casual wizardry 🧙♀️| math student
nyc
Joined March 2021
- Tweets2.5K
- Following849
- Followers1K
- Likes15.4K
new post: on modeling molecular systems from their quantum mechanical origins
curiositycomposed.substack.c…
new post: a mildly mathematical introduction to chemistry’s coolest hypersurfaces
curiositycomposed.substack.c…
em retweeted
fucking insane. some fish use electrical signals to navigate; if two fish on the same frequency encounter each other, they automatically switch frequencies to avoid "signal jamming" each other. exactly like how your wifi router does at home. wow.
Guy Who Memorizes horrified to discover that Guy Who Simply Gets It incidentally remembers just as much
em retweeted
i think one of the things you need in life if you're a certain kind of nerd is one domain of knowledge, almost doesn't matter what it is, that you just know cold, like the back of your hand. a sort of intellectual home base that you can return to and draw strength from, the foundation your nerd power radiates outward from. and i sometimes run into nerds who are clearly very smart but don't quite seem to have this and i feel like i can see this sort of... groundlessness or something that it produces. i might be overgeneralizing from my own experience but i feel like i've benefited enormously from having one of these myself. any of y'all know what i'm talking about? does this seem like a thing?
I suspect that the root cause of most ‘imposter syndrome’ is actually just under-preparedness, and so it is no surprise that addressing it with self-validation techniques is not particularly effective
i think it is actually quite difficult to be over-prepared and feel like a fraud, even if you are unsuccessful by some external measure
not knowing the answer to a question, for instance, plagues your self image only when accompanied by the belief that you very well could have
writing an info piece about the thing you’re learning is a great way to hold yourself accountable for abstractions you haven’t earned the right to use yet
em retweeted
some people just get it. you throw ideas in the air, they catch them, toss them back, stretch them, remix them. they understand that thinking is a live process, not a checklist. every conversation feels like a high bandwidth exploration, open-ended, dynamic, fun. my friends are in this category.
then there are the ones who default to critique. the ones who immediately point out flaws, who force you to preface everything with disclaimers like “this is just a thought experiment, let’s see where it goes man.” they treat every idea like a proposal up for review instead of a stepping stone to something interesting.
the first group is amazing. the second is mostly careerist employees, trained to evaluate rather than create, like a quarterly performance review.
my problem with therapists is that they are too often the kind of people who simply studied to become a therapist. expertise borne purely out of theory
i need to be counseled by a career airline pilot or an underwater welder or something
