I think too much happened today to possibly write about it. But here goes. Let me preface this by saying, it’s glazing over the details. I like her for the way she thinks, her worldview, etc. But I think I’ll look back remembering it mostly for the emotions I felt.
I spent 30min scrambling to find my glasses. Mom found it 3min before I would have left with my backup pair (which was missing a nose pad). I went and bought her favourite drink before (a London Fog) at Monogram, before going to audit her classes.
First of all, I’m glad I dropped out of university. I was sitting in an ARM assembly class literally wondering where the 2x speed button was; it was so little content in 50 minutes. I understood it with zero context. If I went back to university, I’d either study philosophy or psychology — but I’m pretty sure I’d go insane if I had to learn CS at university. I really loved the English lecture where they talked about love vs lust; about pursuing money or love, the two manias of Mankind. The professor was extremely charismatic and spoke for 50 min without a single stutter or pause to think. Superhuman. I’m simultaneously really glad I went to audit classes today. I felt like a kid at his first day at University — excited for a new experience, but simultaneously without the nervousness since I had a close friend, and I wouldn’t have to put up with a bullshit class/professor for a semester if I didn’t like it.
Girls are so weird — I swear to god they don’t eat. Not just Vivi, but Oana, Sarah, etc. They literally eat like snakes (once every 3 days). I asked Vivi and she was like “yeah I don’t eat lunch”, which I could accept, I’m also trying to lose weight, so we skipped lunch. Then, I asked when she last ate, and she said she also didn’t eat breakfast?! So I “force-fed” her Kobe Beef (it’s a name, it’s just teriyaki beef, it’s not authentic at all, but it’s SO CHEAP, $8usd for a huge rice+beef box) at 5pm. She physically fought me to pay again, but I was ready — she again tried to wrestle away my phone but I frontran her. Unironically had to box her out like I was trying to get a rebound in junior high basketball; was proud of it, though she playfully argued about it. I would feel genuinely actively bad if she paid for something, even if we never dated in the end. She’s got the highest marginal utility of money of anyone I know, and that’s not just me crushing or something; it’s genuinely true. When I pay for something, a number decreases slightly. When she pays for something, she’s sacrificing her purchase for something else in order to pay for it; we were talking about most irresponsible purchases and hers were like, some $20 bag. She didn’t have a backpack to use today because her brother took her backpack. I’m so thankful in knowing this is truer connection; she has absolutely no idea how much money I have (nor does she really care, and I think nothing would change if she did know), how far I am in my career, etc. She doesn’t care, but in a good way; she asks enough to know a nonzero amount about it (that I’m a Rust dev, always backend, used to be ML), but not enough to perceive status. As far as she knows, I’m doing a startup with 3 friends. If I heard this on a college environment, I’d think it’s some NGMI bootstrapped thing that would never become anything. But she literally has no idea even the correct order of magnitude.
One super random thing I found funny is how literal she is. She was like “yeahh I really like vegetables” — I thought that extended only to what food she enjoys eating. But no, it’s every aspect of her life — her shoulder bag has a leek keychain plushie with a smiley face on it. Her favourite plush animal at home is a literal Broccoli. She represents her identity very openly — but it’s pretty subtle and “if you know you know”.
There’s a lot of things that I think are infohazards such that I don’t even allow myself to think about it. You literally have to believe in free will to have a satisfying life; it’s not worth even thinking about determinism. You can’t believe in soulmates if you ever want a life partner; you have to put in the continuous effort (maybe even the case with a “soulmate”). I’m willing not to think about these things, and accept the “optimal” scenario as my reality. Maybe another one of these is that you always need to believe in love one more time. Always one more time.
I met up with some of her friends as we walked through the halls. She’s really close with her friends; she met up with one named Charlese and they shared a long hug, and were super excited about each other. She briefly introduced me. When we were in her English class, she saw some friends, waved, but said that she was sitting with me instead. At multiple points, I was pretty tempted to go for her hand, but I could never bring herself to; sometimes I did the “train” thing where I put my hands on her shoulders as I followed behind her, to assure her I was still there. That was nice, but it wasn’t really reciprocated at all. Then, we stopped by the library and sat down and she pulled out her iPad to give me a detailed philosophy lesson — on the Self, what made consciousness, the mind-body dualism, what it means to “know” something, how “truths” are communicated from one party to another etc. We reflected on some famous Lesswrong articles that I liked, such as Reward is not the optimization target. Our knees touched under the desk, and she didn’t pull away. That was really satisfying. One of the most interesting things she mentioned is that her worldview almost never changed — her emotional state was always fairly consistent. She realized early on that people derived their desires from watching others. That she should seek to please nobody but herself. That hedonistic pleasure was, by definition, ephemeral. I was struck by how her worldview was so similar, and yet, the development happened so much earlier in her childhood. It took me a goddamned long time to figure things out; I read Girard because Thiel suggested it, then wrote about it briefly in Seeking Extremistan, but she just… internalizes this off the bat?! Previously, her thesis of “I’d rather be dumb than smart” was a 1:1 mirror of Status Delocalization. Like, genuinely, what??? I said this before but does she have my freaking blog or something? Literally nobody know in our friend group knows of sudolabel. How is this remotely possible??? And these are ideas that are seminal works of a lot of career philosophers; and she seems to have figured out these things on her own. I wanna read Girard with her at some point.
We talked about kids, artificial wombs, and the distinction between embryo selection and “designer babies”. About free speech. About libertarianism. So many extremely controversial topics I would almost never voluntarily bring up, discussed in detail — it’s almost the opposite of how I would try to be agreeable and take low risks with my personal beliefs.
We talked about love languages — both of ours were quality time and physical touch. I commented that I didn’t particularly care for words of affirmation; they only meant something coming from either my parents, or from Eugene, primarily because of rarity. We have a pandemic of fake-niceness. That’s even worse than silence to me. She mentioned she hated gift giving because people gave awful gifts on average; but that I gave great gifts. I was confused what she meant that I gave good gifts — I didn’t even recall giving her a gift. It turns out that she mentioned that they were trading skittles in Econ class, and I got her a bag of skittles as a result. It was literally just convenient for me to; I walked by Safeway on the way to our first date so I thought it’d be cute.
By the end of our marathon date, we were sitting on a sofa side by side, shoulders pressing into each other. Nothing really left to say after 6+ hours of chatting, just people-gazing together. I could tell she was thinking about something. She could probably tell I was thinking something. Neither of us bothered to ask the other what we were thinking for a few minutes. The tension was kinda insane. My mind went through scenarios at a speed similar to Dr. Strange as I sat there; I felt like I had to do something. So I put out my hand. She looked a bit confused so I said “let’s hold hands”. She put her hand in mine gently rubbed the back of my hand. We interlaced fingers. I laughed automatically — it felt a bit like a romcom. It was one of those moments where I would be happy to melt away into nothingness. Incredibly perfect. Too perfect.
Too perfect is an ironic way to describe it — she soon said “hey, I really don’t want to lead you on. i’m still sorting out a previous relationship”. I won’t lie, I felt a bit of PTSD knowing that this is pretty much exactly what Sarah said. But it’s also fairly different scenario wise; we connected ideologically rather than anything else. Weirdly, I didn’t even really feel attracted to her until I actually knew who she was internally, and hugely respected who she was inside. I mean, she was always outrageously pretty, but there’s a lot of extremely pretty people who pass by in the world and I really could not care less for 99% of them. I felt a bit stupid instinctually assigning an outcome from an n=1 heuristic (that “i haven’t handled my past relationship yet” = “everything is fucked”); especially since it was a matter of the heart. I think these things are usually more a reflection of the other person than they are of me, so I very consciously tried pushing my past experiences aside and just trusting what she said to me.
I thought about it all bike ride, and wrote a nice message; I wasn’t going to be a rebound. But I’d be willing to work through things. I’ve learned my lessons, paid for with pain. But I have to believe this time is different, and every time.
I was quite pleased to receive this text after my long reply:
We texted about it a bit. I’m okay with what we made of the situation so far. Weird to admit, but previously, I’d use ChatGPT a lot to reply to texts — in some ways, I thought that it was more acceptable to text like a modest epistemic. But for matters like this, I wrote it out from heart, and I’m glad it hit the right spot.
This tweet quite literally changed my life; before it, I had some semblance of notion of “if it would have worked, it would have worked, if it didn’t work, it wasn’t ever going to work anyways”. But it’s such an insanely visceral representation; 2.5% vs 34.6% is such a huge difference that it gets close to lizardman’s constant.
I’m curious to hear about her previous relationship tomorrow. I guess one lesson learned for me is that even before I build rapport, maybe it’s important to know these things — not that I regret anything I handled with Vivi, but it’s important for self-preservation purposes.
Obviously there’s a lot of uncertainty. But this feels free of expectation in a way my previous dating experiences weren’t. My base case was that I get to know her for a few weeks; maybe 1% that we actually make it out of long distance. But I was in need of experience and connection, so it was an opportunity which was much too good to pass up. And now, it still feels only +ev; I know I won’t get my heart broken like I did previously, because even if the worst possible outcome happens, I’ve already gone through it once. I’ve learned from my mistakes; it wouldn’t be a situationship. I’ve adjusted my expectations. One of my favourite ideas is that to write a good blog post, you have to write 100 shit blog posts. It’s from Visakanv, his thread has a ton more examples. Just start.
The most appealing part of a relationship is that the sum can be greater than the parts, because you and your partner can optimize for different things (money, career, community, emotions) and reap the benefits of both of them. Maybe one’s wife enables them to be a much better earner through being second to none emotional support. Perhaps they manage community in such a way they are both more fulfilled and productive. It does seem to make sense that it’s possible to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
Vivi’s one of the first people whom I see it to be additive. For some people, it obviously made no sense; Rachael didn’t really make any sense from the beginning. Sarah’s appeal was very much that I could have an outsized impact on her career or that she could be OP at some point — she had the will to do things. Maybe I could have learned to be more social from her? Vivi’s more directly beneficial. I get to learn how to be a genuinely happy person, and to let go; to live more in the present. I can of course help her with her career if she’s driven, but she’s also additive “natively” — at more of a personal level than a transactional level. I have much to learn from her character. She’s extremely social, emotionally aware, etc. More than a few times, in a moment of my own insecurity, she texts and quells it; often when I’m waiting for a reply back, or if I’m wondering how something went. I’ve literally never felt ambiguous about her emotions or her opinions for more than a few minutes.
She’s also really candid. It’s not something I had to ask for — it’s very much her personality. It reminds me a bit of Eugene — the first date, she said “when i listen to you talk i really think that you haven’t stopped to look around in a bit”. I was taken aback in the best of ways.
There’s a tweet that I’ve had bookmarked forever that goes something like “how do you know if someone only likes you bc of how kind, funny, smart, pretty, interesting, cute you are, and not bc of who you are as a person”. And for so long, I’ve wanted to control how I’m perceived by new people I meet. By comparison with VIvi, it almost feels like I’m free. Just to be understood. I hope she feels the same way about me. I don’t know what she’s so tired of being appreciated for, but for her, it’s her consciousness that I appreciate so much.
Not many people know me like she does already.
I think she’s the best one yet, by far. It’s really not even close.
This is the most insane, random topic switch ever but some random ass guy overheard my conversation with Vivi and was like “AYOO im also from Hillhurst wtf, did you go to GATE”. Turns out literally all my teachers retired (they were in their 60’s when they taught me; I knew one of them retired but not the other) and he was only 2 years younger than me. Sad how time passes.
Vivi asked me what trait I would keep if I had to reroll every other trait, and keep one. I responded that my ego says my intelligence; reality is probably agency. And these two factors got me thinking a lot about how IQ affected my life.
This all sounds really stupid, and I didn’t tell her for that reason, but IQ has always been a great cope of mine. As an insecure kid, I formed my identity around being clever because it was the only thing I could hang my hat on. No matter how worthless or undesirable I felt, I could always count on people to think I was smart. Everyone I know told me I was smart; I was young, and generally successful at school, then in my career. Even then, if they didn’t, I had numerical proof that I was smart. You can take away almost anything else in my life, but I’d still be smart. You could throw me in the dirt and I’d still be smart. I always had that in my pocket. I wonder if I hadn’t had anything? What if I had no backstop to my sense of self worth? It’s a sad and scary thought.
And even then, in many ways, I had to completely unlearn my notion that I was “smart”. Or, moreso, I just met smarter people; being smart alone is completely and utterly worthless. It’s a Ferrari parked in a garage forever if you don’t have hustle.
To the point where I’d say that knowing your IQ is universally a massive infohazard.
If it’s lower than you expect, you limit yourself of possibilities that you perceive yourself to be incapable of, which you would have went for if you didn’t know your IQ. Perhaps Scott Alexander’s Against individual IQ worries is of comfort — the idea that population level statistics aren’t particularly useful for an individual is a very powerful idea.
If it is exactly what you expect, nothing in your life changes for the positive or negative. You’re $1000 poorer and some psychologist happens to be $1000 richer. Hooray!
If it’s higher than you think… Oh boy, the problems it creates. Are you doing as well as your IQ should indicate? Were you actually crafty, hardworking, resourceful, or were you just smart? Why is nobody similar? Smart people suffer the most from thinking that they have to be as uniquely successful as they are uniquely gifted, so they get stuck in this “can’t settle for less but also don’t know exactly what it is that I’m trying to achieve” limbo.
I’ve said this before, but if I had a kid, I would psyop them into thinking they’re not smart, just really hardworking. Thinking you’re smart is a huge, huge curse. Factually knowing you’re smart? That sounds straight up dreadful.
I have another theory on intelligence: that while IQ is fit on a normal distribution, it too is heavy tailed. Most people are fairly similar in intelligence, but the true distribution of “smartness” is not linearly correlated to the scale — the gap in “intelligence” between a 3s person and a 4s person is much larger than 3s and 2s. But since this is impossible to measure, we only have the technology to compare intelligence relative to other individuals in a comparative measure.
The song playing in my head was https://open.spotify.com/track/5rgy6ghBq1eRApCkeUdJXf?si=ddfae7ecb9094269
I’m pretty sure I came up with a million dollar idea in our call today. It’s like, the most 300IQ marketing play ever.
To bring visibility to our new rug detector, I proposed we make a site like the “give me your address, this is how much you spent on gas” app
It’s genius because it wasn’t possible for scams; scams were a binary outcome. But that also meant that people would tweet about scams. Nobody’s tweeted about rug detection because their base case is that they lose all their money on coins, so it’s hard to distinguish losing money from a rug vs unsuccessful coin. If we can prove something like “you lost $2k on rugs”, people would 1. be astounded, 2. tweet about it.
It’s actually such a good viral marketing tactic. Was thinking SOOOO outside the box today. Also shoutout to Vivi for literally sitting there staring into space listening to music for 1.5hrs as I took our weekly planning call LMAO, if I knew it would be so opgg, I would have just asked to postpone it. But whatever, really appreciate her being accommodating.