I come back from the dead to write another (real) post on this blog, which is maybe a good or bad thing depending on how you interpret the content of this post.

I’m writing this blog post for a Blogathon. Two of my good friends are running the event as the first installation of their club, which aims to “provide a space for MIT students to engage in interesting projects outside of classes” (badly paraphrased). Realistically, it appears they run things like lightning talks and reading groups. I’m a big fan of this idea, because I’ve always craved an intense, self-directed kind of learning toward specific technical and society-oriented goals, and sometimes I feel like I can’t find spaces full of people that are chasing a learning-related passion like this. So I enthusiastically signed up for this event (as the organizers know, I was the first person to fill out the interest form seconds after it came out).

That being said, I’ve been doing some reflection on this idea of rapid learning after I dropped my fifth class this semester (bringing me down to four, a state in which I’ve never been!1). Having so much free time yet not having an organized manner in which to further my interests and goals makes me pretty nervous. Ever since coming to college, I’ve been quite a goal-oriented person in spirit, never really feeling like I want to commit to anything that doesn’t directly further one of my goals (though I don’t consider myself a “success-chaser” or “hustler” or anything like that, my goals being more like “experience a startup at least once”, “understand how people relate to one another”, “understand large-scale societal and cultural forces” and so on). So not being able to rely on classes to fill that niche has got me thinking a bit.

I think the specific thing that put me off about this whole blogging event is the general vibe I get from the set of bloggers that I’ve read online. To be fair, I doubt that this is really a representative sample, the set mostly consisting of people who blog about tech, success, productivity, etc. I’ve also done a bit of digging into the rationality and effective altruism communities. I feel like these bloggers tend to approach complex, multifaceted problems using their own experiences and what they’ve learned from their tiny set of interactions with others’ experiences, treating their own reasoning (which perhaps they have applied to their own life with success!) as approaching some kind of universal truth. I really want to avoid putting anyone who blogs on the defensive, because I think that writing this way is completely valid and also that intellectual street fighting is generally not a good idea – but from my experience at least, it’s easy to slip into this way of “viewing the world through maxims” and not properly weighting for a wealth of different experiences had by people from all walks of life.

Ever since coming to MIT, I’ve ended up expanding my sphere of learning more and more as I realize that disciplines and types of knowledge I’ve never touched are actually extremely important ways of understanding the world. Even if certain disciplines are less “precise” or “rigorous”, they hold value precisely because of these differences. My personal trek between new interests has gone something like math > computer science > economics > political science > anthropology, and in some legitimate sense each field is less “precise” than the previous one, but because of this each field presents an entire perspective missing from the previous ones.

A standard example for this is the field of political economy, which came out of incorporating concepts from political science into economics. For example, lobbying behavior of large corporations (trying to influence politicians to pass laws in their favor, and often the more money the better) is incredibly influential in shaping economic policy, but if this behavior isn’t incorporated into macroeconomic models, large companies can look much less powerful (due to market competition) than they truly are.

Although math and CS are not social sciences, I put them all on the same list because learning e.g. economics did change how I view the role of math in this world. Yes, I believe that the universe could be completely modeled with mathematics, but I think in important ways we cannot meaningfully comprehend what these models say at large scales, and ultimately “coarser” methods of study such as econometrics (or even just social philosophy) are the main way we can really hope to understand such large-scale phenomena, at least for now. (When I say large-scale, I mean at the scale of a human, let alone the scale of a society.)

In my experience2, it seems like people who are very involved with the natural sciences and technology can tend to form views about the world that are poorly informed by the social sciences and humanities, and in this way, well-meaning people are led to think that they can only have an impact through technology, even when the world does not revolve around technology (in my belief). I personally used to have views like this, along the lines of what you’d probably see on HackerNews (nowadays) or Peter Thiel’s book Zero To One, where I narrowly believed that technology and the natural sciences were the only disciplines that had enough power to improve the way things are, and I organized my life around (conventionally defined) productivity and intellectualism. Ultimately, I still hold similar values as I used to (purposefulness, curiosity, kindness), but having waded into the social sciences, I found myself questioning these previous judgements about how to manifest these values in myself and the world.

So yeah. I write this blog post about how trying to compress big learnings about life into a “short and sweet” maxim can be problematic when it glosses over the variety and depth of the human experience, while myself doing kind of the exact same thing. I guess if there is any redemption, I do try to link as many auxiliary sources to my blog posts as possible. My only parting recommendation is to read social science!

Further reading:

  1. We have a four-class credit limit in first-year fall, but I took two classes informally and took them quite seriously. ↩

  2. Of course, following my own framework, I have to provide the caveat that these views are largely from my own experience, but I’m actively on the hunt for books, communities, and so on that can provide more context and depth for these thoughts. ↩