summary
In january I went mostly unhinged and didn’t try to work on duties beyond the minimum and just lived happily in the snow with good soups and walks, and played played played. how luxurious. here are the play trails.
rabbit hole: relationality
- In this current life stage (january), I feel a pull to the question of how relationships form and grow. It’s a non-urgent, fun, no-expectation type of question. good rabbit hole material to create and write and read, in contrast with the colder temperature activities of continuing what I am already doing to maintain survival. rabbit holes have hints of meaning and cohesion. still the relationship between the rabbit hole of relationships and the survival of work execution is, when troubleshooting in teams I am influenced by patronage thinking, and I benefit from consulting for feedback.
- In my free time I naturally obsess over this topic. Over January here are some of my harvests:
- My main takeaway from these readings is: the desire for individual and community are both part of my integrity and desire. what longings, what pleasure, what communities and connections, what philosophies and divinities, I haven’t explicitly listed them yet. I do feel certain that to welcome joy seems better than to reject joy when it comes to producing good change. pleasure evoke change, maybe more than shame - pleasure invite movement growth opening, shame make you small freeze invisible.
- I have the blobby vague desire to translate the organizer language into mental models or back. I assume this act increases connection and discussion. I am looking for ways to act on this tendency more, as it is a bit hard to steer my pre-existing commitments this ways.
- =question to friends: how to translate the organizer language into mental models that is useful to organizers (in any sense of the word)?=
skill building: execution
I started 2025 January attempting to simplify. Simplify the self-gazing and the how-to-plan-to-get-things-done. My intentions are:
- more clearly know what I need to do to get to a multi-step wish;
- when i feel stuck or repeatedly stall on a problem, how to make progress;
- how to maintain (or dynamically return to) a sense of relief and calmness of emotions. In the first two weeks I tried different methods. I had a detailed template that included what I did, what to celebrate, what challenge, any potential solutions to try. That took too long, but the most helpful part is listing out what needs to be done and what to try when i encountered blocks. That template rewired my mind a bit.
- played with making the page prettier as a tiny react app but it was too extra
I also realized that besides the plan/reflection template, there are some important challenges/opportunities. - First, the obstacle that might be bigger was finding the time chunks where I actually have time, energetic time. For example, I find using logic and comprehension hard after 9PM.
- Second, breaking task down makes it actually easier to overcome procrastination and be done. Specifically, keeping a master todo list instead of rewriting the todo list for each week made “what I need to do” much clearer. I just choose which of the tasks to do that day instead of recalling everything or jumping into a side branch of functions or tuning.
- Third, I learned about when and how to use AI to facilitate correctly learning and building things. For example, if it’s a problem that has not been solved before, i.e. no evaluation available (at least in my brain), it’s best to take any AI answer with a grain of distrust. In that scenario, I can still ask for background materials to learn with and explain specific things or questions, but it is necessary to give enough time and energy to learn, by recording what I understand, watching Youtube tutorials, and basically thinking about this as a learning problem (for me the human).
- Fourth, motivation or confidence. I realized the reason why I’m so slow at iterating the mean field approximations is because (as we found out in the meeting) that I think it’s impossible to get a good enough fit to reality. But when I voiced this assumption instead of just promising to make more progress on this task next week, we discussed. It is actually possible to improve fit by parameterizing with simulation data and constraining function form with the data distribution. Reading how others construct similar functions also help with getting inspirations of concrete directions. This is nice because I like reading on its own, it gives this flavor of meaning that I crave. When I read about the cost and benefit of information processing, it increases my appreciation for the parts I am wrangling. The appreciation and interest gives me more motivation to overcome the difficult understandings (like how do we measure sensitivity to external field vs to noise).
- The meaning-derived dopamine is what drove the rabbit holes of the month, around roughly, relations.
- aspiration is fertilized not searched
- a mind map of work execution factors
other happenings
- here are drawings and byproducts of the playing
- what if we have a phone to talk to the cells in our body or our babies’ body?
- lab comics
- microscope-embryo-human cyborg
- starfish embryos rotating in a huddle
- a fitness watch but it just visualizes what your cells underneath your skin are doing
- my ADHD-ish brain is like alzheimer’s grandma with pills
- i’m developing a salivation response to “virgin” flies…
- working at Domino’s is neither meaningful or relaxing.
- microscope-embryo-human cyborg
- read about the holiday shift in labor law in china (semi-coerced into doing this by the political economy study group volunteer that then ghosted me, supposedly due to my unwillingness to provide more opinions)
