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Disappointment

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As I sat at my carrel in the Morris library, I took the February sunlight for fortune smiling on me, inspiration spilled liberally from my Pelikano steel nib fountain pen, and I went home at the end of the second day in a blur of fatigue and self-congratulation. According to certain schools of cognitive science (e.g., Minsky’s Society of Mind model) the idea of a “self” as a unified, indivisible entity is an oversimplification; rather (they suggest) a self is an uneasy federation of simpler subsystems (sometimes termed “agents”) with their own local goals and interests, which are frequently in competition with one another. My annotated exam was no longer a certificate of failure, it was a how-to manual: it was about how to prove an inequality by leveraging the convexity of a cleverly chosen auxiliary function, or how to recast a geometric figure in terms of complex numbers and understand it with algebra.

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