on the shoulders of giants

Today I had a goal in mind.  But nonetheless, I did something orthogonal to that goal; I started testing numpy functions.  In python, if you open a REPL (I know it’s not really a REPL like Lisp’s REPL, but you use it the same way).  If you open a REPL and type

import numpy as np

d=dir; from pprint import pprint as p

p(d(np)

it will print out a list of every function defined under np (ie. np.equal() will pop up, np.add(), np.nonzero(), etc.).  It’ll also print a bunch of other shit that you’ll probably never use.  But I just went through them one by one, and found while I was doing this, the solution to the problem I was working on came to my head.  I tried it.  np.nonzero().  I had never directly known this was a function that existed, nor did I reach this part in my exploration.  I guessed it existed because I’d used np.count_nonzero() before, and maybe this thing I was looking for existed.  Turns out np.nonzero() does exactly what I needed, minus a few trivial reshape() modifications.  Earlier (a few months ago) I tried to write this function myself, and it was fine.  But it was slow.  Also, it wasn’t clear in a Pythonic way to a new reader/maintainer of the code.  But np.nonzero() does what I wanted faster and more elegantly than my clumsy 3-for-loops method.

It’s really like learning a foreign language, or starting to learn math.  You need the vocabulary before you can speak fluent numpy-ese.  And it doesn’t really matter how “smart” you are; what matters is that the code works.  So the coder who has more experience and/or speaks numpy-ese more fluently will be able to produce better results.  This is NOT what I was taught in college.  In college they teach you a lot of high-level, imprecise, conceptual stuff about computers.  The compiler, bytecodes, pointers, etc.  But a lot of what a professional does is learn their toolbox, pick the best tool for the job, and move on with their lives.

I have a friend from college who said something like “yeah, but Nathan, that’s not fun.  I want to do fun stuff, like write my own compiler.”  Okay, fine.  Go be a CS professor or Ph.D.  But a practical person who’s looking for a single result (ie. an entrepreneur) can never do anything this way, because it takes too fucking long.

This is exactly the reason I’m not using Lisp right now.  It’s true, PG, that an experienced lisp-er can write beautiful macros that express ideas most succinctly and beautifully and yada yada yada.  But it’s also true that even the most complex problems usually decompose into lots of general routines that are well-maintained, optimized, documented, and discussed on StackOverflow.  At least, this has been my experience with numpy, and python in general.

Moreover, maybe it’s just my experience, but using Racket involves lots of cumbersome names.  PG likes to not have to type a lot to get what he wants?  Try python.  Much shorter than Racket, and I bet shorter than clisp too.  Because people use it.  Like, lots of people use it.  And lots of people using your programming language is a good thing.

Imagine the ultimate techno-nerd idealist who custom-built his own operating system, the programming language associated with it, the compiler, the interpreter, the profiler, the debugger, the shell, the text editor, etc.  Okay, by the time 10 years of living in his parents’ basement is up, he’s so familiar with all that code that he’s much smarter than anyone else, writes code faster, and is certainly very smugly self-satisfied.  Fine.  But he’s useless!  He can’t talk to anyone; he can’t hire people; he can’t send e-mails or use the internet!

We live in a social society.  Humans are social.  So you may have some romantic notion of you going off and “colonizing the wilderness” all by yourself, becoming Nietzche’s Ubermensch, and reaching the oh-so-American-ideal of perfect self-sufficiency.  But that’s a fairy tale.  It’s why Jobs lost at NeXT, according to Andy Grove; his Macintosh 2.0 may have been the prettiest computer on the market, but it was SO DAMN EXPENSIVE.  And no one writes software for MacOS, even today!  It’s all written for Windows, and the super hardcore people write for Linux

Enough OS wars.  The point is, don’t reinvent the wheel.  Please.  I burned months of runway reinventing the wheel, and in the end I honestly had very little to show for it.  Except this hard-earned lesson, which I’m (poorly) capturing in this blog post.  Probably you’ll have to learn this lesson yourself for it to really stick in.  But I hope you don’t.  I hope you listen to me and, like the Old Testament’s prodigal son, return to the fold of your ancestors.  Use libraries.  Bendich out

image links

nothing worth seeing; just uploading some images to stackoverflow.com

 

 

predictions of how VR will be used in society

Not ideal for business conferencing.  Even Skype, the predecessor to a virtual conference room, breaks too easily.  I doubt you’ll date in VR, meet new people in VR, or work together (successfully)

But we can give you impressions better than the 2-D internet does (approx. size of things, pre-recorded 3-D video, hopefully how things smell, taste, how heavy they are.  I doubt it’ll replace real life, at least until we get the graphics to behave like real life.  People like their parks, their food, their face-to-face meetings.  At least for awhile

And hey, it’s a prediction.  I could be wrong.  But I think non-human stuff will come first (or recorded human-stuff, in the already-thriving case of VR porn)

 

the beauty of the internet

only today in all of human history could I procrastinate on YouTube and learn more about the history of the Mongols than some scholars specifically dedicated to studying Mongols could have learned 500 years ago.

Genghis’ last remaining powerful (direct) descendant left power in 1920, more than 750 years after his death.  Simply astounding

 

biography

After reading some of Chernow’s beautiful “Alexander Hamilton” last night, I had the idea of writing a biography series for the blog. It would come out about once a week, and some of y’all could look forward to it as part of your weekly routine.  I have always been fascinated by biography and, more generally, psychology. As soon as I had the idea, though, I realized why I enjoy thinking about psychology. It’s really me trying to predict the future. If I understand people well enough on an intellectual level, I thought, surely I could interact with humans more productively in the future, and get more out of life. After all, who doesn’t want more out of life? Okay, I thought, then if that’s what I’m REALLY after, what should this series emphasize?

Selfish me, the answer was obvious. I should try to understand my own psychology the best I can. How better to predict and improve the future than by trying to “get” myself a little better. And if you, as a reader, don’t share my goals, at least you’ll get a better understanding of the author who’s writing about all these other people. And if Hamilton’s biography has any “moral,” it’s that no one is objective. Our ideas about what is good in the world all originate from our personal store of data (memories) and the narratives we weave through them to make sense of the world. So without further ado, here’s me:

 

My father says I was a strange child in one way; I walked perfectly the first time. He said I was not a particularly early walker, but when I finally decided to get on my feet, I had very carefully watched how others walked and then decided to stand up and walk perfectly. Now, of course, he’s my dad. So there’s a high level of impartiality; I might not have really walked “perfectly” (I find that pretty fucking hard to believe, actually). But it’s worth noting that before I had too much “nurture” in me from my family, my culture, and “Western Society” at large (if there even is such a monolithic thing), I was a perfectionist. A thinker, a watcher.

I should ask him how I started talking. I wonder if I was similar in that I would listen and think a lot.

Some more cautions against drawing too many conclusions from this one data point: 1) my father is a person who highly values observation and thinking. So in recalling his memories of my childhood it’s likely he saw a lot of what he wanted to see, and he always thinks of himself foremost as a scientific and thinking person. 2) it’s one data point.

But we gotta start somewhere, right? So let’s keep walking this life path and see what we find that squares with and also what disputes this initial characterization of myself.

MY earliest memory is of running away from home. I’m not 100% sure what made me decide to take my bike away from that Wheaton, IL house, but I sure went for it. I got to the nearby highway, parked myself in a gas station, and called home. I imagine the loud highway was a sensory overload and very scary to an under-8-year-old. My mom or dad could probably tell you when that was, if they found it as memorable as I seem to. I don’t know what we can learn from that one; I imagine lots of little kids run away from home around that age. I may have been arguing with my mother, though. If I was, that’s a running theme throughout my childhood. Between ages ~18-21, she and I were mostly on good terms, but we definitely butted heads a lot before then, and currently we aren’t really speaking to each other.

My friends pre-age-8 were mainly these: Maggie, Kevin, Kassie, Hayley, and Michael from Elm Street, and Conrad and Neil from Avery Coonley. I spent a lot of my time playing video games at Maggie’s house. She had a Weimeraner whose name, for the life of me, escapes me. Lots of video games in my boyhood. Mario Kart Double Dash, Super Smash Bros. Melee, some Yoshi game I forget the name of. Maggie was very lonely. Neither of her parents were around much.

Kev and Michael teased me a lot for hanging out with Maggie. Rather, I don’t remember how much (numerically) they actually teased me. But I remember strong feelings one time they were chanting something to the effect of “Nathan and Maggie, sitting in a tree, …” (you know the rest if you grew up in the U.S.A.). It seems like I always enjoyed the company of other women, even at that age. Dad claims he was always like that as a kid, too. I was pretty sensitive: couldn’t always handle the banter most of guys did to bond. It wasn’t always sexual; probably at this age I wasn’t some huge horndog. I got along with my sister fairly well, I hope. I remember bullying her a bit, but I imagine there were worse cases. Probably my stepbrother Daniel would have been less of a bully than I was; from what I remember he was even quieter and more timid, especially compared to his rather forceful younger sister.

So we have perfectionism and sensitivity, preferring one-on-one female friendships to male ones. And now it strikes me that a good biography doesn’t just march along chronologically. My mind favors a single narrative, and while my life has certainly been more random than a narrative, only through narrative can I make any sense of everything. So let’s analyze perfectionism.

In middle school, but particularly high school, a large portion of my brain went to acing math tests. Particularly starting in 9th grade geometry, I was capable of (and pushed myself hard to achieve) an A+ on every test. Ignoring the fact that school intentionally dumbs down material so kids can swallow it easily and it can be graded easily, this shows some more perfectionism. I preferred math to subjects like English where everything was subjective and emotion/opinion-based. By now I have come to terms with something Paul Graham calls “taste is universal,” but I very much doubt that if good design is universal, every 9th and 10th grade English teacher is A) aware of it and B) has the time to grade each essay based on its standards. But I digress. This is about the perfectionism.

I was compulsive. I would pore over subjects where there was material to memorize, trying to stamp out any tiny imperfection. In 9th grade biology, I had a particularly challenging teacher, and I remember crying over a non-A grade on a test. In retrospect, of course this seems silly. But it speaks to my personality. It was hard to realize maturely that I took that teacher because she was teaching the material better than the previous bio teacher who gave me easy As. In middle school, I still remember in 6th grade math I received a “69” on a project because it was poorly organized, or poorly written, or something like that. Mostly I just remember how resentful I was about the grade. I found every excuse to hate that teacher. In 11th grade I had my first serious history class, US History with Mr. Flowers. Flowers was something of an autodidact, and extremely good at focusing intensely. He would always return our essays on the last possible day he could, but somehow he could grade them all in a straight 10-hour period. He came off as rather stern and professorial. I’m sure he knew a lot, but mostly it was his aura that made me strive for his approval. I was still terrible at academic essays, at least relative to my performance on the multiple choice. I stayed up night after night reading Wikipedia, cramming my head with various dates and facts about the things we were learning in class and whatever piqued my interest in random association with those events/historical people. I got a “4” on my AP test, but a 790 on the U.S. History SAT subject test, which had no essay section.

It may be hard to realize this about me if you just talk to me for the first time. After many years of meeting new people, being forced to perform on interviews, and charming adults who had power to reward me, I have learned to make a decent first impression (please correct me if I’m wrong; I’m of the opinion this is one of my strengths when I put effort into it). But as you dive in and get to know me beyond that surface impression, I find it very hard to “settle,” or even to sit still. I always want to sink my teeth into something headfirst, especially in a lecture hall. I have to be asking questions and/or actively engaged somehow; purely listening leads me to be distracted by thoughts related to something the speaker mentioned. I know a guy who I consider quite intelligent who is really good in lecture. Somehow with math and physics he just “gets” it from listening to the lecture, and he doesn’t ask that terribly many questions. I’m definitely not that one, but sometimes I’m quicker at coming up with my own reformulation of the ideas that are simpler than the way the lecturer initially delivers the material. I have a bit of experience tutoring and/or lecturing myself; it certainly runs in the family (my dad’s dad and his dad were both professors, and on my mom’s side there are numerous academics as well).

I think both of these traits stem from a desire to control. If any “nurture” events shape perfectionists, they’re the ones where the person loses something important by not controlling everything. I have a bit of a bossy streak as well, but I think that’s more a desire to hear myself speak and also to figure out the world by talking it through. It’s also to reassure myself that everything will be okay; somehow talking can be more comforting than silence. Although I definitely need my dose of silence too… I’m really just spitballing here, trying to map out the problem and solution spaces

Some say perfectionism is related to procrastination, and I certainly do that too. It’s almost like if a new idea comes up, I have to wrangle it into some neat little space in my head that is already “understood.” I don’t like ambiguity or not feeling like I know what’s going on. But once I know (mostly) how to do something, I procrastinate a lot because I want the result to be completely perfect and I know exactly how hard it’ll be to achieve that. (Here I’m talking about writing code) My dad has expressed similar feelings about procrastinating w.r.t. programming computers. And if yesterday’s work is any indication, my guess of how hard it’ll be to get this code right is correct; it’s gonna be a bitch.

 

It’s funny, though, because the next pattern I was going to talk about it openness. Dad was always pretty open about his feelings and opinions, and I either got it from actively mimicking him or some gene. Openness and perfectionism don’t really seem consistent, though. Maybe my need for control is satisfied by how I treat my work? I definitely know people who try much harder to actively sell themselves than I do? I’m trying to figure out whether that’s actually right. It might also be that I realized it’s better to sell yourself by not compulsively telling them what to think of you. Like I want them to think I’m open and honest so they feel like they can trust me, and that’s more important than them respecting or fearing me? I certainly like attention and compliments; part of my compulsive raising my hand in class was to have an audience for my jokes and insights. I’m pretty good on stage; I don’t get as self-conscious as most of the people I see on stage. I also seem to have relatively little tendency to feel embarrassed. I think a good part of all that is like my dad, but my mom is also not easily embarrassed. I think with her, though, it’s less openness and more a failure to understand the cultural rules (no offense to my mother; she’s very hard-working and practical. Also she grew up in China so)

I guess the best way to understand it is I really want to know that I’m right. It’s more important that I figure out what’s actually happening than that I look like the smartest guy around. So I’m reasonably open about admitting when I’m wrong or don’t know something, which some people definitely think makes me look weak.

 

I can’t say all this makes me super confident in my ability to execute quickly. But I’ve definitely been fairly diligent about picking the right thing to work on. So I guess I gotta take what I can get.

 

Well, this seems like a good spot to call it for today. I anticipate continuing, though. Been good to work this out, and writing is always pretty indulgent, makes you feel like God, haha

And as always, thanks for watching (credits John Green)

not quitting, and depression

“Perseverance” isn’t really a thing for me. I mean, it IS a thing, but it’s much more aptly defined and understood in the negative. Perseverance is just not quitting. Quitting is so easy. Every day you quit something. You decide Chipotle over Qdoba, you just quit Qdoba. You procrastinate instead of working, you quit working.

But the next day, the difference between an adult and a kid is that the kid just moves on, usually. There are rare cases where kids get obsessed with stuff, but by in large the greatest achievements ever accomplished are made by people 25-60, and surprisingly often at the older end of that spectrum. This really shouldn’t be as surprising as it is; if Einstein figured out special relativity by 28, why should he keep on til he gets general relativity by 35? (ages not fact-checked)

The next day, you just gotta know you’re not quitting. Maybe I’m naive, but I doubt even Elon Musk literally woke up every day and managed to perform to his full potential. I doubt there were zero days when he played video games or chatted with his sister on the phone. I certainly hope not, or else I’m doomed.

Not quitting means when you’re depressed and worn down and tired and sleep deprived you STILL know there’s no way you could be doing anything else with your life right now. Hunger? I’ll just lose some weight. No exercise? My muscles will just atrophy. No socialization? I’ll just get a little more depressed. These are the points when the others quit. These are the points where champions are made. You don’t have to be a good person, a smart person, or a talent person. You just have to know that for the next decade or so, you have no plans to do anything big with your life other than make this thing the best it can possibly be. And you have to know that the simple fact you decided that already puts you in the 90th percentile, because even smart, disciplined people usually follow their feelings. So if your rival’s feelings tell ’em “this ain’t working. Just get a day job,” they probably will. It’s the hardest thing in the world to ignore your urges. They’ve done studies; they suspect it literally depletes your glucose levels.

In high school, there were kids smarter than me. There were kids more aggressive than me. But I still remember that one day in robotics when I was the only one still going into the lab to work. Because I believed in what I was doing. That was all that kept me going. And that’ll have to keep me going now.

Excelsior, my friends. And godspeed

the problem with “good”

Spoiler alert: it’s blind obedience and conformity!

Recently I revisited a generous, charismatic, and intelligent professor of mine from undergrad.  Let’s call him “Luke.”  Luke specializes in ancient texts, and his strength is Latin.  In college, he read a lot.  Before going to college but after graduating from high school, he read a lot.  He just likes reading.  When he taught “Literature Humanities,” he would always reread the books on the syllabus as we (his students) were reading the books.  I, on the other hand, read the SparkNotes as much as physically possible and realized that since he wasn’t going to grade harshly at all, I didn’t have to do any work

Luke would have said (and did say) “Nathan, you should do the classwork.”  But I remember what happened to kids who blindly did what Luke said.  My friend read every last book assigned, filled his head with a bunch of noise that was never tested, and forgot upwards of 60% of the contents of the books before the quizzes.  He got better grades than me, but it was definitely not worth the effort

Meanwhile during college, I was reading just about anything I could get my hands on EXCEPT “fine literature” or “the classics.”  Remember, who fucking decided they were “the canon?”  A canon sounds like authority to me, and authority is sometimes wrong.  Much better to read what people enjoyed reading (Taleb’s beautiful “The Black Swan”) or at least found interesting (see Paul Graham’s comments on what is “surprising”)

Remember, Luke, well-meaning and idealistic, would have told me I was being “bad” or “naughty” by rebelling against the “good” he thought was paramount.  But really, to be completely honest, Luke was just following his heart, his intuition.  Luke liked to read literature.  He liked translating, he loved learning lessons through pages, and he liked the arts and talking to people about semi-pretentious but I’m sure still merit-worthy things

The problem is if you’re not following your heart.  If you’re following someone else’s orders, not only are you briefly fulfilling whatever objective THEY have set out for you rather than your own, but you’re falling into the habit of intellectual dependence.  Schools sometimes encourage this.  Anyone remember “the 5 paragraph essay?”  “Don’t use numbers like 5, spell them like five” and/or “MLA citation, please.”  One of the smartest (quickest) friends I had studying physics and computer science once literally said to me “Nathan, we can’t include original research while developing this neural network.  That’s not legitimate!” as if somehow by having a title famous academics like Geoffrey Hinton or Yann LeCunn had more knowledge of solid engineering, utility, and even truth than we undergrads.  Somewhere in my friend’s brain was missing the example of the college student who made Microsoft research’s NN architecture completely irrelevant from his dorm room

So please, I implore; find something your heart desires.  Don’t do merely what’s been pounded into your head as “good” by some authority.  This authority could even be well-meaning and individually attentive, like your parents, like my professor “Luke,” or a classmate.  Because let me tell you; if I were trying to do what I’m currently trying to do just because some authority told me it was the right thing to do, I would fail.  Thomas Edison was sometimes a huge asshole, but his compulsiveness and competitive streak made electricity work, and in the process made him famous and rich, which allowed him to further invent and sell useful technology to people

Alright, so I guess he did listen to his mother.  But in this case, Nancy Edison was an extremely rare find in a parent, someone who encouraged Thomas’ own talents and home-schooled him when his teachers tried to stamp out his native curiosity and drive

why is the truth so hard for people to process?

Sitting here, getting a particularly boring part of the work done, I feel a bit morose.  I wish I had a better mastery of my feelings.  And I definitely have been mildly annoyed at others’ recent emotional reactions to things I’ve said to them.  Most of the reason they reacted like that was because of those same feelings, rather than any kind of reason

I wish I could be more specific without infringing on the privacy of those involved.  If you’re reading this in late 2018, I’m almost certainly not talking about you, so don’t worry

If I were to be fully honest, though, much of the reason they pissed me off is not because there’s some objective truth that they just don’t see; it’s because their opinions and values diverge from mine.  But I guess what really pisses me off is not that I’m absolutely right, but just that most of people’s actions are governed by fear, conformity, and insecurity rather than quiet reflection.  They wouldn’t have judged me so harshly if given a few more of the facts and forced to reflect on them.  I guess that’s just life, though.  What can you do?  Gotta deal with human nature as it is rather than living in lalaland

dots between the dashes

Perhaps I am misguided, or perhaps it is just my personality.

But I think long breaks from work can be enormously valuable in moving you in new directions that previously were not foreseen but turn out to be the correct direction.

When your current path is not quite right, it’s very hard to see that when you’re in hyper-productivity mode. Consider Steve Jobs’ failures at NeXT, after which he was somewhat more flexible about the “open” approach to software development. If he hadn’t taken the time to punctuate his life with a few moments of long walking and reflection, he might never have realized the difference between the Mac’s success at Apple and NeXT’s failures.

Elon Musk thinks vacations are for wimps, and there is an extent to which I agree. However, even in his own life you can see some of his biggest decisions made during times of break (like when Paypal sold, forcing Elon away from the internet). Now his work is much more important and central to the problem of human life than the few bits describing money he used to shuffle around for a living.

Another way of saying “breaks are good” might be “failure is good.” “Failures” make you stop for a second and look around, correcting some of your fundamental assumptions about the universe. We humans don’t have to reflect too much; that would make us worse at getting things done. But still, some of the best initial ideas the world has known came from those quiet moments of reflection, and we all-too-often forget to reflect when everything’s going well. Why should we? We should just keep doing the thing that made us succeed in the first place, right? Except for the “turning points” Andy Grove describes in “Only the Paranoid Survive,” including Jobs’ fall at NeXT, where all of a sudden there were many competing hardware manufacturers pushing computer costs lower and lower.

“Inflection points” can really muck with your life if you don’t take a step back every once in awhile and honestly reevaluate. I’m pretty sure my recent forced reevaluation will become immensely valuable to me in the coming months, years, and decades
~

how to win friends and influence people

In other words, “how to write a good cold e-mail”

 

I recently got a message on LinkedIn that reads as follows.  Don’t do this:

“Hi Nathan,

I’m an Acquisition Editor at Packt.

I’m developing video courses on Deep Learning & while researching the topic came across your profile. Seeing your experience in the same, I found you ideal.

Would you be interested to author the courses?

Best,
*@$%   %#$ (name censored b/c I’m sure this guy is plenty nice and just came off as rude without meaning to)”

 

Let’s do a Dale Carnegie here.  Why is this bad, line by line?  First: “I’m an Acquisition Editor at Packt.”  Why the fuck should I care about your work?  What’s in it for me?  “I’m developing video courses on Deep Learning & while researching the topic came across your profile.”  (not the worst part of the message).  But next: “Seeing your experience in the same, I found you ideal.”  Fucking arrogant.  Well, I’m glad I measure up to your standards of knowledge, total stranger.  I’m so gonna be your friend and coworker now.  And finally, the worst of all: “Would you be interested to author the courses?”  Gee, hm, you’re wondering what I’m about to say to this spammer.  No, I’m not interested.  Literally he said zero things to interest me.  He communicates the following (roughly): 1) “you have something I want and am too lazy to learn on my own.”  2) “I don’t even mention payment for the courses because I don’t know how to grab attention or empathize”

The only way I would have remotely considered this author is if this guy worked for Google or someone like that.  Someone reputable who could have enhanced my own life.

It’s important to have balls and important to try things, especially all you future entrepreneurs out there.  Gals and guys need data on the world before they can learn from it.  But please, after you try your poor spamming, please, write a better cold e-mail.  Here’s one I actually DID reply to, for contrast (again, no hard feelings towards the guy who sent me that on LinkedIn.  In his further defense, it seems English is not his first language).

By contrast, here’s the winner:

“Hi Nathan, My name is Casey (not gonna censor it because I like his message). I recently graduated from Fullstack. I was looking through the Alumni network and noticed that you have been working at some great companies. I am hoping to connect over chat to get some advice on job search. Looking forward to hearing from you! Thanks!”

I’ll give you a bit to think about which message you’d prefer to get and why.  I don’t want to brainwash you too much, 😛  If you take a few seconds to consider it and want to hear what I have to say, please keep reading.

So I initially wasn’t sure exactly what was so different about this message, but I put my finger on it after a few seconds.  The first thing is the nature of the request.  Ending with “Would you be interested to author the courses?” made me feel like the first guy assumed I would be happy to help him.  As someone who has taught courses, I know how much work it is to do well.  And he mentions no payment for what will certainly be a many-day effort.  Casey, on the other hand, promises a max of 2 hours chatting (I like a friendly chat; it’s much much easier than writing clear content), and makes me feel good about myself thinking “I’m such a good person for agreeing to give Casey some advice.”  I also just realized that Casey told me the companies I’ve worked at are “great,” which I of course like to hear, regardless of whether it’s true.  And he ends on a nice “looking forward to hearing from you!  Thanks!” note rather than “please supply me free labor; you’re doing me a favor by even thinking of it”

 

Relating this to my personal life recently, I was sort of worried I was coming off as too “weak” or “available” by sending too many messages in a row to someone I had a phone appointment with.  But looking at the other end (I’ll call it the “negging” end of the spectrum), I’m much more turned off when someone is extremely presumptuous and curt than when someone is friendly and asking for a small personal favor.

There’s gotta be some strange bias in the human brain towards “looking strong” to the detriment of courtesy.  But there’s a very real difference between “looking strong” in a charming, socially aware way and “looking strong” like spam A.  My good friend Noah is a great example of the charming, gung-ho, bordering-on-negging-but-in-a-mostly-charming-way approach to social relations.

Also in Noah’s defense I mostly saw him do that during Avalon, a decidedly confrontational and persuasion-oriented game.  But I think the point remains.  Steve Jobs was renowned for his charm and directness, but he definitely meandered over into “offending people” territory a good amount.  Best of luck in navigating the extraordinarily complex dynamic that is human social interaction, friends.  And as always, thanks for reading