(1)

This is the last post on my first try at polyphasia. For convenience, I've listed all four of my previous polyphasic posts here:

• Greetings, Polyphasic Sleep, Chives (an introduction)
• Theory of Poly Sleep, Reports From the Field (some musings and a progress report)
• Tired, Dreams, Sunrise, BSG (some errata, and more field reports)
• Errata, Food, Reductionism (I try to explain why violating conventional wisdom on sleep is at all a good idea)

After missing two naps in a single day, I realized that this polyphasic thing wasn't going to work in China.

1. We didn't have breaks at the right times in the day.
2. I was incurring approximately 100% overhead on walking back to my dorm to nap.
3. The utility of my time was extremely phase-sensitive, which is to say that having extra hours during the night didn't help anywhere near as much as extra hours during the day.

So I stopped. Re-transitioning to monophasic wasn't precisely effortless, but it was still pretty easy (after all, I've had nineteen years practice). Oddly enough, I had this conversation with my (Harvard summer) roommate a few days before I left for China:

"We're doing pretty well, it seems."

"Don't be so confident; next week is when most people fall off the wagon."

Oh, well. We're not all abnormal all of the time.

(2)

In other news, I decided I was going to eat meat while abroad. It seemed pretty common-sense to me: if I put down every dumpling that turned out to have pork inside, I'd probably starve. I'm only sort of joking -- in a place where you can't speak the language and are

I'll reiterate that I'm not trying to evangelize for vegetarianism. While I don't eat meat, I have no problem with my friends who do. I suppose that, intellectually, I would prefer that people don't (though, that would probably hold true no matter which side of the fence I myself came down on), but it's not a strong enough preference for me to spend social capital, time, or any other resources spreading my vegetarianism, even to the people close to me. I simply don't care enough.

Yesterday I wrote about the events that led me to choose vegetarianism, and some of the beliefs that underlie my continuing choice. If there were a few intended takeaways, they were these:

• The modern meat-production industry is gross, from beginning to end. This is my opinion, and you don't have to agree with it.
• Agribusiness, like any industry presented with enormous demand, has undertaken a century-long drive to cut costs literally everywhere possible. And the meat industry -- delivering unthinkable quantities at historically low prices -- has cut more costs than anyone else. This is a fact, and you sort of do have to agree with it.
• My response to the two above points is to give my food money to what I perceive to be the lesser of (many) possible evils.

Three years ago, I attended my fourth year of the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth summer program. That year, my chosen course was Ethics (section B), and the instructor was Dr. Mark Ralkowski (which my have been a significant part of why I signed up for the course). The year was 2010, I was sixteen, and I'd been entrusted with the sacred laurels of the Poetry Goddess, organizer of weekly poetry-night readings open to all campers (and staff).

That year, Mark tried out a unit that he had developed for his college students (at U. New Mexico in those days...) on the ethics of agriculture. We read Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals, talked about eating animals, and stopped eating animals. (Every one of us except one boy nicknamed 'Steaknife', whose real name I can't remember for the life of me.)

Our reasons, as I recall, were mixed. Some of us cared about animal suffering, some about the environment, and some were just grossed out by the meat-packing industry. ('Meat-packing', I learned, is a term more relevant than ever today, as 'the packing of meat into small metal containers' accurately describes the lives of modern livestock as well as it does their postmortem processing.)

I'm really not sure why I went vegetarian. I do remember the moment that I stopped eating a plate of chicken tenders; I suddenly a-lieved that the plate of food I was putting into my mouth was the same product that had absorbed 10%-30% of its net weight from "fecal soup" -- that is, slaughterhouse-wastewater "cooling vats". And when I came home, I told my mother that I was a vegetarian

I've got a few not-China-related posts drafted that I'd like to have out there sooner rather than later. Specifically, I'd like to have them posted before I touch on one China-specific topic in particular, and no I'm not telling you what it is.

In case you only want to read about my China posts, and don't care about anything else I care to write about, I'll keep an (approximately) up-to-date list of posts I've tagged [China] running here.

• Departure, Arrival (six vignettes from New York to Beijing)
• Internet ("The engine room for internet is under construction...")
• Looking Backwards (seven billion people and the blue marble)

The rambling, introspective, and at times (I felt) dramatic nature of my most recent post has brought something back to the forefront of my mind. While writing for such a disparate audience: family, friends-from-home, friends-from-school, students-from-HSYLC, future-people-I-haven't-met-yet, etc., I want to be aware of the inferential distances I'm asking my readers to jump across.

That is to say, there are mental shortcuts (e.g. "reference class" or "model (of an actor)") and cached thoughts (e.g. "humans are bad at multiplying" or "I should love 7*10^9 people an unimaginable amount more than 1") that seem obvious to me but may not be so accessible nor apparent to my readers. To be completely honest, I suspect that, for most people, "Looking Backwards", "Errata, Food, Reductionism", and "Greetings, Polyphasic Sleep, and Chives" had large sections which were more-or-less opaque with jargon or (seemingly) blind assertions.

But most of what I write seems rather intuitive to me. Which is, of course, because basically everything I write is at most one inferential step away from anything else inside my head. Not so for the rest of my readers. I'm writing from a particular accumulated background: informational (e.g. the many authors -- academic or otherwise -- I've read over my lifetime), cultural (e.g. the parlance, logical abstractions, and norms I've become accustomed to using when talking with my close friends at Harvard or acquaintances in the Effective Altruism or LessWrong communities), and personal (logical leaps that make perfect sense to me, but are difficult to explain to others).

Together, these lead me to something like a a

Challenges in writing about events from the perspective of afterward: Getting things down while they're still fresh in the mind. And so, I figure I'll start with that which is most fresh: returning home.

On the morning of the 23rd, I woke up early enough to see my friends off on their trip to see the Great Wall. I never did get to see it, or the Forbidden City, or the Summer Palace, or the 798 District, or anything else of real cultural interest in Beijing. But that's probably alright; I'll be in China again in the not-so-distant future. It's not like I'm going to see (most of) any of these kids any other time in my life. And so I don't feel so bad about missing a few sightseeing opportunities if it means I got to spend more time with a crop of truly fantastic students.

People ask me "How was China?" or "What did you see?", and my answer to either is "I didn't see much of the country; I only really saw three hundred gifted schoolchildren." Then they say "Oh." and I hastily clarify "But the kids were great, really fantastic." They don't get it, but I really do mean it; they were worth all of the opportunity cost.

My grandfather is fond of saying: "Most things, they can take away. But they can't take away what's in your stomach, or in your head." Which is to say, of course, that when the North Koreans came back to take away your money, they couldn't so easily rob you of what you had invested in your

The engine room for internet is under construction without power and cann't be used until 18August. Sorry for inconvenience.

...and oops, there went my blogging plans. Once the engine room was back up and running, it turned out that the uptime was too slow for my Harvard VPN to connect more than half the time, and of course, once the 14-hour workdays began, I didn't have the time, energy, or werewithal to sit down and blog. Besides, there were too many wonderful people around me to spend my time-units away from them.

I tried my best to keep a running journal of things that struck me as good things to post about, so I hope to reconstruct many-to-most of the posts-I-would-have-written over the next week or so. Perhaps it's not as genuine, but I'll try my best to write while it's still fresh in my mind. I figure I owe you guys at least that much for the head-fake I gave you before leaving for far-away places.