Accountability

I am still having trouble forcing myself to work when I have an extended block of free time. Hopefully, tomorrow I will correct that–I’m resolving to work on some homework in the morning before my first class.

However, that motivation may just stem from the fact that I have two psets due the next day rather than some fundamental change within me.

Regarding kicking my procastination habit, I have yet to find a suitable replacement for procrastination that still gives me a similar reward when my cue of large blocks of unstructured time appears.

Productive Thought

Lately, I’ve been rereading some essays written by Paul Graham, an entrepeneur who later founded YCombinator. I like his writing a lot–he has a lot of good ideas, and he’s clearly been doing something right in his life.

When I started thinking more about why I enjoy his writing, I began to realize that perhaps a large part of why I like his thoughts is because not only do we share similar perspectives of the world but also the style of which we think is very similar. The effect of having a preference for writing that aligns with your personal beliefs is very prevalent and impossible to avoid–you probably know of it by the term, “confirmation bias.”

“Confirmation bias” is commonly seen among news sources and online articles–most people will tend to read until some authority confirms their beliefs, at which point they become satisfied and move on. This leads to large, destructive effects such as political polarization, but also leads to more innocuous effects as well. For example, I’m really into fantasy football and will do a lot of research into what players I should pick up/start–often, I will do a lot of research until I found some source/statistic that personally convinces myself that my gut is correct. It’s a strange process, but also a process that I know happens to other people in fantasy football as well as for other activities.

Regarding Paul Graham, he obviously has a much better perspective than me, but I still relate to his experiences/thought processes way more than anybody else. For example, an article that I find really interesting is this essay he wrote on nerds: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html. I think most people who do not consider themselves nerds will find this essay very egotistical and largely incorrect–I definitely see that, but at the same time, my own confirmation bias wants to blindly accept his arguments. In any case, I share a lot of the same beliefs/experiences that form his perspective, and that plays a large part in why I enjoy/relate to his writing so much.

Actually, a large reason why I started the productive thinking portion of this blog was because I really liked Paul Graham essays and felt that I should practice writing/thinking in a similar way. I like taking the analytical tools from STEM subjects and apply it to more real-life, humanities-centered problems–it’s a good exercise in problem solving/creativity/critical thinking (also boosts my feeling like an intellectual ego but shh). Writing this blog has been a lot of fun.

Specifically regarding the way Paul Graham thinks/writes, in my opinion, he often attempts to construct a model for how this specific subset of society works and then fits some observable effect to it. In my experience, this is exactly how I think/write and how many of my friends who are very involved in STEM also think. I think it stems from the fact that that’s how most STEM problems are solved–you construct some sort of analytical model and try to fit the problem’s parameters to your solution. This goes beyond just STEM, from what I can discern from reading his book, Richard Thaler’s Nobel Prize winning work is literally creating an economical model to illustrate how human behavior screws with theoretically perfect economics.

There’s a lot of merit in discussing whether or not this way of thinking about the world is the best–I think the case could be made for multiple sides. This is one case where confirmation bias won’t affect my opinion on it–my approach of forming models to think about the world works for me because that’s what I’m used to from math/physics/CS, but a completely different approach will probably work better for other people. Furthermore, different approaches could yield in completely different perspectives/solutions, and you already know how I feel about the value of diversity of perspectives. :)