A personal post [View all]

I wanted to share something with you guys here. I have changed a lot over the last 14 years. Some day I will explain better.

I have not changed, so much as changed back.

But I used to try to be someone else in public, because I was never very sociable. I am an only child and I liked reading. I used to try to get away with spending time alone when possible.

Anonymous use of the net with just text is my favorite mode of communication..lol.

I was never insecure. I am Indian and I grew up here. And it was less difficult than I guess highschool etc are over there?

I was educated in the US and I loved it (after the first year in an EECS dept that was hideous..even there, there were a few decent professors, but some were this type that totally is like these jerks breaking everything).

I drifted into a natural science lab and loved it and my postdoctoral mentor was in my opinion the best educator and scientist ever..ever! No argument! No..he was really cool. He cared about everything.

My last mentor was very decent too. We had a rough relationship, because he is overextended and though he is cool, I am wary of the world of the elite at that level. I was never very diplomatic on the inside. So a high surveillance environment is brutal in every direction.

The elite of that type have to be polite to all sorts of people I think should be drummed out of society was..yeah that was hell.

With none of my mentors have I ever had to be diplomatic. They are standard issue NIH professors. But this was that Google type. And I process those guys often just as “creep”.
Andy Rubin/Amit Singhal (sexual harassers), Larry Page (Epstein Files/megalomaniac who wanted to set aside a part of the world for deregulated experimentation), Sergei Brin (sleazy adulterous douchebag); Sebastian Thrun edtech shill/douchebag who wears an eye patch..which somehow makes the edtech shilling worse), Peter Norvig (writes hideous opeds in Noema shilling LLMs..which in fairness I suppose should not be classed with the other offences), Fei Fei Li (kinda cloying on the surface, but sends emails revealing a very different type of person ..all “hey guys don’t let the press find out!” Saw that in the NYT years ago over Project Maven?), Christopher Manning (likens LLMs to humans with mental disorders. NYMag had an article about it), another guy I knew of (banged his undergrad 🤮..my relationships with my mentors/colleagues are sacrosanct professionally..what kind of person does that?), Anthony Lewandowski (wanted to make an ai god ); That Woebot person/Andy Ng/Blake Lemoine ( just no)

And when you stumble into an institution you thought was like the very safe and routine parts of the NIH and instead it is this type, that is awkward. As Jon Stewart put it after Crossfire “they are there”.

By contrast I really do like and respect all my colleagues from my three labs and adjacent ones. There was friction sometimes as they aren’t cults, but very little overall.

And though I never contact them (I don’t like to talk to scientists about anything unrelated to work), they are on my mind a lot and can count on my support.

I am going to file some serious complaints eventually about misconduct in human subject research in these ai and data science adjacent fields. Mostly here in India, but some eventually with the NIH. But I am going about it carefully.

I have barely brought myself to voluntarily talk here. I am trying to

I plan to always be anonymous. I hate crossing the public-private divide. Why would anyone give up being an average citizen of a democracy for a public life? I don’t get it where your profession does not demand it and where you cannot contribute except anonymously and never for profit or self-promotion. I am very grateful that Adam Becker, Clayton Dalton etc are out there. But they are respectable.
I was a mediocre scientist, but not any less dedicated for all that. Publicly funded science is a service oriented profession and not about oneself except as it relates to one’s credibility as a human.
There is never any ai use in my posts. Such as they are, they are all human.

There is no way I could at this point reinvent myself as fit for anything but buttoned down formality in public life and having it proceed with redactions etc. But very informal here, because I find concepts like kayfabe repulsive.

But fwiw, I am going to do everything I can for all values I think are essential and must be taken seriously in spirit not paid hollow lip service to. And I am somewhat uncertainly picking a style I never expected to as I always hated being conspicuous. But sometimes that attracts even more unwanted attention.

I find this Si Valley libertarian male/hacker/gamer etc culture pretty alien best case.

And here I share what the public should know. And you will know fwiw what I am like with my flaws and contradictions.

I do apologize if I ever hurt anyone’s feelings as I move ahead more aggressively than I really have ever before.

I lurk and watch society and human behaviors and learn to try to work out how to minimize the nuisance to me going fwd.
I have misgivings about it. But I can’t avoid it and survive.

The last straw that snapped me out of this disoriented state I fell into in the Dec of 2011 when by brain just snapped, was finding out on Feb 26 or 27, 2026, that this sleazy local hospital was acquired by Blackstone Inc in 2023. That made sense. The other thing was this obnoxious Indian billionaire Vinod Khosla coming here and throwing his weight around and shilling the type of race to the bottom a guy that classless would force, much like Narayan Murthy, Ambani or Adani. Ratan Tata and Asiz Premji have a little more class. But at this point industrial culture as a whole does not respect good science ..good well-rounded science where medicine, the natural sciences, ecology and the earth sciences are not shafted in favor of CS, a brainless growth obsession, a sort of vapidly slippery worldview and a bloated, encroaching entertainment sector and bullshit studies (Pentland, Ariely, Gino etc) displacing good solid science without a type of punishing austerity and Calvinism that aren’t actually that bright.


It was totally circumstantial my brain breaking ..I am generally fairly stable..we are all specific, unique people here or wherever I engage..

I found the people there unrelatable..they are very..insipid and tepidly correct but also batshit crazy in the shit they go along with…not my colleagues who were like normal scientists. But I guess way more open-minded about these Google types than I have ever been. I had already been defrauded by one EECS dept (the one the undergrad banger was from).
I was damned if I was going to (absent a clear explanation) buy into some weird shit that looked dubious.

And I never really liked their politics. It was very superficial when liberal and cracked out when technolibertarian.

I expect to settle down more comfortably in my old, permanent home in India, though I plan to travel for work again as travel unambiguously broadens the mind. But I do love it here. I love my sleepy town and I am fighting to keep it from forcing this kind of disgusting change in every street and home under our loathesome, corrupt, misogynistic communist CM, who has an 8th grade education and has never seen a sleazy business he would not hump.

It is funny..I thought of Jon Stewart of all people just before I went…holy shit.. there goes the old brain and sort of dissociated due to stress..
Thank you DU. You have really helped me open up to the extent I need to. Because I do not find it easy. I am reflexively wary of it.
I have to finish a paper I have been working on for 17 damn years, 14.5 of which were spent battling junk tech.


Anyway, I am going to sleep as it is 11:49 pm here. But I will check in tomorrow.
Thank you and I appreciate your forebearance with me, such as I am..lol.
I sometimes wish I was less difficult. But then I would be a different person and I would not know how to behave. Which was most of the last 14.5 years where I had no strategy beyond like Boxer in Animal Farm trying to work and ignore what back then was even less clear.