Venkatesh Rao
- A Blog by Venkatesh Rao
Domestic Cozy
An Article from Ribbonfarm by Venkatesh RaoFermi Estimates and Dyson Designs
An Article by Venkatesh RaoA Fermi estimate is a quick-and-dirty solution to an arbitrary scientific or engineering analysis problem. Fermi estimation uses widely known numbers, readily observable phenomenology, basic physics equations, and a bunch of approximation techniques to arrive at rough answers that tend to be correct within an order of magnitude or so. The term is named for Enrico Fermi, who was famously good at this sort of thing.
…It struck me that there is counterpart to this kind of thinking on the synthesis side, where you use similar techniques to arrive at a very rough design for a complex engineered artifact. I call such a design approach Dyson design, after the physicist Freeman Dyson, who was one of the best practitioners of it (not to be confused with inventor James Dyson, whose designs, ironically, are not Dyson designs).
One Tenth of a Second
An Article by Venkatesh RaoThe details are fascinating, but the central argument — that the birth of modernity can be traced to a meta-crisis spawned by the 0.1s problem — is worth understanding and appreciating whether or not you’re a time nerd like me.
There is no convenient leitmotif, comparable to the 0.1s problem, for our contemporary version of the rhyming conditions, but something very similar to the “tenth of a second crisis” is going on today. I suspect our Great Weirding too involves some sort of limiting factor on human cognition that we haven’t yet properly wrapped our minds around. It isn’t reaction time, but something analogous.
Mediocratopia
An Article by Venkatesh RaoI once read a good definition of aptitude. Aptitude is how long it takes you to learn something. The idea is that everybody can learn anything, but if it takes you 200 years, you essentially have no aptitude for it. Useful aptitudes are in the <10 years range.
Premium Mediocre
An Article from Ribbonfarm by Venkatesh Rao
Untangling the Bank
Specific aims
Having specific aims, I then started to add almost everything else I could think of that might help me monitor and control my progress.
More than a witness
Documentation has made the difference between simply being a witness to nature and being one who identifies themes and questions.
Peculiarities
Taking notes has always helped me zero in on the interesting questions.
In taking field notes, the way to find these peculiarities is to keep track of as many observations that may not appear at the time to be relevant at all.
Secrecy
At a glance, my journal seems to be a mess. It is not meant to be seen or read, except by me, and often not even that.
If it wasn't written down
I’ve been keeping journals of one sort or another since I was a teenager, and if there is one thing I can now confidently say about all this scribbling and note-taking, it is that if it wasn’t written down, it didn’t happen. The more I wrote the more that did happen, because all this process stirs up ideas. Stopping to sit and write costs time and energy, and some biologists feel that it should be discouraged.
An active participant
Note-taking helped transform me from a young boy on barefoot runs who passively observed the tangled bank of the Maine woods into a naturalist-scientist who is an active participant in unraveling the mysteries of the natural world.