Repl.it has published a cool interview with Simon! It was interesting how Simon struggling to answer some of the more general questions gave me another glimpse into his beautiful mind that doesn’t tolerate crude dimensionality reductions. The first question, “If you could sum yourself up in one sentence, how would you do it?” really upset him, because he said he just couldn’t figure out a way to sum himself up in one sentence. This is precisely the same reason why Simon has had trouble performing trivial oral English exam tasks, like picking some items from the list and saying why he liked or disliked them. The way he sees the world, some things are simply unfathomable, or in any case, extremely complex, too complex to imagine one can sum them up in one sentence or come up with the chain of causes and consequences of liking something on the spot. He often tells me he sees the patterns, the details. Seeing objects or events in such complexity may mean it feels inappropriate, irresponsible, plain wrong to Simon to reduce those objects and events to a short string of characters.
This made me reflect upon how Simon keeps shaking me awake. I used to find nothing wrong with playing the reductionist game and frankly, had I been asked to sum myself up in one sentence, I would have readily come up with something like “a Russian journalist and a home educator”. It’s thanks to Simon that I am waking up to see how inaccurate that is. I begin to see how many games that we play in our society are forcing us to zoom out too far, to generalize too much. How often don’t we just plug something in, pretending we can answer impossible questions about the hugely complicated world around us and inside us! Well, Simon often honestly tells me that he just doesn’t have the answer.
For that first question in the interview, I suggested Simon answer something like “it’s more difficult to sum myself up in one sentence than to prove that e is irrational”, to which he replied: “But Mom, to prove that e is irrational is easy! It’s hard to prove that Pi is irrational!”
I must add that at the same time, Simon has really enjoyed the fact that Repl.it has written a developer spotlight about him as well as the social interaction on Twitter that the piece has initiated. It gave him a tangible sensation of belonging to the programming community, of being accepted and appreciated, and inspired him to work on his new projects in Repl.it.
Geeks out of the box 