There are secrete places all over the university. Most aren't so much hidden as unnoticed For example, you can get from Gordon to Cummings without going outside. There's a tiny garden outside the Reg that only Max P's seem to know about. Five blocks from the edge of campus is the oldest sculpture in the city. The list goes on.
I've always been fascinated by this stuff. It's like we live in an art gallery. My first year I tried to find all of these places. There are a few common ones I haven't been in yet- like the Harper basement- and I've only recently been in the OI library. Still, I like to think I know more about these places than the average student. Fun fact: Our IDs get us into Rosenwald and Stuart. At night, the emptiness lends a surreal atmosphere. Sometimes I go in to run around and write papers.
Rockefeller has tours of the bell tower every Sunday. I really should go.
Showing posts with label Life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Life. Show all posts
2012-02-23
2011-06-17
New Blog!
Hey guys!
As some of you may know, I'm spending the summer doing physics research in Chile. For those of you who don't know, I'm spending the summer doing physics research in Chile. The admin knew I'm fond of writing and asked me to keep a record blog of my time. You can find it at http://scienceinsantiago.blogspot.com/. I'll still be updating here; that's just for Chile related affairs. This is still my main place for nonsensical rambling.
As some of you may know, I'm spending the summer doing physics research in Chile. For those of you who don't know, I'm spending the summer doing physics research in Chile. The admin knew I'm fond of writing and asked me to keep a record blog of my time. You can find it at http://scienceinsantiago.blogspot.com/. I'll still be updating here; that's just for Chile related affairs. This is still my main place for nonsensical rambling.
2011-06-13
Linux
I spent most of yesterday trying to boot Linux on my netbook. To make things interesting, I formatted my hard drive first. All of my old data gone in a flash. Until I got Linux working I wouldn't have a computer. I'd have to use the public one, the one my brother uses to watch the same 'comedy' videos he has the past five years. This was, of course, A Problem. It remained A Problem over 15 hours and five distros. Eventually I pinned it down to a problem in the power management software and got a netbook remix of Fedora working on the comp. Pretty sure I botched a few things on the way. Such is the price of change.
Of course, my job on this blog is to ramble insanely and occasionally talk about physics, not complain about Linux. My thoughts keep coming back to the erasure. Of course I saved the important things. But a sane person would have made sure Linux actually worked before they torched their system. Or they would have had a backup of the old OS, in case they wanted to go back. Hell, why even do Linux? I don't have a major need for it. I can say I wanted to start anew, but then I should have just wiped and replaced Windows.
My family thought I was crazy. And they were right. What I did was possibly the most irresponsible thing I could have done, short of chucking my computer out a window. I knew all of that going in. I knew, I typed in the commands, that there was a good chance I would never get the computer functioning again. And yet I did it anyway. And I have to keep asking myself why.
Okay, I know why. The thoughts make perfect sense in my head. Mostly I was asking myself how to explain it. There are two factors at work here, both drives that most people would call insane or stupid. First of all, I had to erase my hard drive so that I had the risk of it not working. This is difficult to describe. We have to face the consequences of our premeditated actions. But consequences are fickle and unpredictable. We have no way of knowing what will fizzle out and what will go too far. Repercussions blindside us. Mastering the art of response is kinda like trying to shoot by getting randomly pushed into warzones for five minutes at a time. We have to find a way to train ourselves by manufacturing our own potential crises. We can't ignore it, because we engineered it to be unignorable, and we cannot complain, because we knew it would be our own damned fault. All we can do is respond. That's the reason I erased everything first.
So why Linux? Linux is something I cannot use as well as Windows, something I'm completely unfamiliar with, something that would cause me great difficulty if I switched to it. Why not Linux? Comfort leads to complacency leads to stagnation. Better constantly shift my world very slightly, make myself eternally uncomfortable, than risk that. I've always been a person obsessed with flux. In confusion and chaos we find ourselves.
I have no idea how much sense these reasons make to another person. All I know is that these are massive driving forces for me. Switching to Linux isn't going to revolutionize my life, but it will continue to familiarize me with taking these unpleasant and beneficial actions. I guess you could ask are they really beneficial. Who knows? Maybe making chaos more comfortable will itself lead to stagnation, and ten years down the road I'll find new driving forces to combat that.
*G's job is to actually be insightful.
2011-05-30
Is Procrastination an Optimizing Behaviour?
Procrastination. We all do it. And we all have those pangs of regret at the wee hours of the morning trying to finish something that we should have been working on a long time ago. Ask just about anyone, they would probably say procrastination is a bad thing. But if it is so bad, why do we do it all the time? The short answer is, we do it because it is the best choice for us to make!
If we consider the work that must be done as dreadful and we would do anything to avoid it, which is to say that work is a cost, then we can think about our decision to do work as a decision about how to pay a cost over time. Procrastination in this case would be to delay paying the cost until as late as possible.
To understand how we make decisions over time, we must first understand what possible choices there are to make, and the possible trade-offs. At any moment, there are two choices: to do work now or to put it off. The trade-offs in either case are clear: on the one hand, we get the work out of the way and forgo leisure at the present; on the other hand, we enjoy leisure now, knowing that we will have to pay the cost eventually.
When faced with the choice of paying the cost now or in the future, for most people it is in fact optimal to pay later. To delay paying the cost is optimal because experiments show that we tend to "discount" the future, in the sense that we tend to place more importance on the present than on the future. As a heuristic example, consider whether you would prefer to receive $200 today or $200 next year. (In the case of doing work, we can consider the choice of delaying work as preferring to enjoy leisure today over leisure in the future).
There are a few theories as to why we discount the future. One reason is simply that we are impatient and do not look very far ahead into the future. Surely, we've all experienced these kinds of moments. For those that demand a rational-choice reason, however, we discount the future because we lack immediate control and perfect foresight over the future, whereas we can manipulate and have close to full knowledge of the present. For example, there is no guarantee that hyperinflation won't hit and $200 will become entirely worthless by this time next year. Also, if you were give $200 today instead, you could do whatever you want with it, including putting it in the bank and getting the $200 (plus interest) back the next year. Therefore, consumption in the future is worth less than consumption today because we cannot access the future immediately and because there is uncertainty over the future.
The above seems to suggest then, that procrastination is in fact optimizing behaviour because at any given moment, we would want to delay doing work as much as possible. Indeed if there was no deadline, it would be optimal to delay work indefinitely (keeping in mind our assumption that this work is only costly and does not bring any benefits when completed).
The problem is that most work have a deadline so we cannot put it off indefinitely. In this case, two contradictory incentives act. Far ahead of the deadline, when we plan how we will do the work, it is optimal to enjoy leisure now and delay work to later. This incentive to delay paying the cost will be present at all times leading up to the deadline. However, the deadline represents a hard limit at which time the entire project must be done, and forces us to work, against our desire to procrastinate. Given that it is optimal to delay as much as we can, and that we are constrained to finish the project on time, the optimal behaviour would in fact be to start the project as late as possible such that we would still expect to finish on time.
The story is a little more complicated than this though. Since finishing the entire project at once can be physically taxing, and usually involves no leisure at all in those few hours, the fact that we generally like to "smooth consume" is actually incentive for some people to pace out their work more evenly. Smooth consumption means we tend to prefer to have a few hours of free time everyday (and perhaps to sleep a decent amount every night) than to have no free time and no sleep one day, and a lot of free time and sleep the next, i.e. we prefer consumption in an evenly paced way. The other complication is expectations. Notice I wrote it would be optimal to start the project as late as possible while still expecting to finish on time. Since our expectations are rarely, if ever, perfect, we often overestimate our abilities and have to ask for extensions or else sacrifice in quality.
The negative consequences of not smoothing consumption of leisure (just think about the sleepy day after the deadline) and incorrect expectations often lead us to think that procrastination is a bad habit, when in reality it is arguably optimal given our preferences of discounting the future. So next time you get the urge to procrastinate, just be sure that you can finish the work under the pressure of a deadline and feel good in the fact that you're just optimizing your leisure consumption.
Or perhaps we just need to take on less projects.
If we consider the work that must be done as dreadful and we would do anything to avoid it, which is to say that work is a cost, then we can think about our decision to do work as a decision about how to pay a cost over time. Procrastination in this case would be to delay paying the cost until as late as possible.
To understand how we make decisions over time, we must first understand what possible choices there are to make, and the possible trade-offs. At any moment, there are two choices: to do work now or to put it off. The trade-offs in either case are clear: on the one hand, we get the work out of the way and forgo leisure at the present; on the other hand, we enjoy leisure now, knowing that we will have to pay the cost eventually.
When faced with the choice of paying the cost now or in the future, for most people it is in fact optimal to pay later. To delay paying the cost is optimal because experiments show that we tend to "discount" the future, in the sense that we tend to place more importance on the present than on the future. As a heuristic example, consider whether you would prefer to receive $200 today or $200 next year. (In the case of doing work, we can consider the choice of delaying work as preferring to enjoy leisure today over leisure in the future).
There are a few theories as to why we discount the future. One reason is simply that we are impatient and do not look very far ahead into the future. Surely, we've all experienced these kinds of moments. For those that demand a rational-choice reason, however, we discount the future because we lack immediate control and perfect foresight over the future, whereas we can manipulate and have close to full knowledge of the present. For example, there is no guarantee that hyperinflation won't hit and $200 will become entirely worthless by this time next year. Also, if you were give $200 today instead, you could do whatever you want with it, including putting it in the bank and getting the $200 (plus interest) back the next year. Therefore, consumption in the future is worth less than consumption today because we cannot access the future immediately and because there is uncertainty over the future.
The above seems to suggest then, that procrastination is in fact optimizing behaviour because at any given moment, we would want to delay doing work as much as possible. Indeed if there was no deadline, it would be optimal to delay work indefinitely (keeping in mind our assumption that this work is only costly and does not bring any benefits when completed).
The problem is that most work have a deadline so we cannot put it off indefinitely. In this case, two contradictory incentives act. Far ahead of the deadline, when we plan how we will do the work, it is optimal to enjoy leisure now and delay work to later. This incentive to delay paying the cost will be present at all times leading up to the deadline. However, the deadline represents a hard limit at which time the entire project must be done, and forces us to work, against our desire to procrastinate. Given that it is optimal to delay as much as we can, and that we are constrained to finish the project on time, the optimal behaviour would in fact be to start the project as late as possible such that we would still expect to finish on time.
The story is a little more complicated than this though. Since finishing the entire project at once can be physically taxing, and usually involves no leisure at all in those few hours, the fact that we generally like to "smooth consume" is actually incentive for some people to pace out their work more evenly. Smooth consumption means we tend to prefer to have a few hours of free time everyday (and perhaps to sleep a decent amount every night) than to have no free time and no sleep one day, and a lot of free time and sleep the next, i.e. we prefer consumption in an evenly paced way. The other complication is expectations. Notice I wrote it would be optimal to start the project as late as possible while still expecting to finish on time. Since our expectations are rarely, if ever, perfect, we often overestimate our abilities and have to ask for extensions or else sacrifice in quality.
The negative consequences of not smoothing consumption of leisure (just think about the sleepy day after the deadline) and incorrect expectations often lead us to think that procrastination is a bad habit, when in reality it is arguably optimal given our preferences of discounting the future. So next time you get the urge to procrastinate, just be sure that you can finish the work under the pressure of a deadline and feel good in the fact that you're just optimizing your leisure consumption.
Or perhaps we just need to take on less projects.
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