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.

Hyperbolic Discounting in Education

From Akrasia, hyperbolic discounting, and picoeconomics on LessWrong:

We all instinctively assign a lower weight to a reward further in the future than one close at hand; this is "discounting the future". We don't just account for a slightly lower probability of recieving a more distant award, we value it at inherently less for being further away. It's been an active debate on overcomingbias.com whether such discounting can be rational at all. However, even if we allow that discounting can be rational, the way that we and other animals do it has a structure which is inherently irrational: the weighting we give to a future event is, roughly, inversely proportional to how far away it is. This is hyperbolic discounting, and it is an empirically very well confirmed result.
I say "inherently irrational" because it is inconsistent over time: the relative cost of a day's wait is considered differently whether that day's wait is near or far. Looking at a day a month from now, I'd sooner feel awake and alive in the morning than stay up all night reading comments on lesswrong.com. But when that evening comes, it's likely my preferences will reverse; the distance to the morning will be relatively greater, and so my happiness then will be discounted more strongly compared to my present enjoyment, and another groggy morning will await me. To my horror, my future self has different interests to my present self.

Compare to a college student's tendency to procrastinate, rush assignments, not study, and consequently get lower grades than they would otherwise. I'm looking at you, 2013!Nathaniel.

Actually, I still have this problem (though to a much lesser extent), which is why I'm writing this post when I have two final exams in the next 48 hours. While I dislike the university alarmism, the grades (and more importantly, habits) one obtains during their tertiary education has a tremendous impact on the trajectory of their life. Yet extremely little attention is given to the innate psychology of human beings which makes us act against our own long-term interests.

I'm not sure how to solve it, beyond increased self-vigilance while inculcating better behaviors. I've done better this semester (my first proper engineering courseload since 2014) and my grades, though far from ideal, are passable. I study a lot more than I did at Purdue and don't procrastinate as much. But there's been quite a few trivial inconveniences and general willpowers sinks that I'm hoping to avoid in the future (and would have already, if contract hadn't required me to endure them through May).

Week Three

Still fighting to keep up. This week puts me to the real test, with assignments due in all four classes.

There's nominally a career fair this week, but there really isn't terribly much point in attending. I won't have a free term until summer 2017, and they would have to offer one hell of a co-op for me to consider delaying graduation. I have no realistic chance of scoring such a position, but very realistic chance of setting off an avalanche if I pass up a few precious hours in my precarious assignment balance.

I have done better at finishing the thermodynamics assignments (and the others, but thermo is my bête noire). My comprehension is up and I'm more willing to sit down and focus pretty heavily on the material for a few hours. I haven't been making proper use of the pomodoro technique, which suggests plenty of room for improvement. I should see about getting some sort of app or software to help me with that, because the trivial inconvenience of getting out my phone and setting a timer is the main reason I haven't gotten into it yet.

On the subject of time management, this post is a night late because I was doing homework on Sunday night. Going home of the weekend isn't very good for me academically, but it's necessary for my mental health. Spending that many consecutive days here with my noisy neighbors makes me very irritable and short-tempered. Still need to start contacting apartment offices around here to see when I can come take a look.

Habit for this week...I don't know, try tuning out auditory distractions? Last week's didn't work out so maybe I should just roll it over.

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.