Welcome back!

Well here we are again. I promised myself that I would redesign and redeploy this blog before I started writing to it again, but that didn’t happen. I guess I’m relearning the first lesson I learned when I started this project: content first, design second. Maybe now I’ll be forced to do something about it: as I compose this, there isn’t even a working website anymore; my hope is that writing this will give me the kick in the pants I need to get back to it.

Let’s talk about intelligence. Or “intelligence,” with “scare” quotes. What I mean is that I’ve been getting ready to do some “research” in computer science, this new discipline that I have more or less formally allied myself to, and I’m in despair. Now I know that’s the gravest sin a person can commit (despair, that is, not being a computer scientist — the latter is only a venal offense), but I can’t help it.

Let’s talk about smart people. Heng Ji, for example, is a computer science professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, where I am studying now. Her resume of honors is absurdly long and features all the letters of the alphabet soup. She’s even been invited to be a part of the Air Force’s “how are we going to kill people more efficiently” project, which puts her in the company of characters like Douglas Engelbart of “intelligence augmentation” fame. Unaugmented, my intelligence is miniscule compared to theirs. I don’t know — admittedly, I cherry picked the most impressive-sounding and youngest-looking person I could find in the department, but I stand by my basic principle: if you’re not going to be the best, why bother?

Maybe that’s the problem: I have to get used to being just sort of mediocre. There’s nothing, really, that I have any idea of. I thought coming into this that I was going to enjoy programming, or math, or something. Turns out that I make a silly error here, or miss a document string there, and I lose an entire letter grade on an assingment. Frankly, I think that those are the signs that one should quit. As Mario Aguilar once said to me, “if you find this kind of work hard, you shouldn’t be doing it.” I think the suggestion was that maybe there was another domain that would suit me better, but apparently computer science isn’t it either.

I think, sometimes, that I have some idea of what’s happening. I’ll read something someone said and disagree for reasons that appear to make sense to me, so I think that I have something to offer or contribute. But when it comes to explaining it, or understanding something challenging, I can literally feel the dull ache of not getting it: it’s the same feeling of trying to reach your toes when your hamstrings are too tight, except localized above and behind my eyes. I think those are the neurons I’ve killed after so many years of systematically beating my head against hard surfaces as self-harm.

Often I feel as though I’m watching all of humanity (stiff-necked arrogant bastards that we are) hurtle head-long into the pit, because nobody stops to think about what the hell is happening. Sometimes (and this really gets me) someone will get on the soap box to tell people to “think about ethical concerns.” Ok, great. I’ve been thinking about them. Can we talk about it in any more substance than merely saying that it should be discussed? Apparently not: that’s not this discipline. And the discipline of “philosophy” is seldom better: they’re not allowed to know anything about how or why or what’s doing or possible; they can only interact with it at the most over-simplified and surface level.

I don’t know: I look at the work that’s being done at places that have a good reputation from forty years ago and I don’t see much to write home about. Sometimes people make hand-waving arguments that collapse into a systematized presentation of their own intuition; sometimes people painstakingly and inadequately reconstruct an argument made essentially verbatim in a slightly adjacent field several decades ago. And nobody ever talks about capital, or exploitation.

For example, the advantage of using large language models is that hardly anybody can afford a machine large enough to train one, so the company that has such equipment can profit off of owning it. I really honestly do believe that this is one of the reasons that all other methods have been abandoned: for certain applications, an extremely “naïve” implementation can produce nearly-comparable results with orders of magnitude less computation. But those aren’t the sexy or new parts of research, because they’re fairly well understood and there’s not terribly much to learn, and so they’re abandoned and passé, before they even get their shot. In practice, the computers most people use are still less capable than what Doug E. promised us, not because we can’t do it, but because… why? The first version of this paragraph blamed people, but I think that’s unfair. I blame capitalism: it’s profitable to keep people ignorant. This is an argument that I am not yet prepared to unfold, but I do believe that it makes sense: the concept of property begins to break down in its most extreme applications, and so on. This is the part where I begin to feel strangely numb behind my forehead, and I’m sorry that I can’t take you further with me. To do so, I would have to expand the argument in far more detail than I am currently capable of; I don’t know whether I can give you a glib summary right now.

That’s the kind of thought process that makes me think that maybe there is something to what I’ve been reading, what I’ve been thinking, how I’ve been going about it. But the computer science department isn’t where I’ll find my home; I don’t know that the university is where I’ll find my home. I don’t know that I’m capable of engaging in the sort of hyper-scholastic discourse that currently reigns in research in the English-speaking world. I don’t know that it’s any better elsewhere. Ultimately I think that my home, if it’s anywhere, is in the “grievance studies,” which term was coined as a pejorative but I will reclaim as a positive identification: I have grievances, and I want to study them. I suppose the confusion is that one could study grievances as such, which is less interesting to me.

In summary: I am struggling to find a place in the broader on-going discourse of humans coming to understand themselves and the world. Intuitively, it is obvious to me that this is because I’m a fucking moron, and anybody with a brain worth anything wouldn’t be having these troubles. It is for this reason that I have abandoned the possibility of becoming an academic.