Special Concentrating
I think that concentrations (majors) at Harvard are a double-edged sword. And so, last week, after a few months of work and meetings with more than twenty Harvard faculty members and a lengthy application with multiple letters of reference, an email landed in my inbox with a letter which congratulated me, with the message that my self-designed ‘Special Concentration: Rationality and Decision Theory’ had been approved by the Standing Committee on Special Concentrations.
There are many good reasons for concentrations to exist - the intention of the liberal arts education system is to educate students, as former Harvard President Abbott Lawrence Lowell said, “A well-educated man must know a little bit of everything and one thing well.” At our Convocation last year (this fancy ceremony officially welcoming freshmen to Harvard), Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana addressed us, saying that choosing a concentration trains you to see the world through a particular lens - but also that regardless of what you choose to concentrate in, all Harvard graduates have analytical, rigorous, and imaginative minds, creative enough to take the methods of their chosen discipline and solve problems across all opportunities they come across after they graduate.
Indeed, concentrations give students a path to walk in - there is a set group of 10-14 courses which a student must complete in order to graduate, a rigorous foundation of knowledge to ensure that they have the ability to think critically and solve problems in the world. Students should not be allowed to graduate if they take classes without the requisite depth for a liberal arts bachelor’s degree, breezing through with solely basic introductory classes. Indeed, it is important for a student concentrating in a particular field (say psychology) to have a base of knowledge and skills in order to contribute meaningfully to either industry or academia/research. That student needs to understand the underlying theories of psychology and have basic lab skills in order to succeed in graduate school.
Despite these strong reasons for standard paths of concentration, I found much to dislike with the idea of concentrations. What are they, intrinsically? A few words on one’s resume, and a set of required classes that force us to make decisions about how we are to spend hundreds of hours of our precious time at one of the most opportunity rich institutions in the world. Earlier this year, I realised I had intellectual interests that really weren’t satisfied by any concentration or combination of concentrations at Harvard, and a Harvard alumnus friend and mentor to me advised me to start speaking with the office of ‘Special Concentrations’ and various professors about the idea of creating my own concentration. He said that it was one of his big regrets from his time at Harvard - that he didn’t find out about special concentrating early enough. After all, I had applied to most US colleges as a cognitive science major, but declared philosophy, psychology, and computer science as interests when I applied to Harvard - we may be one of the only top US colleges without said major.
I had focused my studies on pure Math and Latin mostly in my first semester, which was a heavy academic load, but took some classes with a lighter workload my second semester, and as a result had plenty more time and mental bandwidth to think about designing my own concentration. I sent some emails - the first to the director of Special Concentrations, who advised me to really find clarity about what I wanted to study and that it would be a long journey ahead. There are understandably many reasons why declaring a special concentration at Harvard College is non-trivial - it needs to be a genuine academic area of inquiry that a current concentration cannot encompass (for otherwise, why would you need a special concentration), being a special concentrator puts a heavy onus on the student to be resourceful with their own advising network and academic journey (especially with the absence of an established department), and also requires the breadth and depth that a standard concentration holds (to ensure the student isn’t taking the easy path out). I was advised to speak to a significant number of faculty members about my academic goals, and to the various Directors of Undergraduate Studies in the departments I was interested in. Last semester, I spoke with professors in the Math, Philosophy, Psychology, Statistics, Classics, Comparative Literature, Romance Languages and Literatures, Neuroscience, Computer Science, Linguistics, and Economics departments about my academic journey. I spoke to some lovely Special Concentration alumni as well, and of course, my original friend who suggested the special concentration in the first place, who is still today an amazing mentor to me and a sounding board for ideas.
Conceptually, I started off with this idea of formal systems - I had read Godel, Escher, Bach in winter before the start of the semester. I also saw strong overlap in the proofs I was working with in math, and the puzzle solving that I experienced when reading Latin literature. Both disciplines require this idea of axiomatic thinking, and making meaning out of symbols that are somehow connected by logical rules (axioms). When we change a slight assumption a proof, we get a totally different result. Likewise with Latin - if we interpret a word in the ablative case instead of the dative case, or imagine the subjective or objective genitive when reading Virgil, we have vastly different results. Solving the puzzles in Latin reveal these beautiful stories that require a modern ‘decoding’ in order to access - and there is some part of it that is indescribable with the English language. My fellow classists will agree, I hope. But I realised that it wouldn’t make sense as an academic area to pair math and classics, at least for my special concentration. So, I adapted the first half of my special concentration to include math, statistics, and philosophy, in order to study formal reasoning.
Those who know me will know that I love poker. I played quite significantly in freshman spring earlier this year, but I do still play here and there currently. There’s something about the complexity and stochasticity of the game, paired with its social benefits, that makes it fascinating. Indeed, there is always a most optimal move in poker, like chess. There is an optimal sizing and betting range, or course of actions given the idea of pot odds and playing hands ad infinitum - the theoretical way to play poker. But poker is a uniquely human game, in that much of it relies on the human aspect of judgement. We might have some emotional attachment that’s affected us that day, or some unexplainable cognitive bias that leads to some weird intuition, or we get ‘tilted’ in poker, that is to say, frustrated and impatient, and make irrational decisions. This makes poker something that almost can’t be explained by formal modelling, and that is why it attracts people who are generally more intellectually stimulated by the game. It certainly makes for excellent conversation at the table and nights of great fun. So, I decided to incorporate courses in economics, psychology, and neuroscience into my special concentration, in order to study reasoning under uncertainty, where formal models break down.
It was important to me when designing my concentration, to not cop out by studying only easy classes. I had done plenty of background reading and independent learning about many of the fields in my concentration, so that I was largely ready for more challenging, rigorous ‘100-level’ non-introductory classes. I wanted to study what it means to reason, and to reason well. What is the difference between the formal, axiomatic side of reasoning and human reasoning? I wanted to study the theory of decision making, and human rationality. Two prior special concentrators named their concentrations ‘Rationality’ and ‘Decision Science’, so I decided to name mine 'Rationality and Decision Theory.’ I now also am trying to conduct research in the psychology/neuroscience space, especially around cognition and this idea of ‘resource rationality’. More to come on that.
But this also has so many wide-reaching consequences - studying cognition means studying the mechanisms which govern not only card games or proofs, but the way humans act on the global stage, in policy labs, and in parliament, not to mention the way that artificial intelligence will shape the future. People are already delegating their decision-making processes to large language models - but could they ever reason like humans do? With the irrational, cultural, highly personal factors that we learn of when we grow up - stories influenced by the greats of Roman and Greek literature. We were all told Aesop’s fables growing up, and emotionally affected in ways that are hard to describe. I’ve written a couple articles on literature and irrationality recently, and can’t seem to find any more ‘profound’ words than what I’ve written. Understanding the boundaries of our reasoning and human interaction with technology is essential to ensure that our delegation of work and decision-making to machines remains ethically and epistemologically grounded.
Lastly, I had the choice to declare if I’m going to be studying on the honors path or the regular non-honors. If you had asked me a year ago, I would’ve said that honors way too much work for just a few shiny Latin words on one’s resume. But after some small scale final projects toward the end of last semester, and going through the special concentration application process, I realised that a thesis is this incredible opportunity to study anything I am interested in, with total freedom and support from some of the most intelligent people in the world. The idea of tutorials and mentorship in diving into something that keeps you up at night because of how fascinating it is, really excites me, and has even moved me to seriously consider graduate school after college. I’m very grateful that I’m at Harvard, because I don’t think that I’d have the support from amazing people to do this at any other school.
As of last Thursday 18th September, I am officially a Special Concentrator at Harvard College. I am one of nine at the College currently and the only Special Concentrator in my class (so far!) - I am very grateful for all the guidance I’ve had so far, and so excited for the path ahead.
Yurui
