Humility

I just finished This Is Where the Serpent Lives, the story of a young man in modern-day Pakistan who tries to climb the ladder but is ultimately crushed by corruption and his own ambition and ego.  The story of corruption is both enlightening and concerning here in the US, as it seems to be on the rise.

It is the story of his own ambition and ego that captured me, though.  Saqib thought he was the smartest guy in the room and that he could outmaneuver all the dullards around him, some of whom had spent a lifetime learning their way through society's tangled corruption.   In fact, he was no smarter than the folks around him, and many of them were more experienced and wilier.  

A good thing about AI is that it is delivering a generous dose of humility to scientists, engineers, and knowledge workers of all sorts.  In "When AI Comes for Your Purpose in Life," Strogatz discusses how AI rips away the fiction of mathematicians as heroes who apply their unique skills to the frontier of human knowledge.   While this is a little scary, it is probably healthy and good to strip away this ego-driven hero mythology and force us to rethink from first principles how we spend our time and what is really important.  My guess is that community, relationships, connections are going to remain valuable and human-centric.

Relatedly, Joan Westernberg talks about how You are not the exception to the arc:

If you’re growing a company, you’ll peak. You’ll run out of customers, a competitor will do it better, your core technology will be replaced, or regulators will change the rules. Nothing tells you when.

Each of us is also on many personal curves at once. In 2015, the psychologists Joshua Hartshorne and Laura Germine tested tens of thousands of people and found that processing speed peaks around 18 or 19, while vocabulary keeps growing into the late sixties. If you take slowing reaction times as proof your mind is failing and stop learning, you’ve mistaken one curve for all of them. Work out where you’re falling, where you’re still rising, and where you haven’t yet peaked, and you’ll use the resources you actually have better.

You don’t get to stay at the peak. You do get to choose what you leave on the way down.

We lived through a time when software was hard, when engineering was hard, when we thought we were special and heroes.  It is natural and healthy that this time has passed, and we need to reimagine how we contribute to and connect with society.

Income Tax

Washington State has been a great home for us.  We’ve paid a lot of taxes to live here, and that has generally been a good trade-off.  In the last 5 years, we’ve paid even more taxes thanks to the capital gains tax, which has brought in billions for the state.  

The government has done good work with these tax dollars in many cases.  We spend a lot to administer our voting and elections, and the system is first-rate — mail-in voting works well, our voter participation rate is high, and fraud is infinitesimally small.   The state has done some great infrastructure work — the light rail system is getting a lot of use; the elimination of the viaduct downtown has been transformational.  

But education?   That was the primary motivator for the cap gains tax, and test scores have not improved.   And it is not the kids’ fault — Jeff Raikes on the state of education:

Reading performance fell in three-quarters of countries between 2018 and 2025. In the United States, math and reading scores each declined by the equivalent of three-quarters of a year of learning. 

But these results are a judgment on the systems adults have built, not on the potential of our children. 

None of this is irreversible. But change begins by refusing to blame young people or teachers for conditions they did not create. We have the responsibility, and the ability, to redesign this system. That starts with how we fund education.

Our kids aren’t getting any less competent, but we are failing them.  We are not spending our dollars well; we are not holding ourselves accountable for the performance of our education system.  

So when Washington State cries for more education funding and asks for a new income tax, well, I am unconvinced.  The evidence says that we are spending money ineffectively today.  Don’t ask me for more money until you can explain how you are spendiing all the money you already collected, be accountable for what is not working, and identify how you are going to change things.  I will vote to cancel the WA State income tax — I am fine with living in a high tax/high service state, but I have no confidence in how the money is being spent.

Shorts

Atomic Machines says it is creating a matter compiler.  I love the idea.  But the first test for any compiler has to be “make a copy of yourself”, and I am pretty sure we aren’t there yet.

Every US Electrical Outlet Explained.  You would have thought that with a MSEE I would have known all this.   But I don’t.

I’ve visited some of the largest cities in the world, but I have also missed a lot.  Not a bad list to guide my travel for the rest of my life — World's Top Metropoles from Uncharted Territories.

Is America Abandoning the Endless Frontier? — we are going to pay the price of the Trump administration for a long time.

“Vibe coding is the new 3D printer” — an interesting point; I played around with 3D printing for a while and gave it up; it was a time sink.