Kowalski Analysis

How is your @x perience? You can tag me or share it under my pinned tweet, i am interested in knowing, thanks

~Trying to move into the reply guy zone~

[Kowalski Analysis @cutepengu]

@grok @X

[Lauren Chen @TheLaurenChen]

USAID gets defunded and now no one listens to rap anymore

[Nancy Mackenzie @NancyMa16153771]

@awkwardgoogle Clearly, there is a fashion stereotype that manifests over time.

[S. Lowell Soderman @soderman]

@awkwardgoogle Wait to see what they look like in another 5 years as AI takes their jobs.

[MollyJoe1980 @MollyJoe1980]

@awkwardgoogle They all look like Ted Kaczynski at the end

[Andy Berryann @Skippy_CT]

@awkwardgoogle Mechanical Engineer here, this is absolutely true. Senior year was especially intense. There was a period where I was on a 36-4 schedule, 36 hours awake followed by 4 hours of sleep. And I was living on Mountain Dew and Little Debbie snacks.

[The Perch @tchoupitoulas84]

@awkwardgoogle When non-engineering students go through college they typically have a couple of papers/exams per semester. Engineering students have graded homework every night. I’d be studying for a test and also have 4 assignments due in the next 36 hours. It’s designed to break you.

[Nowhere Girl @nateofeos]

@awkwardgoogle It's giving:

[CrazyCat @CrazyCat10770]

@awkwardgoogle “Listen kid, it’s not as easy to be an Engineer as you think.”

[Jabby @JabbyBLOOM]

@awkwardgoogle

[Interesting things @awkwardgoogle]

The Waterloo Effect: students share their progress from year 1 to year 5 in engineering school

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

🇧🇷 A Brazilian judge just sentenced two parents to prison for homeschooling their daughters.

Their crime, according to the court: "intellectual neglect" and not teaching state-approved "gender and sex education."

The girls are 15 and 11. They speak multiple languages and are both accomplished pianists.

An independent psychologist found zero signs of neglect. The prosecutor recommended acquittal.

The judge convicted them anyway. 50 days behind bars.

It's the first time in Brazilian history parents have been criminally prosecuted for homeschooling.

The mother's response: "I cannot conceive a more dictatorial state than the one that wants me in jail because I chose to exercise my right to direct the education and upbringing of my daughters."

Their case is now headed to appeal.

Source: ADF International / Writer: Michael

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

In June 2017, during a major heatwave in the UK, boys at Isca Academy in Exeter, Devon, were not allowed to wear shorts as part of the school uniform: they had to wear long grey trousers.

Girls were allowed to wear skirts so when the boys complained and asked for an exception, the headteacher reportedly said sarcastically: “you can wear a skirt if you like”.

The boys took her at her word: the first day, a small group showed up wearing the school’s plaid skirts and the next day, around 30 boys joined in.

[David Marsh @davidhmarsh]

@mhartl @DanRosiak I don't believe Tao meant to imply that there are no gifts. Only that they aren't magical. Like how a champion runner is still just running, and it's something everyone ought to do themselves.

The OP is overstating his point to where it becomes something far different.

[David @trisatopos]

@DanRosiak This is essentially blank slate-ism. For Tao and other PGs the pre-ontology is different. Many things are obvious (often distressingly) which will never be to lessers. It’s an unfortunate blackpill. No amount of interest or dedication will compensate for lack

[Daniel Rosiak @DanRosiak]

For people getting upset about this, it's not that complicated. At bottom, all of these people have worked insanely hard, that's the main thing. Decades of 16 hour days focused on math. Grothendieck famously was so purely focused on math at times he wouldn't engage in discussions about anything else or see a movie, for fear of "losing time." That's the first thing to realize.

The second is that if you can truly sustain "work" this long and this intense, for decades, it's because you have an immense desire for it, it doesn't feel like "work", but like what just has to be done, there's no other way. And the level of focus this grants makes a 16 hr day of math from a Grothendieck or Tao become equal to many many days of work from someone without that. That compounds. Eventually, these people have built up so much momentum that they can do in 2 hrs what might take other competent mathematicians days.

That looks like magic, but it isn't. It's fundamentally hard work and insane levels of focus/devotion that gradually transform this work into something that doesn't look or feel like "work" in any sense normal people mean by that. It's just play or doing what they do and can't help but do.

"What about exceptions like June Huh who said 3 hours a day is all you need?" If you understand the context, you understand that this isn't an exception either, but shows the same thing. At some point, Huh stapled together fabric to make a blanket to essentially avoid having to go out and buy a blanket. Which, whatever reason he gave, surely was just because he was too deeply and constantly absorbed in math to be able to deal with that.

There's no magic. Just work and the transformation of work that happens when you do it with all of your soul, for the long march of your life, with no other motive than that it has to be done and it is your desire.

[Epper @Eppur13]

@mhartl @DanRosiak On another thread I compared this to musical ear training. You can give toddlers the exact same ear training and only some of them will develop perfect pitch.

Rick Beato of YouTube fame actually did this, and only his son Dylan developed perfect pitch.

[Michael Hartl @mhartl]

>all of these people have worked insanely hard

Yes. Every knowledgeable observer would agree.

>that's the main thing

This is the claim (implicit in Tao’s quote) that many people are taking issue with. Is hard work really the main thing? It depends on what you mean by “main”, but we can easily observe that hard work without talent frequently goes nowhere. Morever, there is significant selection bias, since few people are willing to work for years on end in fields where they lack sufficient ability to make progress.

This applies in intellectually challenging fields like mathematics, but it’s perhaps easier to reason about in fields involving physical performance, where talent is more legible. Consider: “Michael Jordan played basketball at the highest level, but he worked insanely hard. When it comes to basketball performance, working hard is the main thing.”

Hard work was certainly a major reason why Jordan was so great compared to his contemporaries. But this argument works only because we are considering a group already selected for extraordinary basketball talent. And even in such rarefied company, Jordan was still widely regarded as having more native talent than most. (This advantage is even quantifiable in some cases: consider Jordan’s exceptional vertical leap, which was among the best in the league, and is difficult to improve by training.)

Likewise, people who work obsessively for years on mathematical problems are typically quite mathematically talented. Are their accomplishments due mainly to hard work? Perhaps on the margin, but only because they already have sufficient talent. And extraordinary levels of talent—such as, in all probability, Tao’s—are likely not compensable by extra effort.

No matter how hard you or I work at basketball, we could never make it to the NBA. Similarly, the median human could spend every waking moment of their entire life thinking about primes in arithmetic progression and never come close to proving the Green–Tao theorem. Hard work is necessary, but it is certainly not sufficient.

[Dylan O'Sullivan @DylanoA4]

How does C. S. Lewis do that, every paragraph is a book

[RudeBwoy ™☠️🏴‍☠️ @RudeBwoy_254]

Happy Father's Day