Fleeting youth

Since last year, I’ve known that by my fourth year, I wouldn’t care much about Oxford anymore. History has shown me that in the final year of anything, I can’t help but obsess over the future, losing sight of the fleeting present—and inevitably regretting it later.

It’s hard not to admire the pure, coffee-to-math machines among the first- and second-years. That admiration fades as quickly as I remember how nostalgia polishes the past–I was never one of those “coffee-to-math” machines; back then, I was just preoccupied with simpler, once-daunting but now trivial things like cooking and cycling among cars.

Recently I read something about how

少年时代的情感，大概是最令人珍惜的，因为比较纯洁，没有被社会上各种物质的、文化的、生活的、人生的、金钱的、欲望的种种东西所波及。

I suppose the relentless modern drive for self-improvement often makes us overly critical when reflecting on the past, rather than appreciating its purity. It’s only when I interact with younger people, feeling compelled to be optimistic and helpful for their sake, that I become less harsh on myself.

Quantifying decades

Nearly a decade ago, there was a famous Hong Kong film called Ten Years (《十年》), which imagined Hong Kong in 2025, with freedoms steadily eroding under the increasing influence of the Chinese government.

Recently, I was also reminded that it’s been 20 years since Modern Love began in The New York Times, a column I’ve followed avidly for about five years. It makes me wonder: 20 years from now, how will I look back on everything I’ve been creating here?

Lately, I keep hearing that we really only have around 40 years of work in our lives—-some 80,000 hours. Reducing life to numbers like this feels offputtingly accepted nowadays. It makes me think of the so many people around me rushing to quant. Am I going to be the one quantifying the world, or is the world going to quantify me?

1x or 10x?

There seems to be a theme in many domains that you should aim for either 1x or 10x effort. Anything in between falls into the valley of death. This idea has always seemed reasonable to me in the context of startups or creative projects, but I was surprised to see it applied to planning:

(Plan) 6 months or 30 years (ahead) … It’s a little bit shortsighted and a little bit not. But any other approach guarantees everything you release is already obsolete. [source]

or meetings:

I find most meetings are best scheduled for 15-20 minutes, or 2 hours. The default of 1 hour is usually wrong, and leads to a lot of wasted time. [source]

A friend of mine recently commented that I shouldn’t try to quantify the personal aspects of my life as well. I reassured them that I only turn to numbers when speaking in abstractions–there are almost no quantities in my personal journals.

I do wonder if the world is getting more quantative or less. We’ve been promised of a future where STEM (and recently coding) take a backseat, freeing us to focus entirely on creativity—but that day never seems to come. Over 200 years ago John Adams wrote

Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.

I doubt LLM weights and quant algorithms will be the final frontier. You can’t wait for the next generation to be creative.