Do you love yourself or your field?

A flavor of grief I can’t taste

Here’s a tweet from July:

i thought about this. i wrote down “i like the person math is making me become”, & thought about roon’s tweet:

i feel healthier—more like myself—on math

& (crankery incoming) it co-evolves with my world-ideology. because it can’t just be a thing you do, it’s the air you breathe the water you swim in. this is why i find math reverence weird, because to fetishize math is to alienate yourself from it, & why would you do that?

i think it just has to become part of who you are, so well-integrated with your life and the filter through which you process incoming information & send new information out. like i told <math tutor> i want to be able to read math casually on the bus. like once i watched <blogger> bring out his phone to write a blog reply on the spot—it’s not a separate activity he sets time aside to do. like ‘technical vibes’ and mathematication. an extension of the self & a form of self-expression. your bread and butter

here it’s almost as though [OP] sees [math] as something other than himself. like a task or activity he participates in, a thing he does; it’s described like a thing that he acts on, but not so much, really, a thing that acts on him.

what’s ‘good at math’? is math part of how you process the world or not? if the former, what part of your blessing is diminished by the ai’s accomplishment?

in the dog example, he could be thrilled to have other intelligences that can speak in both of the languages that have become part of him, that constitute his thinking—now he doesn’t have to be so lonely anymore. the dogs spoke doglang but not human, the humans spoke humanlang but not dog, and now, finally, he can get a companion that can do both!

but he’s not because...??...i think i ~get it cognitively, but don’t relate to it (yet).

(if there’s something missing from this companion...if this alien doesn’t scratch the itch that another human would...that’s his persistent edge!)

there is a difference between people who actively want others in their field, to see how far they can take it & just what they can do together, & those who want to retain their “incumbents’ advantage” at the expense of furthering the field, i feel (lots of nuance).

i muted another tweet today:

for me it is like, well, if all math+cs+research get automated away, i will just turn to entrepreneurship or to politics. i will turn to defence or safety or regulation or bushcraft if i have to & am convinced of the need for it. and in any case i will be glad for the math i knew in the dreamtime.¹

1. there is lots of nuance, but i think our job is to represent, crystallize, reify positions, so that we may mix clear basis vectors together.