Tuesday, December 31, 2019
Yet more Thiel questions
Expanding and probably loosening the Thiel question yet again.
Thiel's evocative original: "Tell me something that’s true that almost nobody agrees with you on."
Loosened: Something that's true that almost nobody else seems to know.
Real-world math is a common thread in these.
1. Math fails to deal with thresholds, which are a vital and universal fact of life in everything from neurons to shrinkflation.
2. Not a fact but a plausible hypothesis that works better than the usual. Cooking started with fermented barley, not with grassfires in the Sabertooth Savannah.
3. Also related to barley, the crucial importance of storage.
4. Debunked the tiresome Tocqueville quote about voters and largesse. (This fits the strict Thiel standard.)
5. Georg Ohm's original idea about heat and electricity turns out to be more correct than the usual metaphors.
6. There is a sharp demographic breakpoint at age 46. People who live hard and fast die at 46.
7. Counting votes by hand isn't slow. In practice it beats electronic counting. The reason for the Electoral College was to make cheating easier, not to compensate for "slow" counting. The reason we're switching to electronic counting is to make cheating easier, not to speed up the count.
8. The only externally observable evidence of awareness is REM sleep, so vertebrates and cephalopods are the only known and proven owners of consciousness. (Tacked this on after mentioning it in another item. This blatantly obvious piece of logic MUST be understood by others, but I've never read it anywhere else, so I'm going to claim it as unique for now.)
Labels: Real World Math, storage
¶ 12:33 AM
