An Algorithmic Lucidity

Why is it considered rude to reschedule an event after you've already sent out the invitations? Why do people stubbornly rejecting a compromise tend to do so in a polite and kindly manner? Why did you name your car Rainbow Dash? Speculative answers to these and other questions might be found in the following list of observations.

You can't spell alliteratively without literati.
You can't spell announcement without cement.
You can't spell apprenticeship without entice.
You can't spell chemotherapy without mother.
You can't spell eponymous without pony.
You can't spell compassion without compass.
You can't spell literate without iterate.
You can't spell disappointingly without tingly.
You can't spell disapproving without roving.
You can't spell disconcerting without sconce.
You can't spell discontinuance without nuance.
You can't spell ill-naturedness without redness.
You can't spell illustrative without strati.
You can't spell intransigently without gently.
You can't spell resolute without solute.
You can't spell oversuspicious without versus.
You can't spell precedent without recede.
You can't spell vindictive without indict.

"We need some sort of slogan to go on our advertisements. Any ideas?"

"How about 'World's Best Widgets'?"

"Ha—no."

"Too cliché?"

"Not ambitious enough."

"Not ambitious enough?! How so?"

"Think about it! What use is it to have the best widget in today's world, if someone might just invent a better widget tomorrow? And who would be content to have the best widget in our universe, past, present, and future, when still better widgets might have existed if things had gone differently? No! I want all our potential customers to know that we make the best widgets in all possible worlds!"

"What do you think of my website's new look? I designed it with ESS."

"It's hideous! And you mean CSS."

"No, ESS. I used genetic algorithms to 'breed' new designs until the pool of candidates settled down into equilibrium."

"Ah."

kind of disappointed that cog and cognition don't actually share a root

"I shall seek the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

"I shall seek? What's wrong with the original God grant me?"

"What God sees fit to grant me is one of the things I can't change."

YOLO, VOI

"I've heard of dei ex machinis, but this is ridiculous!"

Books arrived in the post! Including the book about counterfactuals and causal inference in the social sciences, which is really important because everyone and her dog has political opinions, but it's rather less common to have a theory about how to reason about which interventions will lead to which outcomes!

"Every day, I ritually sacrifice part of my soul to appease Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory."

"Sorry, have I been dominating our conversations too much?"

"Not at all; why do you ask?"

"I feel like my model of you is less detailed than my model of your model of me."

"Maybe there should be an effort to cryopreserve specimens of endangered species. 'Hey, sorry we killed your entire species, but when we get more computing power later, we'll be sure to give you lots of happy runtime as compensation.'"

"It is my considered opinion that Emily Dickinson was a time-traveling cryonicist."

"That is an opinion I have not previously heard advanced."

"C'mon! 'Because I could not stop for Death, / He kindly stopped for me; / The carriage held but just ourselves / And Immortality'? It's obvious!"

"And you, you louse! How do you justify your existence?"

"I tutor orphans."

"Oh, yeah? What subject?"

"Galois theory."

"So, an engineer and a mathematician are leaving a lecture. The engineer says, 'I just don't understand how you can visualize objects in seven-dimensional space.' The mathematician says, 'Oh, that's easy. You just visualize the n-dimensional case, and then set n equal to seven.'"

"I've never liked that joke. The punchline is intended to be absurd, but it's not: that's actually how you do it."

"Really?"

"Okay, fine. You visualize the three-dimensional case, and then set three equal to seven."

"I miss being a human."

"You miss it? What do you think you are now?"

"A crude, slow, bug-ridden implementation of general intelligence patched into a human brain."

"Hey, I'm Kevin. I'm a junior majoring in marketing. I live in San Leandro, and my favorite teacher was my high school English teacher Mr. Wheeler."

"Hi, I'm Jody. I'm a kineseology major in my fourth year, and I live in Daly City. And my favorite teacher's name is Kelly Schmidt."

"Why, hello there. My name is Zack M. Davis. As far as this whole 'college' business goes, I have accumulated ninety-four credits towards a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics. I live on an island of guesswork, storytelling, and noise, and my favorite teachers are grace, beauty, and the true structure of the world beneath the world."

The great Brian Kernighan wrote, "Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?"

It's not just good advice for programmers. The same principle applies to any sort of planning and any sort of reasoning: the most intricate, sophisticated thoughts you can think, the thoughts at the very edge of your current abilities, are going to be less reliable than simpler thoughts that you can not only conceive of, but also understand in detail exactly why they're correct. Thus, insofar as you're thinking to achieve an outcome in the world, insofar as you actually care about your plan working, then (other things being equal) simple plans are preferable.

(On the other hand, if what you really want to do is show off how smart you are, then you should think and say complicated things. At the meta level, this is itself a simple plan, as contrasted to complicated and nonobvious schemes to achieve the outcome of looking smart.)

"I'm not sure that I'm happy that concrete is used as a sort of metonym for anything definite and fixed; there are lots of other hard substances, too, like diamond, steel, or topaz."

"Concrete spends part of its life as a fluid."

"Oh, so it is actually especially good as a verb, concretize or to make concrete, because you're 'hardening' something that previously was not. Thanks!"

"I'm entertaining this daydream of standing in a coffeeshop with a sign saying, 'BUSINESSPEOPLE: TELL ME ABOUT YOUR PROBLEMS; I WILL BUY YOU COFFEE' in the hopes that some of their pain points could be easily solved in software for money. I don't know if this would actually work."

"That sounds inexpensive and high-upside. Do it. If it's boring, stop."

"Not right now; I'm still on Father's dole for another year, which is fine. I'm just musing on the principle of Make Something People Want as opposed to 'get a job.'"

"Why not right now? You are allowed to cut yourself off the dole if you find something else."

"I agree that it's important to appreciate that such things are allowed, but note that the amount that I complain about my social position is more reflective of ideologically-induced madness rather than actual preferences; I really do like having time to study. My constant petulance is a distortion, a mistake."

"Ah."

Short-Term Career Objective: make money and help people by means of using computers to solve problems

Long-Term Career Objective: make lots of money and help people lots by means of wielding godlike mastery over computational existence to solve important problems