Feeling Good

I would post pictures of the sunset I saw, but I was driving at the time and thus was not recommendable on multiple accounts.

My parents are in San Diego for Mensa's Annual Gathering, which meant I had the house to myself for the weekend. I didn't do a whole lot, beyond homework, messing around on the internet, and reading. I've finishing Part I of my Atlas Shrugged reread and at this point it's given me about 20% of the feels. I'd forgotten how engaging the book is. To be clear, Rand's style isn't for everyone, but it's like catnip for me.

This is the last week of Fluid Mechanics. I can hardly believe the class is nearly over (two exams this week, so we won't be getting the full class time). The next week aerodynamics starts with the same professor in the same room, so it's not like it's over over, but still the summer is flying by.

Independence Day is next Monday. For the first time since 2012 my parents will be home to celebrate it with me. I'm very happy about this development--usually July 4th is lonely and depressing for me.

Missed my Sunday night post yesterday, on account of spending the weekend at home. My productivity has taken a huge hit, not the mention the easy points lost on the Fluid Mechanics exam today.

I would go into detail about the reasons spending time with my parents is detrimental to my grades, but they don't read this blog, which is actually kinda ironic considering that they're on the pro- side when it comes to parental snooping. Talk about not picking the low-hanging fruit.

Then again, my posting is so inconsistent maybe Mom just forgets about this blog for long periods at a time. Dad doesn't have a whole lot of time to look. It depends on how you choose to structure your free time. We have some substantial differences, but it won't profit me to get into them here.

Suffice to say that I'm not feeling up to the continuous stream of homework, which doesn't take a break just because I made a questionable decision. My plan is to turn in early and hope that when I wake up tomorrow I'm feeling less .... is there a word for this sensation? Probably. It'd be nice to know it right now.

On the bright side, I think I'm going to begin my reread of Atlas Shrugged before turning in. I haven't read a significant portion since high school (if memory serves), so it'll be interesting to see how I react to it after the last few years.

I should start exercising again while I'm at it.

Inconsistency Is Not Conspiracy

A thing I see a lot--from people of all political stripes--is a tendency to frame inconsistencies in the criminal justice system as a conspiracy of some sort. Now sometimes these sorts of criticisms are valid: for example, if two people get radically different sentences for similar crimes, that is indeed a bit questionable. I'd urge you to avoid generalizing from one example and instead look at it statistically*, but that's not categorically wrong.

What does bother me is when people compare the sentences for unrelated crimes and conclude that there's some sort of conspiracy to hurt people or let others off easy. (You see this all the time in the context of social justice issues.) But that makes the very, very foolish assumption that our laws are consistent and well-thought-out. Humans don't think consistently. We're really really bad at coming up with values ex nihilo. If politicians were comparing crimes side by side then we could reasonably expect consistent sentences, but they almost always aren't. Even when a bill considers different crimes, the length may be prohibitive.

This is before we realize that a significant fraction of criminal legislation is symbolic, not designed with the idea that people will be imprisoned or killed for breaking it. Politicians aren't trying to craft an elegant and consistent legal code. They're trying to kiss and cover enough ass to avoid getting primaried and then beat the other guy come November. This is one of the downsides of representative democracy that no one has yet been able to patch. If you have some ideas beyond "term limits", I'm all ears.

Look, politicians are not optimizing for legislative coherency. Ron Paul got painted as a radical in large part for voting consistent. Judges nominally are trying to do that, but they're both handicapped by mandatory minimum sentences and failures of human psychology (see Thinking Fast and Slow for some horrifying research on how lunch breaks affect judges' leniency in granting parole).

I wish I knew what to do about this, but I don't. All I know is that ignoring the real problem isn't going to help the situation.

*Both of those are Scott Alexander articles, so let me just throw a third one at you where he does just that when looking at race and the criminal justice system.

Back at it again

I guess we're gonna try the Sunday Night post thing again.

I've moved into my apartment and summer classes have begun. It doesn't feel like it's only been one week. I've done a pretty decent job studying and paying attention in class, though my feedback via assignments has a pretty low sample size. There's at least another week before any exams, so I'll have a change to adjust upwards if necessary.

Speaking of exams, I did quite well on my spring finals. My GPA technically went down, but I'm happy with a solid slate of B's in engineering classes. Hopefully I'll be able to keep this up through the end of the year.

My concern is avoiding burnout. That sorta happened to me in thermodynamics before spring break, and in regular dynamics in April. I can't say for certain that those spells pulled me down letter grades, but they might have. I'm not entirely sure how to avoid this, beyond building in adequate recreation time and avoiding the aforementioned willpower sinks (I promise I'll get around to writing a post on them eventually).

In the meantime though, I should probably get some sleep.