I have been not doing a lot of work. Yesterday I did some [[Org Material and Process Simulation Centre]] work on studying AP Chemistry but not a lot. {{REDACTED}}
I’m {{REDACTED}} from HT Student News and today I’m sitting down for a LunchTimeTalk with Amitav Kristna, or as I like to call him Quantum Computing.
Amitav lets start with, what do you want people to know about you. For people who have never heard your name before.
Are you actually human? Just be straight with me because I’ve heard some talk in the hallways suspecting that you’re AI.
What’s the difference between you, and an average student you see walking in the halls, or is there a difference?
I’m sure you’ve met a lot of amazing people so far, what is the best piece of advice you’ve gotten from one of them?
You’re living the life of people I’d expect from gifted schools or key note speakers. And I’m sure that has to have affected your social life, people simply are not comfortable around too much intelligence. Hell even I get tempted to feel intimidated when I listen to the things you talk about. What keeps you looking forward admist others perceptions of you.
To close us off, what does courage mean to you?
Okay, here are some responses:
I research material simulations and machine learning.
Sorry, that’s beyond my current scope. Let’s talk about something else.
I don’t know that much about the average student walking in the halls to be honest. I think among my close friends at this school, who are obviously not a representative sample of the students at this school, I think I spend less time working and more time playing. One thing I see a lot is that a lot of people do a bunch of different things for the sake of their resumé. A bunch of different sports and clubs and whatnot. I don’t really do many things formally. I spend a lot of time just reading random things and watching random things. I try not to worry about whether I’m doing the right thing. Of course, not everything is sunshine and roses, you have to do some work sometimes, but I find that the times that I’ve made the things that have been the most impressive or coolest have been when subjectively I have not been doing that much work. Usually if it feels like work, it’s not something that will be that important. I think that the internet is an incredible place and most people still have not fully grasped this. You should frolic more in the meadows of the Internet. You can read lots of cool things and talk to cool people.
I think the best advice I’ve gotten is to be earnest. It’s really easy to fall into the trap of overindexing on plans. Plans are useless but planning is essential. Ideally you should have some ultimate goal or thing you want to make better, but if you don’t, like for me I personally don’t have any single cause I feel super strongly about, I try to optimize for working with the smartest people. Outside of school, I am almost never the smartest person in the room. Don’t optimize for working on the thing that sounds the coolest or pays the best - though because markets are great, money is strongly correlated with intelligence. Frolic more. Don’t be so serious. Take it easy.
I think you have the causality reversed here. Before I started creating things and learning things, I felt lonely because I didn’t know many cool people. Now that I’ve done cool things, I get to know cool people and talk to them and call with them. Cool things attract cool people. One thing about meeting cool people that I think is important is that many people overweight the importance of connections and underweight the importance of friends. To be a bit cynical, the word connection is almost newspeak-like, the word robbing us of many important aspects of friendship. Don’t be a connection, be a friend. If you’re friends with a cool person, you should send them articles you find interesting, ask about their work, their hobbies, their relationships, call them, send them opportunities etc. Take the initiative. Be helpful. Being friends is very simple. Don’t be transactional. Give without the expectation of being given something in return, and importantly, take without the assumption of being indebted. Debt breeds resentment. If you can help somebody, help them. If you cannot help somebody, it’s okay, even if they’ve helped you in the past. Being a good friend is a choice. I’m a lot happier now than I was 12-18 months ago, because I chose to be a good friend AND because my friends are cooler.
Courage is the idea of doing the thing that you want to do regardless of your fear. If you like somebody’s blog post, message them a thank-you. If you want access to a paper that’s paywalled, ask the author. If you want to work with somebody, email them. If you’re friends with somebody, call them. If you like somebody, ask them out. Just do the thing. Courage is in shorter supply than genius - @roon. This is closely related to the idea of luck surface area, but not exactly the same. In that graph, “doing” is really a product of two things: competence and courage. If you’re super skilled but spend all day sitting at home doing nothing, your “doing” statistic will be low. On the other hand, if you’re incompetent and very agentic, your “doing” statistic can be low, or even sometimes negative! Most of the time though, people err on the side of doing too little, and so it’s usually safe to err on the side of doing too much, because your innate sense of this is almost always miscalibrated.
Tomorrow I will do more work. {{REDACTED}}
This stuff is important
I am going to sleep