the

Final Project

among waylaid pursuits

My first blog post here (and indeed ever) I wrote after setting a 15 minute timer. I didn’t worry about what I’d write, didn’t worry about the fact that I’d never blogged before, resisted obsessive editing and trying to optimize for anything other than creating some personal text. And before I knew it, I had a fairly coherent piece of content that I wasn’t displeased with. That was in the second week of my 13-week course at The Iron Yard, and I’ve only generated two other posts so far. So, I’m trying the exercise again.

It has been a super busy 8 weeks, and this is in fact the last “lecture” week. Next week we begin working on our final project! Blogging isn’t the only thing that has had to come second during this course. Just before we began, I organized an Effective Altruism meetup here in Durham. The first went well, but was mostly composed of friends I already knew, rather than those I reached out to. I held one other since then, which one new person attended, but I haven’t had the energy to organize a third.

But I would like to fold my passion for Effective Altruism into my final project here at The Iron Yard. It would be a taste, and perhaps even a head start, on what I’d like to do with the skills I’m learning; to turn “make the world a better place with programming” into something less than a platitude. I’ve had a few vague ideas for the final project, but nothing exceptional in mind. The .impact group, a volunteer organization of programmers and other interested parties that work on EA-related projects, has a few side-lined projects that may be suitable, but again nothing that stands out to me yet.

It’s a little odd, the forces at work here. I used to be a head-in-the-clouds “idea person”, and I still often get into phases where it’s difficult not to brainstorm about game design ideas, and the only remedy is to write them down over the course of hours or days. But years of skimming Hacker News has drilled in the tenet “It’s about execution, not the idea” pretty deeply.

And to be honest, it feels good to let go of the potential for disappointment that attends every big, tempting idea. Some advice says not to think about creating something amazing, just to keep hammering on your next problem, and eventually something of value will have come to light. So, my 15 minutes have concluded, and I have to say I am somewhat displeased with this output. I could leave this as a draft and come back to it. But in the spirit of letting go, if not “quality from quantity”…

We have finally begun learning Rails (illustrated above via the awesome open space design of American Tobacco Campus, host to The Iron Yard here in Durham).

I’ve had little time to reflect on the past weeks, but one thing I have noticed is that I’ve consistently surprised myself with the hurdles I’ve jumped in our nightly homework, and especially the weekend projects.

I had a tough time deciding between a couple of the choices for our second weekend project — either Go Fish, which would help me learn to use external libraries and code in some strategy for the computer player… or implementing Conway’s Game of Life. Game of Life is an instance of the mathematical-ish concept of Cellular Automata; a set of simple rules that create complex interplays and can generate great beauty. Indeed, Alan Turing posited something similar as the underlying behavior of Morphogenesis — that is, how living things grow and take the form they do. And recently, his theory has been scientifically confirmed.

I’m aware that Life is something of a classic coding exercise, but for someone who had previously struggled with the deeper mathematical side of… well, everything in high school and college, it was still pretty daunting, and I really wasn’t expecting to actually get through it in 3 days, after learning only two weeks of Ruby.

I almost immediately hit a road block. After implementing the ability to toggle individual cells, it in fact toggled an entire column of cells. I spent an hour or two poring over things, and then enlisted multiple people to look at it as well (It turned out I had been creating my array of arrays by generating one array, then assigning it to each element of the higher level array, so that when I toggled one cell, it actually referred to that cell in each subarray). After correcting that, I made a bit of progress, hit another multi-hour blocker, and then eventually that fell away too.

Eventually, I realized implementing the rules themselves was simpler than I expected, and then… Life happened! (In a good way!)

It still has an elusive bug, but I’m immensely pleased with myself. It seemed like the ratio between amount of work I was putting in and the impressiveness of the results followed an exponential curve. In the coming weeks, I should keep this in mind when I hit more and more blockers. Because if we’re not hitting some kind of limit, we’re not actually learning.

My parents were well-off, and being a geek who can occupy himself with the untold reaches of the internet and endless expanses to be explored in games, I have conveniently inexpensive tastes. My father endowed me with the habit of fiscal conservatism (and set me up with a IRA and an investment account). And, funded by my grandfather, I chose to attend college for Art & Design, fully aware it would not greatly benefit me in the otherwise ubiquitous quest for wealth.

All of this privilege has, in a way, kept me modest and somewhat unmotivated. And in recent years, that effect has been bolstered by the evidence that, while money can buy happiness, but not past an income of $75,000. In my case, and for other material minimalists, probably quite a bit less.

My sense of altruism and empathy on a large scale has been similarly tempered.

Growing up, it felt like the message I got from society was: one person just can’t do much. The problems in the world are huge and structural, and naive reformers will eventually just become disillusioned and burn out. We can try to make small efforts in our personal lives, but they’re tiny and won’t scale.

— Kaj Sotala

But recently, both of these forgone conclusions have been utterly inverted. I now want to make as much money as I can, and to help as many people as I can.

What changed my mind?

What if you actually knew that your actions could had vast, substantive, far-reaching, and verifiable positive effects on the world, and the future?

Those who have learned about effective altruism do.

With careful examination, some philosophy, and a lot of science, we can optimize the amount of good we do, to improve the world by orders of magnitude. We can prevent vast amounts of suffering, disease, and death, eliminate global poverty, approach the equality of all humans, and ensure humanity’s future potential against global catastrophes and even the risk of extinction.

These are lofty goals, but it can start simply, with identifying existing charities that are thousands of times more effective than others, and yet are less funded than substantially less effective ones. GiveWell is an organization taking it upon themselves to identify these outstanding opportunities to donate.

Somehow, this concept is only recently coming to fruition. But it is so powerful that it has caused a social movement to quickly grow to thousands across the world in just a few years, and everyone involved is supremely excited by its prospects.

While I’ve been glued for a computer for most of my life, the code that runs things behind the scenes has always been something of a stop sign. Due to a poor grasp of math during my education, I’ve discouraged myself from getting close to it. But finally after a few years of hearing that most of programming doesn’t require much skill at math (indeed, skill at googling is more important), fiddling with scripting and modding of games, and getting very positive encouragement from effective altruists who have taken this path before, I felt galvanized enough to take the plunge.

And programming seems to be the last skill humanity need acquire. The future will be built with code. And even if I am unable to work directly on making the world a vastly better place, I hope to be the best programmer I can, and redirect a significant percent of my income towards the organizations that will.

And I was thrilled to discover that I could learn to do so here in Durham, at The Iron Yard Academy, to which I applied, was accepted, and began two weeks ago. It’s been challenging, and no doubt greater challenges lie ahead, even beyond the course.

But now I have something to fight for.

There are many more aspects to effective altruism, which I may write about in the future, but you can start being an effective altruist by simply learning more about it, and putting some thought into your choices about spending and giving.

Here’s a great place to learn more, and many effective altruists write articles about important and impactful ideas at the EA Forum.

However, the koans are actually quite easy to pass, if your intention is disingenuous. In fact, the answer can be determined by looking at some debug code that appears before you even have a chance to look at the koan. This immediately brought to mind the concept of guessing the teacher’s password.

Suppose the teacher presents you with a confusing problem involving a metal plate next to a radiator; the far side feels warmer than the side next to the radiator. The teacher asks “Why?” If you say “I don’t know”, you have no chance of getting a gold star — it won’t even count as class participation. But, during the current semester, this teacher has used the phrases “because of heat convection”, “because of heat conduction”, and “because of radiant heat”. One of these is probably what the teacher wants. You say, “Eh, maybe because of heat conduction?”

This is not a hypothesis about the metal plate. This is not even a proper belief. It is an attempt to guess the teacher’s password.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky

As students at The Iron Yard, each of us is here voluntarily, for diverse but likely deliberate reasons. I’ll speak about my own in the near future. But we’re not being pulled through this experience from outside forces. We’re here to actually learn how to become programmers. And while programming inherently includes a lot of Googling and even some guesswork, just guessing the answers to the sensei’s koans not going to get us there.

So, mindful of this dichotomy, I can feel that intentionality to learn within the subconscious tension between just filling in the blank, and truly absorbing the meaning and intention behind Jim’s code.