In Tucson, Arizona, New Year’s Eve is punctuated by the “Taco Drop”, sponsored by Taco Bell, where thousands gather to watch a crane lower the titular Taco at midnight. Officially, this night reflects how delicious and affordable Taco Bell is. Kabbalistically, the Taco Drop celebrates renewal – the purging of the maltodextrin-lubricated GI tract after imbibing the sacred laxative.
5 days later I fly to San Francisco. January 6th is also a day of kabbalistic significance. It is the day of Epiphany, when the Magi visited the infant Jesus, when (in some traditions) Jesus was baptized, a day for feasts and gifts.
It is also the day when rioters stormed the US Capitol. Capitol comes from the Latin caput, meaning head; thus, January 6th can be interpreted as the changing of one’s head through decisive violence.
And make no mistake, growth is violence. You kill N for N+1. You can make no inductive guarantees for who takes over your body. Stray, and you may live to hate the person you become.
An aside: I’m writing this on my phone on BART and I just saw this guy with a falcon on his shoulder. It’s been a childhood dream of mine to befriend a bird of prey. Imagine having your falcon pal flying above you on a hike! You point at a rabbit and the regal bird – hanging, then diving, then a flash of red blurring upwards – returns with its catch. Anyway I had a brief chat with him about falconry permits – as expected, California has the most restrictive laws.
This past year has been a violent one for me, and in some ways I am still unmoored. When you spend so much of your time thinking about hypotheticals and possibilities, reflecting on the past looks like a distortion of the future. In the last year I think I’ve fully internalized that the world will not be the same, that maybe only a couple thousand people in the world have the requisite situational awareness (™) to act, that maybe if I try really really hard I can be one of them. I have had some of the most productive and enlightening weeks of my life (where I’ve shocked myself with the quality and quantity of my output) and also my first real stint of burnout (weeks where I let deadlines roll by and let myself down).
I have learned that I am not a productivity machine, and that indeed optimizing is somewhat corrosive to my soul. Backchaining is important, but I cannot let my life be subsumed by some far off goal no matter how important it is. My semester resolution of “no matter how busy I am I will make time for friends every week” was implicitly actually “I will make time for friends to prevent burnout”. But friendship is not an instrumental good! Friendship is not just something you keep around simply to maximize your expected output over long durations! If this is a skill issue, I’m okay with constitutionally being incapable of being maximally agentic.
Another aside: I am now at the California Academy of Sciences. I have watched the tang circle in the tank for 5 minutes now, what an electric blue! They wave their fins in ungainly flapping motions. I wonder how this blue will compare to Yves Klein’s synthetic ultramarine when I visit the Museum of Modern Art later today.
I’m also working on AI safety now! I read HPMOR in middle school, watched Rob Miles in high school, and it still took me until nearly my 3rd year of college to realize people were actually working on this and I could help. I am absurdly, grovellingly grateful to my friends Yixiong, Parv, and Ayush (among others) for helping me grow into the person I am today. At OASIS I realized how lucky I was to be in an environment filled with high context passionate discussion. Even most other college organizers cannot say the same.
I think over the last year, I’ve been shaping increasingly into a person who thinks doing good is tractable. We should have grand ambitions. We can solve poverty and build trains and structures of great beauty and learn the mysteries of the universe and we should not settle for a fucked political system and incompetence and scarcity and disease. By all rights I should despair for humanity’s continued survival in the next century, but I truly think the future can be bright and individuals can make a difference. Is that so insane?
And maybe that’s my comparative advantage in some utterly useless way. I think I am really good at a lot of things, but if you keep applying a compression algorithm to my soul, perhaps the simplest building block, the pattern from which all else can be built, the enduring constant across time and experience has been this love for life, joie de vivre. I am a savant at joy. In a Alexander-ian sense, let me gaze upon ten thousand sunsets on wine-dark seas by ten thousands shores, filled with fiercesome joy.
I’m rambling now, but I am often reminded of one of my favorite passages from Marcus Aurelius:
“We should remember that even Nature’s inadvertence has its own charm, its own attractiveness. The way loaves of bread split open on top in the oven; the ridges are just by-products of the baking, and yet pleasing, somehow: they rouse our appetite without our knowing why. Or how ripe figs begin to burst. And olives on the point of falling: the shadow of decay gives them a peculiar beauty. Stalks of wheat bending under their own weight. The furrowed brow of the lion. Flecks of foam on the boar’s mouth.”
The world is growing and stagnating and decaying in all kinds of rich ways. There is surpassing beauty, the world is almost perfect. Things are also terrible, and you should do things about it. Holding these two ideas in my head simultaneously is the only helpful cognitive dissonance I’ve ever had.