Category Archives: Personal

Personal Reflections on Self-Sufficiency

Leave a reply

I just realized that every paper I had accepted so far in grad. school was written entirely by myself. Sure, others’ ideas are involved, and I sometimes base my code on theirs (although I invariably end up rewriting a good deal of it because it tends to be thrown together rather haphazardly), but I’m always the one reviewing the literature, putting the papers together, setting up and performing the experiments, and describing the results and some of their likely implications (I’ve become a very bold hypothesizer when trying to explain particular patterns in data; I think this is probably an important aspect of any sort of science). I’ve even had to explain the biological aspects of the research, which is quite silly, as we have actual biologists on the team.

But it works. Publication after publication. I was wondering when I would get research training, but I guess I have it already.

Being a common researcher isn’t enough, though. I need to figure out how to do great research with similar success. I can contribute more, but I need to figure out how – once again, on my own.

I wonder if my penchant for self-sufficiency is an aspect of my personality, or whether it is a consequence of my circumstances. I can’t really remember any time during my life when I had a significant degree of aid beyond the basic support that a family provides. I wonder what it would have done to my personality if I had? I’d probably be more compassionate, more willing to shield people from the relation between action and consequence (since I’ve borne the full brunt of that link, I view those who can’t grasp it as fundamentally immature). What situation would I be in? Would I shoot for the moon, requiring realization of my vision in an absolute sense?

Would it limit me? Could I still exceed the abilities of others if I had always relied upon them for help? Would I even have goals at all?

The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that my self-sufficiency is proper; that, in a sense, this is how to live an effective and rewarding life, whatever the hardships.

And that means that every time society forces me to rely upon myself, I grow stronger. If this is to be the theme of my life, I welcome it.

NJ has very unfavorable incorporation laws

Leave a reply

I have spent about 2 months trying to navigate the state’s red tape. Now I’m stuck because of their form for filing a certificate of incorporation, of all things, until I get clarification from the state, which, of course, has taken far longer than it should. I am about 24 hours away from incorporating in Delaware instead.

Never be a nice freelancer

Leave a reply

I always try to be nice to my clients when I do freelance work. However, I’m beginning to realize that this is essentially an engraved invitation to be taken advantage of – being asked to do more work (that was out-of-scope) in less time for less money. And that’s just not right.

Interviews

Leave a reply

Technical interviews are useless. I’ve passed 5 for 5 already this week, but more and more are going to pile up, and the recruiters are still streaming in.

I have reversed a string without using extra storage so many times that the question has lost all meaning. Swapping two variables, again without using storage? Done it. Why do you need to do that anyway? Never was one byte of storage so expensive. Debugged and fixed some stupid pointer error? At almost every interview. I wrote SQL queries involving joins, subqueries, aggregate functions, and pretty much everything short of stored procedures. I’ve gotten the farmer, his sheep, and the wolf from one side of the river to the other without anyone eating anyone else. I’ve created algorithms involving divide and conquer, dynamic programming, NP completeness, greedy approximation, and complex recursion. In two of my interviews, the interviewer turned around and asked “You’re obviously very well qualified. Why are you applying here again?”

It’s enough already! Give me *one* interview that actually tests my programming ability (none of these really have yet) and be done with it. Having to do this every day is extremely stressful. I haven’t failed yet, but I’m eventually going to – probability dictates it (it’s the classical “multiple tests” problem).

Masks

Leave a reply

Like most other INTJ types I know, I’ve adopted a “mask” to deal with strangers, since the merest expression of my true personality is apparently a threat to people’s well being. At least I don’t get beaten up for being different anymore, like I did in high school. Perhaps I misunderstood the aggression as being a social phenomenon, when in actuality, it was motivated by a subconscious sort of fear. Either way, I’ve always tried to avoid scaring people, because all I really wanted from anyone was to be either understood or left alone.

This causes some very powerful people to adopt a ruthless drive for mastery to compensate, and that’s a pity, because not only does their agony continue, but they become a special breed of tyrant, devoted to reciprocating the misery that was meted out on them – and more often than not, they are terribly effective at doing so.

The rest of us take it in silence and accept that it is merely transient. It doesn’t kindle vengeance in the same way, but it profoundly shapes one’s worldview. These are the “tortured geniuses” – unable to find any communal niche in society to which they can belong, they have no choice but to forge ahead alone.

I find it ironic that the very traits that have made me as successful as I have been thus far are the same ones that I need to hide, however. Not just from strangers, either – my father still thinks that anyone not currently in the workforce is worthless, despite the fact that the research I’ve published should have a much more profound impact on society because it’s an application of a unique talent. Any attempt to convey the fact that a stratification exists between the activities one can devote one’s time to – that some are indeed “higher” or “more worthy” than others – is met with outright refusal to believe, usually accompanied by some sort of personal attack. After all, he’s making money, right? To him, this is the primary justification and the imperative for what he makes of his life. The very thought that I am able to obtain a well-paying job but consider the ensuing truncation of my own ability to implement my visions an important reason to proceed with caution is completely foreign to him – and almost certainly to an overwhelming majority of the public, if the groups I’ve been forced to associate with throughout my life have been any sort of representative sample. To use a somewhat inaccurate analogy, he doesn’t yet realize that I’m not scoring the game in the same way that he is.

In the end, it’s yet another constraint that is added to the web that already slows us down – and by now, the web I’m caught in is getting very thick. I don’t wish harm on anyone – why can’t they simply accept who I am? They’ll gladly exploit the fruits of my labor and the labor of those like me, but they will never acknowledge the worth of the labor itself.

Others

Leave a reply

It’s funny – there are so few people who think like me, and yet I immediately know when I am speaking with one of them. Their entire outlook on life is different from the rest of the population. The individual variations on the theme are unique, but the core values are usually very similar in some vaguely defined way.

Foils

Leave a reply

One of my friends is becoming a very interesting foil to myself. We’re of roughly equal intelligence, started out in the same high school studying the same things, but our paths diverged at college.

It’s very interesting seeing how our differing qualities of education are impacting our trajectories. Of course, education is just a tool, to serve rather than limit its wielder, but I didn’t realize this until last month. His success may come with academia (and I wish him all the best), but mine will certainly come in spite of it. That’s probably why I’m riding on my own ideas now more than ever, though I must say it is a heady feeling to enact change on the power of your own vision.

And yet even after I finish my Ph. D., I’m going to need to go back if I want to study music. Or biology. Or mathematics. Or sociology. Or philosophy. It’s quite a dilemma.

Juggling

Leave a reply

It’s funny – I’m juggling 9 large projects that all need to be completed in the short term. For most people (or me more than six years ago), this would have been a crushing load. But now? I’m knocking one off per day. I’m in my element when I have to deal with this sort of thing, and I’ve done it so much that it’s second nature by now.

4 for 4

Leave a reply

The IWDM paper has been accepted, which brings my total count for this round up to 4. There’s no way the fifth paper we submitted to ICIP will be accepted (the results are terrible and we know it), so we’ll just end it at that 🙂