Optimization is Difficult, Discernment More So

Sitting on a boat in Clear Lake the morning of my now-sister-in-law's wedding, somehow I felt compelled to write this mixed metaphor about optimization and the pursuit of truth:

The canonical analog for truth-finding is that it’s like multi-variable optimization. You seek the highest point by heading uphill and search until there’s nowhere higher to climb. I think this analogy is flawed. It’s flawed because we know which way is up, at least, if we’re to have any hope that we can be successful, we have to assume that. It should be easy, then, to compare the levels of different local maxima to determine which is the global max. Yet it’s not. The problem seems to be that we don’t know which way the truth axis should be oriented, so we attach to different maxima which seem more right with our personal orientation. So how do you determine which orientation is correct? I’m not quite sure. Some truths seem to jump out and assert themselves loudly and clearly, while others are highly counterintuitive and may seem downright wrong at first. It would be good to have a way to self-determine the difference between counterintuitive good ideas and bad ideas without resorting to just doing what other people say. Listening to others is okay, just do it thoughtfully. Must investigate further.

The Desire to Sleep and Find Meaning While Awake

Here's something I wrote shortly after starting my internship in the Boeing structures lab:

I can’t sleep. I’m not really sure why. I was exhausted this morning. More than almost anything I just wanted to turn off the monitor, lie down somewhere soft, and close my eyes, and now that that’s what I’m supposed to do my body seems to want nothing to do with it. I can’t stand this feeling, like I’m an unwitting pilot in a vehicle sliding on ice. My mind, and my body, I mean. Shouldn’t they just agree? The tension is such a pain when they don’t.

I’m worried that my body simply won’t adjust to this new sleep schedule. The second letter in “schedule” I wrote just now came out as a “k” at first, not the “c” that it should’ve been from the start. I don’t think I used to make those kinds of mistakes, and it’s worrying me that I’m making them more often now. Maybe I’m getting better at recognizing and remembering my mistakes, but the idea that I’m screwing up simple things more often because I’m not getting enough sleep seems more plausible for some reason.

Tonight I’ve had the strangest sense of freedom. Recently it hit home that I had it completely backwards on a key life decision. I used to think that going to graduate school, reaching the highest academic level I could reach, was a good decision. I was wrong, deeply, vastly wrong, on this count.

Now that I realize that, the future is wide open in a disconcerting way. The variables are all still there, but the equations are invalid and have to be thrown out. The system is underconstrained, and it’s hard for me to make heads or tails of what’s right anymore. My future is like a blindingly bright light, and I can’t get my eyes to focus on what’s out there in the glare.

I have this gnawing feeling that I’m supposed to do something important. But what, exactly? Cancer exists, no one’s ever set foot on Mars, social security is a Ponzi scheme, and humans are cranking Earth's thermostat up in an uncontrolled fashion. I believe these are all problems, and I’d like to see them rectified. My time is limited and I have strengths and flaws and preferences that no one else has. This means that I need to get serious about priorities and putting my time to good use on a plan that makes sense. The current plan isn’t necessarily bad, it just needs to be evaluated in a fresh light.

Now I can barely keep my eyes open. Maybe I just needed to get some authentic expression across today, when I spend so much of the day donning and doffing the personas I’ve developed to get by in this new northern world. Be authentic. Be nice. Be expressive. Be honest inside and outside. Like Alice, I give myself good advice. Hopefully some day I’ll take it.

Illuminating the Cobwebs

A valid argument could be made that this blog is kinda just me being this guy.

With that in mind, I'll avoid apologizing for not posting more. It's not as though the world is suffering from a lack of my speech anyway.

What is this blog for, then? I'll get to that in a moment.

At one point in my life I wrote a lot. Not a lot by professional writer standards, but I wrote a lot of very introspective things that were sometimes philosophical, sometimes engineer-like. I liked doing it, and it helped me get a sense of what I actually think. Sometimes I felt compelled to stay up past my bedtime (like tonight, oddly enough), and jotted things down til my mind felt fuzzy and happy that I'd gotten something out into the world of language. I've filled a red wide-ruled notebook that I got for free after helping with a promotional video for my alma mater with this stuff. I also write things in my laptop when I want to bypass the graphite-on-paper step.

So what's the point of all that? If I'm wondering what the point of blogging is, and I'm wondering what the point of jotting my thoughts down is, maybe I might as well let the two of them synch up. I'm not particularly shy about most of the things I write about (very little is politics, which seems to be what I'm most shy to talk about), so I might as well make them public. Without false humility I will say that I don't know if this will make anyone's life better, but I communicate with people a lot less than I used to, before I moved to California and had kids, so maybe putting my thought journal out there will be a good way to get things moving.

What I propose to do is copy a bit a time from this long-running journal here under the "Illuminating the cobwebs" tab. To start, here's something I wrote in March of 2012:

It’s like there are these two worlds. Two domains. There’s the world of sensing, of awareness and introspection, and then there’s the domain of math and method, and cause and effect. There’s a barrier between them, between the world outside and the world inside, like a flat sheet of glass. You’re looking straight into it, so you can’t see the interface. But it’s not glass at all. It’s water, and when something moves over the surface of that water, it shimmers, and the way the ripples catch the light is breathtaking. It knocks you down, makes your mouth gasp and your mind reel, and all you can do to keep up is think beauty, beauty, beauty. Think isn’t even the right word. Your mind flows and runs until all that you are is all that’s in touch with this magnificence that’s being.

The only proper response is laughter. It’s a humble laugh, a wild-running expression of the euphoria it is to be this moment. The universe reads to us a picture of light and sound and motion, and we read back a wildfire image of emotion and gratitude. What else could there be? What else could we do?

The world of atoms and the world of wonder aren’t adversaries. They harmonize. When the line between them shakes and twinkles you see how they weave together like never before. Joy becomes light, colored light, colored light that moves, lupines flapping on a March morning breeze. Causation becomes trend, function, interaction, emergence of knowledge. To know. We want to know. We want to know by the language we speak, by the book, by theory, but we also yearn to know by taking this world to heart, by sensing, by seeing our innermost selves in it.

How do our inner worlds come to know this outer world? It’s a mystery, a necessary one, to the linguist. But to the explorer it just is. There’s a frontier, and knowing it piece by piece and bit by bit is a magical thing of joy. You who have seen the touch of this magic, in a beautiful song, in a religious awakening, a lover’s touch, or a psychedelic journey, will never walk the Earth the same way. For you will know the ecstasy it is to be, and will long to be the euphoria of life again.

In case you're wondering, the pictures in this series will be non-sequiturs; just pretty stuff I've taken here and there.