It has become fashionable as of late for media outlets like Gawker and others to attack Silicon Valley, math, computer science, and the hard sciences generally for being unfriendly to women. This does not strike me as much different than the bullying of math and computer nerds during high school, except now we’ve exchanged jocks for journalists, and it’s covered in a not-very-convincing veneer of social justice-y but-we’re-bullying-nerds-because-oppression. The most convincing challenge to this narrative was written by Scott Alexander in a comment, which was a response to many other specific concerns not likely to appeal to most readers.

The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits. —Albert Camus, The Plague To my perpetual dismay, I’m not a rational agent with limitless willpower. I’m not every moment brimming with novel insight and original computation. No. I’m a habit machine, a behavior-executor, on autopilot — a creature of habit. (Or “habbit,” for illiterate googlers.) I do the things that I do because that’s how I’ve done them in the past.

What’s the most bullshit-sounding-but-true fact you know? My personal favorite: “There used to be a flying reptile that was as tall as a giraffe.” It’s called the Quetzalcoatlus. 36 foot wingspan. May have weighed more than 400 pounds. Runner up: bombs containing bats. If Earth were shaped like a donut, a day would be 2.84 hours long. Terry Tao, whom I like to admire from afar, has posted what is maybe a takedown of Otelbaev’s claimed proof of Navier-Stokes, but the best part?

Meditation: If there are true things that no one is allowed to say, how will you know them? Where there are humans, You’ll find flies, And Buddhas. —Kobayashi Issa Friend, I have a confession. I like 4chan. Whenever I see someone call 4chan the cesspool of the internet or disgusting or whatever, I shake with excitement. I’ve found the King of Fools! At long last, I can kill him and the Fool people will scatter forever.

Every bit of evidence one can acquire, in any area, leads one that much closer to what is true. —Carl Rogers Here’s why replication is important. We know what is true based on evidence. The more evidence for some belief, the more confident in that belief you ought to be. This is where replication comes in. If you have one study that says something, this is not all that much evidence that this something is true.

No one in her left brain could reject reductionism. —Douglas Hofstadter Dear friend, I read your recent response on edge.org, arguing that the concept of race ought to be retired. Race, you argued, has no place in science, being a messy concept with no clear genetic basis. You said things like — I’m paraphrasing here –, “the apparent homogeneity of races is a product of the environmental factors, not genetic determinism and DNA.

Now listen, you queer, you stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered. —William Buckley1 I’m not sure whether the two sexes are about to stage World War III over gender issues or if I’m in some sort of gender bubble but, for whatever reason, I’ve been hearing about gender issues daily for the past six or so weeks and, as part of a gender, I have some thoughts on it.

That which we persist in doing becomes easier, not that the task itself has become easier, but that our ability to perform it has improved. —Ralph Waldo Emerson Malcolm Gladwell dragged the notion of deliberate practice into the public lexicon with the publication of his book Outliers. In short, world class performance depends not on talent, but on thousands of hours of a special sort of practice, deliberate practice.

I have heard tell of a time in a man’s life where he begins to worry less about his own dreams and invests more in living through his children. His children will be his legacy. This is a very real and common thing that people value: leaving behind something of some permanence, and children are one means to achieving this. I would like to suggest, though, a broader view of things, of thinking about humanity as a whole as a legacy.