Look at what Putin tricked this woman into believing: https://t.co/5dGOXSaCMm

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) December 10, 2018

Putin really gets around. This morning, I think I saw him stealing mail out of my mailbox. I think he was also tickling my feet last night as I slept. Damn Putin.

Many people in engineering believe that to understand something, it is necessary and sufficient to have a low-level mathematical description of that thing. That you need to "know the math behind it". In nearly all cases, it is neither sufficient nor at all necessary – far from it

— François Chollet (@fchollet) October 26, 2018

Yes. I had a friend who could basically solve any equation. He, however, didn’t understand what any of them actually meant. He was just good at math. This is true of all too many in the STEM fields. They are so narrow they could slide under a door.

Math is not unimportant, but understanding it is not a key to some great mystery. It’s just another tool. It’s not a substitute for everything else.

All of life is tradeoffs. Too many people both politically and personally believe they can just opt out or negate this — which is itself a tradeoff.

A lot of unhappiness and anomie I believe extends from not recognizing that better decision-making can occur when you embrace the necessity and even freedom of using the idea of tradeoffs and marginal improvements to your advantage. Assuming, that is, that your basic needs are already taken care of.

I started pondering this as I was considering why Stoicism was not for me, and its flaws. This is a small result of that thinking.

We have entered the stage, in the US at least, where elite liberals truly believe that any and all mass dissent or unhappiness is caused by 1) racism or 2) Russia, both being illegitimate. That's why they're so detached from any deeper analysis

— Bullneck (@Bullneck) December 9, 2018

Indeed. Anything that upsets the status quo is immediately blamed on Russia — even if it harms Russian interests. It reminds me of how when you fix someone’s computer, every problem, even five years later, is your “fault.” It’s the same irrationality and magical thinking.

A surprisingly large part of having expertise in a topic is not so much knowing everything about it but learning the language and sources well enough to be extremely efficient in google searches.

— Katie Mack (@AstroKatie) December 8, 2018

Absolutely. I don’t know nearly everything about virtualization and networking. But I know a lot, and more importantly I know how to find — with celerity and accuracy — what I don’t know, and put it to use just as rapidly.

The other day, I was working on a problem for a company for which my company is a vendor. It was an infrastructure problem and unrelated to our product, but as I’ve noted before I end up doing a lot of free infrastructure consulting for various reasons (mainly that many companies have shockingly bad infrastructure teams). This problem 3-4 people had spent nearly a week working on.

I solved it in 10 minutes through knowing how to find what I needed and how to put that knowledge to use. I know I get paid a lot. But I often solve things in 10-15 minutes that teams of people spend weeks looking at. And that’s because I know how to find what I need and know that I know it’s right very damn quickly.