Tokens for nothing and your (cognitive) chips for free

May 17, 2025

Cruyff:

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 find analogies to this. No shade to Cruyff, but H. Jackson Brown’s is 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)

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

His example: young Mozart. Perfect pitch, note-for-note score recall. Why? His father was a tyrant who drilled it into him and his sister. Deliberate practice can yield extraordinary skills. (We know g mostly measures working memory.)

NB:

  1. Why no mention of the Polgar sisters?
  2. Mozart’s sister got the same drilling—why didn’t she become equally extraordinary?

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

Broadly I agree. Perhaps variance in innate ability suppresses variance in environment. By “environment” I mean: Mozart’s tyrannical father.

On representation @43m22s: Roman numerals make math inefficient. Meanwhile in India/Arabia, the same calculations were effortless. Cultural transmission matters. This is what Krakauer calls a “Complementary Cognitive Artefact.”

Other complementary artefacts @47m2s:

Opposite: competitive artefacts @49m38s:

We accept these tradeoffs because utility is so high. Glasses, calculators, cars—modern life requires them.

Missed this on first 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 says David is making normative claims despite claiming otherwise @58m20s. The normativity enters via “we want to be better.” David @59m10s: “I agree there are better ways of being—imagine still coding on punched cards.”

But in his framework, wouldn’t programming languages be ambiguous? They replace our ability to code in binary—competitive. Yet they provide abstractions for thinking that binary never could—complementary.

Not sure what I think about this.