Week Two

Faltered a bit this week, but not irrecoverably. My biggest problem was all but failing to complete the thermodynamics assignment due Friday, but the one due tomorrow made a lot more sense. I'm still getting good scored on my statics homework, which is good because the first test is supposed to be this week. I've also fallen behind in the readings, but at this point it's not a major problem. I'll need to be more wary of that in the future, however.

Part of the problem is spending so much time away from my dorm. It's not really possible to study in such an unpredictably noisy environment, so for the most part I don't even try. My backpack can be extremely heavy, and so textbooks are usually the first thing omitted. My plan, last week, was to leave my laptop, but considering every day's statics homework is only available online after that day's class I would be hard-pressed to get by just on my phone. So the laptop stays, for now.

Distractions are still an issue. I very rarely truly relax, which is why I'm planning to go home more weekends this semester. Two night's sleep away from the noise is incredibly helpful. I can also take all the books with me easily, which would easily allow me do the week's reading in advance. So that's another incentive.

In addition to audible sounds, there's also the issue of intellectual noise. I'm trying to cut back on social media use (and sorta succeeding, actually) because I simply don't need the endless stream of mostly-irrelevant information getting injected into my brain. (Now contrast this with my vague intention to start doing link-dumps....)

Then there's the elephant (and donkey) in the room. The Iowa Caucus is tomorrow night, at which point it's slightly okay to start paying attention to politics again. But should I? It takes a lot of energy and probably isn't worth it much. At the very least I'm not invested in an improbable outcome like I was last time.

My habit for this week is using the pomodoro technique while studying to avoid burnout.

GOP Debate Impressions

I watched, or rather, listened to the first 45 minutes of last night's Republican Presidential debate before I got bored and went to play Kerbal Space Program. Here's my impression of the candidates.

Ted Cruz is smug and a touch hypocritical. Please stop talking.

Marco Rubio is trying too hard to win the warmonger vote.

John Kasich was there. (This was surprising just in itself.)

Jeb Bush is a nice person but can't defend himself very well.

Ben Carson isn't very good at forming coherent answers to the questions he's asked. Also too quiet.

Chris Christie was actually too bland to evoke any real emotions at all.

Rand Paul had the best claque.

Overall, I'd say that Paul is still my closest ideological fit, but agree with David Wasserman that Rubio is the best hope for the Republican Party. Not that any of this particularly matters, since Hillary Clinton is going to our next President, but the GOP needs to pivot if it wants to stay relevant into the 21st century. In my vision, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, and Speaker Ryan are all integral parts of that shift, but they might have other ideas.

One Week In

We're one week into the new semester and I'm still on top of everything. For the most part. I could have done a bit more of the optional reading for thermo and I need to write a few paragraphs about humanism for my English class, but aside from that I've at least finished all the assignments so far.

This week, my primary goal is simply to retain and consolidate my success. The longer I go before faltering, the better. The material will likely become more challenging this week, in which case attending office hours may become necessary. If that's the case, I'll just go. I've waited too long too many times before.

My secondary goal is to begin the process of finding an apartment to live in this summer and into the next school year. Where I live currently is not at all conducive to my academics success, and it's only going to get harder from here. It's going to be warmer next week, so heading back and forth to the library will thankfully be more practical.

My habit for this week is to simply avoid procrastinating, and do work as soon as I can.

Problem with Classics

Many literary pieces become "classics" in part because they were better than whatever else was in print at the time. This was a perfectly honest and reasonable criteria, but after decades of continuous use it has broken down quite terribly. By now, so many books are in print, and so many "classics" now declared, that we can't escape the fact that some "classics" are better than others, and moreover, that some are more enjoyable to read.

People like me, who were raised in a world overflowing with "classics", where the entire English curriculum was devoted to "classics", have no basis for comparison. They aren't "classics" to me so much as they are books, and respecting them simply because they're old is quite difficult when so many are so painful to read. I can't see these books in relation to their time, nor do I usually view them against modern literature, in part because I don't read all that much of it.

Furthermore, themes which may have been profound when a book was first published are by now part of the general cultural background, and so the notion that they're worth spending time on is a bit of a challenge. This is especially true of ideas which I reject but everyone accepts.

Here's Scott Alexander on a similar topic:

In a recent essay, Against Bravery Debates, I think I underestimated an important reason why some debates have to be bravery debates.

Suppose there are two sides to an issue. Be more or less selfish. Post more or less offensive atheist memes. Be more or less willing to blame and criticize yourself. 

There are some people who need to hear both sides of the issue. Some people really need to hear the advice “It’s okay to be selfish sometimes!” Other people really need to hear the advice “You are being way too selfish and it’s not okay.” 

It’s really hard to target advice at exactly the people who need it. You can’t go around giving everyone surveys to see how selfish they are, and give half of them Atlas Shrugged and half of them the collected works of Peter Singer. You can’t even write really complicated books on how to tell whether you need more or less selfishness in your life – they’re not going to be as buyable, as readable, or as memorable as Atlas Shrugged. To a first approximation, all you can do is saturate society with pro-selfishness or anti-selfishness messages, and realize you’ll be hurting a select few people while helping the majority.

For the most part, I find a lot of the themes in older literature to be obvious and universal to the point that criticizing them seems like a duty. But perhaps that wasn't the case at the time. Maybe when these books were written such messages were actually useful. But how would I know, without actually taking a representative survey of what was being written at the time. Not the best works--the works that were so dull or bad that they were forgotten with a year.

Alternatively, it would be helpful to show how schools of literary thought react to one another. A certain mode of thought is in vogue, and then people get fed up with it and try something else, until people get fed up with that and try yet another thing. Sometimes this can be collapsed onto a simple one-dimensional axis, but usually the space is much larger than that.

In my English education there was a touch of this, but for the most part we glossed over the differences and relationships between different schools. I can't really blame my teachers for this--they were working within quite limited restraints--but the broader book culture would be well-advised to take this into account when demanding genuflection to the "classics".

New Year New Blog

As promised, my new blog has been launched. This will be for more interesting, longform posts, while shorter but less-thought-out posts will reside here. This will, finally, be a personal blogs about the gripes of Routh, finally freed from the burden of being a repository for my serious ideas as well. A more detailed explanation can be found in the introduction post.

Happy New Year and may the Probability Gods look favorably upon you.