Date: 2007-02-14 21:57 Subject: Why be wise? Security: Public Mood: contemplative

There's a new essay by Paul Graham, whose essays I almost always enjoy. He tries to define wisdom as distinct from intelligence: wisdom is broad, knowing the right thing to do in many situations, while intelligence is narrow, being unusually good at a particular thing. Two different ways of measuring ability--the average versus the maximum of a function--and he pulls out a number of interesting ideas from that basic concept:

"Distinguishing between 'wise' and 'smart' is a modern habit. And the reason we do is that they've been diverging. As knowledge gets more specialized, there are more points on the curve, and the distinction between the spikes and the average becomes sharper, like a digital image rendered with more pixels."

"For both Confucius and Socrates, wisdom, virtue, and happiness were necessarily related.... To me it was a relief just to realize it might be ok to be discontented. The idea that a successful person should be happy has thousands of years of momentum behind it. If I was any good, why didn't I have the easy confidence winners are supposed to have?"

Enjoy! He reminds me of C. S. Lewis in the verve of his writing. Like Lewis he often goes astray, but he's always worth reading.

Date: 2007-02-13 21:24 Subject: Ah, so there is precedent... Security: Public Mood: amused

So lehser's grandmother will be coming to live with us, this spring if things go according to plan. We worry, naturally, about all kinds of things, including whether our new house (built c.1895) will be comfortable for her. Now we learn that we couldn't have done better, having just read about the trendy "Reversible Destiny Lofts" in Tokyo.

Let's see:
"bright colors" ... check
"floor that slopes erratically" ... check
"concave floor" ... check
"Electric switches located in unexpected places on the walls" ... check
"A door ... is so small you have to bend to crawl out." Well, only the doors to the storage space under the eaves, which hardly count.

Who knew that unhelpful old houses were the fountain of youth?

Date: 2007-02-02 14:27 Subject: (no subject) Security: Public Mood: geeky

I just read with interest Participation Explains Gender Differences in the Proportion of Chess Grandmasters on the blog Pure Pedantry. It's a discussion of the research article Sex Differences in Intellectual Performance: Analysis of a Large Cohort of Competitive Chess Players by Chabris and Glickman.

It's a nice discussion of some recent research looking at boys' and girls' chess ability. They were looking at chess because of all the interest in math & science ability, of course, but chess is nice because it's a reasonably objective system of ranking based on tournament results. They looked at a large sample -- 250,000 tournament players over 13 years -- and consider a number of explanations for the observation that boys and men dominate elite chess.

It seems that the hypothesis that explains their data best is a quite simple one: lower participation rates of girls in chess mean a lower chance that the girls who would be really good at it even try it. When participation rates are equal (which they are, in certain zip codes), abilities are equal. Other popular hypotheses, like the idea that males have higher variance (so more occur in the top tail) are not supported by the data.

Date: 2007-01-28 22:28 Subject: Why catalpa? Security: Public Mood: contemplative

Well, there's a big catalpa tree in the backyard of our new house. I like catalpa trees--the little cones of white flowers in the spring, the dinner-plate-sized flat leaves in the summer, even the foot-long bean pods in the fall. So I told my father happily that we had a big catalpa tree, and he said blankly, "Who on earth would want a catalpa tree?"