This might be apocryphal, but it tells a deep truth — There’s a difference between those who know from knowledge and reasoning vs those who know from memorization and rote learning.
Coincidentally also the difference between reasoning models vs non reasoning ones, but I digress!
Charlie Munger on ‘Planck’s knowledge’ vs ‘Chauffeur knowledge’.
“Max Planck’s chauffeur memorised his lecture after hearing it 20 times. During one talk, the chauffeur replaced places with Planck.”
“When asked a difficult question, the chauffeur replied: That’s such an elementary question, even my chauffeur can answer it.” 🤣
8 y/o discovered a simple math trick to multiply an even digit by 6 -- concat(half of the digit, digit)
So (2k)x6 becomes concat(k, 2k) [k=1,2,3,4]
This is correct because the answer is 12k, which is 10k + 2k -- which is concat(k, 2k)!!
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“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function” — F Scott Fitzgerald
I accidentally broke my brain reading about Nobel Prize winners last month.
There's this thing called "Janusian thinking" that basically explains why some people's minds work like magic while the rest of us think in straight lines. Named after Janus, the Roman god with two faces pointing opposite directions.
The psychologist who discovered it, Albert Rothenberg, was trying to figure out what made breakthrough thinkers different. He interviewed dozens of Nobel laureates, major artists, revolutionary scientists. What he found sounds impossible.
These people can hold two different ideas in their mind at the same time. They can explore both without switching back and forth or forcing a quick comparison. They can consider “yes” and “no” to the same question simultaneously and stay clear-headed.
Einstein too talked about this when he described his relativity breakthrough. He was imagining riding alongside a beam of light while also standing perfectly still. Both perspectives at once. Mozart said he could hear an entire symphony "all at once," every note, every contradiction, every resolution happening in a single moment of awareness.
Your average person's mind works like a courtroom. Evidence comes in, you weigh it, you reach a verdict. Case closed. But Janusian minds work more like... I don't know, like a quantum computer that can process multiple realities simultaneously until something new emerges from the overlap.
I've started noticing it in conversations. When someone can genuinely see both sides of something without needing to pick one, it drives people nuts. They want you to land somewhere definite. The ability to live in that tension space reads as wishy-washy or indecisive.
Most creative advice tells you to "think outside the box." But Janusian thinking is weirder than that. It's being inside and outside the box at the same time. It's thinking the box exists and doesn't exist simultaneously.
Which explains why truly creative people seem slightly unhinged. They think they're choosing between realities. But, they're inhabiting multiple realities at once, mining the contradictions for insights the rest of us never see.
Sadly, most of us have trained ourselves out of this ability. We've learned that holding contradictions feels unstable, so we rush toward resolution. We've been taught that changing your mind means you were wrong before, so we defend positions instead of exploring them.
But the people changing the world have kept that childlike ability to hold impossible thoughts without needing them to make sense immediately.
We just need to live in the questions everyone else is too scared to ask.
Charlie Munger: "Politicians are never so bad that you don't live to want them back."
"You laugh, you young people, but you're going to live to wish that Nancy Pelosi and Donald Trump were immortal."
Thanksgiving-week treat: an epic conversation on Frontier AI with @lukaszkaiser -co-author of “Attention Is All You Need” (Transformers) and leading research scientist at @OpenAI working on GPT-5.1-era reasoning models.
00:00 – Cold open and intro
01:29 – “AI slowdown” vs a wild week of new frontier models
08:03 – Low-hanging fruit, infra, RL training and better data
11:39 – What is a reasoning model, in plain language
17:02 – Chain-of-thought and training the thinking process with RL
21:39 – Łukasz’s path: from logic and France to Google and Kurzweil
24:20 – Inside the Transformer story and what “attention” really means
28:42 – From Google Brain to OpenAI: culture, scale and GPUs
32:49 – What’s next for pre-training, GPUs and distillation
37:29 – Can we still understand these models? Circuits, sparsity and black boxes
39:42 – GPT-4 → GPT-5 → GPT-5.1: what actually changed
42:40 – Post-training, safety and teaching GPT-5.1 different tones
46:16 – How long should GPT-5.1 think? Reasoning tokens and jagged abilities
47:43 – The five-year-old’s dot puzzle that still breaks frontier models
52:22 – Generalization, child-like learning and whether reasoning is enough
53:48 – Beyond Transformers: ARC, LeCun’s ideas and multimodal bottlenecks
56:10 – GPT-5.1 Codex Max, long-running agents and compaction
1:00:06 – Will foundation models eat most apps? The translation analogy and trust
1:02:34 – What still needs to be solved, and where AI might go next
In 1890, 23 years old without any formal degree, she was working as a governess in her father's friend's house in Warsaw to help support her sister who was struggling to get an education in Paris. She fell in love with the elder son of the family who refused her as she had no prospects. Heartbroken and weary she wrote to her sister Bronia that she was stupid, would remain stupid and nothing would ever come of her life.
Thirteen years later she won a Nobel Prize in Physics along with her husband Pierre, and won another one for Chemistry eight years later.
On Marie Curie's birthday, giving up shouldn't ever be an option.
“Our inability to understand the exponential function is our biggest weakness” — Prof Albert Bartlett
https://t.co/gUUwYYXiQT
The example given is striking in its simplicity!
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If a bacteria doubles every minute, and in 60 minute fills up the container — Exactly when does a bacterium first realize this fact?
Even a mere 5 seconds before, the container is only 3% full, ie 97% empty!
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