Future

It's a well known question: if all we know and are is *now*, what sense is there in preparing for the future?

In the late 1960s, a study was conducted in Stanford where a child was seated at a table with a marshmallow placed in front of them. The child could eat it now or wait until the researcher returned, at which point they would get a second marshmallow. These children were tracked throughout their adult lives, and those who were able to delay gratification tended to have "better" life outcomes -- better paying jobs, better health, etc. 

Some people moralize delay of gratification, talk highly of discipline and grit. Not everyone feels so strongly about it but I'm sure most agree future-thinking is better than living hedonistically or impulsively -- that it's far better to wait for the second marshmallow.

I question that, though. Only the present moment is certain -- and even if we model the future, the further out it gets the more uncertain it is. And a marshmallow in hand is worth two in the bush, no?

There is no real benefit to assigning a hierarchy to different parts of the brain -- the so-called "monkey brain" and the frontal lobe are all part of a singular reinforcement learning agent that seeks reward. For some, two marshmallows doesn't mean double the happiness and they'd rather have a certain marshmallow now. For others, maybe the waiting itself is the reward, as the promise of two is worth it. Or perhaps the reward is the the feeling that you're following the rules, that you're taking the "smarter" path, being a good boy like your parents taught you, or even avoiding punishment by doing the "right" thing. Maybe you even get to feel better than those undisciplined, uneducated folk who just can't wait. 

As it turns out, the latter is closer to the truth. Later replications of the marshmallow study found that family environment and socioeconomic status explained much of the difference in life outcomes. In other words, people who wait for two marshmallows do so mostly because their parents told them to. Then they grow up and tell their kids the same thing, that two is better than one, which conditions their kids to reward themselves while waiting for that marshmallow ("I'm a good kid"/"I'll get hit if I..."/"I'm better than them"), and hence the two-marshmallow faith self-perpetuates. 

Loneliness

There's a kind of loneliness that goes deeper than physical loneliness, emotional loneliness. It's the realization that no matter how close you are with someone, at the end of the day it is only your conscious experience that you have. It is the solipsistic reality that you only presume what others think and feel, *that* others think and feel. It's what I describe as the realization that you are an island in a dense, eternal fog, and there's no real evidence that there are other islands in the sea, only currents to suggest so. 

Even if they do, you communicate through such channels already so narrow and further hampered by societal, cultural, or emotional barriers. 

It's a feeling I want to investigate further. I don't think it's necessarily a bad feeling, this loneliness. I think that maybe it's not necessarily the stripping away of the physical, mental, emotional frameworks of our everyday life that gives it this "lonely" flavor -- in fact I think this ought to be liberating. Maybe it's the holding onto that last frame of "concept of self" -- the ego. If we rid ourselves of this, then what is left but simply a collection of experiences and memories? What is there to *be* lonely?

Moderation

Centenarians often say their secret to longevity is "everything in moderation". But moderation means different things to different people. What is moderation, in a lifestyle where excess is normalized? Too much sugar, meat, caffeine, too much sitting, too much stress, loneliness, and too little sleep... Not to mention our baseline exposure to substances we are slowly learning are poisons: PFAs, xenoestrogens, and more recently microplastics. Our bodies no longer understand "moderation" as it once was known -- it is now considered normal to live out the end of our lives in poor health and isolation.

It is amazing to me that in 16th century Europe, sugar cost more than gold per ounce. It was sold by apothecaries and praised for its medicinal properties: energizing the body, curing melancholy, warding off disease... makes it sound like a drug.

What is the "optimal" use of rote learning in studying (pure) math?

I feel like I wrote a decent answer to the above-titled MSE question so I'm pasting it here. 

How do you solve a jigsaw puzzle? Do you take each piece and try to figure out exactly where it must go first, piece by piece? Or do you start sorting a bunch of pieces by color, texture, until the images start clicking into place? How much of both?

Like puzzle pieces, mathematical concepts gain clarity in context -- e.g. an isolated dark spot on a puzzle piece may be identified as a roof tile only when gathered with other "roof pieces". Or maybe you could have added it with the "skyline pieces" instead. In the same way, there is often more than one way to "understand" a mathematical concept, and each way admits a different set of relations to other concepts. Look up any "intuition" question on MSE and you'll see this at play in the various answers given. It follows that if you are struggling with a particular proof or concept, it's sometimes better to cast your net wide and focus on expanding your context -- that is to say, memorize and move on.

You will find people giving similar advice when reading papers -- skim first, several times if you need to, then drill down as needed. Unfortunately, I don't have anything more specific that can apply to a general case as it even depends on how something is meant to be read, and how well it is written. The best expositors (Halmos comes to mind) mitigate the need for jumping around to some extent and try to keep things linear, but there are still lots of variables like writing style, learning style, and compatibility of background knowledge which make it difficult to give a general solution. The best thing to do, like others have mentioned, is to do the exercises to constantly evaluate your understanding and see where you might need to drill down a bit.

9/19/2025

But all at once I felt like a stone realizing its stone-nature. There is no transcendence to the stone, there is no mind or soul or higher calling. But we humans, unlike stones, possess an incredible ability to acknowledge our own limitations in our own limited minds. A cruel joke, that this doesn't afford us access to any higher plane of experience than a stone's. On the other hand the stone's experience is unadulterated by self-reference, pure and essential. It is better to be the stone. 

There's a sense of disillusionment watching people who are supposedly in love with each other casually hurt each other with their words, and in return, watching those who receive that hurt shrug it off just as casually as if it were nothing. It's the emotional analogue of that sense of disgust and violation you feel watching people do bodily violence to each other callously -- the realization that your body is not sacred or protected, that you're really just flesh. 

It felt like some bubble bursting around me. I, like everyone else, have always felt the need for something sacred in this world. I, like everyone else, possess a void, a void I wanted to fill by striving for something higher, transcendent, without really knowing what that meant. 

It wasn't always Love I sought to fill that void, though. At first it was God. It occurs to me that I have been fundamentally unhappy since I lost my faith in high school. I had felt an acute sense of loss when that happened. I felt aimless... my grades started slipping dramatically and I no longer felt in control of my life. 

Then I found other things, distractions of the mind: I angrily turned on God, arguing with Christians to satisfy my cognitive dissonance. I chased whatever the philosophical curiosity of the week was with my underdeveloped, under-read mind, believing that I was doing something productive with my time. I continued this in college and took on mathematics, that childhood pressure-cooker-turned-refuge when the fruits of my mother's beatings (I was always quite slow at arithmetic) eventually translated into my teacher's praise for being the "smart kid". 

Now I wonder if it's time to outgrow love. Is seeking to fill a void itself a hopeless endeavor? After all, all we have is that irresistible drive to exist and to reproduce, and its countless derivatives that masquerade as "higher purpose" but smell of human and non-generality -- something Mind resists. 

But someone in me protests, says I'm thinking about love wrong. That seeking for others to fill my void is selfish. Like everyone else, I wanted to be understood deeply. But have I really, really tried understanding another soul? To fill their void? I always felt lonely and strived so hard to become more lovable, the most lovable: the most impressive, the most capable and smartest... yet how often do I see others as lovable, without intellectualizing their flaws? They say that love comes when you stop seeking it and start giving it out.

All that to say: I'm not sure it's worth giving up quite yet. Maybe disillusionment is necessary for coming to terms with reality; this reality that is at once so mundane, so cruel, so flesh-bound... If "transcendence" even exists, whatever form it takes, maybe it is within that reality, made of it. 

The metroplex and kinetic theory

Re. the title: I'd like to flesh out a proper model so I can describe more precisely the metric we're looking for, but I don't think I really have the machinery yet. Probably best to revisit this later, but the general idea is that people might modeled as particles. But interactions aren't necessary like collisions, and there's some discretizing, suggesting maybe more of a network/percolation model. Do we go more general, not necessarily choosing collisions over real space nor some graph topology but maintaining a minimal concept of "interaction" to see what general effects arise? Or do we choose, knowing that it's not a perfect analogy but we try to see what happens? Or do we try to model the actual dynamics and more accurately describe? 

There's this weird phenomenon on the Dallas subreddit where some people say the city sucks and it's hard to meet people and equally as many come out of the woodwork and say that it's not the city, it's you, pretty much everywhere is like this, etc. etc... 

Having heard these complaints and counter-complaints over and over the past few years I decided to have a think about it. I'm pretty convinced that the metric we're looking at is "interaction density" -- where an "interaction" is not necessarily you bumping into the love of your life but rather much more mundane things: seeing a flyer for some random event, calling for information and learning about this other group, playing a pickup game of ping-pong with some elderly Chinese man at a public park, etc... 

In short, interaction here seems at least slightly more intentional, more self-sorting with less of locality-based shared experiences here than in other cities in my experience. This is not limited to Dallas, of course, and it's definitely more of a continuum. And yes, I have personally felt there's a bit more difficulty to break in with people here --

For instance you might not have a shared commute with hundreds of other strangers that might have if you took the bus or train, might not see the same bulletins for the same events. In fact these events might not even happen with the same frequency because of that or be distributed moreso across hobby groups rather than proximity. Of course these effects are not necessarily so dramatic but tend to accumulate, so are perceived by some people. 

I think essentially two things mitigate this, as plenty of people have pointed out: having a hobby or the internet. 

The hobby provides an intentionally constructed, virtual network that has higher interaction density as compared to normal since it encourages people to meet in courts, concerts, what have you -- essentially a purposefully constructed substitute for traditional third places. 

An alternative if you don't have a hobby or your hobby sucks for finding people or your hobby is just way too self-sorting, is to use the internet. The internet, like a hobby, is an externally constructed, literally virtual network where interaction density is uncapped, provided people in your locale actually use the internet. 

I think the people with thriving social lives because they already have the right networks and hobbies and methods have to acknowledge the plight of people who don't. 

On the other hand those who don't should accept that yes, it is isolating to have long drives in your metal box to get to stuff and yeah, maybe some people are less social with strangers because of said relative sparsity of interactions/ shared experiences and so on. At the same time -- it's not going to get much better for a while, so you're going to have to expend more energy and look for workarounds. Once you get going and your network grows it's really not so bad.

Korean BBQ

One day my coworker and I were discussing barbecue and I brought up how Korean BBQ especially makes your clothes stink after. 

He made some snarky comment about how there seems to be some Korean everything, implying that maybe I talk too much about Korean stuff.

Looking back this feels insensitive to me. We talked about "American stuff" 98% of the time. The majority of my life was trying to, or at least appearing to, fit into this mainstream American way of life despite not really ever being raised in that context. But I tried my best: When my coworkers talked about old American movies I would always show curiosity -- I even made a list of old American movies to catch up on like Tombstone and bills Excellent Adventure.

The immigrant experience is my experience. From very young I was taught to behave myself in public because how I act would affect how Koreans, and Asians in general, are perceived in this country. I now realize how right my mother was -- as Asian-Americans, we are not seen first as Americans, but rather Asians. We do not have the privilege of acting as individuals because we are not, in public or at first glance, seen through that lens. 

It feels a bit unfair then to simultaneously "other" this group of people but also insist that they adopt wholesale the majority culture, perhaps to only weigh in through approved, comfortable channels like Panda Express or K-Pop.

Some say that we live in America, so we should speak American and dress American. To those individuals I ask: what is "American"? I have lived the majority of my life here in the land, the same as you. What personal contribution have you made to the land that makes your definition of "American", your lifestyle and your pop culture, more "American" than my own lived experiences? Is galbi not as American as smoked ribs, because it is made by people of a different culture to yours, different race? 

Such is the problem of the immigrant and their descendants. Given time the immigrants will "fold in" to the popular American culture in the same way that the European and African Americans have. But it is clear to me that only a certain amount of foreign-ness will be tolerated at any given point. Maybe imperialism is in the Western blood -- they would rather others adopt their culture than they adopt others'. No trade deficits will be tolerated. 

Even understanding this, I still struggle to comprehend how on the individual level you could say or imply that my Korean-labeled cultural artefacts should be treated as something "different" than your American-labeled ones. 

I don't say things like "You always bring up a white-people version of everything" yet it seemed so natural for my coworker to say essentially the same thing to me.

And even then, I know white people who live very, very different lives -- but I can't imagine one white person saying to another "You always seem to talk about yuppy versions of things". It makes it clear to me that being raised Korean is not the same as being raised in the city, or on a ranch, or in Tennessee, because it is somehow non-American. 

It's not that I don't understand that there should be a cultural center, a shared cultural language of America. It's more like, something feels very different about mentioning my cultural label -- it is less "we should talk more from a shared/mainstream cultural language" and more "my cultural language IS the mainstream, and yours isn't, so I don't care nor need to care". It seems that they don't understand that in many ways I don't know the mainstream "American" culture in the same way they don't know my Korean-American lifestyle. But theirs doesn't have a label, because it is the default and mine isn't. And again: I try to approach and understand them, but there seems to be little attempt at reciprocation, even on the individual level. That's what bothers me. 

Perhaps it is my fault for self-labeling things as Korean. If I talked about eating kimchi in the same way I talked about eating pasta, maybe things would be different...

---------------------------------

10/29/25

I think I've started noticing more and more that many Americans on some level are uncomfortable with foreign cultures. It projects like a superiority complex but feels more like an insecurity. Like that one guy who grew up in the same town their whole life who feels insecure when they meet a friend who's been all over. It's human to compare and feel sad that maybe you haven't lived your best life, but it's a choice to instead take the opportunity to enjoy a friend's stories and take curiosity, rather than insecurity, take over. Curiosity seems dead, though.