It’s so weird to think that I’m going to wake up tomorrow and a whole new world of human experience will have opened itself to me

What I am now isn’t remotely the limit of my future

What are you most excited to experience, Frank?

This question makes me nervous, because it’s going to reveal to me exactly the sorts of things I think people are most likely to assume I like (things that people would not have reason to think would appeal to me much): the Bayesian-style ideas of “you need prior beliefs to even think about a problem, and your beliefs will depend on the data,” and “you are in a state of constant uncertainty, so your best bet is to try things and see what sticks, and try to update your beliefs accordingly.”

I’ve actually started feeling a little defensive about this stuff. My mind, as you may know, has always tended to latch onto “I am an uncertain creature who must constantly decide what to believe, and my best bet is to try lots of ideas in order to minimize the chance that I’ll end up believing something awful.” So I feel a little defensive when people try to suggest that this is a thing that will “happen” to me and I’ll “need” to do it, or that it’s a “correct” way of thinking that I can’t escape.

(What I like to do in general is “follow lots of avenues of research, including avenues with little if any prior chance of success, and try not to worry about how I’m going to explain it to people when this all goes to shit. In fact, I think it’s a mistake to worry too much about explaining it to people at all. Just let the truth flow from you, like a river, like the great, powerful Mississippi, or the Amazon. It is right there in nature and it has a right to be you.” The Bayesian-style “use all your prior beliefs as your starting point and try to update them accordingly” thing is, in its own way, a more literal translation of that sort of feeling – and yet it often feels like it’s going to take away from that feel rather than give it back. So I am defensive about it, for the same reason that I’d be annoyed if someone just said “just do this anyway,” which is that the whole idea feels like trying to take away a part of your soul)