Relationship anxieties

I struggle with knowing how to be in a romantic relationship, to depend on someone else and share intimacy and effort in a balanced way; I’ve noticed I feel uncomfortable more than not. Working on this actively (which includes surrendering!) and seeing some progress. Note: a lot of the below bullets are really negative and not all are reflective of my current situation (March 2019).

• Never know if I’m letting people walk all over me and if it’s a bad look, vs just being my flexible/adaptable self
• Sometimes it's hard to believe caring people truly exist; or maybe I'm bad at attracting them
• Hard to believe our connection is real or I’m being tricked/taken advantage of
• Don’t know when its appropriate to involve him in my suffering
• This thing I say/express I need will be his "last straw"
• Not knowing how to support, I’m a failure/too insecure
• The relationship is ending; I see similar patterns as my last one, relationship ending will be a self-fulfilling prophecy...never ending rumination cycle
• I hate that I need people so much
• I hate myself for not being able to handle distance well
• So lonely when the person you want to talk to the most is believed to be the one hurting you. Or just feel detached/disconnected, don’t know what the solution is; more closeness? More distance? 
• Pendulum: excessive neediness vs. cut-off. Can’t discern whats genuine, normal love & desire vs. neediness on my end
• Overly focused on the “content” of the relationship and assigning meaning to the smallest things

Observations

• Art is what I do when I feel beyond help 
• Certain things get me overwhelmingly upset and it's impossible to reason out of, and I don't know what I want or need 
• One night can be infinite
• Fear has really impacted how I’ve approached learning in the past, and hence why I haven't retained as much as I would have liked
• I process the anxiety later by crying, releases tension
• Deep fears: being taken for granted / advantage of: I’ve allowed it too easily in the past and it was painful; I don’t want to see myself as: 1. not improved or grown from that, 2. that that’s how I’m always doomed to be treated because “maybe I’m just not good enough” or “good enough at asserting” that I deserve more
• 
  
• Life is all about being ~in tune with~ what the right choices to make moment to moment are. Choosing to, or sometimes just going with the flow to “receive” and recognize what’s happening to you by being present and trusting/not controlling the narrative all the time
• Knowing is always better
• I struggle with “what is the ‘healthiest’ way to handle this” vs being my “authentic self” and acting out of emotional reactions — which one will create a more beneficial connection and/or result from and for the other person (in the long run)?
• 
  
• The raddest thing is when people are capable of transforming and you can see it

Themes

* Desires fading
* Unlearning “have-tos” 
* Drifting and is it ok?
* Lost in myriad of thoughts, trap / spiral but also creativity-generating 
* Gradually revisiting and solidifying views / dreams / purpose in a sort of distributed manner

Reasons to be in a relationship

• Platform to express love and to give
• Personal growth 
• Polarity of strengths
• Make a difference in the world together
• Feel loved and accepted for who I am, to feel like I matter
• Having fun and experiencing new things together
• Build a home and foundation
• Deeply care for and support one another in the ways we know how

Anxious thought triggers

Note: I’ve observed counter evidence for most of these, but these thoughts still enter my mind sometimes. The frequency has declined which I’m happy about

• I didn't adequately represent myself; I said something the wrong way
• Feeling generally criticized by everyone
• I have so much to do, not enough time, I'm doomed
• Pressure to produce 
• I look ugly
• I’m useless
• I feel worthless 
• No one cares
• Feel like a burden rather than cared for 
• I affect everything in a negative way
• After literally everything I do: I shouldn’t have said/done that, why haven't I learned
• I don't have the personality traits to escape "bullying" situations - I'm at a disadvantage 
• Feeling disconnected
• I’m inarticulate

Flaws / Strengths

• Impatience (the main way my anxiety manifests). It’s something I can usually catch myself doing right away. I’ve gotten immensely better with it over time and I try my best to not take it out on others. I also have tenacity as a strength at the same time, so have been trying to embrace/lean on that more.
• I struggle with vocalizing needs and can sometimes let things fester for too long, fear being perceived as weak/clingy/too much. Looking back at most past situations, these fears were hardly ever justified...it’s a long story for how they’ve become ingrained. But as I get to know you and feel more comfortable it gets a bit easier.
• Jumping to conclusions, tendency to prepare for the worst. It’s how I’ve been wired since I was little. Sometimes I’m only able to catch myself after the fact, but I’ve learned how much it can potentially hurt others’ feelings and it’s definitely something I’m working on.
• Neurotic and overly contemplative, sometimes I don’t know when to stop thinking and/or obsessing about a certain thought. Also, I have trouble relaxing and not working/taking initiative 10x more than the average person. But these indicate that I just care immensely about everything I do and all of the people in my life - I’m fiercely loyal and reliable to a fault.
• I can get overly emotional and wear my heart on my sleeve, but rarely ever in a lashing out way, just that I feel things immediately more strongly than most (both happy and sad ends of the spectrum). I can feel 10 different ways throughout the day, and also tend to wallow for longer than most. I’m hyper aware of social cues though and am able to conceal this well so as not to disturb others' sense of peace.

Activism-based data visualization

• Transit ridership data by stop - how many get in vs off. Overlay on map / animate / etc in D3. Possible ridership data API
• Illuminate ingrained discrimination in public transit routes (“riffraff” conversation), like what paths purposefully don’t exist, how it denies opportunity? etc
• Importance of compassion 

My current role and purpose at EducationSuperHighway (ESH)

70 person nonprofit based out of SF that feels a lot like a startup.

Mission: help upgrade the internet access in every public school in America by 2020 with data-driven programs and tools.

My role (at a high level): provide insights on the connectivity gap for each state and propose concrete actions to improve broadband connectivity in schools. A lot of our analyses go directly to legislators.

Also, accelerate and make the cleaning of data more efficient with Machine Learning

“What’s really made this job interesting is the data itself — the inherent relationships and structure of it are more complicated, and it’s not very clean (e.g., a lot of it is missing) - most of it comes from government forms that school districts fill out. So, it requires more rigorous and creative techniques to extract meaning from it. And I’ve also really been accelerating my learning of different programming languages and tools, so I’ve been enjoying those challenges.

It’s much smaller and more supportive work environment, no politics, you make more of an impact and the people invested in learning and employee development which has been a refreshing change for me”

Overall, I enjoy working for an organization that ultimately helps students learn in more individualized ways that work best for them, helps them become more self-sufficient (what the internet has done for me most fundamentally), and prepares them for the current job market

ESH culture in 5 words

1. Welcoming/inclusive
2. Mission driven
3. Team-oriented (rather than individual)
4. Humble
5. Fun

Analysis team culture 5 words

1. Also welcoming
2. Incredibly driven
3. Process oriented
4. Detail oriented (matches well with my personality)
5. Helpful

Why do we learn?

To improve ourselves, to find the peace of mind that we keep seeking, to find inner peace, to minimize our mistakes, and to be careful

Improving education (stolen from somewhere and wanted to remind myself)

Better health outcomes for the population, lower levels of crime, a cleaner environment, and a more stable, democratic government. For these reasons, many nations have chosen to use taxpayer dollars to subsidize primary, secondary, and higher education. Education clearly benefits the person who receives it, but a society where most people have a good level of education provides positive externalities for all.

Tim O'Reilly Talk Notes

Event Link

How platforms (and/or their concepts and technology) can better serve people in the future

1. Tim’s Main Points

• The future happens “gradually, then suddenly” — just need to pay attention

• We’ve been building a set of platform-based companies ruled by algorithms (power companies, transportation (Lyft/Uber), social, etc) — they tremendously help the companies to scale, and can be built on/iterated and constantly improved. 

  • Issue: what are they all optimized for? Sometimes they can go haywire on their objective functions and have unintended consequences
    • e.g. Facebook: optimized for what /you/ like, leading to fake news/people never see the other side objectively.

  • But not just unique to tech — algorithms and marketplaces are not a natural phenomenon, they are shaped by rules that can be rewritten

• There hasn’t been ‘meaningful’ inflation since the 70s. Businesses blindly optimize for profits and their shareholders, not always the right thing for users and society. For example, many view human employees as a “loss”, which is something that can be rewritten in the objective function

• Inspired by quote in a book by Alvin E. Roth who redesigned the marketplace for kidney transplants - “Who gets what and why”

  • We should use platforms as a “lab” to determine who gets what and why and measure it. e.g., how do we measure how we contribute to and benefit from Google?

    • Google is taking more and more of the web ecosystem. what happens when there’s no more ad revenue to be gained by other sites? Is the distribution fair?
    • What should the fair distribution of company stocks be? Our long-held assumption is that it should be skewed towards the top

  • Our economy is just creative at this point (shifting perceptions about commodities). We can just choose to do things differently — like make people happy. The ‘good life’ is often ‘less is more’ 

  • Technology = augmentation of human beings. Why are we optimizing by removing people? 

    • We shouldn’t use it to do the same things more cheaply, but to innovate/enhance/rethink and tackle problems that are previously unsolvable, like climate change. There’s so much to do, we’re going to need the robots to help


2. “Government 2.0”

• Issues like rising inequality: by electing Trump we’ve broken old patterns, putting it back on us. It’s up to us to make good choices to rethink and rebuild 

• Policy implementation needs to be more like tech platforms and more iterative, using engineering approaches

• Right now, shareholder value is the master algorithm. AI = super organism ruled by making money. How can we start to shift the rule? 

  • power has shifted from country to country because those with the most power can’t be trusted. We may need to impose limits on platforms and give them an obligation to society…leading to some type of revolution and shift in belief system
  • Need to rethink the tax code (duh)
  • There’s been a lack of fresh ideas in populism. We need to rethink how things are distributed. Capitalism has been a good engine of progress (e.g. life expectancy has skyrocketed) which is an example of the power of tech to do good. Let’s tackle other problems now too


3. Questions from the audience

• Will tech make us “weaker”? (Physically, psychologically…) since for example we don’t go outside, physically fight or socialize as much. 

  • Tim: We don’t yet know what skills the future will demand of us. Don’t underestimate our children

• What about startups? How to convince that the main goal isn’t profits. 

  • Tim: They should start to avoid trying to make hits and then leave, like making movies. Taking a lot and feeding investors is part of the sickness. Be a different kind of entrepreneur that wants to build something sustained, take as little upfront investment as possible

• What’s the solution for lack of diversity in leadership roles and age discrimination — is this something that can be tweaked in algorithms? 

  • Tim: No answer for how to fix at the moment, and apologies for not touching on this enough in the book. I don’t have a ton of experience wrestling with it myself. Diversity does make us stronger. In general there’s a lot of bias in our society, and we need to fix all of it. We generally aren’t taking advantage of everyone’s talents efficiently or valuing the right things

• Will AI amplify the imperfections in society? 

  • Tim: although this is a risk it also has potential to make a lot of things better. It’s what you do with it. AI could help us understand our complex economic system better.
  • We need to debug what are we REALLY asking it to do for us, it might not be what we thought initially. Then we need to take action and try to change it if it’s not good for society

• How do you view the blockchain? 

  • There are still inefficiencies in the system and scalability issues
  • It’s still early, we haven’t seen it get over the initial hurdle yet. We’re just starting to find out what it’s good for.
  • Just making something open source isn’t always super transformative, the underlying structure dictates more of it’s impact

• Who are the best practitioners of your ideas? 

  • The economics profession as a whole and their discovering that there’s “something wrong with our models” - they are the the ones feeding governments ideas
    • The ‘walkaways’ — those who live by their own rules, are in it for alternative goals other than purely profits
  • Entrepreneurs not flipping, doing 30/40 year projects

• What can we do as a community? Besides absorbing the ideas. More concrete steps?

  • No specific prescriptions, but see things around you and try and make things better even if small.
  • Prevent ‘Death Star’ thinking, do the hard work of making better choices every day


Random thoughts:

• REI is a cool example of rethinking shareholder distribution
• Shareholder capitalism vs. Communism: there are things in between 


AI as threat to humanity

Wait But Why Article

Computer Colossus is learning to think. We need to help develop it in a way that’s good. There are plenty of times in life when it’s a good strategy to take a risk in order to give yourself a chance for the best possible outcome, but when the stakes are at their absolute highest, the right move is usually to play it safe. Power is one of those times. That’s why, even though democracy essentially guarantees a certain level of mediocrity, Elon says, “I think you’re hard-pressed to find many people in the United States who, no matter what they think of any given president, would advocate for a dictatorship.”
And since Elon sees AI as the ultimate power, he sees AI development as the ultimate “play it safe” situation. Which is why his strategy for minimizing existential AI risk seems to essentially be that AI power needs to be of the people, by the people, for the people.

For the people

More broadly, a single pioneer’s magic wand would likely have been built to serve that inventor’s own needs and purposes. But by turning the future magic wand industry into a collective effort, a wide variety of needs and purposes will have a wand made for them, making it more likely that the capabilities of the world’s aggregate mass of magic wands will overarchingly represent the needs of the masses.

Of the people

In a future world made up of AI and everyone else, he thinks we have only one good option: To be AI. [It’s like trying to imagine a color you’ve never seen.]

The challenge is the communication bandwidth is extremely slow, particularly output. When you’re outputting on a phone, you’re moving two thumbs very slowly. That’s crazy slow communication. … If the bandwidth is too low, then your integration with AI would be very weak. Given the limits of very low bandwidth, it’s kind of pointless. The AI is just going to go by itself, because it’s too slow to talk to. The faster the communication, the more you’ll be integrated—the slower the communication, the less. And the more separate we are—the more the AI is “other”—the more likely it is to turn on us. If the AIs are all separate, and vastly more intelligent than us, how do you ensure that they don’t have optimization functions that are contrary to the best interests of humanity? … If we achieve tight symbiosis, the AI wouldn’t be “other”—it would be you and with a relationship to your cortex analogous to the relationship your cortex has with your limbic system.

In a world in which millions of people control a little piece of the world’s aggregate AI power—people who can think with AI, can defend themselves with AI, and who fundamentally understand AI because of their own integration with it—humans are less vulnerable…..the AI on the planet will be so widely distributed and varied in its goals.

https://hbr.org/2014/11/with-big-data-comes-big-responsibility

Future of technology/"Web 3.0" notes

• New “value” = chain of trust
• What they do is minimize the amount of trust required from any single actor in the system. They do this by distributing trust among different actors in the system via an economic game that incentivizes actors to cooperate with the rules defined by the protocol.
• Data and processing power are the new ‘scarce’(?) resources
• More monetizing social impact/“real” value
• Blockchain: a ledger of transactions — whether of goods, payments, or data — that functions without a central intermediary. Helps in reaching consensus; not for storing large data
  • Immutable linked list
  • Have to have more computing power than majority of blockchain users to hack
  • IPFS: replacement for http!? Content address hash
• Code runs on the ethereum blockchain; like heroku/EC2 , scalable computation…
• Open source AND profitable apps, censorship resistant
• Scaling it
• AI DAO

Random internet/programming tidbits

• https://github.com/someone: “A user can obtain the web resource identified by this URL via HTTP from a network host whose domain name is github.com