Trust, forgiveness, interrogation, and parental influence
Sunday Shorts (25W1): 20250105
New year, new me 🤪
…beginning with losing the 0.4 kg (0.88 lbs) I gained over the holidays1.
Things I’ve consumed
I rediscovered Paul Graham’s essay archive. I read his pieces about how to do great work, having kids, and being independent-minded. I’d comment about work and being weird and why I want kids, but that’s a story for another day. I read this piece on the impact of AI on global power systems. I got so excited over this music chord progressions dataset, too!
I watched The Substance, which seemed to me like a sci-fi, Hollywood take of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Growing up, my parents never complimented me – not for my intellect, talent, achievements, beauty. (It’s an Asian thing.) But as a result, I never grew up bothered by the way I look. I felt particularly thankful to my parents for protecting me from attaching my worth to something so evanescent.
YouTube recommended a video on things you need to hear after a narcissistic ex and signs they are “the one”, probably because I watched the Guy Winch TED talk on how to fix a broken heart on my friend’s suggestion. If we’re letting YouTube “reveal” my psyche (which you should convince yourself is not the case because I am *personally* choosing to divulge this information), I saw this talk saying that “everything you want in life is on the other side of ‘worse first’” that I’m pretty sure I’ve already listened to last year, this recording of Roger Federer versus John Isner, and this video on how your memory is lying to you.
I always say that I want to understand people, and to do so, I need honest data. I think dating app data is one such source, but another revealing source is porn data, such as the Pornhub trends of 20242. There’s also Google search trends, but there’s a lot more noise there. I also read this paper on overthinking in o1-like LLMs and on theoretical appropriateness.
I played this guessing game about when various Chinese Americans arrived in the States by their accents.3 I feel like they purposely chose participants who had stronger accents than the average Chinese American immigrant who went to the U.S. as a kid? For funsies, you can try to guess when I arrived to the U.S.4 based on my own recording of the three sentences (I was trying to be quiet here):
S1: The airplane flew over urban and rural America.
S2: Got my hands up. They're playing my song. I know I'm going to be OK. Yeah, it's a party in the USA.
S3: Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.
and the Speech Accent Archive elicitation paragraph (I optimized for transcription):
Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store: Six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids. She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.
Things I did
I am wondering if I should keep this section since it feels a bit too…public…
I notice the days getting longer.
It’s bittersweet to see the shadows cast by the darkest days as they pass along their paths.
Russian New Year’s Eve
It was not quite the one I pictured I would be in at the end of summer, but I am grateful for the friends in my life who stick with me through thick and thin. (My weight fluctuates around the holidays.5) One curious comment from the night came from this Russian who said he preferred Eastern Europeans because they are more “honest”. He emphasized that Eastern-European “honesty” is different from German “truthfulness” in saying things that are factually correct6. I’ve heard the same sentiment from multiple Eastern Europeans before, and it reminded me of the significance of cultural norms in eliciting an almost-blind trust within the group and an almost-blind distrust outside the group.
On trust
My best friend and I were discussing the mechanics of trust.
[Cue Ariana Grande’s voice] Is trust earned? Or is it given? After all, you often cannot earn trust until someone gives it to you.
Jokes aside, I do believe that trust is built over time. You build some trust in me by observing my interactions with others, noting how I handle the power that others have entrusted in me. You build much of our trust by observing our interactions together. But until you try to give me information with greater importance, you won’t know how I handle the power you entrust in me.
I’ve heard it said that trust is broken when you punish someone else’s honesty and vulnerability – the very qualities I value. So when those I care about (especially people who are emotionally dysfunctional or guarded) lose trust in me, I internalize it as my own failure.
After all, I’m far from perfect. I’m not a mind reader; people have different preferences and norms. And I make mistakes. But I change. You’d have to find it in your heart to forgive me, but trust is not monotonically increasing.
As Patrick Star in Spongebob once said, "Trusting you is my decision, proving me wrong is your choice." Trust must first be given before it can be earned.
On forgiveness
C. S. Lewis wrote an essay on forgiveness. He focuses on God’s forgiveness of our sins, but at the end, he writes:
When it comes to a question of our forgiving other people, it is partly the same and partly different. It is the same because, here also forgiving does not mean excusing. Many people seem to think it does. They think that if you ask them to forgive someone who has cheated or bullied them you are trying to make out that there was really no cheating or bullying. But if that were so, there would be nothing to forgive. (This doesn't mean that you must necessarily believe his next promise. It does mean that you must make every effort to kill every taste of resentment in your own heart - every wish to humiliate or hurt him or to pay him out.) The difference between this situation and the one in which you are asking God's forgiveness is this. In our own case we accept excuses too easily, in other people's we do not accept them easily enough. As regards my own sins it is a safe bet (though not a certainty) that the excuses are not really so good as I think; as regards other men's sins against me it is a safe bet (though not a certainty) that the excuses are better than I think. One must therefore begin by attending to everything which may show that the other man was not so much to blame as we thought. But even if he is absolutely fully to blame we still have to forgive him; and even if ninety-nine per cent of his apparent guilt can be explained away by really good excuses, the problem of forgiveness begins with the one per cent of guilt that is left over. To excuse, what can really produce good excuses is not Christian charity; it is only fairness. To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.
This is hard. It is perhaps not so hard to forgive a single great injury. But to forgive the incessant provocations of daily life – to keep on forgiving the bossy mother-in-law, the bullying husband, the nagging wife, the selfish daughter, the deceitful son - How can we do it? Only, I think, by remembering where we stand, by meaning our words when we say in our prayers each night "Forgive our trespasses as we forgive those that trespass against us."
I agree with Lewis that (1) forgiveness is not excusing; (2) forgiveness means “you must make every effort to kill every taste of resentment in your own heart”; and (3) we accept our own excuses much more easily than the excuses of others. I do believe the world would be a better place if everyone internalized those three principles…
Anyway, here’s my short secular view.
Forgiveness is not weakness, but strength. It’s the freedom from the mental baggage that you can hold against others. Forgiveness is rational, as people and situations are bound to change. And how can we “forgive the incessant provocations of daily life”? Only, I think, by reminding ourselves that we, too, are imperfect beings.
Apparently I interrogate people7
Yesterday was the Nth time someone asked me if I’m interviewing them. No, absolutely not! I’m genuinely curious about them, what they like, what they do, how they think, yada yada. Isn’t emotional interest the basis of any meaningful connection?
I love consumer ideas
Mass-market consumer startups are difficult, because everyone has an opinion. However, everyone is different, and everyone is convinced they are correct. And everyone *is* correct, because everyone is a customer. There’s a nascent AI field of pluralistic alignment that I believe is attempting to “solve” this problem. But this phenomenon is also true outside of entrepreneurship. I’m talking about things like music, restaurants, dating, kids, workouts, work, or any humdrums of daily life. Everyone has a take. And how do you develop taste?
On parental influence
This is not about nature versus nurture, and I have a theory that what I’m about to say is potentially part of Asian culture. But I’ve recently had an enlightening observation.
Whenever I experience a setback, I ask myself what I could’ve changed and what I can improve. It comes from a childhood of hearing my parents question, “What could you have done better? What’s wrong with you? What do you need to do to fix the situation?” even when I was clearly the victim. I suppose they wanted me to have an agentic, antifragility, and growth mindset.8
I assumed this was the norm until two months ago. Apparently, many parents adopt the “what’s wrong with them” mentality. “Oh, you didn’t get the postdoc? Well, the professor was clearly shortsighted for not hiring you.”
A friend described his parents’ parenting philosophy as the “opposite side of the same coin” as the stereotypical Asian one. Instead of being reprimanded as “trash” or “a failure”, he was told he was “special” and the “chosen one” who must gift the world with his brilliance.
My mom once told me that her job is not to be my friend. Her job is to prepare me for any challenges in life. And while I think it’s counterproductive to blame myself when I’ve tried my very best, I am glad my parents taught me to have the strength and resilience to solve conflicts.
Random thoughts of the week
I miss the days when you can kind of, just, like, think and have it be known as philosophy, as in Ayn Rand9.
People sometimes get confused when I say “woke”, since I don’t see it as an inherently left-wing practice. I define “wokeness” by its practice: the policing of thought in order to adhere to a particular ideology.
Why isn’t there a united healthcare (lol) mobile app? Like, one where I can get universal access to care in any country. I feel like today’s world is so globalized that it’s worth someone figuring out how to use technology to connect different healthcare systems to individuals. I’m pretty sure you can also get people to pay a premium for that. Or, even starting a more universal insurance company. I’m sure there are lots of pitfalls in the idea, but I think a difficult idea is worthwhile to pursue for a worthwhile goal. Idk, just a thought.
I am most bummed10 that we won’t get to experience all the fun I’d planned in my head.
But seriously. It’s the unrealized plans for the future that kills me. Every. Single. Time.
I want my writing to be like Taylor Swift songs. Personal, yet relatable. Pleasurable. Prolific. Prodigious. Profitable. 😂
How do you represent 2+1D on a phone??
Sarcasm. I am serious, but I know it’s not much.
Especially the country-by-country differences
My guesses done sequentially: [95th percentile interval] (age). Reason.
(1) Luke: [10, 18] (13). He sounded fluent albeit accented, and I reduced my lower bound to 10 years old to account for the fact that he was male, but he really sounds like he came to America for boarding school at 15 or something, although maybe I was indexing too heavily on his current age.
(2) Frank: [18, 23] (21). He had a weird British-ish accent, and I figured he came as an adult either for college or right after, so I guessed something in between.
(3) Larissa: [5, 10] (8). Her story threw me off, and the longer she spoke, the more of an idiosyncratic accent I heard, but I definitely thought she came to the U.S. in elementary school.
(4) Jiayang Fan: [13, 16] (14). I know she’s not a participant, but I was trying to guess her as well (I thought she came for boarding school or something).
Message me for the answer :)
Lowbrow joke…
Autistic description: a comment that made everyone laugh
This is unfortunately why I sit still and be quiet to be “polite” around important adults, such as the parents of those I date…
Which, hopefully I do!
I object to Objectivism, and not just because it’s punny, although I’ll leave the critique for later.
I find the word cute.