Life Update: Winter Quarter, Momentum, and the Plan for Now

Header image: J.M.W. Turner, Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth. (from Wikimedia Commons)

For the past three months I've worn a coin around my neck. People kept asking me why it was there, and I told them it was a "sentimental quarter"; I'd be evasive about it if they pressed any further, because I enjoyed the mystique and didn't want to reveal how silly its origin was. It was both deeply personal, bound up with intense insecurity, and also little bit funny and dumb.

It's there because I decided to change. At the end of my first quarter of college I was desperate and kind of loathed myself. I took a light quarter, thinking that was the right decision to make as a college freshman; I ended up just becoming frustrated, restless, and jealous. I felt like I wasn't working hard enough; I felt like I wasn't making progress. I felt like I wasn't good enough for myself, like I was wasting away, like I'd left high school but continued to be trapped in the same patterns of desire and unfulfillment, unable to muster the executive function required to actually become the person I wanted to be. Inside I felt an intense pressure, like I was going to break down or explode, frustration and anxiety and desire and ambition coalescing into a dense ball in my diaphragm.

I remember distinctly being in the study lounge with Ailon. We were plotting about what I'd do to change my life. We set some things out, and they were awesome but scary; I wasn't sure if I was capable of them, but I felt like I had enough energy inside me to keep me going. I'd be different, I told him; I'd be more like the person I want to be. (At the time I think I used the word "cracked," which I regret and which I have recently been attempting to remove from my vocabulary.) I needed him to "just give me a quarter" and we'd both see. As a joke, he handed me a physical quarter. This was tremendously funny at 3am. I told him I'd put it on a chain and wear it as a symbol, and thus it remains today.

I can't yet declare victory, and won't be able to for a while. There's still quite a winding road ahead. I can, however, declare one small battle won: I have turned the ship. Last quarter I did a lot of hard things and very little bullshit; I pushed through intense fear. My will got stronger, and so did my body. I put myself finally on what feels like the right path.

I'd been trying for years throughout high school. I always wanted to be the someone who worked really hard, who did crazy and hard shit and challenged himself and woke up early, who was learning awesome things all the time. Above all, I wanted vitality. I wanted to wake up with nervous excitement. But I'd try to wake up early, and instead just end up underslept and disoriented; I'd try to read a textbook or take a course but instead get overwhelmed and lose my momentum on it. School always took precedence over what I wanted to do on my own, and so after the first 20 pages took me an hour and a half to get through, I'd realize I needed to go finish my stupid English assignment and then never pick up the book again. I'd subtly feel like the book was intractable, and so I should do something else.

I settled for fragmentary learning, in the cracks that school or sports didn't fill. I got used to quietly disliking what I spent most of my time doing, and the time I wasn't working became escape; instead of being excited to learn, I was put off by the prospect, because every time I tried I just felt demoralized. I was trying to make changes in those little cracks, using the time I had to rest as time for cognitive load that I chose.

This pattern repeated for other things; often I would try to do something hard for the sake of being cooler and better, not recognizing that it wouldn't work if I hated it. I tried to train on my own for Soccer and Volleyball, but I didn't actually want to do either — there's definitely no way it would squeeze into the cracks that way. I tried to go to events outside of school to expand my social sphere, but usually decided I needed the time to work, or that I didn't really belong at the event anyway. I was throwing shit at the wall but nothing was sticking.

The primary problem was not that I was not capable of being who I wanted to be. In retrospect, it is obvious: If you want to be a certain way, you cannot put yourself in an environment that pushes you in the very opposite direction, and then spend most of your life in it.

The problem was that I was in the wrong environment, and I was unwilling to make the changes I would have needed — i.e. radically reducing my course load, or just dropping out — to make space for these hard things. High school's notion of what matters is deeply out of line with my own; to an extent I got sucked into it, but to an extent I was also just trying to survive. I wanted to be accepted, so I ended up just avoiding the conversations that I wanted to have; they inevitably ended up being alienating when the person I was talking to thought it was boring or didn't get it. I suppressed the way I talked because I was afraid people would think I'm pretentious. I played a character for the soccer team, and for many of my friends, and for Student Council, and for practically everyone else, because I didn't fit with them as myself.

The high school environment exerted force in the opposite direction: it made me worse. It made me suppress the things I loved about myself and act like a version of myself for whom I felt contempt. There were many valuable things about high school, but I was deeply unhappy there. At the end, I emerged with my soul intact, and I got about as much of the positives out of it as I could hope; I think I did a reasonably good job all things considered.

College is great for the research and classes and access and such, but the thing that I think really matters — you'll hear this from everyone you ever ask ever — is the people. College has given me the chance to surround myself with people who push me to be better, who fill me with excitement and anxiety and ambition, who make me restless, who make me want to push myself in order to keep up. The environment brings out the things I love about myself — my intellectual vitality, my desire for independence and mischief, my ambition — and the people around me fill me with nervous but excited energy; they make me more like the person I want to be. This is what really makes the tuition worth it.

This retrospective has brought to mind a new model, one which is not particularly original but which kind of wouldn't have clicked with me until I derived it from my own experiences.

At every moment you are hurtling in some direction in the space of possible lives you could live. Each choice you make nudges your momentum slightly. The thing that matters in the long term is not your individual choices, but the momentum that you hold; most of life is run by 'defaults', routines, the 'thing that you do, just because it's what you do,' and so the momentum you hold determines the vast majority of where you end up.

Thus most choices matter not insofar as they change your life themselves, but insofar as they change your momentum — and if you want to change your momentum significantly, you're going to have to make a lot of hard pushes in order to overcome your inertia — big choices that are outside what you're comfortable with. Real, substantial changes — things that are deeply hard, which require willpower, risking your ego, and/or dealing with uncertainty or underspecification.

Here's to keeping the momentum!

While I'm here — while, as usual, I'm getting done my brief writing in the interstices of life — I want to set a direction again. I wrote a long memo to myself last quarter, but I will summarize it for posterity below.

I believe that, right now, the most important thing for my well-being is becoming technical — getting deep knowledge in something that fascinates me, and which will allow me to go out and do things in the real world. My best guess at what that is is mechanistic interpretability or AI Control research.

I think that I want to work on this because

• I am fascinated by research papers that have been published (e.g. I constantly bring up Alignment faking in language models, I love talking about SAEs and I really enjoyed toying with them)
• It is technical work with philosophical implications
• It is a problem that has real weight for the future of the world
• It will give me skills that are generalizable to other nearby disciplines I also think are interesting, like modeling human brains. (This means that if I do mech interp or something else and hate it, I can switch to something different that I have some confidence I will enjoy)

I don't actually know if I will enjoy doing this research until I actually do the research; my ETA on being able to actually do real shit (i.e. actually contribute) is a couple months, as detailed below. (In theory I could start now; however, in previous attempts I have gotten demoralized because I wasn't fluent enough with underlying objects e.g. model architectures, PyTorch, statistics, and linear algebra, and so I am in the second part of a two-quarter detour to get those things. With relatively high confidence it is crucially important that I keep my momentum.)

I want to get there not quite as fast as I can — I am wary of rushing — but as fast as is reasonable, as fast as makes sense. My current plan is:

1. Take CS231N this spring and do a cool project. (Goal: get very comfortable with PyTorch, get very comfortable with working with neural networks, do a cool project)
2. Self-teach CS224N in a couple weeks over the summer and do an even cooler project (Goal: get very comfortable with working with language models and reading papers, do a cool project with them)
3. Once that is done, read and replicate like 10 papers or something (Goal: develop research taste, get comfortable with research methods, get comfortable with reading and integrating research)
4. At the end of the summer, find and start bombarding interesting labs/grad students/professors with emails (containing an intro about myself and some new ideas regarding what they're working on) and showing up to office hours as the fall starts
5. In the fall, take CS229 (probably?)

While my current top priority is getting skills for ML stuff, I also care about doing cool math, having a vital intellectual life, and having regular fun (like going on backpacking trips and watching movies). Some other things I will be doing:

• Taking fundamentals of analysis (MATH171) and writing an awesome research paper for SLE 93
• Running dorm lectures
• Starting a political theory/philosophy reading group
• Going on a backpacking trip
• Training at least 3 days/week and racing a triathlon

I think this is more than enough for one quarter! For now, I'll stick with this, and solicit advice.