🌲 Some Things I Learned in 2022

Last Updated: December 2022.

As the year is coming to an end, I’m taking some time to sit down and reflect on 2022 along with two of my friends. We are sharing this publicly as a continuation of our experiment with more public long-form texts. You can find Makonnen’s here and Branden’s here. Hope you find something useful or interesting. May the new year bring you something great!

I’ve picked three themes for this year: personal, politics, and work. Might make another post down the road specifically expanding on the personal side of things.

Joy in Learning

In 2022, I picked up photography as a hobby. It’s been a nice creative outlet forcing me to think differently and develop a taste for things. More importantly, I’ve enjoyed being a complete beginner at something new. There is something about saying “I have no idea how this works and I’m going to learn” compared to “Yeah, I know something about this but I need to fill in the gaps”. I suspect that the latter has a sort of “incompetence” attached to it (especially when some of these tasks relate to my work or school). As a beginner, not knowing is, well, the norm otherwise you aren’t a beginner. I have rediscovered some of what makes learning a joyful experience for me: that curious and focused attention without getting attached to specific goals. I want to keep this in various forms in my life by being a noob at one thing at any given time.

The American Political Drama

In 2022, I’ve found the right words to describe some of my positions regarding much of the American Political Drama. The set of events in the years 2016-21 has yielded a lot of Discourse, usually falling on the lines of race, gender, and social roles. I think most of us instinctively called out the guilt-induced DiAngelo-style approach to social justice issues in the face of the 2020 events– in many ways, they just felt like irrelevant fluff that wasn’t doing much to fix the problem we all seemed to recognize.

In 2022, I think my views on this and related issues are a little clearer. First, some agents aren’t necessarily invested in fixing these problems and improving the living conditions of the relevant groups. For some people, it is better to keep these problems in place by making the problems less ugly and palatable to some subset of the affected people and the people on the sidelines. For example, race-related etiquette training programs seem to mostly help upper-class white folks manage their guilt and anxiety and rarely talk about how to avoid the next police-related murder other than hoping that fixing the “internal problems” of these upper-class folks will eventually have a snowball effect on the militarized police forces. Additionally, the upper-class black folks are often captured into this narrative and used as representatives for black people even though they are usually terrible representatives. I have always avoided these sort of people but now I’m also committed to avoiding their topics too. I want to engage, both conceptually and in action, with projects that aim to make material change that fixes the underlying problems. Finding, understanding, and crafting these projects should be the priority.

Olufemi Taiwo’s book “Elite Capture” and Liam Bright’s paper “White Psychodrama” have been super helpful in clarifying this line of thinking. What I’ve sketched above is basically what Bright calls the non-aligned character, and the concept of capturing is well-developed by Taiwo. Ultimately, I’m hoping to encourage myself and the people I talk to to engage with the material reality and how we can improve it instead of getting stuck in the endless, mostly conceptual, culture war topics. It is the healthier and more productive approach.

On a related note, I used to be open to people, especially politically active media personalities, who claim their ideas are beyond existing academic topics and thus require a blank slate treatment. I’m now convinced these people are content creators and/or political actors without the necessary training to engage in the academic area. One could see this as a kind of small-c conservatism regarding epistemic rigor (and the evidence base required to step outside of established academic treatment)¹. While I understand scientific progress might very well require a Kuhn-style revolution, I think these actors significantly overrepresent the probability of such a revolution. No more galaxy brain takes in 2023. If I have to spend weeks positioning my papers within the literature to talk about PL, these actors should at least try to do the same within the relevant literature. I’m protecting my attention from these lazy and incompetent grifters.

Views on Research

I’ve heard the sentiment,

The best way for individuals to help is via their professional specialization.

which I completely bought into for many years. At least aspirationally, my work used to be fundamentally tied to how I imagined the future of humanity. That is, I imagined my work would have a fundamental impact on the world and could change how people live their lives– maybe not in my lifetime but I still hoped that my work and others would culminate in some change to the “human experience”. In retrospect, it was a rather bold position but, in my defense, it is also an incredibly common view in STEM, and especially so in CS for some reason. In 2022 I have come to see how small of a role research and even the software engineering industry plays in the grand scheme of things. I have been disillusioned in the sense that I don’t think my research will do anything insanely significant outside of academia. This is not to say it’s useless but that its use is intelligible only within a specific social and technical space. Many of our current pressing problems are probably beyond these areas.

While it might initially seem depressing, it is freeing as well. I enjoy the research work I do, and it solves relevant technical problems. To some extent, this shall suffice in justifying why it is worth doing. This has freed me from a sort of extreme techno-optimism. ² Constraining myself in my research field even when thinking about large-scale changes was frustrating because some part of me understood many of the big challenges we are facing as a society are simply not related to programming languages or formal verification. Scoping our sense of problems and their solution space into such a narrow perspective becomes a license to disengage from the bigger problems. ³

It also doesn’t mean there aren’t relevant social questions within our technical work. There are many relevant questions here and often they are reflections of our social issues (e.g. racist ML bots, and engineers working for weapon manufacturers). I’m simply suggesting it’s too naive to think our technological work alone will solve our problems.

In reality, we play many roles in our social life, and being a student or researcher is just one of these roles. The problems we are facing as a society are broader than our collective technological work. No one is doing the dedicated work of fixing our communities and nations. Thus it is on us to do this work.