What happened to math prodigy Qiaochu Yuan?

I was an alien born on the early-2000s internet. I woke up in the Rainbow Fountain on Neopets, reviveby Potion XIV. I had no mother. I had a father, but I never saw him, only heard him through the closed door of my room. "Are you doing your homework?" "You better not be playing games in there." "Conserve time."

Everything about the earth was abrasive to me. Breathing hurt. My body rejected food, tolerated only water. I didn't want to have a body. But I had to. I hated it.

Most days I was forced to leave my room to ride the subway. I would take a line, any line, and ride it to the end before turning back. The hum was comforting, though there was no view. Why does a subway have windows, if all you see is tunnel? 

There were other passengers, of course. They rarely spoke to me, because they hated me. They avoided eye contact. They saw through me, though I knew I wasn't invisible to them, because once someone threw a ham sandwich at me. It could have been an act of generosity - that's what my therapist told me years later - but I knew it was malicious. 

At some point I aged out of the mandatory subway rides and began to ride escalators instead. I was good at riding escalators. The escalators are meaningless. There is no end to them. Perhaps I could have rode the escalator to the moon. Everyone seems to want to go to the moon, even though there is nothing there.

I got off the Nth escalator. I don't know how many floors I had ascended. I was at a glass platform. I could see the blue marble beneath me. I don't know what to do, so I pause and sleep. When the sun rises, I dream of a softer world.

The National Book Award Longlist 2024

I want to be a writer but I hate reading. They say every writer is a reader first. I'm fucked.

Sometimes I enjoy reading but not if it feels productive. I enjoy reading threads on reddit about "staying the f**k home if you're sick" (it's flu season) and jokes about the writer Nikolai Gogol dying of self starvation despite his doctor trying a soap suppository. <“Hey this guy won’t eat what do we do?” “Have you tried sticking a bar of soap up his ass?”>

If I win the National Book Award, maybe I won't get sent to an internment camp if Trump goes to war with China. I don't think I could survive internment camp. I read once, in a children's book, about a Japanese grandma who cultivated dandelions while interred. They were weeds, but they were beautiful to her. I could cultivate dandelions, but I might die – of anything. I'm already on the verge of death and everything in my life so far is fine. Maybe I would explode mentally. Or maybe I would simply starve to death because I'm a picky eater. I only eat tong ho, dandelion greenns, if it's cooked in mala spicy hot pot. I doubt there is spicy hot pot in internment camp.

A tweet from @QiaochuYuan on twitter: i am learning about myself that i'm actually very ambitious in a way i've habitually downplayed. like when i try to write short stories i might be telling myself "i'm doing this to amuse my friends" but the actual goal i've set my sights on is "i am going to dethrone ted chiang"

Do you think Ted Chiang gets diarrhea? Everyone gets diarrhea sometimes. If Chinese-Americans are interred, will Ted Chiang be immune? He "only" has like nine Hugo and Nebula awards. Would there be an outrage? The great Ted Chiang, sent to tend dandelions? What about the baller tweeter Qiaochu Yuan? It would be a shame if he was sent to a camp where there were no internet. I want to see more of his tweets trying to make Claude have an orgasm. 

I'm fascinated by Qiaochu. He is a real guy. This part is not fiction. He graduated from MIT and went to grad school at UC Berkeley. He dropped out and has never held a job other than tweeting, if that can be a job. Somehow these words have meaning, have connotation - "MIT", "PhD", "dropout", "tweeting" - as evocative as week-old cup noodle containers and posters of sexy anime girls. Is Qiaochu a "type of guy"? I have a little bit of Qiaochu inside me. You do too.

A mind can be an internment camp.

This whole time, I wanted some blueberries, but I couldn't get up to go to the kitchen. I considered crawling, but it felt too undignified. I stayed in bed, tasting the phantom sugary juice mixing with the taste of day-old fluffy white plaque. My tongue felt too large for my mouth. Instead of getting up, I wrote this piece. It didn't win the National Book Award.

Psychoanalyzing Aella

Aella is a shit eating ho and that's not even the worst part.

She's good at taking pictures, I'll give her that.

I have a bad habit of looking at car crashes. Once, I rubber necked so hard at a white Camry that had flipped over that I rear ended the person in front of me. This is not a metaphor. I had neck pain for six months, which, annoyingly, was only resolved once I caved and went to a chiropractor.

Another bad habit I have is psychoanalyzing niche online microcelebrities. I can't help it, I attended too many classes at a APA approved Psychonanalyst Training Institute™.  My brain autocompletes the scene: Aella coming in to my office and lying on my couch - she wouldn't choose the armchair, she'd lounge in such a way to display her figure- and saying something like:

"My high openness and wild sexuality has been amazing, radically improved my quality of life for 10+ years. My old conservative life was so rough.

I wish conservatives took into account the fact that people like me exist and would suffer greatly if their norms were made universal" 

I'm always interested when people say something that seems provocative on the surface but completely fall apart when inverted. Could Aella really say "I fucking hate sex work, I hate having sweaty old men with bad breath lick my nipples, and I hate all of you autists that follow me" and still make money?

No! Of course not. The incentives of content creation shape everything she says. The illusion is that she’s just thinking out loud, when actually she’s selling you something: An aesthetic. A fantasy. Sexy data science that gets off both your brain and your genitals. 

"I'm not faking it," says Aella, "I just really really love sex!" Sure, the rape fantasy fetish has nothing to do with being chained to a bed as a teenager by your parents. The freeuse fetish has nothing to do with being physically hit by your dad. No similarities here like loss of control of your own body and literal chains. Not your unconscious trying to replay the previous trauma to end in pleasure rather than pain in an attempt to rewrite the past. Doesn't remind me of Freud's recreation compulsion, which says humans recreate their trauma, compulsively, unconsciously, and often to their own detriment. Nope.

But unlike other haters, I don't actually think Aella being traumatized matters, especially if she claims she's not. If her symptoms of oversexualization don't bother her, who am I to say that she should act differently? It reminds me of that one story - a patient with OCD is always worried she has left her hair dryer on. She needs to drive home in the middle of the workday to check; it interferes with her life. The psychiatrist says, "why don't you just bring the hair dryer with you to work?" Problem solved.

Sure, for some people, it might be annoying to bring their hair dryer to work, but in this metaphor, Aella doesn't mind the hair dryer, she even claims to like it! 

Visit notes: No acute psychiatric concerns. Patient reports stable mood, good energy levels, and overall life satisfaction.

✔ Appearance: Well-groomed, appropriate dress, no signs of distress.

✔ Behavior: Cooperative, engaged, no agitation or psychomotor abnormalities.

✔ Mood/Affect: Euthymic, congruent with stated emotions.

✔ Perception: No hallucinations or perceptual disturbances.

✔ Cognition: Alert, oriented × 4 (person, place, time, situation), intact memory and concentration.

✔ Insight/Judgment: Good insight into self-care, responsible decision-making.

Okay, maybe not on that last one, given that the overt sexualization has led to stalkers, threats on her life, etc, but one could argue that's a failure of societal norms and not Aella herself.

But let's say Aella is faking it. The inversion test fails here too. Could she really say, "I don't like sex. I'm just faking it for content" without breaking her carefully curated "raw, authentic" image and losing her audience? 

My read is that Aella is a communal narcissist. She is not a delusional Elon Musk figure in the way of a stereotypical narcissist, but more of the vulnerable, intellectualized kind that hides behind self-awareness and performance. Her self-exposure becomes a tool to control her audience. She's addicted to their attention, on being seen as special.Her entire career is built on proving she is different, an exception to the rule. She is constantly reframing her own life choices as unique, experimental, high-intellectual pursuits."I’m not just a sex worker—I’m a sex worker who can intellectualize it.” “I’m not just doing drugs—I’m scientifically documenting the experience.” This is classic narcissistic differentiation—"I am not like the rest, I am singular."

The whole data science thing is a cope. Dissociation from real selfhood, replaced by a highly curated public persona.  Instead of feeling emotions, Aella analyzes them. Instead of processing experiences, she documents them. Instead of being inside her life, she stands outside it, observing and optimizing.

Aella is going to wake up one day smelly, ugly, old. It happens to all of us. She won't be hot anymore, and her hotness is what makes her special. Face it, you wouldn't be reading her content if she was ugly, or a man. Her brand will die. Probably her self-image too.

quit substack if you care about BIPOC people

Jeff Bezos is a walking turd, and nobody can deny that. 

Just look at the guy. He's having a 500 million dollar wedding Amazon delivery drivers piss in water bottles. Sure, shouldn't the world's richest guy luxuriate once in a while? 5 million wedding I can understand. Have a triple chocolate mousse cake. Hire DJ Khaled. Once in a lifetime event - oh wait, dude's already divorced, well, twice in a lifetime I guess? But 500 MILLION dollars is just excessive. That's more than the GDP of Tonga. Spent in one day.

So I'm all for boycotting Amazon. Quit the Washington Post. Send some bad juju to the next Blue Origin mission. Say a prayer to whatever God that Lauren Sanchez's boob implants rupture. 

Wait - rewind - that cartoonist that quit the Washington Post in protest? She ran to Substack?? 

The Substack Nazi stuff is blowing up just now but I can't say I'm surprised. It's been known in tech circles for a while now about Substack's "approach to free speech" - people joined Substack specifically because they agreed with their mission. A queer female BIPOC friend[1] who interviewed at Substack asked about diversity on their engineering team after the interviewing panel was all white bros. "Well, depends on what you mean by diversity, I'm from Europe." Needless to say the friend did not take the offer. 

Substack is smaller than Amazon but in ethos it is no different. Its founders are sucking Elon Musk's dick and previously did a startup for pedophiles grooming underage girls, sorry, privacy-centric anonymous chatting. Cool cool cool. 

Note that I'm not arguing for or against diversity here. I'm saying that if you're a lefty AuDHD #BLM no-human-is-illegal person that claims to live according to your values, starting a Substack is not it. Like how tweeting about how your followers can donate to RAICES to support the border crisis is still tweeting, which is still lining Elon Musks' fat coffers. Do your research. The founder of Substack "doesn't regret" having a racist on his podcast. Racist, his words, not mine- "having once published extreme and racist views". 

I can hear you crying: what should I doooo? Open your eyes. Tech companies are companies. Look it up in the dictionary. Companies (n.), funnel of money from normies to the CEO's pocket. Notice how I didn't say anything about morality. Tech companies pray only to one god and that god is dollar bills. The god of "being a good person" is dead. Maybe it never existed. The only way is to start your own company. Profit off the backs of desperate writers with your leet hax0r skillz. You either die a hero or live long enough to become the enemy.

Addendum: There is one other way out that I can think of. Blog updates via carrier pigeon. Pigeons are domesticated and thrive in human captivity. This is good - you can support a pigeon rescue and give an animal a good life, while benefiting from its natural homing and flying instincts. You say the problem is that it doesn't scale? Maybe the problem is your desire for scale. 

this guy's available! isn't he cute?

Addendum 2: "But what about your blog?" I know for a fact that Blogger is a cost center, aka, losing Google money. Just look at it. It's 90% dead, the design looks like it's from 2001, they didn't even take the low hanging fruit to integrate with Google Analytics; there's too much inertia to kill it even though Google needs to fund a team of 20 engineers to maintain it (15 of which are resting and vesting). So by using this platform I am actually giving a well deserved middle finger, albeit a small and probably not noticed middle finger, to Sundar Pichai, who, despite his "mild mannered" public persona, is actually an asshole ruining Google. But that's another post.

[1] your reaction to this says more about you than it does about me

Your Worry is the Real Apocalypse (the x-risk basilisk)

I. People are really worried about a lot of things these days. 

I can't blame them. There are x-risks everywhere you look. Climate change. Nuclear war. Societal collapse. And let's not forget AI! AI, AI, Ayyyyy Eyyyyyeeeeeee. 

Maybe you're worried too. I don't blame you for worrying, per se, in school they taught us about the James-Lange theory of emotion, which shitty tl;dr emotions are not rational and (a billion caveats here) emotions are not a choice.

To the extent that you do fancy yourself rational, I pose this question to you: What the fuck is your worry doing to help the situation? I know someone who is unemployed, ahem, too sick to work, and he wakes up every morning, chugs coffee, and goes on Substack. (Fuck Substack, but that's another post for another day). He can debate you about the risks of AI annihilating all of humanity before he takes his morning shit. AI alignment orthogonality thesis foom blah blah blah SHUT UP

I've seen the greatest minds of our generation doomscroll themselves into analysis paralysis, wasting their lives fighting over whether the timeline has shortened to 5 years or 15 years, making spreadsheets calculating P(doom), writing stupid long blog posts[1] about existential risk. 

Let's put it in terms you autists can understand:

P(apocalypse happens) * P(your worry actually helped) * amount of lives saved < P(your worry ruined your life) * # of people worried,

observing that P(your worry ruined your life) approaches 100% the deeper you are in the rationality cult - yes, cult - 

and noting the people whose lives you personally ruined by spreading this AI risk brainworms to.

II. It wasn't about AI risk all along, was it?

If you actually believed AI was going to take over—if you really thought this was the last decade before the endgame—you wouldn’t be sitting in a Discord server debating Roko’s Basilisk for the 100th time.

You’d be saying goodbye to your loved ones.
You’d be doing something meaningful while you still had time.

But instead, you waste your life pre-living the apocalypse. 

B-b-but... AI might take my job! My girlfriend might replace me with AI! Sure, you have clocked correctly that we live in a society where your value is your output. Capitalism, whatever. Want some brownie points? Face the fact that the fear of AI is existential. It's the fear that AI is better than you. It's going to make you irrelevant. That AI is going to replace your "human" ability to make art, to have sex, to chat and have meaningful relationships. Yeah, it feels bad. But be honest, between all the alignment papers, how much sex were you having anyway?

Is it really about saving humanity, or saving face? Narcissism isn’t about thinking you’re great, but about thinking your thoughts matter more than they do - believing that if you just analyze things hard enough, if you just worry the right way, if you just anticipate every possible outcome—you can control what happens. 

Spoiler: you can't.

III. Annihilation Anxiety

Noooooo---- it's not about jobs, it's about annihilation!

Annihilation - as in physical death - is what you mean. You know we're all going to die eventually, right? (I guess the cryo people would beg to disagree). But cryo isn't here yet. It's also fucking stupid, but that's yet another post. You could die tomorrow in a car crash on your way to work. You're probably shortening your lifespan from an elevated A1C by eating too much sugar and sitting all day. If you're not doing cardio 5 times a week and eating your greens[2], then it's not really about physical death.

Psychoanalysis calls this "annihilation anxiety" - not about death, about about the erasure of the self, the ego. Fear that you could be wiped out, dissolved, rendered meaningless. Guess what - you already are meaningless. You live in a society where nobody cares about you modulo what you can give to them. Why are you trying to fight something that has already won?

There is no AI safety policy that will undo the fact that you spent your 20s reading alignment papers instead of touching grass.

There is no x-risk strategy that will compensate for the fact that you spent years obsessing over something you cannot control.

Even if AI kills us all in 10 years, the joke is still on you—because you wasted your last decade worrying instead of living. And if AI doesn’t take over? Then you’ve wasted your life for absolutely nothing.

[1] not unlike this one

[2] x-risk isn't certain, and this marginal effort definitely confers benefit, so by my calculation it's still worth it