Another River

Academia is part of how I express myself.

The road into academic life looks like it came about by chance. Before I was 22, I studied the social sciences. They taught me to connect my own point of view to the workings of society; pressures and feelings I couldn’t make sense of were finally given names, and stopped being a nameless dread. From 23 onward I began studying data science, statistics, and computer science—and this is where the whole thing started to feel questionable. I’m not critical enough to stand against all the social ills, not radical enough to tear down the frameworks, not clever enough to build a scientific vision of my own. But I’m stubborn enough; I love to express, I like to think; I’m slow enough not to fret about my age, lucky enough to have a family that supports me, and I happen to enjoy the game we call social competition.

When Xiang Biao spoke about personal crisis, he said:

It mostly comes down to not being able to get things written. You work on a project for years and you’re never satisfied with what you write, because you don’t have strong or deep ideas, you don’t have your own voice, and the writing wears you out. You keep at it, reaching for this framework and that one, this theory and that theory, and you sink into a painful state—you’ve already poured so much thought into it that you can’t give it up.

This made me anxious, too. The theory of computer science is another river, and I want to follow his advice—to walk it for a while, to find my own voice, my own experience. It’s also why I built this blog: I hope to understand what my own line of thinking actually is—why I work on LLMs, why I work on AI. Perhaps my reflection and understanding are a gift the social sciences gave me, a gift that will carry me, flowing on, through this other river.

As Hesse wrote:

All the waters of the world are bound to meet again; the Arctic Ocean and the Nile mingle in the moisture of the clouds. This ancient, beautiful image makes this moment holy. Even in wandering, every road carries us home. … I am alone, and yet at ease. I ask for nothing but to be soaked through by the sun.