About
I have two About pages. This page is about myself (Issa Rice); for information about this website, see about this site. See also colophon.
Self-introduction
(Writing this in early 2023; I have not been doing a good job of updating this section in the last several years. As of February 2023 I am still in the process of rewriting this section.)
Self-introductions on a website are tricky because different people want to know different things about me. Rather than try to cater to every audience, I will try to say things that will be of interest to the kind of people I want to interact with, in ways that will appeal to such people?
As of 2023, I basically do not earn money. I live on a mix of savings from money I earned in the past, and the goodwill of my parents. I say “basically do not earn money” because I still do a tiny bit of contract work for Vipul Naik each month. I used to do a lot more work for Vipul, and this was my main “job”. I did a mix of writing, programming, data collection, and other miscellaneous work. For the work I have done for Vipul, see his contract work portal page about me.
What do I do with my time instead? Since 2019, I have been dealing with a mysterious chronic illness. As of 2022, the majority of my time has been spent on managing the symptoms of this illness, doing health research to understand what is happening to me and what interventions to try, going to doctors and talking to other health providers, and dealing with medical bureaucracy.
In the few moments of relief that I have, I still like to think about the world. I think the world is going to end, probably quite soon, from unaligned artificial intelligence. I believe this is the biggest problem in the world right now, and I can maybe do something about it, at least once my health is in order. Everything else feels like a distraction, but also, like, having such a totalizing narrative seems harmful, and I haven’t figured out how to resolve this tension. Lately I have also been thinking that telling people about AI existential risk is maybe a terrible idea.
I find myself anhedonic, anxious, and lonely to some extent pretty much all of the time (no doubt partly due to my illness!). I am also pretty jaded and cynical about things in general, even though I want to not be this way. I therefore like to learn about things in the general vicinity of therapy/meditation/self-help. I have found coherence therapy really interesting, even though I haven’t been able to get it to work for me. (In fact, very few things have worked even minimally for me in this realm.)
I also think a lot about other humans. I want to figure out how to have better conversations (both in the sense of how I, personally, can act better, and how to create spaces/structures that encourage better conversations) and not feel like I am always fighting against the world.
For reasons that are not totally clear to me, I keep thinking about how to explain things better, in particular how to explain math better. As part of this interest I have also thought a bunch about spaced repetition and learning.
Contact
The best way to contact me is via email at riceissa@gmail.com.
See my contact page for more ways to contact me.
See the page on account names for account names I use on various websites. You can try to contact me through those sites (if they offer a messaging feature) but I can’t guarantee I will check them often.
Photo/videos
I have a photo you can use to identify me.
You can find some videos of me on my YouTube channel.
See also
- Name for information about my name
- About this site
- Colophon