Persistence, meeting people again, and Emily Ratajkowski
Sunday Shorts (22W45): 20221106
Today’s improvisation
The most extra thing I’ve done
Well, I’ve probably done worse, but this popped into my mind when I was walking back from the gym.
Before my last semester at UC Berkeley, I made sure to check that I’d taken all my requirements to graduate. I wanted some semblance of an “easy” last semester, so I’d planned to take four technical courses. While I was meeting my Applied Mathematics faculty advisor to sign off on my classes, he told me that one of the classes I’d taken for my cluster could not count as a part of my requirements for the major. I’d taken Engineering 120, “Principles of Engineering Economics”, thinking it’d fulfill the requirement, but the professor scoffed at the course and said, “No. This isn’t math.” I then questioned him about the statement, telling him financial engineering is mathematics applied to finance. After some discussion, he remarked, “I don’t think any of the applied mathematics professors will agree that E120 is math”. I saw this as a challenge.
After thanking him for his time, I left and promptly sent out mass emails to all ten or so of the Applied Mathematics faculty advisors who could sign off on my course clusters, although I had to physically chase down a few of them. Some couldn’t bear to accept “Engineering Economics” as a branch of applied mathematics, but one professor promptly said, “Yes”. Unsurprisingly, he had worked at an algorithmic hedge fund.
Although commonsensical, that was the day I truly learned to respect the impact that someone’s experiences have on their subsequent viewpoint.
Collected musings
Meeting someone I already know
I’m one of those people who knows many people who don’t know me. I’ll admit that I definitely do do my online research about people, and I also have a decent memory and do remember stories that my friends tell me about others. As a result, I’m occasionally stuck in a situation where I meet a stranger I already know about.
Today, my friend is bringing her friend (let’s call him Adam) for dinner. I don’t know if Adam remembers me from our brief conversation on Hinge in which I told him I’d like to be friends only and he politely declined, but he likely doesn’t know that I know even more about him through our mutual connections. The issue is, because of these stories I’ve heard – comprised of factual actions he’s taken and ornamented subjective opinions – I know for a fact that I have preconceived opinions about him. It doesn’t matter in which direction the sentiment points. I dislike that I have this bias in the first place.
I’m trying to experiment with ways to remain as neutral as possible. Maybe it’d be good to hear the stories from his perspective. To be clear, I expect to like him as a whole, but I still want to reduce potential confirmation bias. I’ll note the results afterward.
Here’s the update. He’s exactly what I expected, which is not exactly what I wanted. It’s always exciting when someone’s impressions don't match up with my initial expectations of them. However, I did end up understanding more of his thoughts and perspectives, and I don’t view him any differently than I would a complete stranger I met and had dinner with. Plus hopefully, I’ve made a friend, which would be a win in my books.
High Low with EmRata
Remember when I mentioned that Emily Ratajkowski now had her own podcast? Well, I have many thoughts about this.
I have a vested interest in the podcast because her podcast idea sounds like my own1, which I *am* going to start with my friend :) More to come if you’re interested, although, no one reads this blog 🥲
First, I want to say that I really enjoy listening to her voice. It’s quite sultry and smooth, but it sounds authoritative and invitingly seductive at the same time.
As for my thoughts, I found it surprisingly relatable. This was no doubt part of the aim of the show, but it shocked me how much of my personal experience was universal to seemingly all women? I’m in a male-dominated field, so I don’t get the chance to meet – let alone befriend – many female friends, and I am quite sure that my female friends also have stereotypically more “masculine” qualities than the average woman because we’re exposed to such a male-dominated culture. This is such a basic sentiment, but I couldn’t help but be comforted that my experience of, say, having my intellectual output be judged negatively by the way I looked was a common occurrence and that there were people with experiences I could learn from.
As relatable as it was, it’s also very unrelatable, but in a way that keeps me more grounded with the realities of society at large. Emily’s and her guests’ commentaries on how they evaluate dates, their expectations for dating, and their experiences with men are different than my own. I mean they’re in, like, a completely different social circle than I. But it’s interesting to me to have more data points about the average male’s expectations for females to understand its complement: “how a woman should behave to be accepted by society”.
I did note a few random but curious things (with implications for Eleven my matching app). Emily mentioned that she got news on TikTok multiple times, which made me realize how instrumental the app has gotten in disseminating news to the younger generation. I’ve even heard people have started to use it like a search engine? Also, I noticed the focus that Emily and her guests have on intellect. Having both beauty and brains is the ultimate standard, and they’ve obviously gotten the “beauty” part down, so it’s not surprising that they’d want to emphasize the “brain” part. It’s still so unfortunate that society is unwilling to accept that a person2 can be both.
Business ideas I won’t start because I am not unlimited like Elphaba in Wicked
I love that I have too many ideas and not enough resources to pursue them… If someone ever finds these, I do hope that they get created, because these are spontaneous things that made me go, “I wish that existed!” Disclaimer: I haven’t put much thought into them, so many are meh, but I’ve jotted down some impressional notes.
A website or an app with common multi-player games that allows bored people to play against AI for the purposes of selling and collecting data [for research].
Description: like poker, chess, Diplomacy, a fake trading/economic simulation of some sort, etc.
Pros? It’s simple and makes money and would be useful to have more real-world data. Also, people already spend time doing things like this, and I think the AI part has some sort of novelty appeal, e.g. public use of DALL-E. If the data is unable to sell, I’m sure you can just add ads on the sides, and these people wouldn’t mind. You can also test different sorts of bots, etc.
Cons? Can’t really think of any except time…it’s super low risk.
An app that lets you track and control your digital footprint.
Description: You know all the cookies you accept and the ones you don’t, but somehow it knows what you’ve been searching for on Amazon? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could see all the places you’ve given your data to and what type? And also be able to erase it (which is within your legal right) at the click of a button? Wouldn’t it also be fun and informational to see what types of profiling can be made about you based on that data (i.e. what political spectrum, whether you’re pregnant, your age, etc.)?
Pros? It’d be good to control the data, as a consumer. Pretty sure there’s a huge market for it, especially these days when people are taking online privacy more seriously.
Cons? Ugh, lots. How would it be engineered is a complex question…Not to mention, you’d be against Big Tech, and that’s always difficult.
It’s not an issue that the idea is the same. I think people get too caught up about being the first to market or being unique, but a good idea is a good idea. There are multiple true crime podcasts, multiple cereal brands, multiple car makers, and so on. There’s obviously more competition than the Blue Ocean, but execution and gimmicks are underrated.
Men, too. For example, I’m sure I originally learned about that Doctor Mike guy on YouTube because he was advertised as a doctor who was also hot, as if you cannot be both. A model and a coder, like Karlie Kloss? Impossible. I think this leads back to my theory that it’s rare to be in the top X% of beauty standards and, separately, the top X% of intelligence standards, so it’s even rarer to be in the top X% of both beauty and intellect standards, and people have some emotional epsilon, e.g. jealousy, that prevents them from wholeheartedly accepting that a person is both.