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by KeyXiote 1309 days ago
One with the opportunity to meet different kinds of people (not online), less judgemental and more collaborative. A life with multidisciplinary educated folks who want to share knowledge rather than compartmentalize it. The ability to reach out with creative ideas in different networks of knowledge without being passed over as a non expert. Less algorythmicly automated, or more transparent automation so I can better understand how my data is used/abused. A simpler life, basic and sustainable amenities, a job that feels fulfilling, work is work were not always going to love it, a community built around helping each other thrive. Less touch screen more tactile in every aspect. I have great ideas I want to execute on, but find it so hard to reach people in certain disciplines so I can get the right kinds of feedback. I can't drink due to a past medical procedure and this interestingly narrowed my social life, bolstered my physical health but not my mental health. Overall a more natural life that integrates with technology and progress, less fear mongering, more constructive criticism aimed at learning rather than shaming. Overall a freer experience, it's one thing to be told how free you are yet feel imprisoned by non normative systems that feel vacuous.
2 comments

>but find it so hard to reach people in certain disciplines so I can get the right kinds of feedback

Well, I'm curious now, can you share more about what you're looking for? =)

I've been diving into linguistics, have always had better aptitude with language than mathematics, especially as a bilingual individual, German being my first language. However studying linguistics and the interconnection with math led to a personal breakthrough specifically physics/calculus related. However I am self teaching and really finding quantum mechanics/theoretical quantum physics fascinating and fairly comprehensible and have been working on some things in that realm, that said I feel like I'm most likely falling into a self bias trap, i.e. self confirmation based on inadequate information and missing fundamentals. I've tried to focus it more into a test project, specifically in the realm of cryptography, I have a fairly high aptitude for patturn recognition. I'm planning on utilizing it in designing both an embedded hardware/software application for security/authentication. It's difficult to articulate via this format, but there are through lines with a number of fields, specifically music synthesis, a hobby of mine for now, as well as circuit design, which I am also teaching myself, building my own eurorack synth modules. I'm still limited in my coding skill so that's kind of my start point right now. Deciding on a language is proving to be difficult especially with the new memory safe parameters, NIST standards etc. I have some experience with C++, planned on working more with python. The logic seems sound but don't have anyone to really sound off to help focus on things I'm inevitably missing. Apologies for the word salad, it's a lot to try and explain. My educational background is in social science research and cs networking. Had a lot of road blocks in the last 2 years which led to some personal hardships (not unique considering) which seem to be resulting in some positive breakthroughs. But I'm scraping 40 and and time certainly flies by, still paying off student loans etc, school really isn't an option unfortunately at this point, academia would be an ideal place/way to meet people. Bottom line is I need to nail down specifics to focus on and produce project results, but not an undertaking I feel I can or should solo. I'm relatively intelligent and might be better suited in a position to promt the smarter folks in the room on some of what I outlined. Hope this was somewhat comprehensible.
Thanks for explaining, it sounds like you have a lot of big ideas and an interest in many different fields, which is cool.

Something worries me though. I've seen before a pattern that happens, when people have big ideas and see a lot of connections between different things, leading to personal breakthroughs in things like physics/math, where it's then hard to find an an expert to look at your ideas. Your post reminds me of that a little.

I can say that for other people in the past, the point where it went wrong is that the devil is in the details, and by connecting many fascinating things together without knowing the math, you can find beauty in things without having the hard fundamental to confirm whether it's real or an illusion.

>I feel like I'm most likely falling into a self bias trap

My instinct is that, in the kindest way possible, this should be a big concern. To be honest I'm someone who likes reading criticism (because I'm far from perfect), so I realize this might come across as criticism, but I mean it positively and constructively.

I think I also share a lot of the fascination that you talk about for things like quantum mechanichs, cryptograhy, complex and deep topics. (I'm also bilingual, another coincidence!) But the more I learn in these deep areas, the more I understand how deep the subject the really is, and how easy it is to think you understand the broad picture of something, without really understand the details (and all the subtlety really is in the details!).

>Bottom line is I need to nail down specifics to focus on and produce project results

I would look at it this way. There's a lot of people in this world, we might pass eight billion today. That's important, because we can look at the kind of patterns people have tried in the past, and we can see where they ended up.

Crucially, it's impossible to know whether a big idea works without diving deep (otherwise everyone would have done it already, and it wouldn't _be_ a big idea). But it _is_ possible to see the more general pattern of people attempting to see connections between many different things, that are hard to precisely articulate.

There's a very dangerous trap in chasing interconnections of fields with a surface understanding (as opposed to deep details-level understanding), because you can spend a lot of years faster than you'd think and wake up at the end with little to show for it. With the feeling that you have found something but without anything very concrete.

If you have something specific and detailed that you have questions about, I'm good at diving into details in a couple of the fields you've listed (though I'm not an expert, and I'm not always entirely immune to overconfidence either.. caveat emptor).

HOWEVER and this is important: I think you could likely avoid a lot of hardships by trying for a while to stick closer to boring ideas than breakthrough ideas, with the goal of growing enough experience to be able to see the flaw in other people's breakthrough ideas. If you can't see the mistakes other people are making, you can't see the mistakes you are (potentially) making, and this is how people fall into the trap.

Cryptographers have an important lesson & rule: anyone can invent cryptography that they can't themselves break. In cryptography, in quantum-adjacent fields, in high-energy physics, a lot of people come with breakthrough ideas and it is fascinating to see why they went wrong (if they didn't go wrong, we would be using their ideas!). This is genuinely a pattern that happens a lot, and that you really want to pay attention to. I cannot underscore how important it is to not fall into the same trap. You don't want to be a quantum 'crank', or a cryptography 'crank'. People have spent many years feeling misunderstood, and their ideas were never recognized in the end. Some have grown old with nothing. You should really want to understand why, so that it doesn't happen to you.

Take care, and stay suspicious of bias. Everyone has them. The easiest lie to sell if from a person to themselves.

Thabks for the response and the feedback. I agree wholly with your observations, and am aware of my own limitations in the field of topics mentioned. This is why I attempt to check my bias as consistently as possible. I realize my shortcomings and the potential to fall into the oroborus of bias and ideology. It's very easy to fall into self affirming traps and self statements, ex. "I KNEW IT!" feeling when I feel I found a confirmation of a conjecture I put forth to myself. I find I learn more from being wrong about certain things and correcting by learning from said mistakes or misconceptions. I rarely post to social media, other than my music sharing. This is really the first time I have put myself out there in this regard.

I do need to focus on a few (grounded and realistic) things at a time, as mentioned these topics are deep, singular topics in each of these fields take lifetimes of learning and espert experience, successes and failures. My primary focus (intruige) in regards to quantum theory has been based around the recent Nobel regarding Bell inequalities and the resulting experiments and the results. It has been something I have pondered for over a decade and have seen some co formations that I have an ability to at least ask some of the right questions with confirmational responses based on foundational and experimental research. Again realizing my own bias in truly knowing I understand these topics fully. My proposal, related to quantum physics/theory, has to do with our current perception of time, biological shortcomings in terms of synaptic delay, observation/experimentation and localization. Specifically around localization of time, i.e. Quantum clocks and superposition, perceived local time is only consciously calculated through and at the time of observation, again I'm being vague in scope, as the topic is very in depth and am limited in articulating my question fully in this format. Clocks in this regard may be extrapolated as interleaved non local waveform functions, hence my question regarding synaptic delay at the time of observation as well as measurement and how we measure, what experimental tools we utilize etc as well as relative field dynamics, elementary interaction, photon, phonon interaction, relevant things we have learned from CERN in regards to Higgs-Boson and the shortcomings of our understanding related to expected mass of particles resulting from those experements. I don't want this to get too tangential, just outlining where my current foci and interest lies in these fields. I am looking into Quiskit as a jumping off point regarding quantum computing.

What kind of stuff do you like working on?