Academic chat
Getting ready to meet a muse
From last episode
As expected, posting long texts daily is entertaining and ego-boosting. Surprisingly, I notice the “height” of the ideas that I had put into words grow. The accumulation feeling happened when I walked across campus this morning. “Oh, here’s a new thought that builds on the thought I wrote about yesterday. I could append it.” It also happened when I asked my friend what he thought. I felt a sudden ease in discussing the vague concepts that have been swirling in my head before. I look forward to letting this writing practice develop.
There’s a dramatic development from Monday. In the lyrics of Time, there is a line, “No one told you when to run \ You missed the starting gun.” How I interpreted the line is that delaying a pursuit has costs. It was very resonant when I read it that night because earlier that day, yet another loved one told me to stop escaping and work towards my hypothetical hypocritical goal.
In Tuesday’s reflection on the hologram conversation, Maya also said “I wish you will find your mentor(s).” That was the goal I decided to face. Within 30 minutes, I emailed a researcher whose logic I liked and borrowed for my messy thesis. That evening, the researcher scheduled a chat to discuss potential mentorship and collaboration.
In another’s words, this chat is a “nonromantic academic date,” because in both scenarios you are both asking — Is there a connection?
I got a bit nervous after she took that metaphor. What if there are social norms that I didn’t pick up? For example, perhaps I was supposed to prepare a research proposal or explain the contribution and conclusions of my thesis. Worse, what if my reading comprehension and independent research skills are so hopelessly weak and my delusional fantasy skills are so strong that when I thought we match, actually it’s an illusion of ignorance?
Luckily, these are questions that I can ask him directly tomorrow.
Is there a connection?
Definitely. there are at least 5 sites of binding between us.
we are both interested in collective intelligence. However, I wanted to ask him:
“what do you mean when you say that “the fact that the future can’t be sampled and the past can’t be accessed […] leads to traditional collective intelligence models being rather useless when thinking about timing decisions”? I had wanted to know what these fancy concepts that bundle with lots of math and long manuscripts mean. Having that mutual language I can then proceed to use it as a tool to answer things that concern me or my people.
“you got a grant to quantify the predation strategies that brown bears follow to hunt salmon (and how they improve with age). why would we want to quantify that? wouldn’t the hunters and bears already know for centuries?” My intuition is that with the privilege of tool-use and grant resources, we should make a project design that takes other people’s interests into account.
we both value quantitative analyses. to me it’s an aspiration of a value that I am working my way towards checking and becoming. Please don’t enslave me or harm me! That’s my instinctual drive. But as time went by, I think I could be an equal counterpart who can fight fantastic fights with it.
we both want a DIY sense of adventure to designing projects and a joyful approach to science. this sounds fluffy to me. in my memory i have felt the joy and adventure in the ideation phases, but when it comes to execution the DIY adventure because hard and the joy is weak against frustrations or confusions. I want to know how to train my strength and find my people-space to complete the double diamond of an idea into reality, as if the science becomes real and a solution rather than a problem.
we both have a love for biology. for me it’s more a love of life. i have been thinking a lot about life lately.
生命教育
there is a word that perked my ear today, called 生命教育. It’s an educational program term in Taiwan and Japan (I think?) that focuses on learning “respect the life of one self and others”. There are exercises such as taking care of a pig as a class then sending it to the slaughter house, cooking, eating it. there is also a technique for children who fear death — set a 30-minute time constraint on how much you can think about it daily. as you can see these classes are mostly about death. Though, my mom once told me that in developmental psychology, an average (?) child overcomes the. fear of death through curiosity — to learn about what’s in the unknown and to make knowledge in the finite.
There is also an exercise on making your own tombstone. What would my tomb say? I didn’t decide if I want a tomb yet. None of my family does. I remember the equation for entropy — S = k log W — enscribed on Boltzmann’s tombstone, which prof Howe showed in class:
so poetic. perhaps the classes on forces, spacetimes and numbers are also classes on death. to continue past a material body is gone is a tricky task. I hope whatever the form of my “tomb” is, it can have some liveliness. I think I told Padme that I wanted to make some virtual creatures that I can give to people and will live with them while I am alive but also stay after my disappearance. It would be interesting to see them diverge from me. this way I don’t have to be static or exactly remembered like a fantasy. It would be nice for the virtual creatures of me to take care of people I like.
i have been thinking about death. it became more real now than 5 years ago when I was writing about it in a story. than 3 years ago when I went to “death cafe” where people sit and chat about death while sitting in a cemetery in Berlin. than the times I thought I was gonna experience it. i have been crying about it. i feel unspeakably and sacredly confused. after the PhD student shot his mentor on campus last month, i still don’t understand. but when i walk barefoot on the forest floor i can look at dead leaves and feel their softness on my weight, and know that they are not really dead.
last connection…
the most easily and quickly materializable one is a super quick “PhD”: my thesis was inspired by one of his models. I haven’t finished that paper yet. I want to, as a way of exerting power back at the world since the world determined most of what I experience. I sense that I have randomly gotten all the settings needed to do this — the privilege of financial and social resources. the only obstacle is my constantly switching ideas, low self esteem, high perfectionism, preoccupation with social abandonment, tendency to get hooked on emotional coping mechanisms. OK nevermind this diagnosis doesn’t feel productive. What i want to say is, I would love to get his feedback on how to finish this paper.
A match is a feeling of readiness, like “哦原来你也在这里 oh! I didn’t know you are here too.“
Wou know how all your eggs (if you were born female) are there when you were born? and your mom had the genes to instruct all those eggs to instantiate? I suppose the genes and societies also determined most of the other kinds of eggs that we have to bleed out or fertilize already — they are there, waiting for the next change. the budding skills, the getting along, the interests. We are different, genetically and geopolitically. I’m looking forward to the siblingship.