cookie-cutters and bananas

on voice

lately i’ve been feeling like i’m trapped in other peoples’ narratives. i mean this on a number of levels - my news diet has far too many bad takes on the us election and the world chess championship, people i collaborate with have very convincing arguments for why their problem is the most important problem to work on, i keep reading extremely biased economics papers funded by various left- and right-wing initiatives. discerning truth has never felt harder. everyone i know seems to be immersed in either the ideology of others or the ideology of themselves. what i mean is that you’re either at the mercy of an external influence or you lay down some dogma to block out everything else, eg. my friends’ political views are all either very cookie-cutter or they’ve decided to be apolitical minus a couple key issues

i’ve been struggling to decide what to focus on in part because i can’t tell which of my beliefs are authentic and which ones are just memetics. take ai research for instance: do i actually believe progress is hitting a wall, or is this just an idea that haters on twitter planted in my head? do i actually believe agi in two years, or is this just a prediction i absorbed via osmosis from researchers i look up to? or do i believe in some intermediate third scenario? (funny how these three scenarios roughly correspond to doing grad school / more fundamental research, working at a frontier lab, and working on a product)

what is true here?

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around a year ago i had a conversation with david holz that went something like:

D: evolution optimizes for distributions over populations, so you’ll end up with some really strange individuals because evolution doesn’t care about individual psychology and is just trying to produce the right population statistics
V: sure, this is a very evopsych view
D: yep. and from that perspective it’s hard to fault people or get upset at them for being the way they are. like, people think i’m super weird, but i’m the way i am because the species needed some monkeys with an instinct to look for bananas in new places instead of old ones
V: interesting, i think i agree with you! (whereas usually i hate evopsych because it doesn’t make any falsifiable predictions)
D: so what kind of monkey are you?
V: …
V: i think i’m a monkey that likes other monkeys

he told me we needed more of my type of monkey and that he liked my answer, but i hated it. i hated that it was a cop-out, i hated that it seemed less compelling than his answer, i hated that it appeared to be more of a statement about other monkeys than a statement about myself. but most of all i hated that it felt true - i think it’s true that i don’t have a particularly distinguished position or interest in looking for bananas

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last month i went to the van gogh museum and liked it a lot more than expected - i think it was actually my favorite traditional (ie. not modern or contemporary) art museum ever? though i should caveat that other people may not enjoy it as much as me because a) van gogh is one of my two favorite painters, along with edvard munch b) i went right when the museum opened at 9, from 10 onwards it becomes quite crowded and hard to see the art up close c) i do find it funny when a building says “vincent” everywhere

it was very inspiring to see that his entire career happened between ages 26 and 36 and that he had no prior drawing experience. it was cool to hear the thought process behind some of his choices, like i distorted the potatoes to make them seem like heavy objects with real weight. but most of all i liked that i could temporarily experience a new way of interpreting reality that was both extremely consistent and extremely different from my own. i liked simply remembering that it was possible to learn to see the world so viscerally

(garden of the asylum, my favorite painting from the museum. i especially love how tall the trees are)

my writing professor often said one of the goals of editing was to remove anything that might break a reader out of the flow of reading. i think modern writers often accomplish this by removing their own voice from the prose? an article about sally rooney observed: “The literature of the voice is dying. The literature of the pose has arrived… The writing of the pose is, first and foremost, about being correct, both in terms of style and content. Its foremost goal is not to make any mistakes. Its foremost gesture is erasure.” sometimes i feel this way about my own voice as well, so it’s always refreshing to experience a strong voice that i resonate with

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from past lives -

A: Did you know that you only speak in Korean when you talk in your sleep?
N: I do?
A: Yeah. You never sleep-talk in English. You only dream in Korean.
N: I didn't know that. You never told me.
A: Most of the time I think it's cute, but sometimes ‑ I don't know ‑ I guess I get scared.
N: Scared of what?
A: You dream in a language that I can't understand. It’s like there's this whole place inside of you where I can’t go.

every once in a while i’ll be hanging out with a friend, and then they’ll casually bring up a core belief that feels completely alien to me and that i had no idea they believed in, and then i’ll feel a pang of disappointment for not having understood them as well as i thought. then i’ll think about how they have an entire inner process which i’m not aware of, and i’ll remember: you dream in a language that i can’t understand. it makes me a little sad every time, though of course i love trying to learn my friends’ languages

i think fundamentally i am just a very boring person? my inner language is very simple, as are most of the things i care about. for instance, my best friend recently asked me what my relationship criteria were and i was only able to list extremely standard ones; when people in sf ask me what kind of technological future i want my answer is usually something like i think modern middle-class american life is pretty good tbh, i would just want it to be sustainable and equitably distributed. shockingly bland stuff

at this point i can no longer tell if i simply do not have much of an inner voice, or if i’ve been around it for so long that i no longer notice it. regardless i am trying to identify a new way of seeing the world. i think it is the only way to avoid becoming a container for other peoples’ ideologies