This is part of The Blogging Gauntlet of May 2016, where I try to write 500 words every day. See the May 1st post for full details.

About a week ago, a friend of mine made a Facebook post.

That moment when you accidentally use bodywash instead of shampoo, and think “this should have been caught at compile time”

Everybody laugh, cue snare drum, etc. But, it got me thinking. This friend of mine is someone who’s done functional programming, and thinks a lot about programming languages. It’s fitting for him to think about catching mistakes at compile time. To quote the Haskell wiki, “A lot of people experience a curious phenomenon when they start using Haskell: Once your code compiles it usually works.”

In the 2nd-to-last week of classes, a student in the graduate level machine learning/stats course I’m taking said he had very high regret because he procrastinated making his poster.

Last weekend, I did a puzzle hunt with someone who does systems research in AMPLab. At one point, a few members left to do an on-campus puzzle. He said it made more sense to work on a new puzzle instead of getting caught up on the partial progress of the puzzle they abandoned. Or to be more exact, he said they already had that puzzle loaded into their cache, so it wasn’t worth the context switching time for us.

In one memorable math session, someone decided the word “three” was a variable, leading to insane sentences like “If three is bigger than eight, then this property should hold.” But why not? “Three” is as reasonable a variable name as any other.

(Okay, not really, but it’s still amusing.)

If it wasn’t already clear, I’m among these people who let their technical knowledge blend into their real world thoughts. I literally just wrote a post about online milk tea regret minimization. I’ve also described my decision making as a priority queue. I get offered a task with high priority. I can either do it like a productive person, or procrastinate it by placing it back into the queue with lower priority. Perhaps that’s my algorithms side bleeding out.

To me, it seems like the more you think about a subject, the more it shapes the way you think in general. I’m sure that leads to all sorts of stereotypes. Physicists round constants to orders of magnitude. Theoretical computer scientists throw out constants entirely. I don’t know of stereotypes for biologists or chemists, but I’d guess they place more on the process of things - how things change from one thing into another. And then of course, math majors are both pedantic and willing to treat absurd scenarios with total seriousness, because math eventually turns into reasoning about abstract structures that have no real world analogue.

I don’t think this is a bad thing. I also don’t think it’s a good thing. It’s simply a thing; a way that our brains work. I’m sure if you asked, every major could give you a way their major has shaped their thoughts to make them a better person. Math made me a better problem solver and a more detail-oriented person. Astrophysics helped me imagine scales of exponentially large numbers, and gave me more reason to care about Earth. Philosophy made me better at arguing my points. Public health made me more empathetic.

Which field of study shapes thoughts in the best way? There isn’t one. Humanity probably needs all of these modes of thinking, and we’ll borrow the hats of others if we need to think in a way that’s unfamiliar to us.