butteredpopcorn

Thanks for your thoughts and observations.

I may be one of these “simply sight readers”. I supposedly taught myself to read at an alarmingly, insufferably young age. I have no memory of learning to read whatsoever, only the before and the after. We had a complete set of McGuffey readers lying around (thanks for mentioning these, brought back memories!) but by the time I was looking at them I could already sight read and thought the phonics stuff seemed somewhere between too obvious, too detailed, and too boring. The first word my parents noticed me identify was a pretty bizarre proper noun and not phonics-friendly at all.

My best guess is that since everyone in my house could read, and clearly enjoyed it, and did it all the time, I had plenty of readers to study in action and lots of motivation to watch them. Kind of like when you see a little crawling toddler staring at an older kid who’s running, totally stunned with jealousy... calculating, calculating... From before I could read, I remember asking “what does that say?” a lot. Making them read me sentences on demand. I’m a very fortunate person.

I’d be interested to know how network effects helped your six children and many siblings, on top of the dedicated instruction. Seeing you reading casually, knowing you enjoyed it, seeing their peers do it.

I know a couple high-powered executives who have to fly all over the world and meet tough deadlines. They love routine. They love staying at the exact same hotel every time they’re in town, meeting me at the same restaurant we always go to, etc. They love seeing me because I’m someone from their “real life” who just happens to be in the city they’re rushing through. They also know a lot of the waiters, security guards, building staff, etc they see each day by name. This constrained routine and rich social life seems key to their mental health and when mental health is good, physical health is easier to invest in. And vice-versa of course. But I think people forget that it’s hard to eat broccoli when you really just want to cry.

I wonder whether anyone could do it. I tried traveling all the time for work and I just kept getting sick. But, I also didn’t like that job and resented it taking me away from my home city.

Thanks for putting this into words.

During bad times it’s awful, during good times it’s “only a matter of time”.

I wish I knew how I could avoid feeling so helpless. So far I have tried “pretending to not care what happens to me and my career” and “fantasizing unrealistically about freelancing”

How did you made the switch to working by yourself?

It’s possible that if you could spin up an open source relational database like Postgres or MySQL and load your data set, you could do everything but the models and viz themselves in SQL. SQL will handle 3 mil rows in a snap. If you are transforming the contents of the cells then R is potentially nicer, but if you are mainly summarizing, grouping, subsetting, etc SQL is fast and readable and you can “dump” a CSV that’s fast to read in R or Stata. Your R or Stata code will be really short, really just a load step, a viz / pretty tables step, and then a model run step. It’ll be easy to swap out languages according to the team/prof/project requirements.

Some things you could do from anywhere with internet:

- take Skype lessons

- listen to English-language podcasts

- read Strunk & White

“Unschooling” might interest you.

If this is your idea: This is a weird, bad deal for the applicant. Only desperate people will put up with the hassle and the insult. I predict you will be shocked when these desperate candidates are not as good as you wanted. Please do not take advantage of vulnerability any more than the world already is.

If someone’s suggesting it to you: You deserve better.

I’m living your dream then! It’s pretty good. It’ll be ten fun tears “mega social media”-free next year.

I’ll use any online tool if it has a point (usually work or hobby related) and doesn’t bother me in terms of privacy, ethics, or the behavior of the other users. The cozy internet of happy, nice people of all ages and backgrounds doing stuff they love still exists, it’s just hidden in smaller places built for specific interests. I consider HN about as general and large a community as I’m willing to frequent, and I only come here to lurk and listen.

My miscellanous private social life (no point other than that I love these people) is all phone, non-Gmail email, and text because IMO no company has created anything more funny and useful than group texts and hour-long phone calls. I do want to be a little elusive and hard to find so that people value my time, and I want my happy times with other people to feel more concentrated. It’s the personal version of avoiding overexposure.

I quit all personal social media years and years ago. I use a ton of email and text and am deeply involved in several real world communities and hobbies. I do have a LinkedIn I mainly ignore, just because it helps when searching for jobs.

If a person doesn’t have real world interests or networks, I think they should take lessons or classes in things they like from people they respect and see what happens organically over a year or so. They can reintroduce their hobby’s tech stack into their life as needed. For instance, I still watch a lot of YouTube (without an account) and read a lot of non-Reddit forums, like this one, because they help me learn things.

Not having social media is rarely an issue for planning and staying in touch with people and I rarely get asked about it. I still waste lots of digital time but I do it in ways I find more amusing than toxic.