Interesting that you say 4.1 not 4.5, does 4.1 seem noticeably better for non-complex coding tasks generally?
Kishore Mahbubani, Singaporean diplomat and former president of the UN Security Council, studied philosophy full-time as an undergraduate in the late 60s. Recounting that period in his autobiography Living the Asian Century he wrote
For the final examinations, which I took at the end of my fourth year, our degree was determined by how well we did in eight three-hour examinations. In one of the papers, we had to answer a single question. The one question I chose to answer over three hours was “Can a stone feel pain?”
From my exam results, I gained a first-class honours degree, which was rare in the Department of Philosophy. Since our final examination papers were also sent to Peter Winch, one of the leading scholars on Wittgenstein in the world, I felt honoured that my first-class honours had been endorsed by him.
Wittgenstein was Mahbubani's favorite philosopher; back then, “like all other philosophy departments in the Anglo-Saxon world, our department had been captured by the linguistic-analytic school of philosophy that Wittgenstein had launched with his Philosophical Investigations”.
At risk of revealing possible narrow-mindedness, a three-hour free response exam to the question “Can a stone feel pain?” makes me think of Luke's philosophy: a diseased discipline. The questions Richard Ngo answered in his All Souls Fellowship exam got wacky at times, but never “can a stone feel pain?”-wacky.
Mahbubani continued:
... I could write eight pages over three hours in response to the question “Can a stone feel pain?” because Wittgenstein’s ideas allowed me to deconstruct the meanings of the words in this apparently simple question.
The process of focusing on the language we use came in very handy when I joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) in April 1971 and embarked on my long career in the study of geopolitics. Our understanding of “objective reality” is clearly conditioned by the language we use. The first major war that I had to analyse as a Foreign Service officer was the Vietnam War. The “facts” were clear: soldiers from North Vietnam were fighting soldiers from the United States. We could see this. But what were they fighting about? The US leaders, Johnson and Nixon, had no doubt: they were fighting against a global push by the Soviet Union and China to expand communism. But the North Vietnamese soldiers also had no doubt: they were fighting for “national liberation” from the “imperialist” US forces. So who was right? What is the truth here? Adding to the elusiveness of an absolute “truth” is the fact that fifty years after the United States withdrew ignominiously from Vietnam, one of the best friends of the United States in Southeast Asia will be the Communist Party of North Vietnam—the United States wants to upgrade its ties with Vietnam to a strategic partnership.
I find myself completely unpersuaded by his applied example here, but I suppose I'm just the wrong audience...
No, because intelligence test publishers deliberately re-express raw results so their curves have mean = 100 and SD = 15, a convention going back to Wechsler’s “deviation-IQ” idea.
I agree with
No single scale fully captures technological progress
and still like Jason Crawford's idea of a dashboard of metrics for civ progress instead of any single scale, expanded beyond consumption to include productivity and "amount of stuff we can get done", including more future-proof metrics than the near-term ones they all listed, etc. Also Ivan Vendrov's suggestion to counteract the tendency to use Goodhart-resistant-but-terrible metrics with richer ideologies.
Out of curiosity I asked o3 to BOTEC cost-effectiveness of Jennifer's efforts. It gave me 2 answers; the one I preferred happened to be the lower one, which was still spectacularly high even after the 1-3% credit attribution: "Roughly $1.7–5 billion in expected annual export losses averted for two months of work".
I like Quote Investigator for memetic quotes like this. It begins with
The earliest relevant evidence located by QI appeared in a 1966 collection of articles about manufacturing. An employee of the Stainless Processing Company named William H. Markle wrote a piece titled “The Manufacturing Manager’s Skills” which included a strong match for the saying under investigation. However, the words were credited to an unnamed professor at Yale University and not to Einstein. Also, the hour was split into 40 vs. 20 minutes instead of 55 vs. 5 minutes. Boldface has been added to excerpts:2
Some years ago the head of the Industrial Engineering Department of Yale University said, “If I had only one hour to solve a problem, I would spend up to two-thirds of that hour in attempting to define what the problem is.”
Albert Einstein died in 1955, and by 1973 a version of the saying had been assigned to him in an article in the journal “Invention Intelligence” based in New Delhi, India. Interestingly, the hour was split into three parts instead of two.
and then traces the rest of the meme's evolution at length.
Sharing the infographics from Ariel's tweet thread you linked to and also the paper, to save folks the effort of clicking through:
I wasn't sure I understood the difference, so I asked Sonnet 4 and it replied:
Yes, there's a meaningful distinction here that's worth understanding. The difference lies in timeframe, specificity, and the nature of desire versus direction.
"What do I want?" often captures immediate desires, feelings, or impulses. It's more about what feels appealing or satisfying right now. For example, you might want to sleep in, eat pizza, avoid a difficult conversation, or buy something that catches your eye.
"What's my goal?" is more about intentional direction and longer-term outcomes. Goals are typically more structured and forward-looking. They represent what you're working toward, even if it requires doing things you don't particularly want to do in the moment.
I suppose this is related to, if not exactly the same as, wanting vs liking? Or am I even more confused than I realise?
FWIW I'm glad you posted it here, albeit mainly because it's by you.
You reminded me of this part of Rudolf's story: