You’re all scum and I’m not voting for any of you in this election.
Politicians
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Success is innate, but ironic
It’s ironic that the type of person who is capable of obtaining success is incapable of enjoying it. By most people’s standards, I’m probably doing very well already. After all, I graduated first in my undergraduate class, I received my MS in one year at age 22, I’m on track to receive my Ph. D. in at most 3 years total, probably 2, and the job offers are still streaming in, with starting salaries that have just officially broken the 6-figure barrier. By my own standards, however, I still have yet to accomplish anything earth-shattering. After all, aside from my divisor function and quantile tree research, I haven’t really discovered anything on my own. True, I have lots of hypotheses, but they don’t do you much good except from a theoretical standpoint unless you have the equipment, resources, or public response to follow up on them. Even if I did have such resources, I don’t have the clout to ensure that my ideas are heard. By my own standards, I am not successful.
I will be, though. So long as I am given the time, I’m sure of it now, because I’ve realized that the capacity for success is an innate property. True, I have skills that are extremely in demand, which is very much helping me get jobs among other things (and data mining/machine learning jobs pay a lot), but when I speak of success, I seldom mean money, and I almost never mean something that depends on the support of other people (because as I’ve seen over the past few years, society does not make enough sense to consistently support pretty much anyone).
No. I’ll succeed because I’m able to do things many people cannot. Most people can only handle one area of specialization, yet I’ve utterly refused to specialize, even while society attempted to actively force me to, and yet maintain expertise in almost every field I’ve touched. In some fields, it even extends beyond that of most specialists, and I’m still rather young and nowhere near the apex of my skill (except perhaps in mathematics, where skill declines after the late 20s and where I now feel confident enough to extend my previous research in the direction of Robin’s Theorem and GRH after finishing my dissertation). I embrace principles such as the universality of ideas, the ability to fit insane workloads into arbitrarily small amounts of time (while I was winning all those awards, I was also doing research, programming on the side, writing music, taking an 18 credit load, and working three jobs, all at once), and the use of the subconscious as an idea factory endowed with all of the power of the conscious mind but none of the effort or attention required of conscious idea generation because I’ve not only theorized but demonstrated them.
Most people dismiss such philosophies because they are either incapable of following them (and thus presume them false from their own experiences) or because they disagree with their premises or potential consequences. Either way, it simply makes my philosophy all the more unique. There’s strength in that difference.
Waldorf education
Waldorf education + Project Polymath = teh win 🙂
Seriously, look it up – it’s a good idea, and an absolutely great one to prepare someone for multidisciplinary inquiry at the university level.
Motor learning rate
Here’s an interesting idea, and one I’m in a position to test to boot!
Over several iterations of performing a simple motor task, an interesting pattern of activity occurs in the frontal cortex of the brain: the amount of activity diminishes with each iteration until a certain threshold is reached, indicating what appears to be motor learning behavior. It’s more or less linear, but I believe that the slope differs between subjects.
Now, my hypothesis is this: that the motor rate from a simple motor task could in fact be used to estimate the rapidity of motor learning in general. In other words, if I could stick you in an fMRI scanner for a few seconds and have you twiddle your thumbs, I could predict how fast you would be able to type or how long it would take you to learn to play the piano, for example.
But that’s only the beginning: that this is taking place in the frontal lobe rather than the cerebellum suggests that the processing may be somewhat unified with the process of normal cognitive learning, and thus may be a form of intelligence.
So can we build an IQ test from this? Maybe. I’m going to perform some quick experiments on data that we already have at the lab as soon as I can. Since I don’t have test data from the subjects, the initial analysis will be clustering, but if that succeeds, I may attempt to test them and perform regression.
If both of these hypotheses are true, Gardener’s theory of multiple intelligences may need to be amended.
San Diego
Going to San Diego for a conference from Friday to Monday morning. Be back soon.
Dissertation – Week 0
There’s only one good answer to the situation I’m in – leave as quickly as possible. So long as I am at Temple, particularly when I am not free, I believe I will never achieve my full potential. Thus, I am moving my original 3 year graduation goal up to 2 years – that is, I’d like to have my Ph. D. by the end of this year. My productivity in other areas will probably be attenuated, but I will NOT completely abandon other fields; I’ll just work on them less until I finish. Yes, that includes the “Treatise on the Objective Reality of Ideas”. Sorry.
After graduating, I will likely never publish anything again, nor participate in formal academia, since I am sorely disappointed with (a) the constant gatekeeping and (b) the lack of objective and original thought. I will most likely do what Einstein did: work at a relatively unchallenging job that leaves plenty of freedom to imagine (Programming? That’s fun, but hasn’t been a challenge since I was a teenager, so it may be perfect), refining my own ideas while doing so until they are hopefully revolutionary. It’s how I’ve done my best work to this point, so why would I abandon this strategy? Look what abandoning it did to me this past year!
I have completed my literature search and have a general idea of what I specifically want to research. I am starting to write right now. I’m going to San Diego for a conference over the weekend, so this week doesn’t count, but I am going to set my target for 10 pages per week starting next week (right now, my writing is just taking care of the preliminaries: topic, ToC, etc.). I anticipate a 150 page dissertation (I don’t believe in being long winded in a research paper, even a dissertation; even that is too long, but it’s the minimum I can get away with), so at this rate it will take me 15 weeks, which is approximately the length of one semester, giving me an ETA sometime around February. Provided my advisor doesn’t attempt to stop me simply because I’m trying to graduate too quickly (the way Temple operates, it wouldn’t surprise me if the faculty tried to keep me doing their research as long as possible) and that I pass the writing and preliminary exams (I’m already past quals so long as I don’t completely screw up the class I’m in now, which is possible because the midterm is scheduled the day I come back from San Diego and the professor won’t reschedule it), I should have this done well in advance of when I need to graduate. My effulgent hatred of what my life has become (I call it “the dark year”) motivates me.
I’ve already filled out all of the paperwork; even though I haven’t formed my committee yet, I know who is going to be on it.
Now, dates. I do this for my own benefit because it gives me a solid framework to work within (I need deadlines to operate):
The graduation date I am going to shoot for is August 31, 2008. This makes my final thesis due date August 1, 2008, which makes my defense deadline roughly July 15, 2008. This means I have to finish my thesis by July 1 and pass Prelim II by approximately June 17, 2008, though I should pass the Prelim by May if possible because I need six credits of CIS9999 (Dissertation research) between Prelim II and the defense and the Summer I and Summer II semesters would be good opportunities to take these courses. This should indicate a Prelim I completion date of approximately April 15, 2008 at the latest and completion of the writing exam (which by now I should have no problems with) during the first week of February.
This brings us roughly back to the present.
So there’s the strategy: work backwards from the final deadline, get everything but writing and research out of the way, and set regular goals. If all else fails, I’ll take another semester and have a very easy Fall (and a December ETA, which I can definitely meet).
No need to keep ideas to myself
I don’t need to worry about withholding any ideas from an unworthy society. An unworthy society will do that all by itself.
We can detect breast cancer with 96% accuracy. It’s not as if this is a fluke of the classifier, either; our research methods are fine. But innocent people are very likely going to die because we can’t get our results past peer reviewers who won’t give us reasons for their decisions.
I’m blameless here, but it makes me wonder why I bother.
The Research Classroom
The idea is simple, but should be effective: A class that meets solely to do research. It puts 30 or so minds on a project at once, and has everyone collaborating. Some people are naturally more effective in this environment too. It’s win/win.
Keeping scientists is harder than initiating them
While perusing the NY Hall of Science website, I discovered an effort to interest children in science and mathematics that took the form of a TV show called “Cyberchase”. While I applaud the idea, I think it may be missing the point somewhat. It serves the purpose of initiating children into science, but children tend to be natural scientists anyway. What we really need to do to keep children interested is:
a. Stop pressuring them to stray from science in the later years of their childhood and their adolescence. Anyone who fell into the “nerd” group in high school (and face it, most scientists did) should know that a desire to do science runs very much against the ability to remain popular.
b. Bring science and mathematics into the public consciousness. The only times people hear about scientists are when they have results, which are invariably communicated in the form of “scientists have found an x% link between y and z”, and they almost never hear about mathematicians. Ask any random person on the street whether they’ve heard of the recent proof of the Poincare conjecture. You won’t find many who know that it was proved (or even what it is!) or the name of the mathematician who did it. People know who Einstein is because his name became synonymous with genius. However, if ordinary scientists and mathematicians could be brought to the same level of public awareness as other occupations (forget celebrity status; it happens in other countries, but will not happen here for a long time, if ever), then people might consider taking careers in science.
How this would be done is up for debate, but it wouldn’t be done by a TV show. Still, every little bit counts, to kudos for the idea.
An Aphorism
“One can never perform great works when consumed by the will of mediocre people”.
s/people/work if you prefer.