, I would have needed a higher set of values to draw from, and I don't know where I would have gotten those values from. They could have been environmentally derived (somewhat plausible, but the fact that I've had relatively stable patterns since I was very young his evidence against this) or genetic (?? could you inherit complex values??) or, like, metaphysical (I don't have a world model that includes this kind of thinking, but thinking about metaphysical models might be useful for finding things that do fit into my world model)… unless the third is the case, I feel like in neither case can I say that I was not morally lucky.

It's possible that something approximating some of my values is instrumentally convergent for "emotional intelligence" (wisdom?) in the way that power seeking is convergent for regular intelligence, and I got blessed with a crazy wisdom stat or something. Since partially-hereditary regular intelligence is a reasonable thing to believe, I feel like this idea — genetically-influenced emotional intelligence/sensitivity/connection or something like that — makes sense. It also seems to explain why, for example, monks of different religions tend to… be in a similar way; they've converged on similar sets of values and practices (presence, surrender, lightness, etc.) through different traditions. Wisdom convergence would be crazy. Wouldn't that be capital-t Truth‽

Anyway, let's also talk about the second option: maybe I'm just very intelligent, and because of that intelligence I instrumentally converged onto the set of values I have because "happiness" and "success" are, like, natural goals to have? But there have been a lot of intelligent, successful, and miserable people throughout history — in fact it's a pretty common thing. It makes sense that material success would be convergent for intelligent people (because e.g. smart people tend to be curious and be interested in academics, and because status/power-seeking are generally valuable) but moral success seems less likely, as I said above. Lots of precedent for tortured and miserable geniuses.

It doesn't really matter.In either case, or in the case of both, Logan, the person that I am today, did nothing to deserve either of these things. If it was my childhood environment that made me have good values, I was morally, circumstantially lucky. If it was somehow something genetic that either made me have good values, or made me smart, that was genetic luck.

A lot of the traits that I consider essential to who "I" am have been with me since I was very young. I was always pretty curious, and interested in learning about the world. School has always been pretty easy for me, so I've self-taught other stuff (read: I read about things) for most of my life. I was rebellious (or at least impish) when I was younger; that translated into a more refined "agency" now that I'm older.¹² My parents, when we talked about their parenting style, said that they tried to "parent around the edges" — to "get me," i.e. understand me, and to "remove obstacles" for me.

However you put these things, I was lucky, whether they genetic or environmental. The most essential defining drives or traits I find in myself were some combination of genetic or environmental — either way, they were not the result of "free will," whatever that means.

I have done hard things and made good choices. I worked extremely hard in high school. But it seems like the fundamental things that distinguish me from others — the things that allowed me to do hard things and make good choices and work extremely hard — were not things that I chose, that I deserved. I am a product of randomness, my self is not my own!

Some other options or consequences that come to mind:

• There are lots of ways to become happy, successful, and connected with self/world under different sets of values, and you're actually not that lucky, this is reasonably common
• You've accumulated wisdom/luck over cycles of reincarnation or rebirth or however you want to phrase it — there's some sort of underlying essence or soul that has persisted over lifetimes — and actually your luck was deserved
• This is a trivial conclusion because free will isn't real anyway
• The self is an illusion lol who even cares (not just "you don't have free will" but "your identity itself is an illusion"/consciousness is a side effect of brain processing and there's nothing actually "in control" or something)

I think that partially-heritable "trait emotional intelligence" is the most plausible explanation — that I was born with some sort of predisposition towards sensitivity or awareness that allowed me to figure things out more easily.

Anyway, regardless of what is truly the origin of me, there is great cause to be grateful, and great cause to be content.

Footnotes