The Facebook Portrait Project

I started a project. It’s called Facebook Portraits. It has three goals:

  • It’s like a sketch book, but writing. I practice my craft and procrastinate on my book.
  • It shows how Facebook can be a place for connection rather than narcissism. How we are free to choose how we use technology. How it’s up to us to channel it as a force to bring us together, not divide us. But we have to work at that.
  • It’s a contemporary twist on the age-old practice of epistolary correspondence. Just with the world reading what would have been a private letter now versus after the author dies. Which is kind of how the world works now.

Here are my first five portraits. Dear World, I offer you my sketch book.


Portrait 1: Sanita Skribe-Negre

We are hiring a head of people at my company, integrate.ai. The other day a candidate asked me (and the colleague interviewing with me) about past heads of people I’ve worked with and why I liked or did not like them.

I had the honor of telling the candidate why Sanita Skribe-Negre was the most talented leader I’d worked with. Why she was without a doubt a partner to the business, flying around god knows where and working alongside the C-Suite until 3 am to get deals done. How she navigated the tricky, delicate work of assimilating one culture into another post acquisition. How she dealt with the conflict, tension, anxiety of different business units growing awkwardly into adults. How she was thoughtful about creating company-wide performance management programs that could scale with growth, but did their best not to suffocate individuals under the strange, stifling weight of metrics and boxes and numbers.

And most importantly and meaningfully, for me, how she was a personal coach. How she put her own goal to eventually become a full-time coach into practice with a young, ambitious, emotional, self-critical, but good-hearted 28-year-old recent PhD turned entry-level Marketing Content Specialist (that’s me).

A glutton for mentorship, I like to work through things in dialogue with someone I trust. Someone to whom I can expose all the thoughts, all the doubts, and know he or she will leave loving me more, not less. Intimacy evaporating awareness from the dim fog of emotion like a slot canyon squeezing light. Very different from this refracted self I offer in my writing, this I shaped by verisimilitude or analogy, by whatever mood or tone the words dictate from the outset, this I you’re reading about right now (akin to the one that recently confused people in my profile picture. I was amused they thought I was upset. The picture was taken months ago, so doesn’t reflect any current state of mind or heart. And the ambiguity in my eyes, sitting somewhere between happiness, sorrow, and anger, aren’t native expressions, but my discomfort at being photographed, the charcoal symptoms of a fractured superego).

Sanita and I set up a cadence where we met once every three weeks to go over something that I wanted work on. Most of the time, we discussed local emotional nadirs, not goals or aspirations (admittedly the two are hard to parse, in particular when goals are inchoate, not SMART). It was a mutual arrangement: I benefitted from her presence and advice, from the confidence she gave me in shaping what I could trust was my horizon of possibility in the company (ambitious as hell, I felt perennially short changed, stuck, wanting to be VP of ANYTHING yesterday). She benefitted from putting her aspirations into action, getting early experience in the art of helping one person grow, rather than putting out fires, resolving conflicts, bringing on new hires, doing things at a system level, etc.

Here’s one lesson she imparted that I still think about almost every day (and have passed on to younger colleagues).

I came in frustrated that, once again, something I’d said months ago, and which, at the time, was brushed off as nonsense, had come full circle into execution — with the credit going to someone else! I felt a flurry of entangled thoughts and emotions: why can’t I communicate clearly? why does someone get credit for my idea? is this because I’m a woman so am not taken seriously?

Sanita’s advice was priceless.

“Do you want to be a leader someday?”

“Of course. I will be CEO of EVERYTHING!”

“Well, then, learning how to let go of ownership of ideas, untying them from your ego, letting them grow with the team, is critical to your future success.”

Why this rung of healing, of beauty.

Sanita continued, “The best way to marry accountability and autonomy for people who report to you in the future will be to plant subtle seeds and suggestions that inspire them to reach their own conclusions on what needs to be done, to shape their own goals, to feel like they have skin in the game. It’s a totally different emotional relationship to accountability than that which arises from top-down plans. Early practice in renting your ideas, in becoming the sounding board and mirror for others, even though it’s hard when you’re younger and crave recognition, is what you will accelerate you in your growth goals.”

I still struggle to communicate. I still seek recognition. But the satisfaction is dim in comparison to the immense pride in being the sounding board to help younger colleagues grow.

And Sanita will always be my coach. She’ll always be my mental model for a great head of people.

intapp
Sanita’s handiwork: The Intapp tile at the Nuthouse on California Ave in Palo Alto, CA

Portrait 2: Jaxson Khan

“…It is what is
Sequestered. Vasari says, ‘Francescco one day set himself
To take his own portrait, looking at himself for that
purpose
In a convex mirror, such as is used by barbers…
He accordingly caused a ball of wood to be made
By a turner, and having divided it in half and
Brought it to the size of the mirror, he set himself
With great art to copy all that he saw in the glass,’
Chiefly his reflection, of which the portrait
Is the reflection once removed.”

- John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 1984, referring back Parmigianino, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 1524

parma
The original portrait

How precious, how rare, to feel so connected to and so similar to another that writing his portrait is like writing a self-portrait, only refracted in a convex mirror.

Jaxson Khan and I became Facebook Friends December 2, 2017. A mere 7 months ago. We were friends in this virtual world once removed before we were friends in the real world (post-modernists be damned!), the world of flesh, blood, tears, the smell of camomile in the coffee shop, the sound of panting pawsteps as the dog scurries forth only to scurry back again on the ravine path near Saint Claire, the world where two humans sit across from one another in a coffee shop and, slowly-deftly, with cheetah grace spurred by trust and recognition-reveal heart-thoughts to each other.

Heart-thoughts and grand ambition. Jaxson and I went into our first conversation believing what connected us was our common role at work. I started my career as a Marketing Content Specialist at Intapp in 2012 and skipped and hopped around the professional jungle gym, from Principal Consultant at a security firm to Director of Sales and Marketing at an AI research consultancy, to end up nominally leading product and strategy for integrate.ai. Jaxson and I both wholeheartedly endorse the firefly flits of the generalist; it is our lot in life to lie on the horizontal axis of the T, buoyed by our drive and curiosity, our intense need to understand everything, everything, as deeply as we can while always knowing we won’t be the deepest in the group; we will be criticized; it will hurt me more than him; but I will turn to him for support and confidence as I march along this brambled path.

Jaxson is 10 years younger than I, but somehow already has the wisdom and maturity to confidently assess where he stands today and where he wants to go next. He, too, started in marketing but absolutely must test the waters of product management, if only to experiment and shape his path. To view each step in his career as data-gathering exercise to know himself, to grow not only his skills but his values and virtue as he explores. Life as a testing ground. A job as the sandbox to grow roots and shape the soul. But we learned we shared more than just marketing roles: we were both actively engaged in shaping policy around AI, doing our best to ground discussions around ethics in our daily hustle building products that used machine learning models. Yes, Jaxson, yes, it was the first shimmer along the rim of the mirror, the hint of similarity and recognition.

As the sun rose the shimmer expanded into a blinding glare. Almost too much, sometimes.

“The time of day or the density of the light
Adhering to the face keeps it
Lively and intact in a recurring wave
Of arrival. The soul establishes itself.”

After our first time coffee, Jaxson took the subway back to his home in the Annex to meet his girlfriend, the woman he was confident would be his bride. Less than two months later she left for Australia, and decided not to come back.

His world broke.

I am fortunate it did. We would be friends, but it would have taken longer to probe the depths of our connection. To feel ourselves in the other’s words. To be startled by the recognition.

I have watched him learn through his pain. He is extraordinary. He allows his emotions to have their place, gives them space to work and hurt as he mourns the loss of his love and gradually recovers the ability to love anew. He has taught me how to turn to friends when I am anxious, taught me that we need not ever be alone, that even when I feel that restlessness in the evening-wishing Will Grathwohl were back but celebrating his extraordinary accomplishments with the concentrated joy of us as future selves looking back upon and growing through our early time apart-I can call him and he will pick up the phone and talk with me on the train ride home, on the walk home, on the bike ride home, that he is there as constant support. That he too has felt alone. I have watched how he has solidified his brotherhood with Zachary Habayeb, benefitted from their vegan meals and the space they provide for acceptance, as if judgment didn’t exist. I have watched him thrive in his job, no one suspecting what lie beneath. I have admired how he embraces his emotionality as a hallmark of a new masculinity, and how it isn’t challenged for a second.

There is no possible world where Jaxson and I won’t be friends for life. I will be godmother to his children (right Jax?). If not in name, in spirit. I will care for them if anything happens to him. They will sleep well at night, and be ok. Know this.

“The soul has to stay where it is,
Even though restless, hearing raindrops at the pane,
The sighing of autumn leaves thrashed by the wind,
Longing to be free, outside, but it must stay
Posing in this place. It must move
As little as possible. This is what the portrait says.”

jax and me
Jax, Heather Evans, and myself after recording their first AskAI podcast

Portrait 3: John Alber

“Wait, you wrote a book about poisonous plants?”

“Sure I did. Dodie and I had just had the kids and we wanted to make sure they were safe with all the flowers around.”

“But like, how did you find the time to study baby-safe houseplants-and study them thoroughly enough to write a book-while you were practicing at Bryan Cave?”

“Curiosity, Kathryn, and sheer force of will. And efficiency. Which law firms sorely lack. That said there’s a cheshire cat joy in being a dog-headed Futurist in an industry as slow to innovate as legal services. I consider myself to have had a front-row seat in the amphitheater of human psychology. Where skeuomorphisms are an absolute must to get them to adopt anything. Where identities fizzle as the stolid edifice of white-collar prosperity quickly crumbles under cartoon anvils of outside counsel guidelines and alternative fee arrangements and Latent Dirichlet Allocation finally making it just about possible to go beyond expert systems and use machine learning for legal research, not only technology assisted review.

Did you see my article about Watson?”

“Loved it. Smart contracts make SO MUCH SENSE for tenant rights. OMG imagine how much traction we could make against access to justice issues by baking the commitment landlords have to their tenants, the commitment they have to provide a suitable, humane place to live, in this standing-on-the-precipice-of-third-world-despair of a ramshackle country we find ourselves in these days? But how would a firm like IBM overcome the innovator’s dilemma and solve a problem for a smaller market? C’mon, not so much different from law firms, in particular with their customer-centric ethos. Always drags them down the slippery slope of services and mangled customizations and tech debt.”

“Watson was metonymy. It’s a job for startups. Go build it. We’re counting on you.”

“I’m not ready to be a founder yet. I still have much to learn before I can do this myself.”

“Fair.

But not fair! Are you kidding me? You are starting to exemplify servant leadership. I love watching you explore it, tepidly, with the growing pains and braces of a stunning teenager. Probing the delicate balance between strength and vulnerability, finding it, making it your own, and by doing so, opening the space for expression, acceptance, healing, and growth for those around you. What’s holding you back?”

“John, you know how hard I am on myself.”

“There’s a wonderful book by Pema Chodron called When Things Fall Apart. The notion there is that when things seem most desperate, we experience the greatest opportunity to exert a kind of compassionate curiosity about our inner workings.

All of this difficulty, all of this uncertainty can be on the path. Rather, it certainly IS on the path; we just have the chance to see it as such.

I know what it’s like to be so very hard on myself. It was a condition of everyday existence. It still creeps in now and then to remind me.

Sometimes, I think we choose broken individuals as companions as a means of exercising the compassion we are so desperate for ourselves. We give THEM our hearts instead of opening up to our own humanity.

That’s what it was like for me. I wouldn’t acknowledge that I was flawed, that I was messily, beautifully human.

What we need for our own account is the kind of love a mother, or an aunt, would offer: unqualified, nonjudgmental, open and accepting.

Why, Pema Chodron asks, is it so hard for us to give ourselves that?”

“Because we servants we only have so much love to give, and it belongs to others. What do you remember most from your year on the boat?”

“Stillness is what I treasure most. I rise earlier and earlier to get that…try to see the sun come up down on the waterfront every morning, and be quiet enough to hear the noise it makes.

And, kittens are awwwwww…..damn!”

“Will you help me write my book? Will you be a reader?”

“I’m horrible at that. I use other people’s writing as a springboard. The best I can do with my writing friends is co-springboard.”

“Jesus, if my writing can spur something like this from you, I’ll take it. Incredible. Brings tears to my eyes. Thank you, thank you, thank you, for being one of my most cherished mentors, for being a beacon so clearly showing what freedom and joy can arise from having the courage to just be me. For you are so grounded in yourself. John, you are Odysseus.”

In response to my first blog post about love, John wrote the following:

“The love I wonder about most is what is sometimes described as the love emanating from God. Bare of religion as I am, I translate that as the love of the universe, and immediately come up against the utter brutality of the physical realms that surround us. Temperatures near absolute zero, profound vacuums, nuclear ovens…none of them in any way motherly or fatherly, nurturing or, in any human sense, loving. And then of course there is the brutality of our own tiny world, where the horrible and endless death of innocents is so ordinary as to be unremarkable. Where is the love in any of that?

Then again…

Is it love that inheres in the multiverse, that drives the eternal engine spawning new universes, that fertilizes forming worlds with the life-giving dust of exploded stars and thereby makes possible beings who speak of love? Is all love simply a derivative of that vast life-creating process? Is it really just a taxonomy of the vital forces that inhabit us all? When we say we love each other, are we simply connecting with that most fundamental imperative—the imperative to be? In some ways, I find that the most romantic love of all.”

This picture perfectly captures John’s spirit

Portrait 4: William Hume

If the last name didn’t give it away, William Hume is my dad. Imagine the laundry list of details I could include in his portrait.

I’ll tell one story. I suspect he’ll read it and wince just a little, concerned my writing exposes too much and baffled by how differently people reconstruct the past, especially one past moment heavied by symbolic gravity. Facts unraveled into kaleidoscope fractals, so difficult to calibrate, even though our ring size is only 4.5.

On November 23, 2016, I took my parents to the Metropolitan Opera in New York City to see La Bohème. My mom had just turned 60. This was my birthday present to her.

La Bohème is not just any opera in my family. It is a talisman. It represents a bond stronger than a wedding ring, locking together my parents’ fingers in trust at the lower phalanx. No matter what comes. In the music I hear what patience and unconditional acceptance sound like. I hear the work that goes into creating a lifelong partnership, to sustaining it, to outlasting the hurdles that came so close to shattering the old-world vase, a relic of the Austro-Hungarian Empire that fights, Darwinian, to preserve its chromosomes with the pierogi dough. I hear what one couple’s love looks like. My dad’s love for my mom.

My mom suffered when I was a child. She tried to protect me and my brother from the pain. Her will is of iron. But the pain seeped out in ways she couldn’t control, shaping my delicate limbic system, itself singed by my extremely sensitive senses (sounds are louder and smells are stronger for me than they are for most people). When her parents died, memories she had repressed for years bubbled up. They bit at her rugged ambition with the persistence of horseflies. She swatted them back and went to the meeting in stilettos and big silk bows. Only dad saw what her face looked like when she dreamed on the swing set, saw how far away she seemed under the cheerful dominants of Paul McCartney.

Her unravelling strained their relationship. It came perilously close to ending. I didn’t know that: I was 6 or 7 or 8. Young. I envision myself carrying silver polish around with my black bob, but that home video was from much earlier. My hair must have started to curl, just a little, when they reached the nadir.

Mom came home. I envision a cold winter night. Cold in the way that only exists in upstate New York, where I grew up, and Canada. 8 foot snow drifts. Grey that cloaks the sky for months, starving our happiness of vitamin D. The stuff of Russians, just it’s the east coast, so defaults to the caricature of the Mummers.

She came home from work, torn. He had realized that he loved her unconditionally. He was ready to communicate that.

He held her hands. He turned on Puccini. Che gelida manina.

What a frozen little hand. Let me warm it for you.

I don’t know how often my parents hear che gelida manina in their minds. I don’t know what emotions it incites in them when it comes on.

They must be powerful. For, at the very inkling of the chords, in the very cusp of Pavarotti’s tenor, time collapses for me. I go back to 27 Highland Drive. To the tiny little house they bought for $13,000, nothing to their name but the promise of the future.

I am grateful that he loves her the way he does. When my dear friend Julien Rosa met them in Paris years ago, he told me the image that left the strongest impression on him was how my father looked at my mother.

My father taught him something profound about what it means to love.

mom & dad
My dad loving my mom with every breath

Portrait 5: Michael D’Souza

I have this friend Michael. He and his wife Colleen just got back from a 14,317-kilometre drive around god-knows-where in Canada. They didn’t care how long it took. They didn’t watch the clock, for that would have compromised their rapt attention to their surroundings and their gentle awareness, like water by now, of the other’s presence. Their destination was Tuktoyaktuk, which means “looks like a caribou” in Inuvialuktun (Western Canada Inuit). They told me that hotel rooms in Tuktoyaktuk follow a peculiar supply and demand curve: as there are only 3 beds for rent in the city-not 3 hotels, 3 beds-they can be relatively pricey. During his trip, Michael populated his Facebook feed with stillness. Lakes and lines of bread and bears and prairies and hummingbirds and bison and mountains. All still. All gleaming.

I met Michael on July 28, 2018. I was a guest at one of his famous dinner parties, courtesy of the inspirational Charlie Oliver. “Do you have any food restrictions?” “Nope, omnivorous.” “That’s just the kind of people we love!”

I had just recently moved to Canada. Was still tiptoeing through the little hits of loneliness and bemusement at finding myself, once again, in a new city: I’ve lived in many places and self-identify as a cosmopolitan nomad, though I’d love to stay put for the someday kids. Being welcomed by Michael and Colleen, therefore, was extra special. I had somewhere to go on a Friday night.

I didn’t expect to meet a best friend. My Toronto Dad.

Michael is also close to enlightened as we mere mortals get.

He is a lover and creator of beauty. He rolls his beet petals into roses, pickles them mildly so they are sweet without turning acrid. He serves the sorpotel, spiked with Feni, a Goan cashew liquor, in elegant Korean pottery, basks it in matte grey. He walks miles to ensure the strawberries are crimson, the tomato skins burst with the right pressure, the fish isn’t fishy. He puts capers in the mashed potatoes and shapes them into leaves baked brown. He and Colleen prefer not to eat out. They have too much to create at home.

He is a lover of and fighter for people. When I say fight, I mean fight. Michael spent his career working at the CBC. He has seen all the people. But he didn’t document them: He learned about them, respected them, opened the curtains wide onto the uniqueness of their culture and their personhood. He regularly corrects my cultural faux-pas, my maladroit misspellings of languages and religions, my imprecision in attempting to write about others. Michael pays attention to cultures with surgical precision. He titrates myths and stories. The seats at his dinner table are filled with doctors and human rights advocates and journalists and AI researchers and ambitious, young, striving, wonderful women from all over the world, women like Anne T. Griffin, another one of Michael’s daughters, like myself.

He is a lover of deadlines. Having spent a career as a journalist, Michael knows that things remain akimbo in limbo unless we have a deadline to birth our creativity, the 9-month mark where it’s either through the canal or a C-section. He keeps me on track, perhaps unaware. He seems to read everything I write. He seems to appreciate it. I cannot express how meaningful it is to me to have a reader who cares, who takes the time, who engages and corrects me.

He is a lover of grace. He carries himself quietly, sipping his wine without garnering too much attention when he’s in public. The dapper elegance of someone who always wears a tie. His demeanor carries with it his long history, the childhood in Pakistan and Goa. But when he is at home, comfortable, free, he laughs out loud. Shrills in joy. The kind of laugh that emerges from a clear conscience.

July 28 is a Saturday, and unfortunately (though very fortunately!) I have dinner plans at Actinolite that evening. Michael, I trust you’ll have me for dinner on the 27th to celebrate the anniversary of what cannot but be a lifelong friendship.

michael-2.jpg
Michael being awesome

More to come…

The featured image is of my dad and me on Father’s Day in 2017. I had just come back from a conference in Paris. We were about to eat oysters with my brother and his girlfriend. 

Love 3 | A Countable Taxonomy

This is the third post in a series about different kinds of love. The first is an incomplete taxonomy and the second is an indefinite taxonomy. More taxonomies will follow.

This gem of a post popped up on my twitter feed this week. Tim Urban posted the original on his super-awesome blog Wait But Why on December 11, 2015.[1]

The post starts by laying out the human lifespan visually, in years, months, weeks, and days.

Screen Shot 2018-07-01 at 8.47.13 AM
Tim Urban’s depiction of the human lifespan in months.

Tim goes on to measure his life in activities and events rather than units of time. When he wrote the post in 2015 he was 34 and assumed he’d live to 90. That meant, he had around 60 superbowls left and, since he doesn’t love going to the beach and only goes around once a year, 60 more times he’d swim in the ocean.

Screen Shot 2018-07-01 at 8.50.49 AM
Number of superbowls left.

I don’t share Tim’s visualization skills (at least not yet!), but loved his post and figured I’d apply the methodology to my own life.


Axioms & Assumptions

Axiom 1: I am 34-years old. Ain’t nothing I can do about it.

Axiom 2: I am an early-stage startup person. My career will be spent founding companies and getting them through infancy and adolescence but when they become mature adults, it’s time for me to move on and have another kid.

Axiom 3: I am a writer. I will write books. Note this is an axiom, not an assumption.

Assumption 1: I will live to be 95 (two of my great grandmothers, one from Mom’s side and one from Dad’s side, lived to be 98 and 102. One smoked for 80 odd years of her life and trafficked bathtub gin during Prohibition, #badass. Genes indicate decent longevity).

Assumption 2: My parents will both live to be 95 (they’re in good shape).

Assumption 3: Will Grathwohl and I will continue to love one another and live happily ever after. He will also live to be 95, so I’ll die before him.

Assumption 5: We will not have completely destroyed the earth in the next 61 years, so  will still have things like oceans we, turtles, whales, fish, and coral can swim in, and cities that are not yet drowned, burned, or ravished by income inequality so stark that they look like the final fantasy scene in Rainer Werner Fassbinder‘s 15.5-hour, 14-part miniseries Berlin Alexanderplatz[2], adapted from the amazing novel by Alfred Döblin (which doesn’t get the international acclaim it deserves outside a small circle of people who read a lot of literature), sadly not a far cry from areas in contemporary San Francisco.

Frank Biberkopf, portrayed by Günter Lamprecht, in Fassbinder’s 1980 miniseries Berlin Alexanderplatz, with two angels of the Armageddon.

Deductions

24 rounds of golf with Dad

Dad loves golf. It’s not a hobby: he is (provisionally?) retired, so it’s become a job, an obsession, the thing he does day in and day out (Mom cringes every time she hears the thump of the 9 iron on the carpet upstairs as we practices not casting like EVERY morning). Let’s assume Dad will be able to play golf until he’s 87: that’s only 24 more seasons of golf. At the rate we’re going, I will play with him around once a year. That means, my Dad and I will only play 24 more rounds of golf together. That’s few enough to remember every single round. Dad will remember every shot, mind you, and dissect them post-round with my brother while Mom and I sit there befuddled. But I’ll remember the killer par 3, as well as the putrid embarrassment at just nearly throwing my club at the foursome out of self-disgust and frustration.

23 trips with Mom 

Mom and I made one of the better decision of our lives a few years ago: we stopped getting one another things for Christmas to instead split costs for a trip somewhere together, just me and her, at some point during the upcoming year. So far we’ve gone to Orange County (Laguna Beach is a geographical oddity, we swear all roads somehow lead back there and we hate the place with every inch of our being…), Jackson Hole, and southern Utah. We both work far harder than any sane human being should work and we both have tortured relationships to ourselves, so it can be hard for us to really talk to one another, to get under the surface available in a phone call and give and know and love. These trips are an opportunity to do that. So, Mom is dogged. It’s realistic to assume she could continue taking trips until she’s 90. That means, we have 28 more to go. I’m giving myself the benefit of the doubt and assuming I will have kids someday. That means, kids complications may make it so that we miss 5 trips. 23 is still a ton of trips. We’ll see a lot of the world together. Mom has already seen tons of the world because she travels for work. I have inherited her Bedouin spirit. I want to walk the world. I want to touch it and have my footsteps seep history and whispers and pollen like osmosis into my soul.

Screen Shot 2018-07-01 at 9.49.22 AM
John Frankel inspired me to write unorthodox out-of-office messages (his are way more creative than mine). I’ve gotten really into adapting the genre and making it my own. This was my out-of-office response when Mom and I took our mother-daughter trip to Utah in April. People respond well to these emails: they love being surprised, love learning something about you as a human rather than getting frustrated by boring-old business facts. I searched for “out of office Veerman” because Alan Veerman from the Vector Institute said he liked this response. I remembered that. An out-of-office email brought Alan and I closer.

102 opportunities to dance to Billy Ocean and Whitney Houston with Mike

The best (or worst, depending on your proclivities and perspective, which unfortunately tends to be how my boyfriends feel) part of being a Hume is that we dance. Like, at a Hume wedding, the whole wedding party is up dancing before we sit down to eat, all we want to do is drink and dance, we don’t care about the food. Thanksgiving is a dance party (for real). The song selection inevitably includes polka hits like the Too Fat Polka by Frankie Yankovic (thanks to Dad) and, without fail, Billy Ocean’s Get Outta my Dreams and Whitney Houston’s I Wanna Dance with Somebody (80s songs that have outta and wanna and gotta and stuff like that). It is impossible that I will ever tire of dancing to these two songs with my brother Mike. Impossible. So, I’ll be alive for another 61 years. Mike’s younger, let’s assume he lives at least as long (Mike, you gotta take care of yourself). Let’s cut off 10 of those years as times where dancing to Billy Ocean may be tough and let’s assume we average two opportunities to dance per year (weddings, 4th of July, Thanksgiving, etc…). That means we’ll do Whitney another 102 times! That’s too many times to remember, which is great.

1123 more books read

The good thing about reviewing all the books I read on my blog is I can count how many I read last year. I’m ashamed to admit that last year I only read 13. That sucks. I work too hard. I also use time I used to devote to reading to writing, which is a good thing. If I kept up at that pace, I’d read another 793 books. I don’t plan to retire until I’m in my mid 80s (for real, I love work). Say I retire at 87. That’s another 53 years of work. During many of those years I’ll be super-duper-can’t-see-straight busy with kids and my job and my writing. Those years I may even read less books! So let’s do:

  • Next 3 years = challenge self to read 18 books/year = 54 books
  • Following 15 years (kids in the equation!) = realistically read 10 books/year = 150 books
  • 52-80 = challenge self to read 18 books/year = 504 books
  • 80-87 (weaning career years) = challenge self to read 25 books/year = 175 books
  • 87-95 = more time without work, so I can read 30 books/year = 240 books

That’s 1123 more books. Lots more to learn! (Tim had a much smaller number of 300, limiting himself to five books a year, outside his research - which means he reads many more books).

12 books written

I am working on my first book (unless we count my dissertation as a preparatory book-writing exercise, although I never tried to publish it). Hopefully it will be published next year. It’s taken me time to come into my stride as a writer: I started my blog at 2:09 pm ET on January 2 of last year, timid and tepid, but committed to writing regularly. I’m happy I did. I now face the growing pains of shedding blog-writing habits, the Saturday- or Sunday-morning sprints that yield these 1500-5000-word posts, to cultivate book-writing habits. I’m writing every morning. The blessing of regularity is that it’s ok if there are off days, it makes it possible to fathom getting started. Michel Serres, one of my mentors in graduate school, inducted me into the sanctified club of daily writers: himself, Graham Greene, Balzac, Thomas Mann, Tolstoy, Henry James, Faulkner, gosh they are all men (my friend Lucy Alford endorses the practice too). Given that I anticipate working until I’m 87 years old, it’s irrational to expect I’ll write a book every two years. If I mean this-which I must, it’s an axiom-I could reasonably expect myself to publish a book once every 5 years. That means, I have 12 books to share with you, Reader. You may die before I do. I hope you have the chance to read some of my better work, or at least fall in love with the promise of future potential.

4784 meals cooked for Will 

I love to cook. My partner Will loves to cook. He’s great at it. He’s great at just about anything he does, however, including, in decreasing order of importance to him, theoretical machine learning, honesty, being a good friend, cooking, vibraphone, fashion, watching TV, mandolin, running, origami, fencing, etc.

So, let’s assume I cook for Will on average twice per week during our time together. If we stay together until I die, that’s 3172 weeks. I assume I won’t cook much from the ages of 90-95, that Will and I, given how ambitious we both are, will spend 3 years of our life living in different places (like right now, he’s in San Francisco doing an internship), that we’ll travel and eat out so let’s take off 2 years, and that for at least 5 years we will need help with childcare so may have someone who helps us cook. That’s 46 years of my cooking twice a week for Will, or 4784 meals. We can explore SO MANY RECIPES. I still want to make a pizza with bresaola and prickly cactus nectar; want to include braised dill in a panna cotta dessert; want ricotta and cardamon stuffed savory macaroons with burnt sage.

66,795 expressions of love

I am ridiculously affectionate. Cloyingly. Used to be ashamed of it, but age helps. Let’s say I utter the phrase “I love you” three times a day for the rest of my life. I will say it 66,795 times! Recall, love can encompass the many kinds in the taxonomy: friends, colleagues, mentors, parents, partners, the universe, myself, herb gardens, mentees, yoga teachers, dogs, cats, food, lots of things to love.[3]

What events and activities are worth counting in your life?

(Note that not all my axioms & assumptions were relevant for the deductions. Oh well. Stuff for a future post!)


[1] I’ve mentioned Tim multiple times on my blog, most recently criticizing a talk he gave at Google because he put forth what I consider to be a medieval, Judeo-Christian frame for assessing our future as shaped by artificial intelligence (this isn’t his fault, this is the posture shared by many big names in the field). His TED Talk on procrastination is one of my favorite things on the internet and his latest post on choosing a career is a must read for anyone who takes their career seriously.

[2] Note he made this movie in 1980, so long before HBO and Netflix series existed, which is cool. But there were also literature series that appeared in magazines in the late 19th and early 20th century: Emile Zola and Henry James both authored a few.

karina roulette
Fassbinder made a lot of interesting movies. His style isn’t for everyone: it’s like Hunter S Thompson meets Pier Paolo Pasonlini meets Günter Grass. I like some films better than others. This image is from Chinese Roulette. The woman is Anna Karina, best known as Jean-Luc Godard’s muse. I saw her speak in Paris once and left crestfallen. She was so pretty but wasn’t as clever as her characters led me to believe.

[3] I made a few edits on July 2, 2018, the day after writing this post. Now I only have 66,792 expressions of love left.

The featured image is of my Mom and me on our latest trip together. This is inside a rock called nautilus, given how it wove around like a shell. We rode horses out there in the dry Utah sun. It was a happy day, one of those days where there’s no place we’d rather be. 

Tilting our heads to theta

I am forever indebted to Clyfe Beckwith, my high-school physics teacher. Not because he taught us mechanics, but because he used mechanics to teach us about the power and plasticity of conceptual frames.[1]

We were learning to think about things like energy and forces, about how objects move in space and on inclines and around curves (fear winces before tucking myself into a ball to go down a hill on cross-country skis are always accompanied by ironic inside-my-mind jabs yammering “your instincts suck-if your center of gravity is lower to the ground you’ll have an easier time combatting the conservation of angular momentum”). Learning to think about images like this one:

Screen Shot 2018-06-06 at 5.53.49 AM

The task here is to decompose the various forces that act on the object, recompose them into some net force, and then use this net force to describe how the block will accelerate down the inclined plane.

I remember the first step to tally the forces was easy. Gravity will pull the block down because that’s what gravity does. Friction will slow the block down because that’s what friction does. And then there’s this force we think less about in our day-to-day lives called the normal force, a contact force that surfaces exert to prevent solid objects from passing through each other. The solids-declaring-their-identity-as-not-air-and-not-ghosts force. And that’s gonna live at the fault line between the objects, concentrating its force-hands into the object’s back like a lover.

The problem is that, because the plane is inclined and not flat, these forces have directionality. They don’t all move up and down. Some move up and down and others are on a diagonal.

I remember feeling flummoxed because it was impossible to get them to align nicely into  the perpendicular x-y axes of the Cartesian plane. In my mind, given the math I’d studied up to that point (so, like, high-school algebra-I taught myself trigonometry over the summer but because I had taught myself never had the voiceover that this would be a tool for solving physics problems), Cartesian planes were things, objects as stiff as blocks, things that existed in one frame of reference, perfectly up and perfectly down, not a smidgen of Sharpie ink bleeding or wavering on the axis lines.

And then Clyfe Beckwith did something radical. He tilted the Cartesian plane so that it matched the angle of the incline.

I was like, you can’t do that.

He was like, why not?

I was like, because planes don’t tilt like that, because they exist in the rigid confines of up and down, of one single perpendicular, because that’s how the world works, because this is the static frame of reference I’ve learned about and used again and again and again to solve all these Euclidean geometry problems from freshman year, because Bill Scott, my freshman math teacher, is great, love the guy, and how can we question the mental habits he helped me build to solve those problems, because, wait, really, you can do that?

He was like, just try it.

I remember his cheshire cat smile, illuminated by the joy of palpably watching a student’s mind expand before his eyes, palpably seeing a shift that was one small step for man but a giant step for Mankind, something as abstract as a block moving on an inclined plane teaching a lesson about the malleability of thinking tools.

We tried it. We tilted our heads to theta. We decomposed gravity into two vectors, one countering the normal force and the other moving along the plane. We empathized with the normal force, saw the world from its perspective, not our own. What was intractable became simple. The math became easy.

This may seem obtuse and irrelevant. Stuff you haven’t thought about since high school. Forget about the physics. Focus on tilting your head to theta. Focus on the fact that there is nothing native or natural about assuming that Cartesian planes exist in some idealized perpendicular realm that must always start from up and down, that this disposition is the side effect of drawing them on a piece of paper oriented towards our own front-facing perspective. That it’s possible to empathize with the perspective of a block of mass m at a spot on a triangle tilted at angle theta to make it easier to solve a problem. And that this problem itself is only an approximation upon an approximation upon an approximation, gravity and friction acting at some idealized center to make it easier to do the math, integrating all the infinite smaller forces up through some idealized continuum. Stuff they don’t say much about in high school as that’s the time for building problem-solving muscles. Saving the dissolution for the appropriate moment.


Reading Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time pulled this memory out of storage. In his stunningly lyrical book, Rovelli explains how many (with a few variations depending on theory) physicists conceptualize quantum time as radically different from the linear, forward-marching-so-that-the-past-matters-our-actions-matter-choices-are-engraved-and-shape-the-landscape-of-future-possibilities-and-make-morality-possible flow of time we experience in our subjectivity. When we get quantum, explains Rovelli, the difference between past and future blur, phenomena appear that, like the ever-flitting molecules in a glass of water, seem static when viewed through the blunt approximations our eyes provide us so we can navigate the world without going insane from a thermodynamic onslaught.

boltzmann
One of the heroes in Rovelli’s book is Ludwig Boltzmann, who used probability to show that the systems tend towards disorder rather than order (entropy) because there are many more possible disordered than ordered configurations of a system. Order, like Reality, is just one improbability amidst indefinite possibles. The equation on his gravestone, S = k log W, shows the relationship between entropy and the number of ways the atoms of a system can be arranged. Boltzmann’s work using probability distributions to described the states of particles in a system was the grandfather to contemporary neural networks (reflected in the name Boltzmann Machine). Someday, someone has to write the book about the various ways in which machine learning is indebted to 19th-century physics (see also Hamiltonian Monte Carlo, amidst many others).

Rovelli reminds his reader that the idea of an absolute, independent variable time (which shows up in equations as a little t)-time independent of space, time outside the entangled space waltz of Wall-E and Eva, lovers saddened by age’s syncopation, death puncturing our emotional equilibrium to cleave entropy into the pits of our emotions, fraying the trampoline pad into the kinetic energy of springs-that this time is but a mental fiction Newton created within the framework of his theory of the universe, but that the mental landscape of this giant standing upon the shoulders of giants became so prominent in our culture that his view of the world became the view we all inherit and learn when we go to grammar school, became the way the world seems to be, became a fixture as seemingly natural as our experience that the Sun revolves around the Earth, and not otherwise. That the ideas are so ingrained that it takes patience and an open mind to notice that Aristotle talks about time much differently, that, for Aristotle, time was an index of the change relative to two objects. Consider the layers of complexity: how careful we have to be not to read an ancient text with the tinted glasses of today’s concepts, how open and imaginative we must remain to try to understand the text relative to its time as opposed to critiquing the arguments with our own baggage and assumptions; how incredible it is to think that this notion of absolute time, so ingrained that it felt like blasphemy to tilt the Cartesian plane to theta, is but the inheritance of Newton’s ideas, rejected by Leibniz as fitfully as Newton’s crazy idea that objects could influence one another from a distance[2]; how liberating to return to relativity, to experience the universe without the static restrictions of absolute time, to free even the self from the heavy shackles of personhood and identity and recognize we are nothing but socialite Bedouins migrating through the parameters of personality as we mirror approval and flee frowns, the self become array, traits and feelings and thoughts activated through contact with a lover, a family, a team, an organization, a city, a nation, all these concentric circles pitching abstractions that dissolve into the sweat beads of an embrace, of attention swallowed intact by the heartbeat of another.

But it’s not just mechanics. It’s not just time.

It can be the carapace we inherit as we hurt our way through childhood and adolescence, little protective walls of habitual reactions that ossify into detrimental and useless thoughts like the cobwebbed inheritance of celibacy.[3] It can be reactions to situations and events that don’t serve us, that keep us back, anxiety that silences us from speaking up, that fears judgment if we ask a question when we don’t fully understand, interpretations of events in the narratives we’ve constructed to weave our way through life that, importantly, we can choose to keep or discard.

Perhaps the most liberating aspect of Buddhist philosophy is the idea that we have an organ that senses thoughts just like we have organs that sense smells, sounds, tastes, and touch.[4] Separating the self from the stuff of thoughts and emotions is not trivial. We lose the anchor of the noun, abandon the grounding of some thing, no matter how abstract and fleeting thoughts or the pulse of emotions may be (or perhaps they’re not so fleeting? perhaps the incantatory habit of neural patterns in our brains is where we clamp on to remain steadfast amidst rough waves beating life shores?). But this notion of the self as thought is also a conceptual relic we can break, the perpendicular plane we can migrate to theta to help us solve problems and empathize more deeply with another.

There is a calm that arises when we abstract away from the seat of identity as a self separate from the world and up into a view of self as part of the world, as one with the coffee cup accompanying me as I write this post, one with the sun rising into yellow, shifting shades in the summer morning, one with the plastic armchairs and the basil plant, one with my partner as he sleeps thousands of miles away in San Francisco, as I dream with him, recovering legs intertwined in beds and on camp grounds. One with colleagues. One with homeless strangers on the street, one with their pain, their cold, the dirt washed from their face and feet when they shower.

The conceptual carapaces that bind us aren’t required, are often just inherited abstractions from the past. We can discard them if they don’t serve us. We have the ability, always, to tilt our head to theta and breath into the rhythms of the world.


[1] Clyfe radiates kindness. He has that special George Smith superpower of identifying where he can stretch his students just beyond what they believe they’re capable of while imbuing them with the confidence they need to succeed. Clyfe also found it hilarious that I took intro to cosmology, basically about memorizing constellations, after taking AP physics, which was pretty challenging. But I loved schematizing the sky! It added wonder and nostalgia to the science. I gifted Clyfe The Hobbit once, for his sons. I picked that book because my dad loves Tolkien and reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were rights of passage when I was a child, so I figured they should be for every child. I guess that means there was something in the way Clyfe behaved that pegged him as a great Dad in my mind. Every few years, my dad gets excited about possibility that he may have finally forgotten details in The Lord of the Rings, eager to reread it and discover it as if it were for the first time. But he’s consistently disappointed. He and my brother have astonishing recall; it’s as if every detail of a book or movie has been branded into their brains indefinitely. My brother can query his Alexandrian brain database of movie references to build social bridges, connecting with people through the common token of some reference as opposed to divulging personal anecdote. My mom and I are the opposite. I remember abstractions in my Peircean plague of being a mere table of contents alongside the vivid, vital particularity of narrative minds like that of my colleague Tyler Schnoebelen. When I think back to my freshman year in college, I clearly remember the layout of arguments in Kant’s First Critique and clearly remember the first time I knowingly proved something using induction, and while I clearly remember that I read Anna Karenina and The Death of Ivan Ilyich that year (apparently was in a Tolstoy kind of mood), I cannot remember the details of those narratives. Instead, I recall the emotions I experienced while reading them, as if they get distilled to their essence, the details of what happens to the characters resolved to the moral like in a fable by Aesop. Except not quite. It’s more that the novels transform into signposts for my own narrative, my own life. Portals that open my memory to recover happenings I haven’t recollected for years, 15 years, 20 years, the white-gloved hand of memory swiping off attic dust to unveil grandma’s doilies or gold-rimmed art deco china. My mind pronounces “the Death of Ivan Ilyich” and what comes forth are the feelings of shyness, of rugged anticipation, as I walked up Rush Street in Chicago floating on a cloud of dopamine brimming with anticipatory possibility, on my way to meet the young man who would become my first real boyfriend, hormones coaxed by how I saw him, how he was much more than a person, how something about how he looked and talked and acted elevated him to the perfect boyfriend, which, of course, gave me solace that I was living life as I was supposed to. My memory not recall, but windows with Dali curtains that open and shut into arabesques of identity (see featured image), cards shuffling glimpses of clubs and spades as they disappear, just barely observed, back into the stack. Possibility not actually reserved for the future, but waiting under war helmets in trench wormholes ready for new interpretation. For yes, there was other guy I didn’t decide to date, the guy who told me I looked like Audrey Hepburn (not because I do, but because I do just enough and want to so evidently enough that the flattery makes sense) when he took me on our first date at the top of the Hancock tower, a high-in-the-sky type of bar, full of women with hair stiffed in hairspray and almost acrylic polyester dresses that were made today but always remind you of Scarface or Miami Vice, with the particular smell only high-in-the-sky bars have, stale in a way that’s different from the acrid smell of dive bars that haven’t been cleaned well, maybe it’s the sauce they use on the $50 lamb chops, the jellied mint, the shrimp cocktails alongside the gin, or the cleaning agent reserved exclusively for high-in-the-sky dance halls or Vegas hotels. It could have been different, but it became what it was because Morgan more closely aligned with my mental model of the perfect boyfriend. We’re still friends. He seems quite happy and his wife seems to be thriving.

[2] Don’t get me wrong: while Leibniz rejected the idea of action at a distance, much of his philosophy and metaphysics are closer to 20th-century philosophy and physics than the other early-modern heavyweights (Descartes, Spinoza, Pascal, etc). He was the predecessor of what would become possible worlds’ theory, developing a logic and metaphysics rooted in the probability, not denotative reality. He loved combinatorics and wanted to create a universal, formal language rooted in math (his universal characteristic). The portion of his philosophy I love most is his attempt to reconcile free will and determinism using our conceptual limitations, rooting his metaphor in calculus. When we do calculus, we can’t perceive how a limit converges to some digit. Our existence in time, argues Leibniz, is similar: we’re stuck in the approximation of the approximation, assessing local minima, while God sees the entire function, appreciating how some action or event that may seem negative in the moment can lead to the greatest good in the future.

[3] It seems like downright sound logic to me that celibacy made economic sense in feudalism, given the structure of dowries and property (about which I don’t know the details) but was conceptualized using abstract arguments about reserving love for God alone, and that this abstraction survived even after economic rationale disappeared into the folds of capitalism, only to create massive issues down the line because it’s not a human way to be, our bodies aren’t made only to love God, we can’t clip our sexuality at the seams, so pathologies arise. It’s not a popular position to pardon the individual and blame the system; but every individual merits compassion.

[4] Something about the cadence of the sentence made me want to leave out sight.

The featured image is Figura en una finestra, painted by Salvador Dalí in 1925. Today it lives in the Reina Sofia. How very not Dalí, right? And yet it displays the same mastery of precise technique we see in the hallmarks of surrealism. The nuances of this painting are so suggestive and evocative, so rich with basic meaning, nothing religious, nothing allegorical, just the taught concentration of recognition, of our seeing this girl at a moment in time. The white scarf draping in such a way that it suggests the moments prior to the painting, when she walked up troubled by something that happened to her and placed it there, with care, with gentleness, as she settled into her forlorn gaze. Her thoughts protected by her directionality, all that’s available to us the balance of her weight on her left foot, her buttocks reflecting the weight distribution. The curtains above the left window somehow imbued with her emotions, their rustle so evidently spurred not only by wind but by the extension of her mood, their shape our only access to the inside of her mind, her gaze facing outwards. I love it. She gains power because she is so unaccessible. The painting holds the embryo of surrealism in it because of what I just wrote, because it invites us to read more into the images that what’s there in oil paint and textures and lines. 

 

Details that Make a Difference

George E. Smith may be the best kept secret in academia.

The words aren’t mine: they belong to Daniel Dennett.* He said them yesterday at On the Question of Evidence, a conference Tufts University hosted to celebrate George’s life and work. George sat in the second row during the day’s presentations. I watched him listen attentively, every once and a while bowing his head the way he does when he gets emotional, humbly displacing praise to another giant upon whose shoulders he claims to have stood. I. Bernard Cohen, Ken Wilson, Curtis Wilson, Tom Whiteside (I remember George’s anecdote about meeting Whiteside in a bookstore and saying he genuflected before his brilliant scholarship on Newtonian mathematics). He unabashedly had the first word after every talk, most of the time articulating an anecdote (anyone who knows George knows that he likes to tell stories) about how someone else taught him an idea or taking the opportunity to articulate some crisp, crucial maxim in philosophy of science. Perhaps my favourite part of the entire day was listening to him interrupt Dan’s story about how they jointly founded the computer science program at Tufts, back in the days of Minsky and Good ol’ fashioned AI**, George stepping in to provide additional details about their random colour pixel generation program (random until the output looked a little too much like plaid), recollecting dates and details with ludicrous precision, as is his capability and wont.

Almost every conference attendee had at least one thing in common: we’d taken George’s Newton seminar, unique in its kind, one of the most complete, erudite, stimulating academic experiences in the world today. Some conference attendees, like Eric Schliesser and Bill Bradley, took the seminar back in its infancy in the 80s and early 90s. I took it with Kant scholar Michael Friedman at Stanford in 2009. Each year George builds on the curriculum, collaborating with students on some open research question, only to incorporate new learnings into next year’s (or some future year’s) curriculum. Perhaps the hallmark of a truly significant thinker is that her work is as rich and complex as the natural world, containing second-order ideas like second-order phenomena, phenomena that no one observes-or even can observe!-the first time they look. Details masked behind more dominant regularities, but that, in time and through the gradual and patience process of measurement, observation, and research, become visible through the mediation of theory. Theories as anchors to see the invisible.

This recursive process of knowledge and growth isn’t unique to George’s teaching. It characterizes his seminal contribution to the philosophy of science.

Many of the conference speakers drew from George’s stunning 2014 article Closing the Loop. The article is the culmination of 20 years of work studying how Newton changed standards for high-quality evidence. We often assume that Newton’s method is hypothetical-deductive, where the reasoning structure is to formulate a hypothesis that could be falsified by a test on observable data, and collect observations to either falsify (if observations disagree with what the hypothesis predicts) or corroborate (if observations agree) a theory.*** George thinks that Newton is up to something different. He cites Newton’s “Copernicum scholium,” where Newton states that, given the complexities of forces that determine planetary motion, considering “simultaneously all these causes of motion and [defining] these motions by exact laws admitting of easy calculation exceeds…the force of any human mind.” George writes:

The complexity of true motions was always going to leave room for competing theories if only because the true motions were always going to be beyond precise description, and hence there could always be multiple theories agreeing with observation to any given level of approximation. On my reading, the Principia is one sustained response to this evidence problem.

George goes on to argue that Newtonian idealizations, the simplified, geometric theories that predict how a particular system of bodies would behave under specifiable circumstances, aren’t theories to align directly with observations, but thinking tools, counterfactuals that predict how the world would behave if it were only governed by a few forces (e.g., a system only subject to gravity versus a system subject to gravity and magnetism). Newton expects that observations won’t fit predictions, because he knows the world is more complex than mathematical models can describe. Instead, discrepancies become a source of high-quality evidence to both corroborate a theory and render hypotheses ever more precise and encompassing as we incorporate in new details about the world. If Newton can isolate how a system would behave under the force of gravity, the question becomes, what, if any, further forces are at work? According to George, then, Newton didn’t propose a static method for falsifying hypotheses with observations and data. He proposed a dynamic research strategy that could encompass an ongoing program of navigating the gulf between idealizations and observations. Importantly, as Michael Friedman showed in his talk, theories can be the necessary condition for certain types of measurement: there is a difference between plotting data points indicating the position of Jupiter at two points in time and measuring Jupiter’s acceleration in its orbit. The second is theory-mediated measurement, where the theory relating mass to acceleration via the force of gravity makes it possible to measure mass from acceleration. Also importantly, because discrepancies between theory and observations don’t direct falsify a hypothesis, the Newtonian scientific paradigm was more resilient, requiring a different type of discrepancy to pave the way to General Relativity (while I get the gist of why Einstein required space-time curvature to explain the precession of Mercury’s orbit, I must admit I don’t yet understand it as deeply as I’d like).****

While George is widely recognized as one of the world’s foremost experts in Isaac Newton, his talents and interests are wide-ranging. Alongside his career as a philosopher, he has a second, fully-developed career (not just a hobby) as a jet engine engineer focused on failure analysis. He has a keen sensibility for literature: he introduced me to Elena Ferrante, whose Neapolitan novels I have sense devoured. He knows his way around modern art, having dated artist Eva Hesse during his undergraduate years at Yale. He treats his wife India, who is herself incredible, with love and respect. He takes pride in having coached basketball to underprivileged students on Boston’s south side. The list literally goes on and on.

Screen Shot 2018-05-12 at 5.54.33 PM
A picture of George doing what he does best.

The commentary that touched me deepest came from Tufts Dean of Academic Affairs Nancy Bauer. Nancy commented on the fact that she wouldn’t be where she is today if it weren’t for George, that he believed there was a place for feminist philosophy in the academy before other departments caught on. She also commented on what is perhaps George’s most important skill: his ability to at once challenge students to rise to just beyond the limits of their potential and to imbue them with the confidence they need to succeed.

This is not meaningful to me in the abstract. It is concrete and personal.

I took George’s course during the spring trimester of my second year in graduate school. I was intimidated: my graduate degree is in comparative literature, and while I had majored in mathematics as an undergrad, I was unwaveringly insecure about my abilities to reason precisely. Some literature students are comfortable in their skin; they live and breath words, images, tropes, analogies. I teetered in a no man’s land between math, philosophy, history, literature, gorging with curiosity and encyclopedic drive but never disciplined enough to do one thing with excellence. The first (or second? George would know…) day of class, I approached George and told him I was worried about taking the course as a non-philosopher. I was definitely concerned few times trying to muscle my way through the logic of Newton’s proofs in the Principia (it was heartening to learn that John Locke barely understood it). But George asked me about my background and, learning I’d studied math, smiled in a way that couldn’t but give me confidence. He helped me define a topic for my final paper focused on the history of math, evaluating the concept of what Newton calls “first and last ratios”, akin to but not quite limits, in the Principia. He was proud of my paper. I was proud of my paper. But what matters is not the scholarship, it’s what I learned in the process.

George taught me how to overcome my insecurities and find a place of strength to do great work. He taught me how to love my future students, my future colleagues, how to pay close attention to their strengths, interests, weaknesses, and to shape experiences that can push them to be their best while imbuing them with the confidence they need to succeed. I carry the experience I had in George’s course with me every day to work. He taught me what it means to act with integrity as a mentor, colleague, and teacher.

I’ll close with an excerpt from an email George sent me September 29, 2017. I’d sent him a copy of Melville’s The Confidence Man to thank him for being on my podcast. Closing his thank you note, he wrote:

“I was pleased with your comment in the note attached to the gift about continuing influence. You had already, however, given me one of the more special gifts I have received in the last couple of years, namely the name of your site. I find nothing in life more gratifying than to see that someone learned something in one of my classes that they have continued to find special.”

Quam proxime, “most nearly to the highest degree possible,” occurs 139 times in the Principia. George became obsessed with what it means for grasping the place for approximation in Newtonian science. I co-opted it to refer to my own quest to achieve the delicate, precious balance between precision and soul, to guide me in my quest for meaning. How grateful I am that George is part of my process, always continuing, always growing, as we migrate the beautiful complexities of our world.


*George and Dan were my second guests on the In Context podcast, during which we discussed the relationship between data and evidence.

**Over lunch, “uncle Dan” (again, his words, not mine) predicted that the current generation of deep learning researchers would likely take a bottoms up, trial and error approach to inferring the same structured, taxonomical web of knowledge the GOFAI research community tried to define top down back in the 1950s-80s, of course will a bit more lubrication than the brittle systems of yore. This shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with Dan’s work, as he often, as in From Bacteria to Bach and Back, writes about systems that appear to exhibit the principles of top-down intelligent design without ever having had an intentional intelligent designer. For example, life and minds.

***I won’t go into the nuances of scientific reasoning in this post, so won’t talk about processes to use data to select amidst competing hypotheses.

****I asked Bill Harper a question about the difference between Bayesian uncertainty and the delta between prediction, likelihood, and data, and the uncertainty and approximations George bakes into the Newtonian research paradigm. I’m looking to better understand different types of inference.

The featured image shows the overlap between the observed and predicted values of gravitational waves, observed by two Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatories (LIGOs) in Washington and Louisiana on September 14, 2015. Allan Franklin, one of the conference speakers, showed this image and pointed out he found the visual proof of the overlap between prediction and observation more compelling than the 5-sigma effect in the data (that’s an interesting epistemological question about evidence!). He also commented how wonderful it must have been to be in the room with the LIGO researches when the event occurred. To learn more, I highly recommend Janna Levin’s Black Hole Blues and Other Sounds from Outer Space

Love 2 | An Indefinite Taxonomy

Love is multivalent.

I’ve been floored by how many readers have engaged with last week’s post about love. As I clumsily expressed in that post, as in so many others, I’m still quite uncomfortable exposing thoughts about affect and emotion. Starting that post as this, I relive a conversation I had with Jean-Marie Apostolidès, a professor in Stanford’s French department, at his home in the 13th arrondissement in Paris in 2008. It was the summer after my first year in graduate school, during which I had taken Jean-Marie’s seminar on Guy Debord, a mid-20th century French kinda-philosopher-but-more-critical-theorist-performer-narcissistic-bastard-but-super-self-aware-and-totally-French dude.* Boris Donné was with us.** Jean-Marie wanted us to meet because we were the nerdiest and mathiest of the scholars interested in Guy Debord. Before dinner, like Jupiter foretelling the events in the Aeneid at the outset of book one, Jean-Marie foretold the pain I would experience during graduate school. “You, Kathryn (hear this in your mind with a thick French accent, Kath-REEN), have something enormously sensual and emotional to offer to the world. You feel so deeply and, when you’re 50, you’ll come into your own as a writer, exposing this sensuality, this depth of emotion, and freeing yourself into the space of inspired expression. But you won’t get there in grad school. Everyone will say your work is brilliant but deep down they’ll hate every abstract word, every stilted interpretation of the history of math; hearts unmoved and minds twitching with impatience, they’ll begrudgingly provide accolades and praises as you continue your fight to show yourself that you think as well as any man in the philosophy or math departments. And that’s fine. It will take its time. But you will look back when you are older and wish you could recover lost time and present your true art.”

Those weren’t his exact words, but that was certainly the gist. They struck a deep chord. They nagged me like harpies as I wrestled to find a dissertation topic I could pridefully stand behind. Jean-Marie was largely right. And yet, there were a few instances at Stanford where I was time-pressed or tired enough to write from my heart. Each time I did, people responded. They paid attention. Each time they did, I was surprised. The wisdom in those words came from the Richmonds (my mother’s tribe), was grafted into my blood upon birth, was a purer exposure of what I felt day to day (I’m not so naïve as to say they expressed my true self, as that’s all bollocks, but they certainly flowed as opposed to being trapped inside the screaming clenches of my superego). Perhaps my blog is my beating Jean-Marie’s predictions of my cloistered destiny by 17 years. I’ll take it.

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Guy Debord made a few films, including In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni. The title is a riddle; it’s my favorite palindrome. I learned Latin about a year after seeing this film, which opened my eyes to how the morphology is integral to the palindrome (e.g., the i at the end of igni is a dative, signaling agency by the word ignis, which means fire in Latin; igni, therefore, means “acted upon by the fire”).  I don’t remember much about the film itself except that Debord plays around with self-referentiality, how the work of art, as my friend Peli Grietzer has brilliantly shown, is something like an auto-encoded representation of lived experience. Autoencoders seem very strange to people outside the machine learning community: they make facsimiles of data sets, with the goal of minimizing lost information as they make a copy. How transient are our representations of past experience. Today, I offer what will come in this blog post. Were I to write tomorrow, were I to have written yesterday, my representation of my lived experience would be different.

Since last week, partially in response to emails and notes I’ve received from readers, partially inspired by listening to podcasts on runs and walks to and from work, partially by the basic fact that I spent one more week alive, I’ve thought of many more types of love. It felt right to follow up. I doubt there will be a third post. I’m often wrong.

To that end, here are further thoughts on the types of love that have shaped me or that I work to practice and cultivate.

Love between mother and daughter

I nearly titled this section love between mother and child, but believe there’s something unique and precious in the particular love a mother has for her daughter, as a daughter has for her mother. Or, the particular love my mother has for me and I have for my mother.

Our love is mighty. Any who meets us recognizes this immediately.

I gave a speech at my grandparents’ 60th anniversary party. I started off by saying that I’d spent 15 odd years of my life actively trying not to become my mother. I’d seen how hard she worked, how she flew around the world and drove herself to the ground (and worse, to regular illness) in her restless pursuit to excel and show herself that she was worth something. I wanted to become her opposite, to cleave and create an identity as a calm, thoughtful academic working to slowly unpack the history of mathematics in the scientific revolution and the enlightenment (it won’t take a careful reader to notice the discrepancies between this vapid self fashioning and what I presented in the introduction). I tried; it hurt like a bitch. I left academia to explore the possibility of greater happiness as a businessperson (and have written about the transition).

It was when I allowed myself to become more like my mother that I started to thrive.

The complexities of the love that can exist between mother and daughter stem from the deep entanglement between their respective identities. I’m not a child psychologist and am wary at best of Freud and Lacan (let along Jung…), but the mirror effect of psychology-where we develop self-reflexive consciousness via awareness of self in the eyes of the mother, the first other being we know in the world-must undoubtedly shape patterns in the limbic system and is a good device to ponder the give and take of identity. My mother has a strong personality and I admire her immensely. I often feel reduced to a shadow of myself in her presence, and have fashioned other avenues of strength over the years to claim my own territory for excellence and beauty. You are extroverted? Fine! I will sit in the corner and attract attention with my mysterious silence. You are an amazing cook? Fine! I will go downstairs and read and develop an erudition few will compete with. You are rail thin? Fine! I will be thinner. I will apply monk-like discipline to my eating schedule, not snacking if my life depended on it as family friends worry I’ll soon be too small for a size zero.

Over the years, pockets of easier love, of my mother accepting that I am different than she, of my accepting that I need not be threatened by her habits, need not view her going to the gym at 5:30 as an indictment on myself, but as something to accept as what she needs to feel ok in the world, have gradually emerged. And they’ve grown deeper with each passing year. The resilient insecurities that pepper my personality are still land mines that ignite conflict between myself and my mom. But I’m getting wise enough to take a step back from them and point them out to both of us so we don’t get trapped. She’s growing too. I can see how her wisdom emerges and shines, see how she’s changes ever so slightly as she calms into acceptance of her identity.

I hope someday to experience this love for my own daughter. I hope never to harm her, but accept the tragedy that no matter how hard we strive to will the impact we want, our emotions communicate on a different plane, spurring horses to skittishness and shaping the delicate limbic systems of our children. Love between mother and daughter begs total acceptance: I am me because you are you. You have shaped how my emotions filter the world. You have shaped the horizons of what I might become.

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My mom and I at my grandparents’ 60th-anniversary party on July 21, 2013. My grandfather has since passed away. I wrote about him in this post.

Friendship

This merits its own indefinite taxonomy. Here’s a small sample.

There are friendships built on collaboration, where the underlying trait, I think, is deep respect and the electric energy that results when we sense another’s mind will help us grow, push us beyond what we might achieve on our own, just as the mechanisms of self-play in AlphaGo Zero. Tversky and Kahnemann, united by the different styles of thought and how funny they found our mind traps as they devised experiment after experiment to show why we suck at probabilistic thinking.*** Jefferson and Adams, whose opinions and goals differed during most of their lives, who sought different political ends and sometimes downright hated one another, but whose epistolary exchange at the end of their lives showed a deep respect and love (they died the same day, July 4, 1826; could it be more symbolic?). Hume and Smith, a generation apart (Hume was older), but whose relationship transitioned from being one of teacher-student to friends. The depiction of the Hume-Smith friendship in Dennis Rasmussen’s recent book (which I’m having trouble finishing it as it’s descriptive rather than philosophical) reminds me of my friendship with Alfred Lee (who also has a blog!). I told him:

I’m reading a book about Hume and Smith‘s friendship. Drawing on Aristotle, Smith divides friendship into three types: those motivated by utility, those motivated by please, and-the highest and rarest of the three-those motivated by virtue and excellence. The Hume-Smith friendship was based upon a shared quest to understand and live well in the world. I believe our friendship shares the same characteristics: it is motivated by virtue and excellence. I admire how you take the time to explore yourself and solidify your values, how you strive to live well each day. And I feel you see the same in me.

I wanted to tell you that reading about Hume and Smith made me think of us. There is perhaps no greater compliment I could give.

Some people keep a small group of the same friends throughout most of their lives and others make new friends frequently. As your token 21st-century neoliberal cosmopolitan nomad, I’ve had a lot of practice honing the skills of making new friends over the years. I’ve uprooted myself so many times, found myself all alone in new countries, new jobs, new environments. I’ve learned how to overcome that awkward feeling of showing up at some networking event and walking over to a group of people in conversation and slyly inserting myself into the circle, glass of red wine in hand, timidly hoping that someone, please someone, will address me lest I am forced to stand there and awkwardly smile at comments out of context before I walk away and try another group. Loneliness in a new place is the best way to rid oneself of judging others. I’ve opened myself to friendships with people from every walk of life because I didn’t have the luxury to do otherwise. My first friend in Frankfurt, Germany was the Serbian cleaning lady at the Avaya offices; I spent days at her home with her daughter and granddaughter, they chain-smoked unfiltered cigarettes and we went to these dance parties where the entire former Yugoslavian community of Bad Homburg linked arms in a circle while men with mustaches played accordions and bouzoukis. I worried I’d be lonely in Toronto when I moved last May, but it’s been delightfully easy to feel connected. It may well be because this is a city of nomads; we’re here joined by this desire to research and build an ecosystem and challenge the boundaries of what’s possible in tech. One of my favorite people in the city is Michael D’Souza, a career CBC reporter and producer who seems to devote his entire being to cultivating beauty and kindness. He cooks and entertains and shaves beets so they look like roses and serves his wife Colleen’s famous shortbread cookies and puts cashew liquor into his pork stew (Michael’s family is from Goa, home of sorpotel, an inherently political food because it contains pork and beef and therefore can only be eaten by Christians, not Hindus or Muslims) and showcases the gentle blues and purples on his matte Korean pottery and takes the time to drive a few hours to watch Tundra swans fly north over waters sparkling in spring sun and welcomes friends of friends to dinner and has been so open and kind with me I sit there flummoxed by generosity, taking careful notes of what it means to be truly hospitable.****

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Michael sent me this picture of tundra swans flying north. Tundra swans mate for life and fly in pairs. These two are followed by their child.

I turn to friends to help me get through moments of pitched emotion. When it’s too hard and too dangerous to stay home alone. When every experience is an out-of-body experience as 99% of my neural activity is fixated on the pain, but friends are ok taking the 1% and just being with me, biding the time as I get back to stability. Those friends know who they are.

And then there are lost friendships. Losing friends creates a different kind of pain than losing lovers, the loves of omission I described in my last post. Every time I do something I feel lacks integrity, I think about friends I have lost because I was selfish, dishonest, or did something to let them down. Sometimes time heals the pain, and they forgive and resurface. Others are gone forever. I feel the pain acutely and call forth the loss as my talisman to help me strive to be a better person.

Self-Love

Not my forte. Have preferred the haunts of self-hatred.

Notions of self-love have changed over time. These days, it seems most pronouncedly influenced by self-help and the trappings of pop psychology. Tangential territory would be yoga and secular Buddhism. This goes kitsch when its stripped of spirituality and devolves into mindfulness 2.0, self-hacking to promote productive automata fooled into thinking we’re living the good life. Lifestyle and shit. Don’t get me wrong: I meditate; I practice yoga; I can’t wrap my head around traditional Buddhist notions of karma because the casual structures drive me bonkers, so I’m not a die-hard Buddhist. Self-love in these traditions is at its best when described by someone like Jack Kornfield (whose dharma talk podcasts are masterful), where the end goal is not self-perfection, but compassion and trust. When there’s the recognition of commonality. Where self-love means to make space for nobility, to encounter familiar habits of mind for what they are and have the ability to act on them or not as we gradually grow.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau differentiated between amour de soi and amour propre. Amour de soi is a basic right of self-preservation, actions and attendant feelings that stem from an innate bias towards existence (to quote Thomas Metzinger). Today, we’d say it’s a good thing to take care of yourself, to keep yourself healthy, to honor your body and your being. Amour propre is insidious self regard built in contrast with another, where our success is relative to another’s failure, where we view ourselves as we assume others view us, where we feel empty unless we’re the center of attention. Rousseau was an inveterate wackjob who identified as a loner and favored radical self-reliance. Adam Smith had a more nuanced appreciation of our need not only to be loved, but also to be lovely, to be appreciated by a given social group and cultivate a sense of belonging.***** There’s an art to finding the balance between the growth that comes from being lovely and the pain the results from being dependent.

In my own quest to gradually tip the scales from self-hatred to (healthy) self-love, I’ve found that compassion is a much more efficient tool for conversion and growth than reason. A colleague tried to convince me that self-hatred was the perfection of egotism, where the act of holding myself to higher standards than others (and hating myself for never being able to achieve those impossibly high standards, “write like James Joyce!” “weigh less than 100 pounds!” “found and sell a company for $100 million by the age of 31!”) covertly shows that I think I’m better than everyone else. That makes logical sense but is emotionally damaging: all it does is exacerbate the anxiety of potentially being selfish. I find it’s much more salutatory to follow Kornfield’s advice and be grateful for the protection patterns of self-hatred have provided as a defense mechanism in the past, and to come to understand they may no longer be needed. The creates a feedback loop of love rather than criticism. Like many others, I’m grateful for how my drive galvanizes me to create and achieve, but work to keep it in check so it doesn’t tip the balances too far and lead to self-destruction. Finally, I find self-deprecation is like salt: just enough can bring out the flavor in food, can level any perceived power discrepancies between people and create a space for connection; too much overrides everything and devolves into awkwardness.

So many more…

3691 words is enough for one day. Can’t do any more. I meant to write about faith (as a non-religious person), love for all mankind, love for a subset of mankind (like womankind), love as striving, love for teachers and mentors, and love of beauty. I’ll likely withhold them unless readers request otherwise.


*Guy Debord is best known for The Society of the Spectacle, which critiques first-generation Marxist thought that religion, politics, and ideologies are nothing but superstructure mirages built upon underlying economic realities-where history unfolds towards the inevitable end of the proletariat coming into awareness that they deserve more, thereby toppling greedy capitalists and instituting equality once and for all-by showing that, in the age of mass media, the spectacle has primacy over economic, material reality, guiding and shaping our tastes and understanding of who we are and what is essential, as we lose touch with what we actually want and need and become worse than automata. It’s not that different from what we read about today with fake news; it is different from insipid impact of personalization in that it promotes collective delusions rather than filter bubbles. There is a small group of die-hard Debordists around the world, including Ken Knabb, who, if I’m not mistaken, lives in a lighthouse near Oakland and still embodies the renegade spirit of what San Francisco was like in the heyday of City Lights Bookstore (my friend Robin Sloan captures the palimpsestic nature of San Francisco’s hippy-now-technocrat culture masterfully in Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore). The most sophisticated of Debord’s projects may be A Game of War, a board game he invented with then-wife Alice Becker-Ho to perform power structures. The folks at the Partially Examined Life (PEL, one of my favorite podcasts) did an episode on The Society of Spectacle late last year; worth a listen if you’re curious.

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Debord and his wife Alice Becker-Ho playing Le Jeu de la Guerre. I consider this not a real game, but an artist staging a theory of political resistance by pretending to have made a game that embodies principles of Clausewitz’s theories on war. It was, after all, the 60s and 70s.

**Donné is a man of many talents and deep erudition. After our dinner, he sent me multiple recordings of Bach masses to help make the case that the modulation from d-minor to D-Major about two thirds of the way into the Bach Chaconne is a musical representation of grace, a citation of a mass Bach had written to lament the passing of a woman he loved.

***Michael Lewis’s Undoing Project is well worth the read. Kahneman was also featured on last week’s 100th episode of the Hidden Brain podcast.

****Another great recent PEL podcast is the March 5 episode on ethics in Homer’s Odyssey. Hospitality was a big part of ancient Greek ethics and is still a big part of what it means to be a good human in many cultures. We don’t focus on it enough in North America.

*****We tend to remember Smith for the Wealth of Nations, but Smith diehards, like Russ Roberts of Econtalk, all think The Theory of Moral Sentiments is the real masterpiece. I’m planning to dig back into it as I’m taken by the idea that commerce is a forum for ethical growth given that we need to regulate our emotions to get along with strangers. The workplace is similar (depending on the culture).

That’s me and my mom in the featured image. We were in Jamaica. I believe I was a senior in college. A few months later I moved to Frankfurt, Germany, where I spent a year between undergrad and grad school at, perhaps, the apex of my striving. I was a dogged learner. It took me eight months to learn German well enough to pass the Grosses Deutsche Sprachdiplom, which is the most advanced of the language tests offered by the Goethe Institut. While there, I wrote my first literary non-fiction work, Inlets of Tonic. I wanted my writing to heal my mother. I wanted to absorb and erase all the pain she’d experienced, propose a way to reinterpret the past that would free her to love herself more fully. It was a Jesus move, I wanted to take on the sins of everyone else so they could be happy. My father read the story and said I didn’t understand the emotional dynamics at play; I’m not sure he understood that my purpose was to rewrite history, not understand it.

Love | An Incomplete Taxonomy

Love is multivalent.

As with qualia, a term some philosophers use to refer to individual instances of subjective, conscious experience, “the ways things seem to us” (Dennett), how a glass of wine tastes, what the particular richness of a crimson velvet dress in a Singer Sargent painting or Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander evokes in you or in me, there’s likely no way to know if love means the same thing to each of us. It may well be ethically preferable to have as many kinds of love as there are instances of its expression, be that to celebrate and respect a person or object we love in her individuality, to more fully cherish the details and differences, or to awaken our minds and hearts to the nuances of what it can feel like to be in the world, to refine our emotional palette through practice as we do with taste buds, each next sip of wine or pu’erh or Himalayan pink salt shifting ever so slightly the weights in our neural network, sharpening our perceptive capacities as we interact and engage.

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A velvet dress, or perhaps a velvet wall behind oiled lampshades (detail from La verre de porto)

But love is also the word known to all men.* An indelible universal. So recognizable that it feels like a crime to utter it prematurely, that it must preserve its status as sacred and rare to carry with it the power of discrimination, of choosing the partner who can promise transcendence, to betoken the uniqueness of a connection and conjure the mild guilt and embarrassment of not being able to say I love you in return. Or to mark the milestone of a phase shift, when it suddenly feels unnatural not to end a phone call by saying I love you, and from whence, ever forward, there is no phone call or parting that does not end with an expression of love.

I don’t think I’m overthinking things if I think through the various types of love that are actively shaping my own experience on this March 10, 2018. It’s hard to expose writing about love to the public: I fear criticism, fear exposure, would prefer to stay safe behind the abstractions of technology and math, prefer to be seen amidst the pantheon of men rather than degraded to tabloid femininity. But my writing habits have gone slack and pudgy, and, as productivity gurus or psychological hackers like Ryan Holiday or Tim Ferriss or Patrycja Slawuta or Nir Eyal would say, I need to make it easy to get started again so it becomes impossible to rationalize an excuse. This is what’s on my mind and in my heart. I’ll brave the exposure as a means of getting back on track.

What follows, then, is a sample of the kinds of love that currently shape how I live in the world. How beautiful that they may be like water around me: Unable to perceive the shape of you, I find you all around me. Your presence fills my eyes with your love. It humbles my heart, for you are everywhere. This list is far from exhaustive, but I’ll give until I’m too exhausted to give any more.

Metta (loving kindness)

People frequently ask what kind of meditation I practice (and teach, as I’ve started leading a (very small!) meditation group at work). The question makes me uncomfortable because I feel it exposes me as a dilettante for not aligning myself with a particular school. I guess my standard style falls under the general rubric of mindfulness, as I’ve learned most of the techniques in yoga classes and do things like alternate restrictions on breathing across nostrils (pranayama), slow my breath cycles to 30 seconds in and 30 seconds out (it’s pretty cool to do one breath per minute), focus my attention on sensations in one local part of my body (like my second toe on my right foot), or scan my body for tension from the top of my head down to the bottom of the soles of my feet. Sometimes I repeat mantras (which I believe is transcendental meditation, although I have to admit I don’t really know what that means). Very infrequently I visualize beings and try to imagine myself being like them. Often when I meditate before writing in the morning, all I end up doing is composing and playing around with ideas in my head. I like doing walking meditations and focusing on all the sensations around me. Or eating meditations, where I pay attention to each bite. I’ve had moments where I’ve completely failed to meditate because I am unravelled by the intensity of an emotional situation. I have yet to fully incorporate meditation into stressful situations, but am getting better at it with each passing day and year. I love how the characters in Dune turn to their breath for mastery in each moment, blue eyes emanating excellence.

One technique I cherish in particular is metta meditation. Metta is normally translated as loving kindness. Don’t let the awkwardness of the term turn you away from its salutatory power. The foundation of metta is to wish well being in the world, where well being means being free from suffering. The tradition characterizes the state of being free from suffering as being safe, happy, healthy, and full of ease. As opposed to wishing for safety, happiness, healthfulness, and peace in general, the practice bids us to direct attention towards various people who cause different kinds of emotions in us. The progression I’ve learned is:

  • Direct metta towards yourself, saying “May I be safe. May I be happy. May I be healthy. May I be full of ease.”
  • Direct metta towards someone you love, saying “May (s)he be safe. May (s)he be happy. May (s)he be healthy. May (s)he be full of ease.”
  • Direct metta towards a mentor or teacher who is helping you.
  • Direct metta towards someone completely neutral.
  • Direct metta towards someone you don’t like or you are having a hard time with.
  • Direct metta towards all beings.

My emotions tend to evolve in predictable ways when I practice metta. The first act of love and kindness towards myself feels like a mere formalism, with the exception of “may I be full of ease.” Ease is meaningful because it signals relief from the familiar dialogue of anxiety and self-hatred. In the latest Tim Ferriss podcast, Buddhist practioner and meditation teacher Jack Kornfield comments on the fact that self-flagellation is a Western endemic: the Dalai Lama found the concept completely illogical when he first heard of it! Kornfield powerfully and astutely shows how we can even come to love our self-hatred as a thinking tool that served as protector and shield in the past, but that ossifies into a useless habit when we gain the strength and wisdom to move beyond it. A bit like celibacy in the Catholic church, which played an economic function in distribution of wealth in feudal societies but has since come to be an ideological restriction repressing natural sexuality and leading to abuse and sex scandals.

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Always loved this image from the inimitable Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings

The joy of metta starts in the movement from self to lover and teacher. I love taking the time to focus on the man I love, to reflect on areas where he may not be happy or thriving and to think about what I might do to bring about greater well being. I love visualizing him and reliving particular moments. I love basking in the warmth and glow of gratitude towards my mentors, finding I often return to the same few people who have patiently accompanied me through so the repetitions of the same mistakes and same dialogues again and again and again. I love deepening my awareness of the humanity that is always around us by focusing my neutral metta at a homeless person I crossed on the street or a stranger who smiled slightly when we passed by one another or someone who sat next to me at a basketball game or a colleague I don’t spend enough time with. Most importantly, I love how my shoulders relax and ease enters naturally when I direct wishes of well being towards someone I am struggling with. I find this simple act of wishing someone who has hurt me-or perhaps who has done nothing wrong except be a catalyst for feelings of self-hatred as I grapple with my own mistakes (anger is a very rare emotion for me, as I transform it into guilt and self-recrimination)-almost instantaneously rewrites my interpretation of what the other’s motives and intentions may have been, and enables me to see him or her from a place of charity and compassion. The possibility of negativity washes away into equanimity. It feels like the way I want to live. I have always felt immense calm embodying a sense of self as unified with everyone and everything else, self not only as species consciousness but as world consciousness, incidentally caught in the limitations of subjectivity. Morality feels different when we move from the utilitarian principles of negative liberty, where our actions may be unfettered unless and until they harm another, to recognizing that others are also us. The golden rule becomes tautological, reciprocal. Wishing well being for another is the same as wishing it for ourselves. This feeling of love is always available. It is a way of being with and in oneself that connects oneself to everyone and everything. It is always there, if we choose to look.

What I’ve learned while writing this is that my deepest and purest act of metta towards myself occurs when I love those I am struggling with.

Loving, not liking

My violin teacher at Stanford, Anthony Doheny, had an immensely positive impact on my life. It was with him that I learned that music is a conversation without words, a back and forth where you listen to the dynamics and speed and cadences of your partner and imitate, with variation and difference, to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts. That the fusion of two people truly playing together, truly communicating, can compensate for any lack in technical virtuosity and rigor; sure, it would have been even better if I took the time to master the difficult sixteenth note passages, but I played with Tony with a different mindset than available before. I played with him.

And our conversation was about more than just music. Tony would pay attention to my emotions and my state of being, and play the piano part of the Brahms violin sonata in d minor just a tad bit louder when he recognized I had demons to exorcise. He knew his playing louder would inspire me to express more, would increase my catharsis, because we were indeed conversing and not just playing separately. He knew why I played; that, at my age, I wasn’t looking for technical mastery, but for expression and joy, for a place to focus my attention while creating music, for a focused reprieve from the pain of my day to day.

One day I walked in and was complaining about a woman in my graduate program I didn’t like much. As standard, my attention focused nearly exclusively on the things I didn’t have, on my failures and shortcomings, on the people who didn’t like me, rather than on all the people who love me and respond well to me, the positive things in my life. His advice was wonderful: “you don’t have to like everyone,” he said, “but you do have to love everyone.”

Monogamous relationships

I can’t write about this in the particular. It’s too private. I’ve dated men of many ages, shapes, sizes, ethnicities, and degrees of emotional availability. People have judged my relationships; I have suffered because I followed my somewhat unorthodox heart but wanted to nonetheless be approved and rewarded as if I followed standard social conventions. That didn’t work. I’m still friends with many former partners, which makes me enormously happy. I’ve messed up bad a few times and have had moments of incredible compassion when I’ve come to experience for myself, in a subsequent relationship, some emotional state I had put a former partner through in the past. When possible, I’ve reached out to apologize and express my compassion. I’ve grown. I laugh at all the shit I did in the past to these poor men who stuck with me for god knows what reason. When I was young, it look me a long time to say I love you. I wanted to mean it. I wanted it to look like it does in fairy tales. The older I get, the more freely I love. The word is not cheapened, but its scope is expanded. I no longer believe in “the one”; I’ve loved too many times and different partners have introduced me to different aspects of myself and stimulated growth in different ways. I believe what I seek-or at least have sought-from relationships lies in the sparse air atop Maslow’s hierarchy (oh those naïve visions of martyrdom as some form of transcendence!). I am gradually learning to temper my yearnings. The purpose of tragedies, after all, is to provide a fictional, protected space to exercise and exorcise surging emotions; they’re not good handbooks for living. Hours and hours and hours of draining emotional energy have been spent coming to learn that lesson.

Erotic love

Another one I don’t want to write about. I’ll share a few things I find philosophically interesting.

I love how Kamala, the sexual mentor in Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, teaches the protagonist that what’s unique about sex is that it’s an act where the best way for a woman to give is to take. Too much focus on the other will never lead to an orgasm. There needs to be some willingness to take and to take care of oneself, and yet this is often best achieved by the ability to satisfy and stimulate the other. That’s why there’s such a difference between great sex and making love and just passive receipt of physical pleasure.

I love how Jean-Luc Marion defines what he calls the erotic phenomenon, where one’s sense of self becomes totally relative to the imagined physical and psychological situation of the other. Where phenomenology cracks at the seams and the center of gravity shifts to be entangled with what we imagine and experience as the presence of a lover. How magical.

I’m not the first person to say that my most powerful and purely joyful sexual experiences have resulted in an experience of focused synesthetic attention and flow. My psychology has been all over the map depending on the man, but the moments I cherish most are those that offer a rescinding of the ego and an aware becoming of movement and sensation. That’s not animalistic. It’s quite spiritual.

Love for colleagues and students

In Plato’s Symposium, the character Phaedrus commented on the power of male sexuality to improve bravery in the military. The argument is that a soldier in love with a fellow soldier would be spurred to incredible feats of bravery and self-sacrifice to protect the loved one. We see the same in Homer’s Iliad, where Patroclus sacrifices himself to protect Achilles; it’s never made explicit that the two are lovers but there are enough clues to lead us to believe that’s the case.

Our culture is quite different from that of the ancient Greeks. Most militaries have a vastly different stance towards homosexuality. I’m not even sure where to start in commenting on potential erotic relationships between colleagues in the age of Harvey Weinstein, Travis Kalanick, and Donald Trump. And it’s not what I want to comment on either. I want to comment on an act of love that is about supporting the growth and expansion of younger colleagues and students.

As I prioritize my activities at the beginning of each work week, I ask myself what I can do to provide a platform for achievement for others in my company and what activities are best carried out on my own. My colleague Jason Silver has inspired me here by his strong and selfless example. It feels good to achieve, to set ever higher goals and do what it takes to accomplish them; there’s a sense of satisfaction that arises from setting an example for others. But it feels 65809090432 times better to enable others to achieve and grow. For me, then, loving my colleagues is synonymous with a style of leadership, and with careful craftsmanship. A leader needs to shape opportunities or goals for junior colleagues that can at once push them beyond the familiar, but are scoped tightly enough to enable achievement in a reasonably short period of time. The sense of satisfaction that results is marvelous. When I look back on professional accomplishments, what sticks out are others’ wins, not my own.

I’ll close this section with a note I sent to my female colleagues in honor of international women’s day:

Recently, my dear friend John Alber wrote me a note to tell me I have been given an immensely wonderful gift, the gift of responsibility, the gift of being able to marry strength with vulnerability, power with pain, competitive spirit and striving for excellence with deep, deep compassion for all other beings, as all other beings are myself. At 33, without children of my own, the example I can set is to be a beacon of possibility for so many women in the world; for our teammates here at integrate.ai as for the thousands of young girls I’ve met and worked to set an example for since joining integrate.ai last year. I am often overwhelmed by this responsibility, and amazed that, somehow, the universe has granted me this gift. I’m coming to accept it, and the willingness to do so is galvanized by the awareness that it is by revealing and sharing our weaknesses, our vulnerabilities, our love, that we can give real strength to others.

Love for those who have died

I have yet to lose someone whose death would tear me asunder. I have been fortunate. My father had a heart attack last January. He is just fine, but it was the first time I had to sit on the plane for six hours, from New York to San Francisco, not knowing if he’d be alive on the other side. I still remember the afternoon with acute clarity, remember running the bath water in my tub in my Brooklyn apartment, remember how the faucet had these little acid pockmarks on it, which, in my memory’s eye, become associated with rusty water even though the water was never rusty, remember my mother calling as I drew the bath, calling from Paris hysterical to tell me I had to go to the airport immediately because he was all alone, remember the determination, how easy it is to act when we need to, how easy to drop everything and execute even though only a small fraction of our mind is there, remember calling my friend Yaro and asking him to stay and take care of my father, remember the sensation of relief and humor when he was ok. I have relived what it felt like to be on the plane, not knowing if he’d be alive on the other side, many times; it orients me, prioritizes what matters, shows me how deeply I love my father. It would shake me deeply to lose him, as it would shake me to lose my mother or my brother.

The loss I’ve experienced at losing a few lovers has also felt like they have died. It elicits a wailing mourning like Italian widows with shoulders bent over graves, a mourning that incapacitates and dampens the rest of the world behind a curtain of emotion. I can do nothing but restlessly wander around the city. Aimless days etched with loss. But they are still alive, and I hold back the desires to reach out and express how frequently I think about them. These are loves of omission. I take solace in directing metta their way and recognizing that to reach out would be more about myself than about them.

My love for my late grandfather, who died 2 years ago, and aunt Leslie, who recently died from pancreatic cancer, expresses itself in vivid images and memories. The images are always joyful. I see them dancing, I see them smiling, the energy they have emitted into the world is full of lessons of the preciousness of daily acts of kindness. I don’t think of them every day, but when I do they pop up with the vividness of Proust’s childhood after biting into the Madeleine and they are so terribly present it’s as if I were just with them yesterday. The difference is that they won’t be there tomorrow, that the dinner table conversation won’t ever be quite the same. I don’t understand why the Christian church required an imagined future life as a place to recover and find lost ones again. There is much more palpable and tangible hope in seeing traits of the dead alive in their children, alive in how the world is different because they acted in it.

Love as practice

There are many more kinds of love, each mapping to the different kinds of relationships we can enter into and the way these relationships engage and challenge the ever-evolving way of being we call the self. At the root of all of it, I believe, is our essence as social beings. Each kind of love is a mode of being created in conjunction with and connection to another, a style of action that seeks fusion rather than difference, even though sometimes-most times-the act of love is to step back and enable the difference rather than imposing interpretation or control.

The act of love I extend towards myself in writing like this is one of abandonment, of hoping that things that feel meaningful to me won’t be ridiculed by others. My experience has shown that expressions of vulnerability empower. Should this attempt to get back into writing empower one other person, it will have been time well spent.


*”Touch me. Soft eyes. Soft soft soft hand. I am lonely here. . . . What is that word known to all men? I am quiet here alone. Sad too. Touch, touch me.” People think of James Joyce as esoteric and impenetrable. Are you fucking kidding me? This language pulses. He offers a simplicity underneath all the complexity.

I struggled to find a good image to represent this post! Tons of bad ones, including many photos of tattoos with the Greek word agape-love for God and all beings-all over people’s bodies. I decided to go with this fresco of a banquet at a tomb in the catacomb of Saints Marcellinus and Peter in the Via Labicana in Rome. I don’t have a great reason why. 

Of Thread and Mermen

I bought a dress Tuesday evening. It’s silk and it billows, the cut loose, elegant, harkening flappers and 1930s France. The print seems sampled directly from a Wes Anderson film. Featured in the image above, it has a Jerry Garcia merman with sunglasses and a ping pong paddle rippling regularly across the silk. The design house, La Prestic Ouiston*, hails from a family that maintains a traditional oyster farm in Brittany. The brand’s manifesto celebrates “craft, tradition, virtuosity, always [seeking] to work and to hightlight** the craftsmanship of artisans by producing unique pieces such as garments with embroideries hand-made in Rwanda or clogs made in Brittany and painted in Paris by an artist.” It’s a small brand that proclaims the local, that “dedicates itself to the return of slow fashion.” The silk is infused with mists from the nearby salt marshes in Guérande, it billows brine gusts and ocean raked into flat white squares. Eyes closed, I imagine walking in merman silk barefoot, bare legged, over the desiccated marshes, shaved salt embedded flake by flake into foot arches, falling flake by flake back to a new place of rest, ever migrant with the opalescent tides. Oysters turgid under rugged shells, their taste reminiscent of our common ancestry as ocean. Sweat and blood betokening a past too old to be remembered but by cortisol and heartbreak.***

le-parc-de-briere-4_reference
The salt marshes in Guérande, just south of Brittany, where you can find the La Maison Mer oyster farm affiliated with La Prestic Ouiston. I visited the marshes in the summer of 2009, learning that the fleur de sel is the crystal crust that forms atop the rectangular marshes. They still use rakes to shave off the salt, collecting it into piles like those in the photo.

I purchased the dress at GASPARD, my favourite clothing boutique in Toronto. The owners are attentive and visionary; they comb the world to find designers with beautiful clothing backed by stories and introduce their unique clothing to Toronto. The first time I visited, I immediately felt the ease and grace of a new relationship. I told Ayalah, who was working at the boutique when I bought the dress, that I speak in public frequently and was excited to wear such a rad dress on a panel the next day. She invited me to send photos in the dress to Richard, one of GASPARD’s owners, as it was currently his favourite. And then she asked if work ever paid for my wardrobe, given my public-facing role. I laughed the idea off as absurd, as I work for a small startup and can only imagine what our controller would think if I included a line item for a merman dress on my January expense report.

But her suggestion sparked an idea. How awesome would it be to collaborate with a design house like La Prestic Ouiston on a wardrobe for talks and public appearances, to design an identity either tailored to or able to challenge an audience, in the same way that, as speaker, I shift my approach, content, and tone depending on whether I’m addressing a super technical artificial intelligence research audience, a super practical business audience who need just enough technical detail to feel empowered but not so much as to feel alienated, a passionate and righteous sociology and critical theory audience who want to unpack the social implications of new technologies and do something to fix them, or a muted, constrained policy audience fascinated by the potential of a new conceptual framework to think about what it might mean to regulate AI but trapped within the confines of legal precedent and the broad strokes of the electorate?

What I imagine isn’t sponsorship à la Tiger Woods or pick your favourite athlete. It isn’t trendsetting or luxury branding à la pick your favourite actress wearing Alexander McQueen or Dior or Armani or Gucci or Carolina Herrera on the red carpet at the Oscars. It’s more like Bowie or Lady Gaga or Madonna, Protean shapeshifters whose songs and performances embody a temporary persona that vanishes into something new in the next project. I imagine a collaboration with an artist or designer. Couture not as fitting a dress to individual proportions but as context, each performance exposing its roots, not just measuring bust and waistlines but identity and persona, my providing constraints and parameters and abandoning myself to the materials, shapes, patterns, folds, twists, buttons, sleeves, lengths, tones, textures the designer felt appropriate for a given performance. Not unlike the dance between authorship and abandonment Kyle McDonald experiences in algorithmic art, where the coder sets the initial parameters of the algorithm and experiences what results. Design a mode of creation girding both fashion and product marketing, both ethnographies of what exists today, techniques to tweeze out mental models that guide behaviour and experience and emotion, but that always go beyond observation, that infuse empiricism with the intuition of what could be possible, of how today’s behaviours could be improved, changed, optimized to create something new.

Screen Shot 2018-02-04 at 11.48.30 AM
Kyle McDonald has been working a lot of algorithmically generated music of late, and featured this image on a recent post about using neural nets for music.

I knew from the outset the idea would be polarizing. Fashion and brand sponsorship is at home in sports because athletes are more than athletes; they are cultural icons. It’s at home in entertainment, where physical appearance and beauty are part and parcel of stardom, whether we like it or not. But it’s not at home in math, quantitative fields in academia, or technology. Which is why the topic is thorny, uncomfortable, interesting.

I was concerned about the potential negative reaction to the very post I’m writing (you’re reading) so shopped the idea with a few people to tally reactions.****

Those in fashion were non-plussed: “Fashion x public figures is as old as bread, it’s just a question of finding someone up for a collaboration.”

The way I engage with my younger, technical, male colleagues inspired a presentation of the idea as an act of badass empowerment. They saw and heard what they normally see and hear from me. I could have been talking about research. I could have been talking about speaking on cybersecurity to a bunch of generals. They didn’t hear me speak about fashion. They heard the persona I embody when I work with them, one where I am at once trusted mentor and role model for the leadership positions they want to occupy someday. My being a woman in amazing clothes on stage was a means of embodying something empowering for them, perhaps even masculine.

My ambitious, female colleague, passionate about diversity and inclusion and also interested in clothing and style, said, “gosh, can I do that too?” She and I inhabit our positions as strong women in technology differently. A jack of all trades, she owned branding efforts early on and got excited about the prospect of our having bright pink business cards. I was appalled, as I couldn’t imagine myself giving a bright pink business card to the scientists and executives I typically engage with at conferences. At the time, I felt it was important to deliberately embody androgyny, but elegant androgyny, to wear a-lines and black and neutral professional clothing, but nonetheless extremely feminine clothing, this subtle dance that both erases and underlines gender, but that is so much different from the direct statement of hot pink. Grappling with the difference teases out the subtleties here.

Friends who openly eschew gender essentialism commented on the thorniness of the issue, likely engaging with my own hesitation, which muted the brazen excitement I embody with my younger colleagues. Here conversations waxed consequentialist, focusing on the fact that, whether intended or not, deliberately collaborating with a designer would reinforce stereotypes aligning women with clothing, while brogrammers perform nonchalance in, well, standard brogrammer garb or icons like Steve Jobs perform aestheticism that indexes the life of the mind by donning plain black sweater uniforms. I worried.

Some admonished me for pursuing the project, commenting on my responsibility to the brand identity of the various organizations with which I am associated professionally. This harkened the split ethical imperatives I explored in Censorship and the Liberal Arts. For indeed, as professionals we sign a social contract where we trade unadulterated free speech and expression for the benefits of collaborating with others to build something and do something we’d be unable to accomplish ourselves. But the line between personal and professional brand is anything but clear, and varies greatly between companies and contexts. As evidenced by his world-class out-of-office emails*****, my partner John Frankel at ffVC falls a few standard deviations from the norm, while also insisting on rigour and consistency on the firm’s positions on investment theses. Friends in government rarely express their personal opinions, ever beholden to their duties as representatives of a public body. This forces the question of how much the integrate.ai brand, for example, stands for personal expression. The nuances here are as delicate as those related to feminine identity: it’s our responsibility to embody the brand that supports our business goals, but I’ve always found that success emerges from the breath of fresh air promoted by authenticity.

What do I think?

I doubt the collaboration will come to be, at least not anytime soon. I spent a few days inhabiting an imaginary potential, thinking about how fun it would be to co-create outfits for different performances, one day a boxy Yamamoto, the next a flowery Dior, the next a Katharine Hepburn-inspired pants suit to index a potential future in politics. I remembered all the articles about Marissa Mayer’s style back in 2013, the fact that her having style was news for the tech industry. I reread Susan Fowler’s post about her disgusting experience at Uber and found another very touching post she wrote about what it feels like to be someone who “wants to know it all,” who lacks a singular destiny. I imagined peppering this post with myriad quotations from Ellen Ullman, my new hero, whose Life in Code I devoured with the attention and curiosity spurred by feeling prose so much in line with my own, by reading a vision of what I’d like to write and become.******  I thought about the responsibilities I have right now as a pseudo-visible woman in technology, as a pseudo-visible woman in venture, as a woman who doesn’t write code (yet!!) but serves as translator between so many different domains, who struggles with her identity but wouldn’t have it any other way, who wants to do what’s right for the thousands and thousands of young women out there watching, dreaming, yearning, ready to do amazing things in the world. I just want them to be themselves and not to fear and to create and to be free to become. To have a voice to shape the world. And to fucking wear beautiful clothing if that makes them happy, and alive.

I wore my merman dress on Wednesday on a panel with my friend Steve Woods and the CEO of Wysdom.AI. The audience comprised mostly men; I felt they paid attention to what I said, not what I wore. On Friday, another strong female leader in the Toronto AI community told me she admires my style, and asked where I buy my clothes. I referred her to GASPARD, delighted to support local entrepreneurs making the world more beautiful.


* It took some digging to find the primary designer behind La Prestic Ouiston. Her name is Laurence Mahéo. She looks unabashedly at the camera in the photos various media outlets have posted about her and her spectacular, singular existence. Her head often tilts slightly to the side. She doesn’t smile widely.

**Typo in the original (English translation from the original French).

***Isak Dinesen understood our oceanic roots, as in one of my favourite quotations: “The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea.” I remember hikes up Windy Hill in 2009 and 2010, mourning the loss of my first real love, tears, and sweat, and sea all needed to get back on my feet, love that broke me, that altered my course in life, that changed my emotions ever forward, instilling both negative patterns I still struggle with eight years later and positive patterns, widening my heart and permitting expressiveness I hadn’t known possible there prior. Memories fixed solid in my synapses, of such heightened emotional importance I will carry them with me intact until the day I die. He always knew that the self he saw and enlivened wasn’t the current me but the me he saw I might one day become, knew I was helplessly addicted to this promised self, as I knew he was helplessly addicted to the child I recovered in him, personhood long silenced, but for which he desperately yearned and was grateful to remember existed as a kernel of possibility.

****I had a hell of a time writing One Feminine Identity exactly one year ago today (curious how those things work; my father had a heart attack exactly one year after his father died, as I commemorate in this post). I was dating an ardent feminist at the time, who criticized me for the lack of rigour and systematicity in my approach to female empowerment. His critique lodged itself in my superego and bastardized my writing. I hedged so as not to offend anyone with what I assumed were offensive positions. Then, two other friends read the piece and criticized the hedging! I learned something.

*****This week, John’s out-of-office email featured this poem, which I sent to two colleagues as I felt they’d appreciate it:

Life is like a grain of sand;
it can slip through your fingers
at any time and be lost forever.
We must enjoy every minute
while we have it
in case that too
slips through our fingers.
Love is a fleeting thing
that passes all too quickly through our lives
unless we grasp it tightly
never letting it go.
Our lives are like a grain of sand
and will slip through our fingers
before we get to enjoy it thoroughly.
A Grain of Sand by David Harris

******Here is Ullman giving a talk at Google. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bCcVyuq9aRE

I took a photo of the featured image last Tuesday evening with my iPhone. The shadows arise from the ill-fit black plastic cover that partially covers the lens, tailored for a previous iPhone release. The tag on the dress indicates that the merman’s name is Seb le Poisson. Seb is in the closet, awaiting his next appearance. I write in my pyjamas. 

Exploration-Exploitation and Life

There was another life that I might have had, but I am having this one. - Kazuo Ishiguro

On April 18, 2016*, I attended an NYAI Meetup** featuring a talk by Columbia Computer Science Professor Dan Hsu on interactive learning. Incredibly clear and informative, the talk slides are worth reviewing in their entirety. But one in particular caught my attention (fortunately it summarizes many of the subsequent examples):

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From Dan Hsu’s excellent talk on interactive machine learning

It’s worth stepping back to understand why this is interesting.

Much of the recent headline-grabbing progress in artificial intelligence (AI) comes from the field of supervised learning. As I explained in a recent HBR article, I find it helpful to think of supervised learning like the inverse of high school algebra:

Think back to high school math — I promise this will be brief — when you first learned the equation for a straight line: y = mx + b. Algebraic equations like this represent the relationship between two variables, x and y. In high school algebra, you’d be told what m and b are, be given an input value for x, and then be asked to plug them into the equation to solve for y. In this case, you start with the equation and then calculate particular values.

Supervised learning reverses this process, solving for m and b, given a set of x’s and y’s. In supervised learning, you start with many particulars — the data — and infer the general equation. And the learning part means you can update the equation as you see more x’s and y’s, changing the slope of the line to better fit the data. The equation almost never identifies the relationship between each x and y with 100% accuracy, but the generalization is powerful because later on you can use it to do algebra on new data. Once you’ve found a slope that captures a relationship between x and y reliably, if you are given a new x value, you can make an educated guess about the corresponding value of y.

Supervised learning works well for classification problems (spam or not spam? relevant or not for my lawsuit? cat or dog?) because of how the functions generalize. Effectively, the “training labels” humans provide in supervised learning assign categories, tokens we affiliate to abstractions from the glorious particularities of the world that enable us to perceive two things to be similar. Because our language is relatively stable (stable does not mean normative, as Canadian Inuit perceive snow differently from New Yorkers because they have more categories to work with), generalities and abstractions are useful, enabling the learned system to act correctly in situations not present in the training set (e.g., it takes a hell of a long time for golden retrievers to evolve to be indistinguishable from their great-great-great-great-great-grandfathers, so knowing what one looks like on April 18, 2016 will be a good predictor of what one looks like on December 2, 2017). But, as Rich Sutton*** and Andrew Barto eloquently point out in their textbook on reinforcement learning,

This is an important kind of learning, but alone it is not adequate for learning from interaction. In interactive problems it is often impractical to obtain examples of desired behavior that are both correct and representative of all the situations in which the agent has to act. In uncharted territory—where one would expect learning to be most beneficial—an agent must be able to learn from its own experience.

In his NYAI talk, Dan Hsu also mentioned a common practical limitation of supervised learning, namely that many companies often lack good labeled training data and it can be expensive, even in the age of Mechanical Turk, to take the time to provide labels.**** The core thing to recognize is that learning from generalization requires that future situations look like past situations; learning from interaction with the environment helps develop a policy for action that can be applied even when future situations do not look exactly like past situations. The maxim “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all” holds both in a situation where you want to gossip about a colleague and in a situation where you want to criticize a crappy waiter at a restaurant.

In a supervised learning paradigm, there are certainly traps to make faulty generalizations from the available training data. One classic problem is called “overfitting”, where a model seems to do a great job on a training data set but fails to generalize well to new data. But the super critical salient difference Hsu points out in his talk is that, while with supervised learning the data available to the learner is exogenous to the system, with interactive machine learning approaches, the learner’s performance is based on the learner’s decisions and the data available to the world depends on the learner’s decisions. 

Think about that. Think about what that means for gauging the consequences of decisions. Effectively, these learners cannot evaluate counterfactuals: they cannot use data or evidence to judge what would have happened if they took a different action. An ideal optimization scenario, by contrast, would be one where we could observe the possible outcomes of any and all potential decisions, and select the action with the best outcome across all these potential scenarios (this is closer, but not identical, to the spirit of variational inference, but that is a complex topic for another post).

To share one of Hsu’s***** concrete examples, let’s say a website operator has a goal to personalize website content to entice a consumer to buy a pair of shoes. Before the user shows up at the site, our operator has some information about her profile and browsing history, so can use past actions to guess what might be interesting bait to get a click (and eventually a purchase). So, at the moment of truth, the operator says “Let’s show the beige Cole Hann high heels!”, displays the content, and observes the reaction. We’ll give the operator the benefit of the doubt and assume the user clicks, or even goes on to purchase. Score! Positive signal! Do that again in the future! But was it really the best choice? What would have happened if the operator had shown the manipulatable consumer the red Jimmy Choo high heels, which cost $750 per pair rather than a more modest $200 per pair? Would the manipulatable consumer have clicked? Was this really the best action?

The learner will never know. It can only observe the outcome of the action it took, not the action it didn’t take.

The literature refers to this dilemma as the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. To again cite Sutton and Barto:

One of the challenges that arise in reinforcement learning, and not in other kinds of learning, is the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. To obtain a lot of reward, a reinforcement learning agent must prefer actions that it has tried in the past and found to be effective in producing reward. But to discover such actions, it has to try actions that it has not selected before. The agent has to exploit what it already knows in order to obtain reward, but it also has to explore in order to make better action selections in the future. The dilemma is that neither exploration nor exploitation can be pursued exclusively without failing at the task. The agent must try a variety of actions and progressively favor those that appear to be best. On a stochastic task, each action must be tried many times to gain a reliable estimate of its expected reward.

There’s a lot to say about the exploration-exploitation tradeoff in machine learning (I recommend starting with the Sutton/Barto textbook). Now that I’ve introduced the concept, I’d like to pivot to consider where and why this is relevant in honest-to-goodness-real-life.

The nice thing about being an interactive machine learning algorithm as opposed to a human is that algorithms are executors, not designers or managers. They’re given a task (“optimize revenues for our shoe store!”) and get to try stuff and make mistakes and learn from feedback, but never have to go through the soul-searching agony of deciding what goal is worth achieving. Human designer overlords take care of that for them. And even the domain and range of possible data to learn from is constrained by technical conditions: designers make sure that it’s not all the data out there in the world that’s used to optimize performance on some task, but a tiny little baby subset (even if that tiny little baby entails 500 million examples) confined within a sphere of relevance.

Being a human is unfathomably more complicated.

Many choices we make benefit from the luxury of triviality and frequency. “Where should we go for dinner and what should we eat when we get there?” Exploitation can be a safe choice, in particular for creatures of habit. “Well, sweetgreen is around the corner, it’s fast and reliable. We could take the time to review other restaurants (which could lead to the most amazing culinary experience of our entire lives!) or we could not bother to make the effort, stick with what we know, and guarantee a good meal with our standard kale caesar salad, that parmesan crisp thing they put on the salad is really quite tasty…” It’s not a big deal if we make the wrong choice because, low and behold, tomorrow is another day with another dinner! And if we explore something new, it’s possible the food will be just terrible and sometimes we’re really not up for the risk, or worse, the discomfort or shame of having to send something we don’t like back. And sometimes it’s fine to take the risk and we come to learn we really do love sweetbreads, not sweetgreens, and perhaps our whole diet shifts to some decadent 19th-century French paleo practice in the style of des Esseintes.

Des_Esseintes_at_study_Zaidenberg_illustration
Arthur Zaidenberg’s depiction of des Esseintes, decadent hero extraordinaire, who embeds gems into a tortoise shell and has a perfume organ.

Other choices have higher stakes (or at least feel like they do) and easily lead to paralysis in the face of uncertainty. Working at a startup strengthens this muscle every day. Early on, founders are plagued by an unknown amount of unknown unknowns. We’d love to have a magic crystal ball that enables us to consider the future outcomes of a range of possible decisions, and always act in the way that guarantees future success. But the crystal balls don’t exist, and even if they did, we sometimes have so few prior assumptions to prime the pump that the crystal ball could only output an #ERROR message to indicate there’s just not enough there to forecast. As such, the only option available is to act and to learn from the data provided as a result of that action. To jumpstart empiricism, staking some claim and getting as comfortable as possible with the knowledge that the counterfactual will never be explored, and that each action taken shifts the playing field of possibility and probability and certainty slightly, calming minds and hearts. The core challenge startup leaders face is to enable the team to execute as if these conditions of uncertainty weren’t present, to provide a safe space for execution under the umbrella of risk and experiment. What’s fortunate, however, is that the goals of the enterprise are, if not entirely well-defined, at least circumscribed. Businesses exist to turn profits and that serves as a useful, if not always moral, constraint.

Big personal life decisions exhibit further variability because we but rarely know what to optimize for, and it can be incredibly counter-productive and harmful to either constrain ourselves too early or suffer from the psychological malaise of assuming there’s something wrong with us if we don’t have some master five-year plan.

This human condition is strange because we do need to set goals-it’s beneficial for us to consider second- and third-tier consequences, i.e., if our goal is to be healthy and fit, we should overcome the first-tier consequence of receiving pleasure when we drown our sorrows in a gallon of salted caramel ice cream-and yet it’s simply impossible for us to imagine the future accurately because, well, we overfit to our present and our past.

I’ll give a concrete example from my own experience. As I touched upon in a recent post about transitioning from academia to business, one reason why it’s so difficult to make a career change is that, while we never actually predict the future accurately, it’s easier to fear loss from a known predicament than to imagine gain from a foreign predicament.****** Concretely, when I was deciding whether to pursue a career in academia or the private sector in the fifth year in graduate school, I erroneously assumed that I was making a strict binary choice, that going into business meant forsaking a career teaching or publishing. As I was evaluating my decision, I never in my wildest dreams imagined that, a mere two years later, I would be invited to be an adjunct professor at the University of Calgary Faculty of Law, teaching about how new technologies were impacting traditional professional ethics. And I also never imagined that, as I gave more and more talks, I would subsequently be invited to deliver guest lectures at numerous business schools in North America. This path is not necessarily the right path for everyone, but it was and is the right path for me. In retrospect, I wish I’d constructed my decision differently, shifting my energy from fearing an unknown and unknowable future to paying attention to what energized me and made me happy and working to maximize the likelihood of such energizing moments occurring in my life. I still struggle to live this way, still fetishize what I think I should be wanting to do and living with an undercurrent of anxiety that a choice, a foreclosure of possibility, may send me down an irreconcilably wrong path. It’s a shitty way to be, and something I’m actively working to overcome.

So what should our policy be? How can we reconcile this terrific trade-off between exploration and exploitation, between exposing ourselves to something radically new and honing a given skill, between learning from a stranger and spending more time with a loved one, between opening our mind to some new field and developing niche knowledge in a given domain, between jumping to a new company with new people and problems, and exercising our resilience and loyalty to a given team?

There is no right answer. We’re all wired differently. We all respond to challenges differently. We’re all motivated by different things.

Perhaps death is the best constraint we have to provide some guidance, some policy to choose between choice A and choice B. For we can project ourselves forward to our imagined death bed, where we lie, alone, staring into the silent mirror of our hearts, and ask ourselves “Was my life was meaningful?” But this imagined scene is not actually a future state: it is a present policy. It is a principle we can use to evaluate decisions, a principle that is useful because it abstracts us from the mire of emotions overly indexed towards near-term goals and provides us with perspective.

And what’s perhaps most miraculous is that, at every present, we can sit there are stare into the silent mirror of our hearts and look back on the choices we’ve made and say, “That is me.” It’s so hard going forward, and so easy going backward. The proportion of what may come wanes ever smaller than the portion of what has been, never quite converging until it’s too late, and we are complete.


*Thank you, internet, for enabling me to recall the date with such exacting precision! Using my memory, I would have deduced the approximate date by 1) remembering that Robert Colpitts, my boyfriend at the time (Godspeed to him today, as he participates in a sit-a-thon fundraiser for the Interdependence Project in New York City, a worthy cause), attended with me, recalling how fresh our relationship was (it had to have been really fresh because the frequency with which we attended professional events together subsequently declined), and working backwards from the start to find the date; 2) remembering what I wore! (crazy!!), namely a sheer pink sleeveless shirt, a pair of wide-legged white pants that landed just slightly above the ankle and therefore looked great with the pair of beige, heeled sandals with leather so stiff it gave me horrific blisters that made running less than pleasant for the rest of the week. So I’d recently purchased those when my brother and his girlfriend visited, which was in late February (or early March?) 2016; 3) remembering that afterwards we went to some fast food Indian joint nearby in the Flatiron district, food was decent but not good enough to inspire me to return. So that would put is in the March-April, 2016 range, which is close but not the exact April 18. That’s one week after my birthday (April 11); I remember Robert and I had a wonderful celebration on my birthday. I felt more deeply cared for than I had in any past birthdays. But I don’t remember this talk relative to the birthday celebration (I do remember sending the marketing email to announce the Fast Forward Labs report on text summarization on my birthday, when I worked for half day and then met Robert at the nearby sweetgreen, where he ordered, as always, (Robert is a creature of exploitation) the kale caesar salad, after which we walked together across the Brooklyn Bridge to my house, we loved walking together, we took many, many walks together, often at night after work at the Promenade, often in the morning, before work, at the Promenade, when there were so few people around, so few people awake). I must say, I find the process of reconstructing when an event took place using temporal landmarks much more rewarding than searching for “Dan Hsu Interactive Learning NYAI” on Google to find the exact date. But the search terms themselves reveal something equally interesting about our heuristic mnemonics, as every time we reconstruct some theme or topic to retrieve a former conversation on Slack.

**Crazy that WeWork recently bought Meetup, although interesting to think about how the two business models enable what I am slowly coming to see as the most important creative force in the universe, the combinatory potential of minds meeting productively, where productively means that each mind is not coming as a blank slate but as engaged in a project, an endeavor, where these endeavors can productively overlap and, guided by a Smithian invisible hand, create something new. The most interesting model we hope to work on soon at integrate.ai is one that optimizes groups in a multiplayer game experience (which we lovingly call the polyamorous online dating algorithm), so mapping personality and playing style affinities to dynamically allocate the best next player to an alliance. Social compatibility is a fascinating thing to optimize for, in particular when it goes beyond just assembling a pleasant cocktail party to pairing minds, skills, and temperaments to optimize the likelihood of creating something beautiful and new.

***Sutton has one of the most beautiful minds in the field and he is kind. He is a person to celebrate. I am grateful our paths have crossed and thoroughly enjoyed our conversation on the In Context podcast.

***Maura Grossman and Gordon Cormack have written countless articles about the benefits of using active learning for technology assisted review (TAR), or classifying documents for their relevance for a lawsuit. The tradeoffs they weigh relate to system performance (gauged by precision and recall on a document set) versus time, cost, and effort to achieve that performance.

*****Hsu did not mention Haan or Choo. I added some more color.

******Note this same dynamic occurs in our current fears about the future economy. We worry a hell of a lot more about the losses we will incur if artificial intelligence systems automate existing jobs than we celebrate the possibilities of new jobs and work that might become possible once these systems are in place. This is also due to the fact that the future we imagine tends to be an adaptation of what we know today, as delightfully illustrated in Jean-Marc Côté’s anachronistic cartoons of the year 2000. The cartoons show what happens when our imagination only changes one variable as opposed to a set of holistically interconnected variables.

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19th-century cartoons show how we imagine technological innovations in isolation. That said, a hipster barber shop in Portland or Brooklyn could feature such a palimpsestic combination.

 

The featured image is a photograph I took of the sidewalk on State Street between Court and Clinton Streets in Brooklyn Heights. I presume a bird walked on wet concrete. Is that how those kinds of footprints are created? I may see those footprints again in the future, but not nearly as soon as I’d be able to were I not to have decided to move to Toronto in May. Now that I’ve thought about them, I may intentionally make the trip to Brooklyn next time I’m in New York (certainly before January 11, unless I die between now and then). I’ll have to seek out similar footprints in Toronto, or perhaps the snows of Alberta. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Mentorship

On Tuesday, together with four fellow eloquent and inspiring women, I addressed an audience of a hundred and fifty (I think?) odd young women about becoming a woman leader in technology.

I recently passed a crucial threshold in my life. I am no longer primarily a seeker of mentors and role models, but primarily a mentor and role model for others. I will always have mentors. Forever. Wherever. In whatever guise they appear. I have a long way to go in my career, much to work on in my character. Three female mentors who currently inspire me are Maura Grossman (a kickass computer science professor at Waterloo who was effectively the founder of using machine learning to find relevant documents in a lawsuit as a former partner at Wachtell); Janet Bannister (a kickass venture capital partner at Real Ventures who has led multiple businesses and retains a kind, open energy); and Venerable Pannavati (a kickass Buddhist monk and former Christian pastor who infuses Metta Meditation with the slave spirit of Billy Holiday, man it’s incredible, and who practices a stance of radical compassion and forgiveness, to the point of transforming all victimhood-including rape-into grounded self-reliance).

I’m in my early thirties. I have no children, no little ones whose minds and emotions are shaped by my example. I hope someday I will. I live every day with the possibility that I may not. The point is, I’m not practiced in the art of living where every action matters, of living with the awareness that I’m impacting and affecting others, others looking to me for guidance, inspiration, example. And here, suddenly, I find myself in a position where others look up to me for inspiration every day. How should I act? How can I lead by example? How might I inspire? How must I fuel ambition, passion, curiosity, kindness?

What a marvelous gift. What a grave responsibility.

I ask myself, should I project strength, should I perform the traits we want all women to believe they can and should have, or should I expose vulnerability, expose all the suffering and doubts and questions and pain and anxiety I’ve dealt with-and continue to deal with, just tempered-on this meandering path to this current version of me?

There is an art to exposing vulnerability to inspire good. Acting from a place of insecurity or anxiety leads to nothing but chaos. I’ve done it a zillion times; it’s hurt a zillion and one. Having a little temper tantrum, gossiping, breaking cool in a way that poisons a mood, enforcing territory, displaying sham superiority, all this stuff sucks. Being aware of weaknesses and asking for help to compensate for them; relaying anecdotes or examples of lessons learned; apologizing; regretting; accepting a mess of a mind for the moment and trying one’s damnedest not to act on it out of awareness of the damage it may cause, all this stuff is great.

I believe in the healing power of identification and of embracing our humanity. Being a strong woman leader in tech need not only be about projecting strength and awesomeness. It can be about sharing what lies under the covers, sharing what hurt, sharing the doubts. Finding strength in the place of radical acceptance so we can all say, “Nevertheless, she persisted.”

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This is me saying something at Tuesday’s event.

Many of the audience members reached out over LinkedIn after the event. Here is the message that touched me deepest.

It was great to meet you and hear you speak last night. Thanks for taking the time to share your experience. It is comforting to know that other women, especially ones as accomplished as those on the panel, have doubts about their capabilities too.

As sharing doubts can inspire comfort and even inspiration, I figured I’d share some more. As I sat meditating this morning, I was suddenly overcome by the sense that I had a truth worth sharing. Not a propositional truth, but an emotional truth. Perhaps we call that wisdom. Here’s the story.

I had a very hard time in the last two years of my PhD. So hard, in fact, that I decided to leave Stanford for a bit and spend time at home with my family in Boston. It was a dark time. My mind was rattled, lost, unshackled, unfettered, unable. My mother had recommended for a while that I start volunteering, that I use the brute and basic reality of doing work for others as a starter, as yeast for my daily bread, to reset my neurons and work my way back to stability. Finally, I acquiesced. It was a way to pass the time. Like housekeeping.

I started working every day at the Women’s Lunch Place, a women’s-only soup kitchen located in the basement of an old church at the corner of Boylston and Arlington streets in Boston. Homeless and practically homeless women came there as a sanctuary from the streets, as a safe space after a night staving off unwanted sexual advances at a shelter, as a space for community or a space to be left alone in peace. Some were social: they painted and laughed together. Some were introverted, watching from the shadows. Some were sober. Some were drunk. I treated the Women’s Lunch Place like my job, coming in every morning to start at 7:00 am. The guests didn’t know I needed the kitchen as much as they did.

Except for one. Her name was Anne. When I asked her where she was from, she told me she was from the world.

Anne was one of the quiet, solitary guests at the kitchen. I’d never noticed her, as she hung out in a corner to the left of the kitchen, a friend of the shadows. One afternoon towards the end of my shift she approached me, touching my shoulder. I was startled.

The first thing Anne did was to thank me. She told me she’d been watching me for the better part of a month and was impressed by my diligence and leadership skills. She watched me chop onions, noticing how I gradually honed my knife skills, transferring the motions to a more graceful wrist and turning the knife upside down to scrap the chopped pieces into the huge soup pots without dumbing the blade. She watched how new volunteers naturally flocked to me for directions on what to do next, watched how I fell into a place of leadership without knowing it, just as my mother had done before me. She watched how I cared, how deeply I cared for the guests and how I executed my work with integrity. I think she may have known I needed this more than they.

For then, out of the blue, without knowing anything about my history and my experiences beyond the actions she’d observed, she told me a story.

“Once upon a time,” started Anne from the World, “there was a medieval knight. Like all medieval knights, he was sent on a quest to pass through the forbidden castle and save the beautiful princess captured by the dragon. He set out, intrepid and brave. He arrived at the castle and found the central door all legends had instructed him to pass through to reach the dragon’s den, where lay captured the beautiful princess. He reached the door and went to turn the knob. It was locked. He pulled and pushed harder, without any luck. He tried and struggled for hours, for days, bloodying his hands, bruising his legs, wearing himself down to nothing. Eventually he gave up in despair, sunk with the awareness of his failure. He turned back for home, readying his emotions for shame. But after starting out, something inspired him to turn around and scan the castle one more time. His removed vantage point afforded a broader perspective of the castle, not just the local view of the door. And then he noticed something. The castle had more than just the central door, there were two others at the flanks. Crestfallen and doubting, he nevertheless mustered the courage to try another door, just in case. He approached, turned the knob, and the door opened, effortlessly.”

This wonderful gift I’ve been given to serve as a role model for other women did not come easily. It was not a clear path, not the stuff of trodden legends. It was a path filled with struggles and doubts, filled with moments of grueling uncertainty where I knew not what the future might hold, for the path I was tracing for myself was not one commonly traced before.

I’ve been fortunate to have had many people open doors for me, turning knobs on my behalf. My deepest wisdom to date is that we can’t know the future. All we can do is try our best, always, and trust that opportunities we’ve never considered will unfold. When I struggled hopelessly at the end of graduate school, I never imagined the life that has since unfolded. I was so scared of failing that I couldn’t embrace what it might mean to succeed. Finally, with the patient support of many friends and lovers, I gained the ability to step back and find a door that I could open with less effort and more joy.

Since I earned my PhD in 2012, I’ve spoken to many audiences about my experiences transitioning from literature to technology. I frequently start my talks with this story, with this gift from Anne from the World. God only knows why Anne knew it was the right story to tell. But she did. And her meme evolves, here as elsewhere. She is one of the most important mentors I’ve ever had, my Athena waiting in the shadows, a giver of wisdom and grace. I will forever be grateful I took the time to listen and look.

I can’t figure out where the featured image comes from, but it’s the most beautiful image of Telemachus, Odysseus’ son, on the web. The style looks like a fusion between Fragonard and Blake. I love the color palette and the forlorn look on the character’s face. A seemingly humble and unimportant man, Mentor was actually the goddess Athena, wisdom donning a surprising habit, showing up where we least expect it, if only we are open to attend. 

Degrees of Knowledge

That familiar discomfort of wanting to write but not feeling ready yet.*

(The default voice pops up in my brain: “Then don’t write! Be kind to yourself! Keep reading until you understand things fully enough to write something cogent and coherent, something worth reading.”

The second voice: “But you committed to doing this! To not write** is to fail.***”

The third voice: “Well gosh, I do find it a bit puerile to incorporate meta-thoughts on the process of writing so frequently in my posts, but laziness triumphs, and voilà there they come. Welcome back. Let’s turn it to our advantage one more time.”)

This time the courage to just do it came from the realization that “I don’t understand this yet” is interesting in itself. We all navigate the world with different degrees of knowledge about different topics. To follow Wilfred Sellars, most of the time we inhabit the manifest image, “the framework in terms of which man came to be aware of himself as man-in-the-world,” or, more broadly, the framework in terms of which we ordinarily observe and explain our world. We need the manifest image to get by, to engage with one another and not to live in a state of utter paralysis, questioning our every thought or experience as if we were being tricked by the evil genius Descartes introduces at the outset of his Meditations (the evil genius toppled by the clear and distinct force of the cogito, the I am, which, per Dan Dennett, actually had the reverse effect of fooling us into believing our consciousness is something different from what it actually is). Sellars contrasts the manifest image with the scientific image: “the scientific image presents itself as a rival image. From its point of view the manifest image on which it rests is an ‘inadequate’ but pragmatically useful likeness of a reality which first finds its adequate (in principle) likeness in the scientific image.” So we all live in this not quite reality, our ability to cooperate and coexist predicated pragmatically upon our shared not-quite-accurate truths. It’s a damn good thing the mess works so well, or we’d never get anything done.

Sellars has a lot to say about the relationship between the manifest and scientific images, how and where the two merge and diverge. In the rest of this post, I’m going to catalogue my gradual coming to not-yet-fully understanding the relationship between mathematical machine learning models and the hardware they run on. It’s spurring my curiosity, but I certainly don’t understand it yet. I would welcome readers’ input on what to read and to whom to talk to change my manifest image into one that’s slightly more scientific.

So, one common thing we hear these days (in particular given Nvidia’s now formidable marketing presence) is that graphical processing units (GPUs) and tensor processing units (TPUs) are a key hardware advance driving the current ubiquity in artificial intelligence (AI). I learned about GPUs for the first time about two years ago and wanted to understand why they made it so much faster to train deep neural networks, the algorithms behind many popular AI applications. I settled with an understanding that the linear algebra-operations we perform on vectors, strings of numbers oriented in a direction in an n-dimensional space-powering these applications is better executed on hardware of a parallel, matrix-like structure. That is to say, properties of the hardware were more like properties of the math: they performed so much more quickly than a linear central processing unit (CPU) because they didn’t have to squeeze a parallel computation into the straightjacket of a linear, gated flow of electrons. Tensors, objects that describe the relationships between vectors, as in Google’s hardware, are that much more closely aligned with the mathematical operations behind deep learning algorithms.

There are two levels of knowledge there:

  • Basic sales pitch: “remember, GPU = deep learning hardware; they make AI faster, and therefore make AI easier to use so more possible!”
  • Just above the basic sales pitch: “the mathematics behind deep learning is better represented by GPU or TPU hardware; that’s why they make AI faster, and therefore easier to use so more possible!”

At this first stage of knowledge, my mind reached a plateau where I assumed that the tensor structure was somehow intrinsically and essentially linked to the math in deep learning. My brain’s neurons and synapses had coalesced on some local minimum or maximum where the two concepts where linked and reinforced by talks I gave (which by design condense understanding into some quotable meme, in particular in the age of Twitter…and this requirement to condense certainly reinforces and reshapes how something is understood).

In time, I started to explore the strange world of quantum computing, starting afresh off the local plateau to try, again, to understand new claims that entangled qubits enable even faster execution of the math behind deep learning than the soddenly deterministic bits of C, G, and TPUs. As Ivan Deutsch explains this article, the promise behind quantum computing is as follows:

In a classical computer, information is stored in retrievable bits binary coded as 0 or 1. But in a quantum computer, elementary particles inhabit a probabilistic limbo called superposition where a “qubit” can be coded as 0 and 1.

Here is the magic: Each qubit can be entangled with the other qubits in the machine. The intertwining of quantum “states” exponentially increases the number of 0s and 1s that can be simultaneously processed by an array of qubits. Machines that can harness the power of quantum logic can deal with exponentially greater levels of complexity than the most powerful classical computer. Problems that would take a state-of-the-art classical computer the age of our universe to solve, can, in theory, be solved by a universal quantum computer in hours.

What’s salient here is that the inherent probabilism of quantum computers make them even more fundamentally aligned with the true mathematics we’re representing with machine learning algorithms. TPUs, then, seem to exhibit a structure that best captures the mathematical operations of the algorithms, but exhibit the fatal flaw of being deterministic by essence: they’re still trafficking in the binary digits of 1s and 0s, even if they’re allocated in a different way. Quantum computing seems to bring back an analog computing paradigm, where we use aspects of physical phenomena to model the problem we’d like to solve. Quantum, of course, exhibits this special fragility where, should the balance of the system be disrupted, the probabilistic potential reverts down to the boring old determinism of 1s and 0s: a cat observed will be either dead or alive, as the harsh law of the excluded middle haunting our manifest image.

What, then, is the status of being of the math? I feel a risk of falling into Platonism, of assuming that a statement like “3 is prime” refers to some abstract entity, the number 3, that then gets realized in a lesser form as it is embodied on a CPU, GPU, or cup of coffee. It feels more cogent to me to endorse mathematical fictionalism, where mathematical statements like “3 is prime” tell a different type of truth than truths we tell about objects and people we can touch and love in our manifest world.****

My conclusion, then, is that radical creativity in machine learning-in any technology-may arise from our being able to abstract the formal mathematics from their substrate, to conceptually open up a liminal space where properties of equations have yet to take form. This is likely a lesson for our own identities, the freeing from necessity, from assumption, that enables us to come into the self we never thought we’d be.

I have a long way to go to understand this fully, and I’ll never understand it fully enough to contribute to the future of hardware R&D. But the world needs communicators, translators who eventually accept that close enough can be a place for empathy, and growth.


*This holds not only for writing, but for many types of doing, including creating a product. Agile methodologies help overcome the paralysis of uncertainty, the discomfort of not being ready yet. You commit to doing something, see how it works, see how people respond, see what you can do better next time. We’re always navigating various degrees of uncertainty, as Rich Sutton discussed on the In Context podcast. Sutton’s formalization of doing the best you can with the information you have available today towards some long-term goal, but learning at each step rather than waiting for the long-term result, is called temporal-difference learning.

**Split infinitive intentional.

***Who’s keeping score?

****That’s not to say we can’t love numbers, as Euler’s Identity inspires enormous joy in me, or that we can’t love fictional characters, or that we can’t love misrepresentations of real people that we fabricate in our imaginations. I’ve fallen obsessively in love with 3 or 4 imaginary men this year, creations of my imagination loosely inspired by the real people I thought I loved.

The image comes from this site, which analyzes themes in films by Darren Aronofsky. Maximilian Cohen, the protagonist of Pi, sees mathematical patterns all over the place, which eventually drives him to put a drill into his head. Aronofsky has a penchant for angst. Others, like Richard Feynman, find delight in exploring mathematical regularities in the world around us. Soap bubbles, for example, offer incredible complexity, if we’re curious enough to look.

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The arabesques of a soap bubble