Is It Worth Being Wise?
February 2007
A few days ago I finally figured out something I've wondered about
for 25 years: the relationship between wisdom and intelligence.
Anyone can see they're not the same by the number of people who are
smart, but not very wise.  And yet intelligence and wisdom do seem
related.  How?
What is wisdom?  I'd say it's knowing what to do in a lot of
situations.  I'm not trying to make a deep point here about the
true nature of wisdom, just to figure out how we use the word.  A
wise person is someone who usually knows the right thing to do.
And yet isn't being smart also knowing what to do in certain
situations?  For example, knowing what to do when the teacher tells
your elementary school class to add all the numbers from 1 to 100?
[
1
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Some say wisdom and intelligence apply to different types of
problems—wisdom to human problems and intelligence to abstract
ones.  But that isn't true.  Some wisdom has nothing to do with
people: for example, the wisdom of the engineer who knows certain
structures are less prone to failure than others.  And certainly
smart people can find clever solutions to human problems as well
as abstract ones.
[
2
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Another popular explanation is that wisdom comes from experience
while intelligence is innate.  But people are not simply wise in
proportion to how much experience they have.  Other things must
contribute to wisdom besides experience, and some may be innate: a
reflective disposition, for example.
Neither of the conventional explanations of the difference between
wisdom and intelligence stands up to scrutiny.  So what is the
difference?  If we look at how people use the words "wise" and
"smart," what they seem to mean is different shapes of performance.
Curve
"Wise" and "smart" are both ways of saying someone knows what to
do.  The difference is that "wise" means one has a high average
outcome across all situations, and "smart" means one does spectacularly
well in a few.  That is, if you had a graph in which the x axis
represented situations and the y axis the outcome, the graph of the
wise person would be high overall, and the graph of the smart person
would have high peaks.
The distinction is similar to the rule that one should judge talent
at its best and character at its worst.  Except you judge intelligence
at its best, and wisdom by its average.  That's how the two are
related: they're the two different senses in which the same curve
can be high.
So a wise person knows what to do in most situations, while a smart
person knows what to do in situations where few others could.  We
need to add one more qualification: we should ignore cases where
someone knows what to do because they have inside information.
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But aside from that, I don't think we can get much more specific
without starting to be mistaken.
Nor do we need to.  Simple as it is, this explanation predicts, or
at least accords with, both of the conventional stories about the
distinction between wisdom and intelligence.  Human problems are
the most common type, so being good at solving those is key in
achieving a high average outcome.   And it seems natural that a
high average outcome depends mostly on experience, but that dramatic
peaks can only be achieved by people with certain rare, innate
qualities; nearly anyone can learn to be a good swimmer, but to be
an Olympic swimmer you need a certain body type.
This explanation also suggests why wisdom is such an elusive concept:
there's no such thing.  "Wise" means something—that one is
on average good at making the right choice.  But giving the name
"wisdom" to the supposed quality that enables one to do that doesn't
mean such a thing exists.  To the extent "wisdom" means anything,
it refers to a grab-bag of qualities as various as self-discipline,
experience, and empathy.
[
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Likewise, though "intelligent" means something, we're asking for
trouble if we insist on looking for a single thing called "intelligence."
And whatever its components, they're not all innate.  We use the
word "intelligent" as an indication of ability: a smart person can
grasp things few others could.  It does seem likely there's some
inborn predisposition to intelligence (and wisdom too), but this
predisposition is not itself intelligence.
One reason we tend to think of intelligence as inborn is that people
trying to measure it have concentrated on the aspects of it that
are most measurable.  A quality that's inborn will obviously be
more convenient to work with than one that's influenced by experience,
and thus might vary in the course of a study.  The problem comes
when we drag the word "intelligence" over onto what they're measuring.
If they're measuring something inborn, they can't be measuring
intelligence.  Three year olds aren't smart.   When we describe one
as smart, it's shorthand for "smarter than other three year olds."
Split
Perhaps it's a technicality to point out that a predisposition to
intelligence is not the same as intelligence.  But it's an important
technicality, because it reminds us that we can become smarter,
just as we can become wiser.
The alarming thing is that we may have to choose between the two.
If wisdom and intelligence are the average and peaks of the same
curve, then they converge as the number of points on the curve
decreases.  If there's just one point, they're identical: the average
and maximum are the same.  But as the number of points increases,
wisdom and intelligence diverge.  And historically the number of
points on the curve seems to have been increasing: our ability is
tested in an ever wider range of situations.
In the time of Confucius and Socrates, people seem to have regarded
wisdom, learning, and intelligence as more closely related than we
do.  Distinguishing between "wise" and "smart" is a modern habit.
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And the reason we do is that they've been diverging.  As knowledge
gets more specialized, there are more points on the curve, and the
distinction between the spikes and the average becomes sharper,
like a digital image rendered with more pixels.
One consequence is that some old recipes may have become obsolete.
At the very least we have to go back and figure out if they were
really recipes for wisdom or intelligence.  But the really striking
change, as intelligence and wisdom drift apart, is that we may have
to decide which we prefer.  We may not be able to optimize for both
simultaneously.
Society seems to have voted for intelligence.  We no longer admire
the sage—not the way people did two thousand years ago.  Now
we admire the genius.  Because in fact the distinction we began
with has a rather brutal converse: just as you can be smart without
being very wise, you can be wise without being very smart.  That
doesn't sound especially admirable.  That gets you James Bond, who
knows what to do in a lot of situations, but has to rely on Q for
the ones involving math.
Intelligence and wisdom are obviously not mutually exclusive.  In
fact, a high average may help support high peaks.  But there are
reasons to believe that at some point you have to choose between
them.  One is the example of very smart people, who are so often
unwise that in popular culture this now seems to be regarded as the
rule rather than the exception.  Perhaps the absent-minded professor
is wise in his way, or wiser than he seems, but he's not wise in
the way Confucius or Socrates wanted people to be.
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New
For both Confucius and Socrates, wisdom, virtue, and happiness were
necessarily related.  The wise man was someone who knew what the
right choice was and always made it; to be the right choice, it had
to be morally right; he was therefore always happy, knowing he'd
done the best he could.  I can't think of many ancient philosophers
who would have disagreed with that, so far as it goes.
"The superior man is always happy; the small man sad," said Confucius.
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Whereas a few years ago I read an interview with a mathematician
who said that most nights he went to bed discontented, feeling he
hadn't made enough progress.
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The Chinese and Greek words we
translate as "happy" didn't mean exactly what we do by it, but
there's enough overlap that this remark contradicts them.
Is the mathematician a small man because he's discontented?  No;
he's just doing a kind of work that wasn't very common in Confucius's
day.
Human knowledge seems to grow fractally.  Time after time, something
that seemed a small and uninteresting area—experimental error,
even—turns out, when examined up close, to have as much in
it as all knowledge up to that point.  Several of the fractal buds
that have exploded since ancient times involve inventing and
discovering new things.  Math, for example, used to be something a
handful of people did part-time.  Now it's the career of thousands.
And in work that involves making new things, some old rules don't
apply.
Recently I've spent some time advising people, and there I find the
ancient rule still works: try to understand the situation as well
as you can, give the best advice you can based on your experience,
and then don't worry about it, knowing you did all you could.  But
I don't have anything like this serenity when I'm writing an essay.
Then I'm worried.  What if I run out of ideas?  And when I'm writing,
four nights out of five I go to bed discontented, feeling I didn't
get enough done.
Advising people and writing are fundamentally different types of
work.  When people come to you with a problem and you have to figure
out the right thing to do, you don't (usually) have to invent
anything.  You just weigh the alternatives and try to judge which
is the prudent choice.  But
prudence
can't tell me what sentence
to write next.  The search space is too big.
Someone like a judge or a military officer can in much of his work
be guided by duty, but duty is no guide in making things.  Makers
depend on something more precarious: inspiration.  And like most
people who lead a precarious existence, they tend to be worried,
not contented.  In that respect they're more like the small man of
Confucius's day, always one bad harvest (or ruler) away from
starvation. Except instead of being at the mercy of weather and
officials, they're at the mercy of their own imagination.
Limits
To me it was a relief just to realize it might be ok to be discontented.
The idea that a successful person should be happy has thousands of
years of momentum behind it.  If I was any good, why didn't I have
the easy confidence winners are supposed to have?  But that, I now
believe, is like a runner asking "If I'm such a good athlete, why
do I feel so tired?" Good runners still get tired; they just get
tired at higher speeds.
People whose work is to invent or discover things are in the same
position as the runner.  There's no way for them to do the best
they can, because there's no limit to what they could do.  The
closest you can come is to compare yourself to other people.  But
the better you do, the less this matters.  An undergrad who gets
something published feels like a star.  But for someone at the top
of the field, what's the test of doing well?  Runners can at least
compare themselves to others doing exactly the same thing; if you
win an Olympic gold medal, you can be fairly content, even if you
think you could have run a bit faster.  But what is a novelist to
do?
Whereas if you're doing the kind of work in which problems are
presented to you and you have to choose between several alternatives,
there's an upper bound on your performance: choosing the best every
time.  In ancient societies, nearly all work seems to have been of
this type.  The peasant had to decide whether a garment was worth
mending, and the king whether or not to invade his neighbor, but
neither was expected to invent anything.  In principle they could
have; the king could have invented firearms, then invaded his
neighbor.  But in practice innovations were so rare that they weren't
expected of you, any more than goalkeepers are expected to score
goals.
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In practice, it seemed as if there was a correct decision
in every situation, and if you made it you'd done your job perfectly,
just as a goalkeeper who prevents the other team from scoring is
considered to have played a perfect game.
In this world, wisdom seemed paramount.
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Even now, most people
do work in which problems are put before them and they have to
choose the best alternative.  But as knowledge has grown more
specialized, there are more and more types of work in which people
have to make up new things, and in which performance is therefore
unbounded.  Intelligence has become increasingly important relative
to wisdom because there is more room for spikes.
Recipes
Another sign we may have to choose between intelligence and wisdom
is how different their recipes are.  Wisdom seems to come largely
from curing childish qualities, and intelligence largely from
cultivating them.
Recipes for wisdom, particularly ancient ones, tend to have a
remedial character.  To achieve wisdom one must cut away all the
debris that fills one's head on emergence from childhood, leaving
only the important stuff.  Both self-control and experience have
this effect: to eliminate the random biases that come from your own
nature and from the circumstances of your upbringing respectively.
That's not all wisdom is, but it's a large part of it.  Much of
what's in the sage's head is also in the head of every twelve year
old.  The difference is that in the head of the twelve year old
it's mixed together with a lot of random junk.
The path to intelligence seems to be through working on hard problems.
You develop intelligence as you might develop muscles, through
exercise.  But there can't be too much compulsion here.  No amount
of discipline can replace genuine curiosity.  So cultivating
intelligence seems to be a matter of identifying some bias in one's
character—some tendency to be interested in certain types of
things—and nurturing it.  Instead of obliterating your
idiosyncrasies in an effort to make yourself a neutral vessel for
the truth, you select one and try to grow it from a seedling into
a tree.
The wise are all much alike in their wisdom, but very smart people
tend to be smart in distinctive ways.
Most of our educational traditions aim at wisdom. So perhaps one
reason schools work badly is that they're trying to make intelligence
using recipes for wisdom.  Most recipes for wisdom have an element
of subjection.  At the very least, you're supposed to do what the
teacher says.  The more extreme recipes aim to break down your
individuality the way basic training does.  But that's not the route
to intelligence.  Whereas wisdom comes through humility, it may
actually help, in cultivating intelligence, to have a mistakenly
high opinion of your abilities, because that encourages you to keep
working.  Ideally till you realize how mistaken you were.
(The reason it's hard to learn new skills late in life is not just
that one's brain is less malleable.  Another probably even worse
obstacle is that one has higher standards.)
I realize we're on dangerous ground here.  I'm not proposing the
primary goal of education should be to increase students' "self-esteem."
That just breeds laziness.  And in any case, it doesn't really fool
the kids, not the smart ones.  They can tell at a young age that a
contest where everyone wins is a fraud.
A teacher has to walk a narrow path: you want to encourage kids to
come up with things on their own, but you can't simply applaud
everything they produce.  You have to be a good audience: appreciative,
but not too easily impressed.  And that's a lot of work.  You have
to have a good enough grasp of kids' capacities at different ages
to know when to be surprised.
That's the opposite of traditional recipes for education.  Traditionally
the student is the audience, not the teacher; the student's job is
not to invent, but to absorb some prescribed body of material.  (The
use of the term "recitation" for sections in some colleges is a
fossil of this.) The problem with these old traditions is that
they're too much influenced by recipes for wisdom.
Different
I deliberately gave this essay a provocative title; of course it's
worth being wise.  But I think it's important to understand the
relationship between intelligence and wisdom, and particularly what
seems to be the growing gap between them.  That way we can avoid
applying rules and standards to intelligence that are really meant
for wisdom.  These two senses of "knowing what to do" are more
different than most people realize.  The path to wisdom is through
discipline, and the path to intelligence through carefully selected
self-indulgence.  Wisdom is universal, and intelligence idiosyncratic.
And while wisdom yields calmness, intelligence much of the time
leads to discontentment.
That's particularly worth remembering.  A physicist friend recently
told me half his department was on Prozac.  Perhaps if we acknowledge
that some amount of frustration is inevitable in certain kinds
of work, we can mitigate its effects.  Perhaps we can box it up and
put it away some of the time, instead of letting it flow together
with everyday sadness to produce what seems an alarmingly large
pool.  At the very least, we can avoid being discontented about
being discontented.
If you feel exhausted, it's not necessarily because there's something
wrong with you.  Maybe you're just running fast.
Notes
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1
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Gauss was supposedly asked this when he was 10.  Instead of
laboriously adding together the numbers like the other students,
he saw that they consisted of 50 pairs that each summed to 101 (100
+ 1, 99 + 2, etc), and that he could just multiply 101 by 50 to get
the answer, 5050.
[
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A variant is that intelligence is the ability to solve problems,
and wisdom the judgement to know how to use those solutions.   But
while this is certainly an important relationship between wisdom
and intelligence, it's not the
distinction between
them.  Wisdom
is useful in solving problems too, and intelligence can help in
deciding what to do with the solutions.
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In judging both intelligence and wisdom we have to factor out
some knowledge. People who know the combination of a safe will be
better at opening it than people who don't, but no one would say
that was a test of intelligence or wisdom.
But knowledge overlaps with wisdom and probably also intelligence.
A knowledge of human nature is certainly part of wisdom.  So where
do we draw the line?
Perhaps the solution is to discount knowledge that at some point
has a sharp drop in utility.  For example, understanding French
will help you in a large number of situations, but its value drops
sharply as soon as no one else involved knows French.  Whereas the
value of understanding vanity would decline more gradually.
The knowledge whose utility drops sharply is the kind that has
little relation to other knowledge.  This includes mere conventions,
like languages and safe combinations, and also what we'd call
"random" facts, like movie stars' birthdays, or how to distinguish
1956 from 1957 Studebakers.
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People seeking some single thing called "wisdom" have been
fooled by grammar.  Wisdom is just knowing the right thing to do,
and there are a hundred and one different qualities that help in
that.  Some, like selflessness, might come from meditating in an
empty room, and others, like a knowledge of human nature, might
come from going to drunken parties.
Perhaps realizing this will help dispel the cloud of semi-sacred
mystery that surrounds wisdom in so many people's eyes.  The mystery
comes mostly from looking for something that doesn't exist.  And
the reason there have historically been so many different schools
of thought about how to achieve wisdom is that they've focused on
different components of it.
When I use the word "wisdom" in this essay, I mean no more than
whatever collection of qualities helps people make the right choice
in a wide variety of situations.
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Even in English, our sense of the word "intelligence" is
surprisingly recent.  Predecessors like "understanding" seem to
have had a broader meaning.
[
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There is of course some uncertainty about how closely the remarks
attributed to Confucius and Socrates resemble their actual opinions.
I'm using these names as we use the name "Homer," to mean the
hypothetical people who said the things attributed to them.
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Analects
VII:36, Fung trans.
Some translators use "calm" instead of "happy."  One source of
difficulty here is that present-day English speakers have a different
idea of happiness from many older societies.  Every language probably
has a word meaning "how one feels when things are going well," but
different cultures react differently when things go well.  We react
like children, with smiles and laughter.  But in a more reserved
society, or in one where life was tougher, the reaction might be a
quiet contentment.
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It may have been Andrew Wiles, but I'm not sure.  If anyone
remembers such an interview, I'd appreciate hearing from you.
[
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Confucius claimed proudly that he had never invented
anything—that he had simply passed on an accurate account of
ancient traditions.  [
Analects
VII:1] It's hard for us now to
appreciate how important a duty it must have been in preliterate
societies to remember and pass on the group's accumulated knowledge.
Even in Confucius's time it still seems to have been the first duty
of the scholar.
[
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The bias toward wisdom in ancient philosophy may be exaggerated
by the fact that, in both Greece and China, many of the first
philosophers (including Confucius and Plato) saw themselves as
teachers of administrators, and so thought disproportionately about
such matters.  The few people who did invent things, like storytellers,
must have seemed an outlying data point that could be ignored.
Thanks
to Trevor Blackwell, Sarah Harlin, Jessica Livingston,
and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.
Polish Translation
French Translation
Russian Translation
Russian Translation


@SHUWEIYANG1 That was deliberate. It makes my point hard to dispute.

This seems plausible, but I would add that the designer doesn't have to have the title "designer" or formal training as one. It just has to be someone who cares about design and is good at it. Steve Jobs would suffice.

Now that I think about it, Steve Jobs's trick of having an annual meeting with the 100 most important people at Apple (rather than the top 100 on the org chart) would have tended to ameliorate this problem.

https://t.co/3hOnlKOJBi

This will sound crazy, but it's a serious question. Could a hypnotist make me forget the plots of all the Sherlock Holmes stories? I just reread them all, and don't want to wait another 20 years before I can reread them again. I would pay to speed this up.

Conversely, if you're running a company, how do you make this not be true at yours? Imagine what a great place to work your company would be if you could do that.

@mohamedgad218 They would never do this. They don't need to. Startup ideas are lying around everywhere. That was the whole point of this thread.

@mohamedgad218 That's not where we get startup ideas. I haven't read applications for a decade.

This is one of the best arguments I've read for starting your own company. It's true, but who wants to live like this?

@esthercrawford I used to just break the tips off their cones so the ice cream would drip out once it started to melt.

@XFaure It's not a prize in itself, but it's a way to get something you want.


Prediction: There will be a lot of "authors" of boilerplate fiction (e.g. romance novels) who can't actually write unaided by AI, and most will try to conceal it. People will ask why they made character x do y, and they'll have to lie, because actually AI made that decision.

@sai_veda_ Pasta with spinach and garlic and scrambled egg. (It's really good.)

12 yo: Does anyone smell anything?

Jessica: Like what?

12 yo: It smells like the dog pooped.

Jessica: Oh, that's Dad's dinner.

@jokull Whoah. https://t.co/rcT7h4fTsi

@frankgoertzen If I put numbers in the price fields of the essays, you'd be able to put them in the shopping basket. I doubt you'd be able to check out though since I don't have a merchant account.

@MSanchezWorld @garrytan Yes. If you read the essay you'll see that this is one of the first things I do.

@BoyanSlat Holy shit, that typo was almost 20 years old. Thank you!

@frankgoertzen It's made with Viaweb's software. It always has been.

@Samcornwell If I'm going to write about the second wave of political correctness, I need some way to refer to it, and that's the current default.

@seunosewa Usage is usage. I don't make the rules.


@JohnDCook It has to at least be convincing enough to keep me reading though.

@tylergroce Of course.

@dvelopment @Afinetheorem Then why on earth do you follow me?

Arnold on why he's voting for Harris.

"I will always be an American before I am a Republican."

@Klaymen__ "They should have stayed brown. They could have done anything, but they changed his pants?"

Friend: How was your day?

Me: Well, in the morning I published something explaining why moderates should vote for Harris, and then spent the rest of the day being called a retard.

@NJacobson15 A mistake he won't make the next time. That's why we can't let there be one.

For Halloween 12 yo is an engineer from Team Fortress 2. https://t.co/4UrHIULFiD

@LifeMathMoney To start with you'd have to convince me that Trump didn't try to pressure Pence not to certify the election, or call Georgia's secretary of state and ask him to "find votes."

@FastTradeKing Bots don't get to vote.


@emkara You rarely need to pay more than about 10k for a decent name. I'd pay more for an amazing one.

@_asadmemon I only look for .coms.

If you're trying to sell a domain name, quote a price. I often help startups find new names, and we always just skip the names that say "make offer." A name is not even interesting until you know what it costs.

@kmarunchenko @shylockh There are a few about startups that talk about obsolete technology and valuations, but off the top of my head I can't think of much else.

@shylockh Of course I would write it again. I haven't changed my opinions about anything in it. Nor have I seen anyone reference it in a way that contradicts any of my political beliefs.

@dkirtley Direct air capture.

"I just met with Ronny and he reminded me why he's the best institutional VC I've ever worked with. He has feedback (as he should!) but is supportive of me and my judgement."

— a founder on Ronny Conway

@mnyallen11 You didn't mean to, but this illustrates my point. Your claim that there's no risk makes you seem completely unconvincing. Especially coupled with that giant TAM.

@oliversgriff Some are, but you don't want those.

Ideally this tour of risks becomes a sort of humblebrag, as you eliminate most of them. For example: it's inevitable that this product will exist, and certain that it will make a lot when it does, so the only uncertainty is whether we can execute, and we have been so far.


@anammostarac Most ancient art was mediocre too, and the art of the Renaissance can match anything from any preceding era. https://t.co/dw4sN5TO1j

And that damage is already done. Trump has shown himself to be ill-advised and impulsive. Even if he repealed all the tariffs tomorrow, businesses would still have to worry about what he might do next, and be correspondingly conservative about plans for future expansion.

Someone in the pharma business told me companies are freezing hiring and new projects because of uncertainty about tariffs. I don't think Trump grasps how damaging mere uncertainty is.

@MrRobzilla @ctjlewis @AlecStapp The government doesn't automatically treat being funded by a legit investor as an extraordinary achievement.

@AlecStapp We need the founder visa. Lots of other countries have since implemented it, but America still hasn't.

https://t.co/n99oYhbcUZ

@abarrallen At first I read this as "AI-proof reading," meaning automatically flagging emails sent to you that had been written by AI, and it sounded like an interesting idea.

@SallyMayweather What Lincoln actually said:

"If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that."

@swombat Not 65% of Americans. This is a poll just of Trump voters. His overall approval rating is much lower.

A story in two graphs. Americans believe Trump will make them poorer, so his approval rating has plummeted. https://t.co/e24o1qCcnQ

@robfoot @Noahpinion That's a hierarchy of techniques used in arguments. I'm not calling Noah one.


I'm embarrassed for the UK when I have to explain to Americans that the UK doesn't have anything like the First Amendment. If you grow up in the US, you take freedom of speech for granted, but not all countries have it.

Founders: You can trust Ivan. I've known him for 16 years, and he's both smart and upstanding.

What do you do with things that change this fast? (a) You pay attention to them, if only to avoid being blind-sided, (b) you bet on them, since there's bound to be upside as well as downside, and (c) you make choices that keep your options open.

A rate of change like this makes the future extremely hard to predict. It's not just that we don't have experience with things that change so fast. The future would be hard to predict even if we did. A couple years of compounding, and you get qualitative changes.

A friend in the AI business estimated that the price/performance of AI had decreased by about 100x in each of the past 2 years. 10,000x in 2 years. I don't think any technology has improved so fast in my lifetime. And this is very general-purpose technology too.

@SimonMoisselin1 Maybe it could work. It's still early in the evolution of startups.

@ray_deck Not that early. I'm talking about the phase when you've started the company and raised some money, but are still small.

@afoxinweb3 Yes, it was definitely true for us.

@bgdnandrew Usually both.

@toothfairy_hk At the very least, enjoy that stretch. But ideally prolong it.


Postscript: I ended up incorporating five things from the second version. Of those, four were shorter, and one fixed a grammatical error.

@XposeHypocrissy I wouldn't kill other people's children, if that's what you mean.

@ChrisSandvick "Because they lived under a government..."?

Do you believe that living under a government with the wrong principles is sufficient justification for killing children? Because I don't, and international law is very clear about this too.

@real_ahmed It's always like this.

@mebenstein7 That's your reaction, Michael?

You don't know anything about these children except that they're Palestinian. So you're saying in effect that it's permissible to kill any Palestinian child, and that it will have been their parents' fault.

@ByrneHobart And long before that, teenage him will, and he'll no longer want you to read to him.

@SpencerJJoseph @shikasenbei420 @jakozloski You accuse me of "deliberately avoiding the difficult questions with trite comments," and then you reply with this. Goodbye.

@0xBobdbldr Not this. Principled militaries don't do this.

@SeligChr You don't care what happened to these boys, Christian?

@jakozloski I think they should have killed fewer children.


How to Lose Time and Money
July 2010
When we sold our startup in 1998 I suddenly got a lot of money.  I
now had to think about something I hadn't had to think about before:
how not to lose it.   I knew it was possible to go from rich to
poor, just as it was possible to go from poor to rich.  But while
I'd spent a lot of the past several years studying the paths from
poor to rich
,
I knew practically nothing about the paths from rich
to poor.  Now, in order to avoid them, I had to learn where they
were.
So I started to pay attention to how fortunes are lost.  If you'd
asked me as a kid how rich people became poor, I'd have said by
spending all their money.  That's how it happens in books and movies,
because that's the colorful way to do it.  But in fact the way most
fortunes are lost is not through excessive expenditure, but through
bad investments.
It's hard to spend a fortune without noticing.  Someone with ordinary
tastes would find it hard to blow through more than a few tens of
thousands of dollars without thinking "wow, I'm spending a lot of
money."  Whereas if you start trading derivatives, you can lose a
million dollars (as much as you want, really) in the blink of an
eye.
In most people's minds, spending money on luxuries sets off alarms
that making investments doesn't.  Luxuries seem self-indulgent.
And unless you got the money by inheriting it or winning a lottery,
you've already been thoroughly trained that self-indulgence leads
to trouble.  Investing bypasses those alarms.  You're not spending
the money; you're just moving it from one asset to another.  Which
is why people trying to sell you expensive things say "it's an
investment."
The solution is to develop new alarms.  This can be a tricky business,
because while the alarms that prevent you from overspending are so
basic that they may even be in our DNA, the ones that prevent you
from making bad investments have to be learned, and are sometimes
fairly counterintuitive.
A few days ago I realized something surprising: the situation with
time is much the same as with money.  The most dangerous way to
lose time is not to spend it having fun, but to spend it doing fake
work.  When you spend time having fun, you know you're being
self-indulgent.  Alarms start to go off fairly quickly.  If I woke
up one morning and sat down on the sofa and watched TV all day, I'd
feel like something was terribly wrong.  Just thinking about it
makes me wince.  I'd start to feel uncomfortable after sitting on
a sofa watching TV for 2 hours, let alone a whole day.
And yet I've definitely had days when I might as well have sat in
front of a TV all day — days at the end of which, if I asked myself
what I got done that day, the answer would have been: basically,
nothing.  I feel bad after these days too, but nothing like as bad
as I'd feel if I spent the whole day on the sofa watching TV.  If
I spent a whole day watching TV I'd feel like I was descending into
perdition.  But the same alarms don't go off on the days when I get
nothing done, because I'm doing stuff that seems, superficially,
like real work.  Dealing with email, for example.  You do it sitting
at a desk.  It's not fun.  So it must be work.
With time, as with money, avoiding pleasure is no longer enough to
protect you.  It probably was enough to protect hunter-gatherers,
and perhaps all pre-industrial societies.  So nature and nurture
combine to make us avoid self-indulgence. But the world has gotten
more complicated: the most dangerous traps now are new behaviors
that bypass our alarms about self-indulgence by mimicking more
virtuous types.  And the worst thing is, they're not even fun.
Thanks
to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Jessica
Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.


@ChiefScientist He also walked a lot.

If you've ever wondered how Ingres et al made those photographic-seeming drawings and paintings, this was how.

@lefineder The Commonwealth was a symptom of puritanism as well as a cause. It was already a thing.

@lefineder You could start by looking at whether the phenomenon is less pronounced among Catholics. What happened within recusant families, or in Ireland?

I'm always so envious when I meet people who haven't read any Wodehouse novels, because it means they have them all to enjoy for the first time. That seems the ultimate accolade for a writer of fiction: when the people who've read your books envy those who haven't.

I met someone helping the British government with AI regulation. When I asked what they were going to regulate, he said he wasn't sure yet, and this seemed the most intelligent thing I've heard anyone say about AI  regulation so far.

@__tosh I mean I finished writing it. I don't deliver it till this evening.

@lefineder That's why, and not puritanism? Is there some way to test this theory?

@lefineder Also that they skipped the Commonwealth dip in the mid 17th c.

@arthurcolle @felixchin1 I didn't pick the venue.


How to Be Silicon Valley
May 2006
(This essay is derived from a keynote at Xtech.)
Could you reproduce Silicon Valley elsewhere, or is there something
unique about it?
It wouldn't be surprising if it were hard to reproduce in other
countries, because you couldn't reproduce it in most of the US
either.  What does it take to make a silicon valley even here?
What it takes is the right people.  If you could get the right ten
thousand people to move from Silicon Valley to Buffalo, Buffalo
would become Silicon Valley.
[
1
]
That's a striking departure from the past.  Up till a couple decades
ago, geography was destiny for cities.  All great cities were located
on waterways, because cities made money by trade, and water was the
only economical way to ship.
Now you could make a great city anywhere, if you could get the right
people to move there.  So the question of how to make a silicon
valley becomes: who are the right people, and how do you get them
to move?
Two Types
I think you only need two kinds of people to create a technology
hub: rich people and nerds.  They're the limiting reagents in the
reaction that produces startups, because they're the only ones
present when startups get started.  Everyone else will move.
Observation bears this out: within the US, towns have become startup
hubs if and only if they have both rich people and nerds.  Few
startups happen in Miami, for example, because although it's full
of rich people, it has few nerds.  It's not the kind of place nerds
like.
Whereas Pittsburgh has the opposite problem: plenty of nerds, but
no rich people.  The top US Computer Science departments are said
to be MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, and Carnegie-Mellon.  MIT yielded
Route 128.  Stanford and Berkeley yielded Silicon Valley.  But
Carnegie-Mellon?  The record skips at that point.  Lower down the
list, the University of Washington yielded a high-tech community
in Seattle, and the University of Texas at Austin yielded one in
Austin.  But what happened in Pittsburgh?  And in Ithaca, home of
Cornell, which is also high on the list?
I grew up in Pittsburgh and went to college at Cornell, so I can
answer for both.  The weather is terrible,  particularly in winter,
and there's no interesting old city to make up for it, as there is
in Boston.  Rich people don't want to live in Pittsburgh or Ithaca.
So while there are plenty of hackers who could start startups,
there's no one to invest in them.
Not Bureaucrats
Do you really need the rich people?  Wouldn't it work to have the
government invest in the nerds?  No, it would not.  Startup investors
are a distinct type of rich people.  They tend to have a lot of
experience themselves in the technology business.  This (a) helps
them pick the right startups, and (b) means they can supply advice
and connections as well as money.  And the fact that they have a
personal stake in the outcome makes them really pay attention.
Bureaucrats by their nature are the exact opposite sort of people
from startup investors. The idea of them making startup investments
is comic.  It would be like mathematicians running
Vogue
-- or
perhaps more accurately,
Vogue
editors running a math journal.
[
2
]
Though indeed, most things bureaucrats do, they do badly.   We just
don't notice usually, because they only have to compete against
other bureaucrats.  But as startup investors they'd have to compete
against pros with a great deal more experience and motivation.
Even corporations that have in-house VC groups generally forbid
them to make their own investment decisions.  Most are only allowed
to invest in deals where some reputable private VC firm is willing
to act as lead investor.
Not Buildings
If you go to see Silicon Valley, what you'll see are buildings.
But it's the people that make it Silicon Valley, not the buildings.
I read occasionally about attempts to set up "
technology
parks
" in other places, as if the active ingredient of Silicon
Valley were the office space.  An article about Sophia Antipolis
bragged that companies there included Cisco, Compaq, IBM, NCR, and
Nortel.  Don't the French realize these aren't startups?
Building office buildings for technology companies won't get you a
silicon valley, because the key stage in the life of a startup
happens before they want that kind of space.  The key stage is when
they're three guys operating out of an apartment.  Wherever the
startup is when it gets funded, it will stay.  The defining quality
of Silicon Valley is not that Intel or Apple or Google have offices
there, but that they were
started
there.
So if you want to reproduce Silicon Valley, what you need to reproduce
is those two or three founders sitting around a kitchen table
deciding to start a company.  And to reproduce that you need those
people.
Universities
The exciting thing is,
all
you need are the people.  If you could
attract a critical mass of nerds and investors to live somewhere,
you could reproduce Silicon Valley.  And both groups are highly
mobile.  They'll go where life is good.  So what makes a place good
to them?
What nerds like is other nerds.  Smart people will go wherever other
smart people are.  And in particular, to great universities.  In
theory there could be other ways to attract them, but so far
universities seem to be indispensable.  Within the US, there are
no technology hubs without first-rate universities-- or at least,
first-rate computer science departments.
So if you want to make a silicon valley, you not only need a
university, but one of the top handful in the world.  It has to be
good enough to act as a magnet, drawing the best people from thousands
of miles away.  And that means it has to stand up to existing magnets
like MIT and Stanford.
This sounds hard.  Actually it might be easy.  My professor friends,
when they're deciding where they'd like to work, consider one thing
above all: the quality of the other faculty.  What attracts professors
is good colleagues.  So if you managed to recruit, en masse, a
significant number of the best young researchers, you could create
a first-rate university from nothing overnight.  And you could do
that for surprisingly little.  If you paid 200 people hiring bonuses
of $3 million apiece, you could put together a faculty that would
bear comparison with any in the world.  And from that point the
chain reaction would be self-sustaining.  So whatever it costs to
establish a mediocre university, for an additional half billion or
so you could have a great one.
[
3
]
Personality
However, merely creating a new university would not be enough to
start a silicon valley. The university is just the seed.  It has
to be planted in the right soil, or it won't germinate.  Plant it
in the wrong place, and you just create Carnegie-Mellon.
To spawn startups, your university has to be in a town that has
attractions other than the university.  It has to be a place where
investors want to live, and students want to stay after they graduate.
The two like much the same things, because most startup investors
are nerds themselves.  So what do nerds look for in a town?  Their
tastes aren't completely different from other people's, because a
lot of the towns they like most in the US are also big tourist
destinations: San Francisco, Boston, Seattle.   But their tastes
can't be quite mainstream either, because they dislike other big
tourist destinations, like New York, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas.
There has been a lot written lately about the "creative class." The
thesis seems to be that as wealth derives increasingly from ideas,
cities will prosper only if they attract those who have them.  That
is certainly true; in fact it was the basis of Amsterdam's prosperity
400 years ago.
A lot of nerd tastes they share with the creative class in general.
For example, they like well-preserved old neighborhoods instead of
cookie-cutter suburbs, and locally-owned shops and restaurants
instead of national chains.  Like the rest of the creative class,
they want to live somewhere with personality.
What exactly is personality?  I think it's the feeling that each
building is the work of a distinct group of people.  A town with
personality is one that doesn't feel mass-produced.  So if you want
to make a startup hub-- or any town to attract the "creative class"--
you probably have to ban large development projects.
When a large tract has been developed by a single organization, you
can always tell.
[
4
]
Most towns with personality are old, but they don't have to be.
Old towns have two advantages: they're denser, because they were
laid out before cars, and they're more varied, because they were
built one building at a time.  You could have both now.  Just have
building codes that ensure density, and ban large scale developments.
A corollary is that you have to keep out the biggest developer of
all: the government.  A government that asks "How can we build a
silicon valley?" has probably ensured failure by the way they framed
the question.  You don't build a silicon valley; you let one grow.
Nerds
If you want to attract nerds, you need more than a town with
personality.  You need a town with the right personality.  Nerds
are a distinct subset of the creative class, with different tastes
from the rest.  You can see this most clearly in New York, which
attracts a lot of creative people, but few nerds.
[
5
]
What nerds like is the kind of town where people walk around smiling.
This excludes LA, where no one walks at all, and also New York,
where people walk, but not smiling. When I was in grad school in
Boston, a friend came to visit from New York.  On the subway back
from the airport she asked "Why is everyone smiling?"  I looked and
they weren't smiling.  They just looked like they were compared to
the facial expressions she was used to.
If you've lived in New York, you know where these facial expressions
come from.  It's the kind of place where your mind may be excited,
but your body knows it's having a bad time.  People don't so much
enjoy living there as endure it for the sake of the excitement.
And if you like certain kinds of excitement, New York is incomparable.
It's a hub of glamour, a magnet for all the shorter half-life
isotopes of style and fame.
Nerds don't care about glamour, so to them the appeal of New York
is a mystery.  People who like New York will pay a fortune for a
small, dark, noisy apartment in order to live in a town where the
cool people are really cool.  A nerd looks at that deal and sees
only: pay a fortune for a small, dark, noisy apartment.
Nerds
will
pay a premium to live in a town where the smart people
are really smart, but you don't have to pay as much for that.  It's
supply and demand: glamour is popular, so you have to pay a lot for
it.
Most nerds like quieter pleasures.  They like cafes instead of
clubs; used bookshops instead of fashionable clothing shops; hiking
instead of dancing; sunlight instead of tall buildings.  A nerd's
idea of paradise is Berkeley or Boulder.
Youth
It's the young nerds who start startups, so it's those specifically
the city has to appeal to.  The startup hubs in the US are all
young-feeling towns.  This doesn't mean they have to be new.
Cambridge has the oldest town plan in America, but it feels young
because it's full of students.
What you can't have, if you want to create a silicon valley, is a
large, existing population of stodgy people.  It would be a waste
of time to try to reverse the fortunes of a declining industrial town
like Detroit or Philadelphia by trying to encourage startups.  Those
places have too much momentum in the wrong direction.  You're better
off starting with a blank slate in the form of a small town.  Or
better still, if there's a town young people already flock to, that
one.
The Bay Area was a magnet for the young and optimistic for decades
before it was associated with technology.  It was a place people
went in search of something new.  And so it became synonymous with
California nuttiness.  There's still a lot of that there.  If you
wanted to start a new fad-- a new way to focus one's "energy," for
example, or a new category of things not to eat-- the Bay Area would
be the place to do it.  But a place that tolerates oddness in the
search for the new is exactly what you want in a startup hub, because
economically that's what startups are.  Most good startup ideas
seem a little crazy; if they were obviously good ideas, someone
would have done them already.
(How many people are going to want computers in their
houses
?
What,
another
search engine?)
That's the connection between technology and liberalism.  Without
exception the high-tech cities in the US are also the most liberal.
But it's not because liberals are smarter that this is so.  It's
because liberal cities tolerate odd ideas, and smart people by
definition have odd ideas.
Conversely, a town that gets praised for being "solid" or representing
"traditional values" may be a fine place to live, but it's never
going to succeed as a startup hub.  The 2004 presidential election,
though a disaster in other respects, conveniently supplied us with
a county-by-county
map
of such places.
[
6
]
To attract the young, a town must have an intact center.  In most
American cities the center has been abandoned, and the growth, if
any, is in the suburbs.  Most American cities have been turned
inside out. But none of the startup hubs has: not San Francisco,
or Boston, or Seattle.  They all have intact centers.
[
7
]
My guess is that no city with a dead center could be turned into a
startup hub.  Young people don't want to live in the suburbs.
Within the US, the two cities I think could most easily be turned
into new silicon valleys are Boulder and Portland.  Both have the
kind of effervescent feel that attracts the young.  They're each
only a great university short of becoming a silicon valley, if they
wanted to.
Time
A great university near an attractive town.  Is that all it takes?
That was all it took to make the original Silicon Valley.  Silicon
Valley traces its origins to William Shockley, one of the inventors
of the transistor.  He did the research that won him the Nobel Prize
at Bell Labs, but when he started his own company in 1956 he moved
to Palo Alto to do it.   At the time that was an odd thing to do.
Why did he?  Because he had grown up there and remembered how nice
it was.  Now Palo Alto is suburbia, but then it was a charming
college town-- a charming college town with perfect weather and San
Francisco only an hour away.
The companies that rule Silicon Valley now are all descended in
various ways from Shockley Semiconductor.  Shockley was a difficult
man, and in 1957 his top people-- "the traitorous eight"-- left to
start a new company, Fairchild Semiconductor.  Among them were
Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, who went on to found Intel, and
Eugene Kleiner, who founded the VC firm Kleiner Perkins.  Forty-two
years later, Kleiner Perkins funded Google, and the partner responsible
for the deal was John Doerr, who came to Silicon Valley in 1974 to
work for Intel.
So although a lot of the newest companies in Silicon Valley don't
make anything out of silicon, there always seem to be multiple links
back to Shockley.  There's a lesson here: startups beget startups.
People who work for startups start their own.  People who get rich
from startups fund new ones.  I suspect this kind of organic growth
is the only way to produce a startup hub, because it's the only way
to grow the expertise you need.
That has two important implications.  The first is that you need
time to grow a silicon valley.  The university you could create in
a couple years, but the startup community around it has to grow
organically.   The cycle time is limited by the time it takes a
company to succeed, which probably averages about five years.
The other implication of the organic growth hypothesis is that you
can't be somewhat of a startup hub.  You either have a self-sustaining
chain reaction, or not.  Observation confirms this too: cities
either have a startup scene, or they don't.  There is no middle
ground.  Chicago has the third largest metropolitan area in America.
As a source of startups it's negligible compared to Seattle, number 15.
The good news is that the initial seed can be quite small.  Shockley
Semiconductor, though itself not very successful, was big enough.
It brought a critical mass of experts in an important new technology
together in a place they liked enough to stay.
Competing
Of course, a would-be silicon valley faces an obstacle the original
one didn't: it has to compete with Silicon Valley.  Can that be
done?  Probably.
One of Silicon Valley's biggest advantages is its venture capital
firms.  This was not a factor in Shockley's day, because VC funds
didn't exist.  In fact, Shockley Semiconductor and Fairchild
Semiconductor were not startups at all in our sense.  They were
subsidiaries-- of Beckman Instruments and Fairchild Camera and
Instrument respectively.  Those companies were apparently willing
to establish subsidiaries wherever the experts wanted to live.
Venture investors, however, prefer to fund startups within an hour's
drive.  For one, they're more likely to notice startups nearby.
But when they do notice startups in other towns they prefer them
to move.  They don't want to have to travel to attend board meetings,
and in any case the odds of succeeding are higher in a startup hub.
The centralizing effect of venture firms is a double one: they cause
startups to form around them, and those draw in more startups through
acquisitions.  And although the first may be weakening because it's
now so cheap to start some startups, the second seems as strong as ever.
Three of the most admired
"Web 2.0" companies were started outside the usual startup hubs,
but two of them have already been reeled in through acquisitions.
Such centralizing forces make it harder for new silicon valleys to
get started.  But by no means impossible.  Ultimately power rests
with the founders.  A startup with the best people will beat one
with funding from famous VCs, and a startup that was sufficiently
successful would never have to move.  So a town that
could exert enough pull over the right people could resist and
perhaps even surpass Silicon Valley.
For all its power, Silicon Valley has a great weakness: the paradise
Shockley found in 1956 is now one giant parking lot.  San Francisco
and Berkeley are great, but they're forty miles away.  Silicon
Valley proper is soul-crushing suburban
sprawl
.  It
has fabulous weather, which makes it significantly better than the
soul-crushing sprawl of most other American cities.  But a competitor
that managed to avoid sprawl would have real leverage.  All a city
needs is to be the kind of place the next traitorous eight look at
and say "I want to stay here," and that would be enough to get the
chain reaction started.
Notes
[
1
]
It's interesting to consider how low this number could be
made.  I suspect five hundred would be enough, even if they could
bring no assets with them.  Probably just thirty, if I could pick them,
would be enough to turn Buffalo into a significant startup hub.
[
2
]
Bureaucrats manage to allocate research funding moderately
well, but only because (like an in-house VC fund) they outsource
most of the work of selection.  A professor at a famous university
who is highly regarded by his peers will get funding, pretty much
regardless of the proposal.  That wouldn't work for startups, whose
founders aren't sponsored by organizations, and are often unknowns.
[
3
]
You'd have to do it all at once, or at least a whole department
at a time, because people would be more likely to come if they
knew their friends were.  And you should probably start from scratch,
rather than trying to upgrade an existing university, or much energy
would be lost in friction.
[
4
]
Hypothesis: Any plan in which multiple independent buildings
are gutted or demolished to be "redeveloped" as a single project
is a net loss of personality for the city, with the exception of
the conversion of buildings not previously public, like warehouses.
[
5
]
A few startups get started in New York, but less
than a tenth as many per capita as in Boston, and mostly
in less nerdy fields like finance and media.
[
6
]
Some blue counties are false positives (reflecting the
remaining power of Democractic party machines), but there are no
false negatives.  You can safely write off all the red counties.
[
7
]
Some "urban renewal" experts took a shot at destroying Boston's
in the 1960s, leaving the area around city hall a bleak
wasteland
,
but most neighborhoods successfully resisted them.
Thanks
to Chris Anderson, Trevor Blackwell, Marc Hedlund,
Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, Greg Mcadoo, Fred Wilson,
and Stephen Wolfram for
reading drafts of this, and to Ed Dumbill for inviting me to speak.
(The second part of this talk became
Why Startups
Condense in America
.)
VC Deals by Region
Startup Jobs by Region
They Would Be Gods
Interview: Richard Hodgson
Santa Clara Valley, 1971
Scattered Abroad
Russian Translation
Spanish Translation
Japanese Translation
Portuguese Translation
Arabic Translation
If you liked this, you may also like
Hackers & Painters
.


@paultoo Teenagers are the early adopters and have the least existing data (that they care about).

For literally decades I've been running a background process asking "What's the next form factor? Desktops then laptops then phones then what?" Maybe the answer is "Then it doesn't matter what or where the hardware is, so long as you can talk to your AI running on it."

This may seem like a type error, but I wonder if AI is the next form factor in computing.

@paultoo This could well be the next big platform without it being Apple's next big platform. In fact I would guess the odds are someone else will do it first.

@engineers_feed "Is this on? Can you hear me?"

@stevegraham Yes, but more for general fitness than specifically for throwing kids around. Little kids are lighter than luggage.

@phemartin A text file. I always just use text files.

@unable0_ @ycombinator The first batch probably.

@KyleBeautweet I wonder if anyone has ever illustrated such a thing before.

@Noahpinion It's true, it's hard to get a Twitter mob going nowadays. I think it's partly due to changes in the algorithm.


@baileysimrell "Signatory" is not an adjective.

@asra_yousuf It would probably be worth doing even if you weren't worried about sounding like ChatGPT.

https://t.co/K1ZWs2v6RF

Pogo sticks are not dead. One of the most common sounds outside my office window is 11 yo passing by on his.

@librxrian I do, and I've used both to help @GrowSF along with several individual candidates trying to fix the problem in SF.

@garrytan You better watch out. They look they're ready to superglue themselves to you.

@HistoryEJ No one uses it in spoken English. It's one of those words like "burgeoning" that people only use when they're writing and want to sound clever.

My point here is not that I dislike "delve," though I do, but that it's a sign that text was written by ChatGPT. https://t.co/2i3GUgynuL

Someone sent me a cold email proposing a novel project. Then I noticed it used the word "delve."

@MacaesBruno Can you say more about what you expected and why?

@kenshirriff @curious_marc How much more powerful is an iPhone now?


What Made Lisp Different
December 2001 (rev. May 2002)
(This article came about in response to some questions on
the
LL1
mailing list.  It is now
incorporated in
Revenge of the Nerds
.)
When McCarthy designed Lisp in the late 1950s, it was
a radical departure from existing languages,
the most important of which was
Fortran
.
Lisp embodied nine new ideas:
1. Conditionals.
A conditional is an if-then-else
construct.  We take these for granted now.  They were
invented
by McCarthy in the course of developing Lisp.
(Fortran at that time only had a conditional
goto, closely based on the branch instruction in the
underlying hardware.)  McCarthy, who was on the Algol committee, got
conditionals into Algol, whence they spread to most other
languages.
2. A function type.
In Lisp, functions are first class
objects-- they're a data type just like integers, strings,
etc, and have a literal representation, can be stored in variables,
can be passed as arguments, and so on.
3. Recursion.
Recursion existed as a mathematical concept
before Lisp of course, but Lisp was the first programming language to support
it.  (It's arguably implicit in making functions first class
objects.)
4. A new concept of variables.
In Lisp, all variables
are effectively pointers. Values are what
have types, not variables, and assigning or binding
variables means copying pointers, not what they point to.
5. Garbage-collection.
6. Programs composed of expressions.
Lisp programs are
trees of expressions, each of which returns a value.
(In some Lisps expressions
can return multiple values.)  This is in contrast to Fortran
and most succeeding languages, which distinguish between
expressions and statements.
It was natural to have this
distinction in Fortran because (not surprisingly in a language
where the input format was punched cards) the language was
line-oriented.  You could not nest statements.  And
so while you needed expressions for math to work, there was
no point in making anything else return a value, because
there could not be anything waiting for it.
This limitation
went away with the arrival of block-structured languages,
but by then it was too late. The distinction between
expressions and statements was entrenched.  It spread from
Fortran into Algol and thence to both their descendants.
When a language is made entirely of expressions, you can
compose expressions however you want.  You can say either
(using
Arc
syntax)
(if foo (= x 1) (= x 2))
or
(= x (if foo 1 2))
7. A symbol type.
Symbols differ from strings in that
you can test equality by comparing a pointer.
8. A notation for code
using trees of symbols.
9. The whole language always available.
There is
no real distinction between read-time, compile-time, and runtime.
You can compile or run code while reading, read or run code
while compiling, and read or compile code at runtime.
Running code at read-time lets users reprogram Lisp's syntax;
running code at compile-time is the basis of macros; compiling
at runtime is the basis of Lisp's use as an extension
language in programs like Emacs; and reading at runtime
enables programs to communicate using s-expressions, an
idea recently reinvented as XML.
When Lisp was first invented, all these ideas were far
removed from ordinary programming practice, which was
dictated largely by the hardware available in the late 1950s.
Over time, the default language, embodied
in a succession of popular languages, has
gradually evolved toward Lisp.  1-5 are now widespread.
6 is starting to appear in the mainstream.
Python has a form of 7, though there doesn't seem to be
any syntax for it.
8, which (with 9) is what makes Lisp macros
possible, is so far still unique to Lisp,
perhaps because (a) it requires those parens, or something
just as bad, and (b) if you add that final increment of power,
you can no
longer claim to have invented a new language, but only
to have designed a new dialect of Lisp ; -)
Though useful to present-day programmers, it's
strange to describe Lisp in terms of its
variation from the random expedients other languages
adopted.  That was not, probably, how McCarthy
thought of it.  Lisp wasn't designed to fix the mistakes
in Fortran; it came about more as the byproduct of an
attempt to
axiomatize computation
.
Japanese Translation


@chrisfralic Good so far.

@market_news0 @chrisfralic It's reasonable to call it that when talking to someone who knows nothing about startups, but to call it that when talking to someone does would be misleading.

@Chris_arnade I just bought a copy.

@chrisfralic YC started with $200k. In 2005.

@yalinewich @JohnDCook Ah yes, obviously, speed relative to the thing pulling everything toward it.

@ahistoryinart Man, there were so many great artists in the 20th century that no one has heard of because all anyone heard about was Picasso et al. You really need to write that book.

It's not a solution to tell it to make the answer short. The answers to some questions should be long. Getting the length right is part of answering a question well.

@JohnDCook Does it actually slow down between the assists? Why would it?

ChatGPT writes like a kid doing an assignment who's been told to write x number of words. It doesn't yet realize that the right answer is sometimes short.

@webdevMason That's how admissions to PhD programs work. The professors choose.


@Mr_DaddyTruth @stripepress Some are: https://t.co/I5WQ5uK8bh

@eastdakota @Cloudflare Who was the target?

@Austen Surely far more than that. That's just his salary.

@mattyglesias How do you know this?

The amount of time young men spent gaming was not exactly low in 2019. Usually when you see dramatic growth it's from a low starting point, but this is dramatic growth from a high starting point. https://t.co/GlQR2EoZTY

@GiacomoGorini Many American investors still thought this in the 1990s. So this is not a uniquely Italian quality. Italy is just 30 years behind.

@jaikishanb_ @imobulus If you have a friend who will help you get started, whatever language they prefer.

@paultoo Unions had to be specifically exempted from antitrust laws when they were first written, or they would be subject to them. The casuistry they used was that a person's work is not "a commodity or article of commerce." Which seems to imply service companies should also be exempt...

@tlbtlbtlb Your existing conversation probably has this angle sufficiently covered.

This is how good Aldus Manutius was. Printed in 1497. https://t.co/VGmqrAc7be


@ESYudkowsky Medieval is inherently a catch-all concept. It's everything between the fall of the Western Empire and the Renaissance. That's a long time, and very different things were happening at different points during it.

@mert That depends. Would the startup be selling something fake, like worthless undergraduate degrees, or scammy crypto coins? Because I admit in that case the choice would be clear.

If you zoom in, you can see a little Bede bump before the lights go out again. https://t.co/9e435Jzjk0

This graph by @Scientific_Bird shows very clearly the bite that the Dark Ages took out of scholarship, and how dramatically things took off afterward. https://t.co/IgPRwJ4loH

@JoshuaSteinman @jburnmurdoch Perhaps, but we can assume that if Biden could have foreseen the result he'd have overruled this one.

It's certainly clear now what a mistake this was, and a Harris administration will presumably work to fix the situation.

@jburnmurdoch There is no reason to expect that a Harris administration would be anti-crypto. But in the meantime the Democrats have alienated a lot of the crypto people, and they have a *lot* of money.

@jburnmurdoch One of the biggest causes of this shift was an unforced error by the Biden administration: the appointment of Gary Gensler as the head of the SEC. I don't think Biden did this because he was anti-crypto. He just wasn't paying attention.

Naval is mistaken that you should focus on policies rather than people. Policies are just words, especially in an election year. It's easy to invent attractive-sounding policies. Whereas it's practically impossible for people to change their characters.

You already know this.

@jam3scampbell "Despite" is not really the word you want here. This is the default in technology.

A while ago I bought a Gunter rule (the predecessor of the slide rule) and a pair of dividers, and it's so pleasing to use. And the lack of any mechanism makes it seem like magic to people you show it to. You seem to have done nothing, and yet you've found that 420 / 17 ≈ 24.7.


See Randomness
April 2006, rev August 2009
Plato quotes Socrates as saying "the unexamined life is not worth
living."  Part of what he meant was that the proper role of humans is to
think, just as the proper role of anteaters is to poke their noses
into anthills.
A lot of ancient philosophy had the quality — and I
don't mean this in an insulting way — of the kind of conversations
freshmen have late at night in common rooms:
What is our purpose?  Well, we humans are
as conspicuously different from other animals as the anteater.
In our case the distinguishing feature is the ability to reason.
So obviously that is what we should be doing, and a human who
doesn't is doing a bad job of being human — is no better than an
animal.
Now we'd give a different answer.  At least, someone Socrates's age
would.  We'd ask why we even suppose we have a "purpose" in life.
We may be better adapted for some things than others; we
may be happier doing things we're adapted for; but why assume
purpose?
The history of ideas
is a history of gradually discarding the assumption that it's all
about us.  No, it turns out, the earth is not the center of the
universe — not even the center of the solar system.  No, it turns
out, humans are not created by God in his own image; they're just
one species among many, descended not merely from apes, but from
microorganisms.  Even the concept of "me" turns out to be fuzzy
around the edges if you examine it closely.
The idea that we're the center of things is difficult to discard.
So difficult that there's probably room to discard more.  Richard
Dawkins made another step in that direction only in the last several
decades, with the idea of the
selfish gene
.
No, it turns
out, we're not even the protagonists: we're just the latest model
vehicle our genes have constructed to travel around in.  And having
kids is our genes heading for the lifeboats.  Reading
that book snapped my brain out of its previous way of thinking the
way Darwin's must have when it first appeared.
(Few people can experience now what Darwin's contemporaries did
when
The Origin of Species
was first published, because everyone
now is raised either to take evolution for granted, or to regard
it as a heresy. No one encounters the idea of natural selection for
the first time as an adult.)
So if you want to discover things that have been overlooked till
now, one really good place to look is in our blind spot: in our
natural, naive belief that it's all about us.  And expect to encounter
ferocious opposition if you do.
Conversely, if you have to choose between two theories, prefer the
one that doesn't center on you.
This principle isn't only for big ideas.  It works in everyday life,
too.  For example, suppose you're saving a piece of cake in the fridge, and you
come home one day to find your housemate has eaten
it.  Two possible theories:
a) Your housemate did it deliberately to upset you.  He
knew
you were saving that piece of cake.
b) Your housemate was hungry.
I say pick b.  No one knows who said "never attribute to malice what
can be explained by incompetence," but it is a powerful idea.
Its more general version is our answer to the Greeks:
Don't see purpose where there isn't.
Or better still, the positive version:
See randomness.
Korean Translation


If you resolved to read more this year, here are some particularly pleasing books: Master and Commander, Franklin's Autobiography, The Inimitable Jeeves, My Family and Other Animals, Wing Leader, Some Experiences of an Irish RM, A Time of Gifts.

Whoah, today's Times crossword puzzle. We are as legit as Michael Caine and the yapok. https://t.co/02cS97OXLN

Few startups have a smooth ascent. Many if not most have some setbacks initially. The good ones react by focusing on specific steps they can take. The bad ones are vaguely hopeful, or depressed, or in denial — and change nothing.

The rational fear of those who dislike economic inequality is that the rich will convert their economic power into political power: that they'll tilt elections, or pay bribes for pardons, or buy up the news media to promote their views.

I used to be able to claim that tech billionaires didn't actually do this —  that they just wanted to refine their gadgets. But unfortunately in the current administration we've seen all three.

It's still rare for tech billionaires to do this. Most do just want to refine their gadgets. That habit is what made them billionaires. But unfortunately I can no longer say that they all do.

This is a powerful logo in a literal sense: it asserts ownership of a very basic combination of shapes.

(As Patrick Collison discovered back in the day when he created the perfect logo for Stripe, only to discover that he'd recreated the Deutsche Bank logo. I still miss that logo.)

The new plan is apparently to make as many people as possible as miserable as they can be made without blowing them up. And this will be pursued with the same relentless ingenuity as blowing them up was.

If you want to start writing essays but are intimidated by the idea, one possible solution is to write about specialized topics you happen to know a lot about. Then there will be less pressure. And if you're a domain expert, you know you'll be helping your readers.


(Starts raining.)

11 yo: I don't think I'll go outside after all.

Me: Well, it won't rain all day.

11 yo: It did yesterday.

@Rainmaker1973 I would have loved one of these.

@inglesuk You need to work a little more on that Inglés general.

@itskenbook @eldsjal It's hard to imagine any G7 country restricting the entry of food aid in order to starve civilians.

@mariusschober It's fine for that situation.

@omerozener Thanks! I wonder if this is the cause of it all.

@robhoeij "I try to understand," said Rob.

@Kdeshpande3 Certainly if one of them insane, the other had better be firmly rooted in reality.

@dash_xa Empirically, not quickly, because learning new words often means learning new ideas.

I shouldn't complain, because Google Maps is a free service, but it's regularly defeated by British roads. It will often prefer a route that no sane person would choose, using 20 different roads to save 5 minutes. We call a route like this a "Google Maps special".


How to Get New Ideas
January 2023
(
Someone
fed my essays into GPT to make something that could answer
questions based on them, then asked it where good ideas come from.  The
answer was ok, but not what I would have said. This is what I would have said.)
The way to get new ideas is to notice anomalies: what seems strange,
or missing, or broken? You can see anomalies in everyday life (much
of standup comedy is based on this), but the best place to look for
them is at the frontiers of knowledge.
Knowledge grows fractally.
From a distance its edges look smooth, but when you learn enough
to get close to one, you'll notice it's full of gaps. These gaps
will seem obvious; it will seem inexplicable that no one has tried
x or wondered about y. In the best case, exploring such gaps yields
whole new fractal buds.


@waitbutwhy I just picture someone who doesn't have anything substantial to say.

Incidentally, the reason I posted it as image instead of quoting his tweet is because I have it saved as a screenshot, on my desktop, in case the tweet ever goes away. It's the perfect way of expressing a very, very important idea.

You can always get a lot of likes by reposting this image with some empty but deep-sounding statement like "I think about this a lot."  I've seen people do it multiple times. But imagine the damage you do for each ambitious kid who reads this bullshit and actually believes it.

This may be the most inspiring sentence I've ever read. Which is interesting because it's not phrased in the way things meant to be inspiring usually are. https://t.co/1eNvXaBRId

@_wafim_ They're just the links people sent me.

@Itsjoeco Probably people who like their senator or representative. Parties aren't just the executive branch.

Guess who's Bucknell's commencement speaker this year. https://t.co/nBXU8tEYLX

Whereas if you just give one award at a time, no one (including you) will notice if they're unevenly distributed, so you can focus entirely on who did the best. True, there's a certain kind of person who will actually go back and count, but you can increasingly ignore them.

One way to avoid bias is to treat each decision individually. If you're giving awards to a group of kids, for example, and all the best performances are by girls, you'll feel a lot of pressure to lie to yourself about how well the boys did, to even things out.

@bwertz In the limit case your firm is.


The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
November 2019
Everyone knows that to do great work you need both natural ability
and determination. But there's a third ingredient that's not as
well understood: an obsessive interest in a particular topic.
To explain this point I need to burn my reputation with some group
of people, and I'm going to choose bus ticket collectors.  There
are people who collect old bus tickets. Like many collectors, they
have an obsessive interest in the minutiae of what they collect.
They can keep track of distinctions between different types of bus
tickets that would be hard for the rest of us to remember.  Because
we don't care enough. What's the point of spending so much time
thinking about old bus tickets?
Which leads us to the second feature of this kind of obsession:
there is no point. A bus ticket collector's love is disinterested.
They're not doing it to impress us or to make themselves rich, but
for its own sake.
When you look at the lives of people who've done great work, you
see a consistent pattern. They often begin with a bus ticket
collector's obsessive interest in something that would have seemed
pointless to most of their contemporaries. One of the most striking
features of Darwin's book about his voyage on the Beagle is the
sheer depth of his interest in natural history. His curiosity seems
infinite. Ditto for Ramanujan, sitting by the hour working out on
his slate what happens to series.
It's a mistake to think they were "laying the groundwork" for the
discoveries they made later. There's too much intention in that
metaphor. Like bus ticket collectors, they were doing it
because they liked it.
But there is a difference between Ramanujan and a bus ticket
collector. Series matter, and bus tickets don't.
If I had to put the recipe for genius into one sentence, that might
be it: to have a disinterested obsession with something that matters.
Aren't I forgetting about the other two ingredients? Less than you
might think. An obsessive interest in a topic is both a proxy for
ability and a substitute for determination.  Unless you have
sufficient mathematical aptitude, you won't find series interesting.
And when you're obsessively interested in something, you don't need
as much determination: you don't need to push yourself as hard when
curiosity is pulling you.
An obsessive interest will even bring you luck, to the extent
anything can. Chance, as Pasteur said, favors the prepared mind,
and if there's one thing an obsessed mind is, it's prepared.
The disinterestedness of this kind of obsession is its most important
feature. Not just because it's a filter for earnestness, but because
it helps you discover new ideas.
The paths that lead to new ideas tend to look unpromising. If they
looked promising, other people would already have explored them.
How do the people who do great work discover these paths that others
overlook?  The popular story is that they simply have better vision:
because they're so talented, they see paths that others miss.  But
if you look at the way great discoveries are made, that's not what
happens. Darwin didn't pay closer attention to individual species
than other people because he saw that this would lead to great
discoveries, and they didn't. He was just really, really interested
in such things.
Darwin couldn't turn it off. Neither could Ramanujan.  They didn't
discover the hidden paths that they did because they seemed promising,
but because they couldn't help it. That's what allowed them to
follow paths that someone who was merely ambitious would have
ignored.
What rational person would decide that the way to write great novels
was to begin by spending several years creating an imaginary elvish
language, like Tolkien, or visiting every household in southwestern
Britain, like Trollope? No one, including Tolkien and Trollope.
The bus ticket theory is similar to Carlyle's famous definition of
genius as an infinite capacity for taking pains. But there are two
differences. The bus ticket theory makes it clear that the source
of this infinite capacity for taking pains is not infinite diligence,
as Carlyle seems to have meant, but the sort of infinite interest
that collectors have. It also adds an important qualification: an
infinite capacity for taking pains about something that matters.
So what  matters? You can never be sure. It's precisely because no
one can tell in advance which paths are promising that you can
discover new ideas by working on what you're interested in.
But there are some heuristics you can use to guess whether an
obsession might be one that matters. For example, it's more promising
if you're creating something, rather than just consuming something
someone else creates. It's more promising if something you're
interested in is difficult, especially if it's
more difficult for
other people
than it is for you. And the obsessions of talented
people are more likely to be promising. When talented people become
interested in random things, they're not truly random.
But you can never be sure. In fact, here's an interesting idea
that's also rather alarming if it's true: it may be that to do great
work, you also have to waste a lot of time.
In many different areas, reward is proportionate to risk. If that
rule holds here, then the way to find paths that lead to truly great
work is to be willing to expend a lot of effort on things that turn
out to be every bit as unpromising as they seem.
I'm not sure if this is true. On one hand, it seems surprisingly
difficult to waste your time so long as you're working hard on
something interesting. So much of what you do ends up being useful.
But on the other hand, the rule about the relationship between risk
and reward is so powerful that it seems to hold wherever risk occurs.
Newton's
case, at least, suggests that the risk/reward rule holds
here. He's famous for one particular obsession of his that turned
out to be unprecedentedly fruitful: using math to describe the
world. But he had two other obsessions, alchemy and theology, that
seem to have been complete wastes of time. He ended up net ahead.
His bet on what we now call physics paid off so well that it more
than compensated for the other two. But were the other two necessary,
in the sense that he had to take big risks to make such big
discoveries? I don't know.
Here's an even more alarming idea: might one make all bad bets?  It
probably happens quite often. But we don't know how often, because
these people don't become famous.
It's not merely that the returns from following a path are hard to
predict. They change dramatically over time. 1830 was a really good
time to be obsessively interested in natural history. If Darwin had
been born in 1709 instead of 1809, we might never have heard of
him.
What can one do in the face of such uncertainty?  One solution is
to hedge your bets, which in this case means to follow the obviously
promising paths instead of your own private obsessions. But as with
any hedge, you're decreasing reward when you decrease risk.  If you
forgo working on what you like in order to follow some more
conventionally ambitious path, you might miss something wonderful
that you'd otherwise have discovered. That too must happen all the
time, perhaps even more often than the genius whose bets all fail.
The other solution is to let yourself be interested in lots of
different things. You don't decrease your upside if you switch
between equally genuine interests based on which seems to be working
so far. But there is a danger here too: if you work on too many
different projects, you might not get deeply enough into any of
them.
One interesting thing about the bus ticket theory is that it may
help explain why different types of people excel at different kinds
of work. Interest is much more unevenly distributed than ability.
If natural ability is all you need to do great work, and natural
ability is evenly distributed, you have to invent elaborate theories
to explain the skewed distributions we see among those who actually
do great work in various fields. But it may be that much of the
skew has a simpler explanation: different people are interested in
different things.
The bus ticket theory also explains why people are less likely to
do great work after they have children. Here interest has to compete
not just with external obstacles, but with another interest, and
one that for most people is extremely powerful. It's harder to find
time for work after you have kids, but that's the easy part. The
real change is that you don't
want
to.
But the most exciting implication of the bus ticket theory is that
it suggests ways to encourage great work. If the recipe for genius
is simply natural ability plus hard work, all we can do is hope we
have a lot of ability, and work as hard as we can. But if interest
is a critical ingredient in genius, we may be able, by cultivating
interest, to cultivate genius.
For example, for the very ambitious, the bus ticket theory suggests
that the way to do great work is to relax a little. Instead of
gritting your teeth and diligently pursuing what all your peers
agree is the most promising line of research, maybe you should try
doing something just for fun. And if you're stuck, that may be the
vector along which to break out.
I've always liked
Hamming's
famous double-barrelled question: what
are the most important problems in your field, and why aren't you
working on one of them? It's a great way to shake yourself up. But
it may be overfitting a bit. It might be at least as useful to ask
yourself: if you could take a year off to work on something that
probably wouldn't be important but would be really interesting,
what would it be?
The bus ticket theory also suggests a way to avoid slowing down as
you get older. Perhaps the reason people have fewer new ideas as
they get older is not simply that they're losing their edge. It may
also be because once you become established, you can no longer mess
about with irresponsible side projects the way you could when you
were young and no one cared what you did.
The solution to that is obvious: remain irresponsible. It will be
hard, though, because the apparently random projects you take up
to stave off decline will read to outsiders as evidence of it.  And
you yourself won't know for sure that they're wrong. But it will
at least be more fun to work on what you want.
It may even be that we can cultivate a habit of intellectual bus
ticket collecting in kids. The usual plan in education is to start
with a broad, shallow focus, then gradually become more specialized.
But I've done the opposite with my kids. I know I can count on their
school to handle the broad, shallow part, so I take them deep.
When they get interested in something, however random, I encourage
them to go preposterously, bus ticket collectorly, deep.  I don't
do this because of the bus ticket theory. I do it because I want
them to feel the joy of learning, and they're never going to feel
that about something I'm making them learn. It has to be something
they're interested in. I'm just following the path of least resistance;
depth is a byproduct. But if in trying to show them the joy of
learning I also end up training them to go deep, so much the better.
Will it have any effect? I have no idea. But that uncertainty may
be the most interesting point of all. There is so much more to learn
about how to do great work. As old as human civilization feels,
it's really still very young if we haven't nailed something so
basic. It's exciting to think there are still discoveries to make
about discovery. If that's the sort of thing you're interested in.
Notes
[1] There are other types of collecting that illustrate this point
better than bus tickets, but they're also more popular. It seemed
just as well to use an inferior example rather than offend more
people by telling them their hobby doesn't matter.
[2] I worried a little about using the word "disinterested," since
some people mistakenly believe it means not interested. But anyone
who expects to be a genius will have to know the meaning of such a
basic word, so I figure they may as well start now.
[3] Think how often genius must have been nipped in the bud by
people being told, or telling themselves, to stop messing about and
be responsible. Ramanujan's mother was a huge enabler. Imagine if
she hadn't been. Imagine if his parents had made him go out and get
a job instead of sitting around at home doing math.
On the other hand, anyone quoting the preceding paragraph to justify
not getting a job is probably mistaken.
[4] 1709 Darwin is to time what the
Milanese Leonardo
is to space.
[5] "An infinite capacity for taking pains" is a paraphrase of what
Carlyle wrote. What he wrote, in his
History of Frederick the Great
,
was "... it is the fruit of 'genius' (which means transcendent
capacity of taking trouble, first of all)...." Since the paraphrase
seems the name of the idea at this point, I kept it.
Carlyle's
History
was published in 1858. In 1785 Hérault de Séchelles
quoted Buffon as saying "Le génie n'est qu'une plus grande aptitude
à la patience." (Genius is only a greater aptitude for patience.)
[6] Trollope was establishing the system of postal routes. He himself
sensed the obsessiveness with which he pursued this goal.
It is amusing to watch how a passion will grow upon a man. During
   those two years it was the ambition of my life to cover the
   country with rural letter-carriers.
Even Newton occasionally sensed the degree of his obsessiveness.
After computing pi to 15 digits, he wrote in a letter to a friend:
I am ashamed to tell you to how many figures I carried these
   computations, having no other business at the time.
Incidentally, Ramanujan was also a compulsive calculator. As Kanigel
writes in his excellent biography:
One Ramanujan scholar, B. M. Wilson, later told how Ramanujan's
  research into number theory was often "preceded by a table of
  numerical results, carried usually to a length from which most
  of us would shrink."
[7] Working to understand the natural world counts as creating
rather than consuming.
Newton tripped over this distinction when he chose
to work on theology. His beliefs did not allow him to see it, but
chasing down paradoxes in nature is fruitful in a way that chasing
down paradoxes in sacred texts is not.
[8] How much of people's propensity to become interested in a topic
is inborn?  My experience so far suggests the answer is: most of
it. Different kids get interested in different things, and it's
hard to make a child interested in something they wouldn't otherwise
be. Not in a way that sticks.  The most you can do on behalf of a
topic is to make sure it gets a fair showing  to make it clear to
them, for example, that there's more to math than the dull drills
they do in school. After that it's up to the child.
Thanks
to Marc Andreessen, Trevor Blackwell, Patrick Collison, Kevin
Lacker, Jessica Livingston, Jackie McDonough, Robert Morris, Lisa
Randall, Zak Stone, and
my 7 year old
for reading drafts of this.
Spanish Translation
Russian Translation
Korean Translation
Armenian Translation


Send something as a PDF attachment instead of in the body of the email if you don't want people to read it.

@david_perell The sons of Hermes love to play,
And only do their best when they
Are told they oughtn't;
Apollo's children never shrink
From boring jobs but have to think
Their work important.

– W. H. Auden, Under Which Lyre

If Lina Khan blocks the sale of US TikTok on antitrust grounds, does the CCP get to keep it? If so I don't see what they're worried about.

Me in Ithaca in 1984 or 85. (In Ithaca, snow doesn't narrow down the month as much as you might hope.) The white thing is an egg. The photo was for my housemate Nancy's class project, which must have involved photographing people with eggs. https://t.co/upBqUNmI5p

@jdmccafferty Were these for hand washing? I always assumed they were for drinking water.

@ChiefScientist It's usually obvious from the context who "we" would be, so it hasn't been a problem so far.

@AravBehl @bamitsmanas No, a paper book guy.

@rauchg @nextjs A, but what if you make the N a dark red?

@matthew_d_green I've found you can always get away with using "he" for someone being portrayed in a negative light. I've been quietly doing it for years and no one has ever called me on it.

@andinfinity_eu If you're Swiss you're entitled to that belief, but not if you're American.


@DominikPeters I've had lots of practice.

If it's possible (no idea if it is) someone should invent a Chinese nickname for Mao that looks like this curve when written. That would be a vivid way to remember him.

@scheminglunatic Annually for how long? If it were an annuity (i.e. ending in death) it would be trivial to calculate the value and thus the valuation.

@Noahpinion Big dais maybe. Yuge.

@cremieuxrecueil It has always been true, however. So discourse is no worse off than it has been in the past.

@elonmusk @NoahCarl90 If someone starts from that assumption and notices you posting things that are false or misleading, they assume that you must be doing so knowingly — that it's part of some deliberate plan. And any plan involving deliberate falsehoods must be a bad one.

@elonmusk @NoahCarl90 When I try to explain that you simply use Twitter like most people do, posting impulsively, often without doing much research first, they can't believe it. They assume that a magnate who controls multiple huge companies must always be serious.

@elonmusk @NoahCarl90 The people I hang out with are the equivalent of middle class suburban couples in the US, except they make less. They're not in tech and don't even use social media much. So their opinions about you derive from reports like this:

https://t.co/5i1oSBOjpC

@R_CA_1 @elonmusk @NoahCarl90 The majority of the people I'm referring to support the conservatives.

@TomDavenport @elonmusk @NoahCarl90 No it isn't. They didn't particularly dislike Gates or Bezos when they were richest.


@AngelicaOung They also elected a moderate majority to the Board of Supervisors. The supervisors were the ones who really dragged the city down in its darkest days.

@per_anders It is praise of SF. I know both cities well. It's SF that has changed.

@HistoryBoomer I checked and I had them both already blocked.

@BosonJoe Most interesting things are known by other people. Yours would be too if you were more curious.

@GirardHolistic @michaeldbertino Not that election. Trump had nothing to do with it.

@michaeldbertino Exactly. Since the election.

@MissouriHusker @garrytan Yeah, you'd hate it. Better to stay away.

@TheNextAfrican That's what they said, and they know because they live in London.

@JamesGillespieX It has. Because of the election.

@Helghardt The government. There's a new mayor and a new moderate majority on the Board of Supervisors.