Kish’s Blog

Something I've been thinking about recently is the question of how much of what we think/"know" about ourselves is a consequence of what others have said about us, and how much of it is from first principles. I was surprised when two of my classes this week touched on this question. In my Attitudes and Persuasion seminar, we were discussing the difference between explicit and implicit attitudes, and which one is one's "real" attitude. There is actually no consensus in the field about whether or not explicit and implicit attitudes are even internally represented separately. Explicit attitudes are ones that can be measured using surveys, like Likert scales, and are known to us. Implicit attitudes are commonly measured using the  implicit association test , and use responses that are automatic/out of our control in some way (like muscle activity in the face , heart rate, etc.). There was one study  on racial attitudes that examined body language as well as imp...

I'm taking 5 classes this semester, and something that's been surprisingly nice is that I have a pretty regular schedule (and no classes on Fridays). Monday through Thursday, I have a class 11-12:30, a one hour lunch break, and then either a 1.5 or 3 hour-long class. I realized that having a consistent daily schedule really helps with establishing a regular sleep schedule and morning routine. Usually, I wake up a bit before my alarm at 9:20 (unless I go to bed late/am super tired, in which case I wake up later and skip breakfast), and have a slow and relaxed morning in. Usually I have time to walk to class early and either journal by the Woody Woo fountain or reflect inside the Richard Serra sculpture. In terms of my classes...they're definitely a lot of work as a whole, which I kind of touched on in my last post . I'll just go through them one by one. World Drama (English / Theater) : I am taking this class to satisfy my requirements for the theater certificate, and I ...

For people who don't know what pomodoros are, they're basically alternating periods of work + break (usually 25 min working / 5 min break), and there are a bunch of desktop and mobile pomodoro apps that you can get. I've known about pomodoros for a pretty long time but only started doing them after learning more about them when I took the Learning How to Learn online course  while I was at RC. Even then, I never fully incorporated them into my work until this past month. I feel like doing pomodoros has changed my life in a big time way, by making me more aware of both the passage of time and my own mental state. For instance, now I can set daily goals for myself like "work on cos pset for 3 pomodoros," which allows me not only to break down big (and undesirable) tasks into manageable daily chunks, but also to become more aware of how long it takes me to do certain parts. Not only that, but I'm now also more aware of how many things I can actually do during the...

Basically, putting the needs of others before your own. For instance: Doing the “right thing” even if you don’t want to Letting other people encroach on your personal space and boundaries, and not standing up for yourself and your needs until they've egregiously overstepped  Second-guessing yourself and your intuitions while giving others the benefit of the doubt Comforting others (and taking on their emotional/etc. burdens!) even when you’re not in the right/best mental state to do so Doing things that are inconvenient, annoying, or downright bad to you because they make someone else’s life (even slightly) better Fuck being a nice girl.

Hi all! I figured I would post the link to this "video" on my blog since it basically is just an unedited oral blog post. I recorded the audio around two weeks ago and just posted it. I enjoyed making it, and I will probably continue to use this media format for topics that are more difficult to write about concisely. Maybe I can live out my dream of making a podcast/radio program? 😊 I feel that I am in a period of many changes in my life. (click on the video for some more context + helpful links in the description!)

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...