Tokens for nothing and your (cognitive) chips for free

May 17, 2025

Via X, got inspired to find good analogies to Cruyff’s quote:

Speed is often confused with insight. When I start running earlier than the others, I appear faster.

I. Intelligence & Quotes: All this speed is an illusion.

Something poetic in prompting LMs to assist with this task. No shade to Cruyff, but I like H. Jackson Brown’s best –

Opportunity dances with those already on the dance floor.

Other sports figures with similar insight –

I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been. (Wayne Gretzky)

Precision beats power, and timing beats speed. (Conor McGregor)

The harder I practice, the luckier I get (Gary Player, golf maxim)

To the pithy –

Chance favors the prepared mind. (Louis Pasteur)

Never confuse motion for action. (Ernest Hemingway)

Slow is smooth, smooth is fast (US Navy SEAL Proverb)

And the pithy historic –

Every battle is won before it’s ever fought. (Sun Tzu)

Dress me slowly, I’m in a hurry. (attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte)

Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. (Seneca)

To the serendipitous finds –

Vision without action is a daydream; action without vision is a nightmare. (Japanese Proverb)

Talent hits a target no one else can hit; genius hits a target no one else can see. (Arthur Schopenhauer)

And finally, one I recalled without GPT assistance –

Stupidity is making easy problems hard. Intelligence is making hard problems easy. Genius is making hard problems go away. (David Krakauer)

II. Intelligence & Krakauer: Comfortably dumb

With reference to great interview

Examples I’d like to give is the rubik’s cube because just a beautiful little mental model metaphor. If I gave you a cube and I asked you to solve it and you just randomly manipulated it since it has on the order of 10 quintillion solutions—a very large number—you basically, if you were immortal would eventually solve it and but it would take the lifetime of several universes to do so that is random performance stupid performance is if you took one face of the cube and you just manipulated that one face and turned it rotated it forever and as everyone knows if you did that you would never solve the cube if you weren’t already at the solution right and it would be an infinite process that would never be resolved that rule is in my definition stupid it is significantly worse than chance now let’s take someone who’s learned how to manipulate a cube and is familiar with various rules and these rules allow you from any initial configuration to so the cube in 20 moves or less that is intelligent behavior so significantly better than chance and this sounds a little counterintuitive perhaps until you realize that’s how we use the word in our daily lives you know if I sat down with an extraordinary mathematician and I said I can’t solve that equation and they say well no it’s easy here this what you do and you look at you say oh yes it is easy right you made that look easy that’s what we mean when we say someone is smart they make things look easy if on the other hand I sat down with someone who was incapable and they just kept you know dividing by two for whatever reason I say what on earth you doing what a stupid thing to do you’ll never solve the problem you know what a what a foolish things you do what a inefficient thing to do right so that is what we mean by intelligence: it’s the thing that we do that ensures that the problem is very efficiently solved and done in a way that makes it appear effortless and stupidity is assertive rules that we use to ensure that the problem will be solved in longer than chance or never right and and is nevertheless pursued

(…)

Krakauer: The concept of IQ is useless. @36m40s “I would dispute the g concept of intelligence.”

The example he gives is young Mozart. Acquired perfect pitch, could recollect scores note-for-note, etc. Because his father was a tyrant who drilled into Mozart and his sister all of this. Normally he would not have acquired this. Via deliberate practice you can acquire extraordinary skills. We know that g measures working memory and that strongly correlates with many tasks.

NOTE to self around two things:

1. Why does Krakauer not mention Polgar sisters?
2. How does he explain the fact that Mozart’s sister did not become equally extraordinary as Mozart?

Re (2): he does say there are innate variations @39m31s. But does this not do the heavy lifting here?

Broadly I do agree with him, perhaps this variance in preferences or natural ability should suppress the variance in environment. And by environment, I mean e.g. “Mozart’s tyrannical father”.

On the importance of representation @43m22s Krakauer makes it explicit how e.g. Roman numerals make it inefficient to perform math. In India / Arabia, they would at the same time be able to effortlessly perform the same calculations. This is a good example of cultural transmission. This is also a good example of what he calls a “Complementary Cognitive Artefact.”

Other complementary artefacts @47m2s

• The Abacus. Expert users actually modify their brain s.t. they have “an abacus” in their cortex.
  • It shifts from language to visuo-spatial areas.
  • An object in the world is restructuring the brain intelligently.
• Maps
• Sextant, Quadrant, etc. As you become familiar with them, you need to use them less and less.

Opposite of complementary artefacts (competitive) @49m38s

• Calculator. Me and my phone are very smart. But if we take (the phone) away, I didn’t get any benefit. The artefact does not amplify but rather replace my ability.
  • This is not a normative recommendation.
• Of course, Machine Learning.
  • He mentions AlphaGo, however I am not convinced that this is 100% true. Famously it seems that human strategy in many games is positively modulated by the use of computer tools.
    • So is it possible that in some contexts the artefact is competitive, while in others complementary? Is it not similar with maps mentioned above?!
• A car. Clearly allows us to move more efficiently along a surface. But take it away, and you are not any better than before (in fact, worse).
• (he does not mention this but came to my mind) Glasses.

We accept the tradeoffs because the utility value of these artefacts is so high. Glasses, calculators, cars; modern world would not work without them.

I missed this on the original read:

the real discussion that we should be having is that might be a discussion in a hundred years time but the imminent and practical debate is what to do about competitive cognitive artifacts that are already leaving an impression on our brains that is arguably negative.

Sam claims David is making normative claims even though he says he’s not. @58m20s Normative claims in his mind enter via “we (as humans) want to be better.” David: “I agree there are in some domains better ways of being, e.g. imagine we would still be writing code on punched cards or binary.” @59m10s

But I suppose in his framework, computer languages would be ambiguous? They are not complementary in the sense that they replace our ability to code in binary; however, they are somewhat complementary because they provide an efficient abstraction for thinking about code that binary could never offer. Not sure what I think about this TBH.