A collection of notes after a quarter at Stanford, mainly addressing the questions:

  • What should you be optimizing for?
  • How do you plan your future?
  • What classes should I take? (useful vs fun?)
  • How do I choose what person I want to be?

why you shouldn’t be able to predict their future

You can’t predict your future. Those who know with certainty are making a bet on themselves. This is only justified if you know enough about yourself in order to do so.1

then what should I do?

Life is a multi-armed bandit problem. Most optimal policy is to explore first, then exploit. Right now I’m learning how to think, so I don’t care about the direct applications. Later on it’s always easy to apply knowledge or creativity, as long as you know what to look for.

You’ll never know what you could have fallen in love with. Henrik Karlsson writes “doggedly looking for what makes you feel alive”2

Keep dialing down temperature.

Pretrain, then finetune. Good foundation models beat out narrow AI.

Create a good model of the world first. Then apply it. Similar to the adage “to become a good artist, first develop good eye then just draw what you see”.

Exploring, but do so with intention. Pick something, go as deep as you can in it, then as soon as you realize it’s not for you, switch. Have a policy to explore the search space efficiently.

Once I understand myself better, I can better apply myself.

  1. “Why greatness cannot be planned”, Kenneth Stanley and https://x.com/lnofx/status/1752193422562328962?s=20 ↩

  2. https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/multi-armed-bandit ↩