Things I like

Books

• Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid Douglas Hofstadter

  I read it right before college and it blew my mind. I probably don’t need to explain why. I deeply believe that self-reference and loops has some kind of outsized importance in intelligence.

• The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat Oliver Sacks
• Neurophilosophy Patricia Churchland
• The World as Will and Representation Arthur Schopenhauer
• The Bell Jar Sylvia Plath

  Brave, moving, and precise depiction of hyper-intellectual despair/depression and its consequences.

• The Doors of Perception Aldous Huxley

  The prose is so beautiful, and the historical relevance is way underappreciated in my opinion.

• Walden Henry David Thoreau

YouTube

• Richard Feynman. Why. — Feynman stops the interview to explain why "why" is so hard to answer
• What makes Magnus Carlsen unbeatable? — I like thinking about how very divergent thinkers think
• Alpha Zero's "Immortal Zugzwang Game" against Stockfish
• The mystery of the quintic — a genuinely awe inspiring and beautifully animated math video essay
• Norm Joke
• Some stunt by some guy who graduated from one of Canada's top business schools

Music

I used to have a singular obsession with the Beatles for years, but lately I love Olivia Dean and Radiohead's In Rainbows which I am trying to learn bass to.

Nerdy things

Sparse Autoencoders, Optogenetics, the Free Energy Principle, the Cingulate Cortex, the Fundemental Theorem of Algebra, Homeomorphisms, Functionalism, Pi Recitation Bees

Chess

Positional games like in the Catalan in which I feel rewarded for really trying to understand the board rather than spot crazy tactics. I’m about 1800 rapid at my best. In my head I think of dynamic tactical vs.  strategic positional chess as something like doing analysis and doing algebra.

Other things

The Friday NYT crossword — it's difficult but not trying too hard to be so, and it's full of the most fresh answers and letters combinations since there is no theme constraint.

Meditation — I used to be very into the non dual Advaita Vedanta practices and slowly grew out of that, though I’m still very into the practice.

Movies — Midnight in Paris, Crazy, Stupid, Love, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Inception, Memento (all kind of share some similar thread, I realize in writing this).

Philosophies

• I believe in doing as an antidote to various forms of unhappiness and overthinking, which has corollaries like learning happens most by doing examples instead of forming a perfect prior mental model (maybe that says a little about the bitter lesson?).
• Spending low stimulation time with my girlfriend and friends. I am more and more seeking out deep, warm relationships with shared optimism over intensely intellectual but unstable relationships.