Here I am between 1 and 3 years ago.
Three stories written for a high school short story class during the fall of my senior year. Please read one at least and see if it makes you want to read the rest or not.
A story about the first conscious AI. About 7 pages. Entertaining, slight liberties taken with the capabilities of computers.
About a man who invents an impossible device: basically a teleporter. Focus on the inventor, tried to gauge world impact but may lose you.
One pager about a boy who didn't understand death correctly. The end may seem to be about the importance of life. I think I remember changing it slightly to reflect that. The real point is about what we are told and what we later learn.
Belief is the Natural Attitude of a Thwarted Mind
Originally written for UC Berkeley, then later send to Stanford and some others. It ridicules belief, unfortunately not in a very well thought out manner. At some points I come across as fervently believing in a lack of belief, or in the certainty of science, rather than trying to maintain an open thought structure, which was a more accurate description even then. This essay really tipped off the horrible egotistic attitude I carried into all my applications. I didn't have the room or time to talk about anything large because each 20 line essay had to have a discrete conclusion and 20 essays had to be written in some brief span of time, in parallel with school. Every topic seemed then either incredibly banal or begging for a book to be written. And through all of it, I could not help but enthusiasticly throw my ego at whoever read these things, applied various simplistic value systems to it, and potentially redirected a thousand life courses. It cannot be any other way, really, but at this time I could not invoke that understanding. All I could do was rage at "them", feeling my helplessness and not theirs.
Part of my MIT app. An essay intended to knit together apparently unrelated talents and interests. I still think many of the ideas I express here are implementable, but I am stunned that I felt so certain about it as to write in this style.
Q: What was your biggest mistake?
The Princeton app had some real zingers. A question like the above is a good one to ask: it essentially gives an applicant the opportunity to display total openness about who they are while simultaneously showing maturity in having learned from whatever mistake they describe. I totally flubbed it by egotistically counting my greatest mistake as having made any assumption at birth... oh god just read it. This is probably the worst thing I ever wrote, if you are looking for that.
Q: What do you want from college?
Princeton again. I simplify the life course into three categories and state in grandiose terms that I want "the meaning of life".
You guessed it: I answered, in essence, "myself".
Send to Princeton and I think some others. About how I am always thinking. Showcases some thinking that any calculus student regards as obvious.
Meaning of Life (Princeton version)
Somewhere in the middle of an essay to Princeton, in which I was once again spouting off about seeking the meaning of life, I suddenly began to write directly about the meaning of life, starting from the phrase itself: "the meaning of life". Delving into the dictionary definition brought some revelations, unfortunately recorded in the falsely certain and egotistic style of all my other college essays. The first version is what was sent to Princeton. The second version is an extention of the first that covers some alternate interpretations and goes on to discuss (as a separate essay) the nature of logic. The second version is quite worth reading, although I expect to cover the same material in a more recent essay.
These essays all jump into the middle of some topic that was being discussed in class, though if you are relatively well versed in popular history you should be able to pick up what I'm talking about. It really shines through in every essay how much I wanted to jump away from trivial topics to attack something larger (and often, in trying to get to a larger topic while maintaining the referent of a event in history, I conclude something huge quite out of the blue).
History at my school was an exercise in learning about an event in history, then asking, "is this right?". We were there to learn about morality, and this class was to force students to form some kind of moral system. There was no room for anything more general. This was in the middle of a senior year during which I was questioning everything I could. When it came across that this history course was principally about morality, I responded by writing a bunch of essays that blatantly stepped out of those bounds. I did a presentation about the ideology of Hitler, which was not about Hitler at all but about how anchored into a common moral system I was watching the entire class become. My actions weren't as calculated as I make them sound, of course. It was gut response to what I saw.
So that series of essays became a series of D's. Those D's coupled with a couple of B's finally became a C, my first ever, a grade that, couple with some egotistical essays and a lack of cummunity activities, probably killed my chances for the likes of Harvard and Yale, etc. Stanford was a wait list. I say they were responsible out of realism really. I had 8 5's on my APs, including all three Science, and English in Junior year.
Now that was a learning experience.
Believe it or not, the essay topic for a 6 page paper was, "was FDR a great leader?". I wonder if I could have been asked more blatantly to work in someone else's symbol system. Well I did so. Defining leadership in an almost Machiavellian manner I go on to discuss whether FDR fits that definition of a good leader. Never had a single thought the whole time. This was a B essay, before the rush of D's.
Three short essays for the history final Sophomore year. I can't remember the topics.
An research paper written after the string of D's about whether it was fair to drop each of the atom bombs. By this time I had gone back to my style of defining a thesis in some arbitrary moral terms, and going on to argue pros and cons without believing a thing, a kind of mathematics of morality rather than my actual thinking. When I was done I remember going through the essay and adding stronger words and phrasing where it was appropriate. It really added up to be quite genuine, I nearly fooled myself rereading it. What makes this a non-standard paper was that I focused on the second bomb (dropped 3 days later) and the Japanese reaction to the first. It turns out the Japanese hadn't really taken in the news of the first bomb by the time the second was dropped. It also turns out that one overzealous American general was responsible for pushing all the bombing dates way forward.
Various essays on works of Shakespeare, written for a Shakespeare class during my senior year. Some interesting insights, although often oversimplification was required in order to write an essay with a thesis.
Signals for Help in Traps of Conformity
This is an essay about Much Ado About Nothing. I first point out that the characters act falsely for social reasons while pining for what they claim they most abhor, or glorifying something they don't care about. Then I go on to point out that other characters in the book were entirely aware of the false fronts, and acted accordingly. An entire dynamic exists and each character acts accordingly, without anyone ever talking about what is truly taking place. Often it seems to me an extended group discussion can take place, quite clearly in the context of something that is never mentioned and further never becomes a conscious thought. Each person deals with the contextual taboo as an abstract force pushing the discussion in one way or the other, without thinking directly about what the taboo is.
Three essays in two hours, the first on Richard II, the second on Othello vs. Lear, the third on the Tempest. The second and third are better, although some quotations are missing.
Pretty bad. First belabors the many ways in which Hotspur fits the tragic hero role, then underanalyzes the reason he diverges from the tragic hero in his death scene.
The Tempest: A Resignation Speech
The Tempest was the last of Shakespeare's plays. In this essay I claim that the character Prospero is meant to be Shakespeare himself, tired old weaver of worlds. I'm relatively sure this was quite intended: there is a long passage in which Prospero recounts his experiences, and I found a 1-1 correspondance between the events described and plots of Shakespeare's plays. Prospero = Shakespeare is actually a common theory from what I've heard, although I didn't have a lot of evidence overlapping with other essays I've read about this.
Knowledge, Definition and Time
Written for a pseudo-math class called infinity. Basically ramblings. It had to be either that or the solution to the universe, so...