Substrate

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Right now I am very sad, if I’m honest: I didn’t do much this year but write this newsletter and go to the gym and not drink and love some people halfway decently and others not as well as I would have liked to. I did not do anything exciting and I also did not save as much money as I intended to save by trimming out those exciting things. I once again did not finish or sell a book; I got off twitter for a while but only because I spent most of the year wrestling with the feeling that all of this had been a mistake and that I should quit writing and go do something else with my life, and the perhaps-worse feeling that it was too late to even do that, too late, even, to successfully give up. every verb in the future or the past tense and nothing in the present. This is a time to sit uncomfortably with who we are when we have nothing to show for ourselves, and how we might still be loved.

The type of seeing we’re referring to here is less ocular and more oracular. ​ There are hidden pennies everywhere. Our job is to see them. ​ Because in the end, after all of your goals are over and through (achieved or not), when the final tally is counted, these are the only pennies you can keep.

We tend to overestimate […] in the short run and underestimate […] in the long run.

She looks like an Instagram – which is to say, an ordinary woman reproducing the lessons of the marketplace, which is how an ordinary woman evolves into an ideal. ​ Figuring out how to “get better” at being a woman is a ridiculous and often amoral project – a subset of the larger, equally ridiculous, equally amoral project of learning to get better at life under accelerated capitalism. In these pursuits, most pleasures end up being traps, and every public-facing demand escalates in perpetuity. Satisfaction remains, under the terms of the system, necessarily out of reach. ​ The ritualization and neatness of this process (and the fact that Sweetgreen is pretty good) obscure the intense, circular artifice that defines the type of life it’s meant to fit into. The ideal chopped-salad customer needs to eat his $12 salad in 10 minutes because he needs the extra time to keep functioning within the job that allows him to afford a regular $12 salad in the first place. He feels a physical need for this $12 salad, as it’s the most reliable and convenient way to build up a vitamin barrier against the general malfunction that comes with his salad-requiring-and-enabling job. As Matt Buchanan wrote at the Awl in 2015, the chopped salad is engineered to “free one’s hand and eyes from the task of consuming nutrients, so that precious attention can be directed toward a small screen, where it is more urgently needed, so it can consume data: work email or Amazon’s nearly infinite catalog or Facebook’s actually infinite News Feed, where, as one shops for diapers or engages with the native advertising sprinkled between the not-hoaxes and baby photos, one is being productive by generating revenue for a large internet company, which is obviously good for the economy, or at least it is certainly better than spending lunch reading a book from the library, because who is making money from that?” ​ It’s very easy, under conditions of artificial but continually escalating obligation, to find yourself organizing your life around practices you find ridiculous and possibly indefensible. Women have known this intimately for a long time. ​ Barre was much too expensive for my grad school budget, but I kept paying for it. It seemed like an investment in a more functional life.

Have you ever met someone with a unique first name, and then all of a sudden you hear the name everywhere you turn? That's the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon at work. How did it get that handle?

We all want to be seen in our way, whether it be by a broader audience, a romantic partner, esteemed peers—but what's becoming clearer to me is how imperative it is for me to see me. That is quite possibly the only important thing, the thing that drives the regard of others. The problem is that as a beautiful* woman, you become accustomed to being a constant focus of the most superficial kind of gaze, the only kind that you think exists. It convinces you that you are powerful, and you become drunk on this power, addicted, and it becomes the worst kind of crutch and measure of self-worth. Its decline is terrible and slow and steady. You think you're becoming invisible, and you begin to doubt yourself. The fact that you suffer so much from this is also deeply embarassing. It feels shallow, indulgent, and bourgeois.

An implementation at https://www.translationparty.com/.

When you double the choices, you halve the agony of deciding whether you want pasta or seafood this evening. You’ve also increased your possible solution sets;

Psychologists use the term “enmeshment” to describe a situation where the boundaries between people become blurred, and individual identities lose importance. ​ when you engage in any intense activity for the great majority of your waking hours, that activity will tend to become more and more central to your identity — if only because it has displaced other activities and relationships with which you might identify.

These notes were originally developed as lecture notes for a category theory course. They should be well-suited to anyone that wants to learn category theory from scratch and has a scientific...

There's not going to be a “Facebook killer.” But there could simply be lots of other sites, that focus on a different, more constructive and generative, set of goals.

“Women’s geography,” Price tells her students, is made up of more than bridges and tunnels. It’s shaped by asking things like: Where on the map do you feel safe? How would you walk from A to B in the city without having to look over your shoulder? It’s hard to map these intangibles—but not impossible.

and I’d tell them stories about Jane. I pictured her scooping them into her arms. “She’d have eaten you up like English muffins,” I told them. ​ They showed Jane the photograph—she couldn’t really see by that point, but Denise says she knew, she knew, she saw, she knew, she heard, she smiled—and then she died. She knew, she heard, she knew.

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When I looked at that mouse with her broom, I wondered which one of us was wrong about who I was. ​ She was a woman who had spent two years nursing her mother and her best friend through cancer. They had both recently died and she had lost herself in caring for them, she said. She wanted a week to be herself. Not a teacher or a mother or a wife. This trip was the thing she was giving herself after their passing. ​ That I wanted someone to articulate that they loved me, that they saw me, was a personal failing and I tried to overcome it. ​ It turns out, if you want to save a species, you don’t spend your time staring at the bird you want to save. You look at the things it relies on to live instead. You ask if there is enough to eat and drink. You ask if there is a safe place to sleep. Is there enough here to survive? ​ Forgave each other for telling the same stories over and over again. ​ To keep becoming a woman is so much self-erasing work. ​ What I understood on the other side of my decision, on the gulf, was that there was no such thing as ruining yourself. There are ways to be wounded and ways to survive those wounds, but no one can survive denying their own needs. To be a crane-wife is unsustainable.

A smarter futurism would focus less on pushing through advances and more on being sure we will use them wisely when they come. The coming age of robot vehicles should find us dreaming not of their role in this world but of their risk and potential in a future not yet made. ​ the problem from which other problems emerged, was commercial pressure for private ownership—for the car to be a personal vehicle in your garage rather than a shared technology woven into the transportation network, as early electric cars would have been. The costs of this decision can be seen on every curb: the typical American vehicle spends ninety-five per cent of its life parked. ​ electric vehicles were struggling culturally, for reasons we would now call gendered. “The internal-combustion car that had to be coaxed and muscled to life, with its lubes and explosions and thrusting pistons, that would be the car for men,” Albert writes. Electrics—quiet, practical, and, in one engineer’s estimation, “tame”—took on female associations. Not for the last time, the makers of gas cars didn’t so much win the market as create a market they could win. The triumph of gas engines entailed a shift in the whole transportation model—from shared cars to privately owned cars, from an extension of the metropolitan network to a vehicle that required infrastructure of its own. “Had this period of random technological mutation selected for the electric, the social history of America would be unrecognizable,” Albert notes.

They have insight; they have intuition. These come from an internalized philosophy about the field, drawn from experience, observation, and stories.

Mathematics makes the mind its playground. And teaching play is hard work! It’s actually harder than lecturing because you have to be ready for almost anything to happen in the classroom, but it’s also more fun. It is impossible to be a mathematician without being a poet in soul. I would like to encourage institutions to start valuing the public writing of its faculty. More people will read these pieces than will ever read any of our research papers. I now explicitly say on my exams that I will give extra credit on incomplete proofs where students acknowledge their gaps. I get much more thoughtful answers that way. So let me encourage all of us to try having these conversations, to be quick to listen, slow to speak, and quick to forgive each other when we say something stupid. That’ll happen if you start to have conversations, and we just have to have grace for each other if we make mistakes—it’s better than not talking. I sometimes wish graduate school admissions would remember this too: “Background is not the same as ability.” As my friend Bill Velez says: If you want your Ph.D. program to have more students of color, then you have to stop admitting students on the basis of background and start admitting students by their ability. And then, support them. And he said, “I would rather see you work with me, than quit.” Web Mirror: https://mathyawp.wordpress.com/2017/01/08/mathematics-for-human-flourishing/

In the fall of 2009, as the age of blogs was already fading, I launched The Frailest Thing as a space to think out loud as I worked my way through a graduate program in technology studies. In the y...

Now we walk in straight lines because we have to, not because we know where we're going. Far from an expression of certainty, the urban street grid simplifies, removes choices, and reflect's nobody's direct route exactly. ​ We eagerly provide data about ourselves to platforms so they can help us learn what we want; our unique personal desires are mere inputs for systems that channel them into a narrower range of outputs.

I think the sirens in The Odyssey sang The Odyssey, for there is nothing more seductive, more terrible, than the story of our own life, the one we do not want to hear and will do anything to listen to.

Twice in my life I’ve had the good fortune of getting exactly what I wanted, only to find that, once I had it, it wasn’t what I wanted at all. ​ Twitter, then, is a shared delusion experienced by many millions of people simultaneously. That shared delusion can be wonderful and powerful, which is why it is so difficult to explain to non-participants, but it certainly comes with tradeoffs as well ​ A physicist making a contribution about physics might find a social justice advocate reviewing the contribution for social justice norms; a social justice advocate carelessly drawing a physics metaphor in a social justice contribution might find a physicist explaining technical inconsistencies in the metaphor that was intended to be casual. All happens in front of an audience, driving behavior that might play out differently in public. Participating in this process can be stimulating, but also frustrating or exhausting - it is difficult to foresee the various intersections of “expertise” to which a given contribution might be subjected.

Writer Ted Gioia on how important high-quality inputs are to mainting high-quality output.