What a journey it’s been. Today, unfortunately, I will be writing my last post on this site. My journey began on September 7th of last year, and today, on June 13th of 2019, it will end. Through my numerous blog posts, I’ve tried to express how I feel about some topics and voice my opinion, or just to recap facts/concepts that I found interesting. Many of my blog posts include reflecting on novels I had been reading throughout the year, in others I’d discuss podcasts regarding certain topics, and sometimes I’d talk about current events. Overall, writing all these blog posts really helped me think, and in some cases even helped me understand concepts from my other classes. I’ve learned how to write more concisely and how to tie ideas back to a central claim. I’ve also learned more about some things I had been interested in but had not done much research in, such as the Library of Babel, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, quantum computers, etc. Some of my own favorite blog posts include my first post, “Psychological View of the American South”, ”The Damage Caused By Moral Hazard”, and “Nothing is Original”. My first blog post reflects on why I thought slavery was practiced for such a long time in the United States using a psychological perspective and how thinking as a group allowed thousands to justify the enslavement of others. The blog post “The Damage Caused By Moral Hazard” I like because I was able to talk about a topic that I thought about a lot. I’ve always noticed that people tend to push everything to its limit. And when that limit is pushed to a further extreme, then people still chase that limit. I’ve always wondered why people were so desperate to chase everything to such an extreme, and it felt good to finally learn and write about why this is. The post “Nothing is Original” I liked because the idea conveyed by the Library of Babel is very powerful to me. It made me feel like there is no purpose to finding answers to anything, because all of those answers exist. All answers to our questions can be expressed as a sequence of 27 characters on a piece of paper. But it also made me feel hopeful because it reminds me that answers to questions we find impossible still exist.
My plan for the future is to continue to learn and educate myself on topics I’m really interested in. Whenever learning, my goal is to understand what I am seeing rather than remembering. This makes it hard for me to read an article summarizing an interesting fact, as I then have to find out why that fact is true. For example, I read somewhere on some fun fact page that the quantity e^(π√163) is almost exactly equal to 640320^3+744 with an error of ~10^-12, and I found out that there was a reason behind this. For the past year, I have worked to understand this, but have been faced with numerous blocks because in order to fully understand why this is true I’d need to have a background in graduate level mathematics, which drove me crazy. I worked to understand everything I possibly could about it and made progress, but I’m not there yet. I hope that in the near future I will be able to answer this question. In the grand scheme of things, we know almost nothing. We are stuck in the dark in an entire universe full of secrets, and it is my goal to be able to allow myself to make some sense of why everything is.
Goodbye, and thank you for reading my work.
Robert's Intricate Ideas 