Hi DU
Last edited Thu Jan 22, 2026, 10:22 AM - Edit history (2)
Hi DU,
I posted a thread on Dec 23, 2025 where I mentioned filing complaints against a former employer and my contention that it is a part of this whole mess everywhere.
I use medical marijuana for a week once a month. I am usually sober except for Modafinil three weeks out of four and use marijuana once a month.
It does clean out my head and reboot my perception of reality. And it has been slowly returning to normal.
I have never had any mental illness. If I did, i would just get treatment and move on. I don’t see any stigma in that. But i do dislike the “stigma” argument used to attack human credibility.
My behavior has been odd after my last job because I find some specific strains of histrionics that American society or even any society broadly pretends to buy into annoying.
And I am not going to caricature myself because I was quite legitimately a terrible scientist. It could have been gold in the hands of a Hannitty or Project Veritas..Stoner Immigrant Charlatan destroys all of american science.
Well in fairness, that does apply as far as my fairly left-liberal natural science labs go. They were good scientists and mostly white, but probably not particularly endearing to Hannitty. As they would be hard to caricature overall and for The Spectacle, that isn’t very fun.
I actually really liked my academic colleagues. But we only ever discuss science since ..that is normal behavior. And private politics cannot that easily be translated into real world politics when you are just a random…Too groggy for Humor as a Defense Mechanism this morning.
Though they are too decent and bright to put it that way. My colleagues. But its also awkward..because..everyone is cool and its best to not talk and ..ugh. Hate touchy feely.
Anyway I also got ripped off my American computer science. So let’s call it a wash. I shall be cleaning up my journal.
I would never give up my anonymity. But I vaguely feel it should be less polemic and more professional. ;-/. I can’t remember everything I wrote. I probably didn’t mean them precisely that way.
But well..
I don’t often have a real world response to a lot that I see. George Orwell captured one part the body politic’s psyche with Boxer. Many of us who are neither very well off nor entirely badly off - that is-neither under nor over (but if anything as of now over not at all under privileged), rightly think that you have to fix your own issues before you take on society’s. I just don’t need a grifter aligned with AI to diagnose my problems for me and shove shitware onto my phone/comp etc.
Up to 2011, I did blame myself. I still do. Typing this is lower effort than working on this paper I have to wrap up.
The thing is I don’t ever do things for no reason at all. That is not how normal humans behave probably. But i completely lost my internal orientation in 2011 and have been desperately scrambling to move away from strategies I will not be able to pull off. I don’t come from people who go on tv much ;-/. I don’t think we could function well in a Panopticon.
It is not even histrionic. But people from my family have historically chosen to have fewer children and women have typically gone into the stem workplace starting from the seventies. And it wasn’t about status or trends. People in my family have what are known as “education” genes apparently. We like knowledge and understanding.
I have been a particularly poor representative of my family as a whole. My aunt was actually a famous scientist though in Canada not the US.
I try to hide this side from my family, colleagues snd even friends not because of the weed or anything I am particularly ashamed of, but ;-/.. I am a nice person as far as they or the broader public are concerned so it doesn’t really concern anyone I would engage with irl and as for people you would only deal with, with a lawyer in between or not at all, well I am not a person they would mesh with. But it isn’t all irrational and emotional. I know for a fact that the EECS dept I started off in was a rip off for anyone who isn’t willing to just pay a corporation to enter the US to then find a way to hang around. That’s the Cato-Koch view.
I was never a very good scientist, not because I am lazy/stupid, but because science is objectively a hard profession and I don’t have aptitude adequate to compensate for average to dated to outright lousy education systems (e.g. : EECS..they take 25-35 k from a student from India, but they won’t bother with an actual education). Thing is, I wasn’t just looking for a job. I am actually interested in understanding how the world works, but not on display or perfomatively. But for real. It is one or the other. Public speaking is a widespread terror because it is hard for most professionals to perform well under observation.
And I didn’t mean for internal polemics about tech to spill out. I especially try to avoid the circus on or off campus that passes for left.
That is not a fault of the left, but it is certainly a feature of human dynamics.
I am not very contemptuous of anyone. I wasn’t able to express myself well these last 14 years. The thing is, this is true in science and politics that things are generally terrible. So you look for ways..I have an instinctive startle response reaction to humans that is probably more common in other animals than other humans. I generally get along with people who like animals ;-/.
An animal behaviourist may well be a better fit than a standard issue shrink ..oh well…
It takes a while to know who you are in ways you never thought to articulate or define.
But while I am not a cynic, I myself am so inefficient etc that work or politics, on display even “Fight-Flight-Freeze-Fawn” gets stuck in Flight-Freeze-Fawn..heh.
I went to one of these schools: Cornell, Harvard, Brown, MIT, Stanford, Dartmouth, Upenn, Yale,
And that was like a blow to the head that I am
only just recovering from. But well I am still planning a less inept “escape” ..hell being other people and all ;-/. It is not entirely misanthropy though a few rare times irl it was.
I stay on the real (away from cameras or loudly and extravagantly anti-camera like presumably Jonathan Haidt..i l must make a short list of people i attack so it isn’t broadly an attack and ideally pick someone as awful and annoying as Haidt since he is unlikely to have Haidties who dox one..no accounting for tastes so one can’t be sure..man I was groggy..I didn’t mean to next recant my super secret strategies online..there is a non zero probability that someone conscious might read this..oh well..).
But on a practical note, I find all discussions and debates about tech and reality disconnected from reality and full of bullshit kayfabe and that’s not really my thing.
Altogether I need better conflict strategies. It is usually clear just after mj. I will always remember Yasha Levine as one of the few figures (the Greens aside..thats the home team) from the “Images of Adult People who arent Randoms” who stood out as very real, no matter what. He is so distinctly not bullshitting while truthful. He isn’t a good person performatively or to be popular..he just is and that’s not as uncommon in science and medicine and life as it is in this private sector/media etc crowd. And he is really bright..he and Evgenia don’t say the same stuff over and over.
That’s most people I follow. The sole plus of any unwanted attention (which in truth is all non-work and non-income related attention..good labs in science are low key ;-/…not all science influencer adjacent..not that there is anything wrong with that) is if it boosts journalists/non profits I support from DU/EarlG to Yasha or Chris Ketcham or Current Affairs.
And unfortunately for my little buddies Zuckerberg, Pichai etc I am not paranoid..just not a sucker. I was in an EECS dept and I am Green /an animal rights supporter, I know greed and grift sans a conscience when i see it. And Sinclair Lewis’ quote can paraphrase this: “when people try to take over all sorts of rigths for your property and street, it will be dressed up as concern about safety and security and about privacy being hyper privileged.”
That is nonsense.
I hate to be this unpleasant. I am DIYing my medications because unfortunately, with the exception of my medical mj doctor here and my first shrink who prescribed Adderall, I have not found any utilty in these coercive and unsolicited interventions and contact.
But ..I try to be cooperative, collegial etc ;-/.
But make no mistake about this ever, if you cost me time, health and resources over a lie or lazy thinking and not an error (including ones stemming from ..well the generally atrocious politics non-environmentally minded Cornucopians who however see junk that sells as something you cannot challenge..Idiocracy much?), there will be pushback.
I have respected the Limits to Growth all the way all my life and it is the only way to head off hateful austerity for even worse of people. I don’t impose limits o growth for others until it is invasive.
This is nonsense…some conquerors (Been reading Adam Becker’s latest book) which is apparently that guy Andreessen and ..anyway..it is all cracked.
I had an early headsup. And as of this date, the stuff that spills out misrepresents me to the extent that that is my reaction to Google,Facebook etc
For the rest, I have seen no indication that these world builders would respect the earth sciences or be that honest in general. And that’s lame and would not work with me.
I don’t come and take your stuff and you can’t have mine for presumably billboards and moonvertising or some sort of ghastly thing. I don’t want to pool in my assets for group decisions made by people whose scientific credentials are suspect. That is the gist.
I trust Dr Fauci or Francis Collins and scientists but they would be overridden going by how the world works.
All this has forced me to think about my ancestors ..i was reading a tongue in cheek piece by Ashlie Stevens.
The thing is, the gift of seeing this maniacal acceleration bts is only worthwhile scientifically or politically if your reality monitoring is really good.
I have to go work on that. I don’t really like leaving piles of confusing stuff online.
But please understand that The Marketplace has no say in my home.
We didn’t make this a green space in this urban jungle to host real world Angry Birds or to turn my home ibyo
I get that many people are successful in these professions in engineering and tech. But this is my home ahd there is no blanket right of way you can force on my property or contiguous using immigration, technology/“innovation and digital transformation!” etc as excuses.
That leads to legal precedents that are unsustainable for industry and for me.
I need to know where and when things affect me and there are always the courts. I am not particularly paranoid..if it was the normal routine level of nuisance as modernity it would be one thing.
But not a ripoff, pollution, extraction, extortion and coercion repackaged as something for a moronic ai llm thing or next level music and video etc. No.
This is my home. Not property to distribute to influencers and advertisers for a tech co and with a rather disgraceful feel of histrionics.
All these social media cos and a bloated entertainment sector warp the human brain’s perception of reality. Like Jon Stewart, Yasha Levine and the few public figures I pay attention to, I too think this shows how much of a failure it is - the media companies’ skill at honestly communicating reality to the average person. They are just mouthpieces for these sleazy industrial interests.
I cannot afford this. I “took the wrong turn” in theory at my last workplace, but the wrong turn really was ever going there at all. Had it not been for my main lab/colleagues, my best friend and my ex, I would have considered ever having visited America not particularly worth it rather than a wash overall…
It is decent here as well, but this is my home and only accelerations I allow will stand.
If there is no problem, cool. If there is, that is not good. To weave back to my ancestors;-/.. what stories i have vaguely registered didn’t indicate that my family was generally peacefully colonized. They didn’t seem that Gandhian either..I really don’t like how Google etc behave..It is mediocre kleptocracy not elite science that leads to such methods.
Well..that is goofy..hopefully a real dispute is not necessarily acrimonious or even necessary. But I have not yet made up my mind about precisely where the threshold for the banality of evil or even more unpleasantily, histrionically grifty and unprocessable things crossed or crosses the level, the sources and what to do about it. I have to work it all out.
You guys are my only forum and that’s my update. I would imagine that by now that makes sense.
Btw i wanted to be clear on this- I rarely personally experienced much racism or sexism or harassment even in this ott period. But that’s all the more reason it needs to be regulated properly..more encroachment and hand waving or worse taking people’s lives hostage systemically for wanting explanations and refusing to take a paranoid set of constraints as normal. Not that i want to follow any pre-existing script in responding. I think this restrictive, inagination devoid monoculture of corporate pap and shills for it ..
A factor that is confusing..people of my general type I finally understand, see the world as Real or as The World on TV or Online with this strict boundary where unless: 1) you commit a crime; 2) are the victim of if not a crime, some sort of grotesque fraud or 3) do something super awesome, your name shouldn’t be out there or in papers. I totally get the revulsion journalist/artist couple Yasha Levine/Evgenia Kovda (whom I have found very helpful over the years) feel around influencer culture.
I had swiftly concluded that it is definitely not the third (the awesome..) and my contention is that it’s definitely not the first or were that tje case, go ahead. I am agnostic on the second.
But I definitely will change my behaviors from here on out because it seems to be happening on autopilot. I had a pretty healthy brain in the July of 2011 and by Dec of 2011 I was a wreck.
It was this bad rollout of technology..or something like that. And I like my colleagues and don’t blame them ever, but I care very little about placating dishonest systems.
I will be okay because i was pretty healthy and I will get rid of annoying stuff. My life is far from the action and i like it that way.
= new reply since forum marked as read
I wanted to formally update my posts so far.
It’s a bit awkward. I had a pretty severe brain injury around the Dec of 2011.
Or I am going to use the term “brain injury”. The reason I am saying this is that my behavior has been really uncharacteristic of me - extreme anger, sadness, confusion, and paralysis mostly. There has also been some paranoia and type 1 errors.
It happened over the course of a few months at the time. I was stuck on this paper I was working on and had started a new job. The latter became very intense, very fast and I lost my normally very solid grip on reality.
It didn’t help that I was separated from my main mentor. He is one of the rarest of rare scientists/people out there with whom I would take things on trust at all levels. Locally, my onc comes closest.
It is not a diss on anyone else. I generally like doctors and scientists. I don’t at all have difficulty with humility. I know so little.
But once it leaves the realm of pure hard science and other factors come in, it is above my pay grade.
And this is especially true (across the board) in human politics. I really truly don’t understand humanity’s collective decision making, assuming that everyone else has some simple formula for what is wrong and it is the stuff I see out there.
I really didn’t and don’t want to bore people. My vague take on what is wrong with reality goes along the lines of: this is too many people; this model of growth flawed imo; too much fluff/warfare/shopping/superstition and as a result every system is under strain and the solutions that result are pretty contrived, terrible or exploitative ;-/.
My job was being a publicly funded scientist. I wasn’t very good at it to be honest.
But, I have usually, within the best of my ability at any point in time, tried to fulfil that role as professionally as I could. I sadly was unable to at many points, but I did try my best.
I am not really angry about this and I really wasn’t myself, which is hard to convince people of without proof. It usually expresses itself as effortless behavioral change from here on out is my best guess on how to proceed.
I guess information really does change the brain. Only it is still unclear to me time, marijuana, modafinil, my own private resources (which have been a source of relief during this time), the news I follow online aside, how exactly information has played into this, if at all.
It is very quiet and noise free and the street outside is really quiet. Don’t like anthropogenic noise, loud music blared, crowds etc much. I like quiet ;-/.
But most importantly, I guess I don’t have a very dramatic view of reality except at the most superficial levels.
I do see things as driven more by stupidity than malice, because surely outright malice is far less common (except at the very, very top - political/industrial leaders) than malice? But that is also a reason, I am a bit skeptical about what I at least see as a slightly fatuous embrace of unwanted technology (not science or medicine).
For the rest, my last workplace and some things since have been atypical. I usually get along with people of all types (including of different political persuasions) within reason for any day to day stuff.
I was a bit scared ;-/.
Looked at with less alarm and more sophistication I guess, I perceived myself as at the bridge between worlds. By which I mean the world separating what is real from the unreal at profound levels. And I was worried about getting whisked by hustle culture away from my normal real world into stuff where I no longer understand the rules of human behavior.
I really liked my last mentor, but I didn’t form the same kind of intuitive grasp of his worldview that I have of my main mentor’s.
I did not want to affect his work badly, but had I not been crashing I would have tried to convince him that his school’s hospital and legal wing etc are the worst fit for me. They won’t understand that I wouldn’t sue academia and I just avoid the private sector except at the most superficial levels. And that is true from the media to trash sold as healthcare.
I am a private citizen/was a visitor to the US and I have rights I would invoke if for profit entities tried to encroach.
Though I have to now reassess everything as I normally would. I don’t want to fall back into an atypical headspace.
I really cannot see a lot of these other things as worth the tax on your attention and memory.
He is very bright, so he will be fine since I am thankfully not permanently broken.
I usually flee these types of situations as I know intuitively that they would caricature me and not even that well. I can get easily riled up, but on the whole I mean well. Its all very tragicomic ;-/. I don’t really like conflict.
But in all seriousness, my experiences have over all prejudiced me against the fields of engineering and CS. And that level of brash certainty with anything as complicated as the human brain, I do feel leads to the complications.
I don’t really at all approve of the style in my journal so far except where it really was a rambling stream of consciousness spilling out.
It is not that it is good or bad. Its just unnatural.
At the very least the confused rambling is an accurate representation of how I think. The anger and paranoia are a response to noise above the routine annoyance level. I really hate noise. But even more so unexpected noise.
I am no princess so ordinary levels of annoyance with these many damn people one expects.
All very peculiar. Oh well..It really was the Marbury Lens. I have never looked at other humans this way.
I have railed at oligarchs and politicians whom I at least see as speciated away from the rest of us and good riddance to bad rubbish. Its near those people that reality starts to distort even in dull professions like science and medicine, whose plus is that in these increasingly savagely barbarically industrialized societies, they are havens of dully harmless labor for the most part.
I am the type of person who is very unhappy away from routine settings. I hate it.
It jars entirely with my view of reality which is the behavior of life at a certain routine pace.
Its still very confusing. I have been dealing less with people and more with not people, as thats more typical..
Anyway, I think I should post this in case I should post it. I have to think more.
What I do for work and an income is the simplest part-the plainest kind of basic research.
But if relationship with society changes, then first off: I do not volunteer to pool my resources (aka my home, my devices etc) into any project in my home country of India or the United States (which I was a visitor to..I prefer the term visitor to immigrant ;-/. The latter seems to have come to mean people who are forced to go to the US, which I am not. It is not so much that I do it intentionally, but I cannot do things unless I agree and to agree I need to know what I am agreeing to and my main mentor or my best friend from grad school or my ex husband can be proxies some wrt decision making and I generally trust academia and medicine up to a point. That point is where it gets a little awkward.
I didn’t mean what I said about Google etc precisely that way. Google employs humans too and some who are people one may empathize with.
I dojt really like hatred, but if someone has to be the villain, why not a faceless, personality free corporate creep? That sounds least showbiz friendly ;-/.
I have a horror of showbiz.
I have accidentally put on display ..;-/..my friends on the left would understand if I explained..which I am not up to at moment. I am mostly sitting around looking baffled this last year. Every time I use pot it happens wi th speed and at other times more slowly.
My brain is healing back to autopilot smooth functioning instead of on repeat the reaction that touching a hot object must induce.
Overtime the fruitless rumination I guess goes back to putting stuff back in their old places respectively in the head without much ado.
But I can’t reset this time with anger etc ij the mix rather than first trying to reassess what was altogether too much information in the Fall of 2011.
It is much easier to function when you know where you are headed roughly as well as who you are. I never had any confusion about the latter. I was and am very sure of who I am, but i never expected to find it this complicated to communicate that. I was and remain confused about where i was headed stem work wise, since it is the only kind of work I have like, but it keeps getting harder and harder.
But I will update this over time so I make more sense. I think it is important from a health and education perspective just for dull, record keeping if it comes up. Something nice and dull like Dr Fauci not like Zuckerberg/Musk etc who I have to say are terrifying from the perspective of the stock girlfailures toiling away at the bottom of the academic heap. There must be others like me, but it seems to be more typically male to attempt a profession you are no good at.
Thats not my worldview. I was privately a science evangelist for everyone for reasons connected to my disapproval of the dominion of earth worldview. You have to know a lot to understand the societies we live in and hustle culture lies in the opposite direction from that..it throws away the laws of physics and biology and gives supremacy to economics. That cannot be right.
Anyway i have foubd left media and you guys here on DU a comfort..I don’t hate Republicans tbh. That is not how I see the world. But I agree with their views on reality even less on average.
But I also generally am skeptical of most things but science, modern medicine and indoor plumbing - the three things I unambiguously approve of.
I definitely won’t forget the debt i owe to specific left wing media: Nathan Robinson’s Current Affairs, Yasha Levine (I love Yasha Levine and I am sure his wife Evgenia won’t mind 
…it is a very human thing..I have relied on him so much to understand reality..he is someone I respect a lot as a journalist);
I also like Christopher Ketcham and Nandita Bajaj etc, but I am a Green and so I at least perceive them as about as popular as I would be, i.e. not very much. Troy Farah’s misconception of the finger wagging environmentalist..I don’t know..I think we are completely dominated by left humanists..our allies like Yasha but way more popular.
It is a completely friendly divide that exists far from anythint that will ever matter. But at a bad time, I wanted the perspective of allied but different people.
I am a capital G green ;-/ ..my reflex is to conceal it since it is perceived as unrelatable and I guess about immediately moving to a mud hut..which I have no intention of doing ;-/. It is never that I don’t care about humans, but my instinctive sympathy is usually for non-human animals stuck with the mess this species is making of the planet and when you are startled it is hard to locate core features of your identity fast enough, without pissibg people off.
I am not atomized but science and environmentalism in combination make up my worldview and that was scary. I was really worried I was headed somewhere I wouldn’t be able to avoid like..yuck..tv or the papers..I hate that stuff. But if such things ever intruded, they can be handled if one is oneself.
I was never big on trends or what is popular and I retain the Indian bourgeoisie’s pre-media embarassment over being known for anything other than dull work when you are a professional white collar worker. Only it wasn’t conservative slanted. A source of extreme confusion earlier on. I don’t care much what people think about me..they would move on with the characteristic attention span these days.
And even of state surveillance etc, I have the banality of evil worldview at the deepest levels and I didn’t like it getting overwritten. I don’t really buy into dark triad etc beign as much the issue as this generally hideous form of progress will result in an eyesore of a reality.
There is a certain homogenizing monoculture..
And iguess this is my contribution to it..such as it is.
At least it is very representative of something. I am yet to ascertain what that is. Surely I can’t be the worst postdoc in the history of science was my initial take. Surely I don’t deserve such cavalier treatment for finding science difficult and using pot and being stuck with the obviously awful reality everyone is in.
And by now it is that, I don’t think one can actively choose and sculpt one’s perception system. I cannot anyway. It changes on autopilot with reliable information. But it cannot be forced. Informed consent has information in its phrasing.
I partially consented to my last workplace’s overreaches on account of my direct mentor. But I have generally trusted my direct mentors and some parts of the system (the ones that are under attack more these days) but not other parts of the system or the growth of all types and at all costs business mentality.
Nothing in human life is uncomplicated. But human biology and reality that is independent of human manipulation of perception or of human blunders is easier to deal with than the wrong kinds of other things.
Anyway I have to clean up my writing. It doesn’t look natural I guess. I really think an animal behaviorist is a better fit for me in some settings than a proper psychiatrist ;-/.
I am a civilized person, but I wouldn’t know how to react to proximity to our elites. There is clearly no positive reaction possible wrt the people who are responsible for what I see as a broken world.
But i would like to try to head back to the sort of lame people I choose to know ;-/. And i do like to keep my home, devices and street lame ;-/.
I am not American, but at least in India, even though I am an environmentalist, I have rights and a say. I don’t want whatever it is is usually my take on any new shitty thing that is sold.
I dont even need to go political. Its this-I dont buy it. I never asked anyone to buy me beyond the dullest surface contracts and there is never anything unsaid. I make it clear. I hsve no unsaid communication with anyone or if i did it would be secret left telepathy and even that could be wrong since I don’t really ever know what anyone including me should do outside the most routine.
I like lameness..I understsnd the rules very well..
Possibly Candide’s garden is a better model for me than being around alarming things..
I have the diametrically opposite view to move fast and break things. If anything the speed i see as useful was the kind Lina Khan had and the absence pf stasis what Evgenia Kovda talked about..the left (politics aside), has more people I notice with genuinely novel ways of thinking that are not diseased thinking (aka The Unabomber..I mean I get why people turn out that way..but I don’t see it as changing anything much and I dislike the kinds of change or stasis that make my life net harder
;-/).
Something new aside from the dullest scripts - to a hack like mechanical and clunky formulation of mindless surprise minimization sans any clue about what to do without large amounts of collateral damage passed off to other humans or lifeforms when things go wrong.
I will log off except when I have to update this log for record keeping. Science at the bridge between worlds is how I reevaluate it.
Adam Becker’s book “what is real” is one of several books I am casually reading..Very preoccupied lately as my brain “wakes up” i.e. goes back to its July 2011 state, but adjusted for new realities. I should also quite possibly check out Carlos Rovelli’s work.
Its not too bad for a scientist aside from how what is real unambiguously includes finding employment you are sure about as a human.
And unambiguously being clear that your property is not something the private sector or some tech companies like Google etc have any say in. The state cannot bypass citizens and work only with business.
It has been 14.5 years and this is the limit to growth. I honor the limits to growth honestly and encourage others, especially people like that Hennessy person of Google to have more common sense than someone like Sundar Pichai, who I perceive as a classic brainless billionaire who uses a sales job to hoard resources and think he is an elite game player. At least Hennessy should try to be less stupid than his constraints as some sort of Google is the supreme reality crap. It really isn’t.