SimpleWeblog

you know what they say about intuition...

Well, I don't. I want to know how to end this sentence. It seems like there should be a clever saying, something along the lines of "you know what they say about when you assume" or maybe something more like "intuition and a quarter will buy you a cup of coffee" but maybe even more folksy, involving farm animals or what some relative used to say. Anyways, I can't believe this doesn't exist. Maybe people really do trust their intuition?

Big Numbers

Indeed, one could define science as reason’s attempt to compensate for our inability to perceive big numbers. If we could run at 280,000,000 meters per second, there’d be no need for a special theory of relativity: it’d be obvious to everyone that the faster we go, the heavier and squatter we get, and the faster time elapses in the rest of the world. If we could live for 70,000,000 years, there’d be no theory of evolution, and certainly no creationism: we could watch speciation and adaptation with our eyes, instead of painstakingly reconstructing events from fossils and DNA. If we could bake bread at 20,000,000 degrees Kelvin, nuclear fusion would be not the esoteric domain of physicists but ordinary household knowledge. But we can’t do any of these things, and so we have science, to deduce about the gargantuan what we, with our infinitesimal faculties, will never sense. If people fear big numbers, is it any wonder that they fear science as well and turn for solace to the comforting smallness of mysticism?

Scott Aaronson's article about Big Numbers

Long term joy

But at some point I had to ask myself how much of what seemed at first to be immediately enjoyable was transferrable to accomplishing the goals that really gave me long-term joy.

...

I could be consuming the stories, or I could be telling them, and there was only so long I could feed myself the fiction that the consumption fed my abillity to create.