Created: January 27, 2022
Modified: February 10, 2022
Modified: February 10, 2022
come alive
This page is from my personal notes, and has not been specifically reviewed for public consumption. It might be incomplete, wrong, outdated, or stupid. Caveat lector.- "find the thing that makes you come alive, and do that."
- I find myself thinking about 'giving up' in the sense of dreams of being an academic, or a respected expert, or someone who makes world-changing contributions.
- But if I accept the advice above, it's not a bad thing to give up a thing that makes me feel less alive in favor of something that makes me feel alive.
- You almost have to accept the advice because anything else would be to admit that you don't want to be more alive. My whole worry about 'giving up' in the first place was that it feels like death, a loss of identity.
- This was somewhat inspired by reading about Marc Levoy, the Stanford comp photo prof who now works for Google. And reading his talk slides, which are beautifully understandable, and thinking, "there's not theory here, they just did some stuff, it's not revolutionizing humanity or improving human knowledge, it's all just the fact that he thought photography was super interesting and learned a lot about it and can do cool stuff with it". So on the one hand it was a bunch of things that I nominally don't respect, but on the other hand he is doing really cool stuff, building something that will help people smile, contributing to the state of human knowledge (giving these talks), and is revered as an expert for doing something he was good at. He doesn't judge humself against impossible standards, but by any mortal standard he is incredibly admirable. So I should be happy if I end up in a position like his, where there's some field or task that makes me come alive, even if it's not necessarily hardcore AI research.
- (but maybe it will still be that!).
- Another part of this thought was that the computational photography stuff is stuff I would have thought was insanely cool as a sophomore. If I'd taken a CS class and we implemented something to do that, it would have been a 'like magic' capability rather than "oh, they're just averaging a few images". The ability to see the magic in this is
- useful so you can devote effort to making it happen, if you can see it ahead of time
- exactly the sort of contagious enthusiasm that I enjoyed about the Williams CS department, and that I had as an undergrad. AND that the best CS professors have.
- absolutely true.