Think Probabilistic

The sagacious Joost Bonsen once tried to outline his theory of multiplexing ideas, a chapter in his vast treasure-trove of constructs on engineering creativity in my first year at MIT. I found his elucidation to be coherent, almost like an Occam’s razor. But as with most constructs in life, what we deem fathomable in theory are but a train of shadows in practice. The vagaries of the real world, with its messiness and its formidable distribution of noise give us a dose of reality at best and encumber our optimism at their worst. I wanted to completely imbue Joost’s advice into my thoughts, but I found it too daring.

My dear Dustin, I don’t know what has happened to this world, and why things work the way the do. While my spirit is broken, and my heart bleeds,  I still feel your your friendship and your warmth.

When I first arrived at MIT, I didn’t know what to expect and was nervous about many things. You welcomed me like an old friend, and made me feel at home. I remember talking about 6.864, and how Barzilay had just announced that EMNLP was happening in Stata that year. We attended the conference together. It is then that I realized that you were a most unusual chap.

I’ve begun to write again is a bewilderingly good foretoken. Of unexpected signs of thaw from a long, almost cruel winter of deep freeze and bitterly cold headwinds. This past week I spent almost an entire day with Eric Horvitz, one of the best minds in all of artificial intelligence and computation ; a kindred spirit whose fierce and polymathist intellect is matched in equal by his geniality. We talked about approximate posterior inference, of Bayesian theories of human cognition close of those of Sigmund Freud, of stochastic privacy amongst other things. We walked a fair bit that day, oscillating between facing the cold Cambridge wind head-on at times and orthogonal during others.

There are times when the forces of the universe conspire to teach you lessons that you might have otherwise ignored. Ignored or taken for granted. Complicit and a level of naivety that only becomes clear in hindsight. Over the past month I have seen both the best and worst of human behavior.

There’s something extraordinary about those that love us unconditionally. We often take them for granted, but they are the ones whose kindness and sagacity protect us from harm when we are in crises. No loops of enumeration are enough, no lexicon sufficient to describe the depth and bliss of having them in our lives.

Many a time we are simply oblivious to what lies in our surroundings. Blinkered by the vagaries of every day life, we attach ourselves to sub-optimal thoughts. Fettered by our desire for instant gratification, our habits follow a dotted path mired an endless circle of need and more need. Our poverty of attention, our inability to focus, and our brazen unwillingness to pause makes us less human. They make us less gratified and definitely far less effective than we would like to admit. What is it like to constantly miss the forest for a tree, to ignore the variables directly under our control and to try and alter those that aren’t?

I still remember what you told me when I had my first sip of alcohol. It was almost four years ago, shortly after my twenty third birthday. As I sat there, sipping a glass of deep red wine, you were one of many who walked up to me and uttered the word badass. Oblivion to American slang meant that I took badass to mean that my posterior might have expanded in the way the vast majority of fresh-of-the-boat transplants do after they spend a year in the land of the free and the home of the brave. Free, but scared I spent hours burning off the crowd-sourced label that my apparent backside got that night.

One of the most bandied virtues is that of stepping into another person’s shoes. The corollary to this lemma which never finds a mention is how difficult it is to step into another human’s shoes. To even imagine a subset of someone’s circumstances, let alone simulating their affective states, is by no means an easy proposition. This becomes vastly more herculean if it involves another human you’ve never met or know very little about. Whatever one’s sensitivity index might be, we are built as humans not to develop a deep understanding of someone’s plight until the context begins to move in a personal direction.