More Luck

 Well it happened again. Today there were about 10 guesses, and I think we guessed around 70% right. The answer was not always Y, unfortunately. This is again, less impressive than it sounds, because, often times the question had been narrowed down to two answer choices, and I could easily be forgetting times when we guessed wrong. Still, we got way better than the expected value of 25% right. We did this by assuming that the answer would not be Y, and also by exploiting regularities in the phrasings of questions. The questions are designed so that there is a parallelism between questions. For instance if W says that A > D, X might be that A < D, thus allowing people to guess before X is even read. Another thing that happened was when there we knew that there were only 3 possible things in a category, the question asked for which of the following is not in the category, and they were all in a row, thus making the answer Z. A final thing that happened was when concepts that come in pairs that always had one come before the other allowing an easy guess of W or X.

Once again, the same emotions, the same misremembering, the same results.

The last letter of lucky is Y

 Today I made a stunning discovery, one that destroyed my prior understanding of the cosmos. I was in this buzzer based multiple choice competition. This competition had a reputation, which said that the answer was often Y. Well I took that to heart, every meeting since, I had guessed Y, sometimes even before the question was read. Today, I went overboard on guessing Y. I might have guessed Y five times, and those five times in a row I guessed it right. Furthermore, everyone who guessed Y but me, guessed it wrong. I spiced things up, by copy pasting wikipedia articles about the letter Y into chat. By the end, people were questioning the nature of reality. 

I got lucky. But I was willing to make guesses, because I knew guessing it wrong would still bring me social credit, just for continuing the legend of the person who always blindly guesses Y.

It actually wasn't that lucky, my streak is not that impressive, I only guessed Y five times in a row, which has a 1 in 4^5 chance of happening only 1 in 1024. It wasn't even as if those five questions were in a row, and sometimes the question had been read. Each logical leap, each misremembering of what had happened, so small in the moment, a small change in probabilities, compounded and compounded with all the others to create a story of luck that had never happened, and onwards to stranger hypotheses still. 

But, the story sounds better, and among the people in the competition, that story was what had actually happened. It was, in the grander narrative of 2020, the year of the black swan, just another sign that reality has been fraying on its edges.

And I had bought the story at times. In this hyper state, I felt as if I could continue guessing Y forever, I believed that we lived in a simulation. I needed to remind myself of all the ways I was misremembering events, that I had hyped up the mundane. 

But I did learn about old SAT guessing strategies (always guess C, which is the third choice, just like Y), about experiments where 75% people would choose 3 when prompted to pick a point on a number line extending from 1 to 4. I understood how it feels to believe in the paranormal, the feeling of gesturing at the miracles of gods, aliens, and things stranger still. We came out of this believing in the god of the Y, and that belief in Y, not Y itself, is the true story here. 

Path to the Future

I groan every time one of my teachers assigns us a Crash Course or Khan Academy video to watch. Not because those videos are bad, far from it in fact, but because of the fact the videos are free, and there's no reason that I couldn't have simply watched it outside of school and saved a lot of effort. This is especially true regarding supplementary educational institutions, where parents pay hundreds of dollars and hour so their children can ...  look things up on the internet. Information is so easy to come by, but education is still so expensive for some reason. A diploma is just a piece of paper, so the students whisper. Thus, the value of formal education must be about things other than the information transmitted from the educational institution to the student.

Any information I may ever need is always one simple google search away. But just because the information is there, doesn't mean I will actually take the time to look it up. In fact, this is actually kind of bad, because there is never a reason to look anything up, right now, at this very moment (something something Aristotle something something books). Google isn't going to go anywhere (and neither are my video games,  nor my social media presence but good luck convincing me to stop), so why not wait a bit before learning. Thus, the purpose of school, for me, is to externally motivate myself to learn. When something is "homework" as opposed to an "extracurricular activity" it is suddenly much easier to motivate myself to do it. The consequences of failing to do the former are short term and therefore more salient, while failure to do the latter has a long term cost and is more abstract.

I connect this idea to a vague memory of my dad asking me if I knew how a zipper functions. "Yes," I had said immediately. Then I thought about it, and realized that I had no idea how zippers work. Then there was something about how people count knowledge that any human knows as knowledge that they know. In a similar way, knowledge on google, is knowledge that is accessible at any time and therefore unimportant. I vowed to try to learn more and reminded myself that I don't know anything.

I still don't know how zippers work though.

I have heard two other perspectives on education.

First, that education is about credentialism and cronyism or alternatively ideology. What all these views have in common is that they see the educational system as a tool that has very little to do with its expressed purpose and is instead a tool of the state or corporations or [insert conspiracy theory here].

Secondly, that education is about the people in it, rather than the institution, that bringing together skilled people in any context produces good results, and that a university is as good a place as any for that.

Either way, it seems education is not about learning.

There's so much existential dread I feel regarding my future when I consider all this. I still do not approve of myself wasting so much time though. Whatever future there may be for me, surely it's better than playing video games all day. Talking and later writing about this has been pretty meaningful.

Starting to Run

 Today I started to run again. After a full 6 months of doing pretty much nothing, I finally began to discipline myself. Hence, running. Well, actually I didn't decide to do it myself. As. always external motivations.

For some reason I always react better to things that I consider homework, which mmakes it hard for me to reach above and beyond.  At least, however, I have a PE class which requires me to show up in order to report the exercise that I have done.

So I did it. It wasn't actually very much though. I ran 2 miles on the treadmill over a period of 18 minutes. That is considerably slower than usual, compared to my average last year.

But, as my PE teacher says, the speed wil come with time, pacing is more important. Although my pacing wasn't actually that good either ... oh well.

The horrors of cleaning

 Cleaning is quite annoying. For much of my life, I never needed to clean, because I had a higher tolerance for dirty spaces than the other members of the household. Thus, long before I was motivated enough to get the space clean myself, someone else would do it.

Like everything nice, it didn't last. Eventually, I was pressured into agreeing to do some cleaning. Like all external motivational systems, they did not last. Within a week of when the agreement was first made, my parents got lazy at enforcing the rules, and within another week, they forgot that an arrangement even existed. But still, like my other work, off and on, I would be forced to clean.

And then I realized how annoying cleaning was, and why I was delegated the task in the first place. Repetitive motions and the knowledge that the work was never done. Endless frustration at other people messing up my clean area. It was a nice role reversal, for normally it was me who contaminated the sacred ground.

Along with other reasons, our house is a mess. Seeing other houses is like seeing into a whole different world. Although, I suspect that our household's habit of furious cleaning when guests arrive is shared by other households as well.

When I clean, I feel connected to the past somehow. Forget the ideals of the hunter-gatherers or the proud warriors of the bronze age, the true connection to the tradition that I had was the feeling of cleaning house. 

At least until the ROOMBA stops getting stuck. Then its back to the internet.

Nightly Reminiscences

 I've always had trouble sleeping, but it has been particularly bad lately. Like a lot of my classmates, a full six months without much definite obligations leads to wonky sleep schedule as people sleep later and later into the night. In our household, at least, my parents kept our sleep schedules reasonable, by turning off the internet at around 11:00pm. A couple other people I know had parents who were less strict and also ended up screwing up their sleep schedule. 

There were however a few times they messed up, either by staying up way too late themselves or occasionally forgetting to shut off the internet.

Going to sleep intentionally is quite difficult. One lesson I've learned through years of experience is that the very act of consciously trying to sleep prevents one from falling asleep. Instead, I cycle through thinking about a bunch of unrelated topics and eventually tire enough to finally fall asleep. 

Often this lasts quite long, I don't know exactly how long it takes, but I suspect I spend an average of 90 minutes between turning off the lights and actually falling asleep each night.

Then, when I fall asleep I have dreams. I used to dream about once every month, now I dream every single day, without fail. I don't always remember them, but I know that I had them. It feels like a lot of time passes during that point.

My dad agrees that I am a light sleeper, to the point where I can sleep longer than my siblings and still feel drowsier than them. I have heard conflicting things about dreams, that they are either a product of extremely deep sleep or extremely light sleep. Personally, I believe it is the latter.

Oh and sometimes my brother cries at night. It doesn't wake me, but it extends the time it takes for me to fall asleep.

Work

In the last few days, there has been an external motivation for me to write again. While in the past few posts I have expressed an internal motivation to write, the truth is that most of the real reasons I have written are related to rewards from my parents. This is rather obvious in hindsight, and I have a feeling that I knew about that in my subconscious, but never thought the words "I am playing tricks on myself."

There is social desirability in being self-motivated. Even at the depths of my lack of self-confidence, I still managed to trick myself into thinking I have better character than I actually do. It took my mom and my sister constantly reminding me of the fact that I am being externally rewarded to write, before I realized consciously what the reason was.

It took five seconds to realize, and now I wonder how it took so long. All the pieces were there, I just never put them together. 

Nevertheless, it remains true that I write to remember my ideas, and no matter why I begun, it is still true that I have, and that makes me happy.