Are you sure it makes sense to go into these details? After all, the US has waged many wars since WWII, and the Iraq war doesn't seem unusual among them. So maybe we shouldn't explain it by unusual events; the right explanation would have to work for the whole reference class.

I'm against IQ tests for employment. My idea was more about job-relevant tests. They do require study, but the point of banning discrimination by diploma and allowing only tests is that people will be able to study for the test in any way they like, because employers won't be able to demand Ivy League etc.

Thank you for writing this!

I think my ideal system would differ from Singapore's in a couple important ways:

• Classes would be grouped by subject+level. A student would progress in different subjects at different pace and level, and there wouldn't be an overall "level of student" or "level of school".

• Employers would be banned from discriminating on education. They could only discriminate based on exam results relevant to the job, and the exams would be accessible to everyone regardless of hours of study.

It seems to me that this setup is equivalent to "skim air from the top of Earth's atmosphere, drop it back to Earth, extract gravitational energy", with some more details that don't change much. This fails for density reasons, unless I'm missing something.

In fact, I’m less likely to do it than if my friend weren’t trying to pressure me to do it.

Interesting! Why? I mean, the friend probably has your best interest in mind, "you'l be glad you jumped". And empirically, when I take the jump in situations like this, I feel happy with myself afterward. Isn't it the same for you?

(Also, to me it's not as much about what other people will think of me. It's more about me actually having certain qualities, doing certain things, or not.)

It feels to me that "evidence of X" as colloquially used might be a stronger phrase than "evidence for X", and almost as strong as "proof of X". So maybe correlation is evidence for causation, but isn't evidence of causation :-)

One example I like is Eminem's line "I make elevating music, you make elevator music". The meaning behind the line is unremarkable: "I'm better at music than you". But it works so well on the level of language, it's clear that it was born in the form of language straight away. I think all good writing (rap, poetry, prose) is full of this kind of thing.

Is boiling actually necessary for this scenario? Let's say the planet had pockets of pressurized gas instead. We drill into them, the gas expands, does work, and cools below ambient temperature.

This suggests Kelvin's formulation is actually ok, if we focus on the word "by". The work has to be extracted solely from cooling: something cools below the lowest temperature of surrounding objects, some work is extracted, and no other changes happen. If something else happens - for example a rock falls down, a spring is released, a container is depressurized, two fluids get mixed and so on - that doesn't count.

Idk, I feel all this new therapy-speak like "setting boundaries" leads people into wrong directions. Like, therapy assumes that you're the customer. For example if your friend tells you come on, jump in the cold water, you can respond by setting a boundary: I don't want to jump! And I'm right, because the customer is always right! But the real issue maybe is that you're a coward. It's not a pleasant thing to think about, the customer in you recoils from the thought that there's some fault with it - that you're being cowardly, greedy, gossipy, etc. And the right move is to stop being a customer and be a human. Don't distract yourself with therapy speak. When your friend in good nature says jump into cold water, just take the damn jump.

Amazing post. But I want to maybe push it a bit further.

From the perspective of creativity, any given domain (like music, writing, drawing, mathematics and so on) can be seen in two ways:

1. A target of translation. You come up with things that are "good" in other domains, then translate to this one.

2. A creative medium of its own. You first learn it by imitation, then try to synthesize little bits, and gradually learn what's "good" or not.

You approach jazz saxophone as (2), and say poetry is more (1). But from what I understand about poetry, and writing in general, it's also much more (2) than (1). Good writers use language the way you use the saxophone. Annie Dillard mentions a young writer who is asked "do you like sentences?" and becomes confused by the question - but liking sentences is precisely the right way to good writing! It's not so much about having cool thoughts and translating them into sentences, but more about directly creating cool sentences, and even cool individual words. The poet Mayakovsky said a rhyme is a barrel of dynamite, and the line leading up to the rhyme is the fuse.

So the question "is music a language?" is a bit of trick question. When treated as a target of translation, music is poorer than language: things like mathematics can be somewhat translated into language, but not into music. But as a creative medium, language feels similar to music and other creative media.