Juan David's Newsletter - September 5, 2021
90-Year-Old Book, Why MIT was Founded, and f(g(X)) != g(f(X))
Hello everyone,
The second week of school is over, and I’ve seen how the rest of the semester will be: continuous nonstop homework, labs, MPs, and whatever else they throw at you.
When I was deciding on my major, Tyler Cowen told me that engineering required “a high degree of dedication.” But I don’t know if what I’m doing requires a high degree of dedication or I’m just engaging in tedious time-consuming busyness.
I’ll keep at it though. Going through college during this time, I see how the great confusing “Catch 22,” colleges are experiencing: Teaching how to think against Making you hireable. While trying to do both, they’re doing neither.
Perhaps it’s better not to think and believe the future is indeterminate, random, and luck-driven. But I can’t.
What do you think? Am I just flat out-wrong and crazy? What do you think I’m missing?
😬 Curiosities, here we go!
Curiosities 📖🏫♾
1. 90-Year-Old Book
A good thing about going to school with big libraries (2nd largest in the US?) is how many books you see. I only wish I had more time to sit in the library for hours and read about random topics I never knew existed.
Sometimes, I can’t help but grab a random book and read it. This week, I found and read this book from 1939 called about Transportation progress. A story of self-propelled vehicles from earliest times down to the automobile.
I’ll try to keep finding hidden treasures like this.
2. Why MIT was Founded
MIT is a relatively new school that was founded with a purpose: to accelerate progress. William Barton Rogers founded MIT because he realized progress was slowing down.
In 1861, the American scientist and educator William Barton Rogers published a manifesto calling for a new kind of research institution. Recognizing the “daily increasing proofs of the happy influence of scientific culture on the industry and the civilization of the nations,” and the growing importance of what he called “Industrial Arts,” he proposed a new organization dedicated to practical knowledge. He named it the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Rogers was one of a number of late-19th-century reformers who saw that the United States’ ability to generate progress could be substantially improved. These reformers looked to the successes of the German university models overseas and realized that a combination of focused professorial research and teaching could be a powerful engine for advance in research.
Over the course of several decades, the group—Rogers, Charles Eliot, Henry Tappan, George Hale, John D. Rockefeller, and others—founded and restructured many of what are now America’s best universities, including Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago, and more.
By acting on their understanding, they engaged in a kind of conscious “progress engineering.”
3. “The Peace of Wild Things.”
Calming poem. Calming Film. Only two minutes.
4. Nassim Taleb & Stephen Wolfram
If you don’t know who these two are, all you need to know is they’re probably one of the smartest people alive.
I’ve been thinking of sharing this super interesting conversation but I’ve been having trouble about how to even tell you what it is about.
So I’ll share a couple of interesting quotes I found in the comments:
1:53 "a parameter is right on average, but not as a variable. a function of average is not average of function"
31:20 ”The problem with economics is that we don’t have anything bounding a number”
42:57 "law of large number is aggregation, what is central limit theorem is aggregation. something aggregates very well, you don't need to know the detail very well, because the overall is going to work out very well. you build a portfolio that works very well in the Gaussian world. the problem is that we don't live in that world."
54:51 "our explanation of time dilation in modern times is the universe is computational. you can either use your computation to compute what happens next in time or you can use their computation to move in space. if you use your computation to move in space, then you will have less computation to use to evolve in time, so time will effectively run slower for you.
1:17:18 "if a currency is just there for illegal activities, in other words, the currency for fraudsters ransomware and pariah, cannot be a currency. it needs to have a bunch of suckers around them to trade their currency for it to have a value."
and more and more.
But the most important idea was: f(g(X)) != g(f(X)).
Watch this conversation to understand the implication of the above mathematical expression.
5. Mathematics is Meditation
"Mathematics is principally a tool to meditate, rather than to compute."
From Nassim Taleb
I have to get back to more math meditation with Calc 3, and VECTORS!! I’ll talk to you next week.
Ciao,
Juan David Campolargo