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Why I like “awful” television

Posted by christine - 05/19/09 at 05:05:31 am

Thanks to various bittorrent site memberships, I manage to keep up (or catch up) with a solid number of television shows. There’re a few, though, that I tend to downplay in discussion – but always come out, guns blazing, to defend the merits of. Tonight my champion is GRΣΣK.

Exaggerated social stereotypes and brief flashes of cheesiness aside, Greek contains surprisingly sharp writing – and humor that sneaks up on you. Once you accept that you’re watching a television show about Greek life in college (and with that, the knowledge that it’s going to be about college students and the frivolities that surround them), you actually start to care that the nerdy protagonist is able to rush the freshman athlete he cares about, and that the little sister-big sister relationship is patched up.

Absent (mostly) is the overwrought teenage angst and eye-rollingly complex drama of Gossip Girl – gone are the repeated and unbelievable plot twists of Heroes (is Sylar dead or is he not?)… Greek is a largely feel-good television show about human heroes that stay good but make mistakes, real-life villains that have their own agendas but have human streaks, and entertainingly realistic awkward situations between collegians.

Sometimes the existential questions are best left to Battlestar Galactica, the moral, to Law & Order, the supernatural-meets-coming-of-age, to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s nice to just enjoy a television show for the sake of the characters and the chuckles. A cute snippet from an earlier episode:

Rebecca, having discovered her emerging interest in women, is discussing a new love interest with a known gay acquaintance, Calvin.
R: Hey! Wait up! [cooing] So… how are youu?
C: Rebecca, do you even know my last name?
R: It starts with a T. N? R!
C: One lesbian kiss and it’s like you’re just one of the gays, huh?
…
R: Oh Cal. Not every gay person has to go through a self-loathing shame spiral before coming out.
C: Well then – welcome to the team! Our uniforms come in lavender for the boys and denim for the girls. [walks off]
R: … Your last name starts with an S!

Social responsibility, and what is “good”?

Posted by christine - 05/18/09 at 09:05:17 pm

What would you do if you had enough money to not have to work? I recently said I’d still pursue software development – it’s exciting and fulfilling and interesting and I’d still want to find a way to contribute intellectually to the tech world.

The person I responded to (let’s assume he/she is male for pronoun simplicity) was less than enthused with my answer – once given a means to support himself financially, he would wrap things up and go find a way to help people in a third-world / struggling country.

So here’s my question: is it selfish to want to pursue your own interests over some greater good / social responsibility? His goal in life is to work in order to prepare for retirement, after which he plans to find a way to help others. But the world needs people to also continue their own careers, advance their fields. So who decides who does what? Are you only allowed to be selfish and focus on your own career if you’re simply blind to all the suffering going on in the world?

I understand that everyone has some sort of obligation to better humanity – but who’s to say to what extent? Should everyone who is able and aware stop pursuing their dreams (additional point – can dreams be selfish? I suppose they can – but then why don’t we push social responsibility to kids as much as “dream big, you can achieve anything”?) to serve others? How do you decide who has to give up their dreams (to be the best X, to achieve Y) for the betterment of some other society? Or – is helping other people automatically going to trump the fulfillment of achieving any of the previously identified dreams?

I’m conflicted. Frankly, startups, new media, and technology rank much higher on my list of interests than poverty and hunger. Does that mean that, hands down, I’m a selfish person for not caring about others? Does that mean all interests are ranked – some interests are inherently better or less selfish than others? Does being concerned about poverty and racial issues mean that you’re a better person than those who care about the environment? Or gender issues? Or socioeconomic issues within the US, versus those outside?

At what point do we start drawing the line and saying, “you don’t care enough about X. You’re being selfish”? Isn’t this a slippery slope – creating these strict definitions for “caring about others” and judging people based on it? By these definitions, I can care extensively about and for others in my life to the extreme and still be considered selfish. Can you set bounds within which caring is irrelevant? If you always deliver soup to sick friends – must you also donate and be involved in Red Cross / Salvation Army work to be a good person?

I don’t know where to draw the line.

MIT 6.001 and the new curriculum

Posted by christine - 05/11/09 at 03:05:03 am

A recent post about the death of 6.001 caught my attention earlier today, and I’ve been stuck composing this blog post in my head for awhile.

As one of many MIT Course 6 students who took 6.001, I’m crushed they’ve been changing the curriculum. When it happened, student speculation ran along the lines of – enrollment in Course 6 has been dropping since the introduction of Course 20 (Biological Engineering). And because 6.001 was so heavily CS-oriented, the department didn’t want to continue losing the set of students who were turned off by the lack of hands-on appeal – so they wanted to make the class more accessible and exciting to the largest number of students.

While, from what I’ve seen and of 6.01, the class lacks not only the pure coolness of Scheme versus Python, but also 1) the ability to even the playing field for students, regardless of their previous programming knowledge, 2) the radically different way of thinking about computer programming that Scheme and SICP provided, and 3) an actual solid grounding in thinking about problems computationally and breaking them down. (One of the upsides I think I would have appreciated, however, is the ability to put an industry-relevant language on my resume. “Scheme” got a lot more raised eyebrows than job offers.)

What MIT offers now for those looking for CS grounding is an “intro intro” course called 6.00 – a class required for Course 20 but not for Course 6, and a class designed specifically  to teach students how to think computationally and design software programs. 6.00 covers CS basics from recursion to performance to basic Big-O notation. Part of me wishes this class was included in the required curriculum, and part of me thinks it would be too easy / a waste of time for those who have programmed in the past.

I wonder whether this argument boils down to – how should students learn? By learning the basics and theory (math, physics, basic CS classes like 6.001 / 6.00), or by exciting students first by offering hands-on classes and lots of options (6.01, removing 8.02, the E&M class, from the General Institute Requirements, etc.). Unfortunately, the latter approach feels like MIT is relaxing its standards for its students – trying to make things exciting now so that students stick with the program, instead of building a solid foundation for later… and if that’s true, it’s not a trend I’m comfortable with.

For more discussion – the original Hacker News thread here (which actually links the article at the top of this post. How circular!)

Edit: A great point (from a MIT ‘08 sitting right in front of me in class, incidentally) made in an identical thread a month+ ago –

I think there’s something else here, implicit in Sussman’s comment, that’s important. MIT was founded on a philosophy of practicality, and everything else is secondary. If you couple that with the belief that fundamental computer science is the most efficient way to enhance practical software engineering, Scheme was a wonderful choice…

Python (and, frankly, a number of the scripting languages-turned-mainstream) combines this clarity of computer science with a practicality that Scheme never had. If you can convey 95% of the basic ideas in Python, and you can also open the door to learning how to deal with 3rd party code, you’d be a fool not to. It was never about programming purity anyway, so there’s no reason to mourn the passing of Scheme. It’s progress.

Product.good -> people.good?

Posted by christine - 05/07/09 at 09:05:45 pm

In tech and the startup world, there are tons of options – new startups spring up every day with “the next big thing” – or “the ____ killer,” or “____ for [insert platform here],” or “____ meets ____, AGGREGATED!!”

So when something really cool comes around – it seems to make sense to want to jump on board and share in their (or your expectation of their) success. But when you know little about the actual team you’d be working on, and conventional wisdom seems to put “the people” at the top of the list when considering school / workplaces / environments in general, how do things play out?

I like to think that good people want exciting projects. A good developer wants stimulating work, and once put in an environment with that stimulus taken away (either by a boring project or, for example, being bought out by a company which stifles the exciting parts), they’ll find a new place to play out their cool ideas.

So I think instead of worrying whether product.good > people.good or people.good > product.good… I’ll stick with product.good implies people.good (with the converse unfortunately not always being true, without good management / vision / etc). Here’s to the future.

A life, and what to do with it

Posted by christine - 05/05/09 at 02:05:01 pm

I got into an extended argument the other day with a friend who made the claim, “MIT does an awful job of making sure its students know what they want to do after graduation.”

Another graduating senior choosing to pursue the one-year Master’s of Engineering next year (like most, to have some extra time to discover his career interests and direction), he is dissatisfied with how MIT has guided him along his path to graduation. A sound bite of his I can’t seem to forget: “I know less about what I want to do now than I did when I entered MIT.”

It makes me laugh, this sense of entitlement – the idea that a student enters this prestigious institution, often and widely advertised by its “huge range of opportunities,” and expect to be helped and told what he or she specifically is passionate about. The discovery of one’s interests, one’s passions, one’s desired area of expertise – these pursuits seem to need to be by definition self-driven.

Figuring out what you want to do with your life is a problem to deal with every year of your life, as priorities and interests change. It should be something to constantly search for, lest you find yourself at a point in your life dissatisfied and unfocused. As a student, it’s not the Institute’s responsibility to guide you. Provide lots of information and resources, yes – guide you and direct you, never.

It’s your responsibility to try our internships and research opportunities, to take an interesting range of classes, and to explore your field (academically and in the industry) as much as possible.

One other interesting viewpoint that came up when I discussed this with another friend was – MIT does an amazing job of challenging preconceptions. Plenty of pre-med majors are made un-pre-med by the Institute, simply because MIT makes them ask themselves, “Do I really want to do this? Do I really want to be a doctor (and go through this pain of being pre-med), or is this just something I’ve expected to do?” And I think that’s a positive thing – being forced to, as I mentioned earlier, constantly reexamine your own goals and expectations for yourself.

This is the time to explore – this is the time to discover yourself, and let your interests flourish. Why would you allow that responsibility to anybody but yourself?

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