I’ve done a lot of writing—during my brief stint in academia and then during 14 years or so of corporate work—but this blog isn’t for that.
This is really just supposed to be for me: the journal articles I particularly like, or a way to nail down how I’m thinking about something abstract. The ‘Case Studies’ section mostly exists for me to bookmark and/or measure whatever I’m thinking about at any particular moment in time so I can remember it later. I wrote ‘What Do You Do?’ because I’m never exactly sure how to answer that question in a concise way - I do a lot of things for work (sometimes even stuff!), and since I mostly talk to other Americans, ‘What Do You Do?’ typically means ‘What Do You Do For Work?’. I briefly considered naming the section “Intellectually Promiscuous,” but figured that would generate some really disappointed internet traffic, and I took pity on their theoretical souls.
On the actual blog, you will find the person my friends know, my internal monologue, and what it’s like to ramble with me until way after you were supposed to go to bed. I started it way back in 2017 and picked it up again in July 2025, and originally meant for it to be a one-shot homage to Sumedh Joshi, and the unreasonably amazing blog he used to write.
But it turns out I’ve actually been enjoying writing it, so I’m going to try to keep posting to it. If you enjoy it, hopefully you pop by again for the jokes and absurdity and nerdiness, and, well, stay for the jokes and absurdity and nerdiness, because you won’t find much else here. But if that’s your particular jam, stay tuned next week for a cartoon meme about why people spending so much time on RAG databases and fine-tuning LLMs is gilding a lily, or an explanation for why we should all be taking more creatine supplements, or to listen to me argue with a nobel laureate about the end of the world with absolutely no ground to stand on.
Lessons and Inheritances
Before I leave you to go enjoy the world outside of your screens, I do want to express some gratitude - and above all, love - for all of the brilliant and luminous people whose light has warmed me as it has bent the arc of my life. Everything I write and everything that I am is, in some way, an echo of the unique gifts that I have been granted by these people’s generosity, either as inspirations, friends, family, partners in crime, or - the greatest gift of all - found family.
- From Tim Kreider - “I am capable of learning nothing from almost any experience, no matter how profound.” Kreider’s special mix of witty, moody, and pessimistic cynicism is a poorly concealed fake-out for the lesson he teaches by coating each and every noun in real, relentless empathy - and the conviction that we owe it to everyone. Inside unspeakable heartbreak he hides lessons in real love, what it means, and the how gorgeous it is to do the “messy work of understanding” each other, in all of our ridiculousness.
Anyone worth knowing is inevitably also going to be exasperating: making the same obvious mistakes over and over, dating imbeciles, endlessly relapsing into their dumb addictions and self-defeating habits, blind to their own hilarious flaws and blatant contradictions and fiercely devoted to whatever keeps them miserable.
It’s out of that ridiculousness and absurdity that he reminds you of the strange beauty and boundless potential inside all of us - even him. Even you. Even me. From him, I learned that to know is to love, and to love is to know. And that giving each other understanding is the only thing really worth doing in life - everything else is, really, just bullshit.
This is one of the things we rely on our friends for: to think better of us than we think of ourselves. It makes us feel better, but it also makes us be better; we try to be the person they believe we are.
- From Neil Gaiman - “I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too.”
Worlds can be spun out of shadow and wonder, surreal yet tethered to the heart of what it means to be human. There is comfort to be found in good madness, like fairy tales that exist to teach us that every dragon - every challenge - can be slain. That inside of every single person is a whole world of both Delirium and Delight - who, it turns out, is the same person, just at different times. From Neil Gaiman, I inherited the knowledge that everyone else is so terribly wonderful and strange that I might as well be exactly myself, and no more, and no less - and that sometimes the best thing to do is just lie back and enjoy the ride.
“Everybody has a secret world inside of them. I mean everybody. All of the people in the whole world, I mean everybody — no matter how dull and boring they are on the outside. Inside them they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent, wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds… Not just one world. Hundreds of them. Thousands, maybe.”
“I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.
Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You’re doing things you’ve never done before, and more importantly, you’re Doing Something.
So that’s my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before. Don’t freeze, don’t stop, don’t worry that it isn’t good enough, or it isn’t perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.
Whatever it is you’re scared of doing, do it.
Make your mistakes, next year and forever.”
- Michael Lewis and George R.R. Martin - “If you wanted to predict how people would behave, Munger said, you only had to look at their incentives.” The sly magic of hiding a cathedral of ideas inside a story of characters and drama so colorful you don’t notice the architecture until it has you surrounded. In their writing I see the truth lived out that people will never remember what you said, but they will always remember how you made them feel. I will never be able to smuggle a structuralist intellectual masterpiece, Trojan-horse style, into a story so engrossing you can’t seem to put it down. From them, I have learned that it will never matter how brilliant or clever you are, if you are boring.
Every systemic market injustice arose from some loophole in a regulation created to correct some prior injustice. Reality is a cloud of possibility, not a point. He suggested a new definition of the nerd: a person who knows his own mind well enough to mistrust it. ~ Michael Lewis
Power is a trick - it resides where we believe it resides, no more, no less. Some battles are won with swords and spears, others with quills and ravens. Reality is the strip malls of Burbank, the smokestacks of Cleveland, a parking garage in Newark. Fantasy is the towers of Minas Tirith, the ancient stones of Gormenghast, the halls of Camelot. Fantasy flies on the wings of Icarus, reality on Southwest Airlines. Why do our dreams become so much smaller when they finally come true? We read fantasy to find the colors again, I think. To taste strong spices and hear the songs the sirens sang. There is something old and true in fantasy that speaks to something deep within us, to the child who dreamt that one day he would hunt the forests of the night, and feast beneath the hollow hills, and find a love to last forever somewhere south of Oz and north of Shangri-La. ~ George R.R. Martin
From Martha Nussbaum, Amartya Sen, Hannah Arendt, and John Rawls - “Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given by the senses.” Moral clarity is not a gift, but a discipline. That if you do want to find wisdom in this world and to figure out how to do something good, The Right Thing, you have to fight for it with rigor and dedication, and reflect it in the choices you make every single day in your own life, not just in stray acts of generosity or in an abstract philosophy. From them, I learned that knowing The Right Thing to Do is non-trivial, and an essential element of a life well lived. I also learned that the closed systems of reason and logic and mathematics are not sufficient, despite their descriptive power; to temper those insights by respecting human emotions as legitimate, intelligent responses to our perception of the world and its value is essential. I’ve always had an obsession with the aesthetic quality of sound logical argument, but when you get into the ontology of human language, I cannot help but appreciate Arendt’s insight that “Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”
To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility. ~ Martha Nussbaum
Human ordeals thrive on ignorance. To understand a problem with clarity is already half way towards solving it. ~ Amartya Sen
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best; and take what comes. ~ Hannah Arendt
The sense of justice is continuous with the love of mankind. A just society is a society that if you knew everything about it, you’d be willing to enter it in a random place ~ John Rawls
Inspirations - The people who I work to be as good as they think I am.
I will never be as kind—or as unshakably, earnestly good—as my three brothers; never be as strong as my mother; never match the generosity and mentorship of Brian Day, Phillip Jones, or Julie Hardwick. I will never be as brilliant as Eric Wright, Upasana Kaul, Teresa Asma, or Diana Chang. And no one—no one—will ever be as funny as Sumedh Joshi.
- Kindness — I will never be as genuinely kind as all three of my brothers have always been. I am so proud of each of you every single day.
- Strength — I will never be as strong as my mother, even though from her I learned to be as tough as nails.
- Generosity & Mentorship — I was so incredibly privileged to start my career under the wings of Brian Day, Phillip Jones, Suba Vasudevan, and Julie Hardwick - you have all inspired me in different ways, and you will always be the examples I think of and aspire to when I think about generosity, genuine care, and effectiveness in mentorship.
- Brilliance — from Eric Wright, Eric Rowe, Upasana Kaul, Chandra Srivastava, Chelsea Phillips, Teresa Asma, Sukrit Silas, Diana Chang, Katie Carpenter, Michael Carroll, Daniel Szymanski and Annie Weathers - and everyone in both Normandy and Turing Scholars - how did I ever get so lucky as to meet each of you so young? Through osmosis and late-night documentary marathons, sitting through white board sessions I didn’t understand at all, and shouting over music at so.many.parties. - at Arrakis, where we covered the floor with sand that we spilled questionable punch all over, at Business Honors parties where we invented chair dancing, at whatever weird, insane, and almost certainly illegal thing was going on over 21st street, and in our shabby living rooms (and guff rooms) that were somehow permanently full to the brim with lovely people and too much wine and laughter - we had so much fun that I didn’t even realize until later how much I learned from each of you about how to recognize my own weaknesses, how think more clearly, question my assumptions, and that, even though there’s no real source of truth for most problems…you should probably always round up in the case of Eric Wright and Brian Day.
- Everything — No one - no one - will ever approach being as funny as Sumedh Joshi. But I’ve carried your sense of humor with me through every day of my life, even after I lost your light in mine. I’m writing this entire blog as an homage to the one you wrote when you were, theoretically, supposed to be working on your dissertation. Which you wrote, in its entirety, in 20 days, but really only 3. You are ridiculous, and absurd, and you will never be matched. I still hear your voice in my head - including every time single I brush my teeth or microwave soup or start to doubt myself. I wish you were here now, so you could see what the world has done with all your research. I wish I could ask you if you knew, all the way back then, what the world was going to look like after it got a hold of what you were playing around with on Hobbes and Leviathan :tm: , making little robo-Sumedhs on GPUs so you could spend more time watching football and playing games with me. I know that creating an homage to your old blog isn’t much, by comparison, but 15 days from now it will have been 9 years since I heard your voice. Getting your old blog back up and running, and writing follow-ups to some of your posts on a website designed with the same aesthetic makes me feel somehow like I’m extending your voice into 2025. Like I’m talking to you through a very data-limited time machine (and yes, yes, I know, significo, I can hear your objections and requests for clarification on the term). And even if it’s not true, it feels true. And I’ll lean on Martha Nussbaum again for this one: emotions are legitimate, intelligent responses to our perception of the world. So I’m going to round up, and take it.
Love you all. Always.
Cheers, you brave souls who have somehow gotten to the end of this very short post.
And as always, I’ll leave you and the rest of our bizarre, fabulous, disorienting universe with all of my love, delight, and delirium, after finally crashing out and signing off on this at 8:15 a.m., a few dozen research articles into a handful of fields deep, and having nerd sniped 4 of my PhD friends into staying up with me to chatter about nonsense, and giggle, and feed off of each others’ unbounded curiosity.
It’s been a great night here in my shabby living room, and I hope it’s been at yours, too.
~ Alyshia