David Epstein, author of Range, writing about Herbert Simon’s notion of “satisficing” in the NYT as part of his promotional blog tour for his new book, Inside the Box:

Maximizers tend to be less satisfied with their decisions and their lives. They are typically less happy, more prone to regret and more likely to compare themselves endlessly with others. Satisficers don’t necessarily have low standards. Their standard is “good enough for me” rather than “the best out there,” and that makes it possible to feel satisfied with their choices, instead of haunted by the ones they didn’t make.

The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who first used the term “flow” to describe states of complete absorption in an activity, put it well. By making up one’s mind to invest in a choice, regardless of more attractive options that may come along later, “a great deal of energy gets freed up for living, instead of being spent on wondering about how to live.”

Delightful. Both feet fully in as opposed to one foot out. Assuredly hard to always employ in a world where social media functions as “an infinite comparison engine,” but delightful.

// 07.23.26

From Wisdom Takes Work by Ryan Holiday:

The purpose of knowledge is action.

Too much study and not enough doing creates a paucity of knowledge, a shelter of naïveté, no matter how smart you are.

There are things that make sense on the page but do not survive contact with events.

We are living in a world where information is getting ever cheaper and ever more abundant. It still takes work to use it.

// 07.09.26

Isaac Asimov (from a 1988 interview), providing a different perspective on trust, incentives, and guardrails:

It’s insulting to imply that only a system of rewards and punishments can keep you a decent human being. Isn’t it conceivable a person wants to be a decent human being because that way he feels better?

// 06.29.26

From the ending of Leonard Mlodinow’s Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior:

We choose the facts that we want to believe. We also choose our friends, lovers, and spouses not just because of the way we perceive them but because of the way they perceive us. Unlike phenomena in physics, in life, events can often obey one theory or another, and what actually happens can depend largely upon which theory we choose to believe. It is a gift of the human mind to be extraordinarily open to the theory of ourselves that pushes us in the direction of survival and even happiness.

// 06.12.26

Pinnochio’s World

06.11.26 // Miscellany

From Om Malik’s “We Are Living in Pinocchio’s World,” an essay about “our zeitgeist of half-truths”:

Most people remember Pinocchio as a story about lying. The nose grows. You get caught. Lesson learned. But that reading misses almost everything Collodi was actually doing. The book is a close study of a society where deception has gone ambient, woven into every institution, every transaction. Courts punish victims. Authority figures perform competence without exercising it. Experts are decorative. Society holds together through spectacle and habit rather than accountability. Into this environment, a naive creature is released, constitutionally unable to resist a good story about easy reward.

The nose is the least interesting lie in the book. The interesting lies are the ones that work.

Lots of lies work well in a wide variety of contexts, including businessmen selling stories and prognosticators retconning their predictions into reality. Malik argues that most of us want those tidy deceptions:

…Pinocchio is deceived because he wants to be deceived. He chooses shortcuts over work, belonging over truth, spectacle over judgment, every time, until the costs become too steep to ignore. The Fox and the Cat succeed because he hands them what they need. His credulity is not innocent. It is participation.

The grifters and the hucksters and the influencers selling impossible things succeed because audiences reward certainty and punish doubt. They honor confidence and resist complication. A clean story about a genius who will fix everything travels faster than a difficult story about tradeoffs.

As Malik points out, the people of influence spending trust and other symbolic capital don’t need to be right; they need to be believed.

Dr. Cort Wernz, writing about a private equity buyout “Negotiating Blind” in his Substack, The Impression:

The upfront payout the Las Vegas radiologist described wasn’t arbitrary generosity. It wasn’t a bonus. It was his own future income, pulled forward, discounted and paid to him upfront in exchange for accepting less later.

[…]

The radiologist in Las Vegas wasn’t undone by a bad deal. He was undone by a predictable one, structured by people who understood exactly what they were buying, signed by people who understood it less well. That’s not a character flaw. It’s what happens when a profession doesn’t place any serious value on business literacy.

Nice to see a new voice in radiology just doing their thing.

// 06.10.26

Cheap Knowledge

06.08.26 // Miscellany

Rabbi Zohar Atkins’ published an essay recently, “When Knowledge Is Cheap, Insight Is Everything: Jevons Paradox applied to Torah Learning.”

Articles referencing Jevons are everywhere these days. I myself wrote “Radiology Isn’t an Example of Jevons Paradox” last December. Atkins’ essay is a change of pace:

It is worth pausing here to note that the rabbinic tradition was not, in the nineteenth century, sitting around waiting for an English economist to explain to it how human desire interacts with supply.

The book of Kohelet, known in English as Ecclesiastes, already observed that the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing (Kohelet 1:8). The Talmud, in Sukkah 52b, sharpens the principle into a structural law: there is a small organ in a person, the Gemara says, which when starved is satisfied and when satisfied is starved. On the same page, the sage Abaye generalizes: the greater a person, the greater his appetite. The early rabbinic anthology Kohelet Rabbah (1:13) gives the principle its proverbial form: a man with a hundred wants two hundred. The eighteenth-century ethical work Mesillat Yesharim, the standard Jewish text on moral psychology, makes the same observation as a developmental claim: indulgence does not satisfy desire, it expands desire’s capacity (chapters 1 and 13). The nineteenth-century commentator Malbim, glossing the book of Proverbs (21:17), says the same of pleasure as such: attachment enlarges want rather than quieting it.

This passage concerns the same never-full eye concept I shared last year from this parable as relayed by Gluckel, a seventeenth-century Jewish widow, in her memoirs. It is one mixed and rephrased over generations because the new formulations can still provide novel insights and continue grounding us as individuals, even if there is “nothing new under the sun” (Kohelet 1:9).

This is the same observation Jevons made about coal, transposed from industrial input to human desire. Or rather, Jevons’s observation about coal is the same one Kohelet made about the eye, transposed from human desire to industrial input.

Layers upon layers of commentary, authors quoting primary texts and each other, building up a multilayer discourse. It has become a popular theme among techno-optimists writing about AI that there is some ineffable human quality that AI makes more valuable as the raw material becomes cheaper (like critical thinking, judgment, or taste). I think that remains to be seen, but there is a parallel argument that our thinking, our judgement, and our taste matter for us, and possibly our community:

AI is the new master of wheat. It is unusually capable at producing the relevant source, the right translation, the missing citation. Information was never the goal. A learner who consumes AI-generated wheat by the handful, who asks ChatGPT for the meaning of the weekly Torah portion and stops there, has eaten dry grain and gone home thinking she has tasted Torah. She has tasted the input. The tradition lives in what gets made from it.

Great analogy.

The vocation of the learner in the age of cheap wheat is to become a baker: to take the now-abundant raw material and turn it into something a human can eat. Chiddush that surfaces structure. Communities that perpetuate the learning. Students who teach each other when the teacher is gone. This is true for the rabbi and it is true for the nineteen-year-old in Be’er Sheva, because the obligation was always universal in principle (Chagigah 3a). The economics restricted it. The economics just changed.

Chiddush is the Hebrew term for an original insight (particularly with regard to Jewish thought as it pertains to the study of Torah and the Talmud). The point that Atkins makes so well is not that such insights could only come from humans; it’s that doing so is the human thing to do. That strivers must strive. That cheap information would be best if it helped make communities of learning, which would finally fulfill the promise of the early internet/open web.

Jevons’ coal built a new England, more dependent on coal than the old one and more capable of using it. Cheap knowledge will build a new Torah world, more dependent on the corpus than the old one and more capable of working it. The question is whether the people inside that world will recognize the work for what it is and pick up the rolling pin.

I find myself thinking often about the humans from the movie WALL-E on the galactic cruise ship and wondering how we will answer that question.

In “Why Is It So Hard to Be Ordinary?” Joshua Rothman cuts deeply for The New Yorker:

What’s true for Little League holds for the rest of life. In some contexts, at some times, we strive for excellence, pushing ourselves. Elsewhere, we shrug, accepting our own ordinariness or mediocrity. The excellent and the ordinary coexist, but have an uneasy relationship. With phrases like “you win some, you lose some,” we acknowledge how, on an ordinary day, in an ordinary life, events cluster around a medium level of quality; in theory, we could be happy in the range between not-so-bad and pretty-good. Yet, for many people, it becomes difficult to find satisfaction in what’s regular. The excellent starts to shame the ordinary, leaving it worse off. We want to play winning seasons, not average ones. Having dunked once, we’d like to keep doing it. We’d prefer “great” weekends and vacations. On the largest scales, we oscillate between wanting to lead extraordinary lives and embracing the “merely” ordinary.

To paraphrase: if the questions are, is this it? Is this all there is? The answer is yes.

// 05.24.26

From Verdad’s “Priced for Perfection“:

The future is too uncertain and unpredictable to make high-certainty bets. Yet today’s market—and today’s largest tech companies—are taking one of the largest bets in the history of economics on the future of a new technology. One does not need to be a bear on the technology itself—we are power users and love AI—to identify that this moment in market history is likely to be characterized by over-investment, over-spending, excessive valuations, and inevitable disappointment as an uncertain future surprises a consensus narrative that is too specific and too confident relative to the pace of change.

Predictions are hard, narratives a bit easier. It will be interesting to look back at all the bold predictions and hand-wringing in 2, 5, 10 years and see who is eating claim chowder.

// 05.23.26

Feynman’s Rainbow

05.18.26 // Miscellany, Reading

From Leonard Mlodinow’s Feynman’s Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life, a memoir about his early career as a physicist and working in the same department as titans Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann:

People sometimes scoffed at academia because of the relatively low pay. But I had seen too many “adults” work too many hours at jobs they did not like in order to amass things they only thought they needed, and then, decades later, regret their “wasted” years. And I had seen my father work long, arduous hours just to make ends meet. I had vowed to have a better life than that. The most valuable asset I figured I could earn was the ability to spend my time doing something I liked.

When you select your medical school, your residency, your next job, or how you’re working in your current role—what are you optimizing for?

There is a flip side to the comforting knowledge that everyone is just stumbling through the fog, and that is that it is a pretty good bet that many of them are not stumbling in the right direction. Who is going down the blind alley and who is on the road to success? Whose work will be remembered and whose forgotten? What is worth doing, and how do you know? I didn’t have the answers, but I thought back on the pep talk the division chair had given me. Explore, he said. Check out what other people are doing. I decided to open myself to others.

In considering the explore-exploit tradeoff, we are often jealous of those who seem to have it all figured it out. It is a mistake, however, to assume they’ve always figured it out correctly or that their solutions can be taken on wholesale.

The creative mind has a vast attic. That homework problem you did in college, that intriguing but seemingly pointless paper you spent a week deciphering as a postdoc, that offhand remark of a colleague, all are stored in hope chests somewhere up in a creative person’s brain, often to be picked through and applied by the subconscious at the most unexpected moments. It is a part of the creative process that transcends physics. For instance, Tchaikovsky wrote, “The germ of a future composition comes suddenly and unexpectedly. If the soil is ready…” And Mary Shelley: “Invention does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.” And Stephen Spender: “There is nothing we imagine which we do not alread know. And our ability to imagine is our ability to remember what we have already once experienced and to apply it to some different situation.”

I love this description of creativity, derived from a full, vibrant life, broadly sourced and even full of randomness.

Hanging around a grown kid like Feynman made you question things. Like all the things we do in life because we have to do them—or at least we think we do. Sitting through boring meetings with colleagues or customers or clients when we’d rather be outside staring at a rainbow, or managing our careers along some path for which we have no passion merely because it is supposed to be the road to success. Like my young boys today, Feynman was startlingly honest with people, including himself, and you couldn’t make him do anything he didn’t want to do, at least not without grumbling. In contrast, there I was, still free to choose my own path, and I was compromising almost before I began. What, for me, was worth doing? What would give meaning to my life?

[…]

WHAT IS IMPORTANT IN LIFE? It is a question we should all give thought to. The answer is not taught in school, and it is not as easy as it may seem, for a superficial answer is not acceptable. To discover the real truth you have to know yourself. Then you have to be honest with yourself. Then you have to respect and accept yourself. For me, these were all tough tasks.

I had gone through college and into academia in a hurry, wanting to rush ahead with my work, to prove to the world that I had been alive, and that it had mattered. That was an external focus to life. That was Murray’s way. To accomplish and impress. To be an important person, and a leader. It was the classical path. The traditional one. It seemed to be an obvious and worthy goal. I had accepted it without second thought. But for me, it was like chasing a rainbow. Even worse, it was like chasing other people’s rainbows. Rainbows whose beauty I didn’t really see.

Feynman’s example caused me to rethink mine. He didn’t seek the leadership role. He didn’t gravitate to the sexy “unified” theories. For him satisfaction in discovery was there even if what you discover was already known by others. It was there even if all you are doing is re-deriving someone else’s result your own way. And it was there even if your creativity is in playing with your child. It was self-satisfaction. Feynman’s focus was internal, and his internal focus gave him freedom.

Different approaches to life—external validation vs internal motivation—as exemplified by two of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century.

There’s an exchange in the book I loved:

“Do you know who first explained the true origin of the rainbow?” I asked.
“It was Descartes,” he said. After a moment he looked me in the eye.
“And what do you think was the salient feature of the rainbow that inspired Descartes’ mathematical analysis?” he asked.
“Well, the rainbow is actually a section of a cone that appears as an arc of the colors of the spectrum when drops of water are illuminated by sunlight behind the observer.”
“And?”
“I suppose his inspiration was the realization that the problem could be analyzed by considering a single drop, and the geometry of the situation.”
“You’re overlooking a key feature of the phenomenon,” he said.
“Okay, I give up. What would you say inspired his theory?”
“I would say his inspiration was that he thought rainbows were beautiful.”
I looked at him sheepishly. He looked at me.
“How’s your work coming?” he asked.
I shrugged. “It’s not really coming.” I wished I was like Constantine. It all came so easily to him.
“Let me ask you something. Think back to when you were a kid. For you, that isn’t going too far back.
When you were a kid, did you love science? Was it your passion?”
I nodded. “As long as I can remember”
“Me, too,” he said. “Remember, it’s supposed to be fun.” And he walked on.

Remember, it’s supposed to be fun.