Quote Having a fine library doesn’t prove that its owner has a mind enriched by books; it proves
nothing more than that he, his father, or his wife, was rich enough to buy them. - Mortimer J
Adler
Quote The sign of intelligence in reading is the ability to read different things differently
according to their worth. In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you
can get through, but rather how many can get through you—how many you can make your own. A few
friends are better than a thousand acquaintances. If this be your aim, as it should be, you will
not be impatient if it takes more time and effort to read a great book than it does a newspaper. -
ibid
Having a discussion with the author. Knowing they know more than you but not just receiving
information.
Quote So, to the extent that you’re talking about particular macroeconomic time series, you
suddenly scope in a whole bunch of definitional and deflator and measurement debates and all
that. But if we ignore those and focus on the basic phenomena that we really care about:
progress in science, advancement in technology, and the effective deployment of both such that
broader societal welfare is enhanced — yes, I would say that I’m certain that we can do very
meaningfully better than we are doing today. I’ll claim that we could double our rate of
progress.
Science has completely changed as an area. The possible idea that its growth has not been
good. Most systems get worse in a least certain ways as they scale. Try and understand what
Science is now, what are we rewarding and incentivising.
Interesting idea about the shift in culture in terms of expectation of the state. Says
California is the ‘tenet’ of states moving backwards and forwards simultaneously
How do we maintain what we’ve built. Like a mature company, after such high growth how to we
transition. Institution have a working system it requires a lot of work to change as opposed
to them not wanting change
Allocation of talent, what are we getting wrong in terms of getting people to the right places
this could be interesting to look into ?
Stresses the importance of longer term horizon. Think it relates to what we actually want now,
what do we need.
QuestionsSo, I think that the industrial policy folks too often talk about “the returns to
publicly-funded R&D” as a monolithic whole. I would ask them: exactly how will you choose who
gets funded? What will the relevant incentive structure for those people be? What’s your
theory for how they’ll do __top-tier __science/research/innovation/etc.? These are tough
questions! Building systems that allocate capital well at scale and through time is hard. If
they have good answers, I’m probably supportive… more experimentation would be great. If
not, I’m less hopeful.
”Values can be programmed, and since errors are values, errors can be programmed”
Uses scanner example where the err value in the performing object is set and can be
checked for later
Not really the same as a try catch, why?
If seeing err nil checks could abstract to an interface that sets an err value
Underlying API errors “In other words, wrapping an error makes that error part of your
API. If you don’t want to commit to supporting that error as part of your API in the
future, you shouldn’t wrap the error”