I worry that most people just don’t have that many ideas. People like TLP or chesterton or whatever, they’re cool, but they don’t have the breadth of Cowen or a miscellanist like Browne/Burton.
- related to points about caching in conversation
- Think of the backpack model of conversation The Elephant in the Brain Notes. There are basically two things you can show off, cached knowledge/crystal IQ, or raw ability/fluid IQ. How do we show both off differently? David Lewis is a concrete example of fluid IQ. Maybe Tyler Cowen is an example of showing off high cached IQ?
- also Cowen (nad other historical and present infovores are basically LLMs wrt the massive amount of pretraining data they’ve consumed, relative to other people)
- This is the explanation: https://scholars-stage.org/public-intellectuals-have-short-shelf-lives-but-why/
- The individual version of Karnofsky’s Beethoven - Scientific and Artistic Progress.
- This looks at various answers to what is your production function (inputs and outputs) and how can you maximise throughput of the function over your entire life. (Not that this is objectively correct, but it’s something you migth care about). Consider the fact that inputs might degrade or go stale, you might only be able to write certain things in your 20s, if you don’t write them then, bad luck. Does doing this involve learning Mental models and then learning data? Or learning procedural knowledge at different times to data or theories/mental models?
- Might queing theory explain some of this stuff?