Slug Story

Humans are competitive by nature; but I stand out among my kin. When I was a kid, I was very invested in various PE games like dodgeball. Occasionally this was to the detriment of my teammates, but mostly we reveled in being given more recess adjacent time. In elementary school, I’d spend hours of my afternoon around a kitchen table playing board games with my best friend Keith and his parents when they weren’t preoccupied. We’d play the best we could as children from relatively simple ones like risk to the industrial revolution simulator in a box that is Brass: Lancashire.

Mutually trying to tear each other down is a freeing feeling unlike many others, which might explain why we spent the rest of our time together digging holes or fighting with sticks. Ever since then I have continued to play various board games when I have the opportunity, though the skill level of UCSC is a lot higher than my highschool. Competition adds stakes that I need to function.

Many people have a complicated relationship with the internet, I don’t. I like it, a lot. Short form video content bores me but the endless amounts of text ripe for the plucking. Humans have put out much of the information we have gathered on an endless buffet. Want to learn about the birth of empirical measurement in medieval monasteries? There’s a book online. There’s a library grander than anything a modern human can conceptualize available to ~everyone—67% of the world has internet access. I journey up mountains of information, only to reach the summit and see the range stretches ever onwards.

Living in this information age makes clear that my greatest privilege is the year I was born. Famine has been all but banished from the earth and child mortality drops year by year. Residents of the first world live in a mostly post-scarcity society, living standards considered lavish 100 years ago are easy to achieve (though people fall through the cracks on housing where we have made 19th century middle class quality housing illegal). Due to financial aid, I live in my own room and get 2 meals a day for free. Others might need to work a job or be reliant on some other benefits program, but whatever the situation most are far from the specter of death that hung over ancestral humans. This lack of stakes drive people crazy as they invent their own. My vice of choice is arguing with random people.

These debates can span most topics though are mostly related to modern world events. Does Sydney have artificially high home values? Yeah, maybe. Is Kamala Harris’ unrealized capital gains tax bad policy? No, it’s an improvement on the status quo. Does literature for 12 year olds deal with themes of rape? Yes, To Kill a Mockingbird does. Are deficits responsible for recent economic growth? No, they’ve been crowding out private investment. In the war of ideas, I am a medieval aristocrat whose purpose is battle.

Every time you are wrong, you learned something new. Even when you’re right, your ability to make convincing points is improved. The thoughts I share in class are more coherent for having adversaries picking at holes in my reasoning. There’s pitfalls of course, slinging insults does not cultivate virtue but a good mantra is that you are fallible and will make mistakes. When I start reading the literature on a topic, I am just as often checking if my own thoughts are correct as if my interlocutor’s are.

During lectures I am the first to raise my hand, I get problems wrong sometimes which is all the more reason to pay attention and think through what is happening. There are embarrassing mistakes like missing words written on the board but there are also more subtle errors like misunderstanding what it means to find the greatest common divisor. However, professors are gracious and explain gently (at least so far) what you’ve messed up. Slowly but surely good ideas are collected and bad ones discarded. The rock rolls back down the hill, but every time the bumps and divots are worn away.

Sisyphus has been freed from eternal torment but it turns out rolling a boulder is good cardio and what else would he do?