AFTER WORK TIME DOCUMENTATION SYSTEM INSTRUCTION MANUAL
In the fall of 2019, I realized something about myself. I had a great job and had just got hitched. But when someone asked me what I liked to do, I didn’t really have an answer. I had worked for a long time to get my PhD in Economics and then I threw myself into work in the “tech industry” - an odd, nebulous term that, from what I can tell, means a company located on the West Coast, i.e. even if AWS did not exist, Amazon would be called a “tech company” but Walmart would not be despite both being places where you can order stuff online. In any case, I didn’t have an answer for the question about things I liked to do, and I set about finding one.
I stumbled on two things I liked: chess and reading science fiction and fantasy books.
Chess is a game that is simple in structure but difficult in specifics. From a theory perspective, chess is a perfect information, sequential move, zero sum game, a class of very well understood games. All one has to do is use backwards induction to solve it - simple! It’s just fancy tic-tac-toe! So why do I hang my knight? I like it because it’s a difficult thing to learn with easily measurable progress. Most careers are the opposite: relatively easy to learn but with difficult-to-measure progress (“am I becoming a better salesman because I made more sales this quarter or did our company’s product just get more attractive?”).
I enjoy Science Fiction and Fantasy (SFF) books because I get to learn about another world, how it is different from ours and similar, and also for another reason that has little to do with the genre itself: it has attracted authors who write good plots where good people try to do great things. Their stories evoke emotion not analysis, i.e. I don’t think the chasmfiends in the Way of Kings have anything to do with Freud. These are the stories I like reading. This last point shows up in a lot of other situations - programming languages come to mind - where the definition of the thing is not the most important thing about the thing, i.e. programming language X is a good choice for task Y not for any technical reasons but because a lot of other people who have tried to do something like task Y used programming language X so there are lots of libraries and examples of how to do it. Similarly, SFF is a good genre to write adventure stories in not because of anything intrinsic to the genre but because authors that write adventure stories tend to use the SFF genres.
I am writing this blog to keep track of progress in my hobbies and to write about them and the things I am learning. My life at work is easy to remember and keep track of. There are e-mails. But most of my after-work life is in solitary things. So I’d like to remember the good times I had with them. That’s what the blog is going to be about.
Lastly, I am lying about my name. It’s easier to write when it’s not connected to the offline me.
Expect:
Hot chess takes
Reviews of my best and worst chess game of the week
Book reviews
Updates on this fantasy novel I’ve been writing - purely for fun
Musings on the role of hobbies in our lives
Hot takes on programming, statistics, and business