Here is a meme I would very much like to see die forever. I’ll be reading book reviews and come across people gushing about how great the book was — and they know it’s great because they couldn’t understand any of it. In “Greatly Exaggerated” he is so fucking smart that I couldn’t even read the essay, because I am not, and never will be, his intellectual equal. —from a review of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

Consider the trial of Amanda Knox. What’s the purpose of the legal process here? Well, let’s think about. Here’s how a trial works (at least on television): the prosecution and the defense get up in front of the jury. They present evidence — it could be DNA, surveillance videos, witness testimony, or even a tic-tac-toe playing chicken. Closing arguments follow. Then the jury deliberates and returns a verdict. Now, the purpose of all this evidence is ostensibly to get at the truth.

Tyler Cowen pointed me to an article on automated theorem proving. Namely, a computer “has solved the longstanding Erdős discrepancy problem!” This would not be such a big deal, except the 13 gigabyte proof is too complicated for anyone to understand. So, of course, the Boeotians are in rare form as the clack of keyboards fills the metaphorical air in an attempt to sate the internet’s endless appetite for stupidity. Or: people are saying some really dumb stuff.

Here’s a metaphor that comes to me by way of Nobel laureate and Turing award recipient Herbert Simon. Imagine watching an ant on the beach. Its path looks complicated. It zigs and zags to avoid rocks and twigs. Very reminiscent of complex behavior — what an intelligent ant! Except an ant is just a simple machine. It wants to return to its nest, so it starts moving in a straight line.

Zach Weinersmith writes Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, my current favorite webcomic. I wanted to know: Where’s this creativity spring from? Turns out, he reads. A lot. I try to read 3-5 books a week in many different subjects. Whenever I stop that, I run out of ideas reaaallll fast. When asked about his writing process: Usually I just read a lot (at LEAST 4-6 hours a day) then sit myself in front of a blank google doc and try to write.

A sociology-style deconstruction of the pick-up community. Nearly twice as many black men than black women are looking for a long-term relationship, or so they report. Moravec’s paradox: “It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility.” Gay men are three times more likely to suffer from an eating disorder than straight men and are disproportionately interested in plastic surgery.

If you don’t know what Anki or spaced repetition is, start by reading gwern’s excellent introduction. This month, I created my ten thousandth virtual flashcard. When I started using Anki, I worried that I’d do the wrong thing, but decided that the only way to acquire Anki expertise was to make a lot of mistakes. Here’s how my Anki usage has evolved. Why questions Cards that answer the question “Why?

I’ve written before about the relationship between creativity and compressibility. To recap, a creative work is one that violates expectations, while a compressible statement is one that’s expected. For instance, consider two sentences: Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Where there’s a will, there’s a family fighting over it. I suspect you find the second more creative. Three more examples of creative sentences: When I was a kid, my parents moved a lot.

Quantum mechanics is what you would inevitably come up with if you started from probability theory, and then said, let’s try to generalize it so that the numbers we used to call “probabilities” can be negative numbers. As such, the theory could have been invented by mathematicians in the nineteenth century without any input from experiment. It wasn’t, but it could have been… And yet, with all the structures mathematicians studied, none of them came up with quantum mechanics until experiment forced it on them.