Did you know that it’s harder to become an MIT admissions blogger as
an MIT student than it is to get into MIT as an applicant? It was true
my year, in which 18,306 students applied and 1,467 were admitted
(8.0%),1 whereas 69 students applied for 5
blogging spots (7.2%).2 Anecdotally it might also be true
for future years.
I was among the 92.8% who got rejected in the latter process.
Although I obviously would have preferred things go the other way, I
can’t say I was surprised, firstly because, objectively, the odds were
against me (as they were for every other individual applicant); secondly
because, to the extent I can make educated guesses about the criteria
the folks at MIT Admissions would have chosen bloggers by, I would have
been close to the worst possible candidate;3
thirdly because my application probably wasn’t very good.4
I didn’t dwell on it; I just thought to myself some vague consoling
thoughts and moved on. No matter what I missed out on, at least I
retained complete freedom: to choose what to write about, when to post
it, and how to format and typeset it, down to the very last
box-shadow.
Right? But, although I mostly successfully avoided thinking about it,
there really was a lot to like about being an admissions blogger! I
liked writing — or perhaps, I liked being a person who has written a
lot more, and having a commitment to blog regularly would be a way
to force myself to become that person. I liked the idea of getting to
share things with thousands of readers, or less euphemistically I liked
the thought of being, if ever so slightly, famous.5 I
liked the idea of having a sketched portrait and being part of official
events with “Blogger” in the title and all that jazz. Collectively these
things just felt cool.
The thing is, though, that there were things I could do to try to get
those things for myself, and I didn’t do them. I know how to force
myself to blog regularly, which is just by announcing publicly to nobody
in particular that I’ll blog regularly (it’s worked effectively at least
twice). I know many places I could promote my blog and try to get more
readers. I can buy a sketched portrait.6
It’s not that hard.
This is the first post on this blog after I migrated off WordPress
for a static solution.
At first, I wanted to set things up on Amazon Web Services (AWS),
which was an adventure. There are lots of online posts about how to do
this, but Amazon’s services change quickly and there was often outdated
information. For instance, Amazon had a wizard that led you through
setting up a static site, which I clicked on. It helpfully handled a lot
of grunt work, but now I was out of sync with all of the guides. Oh
well.
I think things are confusing partly because there are four AWS
components all interacting to make a static site happen:
2017-09-27
(1480 words)
filed under
Meta, Thoughts
tl;dr: I don’t use Facebook much. If you want to contact me,
I would prefer nearly any other mode of communication. I am also going
to stop autosharing posts from this blog onto Facebook. RSS readers are
great; get yours today.
Recently I checked Facebook and it said something like “You’ve added
N friends this past T units of time! Thanks for making the world more
connected!” and I just couldn’t any more. Facebook friends are not
friends.
Dunbar’s
number is around 150, maybe double that if you want to stretch it;
humans cannot handle that many human relationships. Facebook’s siloed
ecosystem is the opposite of connected with the rest of the
Internet.
That is one of many reasons I pretty much don’t use Facebook any
more. This is not new, but I’ve never formalized it. Also, I figure
others might assume otherwise since I still do have an account and still
accept friend requests and post sometimes. Thus, I’m writing this
post.
There’s some point in the decline of a blog’s activity at which you
just can’t apologize with a straight face for not posting any more. Only
ironically.
I brainstormed reasons why I’m not blogging. It took a while for me
to find a reason that felt right, but I think it’s mostly the concern
that I don’t have anything important to say, and I’m just spamming
people’s inboxes or Facebook feeds. I make fun of my perfectonist
tendencies, but they haven’t gone away and have been exacerbated by how
public this blog feels now. There’s also a general feeling permeating
life that I should be trying to present myself professionally to people,
because like a diamond, the Internet is forever.
I hate doing things under time pressure, but I have to admit I do a
lot more things when time pressure exists. One of the things is writing.
Another is posting the things I write. They aren’t very good, but
they’re better than writing that doesn’t exist.
It’s interesting that I can impose time pressure on myself by
declaring commitment devices by fiat and it works. Other people have
developed other methods of doing this — I recently discovered
The Most Dangerous
Writing App, which puts time pressure on you to type every five
seconds or it deletes everything you wrote. There are many other ways
it’s done.
Wow, this has been the longest silence on this blog in a long
time.
I can’t justify it with lack of time either. Interning at Dropbox
takes up all of my weekdays, but my weekends are much freer than I’m
used to. I carelessly let two weeks at home in Taiwan pass by without
doing much about blogging, and once again a lot of my few blog drafts
have drifted into the temporally awkward zone, being too far away from
the events they are about.
Neither is it for lack of things happening. At MIT, there was the
Senior
House turnaround and freshman moratorium. I can’t even begin to sum
up the discussion around this issue, but I think
the
best response I’ve read is this open letter. Then there’s the
official Senior House
response. But that’s enough links, since I imagine the chances that
this issue is relevant to you and you’d need this blog to link
you to them if you’re reading this are pretty low. (Then again, the
chances that you’re reading this are already pretty low. Although the
chances you are reading this right now is 100%.)
After a misstep on the fourth
day I managed to post one post every day, completing the rest of the
streak! This post is scheduled
to go out around the time my plane takes off.
I’m free!
I’d insert a Frozen gif here if I could find a good one,
but I don’t like any of the ones I found and besides, copyright is an
issue. So instead:
IMO2007.C6. In a mathematical competition some competitors are
friends. Friendship is always mutual. Call a group of competitors a
clique if each two of them are friends. (In particular, any group of
fewer than two competitiors is a clique.) The number of members of a
clique is called its size.
Given that, in this competition, the largest size of a clique is
even, prove that the competitors can be arranged into two rooms such
that the largest size of a clique contained in one room is the same as
the largest size of a clique contained in the other room.
Author: Vasily Astakhov, Russia
If you remember where I first posted this to break a combo, you have
an excellent memory and/or spend too much time stalking me. If you
remember the context under which I posted this to break a
combo, you have a better memory than I do.
Was my streak a success? On the bright side, I definitely generated
lots of posts, many of which were radical departures from my old
blogging habits:
Blogging is weird. I’m still nervous when I post stuff because I’m
concerned I’m wrong, and end up looking unprofessional or attracting a
bunch of Cueballs or something.
Before I told people about this blog, during the time when 100% of
its traffic came from its coincidental placement in search results, I
didn’t have to worry about this. Now, I choose my words. Because some
Important Person™ might show up. Maybe even misinterpret something I
said and/or get furiously offended at a badly phrased joke.
I also fear that I’ll update my beliefs quickly; maybe I’ll change my
mind or discover a much better argument for the other side really soon.
But the blog post would still be there, displaying my old belief, giving
the reader an inaccurate or misleading impression of myself. People
might even chat with me to argue about it, and then I have to admit
I’m wrong oh no! It feels a lot better admitting I’m wrong on my
own turf, in my own time.
This passage from Lord of the Flies comes to mind (I had
hurriedly reread the book as ammunition for the AP Literature test and
noticed that my past self had marked it):
For the interested, I wrote a
post
summarizing issues in copyright and patent law on a new
blog for a school club. Actually, if you’re reading this post, you’re
probably already interested enough / bored enough to read that post, so
go read it. I think the videos are worth watching despite their length,
but I tried to summarize the key points in text, so decide how much to
read or watch depending on how much spare time you have.
I don’t know if that blog will work out, but anyway WordPress tells
me I have 8500% more followers on this blog than the other one, even
though I have doubts about how many of those followers actually read
anything I post at all, so I thought I should link to that post here.
Also, by publicizing the blog, I get to shame my friends and fellow club
members into posting so that it doesn’t look so empty. Social media
expertise, you know?
And I broke like 90% of my HabitRPG streaks too. I was busy running
Monte-Carlo calculations to estimate the number of domino logic puzzles,
and forgot about midnight. Okay, before that I spent twice as much time
on Flight Rising for
whatever reason. Bad life decisions.
I guess that means today I have to post one now, before going to
sleep, and one later. Eh, time to harvest really weird mini-posts from
nowhere.