Author: nancyhua

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Judging Strangers

Everything I do depends on other members of our species… And a lot of us want to contribute something back to our species.
-the inspiring Steve Jobs

 

I can be pretty judgmental. I believe I also change my mind as I get new information but I don’t know how true that is. In any case, after reading Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, I thought Jobs was an awesome visionary, a self-made hero who transformed, revolutionized and created several unique industries.

Isaacson’s book made me tear up- the drama of Jobs’ creative dreams was so inspiring to an enterprising young person like myself, plus he’s an orphan who grew up to enslave a meek, unambitious, gentle giant genius and force tons of people smarter than him to work harder and smarter than they would’ve asked of themselves. And he wore the same clothes all the time like a dorky superhero. What a courageous star!

Then I read Jobs’ favorite book, “Autobiography of a Yogi.” Apparently Steve Jobs read this book every single year. He made it the first iBook. Has anyone else read this?

My reaction to this book was, “I love Steve Jobs but I have no idea what this yogi is talking about. Am I insane?”

Midway through this book I concluded I had no idea what this yogi was talking about and Steve Jobs was insane.

I actually liked the book and found its preachings of spirituality over materialism inspiring. There were interesting parts about Bose’s plant and radio discoveries that I hadn’t known about (I used to be a Tesla fan (before it was cool!) but now I think Bose might be even cooler, plus I’m nicer to my plants and even my objects (Guys, it’s science. Seriously)) (Also I am really good at yoga, probably a prodigy). But most of the “autobiography” didn’t make any sense. Are we supposed to believe that yogis can levitate or are we supposed to view this whole book as some kind of metaphor? I got the impression it was NOT supposed to be read as fiction- the yogi seemed to believe all this stuff. Did he have the power to bend reality, or was he hallucinating, or was he deliberately lying, or was this some kind of meta art, or is none of it meant to be taken literally?

I still love Steve Jobs. What these books made me realize is how a relatively small new piece of information can really change one’s judgment of a stranger, and how weird that is relative to the slack I give to people I actually know, and the slack I wish for them to bestow me in return.

My best friends could (and do) say anything- no matter how offensive- and I still don’t think they’re bigots because it’s just one drop in the ocean of information we have on one another. In contrast if a total stranger said something evil, I’d probably just never talk to them again because now the only thing I know about them is that they say weird things. Even though I know the likelihood of someone being evil is low, when 100% of my information about someone is negative, maybe I can be justified in judging them for it.

The thing that happened with my judgment of Jobs is not like the complete stranger scenario because I knew a lot about Jobs- I’d read 700+ pages of writing about him, and yet this single new piece of information about this yogi book easily changed the way I viewed him. Maybe it’s because everything I know about Jobs is second hand, so this new piece of information is given the same weight as “founded Apple”- they’re both random facts that took me 30 seconds to learn and my brain doesn’t realize that “favorite book: Autobiography of a Yogi” maybe shouldn’t have the same weight as “founded the most valuable company ever and ran it for decades.”

People are complicated and have lots of inconsistencies because we’re all crazy. Public figures and strangers are not people the way people who we actually know are people. No matter how much you know about a stranger, you still don’t think of them as a real person. Our brains naturally assign stereotypes to people- we map stuff onto other stuff and when we don’t know someone, we make assumptions about them. Maybe a 30 second sound bite can undo 30 years of patriotism and civil service and professional excellence and loving parenthood because the time it took us to process the soundbite is the same as the amount of time it took us to learn they were war heroes or human rights advocates or whatever. We only know our own experiences so when we don’t have personal experience with someone, our judgment can be totally off.

People can be really mean to each other on the internet. The only Internet places I’ve participated in public discourse are Quora, Hacker News, and this blog, all places populated by nerds who are probably more intelligent and educated than 90% of humans. But many responses are either “This person agrees with me, except more so. This person is a genius” or “This person disagrees with me and is an idiot who’s also a jerk and probably hates me and begrudges my happiness and is trying to steal my freedom by annoying me with his crazy comments.”

I think in general people are actually really nice to me on the internet because I don’t hide my identity as a lovable Chinese girl. But whenever I do something anonymously, I see what many Internet men have to deal with. People will completely misread whatever you were saying! They assume you’re a stupid, disagreeable, male jerk and accuse you of all manner of nonsense. For a time this was very annoying because how could someone be so totally wrong! In response I’d either make some joke, present some data that proved their idiocy, or ignore them.

But now whenever I feel the urge to accuse the commenter of being a mean, illiterate troll and basically becoming a troll myself, I now do this trick of pretending the commenter is a particular friend of mine who disagrees with me about everything. I’m not going to say who this person is, but s/he knows who s/he is. And I find I’m way nicer to everyone on the internet when I do this because now my map of “disagreeable person” is no longer “anonymous jerk” but “annoyingly argumentative friend who doesn’t read the correct news sources but is still cool.” I can still get annoyed when a friend obstinately disagrees with me but I’m more open to changing my mind and don’t assume they’re being intentionally stupid or difficult.

Maybe I’ll also try this trick with public figures. Because most public figures are generally not that stupid or evil. They’re strangers, and strangers are not like real people.

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Nice Places Where I Don’t Want to Live

In Europe everybody lingers at their dinner tables for hours. We witnessed a lot of charity to street artists in Europe. People who play music at your table and then shove their cups into your face seemed to get a nice return. While eating in Rome we bought a crazy dancing dog doll that sports a combination of sunglasses, Santa hat, weird old-timey love song, and dancing ears- our sole souvenir from all of Europe.

“What does it mean if people don’t value their time?”

“Maybe it means they don’t value money.”

However I know people generous with their time but not with their money. Is this evidence that valuing time != valuing money or just more human irrationality?

Pleasure travel is always weird for me because if I’m going to be in some place I often think I should really value my time so I should take a taxi to the colosseum instead of a bus to minimize filler time that I’d normally spend in the USA on my computer because we’re not here to read and write- we’re here to spend time doing travel stuff! But I don’t like to rush myself and I always think these places are always going to be here. I rarely go anywhere that I think I won’t return to.

Oh except I got rid of my NYC apartment- I’m never going back there. I hadn’t been there in a while and when I returned to the states I fled into my serene little yard. I always slept soundly in the bedroom because there’s no street noise and the room opens into the quiet yard, with its tree that drops white petals in the summer. But as I stepped out into the yard there was a gigantic dead rat! I screamed so loudly when I saw this 6 pound monster toppled over onto its side with its fleshy pink toes and tail that my neighbor knocked on the door to make sure I hadn’t been murdered. So yeah I’m never going into that yard again. I’d already been intending to move out but I felt so crawly after seeing that rat (my superintendent removed it) that I moved out 3 weeks early. I kept thinking that it probably lived in my yard and was fatly sauntering around and could’ve given me the plague and what if it’d entered the house all the times I left the door open?? Anyway, I seek a place without rats. And I’ve learned my lesson about NYC: only live in a high rise.

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My First Film: Indiegogo Crowdfunding PGSS Campaign

I love movies. I try not to think about the thousands of hours I’ve wasted repeatedly watching “Fight Club,” “Being John Malkovich,” and some of my other favorites. When we went skiing in Utah one year and stumbled upon Sundance, I was amazed by how bad some of those movies were- amazed and inspired- like, “Wow, I could definitely make a movie that gets into Sundance because these suck!”

This week I began to see how hard filmmaking can be because I’ve finally made my first “movie,” an Indiegogo campaign video for PGSS. It is 54 seconds long and took me at least 20 hours to make. I just finished it a minute ago and I’ll be so sad if no one watches it. I’m a perfectionist about certain things- I think 80% of the movie has not changed since hour 5 while 10% of the movie has changed 1,000 times. Obviously I wasn’t a perfectionist about a lot of stuff like sound editing- I think I’m not super into sounds. During the creation of this film, I learned to use and hate iMovie with its infuriating bugs and basic features that simply don’t work (come on, Apple- how hard is it to figure out a file system? This is basic stuff), although it was really easy to learn.

It’s not “Exit through the Gift Shop,” but “Save PGSS” is my first video so I’ll probably watch it repeatedly until I make my next movie. The footage came from past years of students filmed during their summers at PGSS, and also from Ray He, Dan HL, and mitri. Thank you guys so much for making videos of how PGSS has changed your lives! I wouldn’t be surprised if this film launches you all into well-deserved movie-stardom.

So yeah, watch my movie debut and go to
http://indiegogo.com/pgss. Please tweet and share this video because the algorithm that selects videos onto Indiegogo’s front page cares about tweets, etc. If you tweet and share this video, I will get my cat to do a flip for you!

Cool fact: if you show this video to someone and they aren’t moved to tears and immediately inspired to tweet it, Facebook it, and donate to PGSS, you should stab them in the chest where you will find a mess of mangled metal wires instead of a beating human heart.

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Any thoughts to offer a 24 yr old who feels that time is passing at an ever accelerating pace?

Answer by Nancy Hua:

I heard that the brain mainly records new events and your perception of time is based on the number of memories. This makes sense to me because I’m not likely to remember every time I go scuba diving but I’ll probably remember the first time. If I have no memory of last night it’ll feel like last night didn’t happen, like time skipped from yesterday to today, whereas if I stayed up all night talking with a new person it’ll feel like a really long day. This could explain the phenomena you’re describing and prescribe a solution.

When you’re a kid, everything is new, nothing has ever happened to you before (which is part of why kids are lured by strangers into cars, etc: they don’t know what’s normal). Thus your first summer at camp might feel like it’s lasted a million years- you feel yourself changing because your brain is experiencing and recording a lot of new events, meeting new people, and learning new ideas. The fraction of stuff that’s newly recorded in your brain is high, and you feel like time has passed slowly.

As our lives progress, the rate of learning and new experiences tends to slow. As you age and begin a career, you don’t learn new things as frequently. You’re gaining expertise and your community is not changing as much. Furthermore the probability of some event being new to your brain is lower- a monotonically increasing fraction of experiences will map to an existing memory. Because your brain doesn’t record as many new memories, time feels like it’s passing more quickly.

Maybe if you want to make time seem like it’s passing more slowly, you have to get your brain to form a lot of new connections. To do this, you can try to learn a lot of new things, go to new environments, and gain new experiences, which is going to be harder as time passes for obvious reasons, but should be getting easier as technology advances. The amount of information accessible to any person is always increasing, connections between people are always increasing, and travel frictions are constantly decreasing.

The model of getting good at one occupation and doing it repeatedly might make time seem to fly by unless you’re deliberate about it. You could deliberately choose to keep a level of failure in your work and life so that your’e always pushing yourself to become more of an expert and learning new things. Your brain will form new connections every time you go to a sufficiently different environment, so changing locations will make you feel like time is slower and that more stuff is happening to you because you’re forming new memories. Engaging with sufficiently different types of people will also stimulate you.

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