Kish’s Blog

I’ve told this story to a few people in person, but I wanted to write it out because honestly I just wanted to challenge myself to say something that many people I know may disagree with. Some background on how I got into rationality and my experience being a rationalist: Michael introduced me to LessWrong and Slate Star Codex when we “met” in October 2014. I became more interested in rationality because I wasn’t happy with myself and was getting more into self improvement around this time (during my freshman year). I attended a CFAR workshop during the summer of 2015 (the summer after freshman year). I became friends with a few rationalists and came to know quite a few others through Facebook, mutual friends, and various other random things (posting on the Princeton class pages looking for other rationalists, attending EAG in 2016). I don’t want to pretend that I’m a super complicated person or try to construct a narrative that might be more compelling to others -- the one “event” tha...

This post has been in my drafts for awhile... Last month, I visited New York and took a trip to the Glossier showroom, the first (out of two, now) Glossier store in the world! I had never purchased any Glossier products before, and I was not super familiar with their product line, so this was a very new experience for me. The showroom is located in the penthouse of a building that is actually pretty close to RC. When I arrived, there was a line of about 10-ish people waiting to get in. It was somewhat deterring, but the woman in front of me told me that the line moved quickly. We were probably waiting for less than 5 minutes, and then we got ushered into an elevator and went up to the showroom together. The place was fairly crowded and smelled like roses. There was music playing. The interior decoration was spot on, and very on-brand, like the graphic design of the website in real life. Even though the place was crowded, the product layout made it pretty easy to try things on. Lots...

Junior year was really not what I expected it to be. Coming back from my gap year, I had all these ideas about what I wanted to do differently, and how I would make the most of my time and get a lot out of being back at Princeton. In some ways, that did happen. I took some great classes that I was actually interested in and tried things that I wouldn't have otherwise tried. But after my first semester back, I felt that I had lost a lot of the personal and mental growth that I had made during my time off, and I felt incredibly lonely. It seemed unthinkable that I would end up feeling more lonely in a school full of 5000 people my own age, than in the cities full of strangers that I lived in during my time off. In January, I felt really lonely. I felt like I did my first semester all wrong, and I should have focused more on socializing and making friends and strengthening friendships. When I opened up to other people about this, I found out that I wasn't alone in feeling this way...

This past weekend, I visited the Amazon Books store on 34th Street in NYC. According to Wikipedia , it's one of the 13 Amazon Books stores in existence! First, let me show you some of the pictures I took of the store, and then I'll tell you why I dislike the entire concept of the store (and why I'll never go there to buy books). 🙂 Btw, hope the scroll-down gallery is fine! The slideshow view doesn't seem to display long captions.   A screenshot of a Yelp review for the Stumptown inside the store (which is definitely a plus for Stumptown lovers like Michael!). "Slightly dystopian vibes" is definitely a phrase I would use to describe the store! The storefront. I saw a bunch of people taking this picture as I drank my chai latte inside the street-facing window of Stumptown. A sign you see when you walk into the store. This was kind of confusing to me! I'll get back to the pricing in a later picture. One of the ways the Amazon Books store is different from ma...

The word beauty is overloaded: it’s used to describe both “outer beauty” and “inner beauty.” Inner beauty is pretty much an unobjectionable idea. Of course we all want to be good people! But why does inner beauty have to have any relationship to outer beauty? C.f. quotes about “true beauty comes from within.” Even if outer beauty does reflect inner beauty, I don’t understand why the relationship is drawn at all, other than the fact that the two ideas happen to share a common word! This is also why I find messages like “strong is beautiful,” “skinny is beautiful,” etc. so problematic. Although well-meaning (whatever that counts for!), in an attempt at inclusivity, they reinforce the idea that outer beauty—rather than inner beauty—is something that should be universally sought.

What is the truth of mediums (e.g., mechanical pencils, oil paints, human beings) and processes (e.g., printing, sketching on a moving vehicle, human-based service industries)? I think for a lot of “high-achievers,” we hold everything (including ourselves!) to a standard of perfection. But that often betrays the truth of ourselves and our lives. I used to have very light handwriting, so that when I erased - always with a huge eraser - you couldn’t see the mistakes I had erased. I wanted to be seen as someone who got everything right on the first try, even though, like everyone else, I’m a human being! Why do we feel a need to conceal these “imperfections”? These are literally the truths of our world.  In computer science, there is a joke that programmers rebrand bugs (unintended programmatic behavior) as features. I recently started to reframe what I previously thought of as flaws as consequences of the qualities that enable something or somebody to do all the good things that I ap...

Art is great because it’s accessible by nature. You can literally just look at it and see whatever it is. It’s easier to grasp than literature, which can sometimes require you to know certain vocabulary and also require more time/some patience.  I hate how many things have become so “intellectualized.” A big part of the reason I didn’t like art when I was younger was because of my English classes in middle and high school. They were pretty bad at encouraging you to come up with your own opinions. I remember I once turned in a quiz (on something related to Egyptian mythology) in 10th grade English, and I got pissed because I got marked off for a “defend your answer”- type question. When I asked the teacher why my answer was wrong, she essentially gave me a “because I said so” response. There were many instances of teachers saying “as long as you provide compelling supporting evidence, I’ll accept it,” but not following through. I think this contributed to me internalizing a narrativ...

I visited the Reformation store in SF (on Valencia) before my trip to Europe to buy some 80/90 degree-weather appropriate clothing. It was Reformation’s 4th brick-and-mortar store, out of the 6 stores now in existence. I was really confused when I walked into the store; I had walked past it multiple times but this was my first time actually entering. There were several other customers in the store, and their behavior was abnormal in a way that I couldn’t pinpoint. I am terrible at asking for help from customer service reps that aren’t in-your-face friendly, so I just started browsing the racks and pulled a dress off to try on. A sales associate quickly came over and semi-explained the system to me: she’d create a virtual dressing room, and I should notify her to add anything to the room. She asked for my name and added that dress to the room after verifying what size I wanted, and then put the dress back on the rack and walked away. I was a bit confused at this point, and thought, “I h...

The reason is actually pretty simple, but I wanted to have a public explanation in writing. I visited the Bauhaus-Archiv in Berlin, and they had a wonderful special exhibition on the works of Jasper Morrison. There were two parts to the exhibit: one was Thingness, a retrospective that showed various works of furniture and other everyday objects that Morrison had created or collaborated on over the last 35 years; and the other was The Good Life, a selection of photo essays from his book of the same name. I really enjoyed reading about the Morrison’s design/thought processes in Thingness, but I was truly ~inspired~ by The Good Life. In each of the photo essays in The Good Life, Morrison writes about something that he noticed and photographed - he reflects on why that thing piqued his interest and imagines what sorts of conditions caused it to come in existence. I’m doing an awful job describing them - you’d probably get a better sense by reading a couple. I was fascinated by these seemin...