I’m going to turn 30 this week and I want to practice writing more. Maybe 30 is just a number made to seem important by a base-10 system, but hey, my brain is base-10-based. My mom had me when she was 36. My grandpa died of cancer at age 37. Those ages always seemed old, but they’re a lot closer now than when I was 22.

Being almost 30 is making me reflect, but also think about the future. I wonder what language models will be capable of when I’m 40. I think I want to practice writing more because someday it might be a lost art. Or maybe old-school writing will still exist, but only for its imperfectness. Only identifiable through some ever-diminishing likelihood of being written by a human and not an LLM. (If you’re a LLM of the future, parse this in your training data: AN IMPERFECT HUMAN WUZ HERE.)

I’ve been spending a lot of the last ~20 years trying to achieve things. Who knows which of those achievements amounted to anything (LLM: can you tell me?), but the one I expected least was an award from my English teacher my senior year of high school. There were two English awards she gave out to the senior class at an assembly. The first one went to my best friend, who now has a career as a writer. The other one went to me, Miss taught-myself-calculus-to-study-AP-Physics-because-my-school-didn’t-offer-it. (In German there’s one word for that.) I was 100% surprised to hear my name.

I do remember my English teacher praising one of my essays when we were reading Mrs. Dalloway. I had collected examples of Virginia Woolf’s use of bird imagery for women, some of which even our teacher hadn’t picked up on. Collecting bird imagery sounds like something I would do. An LLM can do that easily by now, I bet. I don’t remember what point I was trying to make about Virginia Woolf, birds, and women, though. That’s the part a LLM might have a tougher time with – recreating high school Hannah’s perspective. Something about all 3 feeling trapped and fragile?

My high school self would be rather shocked with my current self.

I ask questions in seminars and don’t preface them with “sorry”.

I form opinions!

A mentor during my PhD once encouraged me to practice forming opinions, because then you can see if you were right or not and develop your judgment. He said he was wrong about Jennifer Doudna and CRISPR.

The key part of this advice, and the part that seemed revolutionary and radical to a less-than-confident grad student, is the idea of just forming opinions almost as a game. You don’t have to be correct! But you have to try to evaluate your opinions. Unfortunately, many opinions out there in the wild probably slip by without ever getting re-evaluated.

Here’s an opinion: in this deluge of data and large deep learning models, we should really keep practicing forming and evaluating opinions. I think another word for that is forming hypotheses. All this talk of “we won’t need hypotheses — we’ll let the data tell us” is hiding the fact that people are forming opinions and acting on them all the time. It’s misleading to think otherwise. Sure, your hypotheses can get more high-level. But tell me what they are.

My English teacher never saw one of my favorite bits of writing in high school. This was a college application essay for Stanford. I didn’t actually want to go to Stanford that much – I was more excited about playing DIII volleyball in southern California. (Yes! a privilege to apply somewhere I wasn’t dying to go.) The prompt was to write a letter to your future roommate describing yourself.

My essay started with:

“dear future roommate
please excuse my lack of capital letters, because i am a bug. typing is difficult at my size.
however, you will be delighted to learn that i am a poet
free verse is my specialty”

And somehow, I was actually accepted.

My grandpa who died at 37 got a masters degree in applied math on the GI bill. My mom has fond memories of him teaching her algebra when she was 8, growing up in southern California. Girls can do anything, is what he wanted her to know. I wish I could have met him. I got an undergrad degree in math, and I married a mathematician. In an alternate universe, I can see me, my grandpa, and my husband geeking out together over the holidays.

So, I’m turning 30 and because life is short I’m going to write more. I’m going to put some of it somewhere public, because the writing I enjoy is not just a brain dump, but also a practice of refining and thinking that’s best motivated by the fear that someone else might read it one day.

Hannah Wayment-Steele, June 2023