Academia: parrot cage
There is no one more narcissistic than wannabe scholars: those who have absolute conviction that their highly intellectual thoughts are their own, born from ether, magic, rigorous study, and free will. Debate with an academic about any topic and they will list thinkers such as Rousseau, Kant, and—if they are a bit hippie—Byung-Chul Han as sources of their knowledge; everything must be credentialed! Any thought without a clear source is tarnished. After all, at the very least beliefs come from somewhere. If not from rigorous study, then from Instagram reels. If a person can’t mention which page from The Prince their genius was born from, then they must have watched a TikTok. Even worse! What if they can’t mention any works at all?!
“Okay, but what hermeneutics are you using?”
“I don’t know what that means.”
Appalled! Shibboleth, Shibboleth, Shibboleth! Sirens go off in their mind; their faces contort in horror. “You just outed yourself! How dare you engage with me in a conversation, disgusting inferior being; haven’t you read De Interpretatione? Worry not! I shall enlighten you with truth. I’ve read all of Aristotle’s work in two weeks! That’s how amazing I am.”
It amazes me how this type won’t even stop, for a mere thirty seconds of their lives, to ponder if the thinkers introduced to their belief system were introduced with intent. I know how difficult this is to understand given that I mentioned these people need to paraphrase and give sources. Let me explain: it’s as if the purpose of that is to prove and quantify, not understand. They understand knowledge comes from somewhere; what they don’t understand is intent. They don’t believe in that. That’s woo. They don’t question authority, they don’t see the big picture, they don’t understand that every single thing that was taught to them was due to multiple reasons (including, of course, truth-seeking and honesty). Hence, there aren’t really different perspectives; there’s only ignorance.
Do they ponder if their beliefs are a culmination of nature and nurture—outside their control—and that the truth they regurgitate is anything besides epistemically conditioned?—yes, I can be fancy too.
“Well of course it isn’t the truth, but an approach to it, based on observation and science.”
A Chinese student might as well be taught from a completely different set of rationales and arrive at a different truth and be just as certain of it, like you.
If Plato hadn’t existed, how different would your core beliefs be? Sprinkle chaos, amino acids, and heat, and somehow quartz thinks they are divine. There is no flexibility, no skepticism besides the kind given by someone above them in the hierarchical academia chain.
Aren’t you a genius? You are so wise, I know so little, I barely know what a normative statement is, besides in economics. I make sure to include the “besides in economics” so I can clarify how intelligent I am; it’s not like we can have a non-applied-quantitative-categorized interaction, right? My words wouldn’t be taken seriously if I don’t add that part.
I study Computer Science; I am so knowledgeable in computers!!! I love logic gates; I eat silica beads for lunch; they remind me of circuit boards. Ain’t no way I know about logic besides logic gates; that is your conclusion. After all, I study computer science!!!! Aren’t you special?
There is an inherent truth to everything; no doubt. The only thing is that that inherent truth changes completely if you change who I am; the time I live in; what I am, and what is around me. Well, aren’t we determinists though, actually, hard determinists—necessitarians! Hence, my positioning is absolute; therefore my understanding is the truth. Amazing how we can play around with definitions and make whatever the fuck conclusion we want. Yes, buddy, axioms don’t really matter unless you make them matter, and I won’t spend five hours discussing the chicken and the egg “dilemma.” How about you drink a bit of orange juice, shut up, and listen to someone more stupid than you? Maybe you’ll learn to be more flexible—more intelligent. Wait! I am so sorry, I meant to say matcha.
“I must know. I must understand. Therefore I reach my hand deep in my throat until I vomit every single piece of rancid matter; then I eat it—the rotten flesh releases gases that fill me up further; my belly is huge; that’s where the soul is—my intellect. I can feel the bloat, magnanimous. I shall bless others! I will vomit on everyone else—rampage in monologues—I dare not eat from others; they are skinny. But worry not, I do groceries! Not to consume, but to keep receipts; everything else is trash.”
In my average CS lecture I look to my left and there are 10 physics gold medalists, and on the right 3 reincarnations of Sheldon Cooper. All of them can recite every Prelude function and its type written in an obscure Haskell manual. I must be stupid—I think—I can’t memorize this shit: my brain is rotten! Too many ig reels! I need three extra displays: Minecraft parkour videos, another for subway surfers, and the third one for Instagram reels with auto-scroll. Maybe then I can focus on memorizing functions.
That is, until we have a project that is not a copy of a class assignment or isn’t a copy of some other university’s course material. Oh god! Piazza is bombarded: “How can we solve this? You haven’t shown this in class!”; the professor’s RateMyProfessors and PlanetTerp get raided! I then open up the assignment, scared, only to find out it is akin to a puzzle a middle schooler could solve.
It took me five hours to solve a project that a so-called “Olympiad medalist” couldn’t solve after dozens of hours. Apparently ChatGPT hadn’t been trained on anything similar to it! Too unique of an assignment! Oops. Now I am getting bombarded with classmates begging for help—not guidance; they want the answer. They will do everything they can to extract the exact code from you; they won’t accept any guidance or suggestions, for that is recognizing you solved it instead of finding the answer somewhere else, like they are doing. “Isn’t that cheating?” To them cheating doesn’t exist because it isn’t needed, and when it is needed, it’s actually the professor’s fault, hence justifiable. These students can memorize the entire textbook in one go; they’ve been trained for that their whole lives. If an answer requires critical thought though… what? What does that even mean? The professor is an asshole that expects students to vomit something they haven’t eaten before. Preposterous! We shall raid PlanetTerp.
I certainly wish I could be better at rote memorization; at the very least it would be beneficial. I wonder, though: maybe I am just stupid and faking it well enough to get further than I should; maybe they are all onto something. Maybe I should be spending every second of my non-studying hours doing LeetCode. I must get into FAANG. There is no life besides FAANG. I need the status, I need my parents to tell everyone I work at Google. If Google asked me to work for them for free—actually, if they asked me to pay them to work for them—I would! I only care about prestige. My entire life has one purpose: telling people I work at a FAANG—MAANG! Nothing would bring me closer to eudaimonia. If not that, then I would love a job at Palantir, I would become an intrapreneur and suggest we create a new type of non-fungible tokens that connects reality (the internet) with its shadow (the physical world): add a unique code to every material thing—and that must be scanned before consumption. Water should be blessed with special amino acid chains that form a barcode; then a chip implanted in our stomachs should read the barcode to calculate how many ounces of water we had, and from where. Did you know neurodivergent individuals can drink non-standard amounts of water per day? Now the entire water-barcoding idea is sounding enticing, right? The government and corporations can now gather more data to justify eugenics—if the data suggests otherwise, then oh well; we could just secretly add delicious amounts of lead to the outfall of data centers—action becomes cause; tomayto tomahto. Kaboom, kablaw, kaboom.
I have a midterm tomorrow morning (would have had I posted this a month ago) and here I am writing this instead of studying. I do need some extra screens. You know what, maybe I should create a brainrotmaxxer: a display with an eye-tracking camera and AI slop that detects distraction; if it happens, a juicy, enticing video of a Minecraft speedrun with hardtekk should play.
I keep being measured on my memory. Meanwhile I can’t remember what I ate yesterday. I don’t even bother taking notes at this point. How do I pass classes? Somewhere deep inside my brain the material gets absorbed and mixed up with everything else, just like an LLM getting its weights readjusted. Am I performing backpropagation every millisecond? Maybe that’s what LLMs are lacking: real-time backpropagation! Maybe I am a machine. Anyways, unlike some intellectuals, instead of keeping receipts I eat them. At least I know I am offering a mashed-up mix akin to hyperprocessed baby food slop. I don’t pretend otherwise. My word is not the truth—it’s not even mine—nor exclusively from another.
If I wanted to know the date when Kant first formulated the categorical imperative, I would’ve googled it. Your intellectual façade doesn’t work. Tell me something complex and I’ll think you might be smart, but won’t care for it. Show you can listen and I’ll think you are mature and warm; point out my idiosyncrasies, the nuance—the spices in all that mashed-up bonanza—and I’ll forever admire you. Beauty is in nuance or extremes; everything in between is mediocre.