Week 71
Textural research, MIT Application, ChatGPT for analysis and thoughts on what I mean by loneliness.
I don’t particularly feel like writing today. It has been a challenging week – the end of it being the most challenging of all. Yet, I find myself on my work desk, willingly enslaved by my computer.
There is something uncannily peaceful about writing on a Sunday afternoon, which, by the way, is not at all peaceful by itself. There are kids playing outside my window, birds chirping away mercilessly, people praying over a mosque’s loud-speaker and the persistent buzz of insects that I cannot name.
I am wandering closer into a self-made recluse, which is causing me agony. Maybe it’s time I stop fighting this and, maybe, the acceptance of this path is what can bring me peace.
I don’t know, I don’t know anything at all.
[Experiments] Textural research
This past week, I started exploring WebGL – a way to generate computer graphics by processing code with the graphics card, instead of the processor (making the processing system a lot more powerful).
I’ve been able to create systems that can duplicate and modify very small elements to produce finer, complex and more detailed outputs. Here are some:
I think it’s an exciting space to generate textures of materials. Good space for me to observe, understand (break down into logic) and make – which is what I enjoy doing.
[Struggles] MIT Application
My top-most worry this week was writing for my graduate applications. With the two pieces that I’m supposed to submit to MIT, I’m 22 drafts in (combined) and I have sum-zero nothing.
I went back to how I used to do things before, to discover my own truth that I need to communicate to MIT, in a process that has always made sense to me.
I think I have it. It’s just about being in a mind-space where I can synthesise this dump of words.
I need no other work, no other worry, absolutely nothing and I’ll be able to get it done. Alas, the world doesn’t quite work like that. I need to be able to manage life better.
To self: it’ll happen Arjun. You’re okay.
[Experiments] Stochastic parrot & trying ChatGPT for research analysis
Read a beautiful article by Angie Wang on The New Yorker, comparing the growth of LLMS (Large Language Models) and her toddler, who is just beginning to speak.
She introduces the term stochastic parrot in her article, a term used for a system that haphazardly stitches together sequences of linguistic forms that it has observed in vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning (paraphrased from her article).
What I found interesting was that LLMs (such as ChatGPT) do not truly understand the content they generate, but provide compelling arguments based on probabilistic merit. Therefore, essentially what an LLM is pretty good at is spotting patterns that are historically (or probabilistically) best guesses.
With this connection, I wondered at what stage of the design process can ChatGPT truly help with. In the past, I explored writing briefs, creating qualitative research guides and identifying clusters from verbatim. However, they were failed experiments.
This week, however, I fed it cluster heads and briefed it to conduct a behavioural diagnosis, which it was surprisingly decent at.
While discussing this possibility with my coworkers, where ChatGPT could probably do all our diagnosis for us (and we become experts in research only), Pratyush pointed out an interesting missed area.
This was an interesting perspective – where we agree that the expertise is not in just conducting research, but also looking at it from interesting (multiple) lenses.
For all my fixation on objectivity in the design process, it turns out that all the merit and beauty is in its insolvably subjective nature. I find the pursuit of balance interesting, but I now find the alignment to one side stupid.
[Thoughts] On loneliness
Many people in my life believe loneliness to be an absence of physical presence. They end up over-offering their presence, with words and actions, thinking that it’ll make me feel less alone.
But that’s not it. It’s not about the fact that I live alone, or that I speak to one person in this city. It’s about the loneliness of the journey – doing work that no one understands, being fascinated by things that other people find petty, feeling complexity where others feel simplicity, walking on a path that no one else is … although, writing this makes me aware of the fact that everyone is pretty much doing the same – living a life that no one else is living.
I don’t understand how people form connections that serve as meaningful ones for their lifetime. The nature of lives feels inexplicably solitary, albeit my heart can’t accept that it should be the case.
Do I live with my brain or do I live with my heart, being okay with the triumph of one defeating the other.
I don’t know. I don’t know anything at all. I even forgot the point I was trying to make.