Optimizing everything — including the details of one’s life — is another way to fail at everything, but quantitatively.

I simply don’t believe this is true for everyone. It’s certainly not for me.

Math is the only area where I’ve ever deliberately studied, and saw no improvement, even with huge number of hours using many different methods with full dedication on my part. I can memorize many things, and make sense of the concepts just fine, but when it comes time to actually doing the problems, unless they are completely identical I am lost.

Furthermore, when I do manage to memorize enough to determine what to do, the moment I learn something in the math arena but not related to what I was studying before the previous learning is utterly extinguished. What I mean is that, say, I learn how to handle factoring. I have it down from an operational standpoint (I always have understood the concept of factoring just fine). The moment I learn for instance how to do some geometry, factoring is wiped. It’s just gone, never to return.

Whatever it is in most people’s brains that allows them to remember more than one math idea at a time (from a working-out-the-problem standpoint) is just not present in mine. I suspect it’s because so much of my mind is devoted to languages and data analysis at a high level, there just isn’t space for anything else like this.

In high school, a teacher was astounded that some algebra techniques that I’d seemingly mastered just a few weeks before I could no longer remember even the first thing about. Sure, I remembered doing them. But I had no idea how to perform them any longer. This is the case with anything in the math realm, no matter how much time I devote to it.

With great effort, I can memorize enough for one test and do well on it, but a week later, all is forgotten.

All ya’ll realize I hope that what Trump and his cronies, conmen, cozeners and crooks have been doing is basically what all very rich people do, right?

Sure, it’s atrocious, but it has only been revealed because of a $25 million investigation. Look at just about any other person worth a few hundred million or above and you’ll find the same sort of nefarious frauds and grifts. It’s how you get that rich. That Trump’s staff criminals aren’t particularly good at it hasn’t mattered because no one looks.

Just a public service announcement.

A young woman in front of me in the line at the grocery store, who was buying turnips, confusingly enough could not identify them when the cashier asked what they were. No one around other than me knew that they were in fact turnips.

I considered asking the woman why she was buying something that she couldn’t identify, but then she ripped off her face and, surprise, it was Putin!

He was here to sow produce uncertainty throughout this great nation! By doubting the turnips, we will then doubt reality itself! Ah, Putin, never would I have considered such brilliant Brassica-based psyops.

Climate change is the big existential risk. Most effort should be spent abating and adapting to this. But it bothers me that the same people who say we should’ve done something about climate change 30 or 40 years ago say that it’s pointless worrying about AI now — that essentially no resources should be spent on this.

While the prospect of runaway evil AI is remote and fantastical, that is not the only failure scenario, and some of the more mundane ones are nearly as bad. How you prevent horrific outcomes is that you devote resources early to ensuring those outcomes are forestalled at the outset.

Is that so hard to understand?

By the way, AI’s risk is both overstated and understated — understated in the sense that AI is already causing harm, so those many who say we should do nothing are already wrong. And it’s overstated in the sense that the sun is not likely to be disassembled anytime soon to make paperclips.

Also, the “Skynet” scenario is most likely for AI causing massive harm. One day, there will be lots of autonomous robots making decisions related to combat and weapon use. I hope I don’t have to point out how even without full AGI this can and likely will go horribly wrong.

To be fair, this is basically how the actual New Deal happened as well https://t.co/6cYh9WFVsH

— Steven White (@notstevenwhite) December 11, 2018

Exactly. The New Deal wasn’t some grand scheme all planned out in advance, handed down from on high. It was iterative, provisional, experimental and uncertain.

Which, you know, was one of the reasons it was successful! Criticizing someone or some group for not having a plan for a society-uprooting undertaking that has literally never been done before anywhere by anyone is facile. It’s a way of shutting down debate and forward motion and it’s extremely ahistorical. We don’t know what will work, politically, environmentally, or technologically. We just don’t, nitpickers, dilly-dalliers, naysayers and dawdlers aside.

There’s an old saw in the IT world: don’t do premature optimization as it’s just wasting time. The same applies in the case, because we don’t know nearly enough to optimize. That doesn’t mean just wildly do whatever comes to mind, but it does mean be flexible, be pliant to the vagaries of circumstance, and responsive to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.