Q: What are the best things Iâve done?
Best by taste:
scheduling, allocation, hashing, P3âs vs C6âs, pigeons
- Beautiful aspects of these projects:
- I choose to care about them. Nobody made me.
- There were many epic battle plans, and epic battles.
- Ground won and ground lost.
- Creating really cool ideas and pictures.
- I love having incremental progress
- I like how you can âactually tryâ. Like, my best example of this is, on the day when I dedicated myself fully to solving that pigeon problem, it felt really good and I actually discovered something. Maybe not every day can be like that, but I think I have some power to create days like that.
- I like working closely with others on these projects.
- Unsatisfactory aspects of these projects:
- Failure to internalize your work is not your worth
- Sometimes worked on these too much, felt somewhat burnt out.
- Sometimes these problems felt a little bit âcuteâ, and I worry that they arenât important. But sometimes they feel fundamental and worth thinking about. Thereâs a mix here.
Enchanted forest / projects with Kevin
- I liked working with someone on a large project that we made up because we thought it was cool.
- I enjoyed the technical challenge of it.
- I liked that it was creative and beautiful.
hackathons
- I like coming up with a plan, breaking down a complex problem, and the rapid prototyping.
Outings
- Walking to the beach! and other places.
- Pizza w/ friends
- Cooking
- Contact (the game)
Talking to people about what Iâm working on, especially when they can listen well
Working on cool math problems with people
Corona coding club
- Enjoyed teaching peers and proactively responding to environment.
BHS Yearbook project
- big project with collaboration, and it actually had an impact on ppl.
- It had a big impact on me alone! I still read these notes. It wouldnât have happened without this app.
Talking to random people
Addendum it should be noted that advice from career advice from 80,000 hours is probably still worth considering. In particular, I havenât ever really tried doing anything other than TCS research. So of course I canât based on historical data conclude that doing radically breaking status quo things like
- healthcare engineer / research
- pandemic prevention research / misc other âapplying computery stuff to sciencey problemsâ
- ML research / safety research wouldnât be better.
This is not hedging; itâs an admission that wrong exists. Itâs not procrastinating choices, as I plan on rectifying this deficit of experience.