Paul: Maybe I Wasn't as Lazy as I Thought
Presently there is much to-do about the degree to which Large Language Mirandas are ruining higher education, particularly the liberal arts, and it is utterly fucking bleak.
I've long had this idea that I didn't work hard in college. I majored in (sigh) Asian Studies (it was the closest to Japanese I could get at the University of New Mexico), with a minor in History. I'd initially planned on a Computer Science minor, but washed out after getting a disastrous-feeling C in CS 257, "Non-Imperative Programming," which I took because I thought the name was funny. "Ha ha, nonimperative? Like you don't have to do it?"
It turned out that it was a class in Scheme, a dialect of Lisp, and it was the only C I got in college. It kicked my ass.
I am an inveterate personal archivist, digitally speaking, and I have most of the computer files I created in undergraduate school, which makes them (gulp) well over twenty years old at this point. They're pretty poorly-organized, though, so every once in a while a melancholy humor compels me to dredge them for some fondness- or wince-inducing artifact I might have missed during the previous melancholy humor.
Recently I found my CS 257 homework assignments. They are filled with clumsy attempts at functional programming, along with a very naive 19-year-old's attempts at witty commentary. Ten or fifteen years ago they would have made me cringe into a shame singularity. Now, though, reading the homework of a version of myself to whom nothing really bad has ever happened, I just want to hug that kid:
;;; 7.8
;;; Maybe I wasn't supposed to use lambda. Maybe I don't care. ^_^
(define (exaggerate statement)
(every (lambda (the-thing)
(cond ((equal? the-thing 'good) 'great)
((equal? the-thing 'bad) 'rotten)
((number? the-thing) (* the-thing 2))
((equal? the-thing 'big) 'humongous)
(else the-thing)))
statement)))
The ^_^! In a homework assignment! Dr. Pearlmutter's CS PhD was from Carnegie-Mellon, for god's sake!
I was so ashamed and disappointed by my CS 257 performance that I gave up computer programming for like a decade and a half, and the hell of it was--I truly wasn't that bad. I got a C! I didn't fail! I didn't do well, and I pretty clearly didn't master the material the way the course asked me to, but—still, that's not the same as an F.
But it might as well have been. I never took another CS class. I switched to History because it was, I thought, easier.
The trouble was, I had fully embraced the idea that my GPA would really matter for whatever I wanted to do after college, so I was an inveterate grade-grubber. I wasn't an especially disciplined student—I was constantly procrastinating on papers, etc—but I lived in such fear of turning in an assignment incomplete or late that I always turned something in by the deadline, and it was always of roughly appropriate length. I was also a rule-following kiss-ass, so the idea of academic dishonesty was completely off the table.
The narrative I've long held to was that I worked genuinely hard in my Japanese language classes, and only as hard as I had to in everything else, save for cases where I liked the professor and wanted to impress them. Outside of my myopic interest in Japan I chose classes for how easy I thought they would be, but I always wanted an A, and my final GPA was something like 3.7 or 3.8, so I typically got that A.
I stayed up late writing papers and formatting bibliographies. I took feedback on my writing especially to heart and constantly endeavored to impress. Upper-level History classes typically involved pretty serious bluebook work in their final exams, and I felt I was a slower-than-average writer by hand, so I did actual study and review in order to do well on them. I took a few creative writing classes and wrote short stories of tremendous mediocrity but total sincerity.
I did all of this not out of a deeply-felt desire to engage in the academic grandeur of the liberal arts, but because I was unhealthily invested in the idea of myself as a clever boy. I've frequently bemoaned my young aversion to poor grades, which inarguably kept me from what would've been valuable academic experiences, and I've often felt that it was evidence of a fundamental aversion to hard work. But what I'd lost sight of until literally this morning is that with my shameless grade-grubbing I nonetheless conned myself into working pretty hard anyway.
For most of my adult life I've looked on my Asian Studies BA from the University of New Mexico as a kind of overture for the mood that I've long felt dominates my adult professional life—a kind of eccentric also-ran-ness, not a failure per se, but certainly not successful.
I am far from certain that if ChatGPT existed in 1998, I would have nobly eschewed its use. My academic honesty was motivated as much by fear of consequences as it was by pride. But I was vain, too, and that unseemly vanity was (and, alas, is) satisfied only by two parallel conditions, and without either it starves: Someone whose opinion matters has to tell me I'm good, and I have to believe that they could be right. Would that second part have provided some kind of prophylactic against the temptation?
There are enormous downsides to letting this kind of vanity motivate you, and having endured those downsides for many years I lost sight of the simple fact that it did in fact still motivate me. I worked pretty hard in school, and no one is more surprised than me to discover after all this time that I got something out of it.