Tim Hartford Ted Talk

Tim Hartford gives a Ted talk discussing trial and error and the God Complex. He defines the god-complex as a belief that no matter how complex the situation or problem a person faces, that person believes they are infallibly right. Hartford says the antidote to this problem is trial and error.

The real advantage of trial and error really is that it allows us to solve problems that surpass our ability to understand them. I remember I was reading Ray Kurzweil a long time ago, and he argued at one point, basically, that evolution is a sort of simplistic intelligence. Because it works through trial and error, it can produce living things of intelligence that far surpass itself (like us humans, for example), though, because it is rather simple and crude, it moves slowly, very slowly. Kurzweil was, of course, talking about the singularity and making a point about how with much more sophisticated intelligences like humans and, some day, super-intelligent machines, we can accelerate this evolution. But the relevant insight for us here is that the great advantage of trial and error is that it's the means to successfully accomplish things that we only something much smarter than us could comprehend.

Hartford calls it an antidote to the God-complex, simply because it so elegantly shows us that we don't understand things that we think we understand. But he ends with the point that, though everyone knows that trial and error is great, it's criminally underutilized because the God-complex is so seductive. There are so many people that are so confident that they are right, and since people believe much more in people who are much more confident, such people have influence, all too much influence, I'm afraid.

Tim Hartford gives a Ted talk discussing trial and error and the God Complex. He defines the god-complex as a belief that no matter how complex the situation or problem a person faces, that person believes they are infallibly right. Hartford says the antidote to this problem is trial and error.

The real advantage of trial and error really is that it allows us to solve problems that surpass our ability to understand them. I remember I was reading Ray Kurzweil a long time ago, and he argued at one point, basically, that evolution is a sort of simplistic intelligence. Because it works through trial and error, it can produce living things of intelligence that far surpass itself (like us humans, for example), though, because it is rather simple and crude, it moves slowly, very slowly. Kurzweil was, of course, talking about the singularity and making a point about how with much more sophisticated intelligences like humans and, some day, super-intelligent machines, we can accelerate this evolution. But the relevant insight for us here is that the great advantage of trial and error is that it's the means to successfully accomplish things that we only something much smarter than us could comprehend.

Hartford calls it an antidote to the God-complex, simply because it so elegantly shows us that we don't understand things that we think we understand. But he ends with the point that, though everyone knows that trial and error is great, it's criminally underutilized because the God-complex is so seductive. There are so many people that are so confident that they are right, and since people believe much more in people who are much more confident, such people have influence, all too much influence, I'm afraid.

Tim Hartford Ted Talk

How the internet affects our memory

New research shows that we tend to remember more poorly things that we think we can look up. As the New York Times describes it:

Dr. Sparrow and her collaborators, Daniel M. Wegner of Harvard and Jenny Liu of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, staged four different memory experiments. In one, participants typed 40 bits of trivia — for example, “an ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain” — into a computer. Half of the subjects believed the information would be saved in the computer; the other half believed the items they typed would be erased.

The subjects were significantly more likely to remember information if they thought they would not be able to find it later. “Participants did not make the effort to remember when they thought they could later look up the trivia statement they had read,” the authors write.

In other words, we don't put as much effort into remembering things we don't think we have to remember. Does it show that our memories are poorer because of the internet? No. In fact, nowadays we're barraged with so much more information and trivia than we were in the past that learning what is important to actually retain in your noggin and what you can just look up later if you ever need it is a really important skill. In fact, the researchers note that people tend to remember better how to find the info or where it is stored, rather than the info itself.

Ronald Bailey at Reason magazine makes the appropriate connection to Plato's Phaedrus (274e-275b), where Socrates had criticized writing's effect on memory saying:

this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.

But Socrates has turned out to be wrong. Writing doesn't diminish our memory; it just changes the way we remember things. Just as writing was in Plato's day, the internet is sort of becoming a back up drive for our memory, a place to go to access stuff we don't have enough room for on our main drive. It supplements our memory. Wegner calls this type of thing "transactive memory," a place "where information is stored collectively outside the brain.

And there's nothing new here. We've always used other sources to supplement our memory, whether it's asking friends, looking it up in books or checking our notes. The difference is that now the internet is almost exclusively filling that role.

New research shows that we tend to remember more poorly things that we think we can look up. As the New York Times describes it:

Dr. Sparrow and her collaborators, Daniel M. Wegner of Harvard and Jenny Liu of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, staged four different memory experiments. In one, participants typed 40 bits of trivia — for example, “an ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain” — into a computer. Half of the subjects believed the information would be saved in the computer; the other half believed the items they typed would be erased.

The subjects were significantly more likely to remember information if they thought they would not be able to find it later. “Participants did not make the effort to remember when they thought they could later look up the trivia statement they had read,” the authors write.

In other words, we don't put as much effort into remembering things we don't think we have to remember. Does it show that our memories are poorer because of the internet? No. In fact, nowadays we're barraged with so much more information and trivia than we were in the past that learning what is important to actually retain in your noggin and what you can just look up later if you ever need it is a really important skill. In fact, the researchers note that people tend to remember better how to find the info or where it is stored, rather than the info itself.

Ronald Bailey at Reason magazine makes the appropriate connection to Plato's Phaedrus (274e-275b), where Socrates had criticized writing's effect on memory saying:

this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them.

But Socrates has turned out to be wrong. Writing doesn't diminish our memory; it just changes the way we remember things. Just as writing was in Plato's day, the internet is sort of becoming a back up drive for our memory, a place to go to access stuff we don't have enough room for on our main drive. It supplements our memory. Wegner calls this type of thing "transactive memory," a place "where information is stored collectively outside the brain.

And there's nothing new here. We've always used other sources to supplement our memory, whether it's asking friends, looking it up in books or checking our notes. The difference is that now the internet is almost exclusively filling that role.

How the internet affects our memory

The Oxford Shakespeare Theory

I was just noticing that Roland Emmerich is working on a movie premised on the idea that Shakespeare's plays were actually written by Oxford Earl Edward de Vere (due out 2012, a trailer is already up). My first reaction was, "How is Roland Emerich going to incorporate the destruction of famous landmarks into a movie set in Elizabethan England?" But my second reaction was, "So, they're making a movie out of the ol' Oxford-Shakespeare theory. Interesting."

The idea that the William Shakespeare from Stratord-upon-Avon was not the true author of the plays attributed to him is an old theory. First, in the nineteenth century, it was proposed that the plays were written by Francis Bacon. This theory runs into the problem that Bacon's style is fairly distinct from Shakespeare's and Bacon is not known otherwise to have written any plays.

The theory that Christopher Marlowe wrote Shakespeare's plays was next proposed. This had more plausibility since Marlowe did write plays, was very good at writing plays, and certainly had more stylistic similarity to Shakespeare. But it ran into the problem that Marlowe was dead, dying in 1593, about twenty years before Shakespeare retired in 1613. No problem. These people claimed that Marlowed faked his own death. The problem this ran into is that his death, stabbed to death in a bar fight, doesn't exactly fit a plausible description of a faked death. Marlowe was a very public figure, a well-known playwright, who was killed in a very public place, a bar, and it was followed by a post-mortem and inquest. If you want to fake your own death, you're much better off doing it in a way that leaves very few witnesses and little evidence, like say dying in a fire or explosion or plane crash or drowning at sea. Heck even in this day and age you could probably get away with faking your own death as a drowning at sea (note to future self: do not attempt). Even though faking your death in 1593, with their rather primitive forensic science, would be a lot easier then than now, it's still hard to imagine how Marlowe could get away with it.

The currently most popular theory of Shakespearian alternative authorship is the Oxford theory, attributing authorship to Edward de Vere. This is more plausible since de Vere was known to be a celebrated poet and playwright in his day, was a patron of the theater and survived until 1604, which means that we only have to assume that some of de Vere's works were performed posthumously, which is possible.

On the other hand, we should note that most Shakespeare scholars are Stratfordians, that is to say that they believe that the plays of Shakespeare were written by the William Shakespeare from Stratford-upon-Avon, not by Edward de Vere or Bacon or Marlowe or anyone else. They believe this for a number of reasons based on very good evidence. For one, there is the simple and obvious one: the plays were, in their day, widely attributed to Shakespeare. The facts that everyone said the plays were written by Shakespeare and that all of the (admittedly unauthorized) publications of the plays that name an author attribute them to Shakespeare are pretty strong evidence. Admittedly, it's possible that there was some sort of clandestine intrigue behind the scenes to obfuscate authorship, but in the absence of evidence of such intrigue, it's best not to assume that everyone was being duped. Additionally, we have good evidence that William Shakespeare of Stratford was a real person, which makes one wonder why de Vere (or one of the other supposed authors) attributed their plays to a real person, a minor actor in an acting company, instead of just making up a a pseudonym like "Eddy Veretti" or "Redox Fordbridge" or something.

Also, most scholars reject the argument, which is behind all the alternative authorship theories, that, since education wasn't as widespread then and Shakespeare wasn't from the gentry that could afford high quality education and access to books, Shakespeare simply wasn't well-educated or cultured enough to have written such plays. The truth is that Shakespeare was the son of a prominent merchant and had access to a rigorous grammar school education and certainly became well-connected with the English aristocracy as he became more prominent. Not to mention the fact that most of Shakespeare's plays are adaptations, not original works, meaning a lot of the details that Shakespeare was supposedly not able to know about, come directly from the original works he adapted. Additionally, we only have a small sliver of the plays written during Shakespeare's time, meaning that literary allusions that we now assume to be only possible for someone well-educated, may have in fact between quite commonplace in the theater community at the time. In fact, some Cambridge students, in 1601, mocked the university-trained playwrights for over-using classical allusion, and noted how Shakespeare, not university-educated, was fortunately clear of that vice (quoted here).

When I was a young English major pursuing my undergraduate education, I too toyed with the idea of alternative Shakespeare authorship, first with the Marlowe theory and later with the Oxford theory. But ultimately I dropped them because there were a couple of problems with the theories I couldn't reconcile. For one, Shakespeare became extremely wealthy during his career. He was an actor, but reportedly a relatively minor and not particularly celebrated actor. It just didn't seem plausible that a minor actor could accumulate wealth enough to become, for example, a part owner of the Globe theater.

Even more implausible for me was the idea that a prominent and dignified courtier could write such a bloody play like Titus Andronicus. In the play, not only is Titus' daughter raped and has her hands and tongue cut off, but also Tamora's sons are killed then baked into a pie and fed to her. Trying to imagine a stately Elizabethan aristocrat writing such stories is really difficult (there are authorship questions surrounding Titus Andronicus, but these don't really change things since most scholars believe Shakespeare wrote all of it or co-authored it and was still the author of these famous bloody scenes)

That being said, though I think the Oxford-Shakespeare theory is wrong, it still is an interesting and tantalizing theory. So, making a movie based on it may not be a bad idea, and it could turn out to be a good movie. It's just to say that Hollywood sort of has an unfaithful relationship with historical accuracy, and this movie will probably be no exception.

I was just noticing that Roland Emmerich is working on a movie premised on the idea that Shakespeare's plays were actually written by Oxford Earl Edward de Vere (due out 2012, a trailer is already up). My first reaction was, "How is Roland Emerich going to incorporate the destruction of famous landmarks into a movie set in Elizabethan England?" But my second reaction was, "So, they're making a movie out of the ol' Oxford-Shakespeare theory. Interesting."

The idea that the William Shakespeare from Stratord-upon-Avon was not the true author of the plays attributed to him is an old theory. First, in the nineteenth century, it was proposed that the plays were written by Francis Bacon. This theory runs into the problem that Bacon's style is fairly distinct from Shakespeare's and Bacon is not known otherwise to have written any plays.

The theory that Christopher Marlowe wrote Shakespeare's plays was next proposed. This had more plausibility since Marlowe did write plays, was very good at writing plays, and certainly had more stylistic similarity to Shakespeare. But it ran into the problem that Marlowe was dead, dying in 1593, about twenty years before Shakespeare retired in 1613. No problem. These people claimed that Marlowed faked his own death. The problem this ran into is that his death, stabbed to death in a bar fight, doesn't exactly fit a plausible description of a faked death. Marlowe was a very public figure, a well-known playwright, who was killed in a very public place, a bar, and it was followed by a post-mortem and inquest. If you want to fake your own death, you're much better off doing it in a way that leaves very few witnesses and little evidence, like say dying in a fire or explosion or plane crash or drowning at sea. Heck even in this day and age you could probably get away with faking your own death as a drowning at sea (note to future self: do not attempt). Even though faking your death in 1593, with their rather primitive forensic science, would be a lot easier then than now, it's still hard to imagine how Marlowe could get away with it.

The currently most popular theory of Shakespearian alternative authorship is the Oxford theory, attributing authorship to Edward de Vere. This is more plausible since de Vere was known to be a celebrated poet and playwright in his day, was a patron of the theater and survived until 1604, which means that we only have to assume that some of de Vere's works were performed posthumously, which is possible.

On the other hand, we should note that most Shakespeare scholars are Stratfordians, that is to say that they believe that the plays of Shakespeare were written by the William Shakespeare from Stratford-upon-Avon, not by Edward de Vere or Bacon or Marlowe or anyone else. They believe this for a number of reasons based on very good evidence. For one, there is the simple and obvious one: the plays were, in their day, widely attributed to Shakespeare. The facts that everyone said the plays were written by Shakespeare and that all of the (admittedly unauthorized) publications of the plays that name an author attribute them to Shakespeare are pretty strong evidence. Admittedly, it's possible that there was some sort of clandestine intrigue behind the scenes to obfuscate authorship, but in the absence of evidence of such intrigue, it's best not to assume that everyone was being duped. Additionally, we have good evidence that William Shakespeare of Stratford was a real person, which makes one wonder why de Vere (or one of the other supposed authors) attributed their plays to a real person, a minor actor in an acting company, instead of just making up a a pseudonym like "Eddy Veretti" or "Redox Fordbridge" or something.

Also, most scholars reject the argument, which is behind all the alternative authorship theories, that, since education wasn't as widespread then and Shakespeare wasn't from the gentry that could afford high quality education and access to books, Shakespeare simply wasn't well-educated or cultured enough to have written such plays. The truth is that Shakespeare was the son of a prominent merchant and had access to a rigorous grammar school education and certainly became well-connected with the English aristocracy as he became more prominent. Not to mention the fact that most of Shakespeare's plays are adaptations, not original works, meaning a lot of the details that Shakespeare was supposedly not able to know about, come directly from the original works he adapted. Additionally, we only have a small sliver of the plays written during Shakespeare's time, meaning that literary allusions that we now assume to be only possible for someone well-educated, may have in fact between quite commonplace in the theater community at the time. In fact, some Cambridge students, in 1601, mocked the university-trained playwrights for over-using classical allusion, and noted how Shakespeare, not university-educated, was fortunately clear of that vice (quoted here).

When I was a young English major pursuing my undergraduate education, I too toyed with the idea of alternative Shakespeare authorship, first with the Marlowe theory and later with the Oxford theory. But ultimately I dropped them because there were a couple of problems with the theories I couldn't reconcile. For one, Shakespeare became extremely wealthy during his career. He was an actor, but reportedly a relatively minor and not particularly celebrated actor. It just didn't seem plausible that a minor actor could accumulate wealth enough to become, for example, a part owner of the Globe theater.

Even more implausible for me was the idea that a prominent and dignified courtier could write such a bloody play like Titus Andronicus. In the play, not only is Titus' daughter raped and has her hands and tongue cut off, but also Tamora's sons are killed then baked into a pie and fed to her. Trying to imagine a stately Elizabethan aristocrat writing such stories is really difficult (there are authorship questions surrounding Titus Andronicus, but these don't really change things since most scholars believe Shakespeare wrote all of it or co-authored it and was still the author of these famous bloody scenes)

That being said, though I think the Oxford-Shakespeare theory is wrong, it still is an interesting and tantalizing theory. So, making a movie based on it may not be a bad idea, and it could turn out to be a good movie. It's just to say that Hollywood sort of has an unfaithful relationship with historical accuracy, and this movie will probably be no exception.

The Oxford Shakespeare Theory

Unrealistic fantasies

A while ago I posted about how romance novels seem to be for women what porn is for men. So, it's interesting to see, at around the same time, a study by some authors that claim that romance novels lead to sexual health problems and a rant by Naomi Wolf claiming that porn leads men to have mental health problems, such as porn addiction and a propensity for extreme sex.

Both of the articles present the veneer of science credibility, but neither appears to have much weight to them. Mind Hacks takes apart Wolf's argument pretty succinctly, showing how she misuses some fact and basically doesn't understand the neurochemistry she presents in the article. The article about romance novels, similarly, doesn't seem to present any evidence of its conclusion. The article basically looks at romance novels, sees their content and pretty much says, "if women take these stories as realistic expectation for what to expect from real-world romances, that'll lead to problems," which is tantamount to saying, "If young kids read Harry Potter and start to expect that they're going to very soon discover that they're wizards capable of magic, that'll lead to problems." Nowhere does the article actually prove that women pick up romance novels thinking they're going to be education and informative.

So, I guess, maybe, porn and romance novels aren't that bad after all. Oh well. I guess we can go back to letting people occasionally and temporarily escape into their unrealistic fantasies.

A while ago I posted about how romance novels seem to be for women what porn is for men. So, it's interesting to see, at around the same time, a study by some authors that claim that romance novels lead to sexual health problems and a rant by Naomi Wolf claiming that porn leads men to have mental health problems, such as porn addiction and a propensity for extreme sex.

Both of the articles present the veneer of science credibility, but neither appears to have much weight to them. Mind Hacks takes apart Wolf's argument pretty succinctly, showing how she misuses some fact and basically doesn't understand the neurochemistry she presents in the article. The article about romance novels, similarly, doesn't seem to present any evidence of its conclusion. The article basically looks at romance novels, sees their content and pretty much says, "if women take these stories as realistic expectation for what to expect from real-world romances, that'll lead to problems," which is tantamount to saying, "If young kids read Harry Potter and start to expect that they're going to very soon discover that they're wizards capable of magic, that'll lead to problems." Nowhere does the article actually prove that women pick up romance novels thinking they're going to be education and informative.

So, I guess, maybe, porn and romance novels aren't that bad after all. Oh well. I guess we can go back to letting people occasionally and temporarily escape into their unrealistic fantasies.

Unrealistic fantasies

Everything is a remix

I also wanted to mention that the third part of Kirby Ferguson's series "Everything is a Remix," is up and is totally worth watching. The "Everything is a remix" series overall is quite good, and this installment is no exception. The basic premise is that all innovation and invention in art, science and technology is really just remixing. Ferguson defines remixing as: "To combine or edit existing materials to produce something new," and goes on how to explain how music, film, and (in this installment) invention, are just remixes.

In short, what makes new innovations new is really just that they take old things and combine them in new ways.

I remember reading a critique that Jacques Derrida made of Claude Levi-Strauss. Levi-Strauss had said that his methodology as an archaeologist was bricolage, namely taking existing and available tools and using them for new purposes. The opposite would be an engineer, who constructs the proper tool for the proper purpose. Derrida's critique was that all discourse is bricolage. He made this point by pointing to the fact that a new thinker simply couldn't reconstruct "language, syntax, and lexicon" from scratch. In short, all intellectual discourse, that is to say all intellectual history, is bricollage because the thinkers, the philosophers, scientists, historians, economists and so on, are taking language and ideas and trying to use them to to describe new ideas that the language and ideas weren't specifically designed for.

Or, to put Derrida's point in the terms that Ferguson co-opted from music to describe the history of innovation: all intellectual history, including all philosophy, is a remix.

I also wanted to mention that the third part of Kirby Ferguson's series "Everything is a Remix," is up and is totally worth watching. The "Everything is a remix" series overall is quite good, and this installment is no exception. The basic premise is that all innovation and invention in art, science and technology is really just remixing. Ferguson defines remixing as: "To combine or edit existing materials to produce something new," and goes on how to explain how music, film, and (in this installment) invention, are just remixes.

In short, what makes new innovations new is really just that they take old things and combine them in new ways.

I remember reading a critique that Jacques Derrida made of Claude Levi-Strauss. Levi-Strauss had said that his methodology as an archaeologist was bricolage, namely taking existing and available tools and using them for new purposes. The opposite would be an engineer, who constructs the proper tool for the proper purpose. Derrida's critique was that all discourse is bricolage. He made this point by pointing to the fact that a new thinker simply couldn't reconstruct "language, syntax, and lexicon" from scratch. In short, all intellectual discourse, that is to say all intellectual history, is bricollage because the thinkers, the philosophers, scientists, historians, economists and so on, are taking language and ideas and trying to use them to to describe new ideas that the language and ideas weren't specifically designed for.

Or, to put Derrida's point in the terms that Ferguson co-opted from music to describe the history of innovation: all intellectual history, including all philosophy, is a remix.

Everything is a remix

Germinating good ideas

Been reading Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From. The basic premise of the book is that good ideas really involve putting together and integrating existing ideas. Thus, the way to promote good idea is to permit openness and connectivity, so that people can take other people's good ideas (or nascent ideas) and pull them together to create new good ideas.

He talks for one about how many good ideas come from talking with and sharing with other people. We have this perception that good ideas come from lone geniuses dreaming up brilliant pieces of insight in profound "Eureka!" moments while meditating alone. The truth is that most ideas come from people talking and collaborating. He notes that in research labs, most of the big breakthroughs actually come about through staff meetings and presentations when people share and critique their discoveries.

He also notes that sudden flashes of insight are not the norm. We may perceive ideas as coming to us of a sudden like a bolt of lightning, but the truth is that good ideas germinate slowly. What we perceive as Eureka moments are just one salient step along a long process of careful consideration. Since good ideas take a lot of time and germination, it's really useful to write down our thoughts. A good idea doesn't leap fully formed from your head, but needs to be germinated. And to germinate a good idea you need to remember it, so that you can return to it and re-return to it so you can add to it and refine it. This is the reason it was extremely common for great thinkers from the 17th century forward to take voluminous notes, filling notebooks with ideas, quotes, scrap of thought and experiences. These notebooks would facilitate the germination as these thinkers would return to their notebooks and rethink the information that seemed most worth notice.

As I'm working on my dissertation, which has inevitably taken me deep into Nietzsche's voluminous notebooks, such insights certainly ring true with my experience. Not only did he take voluminous notes, but in those notebooks are the initial insights that would ultimately lead to his more famous ideas. The Revaluation of All Values, which I am in particular studying, began as a crude idea when Nietzsche was just a young professor fresh out of college, but didn't really become the fully fledged idea that you read about in philosophy textbooks until well over ten years later.

What is also interesting about Johnson's insights is that the notebook, at least for some people, has been replaced by something arguably better: the blog. Though people do use blogs for different things, for many people it's like an open notebook, where you can link to stories and ideas you like, engage in debates and record your thoughts and experiences, just like people would do with their notebooks in the past. Except it's better than the notebook because it has the quality of openness and sharing that the standard closed notebook lacks. Thus, it can be used to germinate ideas for the author of the blog, as well as share those germinal ideas with other, potentially benefitting them.

Been reading Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From. The basic premise of the book is that good ideas really involve putting together and integrating existing ideas. Thus, the way to promote good idea is to permit openness and connectivity, so that people can take other people's good ideas (or nascent ideas) and pull them together to create new good ideas.

He talks for one about how many good ideas come from talking with and sharing with other people. We have this perception that good ideas come from lone geniuses dreaming up brilliant pieces of insight in profound "Eureka!" moments while meditating alone. The truth is that most ideas come from people talking and collaborating. He notes that in research labs, most of the big breakthroughs actually come about through staff meetings and presentations when people share and critique their discoveries.

He also notes that sudden flashes of insight are not the norm. We may perceive ideas as coming to us of a sudden like a bolt of lightning, but the truth is that good ideas germinate slowly. What we perceive as Eureka moments are just one salient step along a long process of careful consideration. Since good ideas take a lot of time and germination, it's really useful to write down our thoughts. A good idea doesn't leap fully formed from your head, but needs to be germinated. And to germinate a good idea you need to remember it, so that you can return to it and re-return to it so you can add to it and refine it. This is the reason it was extremely common for great thinkers from the 17th century forward to take voluminous notes, filling notebooks with ideas, quotes, scrap of thought and experiences. These notebooks would facilitate the germination as these thinkers would return to their notebooks and rethink the information that seemed most worth notice.

As I'm working on my dissertation, which has inevitably taken me deep into Nietzsche's voluminous notebooks, such insights certainly ring true with my experience. Not only did he take voluminous notes, but in those notebooks are the initial insights that would ultimately lead to his more famous ideas. The Revaluation of All Values, which I am in particular studying, began as a crude idea when Nietzsche was just a young professor fresh out of college, but didn't really become the fully fledged idea that you read about in philosophy textbooks until well over ten years later.

What is also interesting about Johnson's insights is that the notebook, at least for some people, has been replaced by something arguably better: the blog. Though people do use blogs for different things, for many people it's like an open notebook, where you can link to stories and ideas you like, engage in debates and record your thoughts and experiences, just like people would do with their notebooks in the past. Except it's better than the notebook because it has the quality of openness and sharing that the standard closed notebook lacks. Thus, it can be used to germinate ideas for the author of the blog, as well as share those germinal ideas with other, potentially benefitting them.

Germinating good ideas

Suitable

In Oak Park, MI they have a law that says that front yards must have "suitable, live, plant material." A woman decided to plant a vegetable garden in her front yard, but a city planner, Kevin Rulkowski subsequently decided it violated that law. Clearly it wasn't the "live, plant material part," since her vegetable garden is unambiguously that. The problem was with the ever-vague and subjective "suitable."

Of course what is "suitable" is entirely up to personal opinion, but Rulkowki decided to justify his decision by claiming:

If you look at the definition of what suitable is in Webster's dictionary, it will say common. So, if you look around and you look in any other community, what's common to a front yard is a nice, grass yard with beautiful trees and bushes and flowers

Since I was pretty sure that there is no connection between "suitable" and "common" in the english language, I went to my dictionary, and sure enough it uses words like "right" and "appropriate" but not "common." Just to check, I went to Merriam-Webster's online dictionary for a definition of "suitable," and again found words like "fitting" and "proper," but not a whiff of "common" there either.

Unsurprisingly, I'm not the first person to go to Merriam-Webster to confirm Rulkowski's mistake. It's actually led to a number of comments, 19 at the present count. My favorite is, "Suggestion for new antonym: Rulkowski."

An even better one can be found on the commentary to this story at The Agitator, where commenter "Jeff" says: "Walking through my little city, I occasionally see gardening boxes in a front yard. It always makes me smile, as it seems like a good use of space. Dare I say suitable?"

I would speculate that perhaps Rulkowski's dictionary is broken, though I suspect the problem is user errror.

In Oak Park, MI they have a law that says that front yards must have "suitable, live, plant material." A woman decided to plant a vegetable garden in her front yard, but a city planner, Kevin Rulkowski subsequently decided it violated that law. Clearly it wasn't the "live, plant material part," since her vegetable garden is unambiguously that. The problem was with the ever-vague and subjective "suitable."

Of course what is "suitable" is entirely up to personal opinion, but Rulkowki decided to justify his decision by claiming:

If you look at the definition of what suitable is in Webster's dictionary, it will say common. So, if you look around and you look in any other community, what's common to a front yard is a nice, grass yard with beautiful trees and bushes and flowers

Since I was pretty sure that there is no connection between "suitable" and "common" in the english language, I went to my dictionary, and sure enough it uses words like "right" and "appropriate" but not "common." Just to check, I went to Merriam-Webster's online dictionary for a definition of "suitable," and again found words like "fitting" and "proper," but not a whiff of "common" there either.

Unsurprisingly, I'm not the first person to go to Merriam-Webster to confirm Rulkowski's mistake. It's actually led to a number of comments, 19 at the present count. My favorite is, "Suggestion for new antonym: Rulkowski."

An even better one can be found on the commentary to this story at The Agitator, where commenter "Jeff" says: "Walking through my little city, I occasionally see gardening boxes in a front yard. It always makes me smile, as it seems like a good use of space. Dare I say suitable?"

I would speculate that perhaps Rulkowski's dictionary is broken, though I suspect the problem is user errror.

Suitable