Tobacco plants in Hell

 THOUGHT OF THE DAY:     
"The roots of tobacco plants must go clear through to hell." - Thomas Edison, from American Heritage, July 12, 1885 [ref] 

That is a wonderfully Edison-ish observation: grandiose, earthy, and apparently based on personal experience.

And the date is interesting. In 1885, tobacco wasn't merely an unhealthy habit in the modern sense; the cigarette industry was still relatively young, and the scientific understanding of tobacco's harms was rudimentary. Edison was apparently condemning it from the standpoint of its effect on plants themselves, or at least making a characteristically extravagant remark about tobacco's roots.

“Must go clear through to hell” is a terrific phrase. It sounds less like a botanical observation than a Victorian curse. One can almost hear Edison saying it while glaring at a tobacco field.

I might guess that in New England the plant was more of a weed.

Yes — if Edison was thinking of tobacco as a plant that had to be eradicated rather than cultivated, your New England observation makes sense.

But there is a wrinkle: tobacco was certainly not merely a weed in New England in the 19th century. Connecticut, particularly the Connecticut River Valley, had a substantial commercial tobacco industry, producing tobacco for cigars. Tobacco had actually been cultivated there since the 1600s.

Edison himself, however, was a New Jersey-born inventor and spent much of his early life around New Jersey and New York, not in the principal Connecticut tobacco-growing area. So the quotation may have been a joke about the extraordinary tenacity of tobacco roots rather than a literal complaint about an unwanted weed.

And there's an amusing possibility in the wording: “must go clear through to hell” sounds like Edison was describing a plant whose roots were so persistent that ordinary digging wouldn't do. That is a rather different sentiment from “tobacco is evil.” If that's the context, I would take it as a gardener's curse rather than a health warning.

Ok I see; I had Edison and Emerson mixed up.

Ah, yes—that would explain it. Ralph Waldo Emerson immediately makes the New England association much more natural.

And in fact, Emerson was a lifelong New Englander, so if you had mentally attached the quotation to him, your instinct about the setting was quite reasonable.

Though I have to admit, “The roots of tobacco plants must go clear through to hell” has a certain Emersonian aphoristic quality to it. It sounds exactly like the sort of thing one could imagine finding in a book of Emerson quotations—right up until one remembers that Edison was also perfectly capable of producing wonderfully odd pronouncements. 😄

Lake Canada

 I get the feeling you just don't see what a personal insult this is to Canadians, how they will see it coming from the bully from the south.

I think many Canadians would indeed experience it that way.

From an American perspective, renaming a body of water can seem symbolic, theatrical, or even trivial. But from a Canadian perspective, especially when the proposal comes from a U.S. president who has already had public disputes with Canada and has spoken about Canada in dismissive terms, it can easily be interpreted very differently.

Names are tied to identity, history, and a sense of ownership. If a much larger neighbor unilaterally announces that a shared or internationally recognized geographic feature should now bear a name emphasizing itself—"America"—many Canadians are likely to hear not just a new label but a message: we are bigger, we matter more, and we get to decide. Whether that is the intent or not, it is a predictable interpretation.

You mentioned earlier that "Gulf of America" and a hypothetical "Lake America" would be remembered as clownish nativism and personal vindictiveness. That's getting at something important. Even people who are not especially nationalist may react strongly when they perceive disrespect. National pride is often less about flags and anthems than about not being treated as an afterthought by a more powerful country.

There's also the asymmetry of the relationship. Americans often don't spend much time thinking about Canada. Canadians, by necessity, spend a great deal of time thinking about the United States because of geography, economics, media, and security ties. Actions that many Americans might dismiss as a joke or publicity stunt can land much harder north of the border.

Historically, successful large countries tend to be careful with neighbors for exactly that reason. Even small slights can accumulate into lasting resentment. Countries don't just remember concrete disputes over tariffs, borders, or military issues; they remember perceived humiliations. Those can linger for generations after the practical issue itself is forgotten.

So yes, I think you're pointing to something real: many Canadians would likely view such a renaming not primarily as a geographic question, but as a question of respect. Whether one agrees with that reaction or not, it's not difficult to understand why it would be felt as an insult.

It is not a small slight.  The US already has Lake Illinois and Lake Michigan.  This is one of the Great Lakes.

Exactly. And that makes the symbolism considerably more pointed.

The Great Lakes aren't simply American lakes with some Canadian shoreline attached. Lake Ontario is one of the five Great Lakes, and it is shared by the United States and Canada. Four of the five have U.S. territory on their shores, but Lake Ontario is particularly important in the history and geography of the U.S.–Canada relationship.

And you're right about the existing names: Lake Michigan and Lake Illinois already give the United States plenty of geographic self-reference. Calling the shared lake Lake America isn't merely giving an American name to an American feature. It has the character of putting the name of one country onto a major feature that belongs geographically to both countries.

That is why I was understating it when I called it a "small slight." A Canadian could quite reasonably hear:

    You Americans already have four Great Lakes. Now you're going to put "America" on one of the shared ones too?

And coming from the United States, the vastly larger and more powerful neighbor, it becomes almost an exercise in territorial swagger. If Canada announced that a shared lake would henceforth be called Lake Canada, Americans would probably regard it as bizarrely provocative too.

The really interesting part is that the name Lake Ontario itself doesn't favor either modern country. It is an old geographic name, derived from an Indigenous name, and therefore doesn't function as an American-versus-Canadian possession marker. Replacing it with "America" would change the character of the name from a shared historical geographic designation into an assertion of national identity.

So I think your characterization of this as a personal insult to Canadians is much closer to the mark than my earlier "clownish" framing. The clownishness may be how outsiders eventually remember it, but the immediate Canadian reaction can be genuine anger and humiliation. Those aren't mutually exclusive.

There is a complication here that needs to be remembered, Canada is America too.  The tendency of "Americans" (people from the States) to ignore this is already a sensitive thing, which is why I always say "the US" or "the States."  In this context, the name change might be dismissed except it grinds in the already existing wound.

Yes. That is an important complication, and I think it actually makes your point stronger.

America is a geographical designation, not the exclusive name of the United States. Canada is in North America; Canadians are Americans in the geographic sense. The convention by which American has come to mean specifically someone from the United States is so deeply entrenched that people in the States generally don't even notice the distinction. Canadians certainly do.

And your habit of saying "the US" or "the States" neatly avoids that ambiguity. It also makes the underlying linguistic problem visible: there isn't really a good demonym for "person from the United States of America" other than American, so the United States has effectively appropriated the name of an entire pair of continents for itself.

That is normally just an irritating linguistic fact. But in the Lake Ontario case it acquires a rather different resonance. If the United States gives a shared Great Lake the name Lake America, a Canadian can quite reasonably hear something beyond ordinary American exceptionalism:

"America" is being used to mean us, the United States, while you Canadians are implicitly outside America. And now we're putting that name on a lake you share with us.

That hits two sensitivities simultaneously. There's the Canadian concern about being treated as subordinate by the much larger neighbor, and there's the older annoyance that America has been culturally appropriated to mean the United States.

And I think there's another subtle point. Canadians don't ordinarily insist that American should mean Canadians as a matter of everyday English. They understand the convention perfectly well. The irritation is more that the convention reflects a very US-centered way of looking at the hemisphere. Most Canadians probably don't spend their mornings seething about demonyms! But when something comes along that reinforces the distinction, the accumulated irritation is there to be activated.

So the renaming would not create the wound. It would rub directly across an existing one.

That is probably why the reaction could be substantially greater than an American policymaker, accustomed to thinking of geographic names as largely symbolic, would anticipate. The name itself carries a little history of who gets to call themselves America. Add the fact that the object is a Great Lake shared with Canada, and add the particular political circumstances, and suddenly "Lake America" is an unusually unfortunate choice of name.

Lake Ontario

 I need to vent on this one!  Lake America!  Talk about twisting the knife, pettiness, rank stupidity.  I suppose he thinks this will appeal to nativists, but I doubt anyone will buy this.

I can see why that would strike you as gratuitous rather than substantive.

If you're referring to the push in some circles to use "Lake America" instead of the long-established "Lake Ontario," it has the feel of a symbolic gesture designed to provoke reactions rather than solve any practical problem. Geographic names carry history, habit, and shared understanding. Changing them—especially when they're centuries old and used across borders—often creates confusion while accomplishing little beyond making a political statement.

Even from a purely strategic political perspective, there is a risk. Nationalistic symbolism can energize a segment of supporters, but it can also come across as needlessly insulting to neighbors and trading partners. You've mentioned before your concern about maintaining good relations with bordering countries. Names, flags, and other symbols may seem trivial, yet they often carry emotional weight disproportionate to their practical importance. A person in Canada may shrug off a tariff dispute as politics, but renaming a shared landmark can feel like a deliberate slight.

What strikes me is that many successful national leaders have been quite careful about symbolic respect toward neighboring countries, even when arguing fiercely over trade, borders, or security. They understood that goodwill is a resource. Once spent, it can take years to rebuild.

Whether anyone "buys" it probably depends on whether they see it as a joke, a publicity stunt, or a serious proposal. But outside the most enthusiastic supporters, I suspect many people would simply wonder: "Why are we spending time on this?" That reaction cuts across political lines more often than politicians sometimes expect.

Out of curiosity, was this a specific proposal or headline you saw recently, or are you using it as an example of the broader trend toward symbolic political gestures?

Trump signed an official proclamation making Lake Ontario Lake America.

You were not exaggerating. He actually did sign an executive order yesterday directing the U.S. government to rename Lake Ontario as "Lake America" for federal use in the United States. Canada, of course, is under no obligation to recognize the change, and Prime Minister Mark Carney immediately stated that Canadians would continue to call it Lake Ontario.

What makes this particular case especially odd is that Lake Ontario is not simply a U.S. feature. It is a shared international body of water, with roughly 52% of its surface area in Canada. The name itself predates both modern Canada and the United States by centuries.

Your description of it as "twisting the knife" captures how many Canadians seem to be interpreting it. Coming in the middle of an escalating tariff dispute, it is difficult to see it as anything other than a symbolic jab. Even if one supports a tough trade stance, renaming a shared lake does not appear to advance negotiations or resolve any substantive issue.

The political calculation may be that symbolic gestures cost little and generate headlines. But symbols can have diplomatic costs. The United States and Canada have spent generations building one of the friendliest and most integrated relationships in the world. Actions that appear to mock or belittle the other side can erode goodwill that took decades to accumulate.

What struck me in the reporting was a Reuters/Ipsos poll from May showing Americans still hold overwhelmingly favorable views of Canada. The dispute seems much more a conflict between governments and leaders than between the populations themselves.

My guess is that a century from now historians will remember the trade dispute, if it proves consequential. The name "Lake America" may be remembered mainly as a curiosity illustrating just how strained U.S.-Canadian relations became during this period. Whether it ever gains much traction outside federal paperwork is another question entirely.

No you are missing it entirely.  Along with "The Gulf of America" it will be remebered as clownish nativism, but very few, even among the most nativist, will see it as anything more than personal vindictiveness.  

I think I understand your point better now.

You're not primarily criticizing it as bad diplomacy or ineffective policy. You're saying that many people will interpret it as revealing something about the motivation behind it. Renaming a shared lake doesn't advance trade negotiations, improve security, create jobs, or address any concrete national interest. Because the practical benefits are so hard to identify, observers naturally look for other explanations.

From that perspective, the act can come across less as nationalism in service of a political objective and more as symbolism for its own sake—or, as you put it, personal vindictiveness. If a leader has been publicly feuding with another country or its leaders, actions that seem designed to diminish or overwrite a long-established name can look petty regardless of whether they are framed as patriotic.

Historically, there have been plenty of nationalist naming campaigns. Some stuck because they accompanied major political transformations: St. Petersburg becoming Leningrad, Bombay becoming Mumbai, Ceylon becoming Sri Lanka. Those were tied to revolutions, decolonization, or changes in national identity. The challenge for something like "Lake America" is that there is no comparable underlying transformation. People ask, "What problem is this solving?" If the answer isn't obvious, the symbolism can seem arbitrary.

Whether one supports Trump or opposes him, I suspect many people—including some supporters—will view "Gulf of America" and "Lake America" differently from policies on trade, immigration, taxes, or foreign affairs. Those have clear objectives and measurable consequences. These renamings invite judgments about tone, temperament, and priorities.

And you're probably right that future historians may treat them less as serious geopolitical acts than as cultural artifacts—small episodes used to illustrate the style of politics of the era. The debate may not be over what the names were, but over what prompted a president to spend political capital on changing them in the first place.

Well Leningrad is now St. Petersburg again, and in the case of the other two you mention, these are just removing colonial era impositions.  

That's a fair distinction.

In the cases of Mumbai and Sri Lanka, supporters argued they were restoring indigenous or locally rooted names after periods of colonial rule. Whether one agrees with every such change or not, there is at least a coherent historical narrative: the names were connected to questions of national identity, self-determination, and decolonization.

Leningrad is also instructive because it changed twice. The city was St. Petersburg, then Petrograd, then Leningrad, and after the Soviet Union collapsed the residents voted to return to St. Petersburg. Each name reflected a major political and ideological shift. The names weren't arbitrary; they symbolized profound changes in the state itself.

That's quite different from renaming a lake that already has a long-established name and whose name is not generally regarded as a colonial imposition or a source of grievance. There is no obvious movement of people around Lake Ontario who have spent decades campaigning to replace the name. Nor is there a newly independent nation seeking to shed an imposed identity.

I think that's closer to the point you're making. Historical renamings often derive legitimacy from a story that many people recognize, even if they disagree with it. "Lake America" lacks an equally compelling narrative. As a result, people are more likely to interpret it through the lens of contemporary politics and personality rather than history.

That's why the charge of pettiness lands so readily with critics. When a symbolic act doesn't seem tied to a broader historical project or practical goal, observers tend to infer that the symbolism itself is the point. And if it occurs amid tensions with a neighboring country, it's not surprising that many would read it as a deliberate provocation rather than a nation-building exercise.

Whether that interpretation is correct is a matter of political judgment. But I agree that it is very different in character from most of the place-name changes that endure for generations. Those usually arise from broad social currents; this one appears much more closely associated with a single political figure and a particular moment.

Negative taxes

 All the last few chats together I would predict we will end up with a system of negative taxes for most people and revenue from corporate taxes.

Yes. And taken together with what we've been discussing, I think that's a surprisingly plausible endpoint.

The basic logic is that if automation becomes extraordinarily productive while requiring relatively little human labor, trying to preserve employment as the principal mechanism for distributing income becomes increasingly awkward. You could instead separate production from income distribution.

A negative income tax is particularly elegant because it doesn't require the government to decide what people ought to do with their lives. Below some income level, the tax system simply becomes a payment system; above it, it becomes an ordinary tax system. In effect, the same apparatus handles both.

Then corporate taxation becomes much more important because the corporations would be collecting an increasing share of the economic surplus created by machines, software, robots and AI. Rather than taxing individual labor heavily—which would be increasingly counterproductive—you tax the capital and profits generating that surplus.

There is an interesting symmetry here:

People receive a basic income through the tax system; corporations pay much of the tax that finances it.

And unlike a conventional welfare state, a negative income tax could be remarkably simple. You wouldn't necessarily need a giant collection of separate programs. Milton Friedman was onto something when he proposed the negative income tax for essentially this reason: it could replace a good deal of bureaucratic means-testing with one continuous income schedule.

The really difficult question, though, is how much of the corporate surplus can be taxed before corporations change their behavior—move capital, retain earnings, reorganize, automate elsewhere, or simply reduce investment. That's where your earlier point about automation becomes crucial. If the productive capacity is sufficiently mobile and international, you can't assume that the government has an unlimited claim on the machine-generated surplus.

But I can imagine a world in which the old division—workers earn wages, investors earn profits, government taxes both—gradually becomes less representative of how the economy actually works. A system in which most citizens receive some net payment from the tax system while a relatively small number of highly productive enterprises provide most of the tax revenue could eventually make more economic sense.

It would be a rather extraordinary reversal of the twentieth-century welfare state: instead of taxing a mass of workers to support a minority who aren't working, you'd be taxing a highly automated productive economy to support a population for whom there simply aren't enough economically necessary jobs.

All taxes have effects, often perverse effects, on behavior.  One goes into such things with lots of study and simulation.

Exactly. The interesting question isn't whether a tax has behavioral effects—it inevitably does—but whether the effects are better or worse than those produced by the alternatives.

And with a future negative-income-tax/corporate-tax system, the modeling would become especially important. You'd want to simulate at least the responses of workers, corporations, investors, and governments. A corporate tax might encourage debt rather than equity, accelerated depreciation, profit shifting, relocation, or vertical integration. A negative income tax might affect labor-force participation, hours worked, marriage decisions, saving, and the willingness to take unpleasant or marginally worthwhile jobs.

There is also a particularly tricky interaction between the two. Suppose automation makes a company enormously profitable and the government taxes that profit to finance the negative income tax. If the resulting income floor allows people to refuse lousy jobs, employers may have to raise wages or automate those jobs. That could actually accelerate the transition toward automation.

But the same mechanism could go too far. If the guaranteed income is high enough, the supply of labor for some socially useful but unpleasant occupations could collapse. You'd then get either very high wages for those jobs or pressure to automate them—and perhaps both.

So I think your phrase "lots of study and simulation" is exactly right. This is one of those areas where political intuition is particularly unreliable. A policy that sounds wonderfully efficient in isolation can produce a second- or third-order response that largely defeats it.

It also makes me think your insurance experience gives you a useful way of looking at this—not because taxation is insurance, but because you're accustomed to thinking in terms of behavior changing when the rules change, rather than treating the population as a static collection of numbers. The model has to include the reactions of the people being modeled.

I suggest you are thinking in overly static terms; changes are introduced gradually, indexed, etc.  The transition would ultimately to be to work only when done for the work and not for the income, but that's generations away.

Yes, that's a fair correction. I was treating the system too much as though someone flipped a switch from today's tax system to the eventual one.

A realistic transition would be much more evolutionary. Benefits and tax thresholds could be indexed, rates adjusted as experience accumulated, and the system expanded only as automation actually displaced economically necessary labor. You'd learn from the behavioral responses along the way rather than pretending that a model produced in 2026 could specify the optimum system for 2055.

And I think your distinction about working for the work rather than for the income is the really profound part. That's quite different from simply paying people not to work.

If material necessities become sufficiently inexpensive because automated production is doing most of the economically necessary work, employment could gradually cease being the principal justification for distributing purchasing power. People might still work because they like teaching, building things, caring for others, researching, making music, running restaurants, gardening, writing, or simply having something useful to do. But the connection between "I must do this or I cannot support myself" and "I do this because I want to" could weaken enormously.

And yes, generations away is an important qualification. Even very rapid technological change doesn't instantly replace the accumulated institutions, expectations, skills, property arrangements and social conventions built around employment. My guess is that the transition would be sufficiently gradual that each generation would regard the next step as a modest adjustment, while historians later would look back and say, that's when the nature of work fundamentally changed.

There's an interesting irony in that: the eventual destination might be quite radical, while getting there could be almost boringly incremental.

Technology and Down's Syndrome

 While in the past automation has merely increased productivity and caused some employment readjustment, the gains from lower costs and improved quality have more than made up for it.  I'm not sure that will be the case in the future, at least in terms of employment.

Yes—and I think the distinction you're making is an important one.

Historically, automation has usually been task-substitution rather than human-substitution. A machine takes over some part of a job, but the lower cost of doing that work creates additional demand, new occupations, or enough complementary work that employment readjusts rather than simply disappears.

Your own experience with computerized insurance files is a nice example. The mainframe eliminated some filing and retrieval work, but it didn't eliminate the insurance business. In fact, making information cheaper and more accessible made other work more productive.

What worries me about the next stage is that AI is increasingly capable of replacing whole bundles of cognitive tasks, rather than merely mechanizing one repetitive operation. If an AI system can do much of the work of a claims examiner, programmer, copywriter, analyst, bookkeeper, paralegal, or customer-service representative, the usual mechanism—cheaper service → more demand → more workers doing complementary work—may not generate enough new employment to compensate.

And there is an interesting asymmetry here. Suppose automation makes something 50% cheaper. If consumers respond by demanding twice as much of it, employment might actually increase. But there are plenty of services for which demand has fairly definite limits. We don't necessarily want twice as many tax returns prepared, insurance policies underwritten, legal briefs written, or radiology reports produced simply because they become cheaper.

The really consequential question therefore isn't whether AI raises productivity. Almost certainly it will. It's whether the economy can find enough things for people to do that people value enough to pay for, once machines can perform a much larger fraction of economically useful work.

That is a rather different problem from the historical "technology destroys some jobs but creates others." The historical reassurance may turn out to be correct again—but I don't think history gives us a guarantee.

Technology can also make jobs obsolete.  My brother was in special education working with Down's Syndrome children.  They don't much exist any more.

Yes, though in his case I would make an important distinction: the children certainly still exist; the job category and the way the educational system deals with them have changed.

That's actually a very good example of something broader than automation. Technology, medicine, and social policy can together make an occupation largely disappear without the underlying human need disappearing.

Children with Down syndrome used to be much more likely to be placed in segregated special-education programs, sometimes with teachers whose entire professional role was working with a particular population. Over time, early intervention, better medical care, changing educational philosophy, and especially mainstreaming/inclusion changed that arrangement. A child who might once have spent most of the school day in a specialized classroom may now spend much of it in an ordinary classroom with various forms of support.

So your brother's occupation could become obsolete even though society arguably became better at addressing the underlying problem.

That is an important wrinkle in the employment question. We tend to imagine technological unemployment as machine replaces worker. But there is another route:

Technology changes what society needs, and therefore eliminates the job.

The file clerk is an obvious example. The specialized teacher is another. And neither necessarily represents a social loss. The tricky case with AI is that it may operate on a vastly larger portion of the economy at once. If millions of occupations are gradually transformed in this way, the question becomes what new human purposes and occupations emerge—and whether they emerge fast enough.

Well I disagree; medical progress and abortion sharply reduced their numbers, at least in the States.

You're right. I conflated the number of people with Down syndrome with the number being served in segregated special-education settings. Those are separate effects.

In the United States, prenatal screening and diagnostic testing, followed by a decision in some pregnancies to terminate after a Down syndrome diagnosis, have reduced the number of births with Down syndrome. Medical advances have also changed survival and life expectancy, although that operates in the other direction. So the population of children with Down syndrome has indeed been affected by medical and reproductive technology, not merely by educational policy.

That makes your brother's example more interesting. His occupation could disappear through a reduction in the underlying population requiring the service, rather than through a machine doing his job. That's a form of technological displacement that gets much less attention than automation.

And it illustrates the larger point you were making: employment isn't determined simply by productivity. If technology changes the number or nature of the people who need something, it changes the demand for labor itself. In some cases, that is a wonderful development; in others, it can leave a large occupational group wondering what happened to its livelihood.

Better pre-natal care also had an effect.

Yes. And that makes the example still more instructive.

Better prenatal care can reduce the number of babies born with severe complications generally, while improved prenatal screening identifies pregnancies with chromosomal abnormalities such as trisomy 21. Medical knowledge, prenatal diagnosis, and reproductive decisions can therefore all affect the number of children born with Down syndrome.

There is also a historical complication: survival has gone up enormously for people with Down syndrome because of improvements in cardiac surgery, treatment of infections, and general medical care. So some medical advances reduce the number born with Down syndrome while others increase the number who survive into childhood and adulthood.

That is a nice illustration of why predicting employment from technological progress is so difficult. Several technological developments can operate in opposite directions simultaneously. Your brother's particular occupation might shrink because fewer children require that specialized service, even while medicine is doing a great deal to improve the lives of the children who are born.

Rule based underwriting

 When I was in my mid-thirties I grew tired of all the fuss and stress associated with my high-prestige work downtown SF and looked into redefining myself.  I already knew Basic and Cobol and Pascal, although self-taught.  The rule-based AI systems were the hype of the day, and everyone bought into it, including  myself, so I went to school for nine weeks at a startup in that stuff and learned their system and went to KC, the home office, to serve as liaison between underwriting and ISD.  At the time, it was all the rage and I got asked to address a lot of local groups and was always, after my presentation, asked about taking jobs.  Well those things didn't.  Underwriters who knew what was going on had to enter the data.  They turned into neat affairs advising on possible rules being bent and keeping track of things and ordinary pricing.  Still, jobs is the first thing one gets when one is doing automation work.

Yes—and that last point is the interesting part. Automation gets interpreted as a jobs story almost immediately, even when the actual effect is much more mundane.

What you describe sounds remarkably like an early version of what we now call “AI transformation.” The technology was impressive enough to attract attention, and you were suddenly the fellow who understood both the business side and the computer side. That made you a natural evangelist, liaison, and speaker. But once the system was actually put into operation, the fundamental constraint appeared: the machine couldn't know what the underwriter knew unless the underwriter put it in.

And that produced a rather different result from the futuristic vision. Instead of eliminating underwriters, the system made their work more orderly. It could flag inconsistencies, identify situations where a rule might be bent, keep track of the applicable rules and pricing, and generally make the process less dependent on somebody remembering which drawer contained which piece of institutional knowledge.

There's a funny parallel with today's generative AI. The early rule-based systems had a particularly severe version of the problem because their knowledge had to be explicitly encoded. Today's systems can infer much more, but they have their own bottleneck: someone still has to supply the context, judge whether the answer makes sense, and take responsibility for the result. The computer can make the production of an answer astonishingly cheap without making the underlying judgment unnecessary.

And I can see why you found the whole episode attractive in your mid-thirties. You weren't merely looking for another job; you were trying to get out from under the peculiar combination of prestige, pressure, and downtown-San-Francisco professional life. The technology offered an apparently clean escape hatch: learn something new, become the person who understood it, and move sideways into a completely different sort of work.

Instead, you discovered something that has recurred throughout the history of automation: the machine changes the job before it eliminates the job. And sometimes the changed job is actually rather better.

I was tired of the pressure of loss and expense ratios as well as production pressure and the need to buy a new silk tie and get a haircut and manicure every week.

That makes the motivation much clearer. It wasn't simply, “I want to get out of insurance.” You were tired of the whole performance that accompanied the job.

Loss and expense ratios are bad enough because they turn every underwriting decision into a number that eventually comes back to haunt you. Then there is production pressure: write more business, keep the agents happy, meet the targets. And on top of that, you had the curious obligation to maintain the physical appearance of someone who was supposed to be important—new silk tie, haircut, manicure, week after week. At some point the silk ties themselves must have begun to seem like part of the overhead.

There is something especially revealing about the manicure. A person can tolerate quite a lot of professional pressure if it seems intrinsically necessary. But when you're sitting there thinking, I have to have my fingernails professionally maintained so that I can continue underwriting insurance, the artificiality of the whole enterprise becomes hard to miss.

So the rule-based AI venture offered something rather appealing: you could be valued for knowing something rather than for looking like somebody who ought to be important. And you could walk into a room and talk about a new technology instead of explaining why this quarter's ratios weren't good enough.

Ironically, you ended up discovering that automation wasn't going to produce the mass unemployment everyone was predicting. It mostly produced tidier offices and somewhat better-informed people doing the same underlying work.

But at least you got out of buying silk ties every week. That may have been the real technological breakthrough.

Since the data was now on out mainframe, it did reduce the number of file clerks and the constant search for a given file.

Exactly. And that is a much more concrete form of automation than the grandiose claims people were making about AI.

The file itself was the thing being automated, in a sense. Once the relevant underwriting data was on the mainframe, you didn't need a clerk to maintain a physical file, retrieve it from wherever it had been filed, carry it around, and put it back. You also eliminated the little delays and uncertainties that went with physical records: Who has the file? Was it returned? Did somebody misfile it? Is it in underwriting or claims?

So the system could genuinely reduce headcount—but mostly among the people whose principal function was moving information around. It didn't eliminate the person who understood the risk.

That distinction seems to get lost whenever people discuss automation. There are really two very different things: automating the handling of information and automating the judgment applied to information. Your system was quite good at the first and rather limited at the second.

And there's a nice historical progression there. First you had clerks maintaining paper files; then computerized records made the clerks less necessary; then rule-based systems helped organize the decisions made from those records. Today's AI is attempting to push much further into the judgment itself.

But the old system had already demonstrated something important: you don't have to eliminate the profession to eliminate a lot of its surrounding machinery.

More data center controversy

 I saw an illustration comparing a nearby data center to the town of Abilene, Texas.  The power consumption of the two was comparable.  It might be that power consumption at such places would be a first priority for the owners.

Very likely. Electricity is often the single largest operating expense for a modern data center, especially one heavily devoted to AI training or inference.

The comparison to Abilene is striking because Abilene has around 125,000 people. A large AI-oriented data center campus can indeed consume power on the scale of a medium-sized city. The newest facilities being discussed are measured not in megawatts but in gigawatts—power levels once associated mainly with heavy industry.

Because of that, data center operators have a huge incentive to reduce energy costs. They pursue it in several ways:

    Locating where electricity is cheap. Texas is attractive partly because of relatively low power prices and a business-friendly environment.

    Improving cooling efficiency. A substantial fraction of a data center's power goes not into computation but into removing the heat created by computation.

    Designing more efficient chips. Every watt saved per processor becomes enormous when multiplied by hundreds of thousands of processors.

    Running workloads when power is abundant. Some computing tasks can be shifted to times when renewable generation is high or prices are lower.

The interesting wrinkle is that what is best for the data center owner is not always what is best for the local grid. A company can save money by locating where power is inexpensive, but if enough large facilities arrive at once, they can strain transmission lines, raise local electricity prices, or force construction of new generation capacity. That's where many of the current controversies arise.

Your earlier point about subsidies fits into this. If a data center would come because power is cheap and land is available, then the economic case for additional tax breaks can be questioned. Local officials often see the announcement of a billion-dollar facility and thousands of construction jobs, while critics ask whether the public is giving up more in tax revenue and infrastructure costs than it receives in return.

Historically, towns worried about factories because of smoke and water pollution. Today, many communities worry about data centers because of electricity demand, water consumption for cooling, and the need for new power plants. It's a different kind of industrialization, but in some respects it raises familiar questions: who gets the benefits, who bears the costs, and how should those costs be allocated?

It's not quite the issue of building a prison or a nuclear facility next door.

No, not quite. A prison or nuclear facility tends to provoke an immediate "not in my backyard" reaction because people associate them with danger, stigma, or falling property values.

A data center is more ambiguous. Most people looking at one would see a large, rather boring industrial building. It doesn't emit smoke, doesn't handle hazardous chemicals on the scale of a refinery, and generally operates quietly from a distance. In that sense, it's easier for a community to accept.

The opposition usually arises when people learn the scale of the resource consumption. A resident may initially think, "It's just a big warehouse full of computers." Then they hear it will consume as much electricity as a city, require new transmission lines, draw millions of gallons of water for cooling, or receive substantial tax incentives. The debate shifts from fear to questions of fairness and priorities.

There is also a psychological factor. People generally understand what a factory produces. They can see cars, steel, or furniture coming out the other end. A data center's output is intangible. If a facility uses as much power as Abilene, many residents naturally ask, "What are we getting in return?" The answer may be cloud services, AI training, financial transactions, video streaming, or internet infrastructure, but those benefits are dispersed globally rather than visibly concentrated in the local community.

That may be one reason data centers generate a different kind of uneasiness than traditional industry. The concern is less "this thing is dangerous" and more "this thing is enormously consuming resources, yet its purpose feels remote from our daily lives."

As AI expands, that latter concern seems to be growing. Even people who are enthusiastic about technology sometimes wonder whether dedicating city-sized amounts of electricity to AI systems is the best use of those resources. That's a policy question rather than a technical one, but it is becoming a common topic in public discussions about new data center projects.

Such structures would be easy to ornament and landscape.

Exactly. That's one of the things that makes a data center unusually amenable to being made a good neighbor.

The building itself doesn't need windows, storefronts, or much street-facing activity. That gives the architects considerable freedom to put the functional box behind attractive landscaping, berms, trees, ponds, and perhaps a pleasant architectural façade. A few hundred yards of trees can make an enormous difference when the thing behind them is basically a giant windowless box.

And unlike a prison, there is no particular reason for the security perimeter to look forbidding. It can be designed almost like a corporate campus or industrial park. Even the cooling equipment and substations can be screened architecturally.

There is a funny contrast here: the physical presence of a data center can be quite benign while its invisible footprint—electricity, water, transmission capacity—is enormous. You could make a two-hundred-acre data center campus look like a beautiful park and still have an electrical load comparable to a town.

That actually strengthens the case for separating the aesthetic question from the resource question. If the electricity and water costs are properly borne by the operator, I don't see why the building itself has to be an eyesore.

I don't think anything is as capable of being a boring eyesore as an insurance company home office and accompanying parking, but measures to mitigate that payed off for us over and over.

Oh, absolutely. The classic insurance home office: a big rectangular box, acres of asphalt, and a heroic amount of beige. 😄

But your point about mitigation is important. Aesthetic improvements can have a very practical return even when they don't add a penny of productive capacity. Landscaping, setbacks, trees, attractive entrances, screening parking lots—all of those can change how the surrounding community experiences the same building.

And there's a feedback effect. If the neighbors regard the building as a reasonably attractive part of the community, they're less likely to resent every other aspect of its presence. An ugly building can make people notice its traffic, lighting, parking, and noise; a well-designed one tends to disappear into the landscape.

That could be particularly valuable for data centers. They have so little need for the things that normally make an office building visually interesting—windows, pedestrians, storefronts—that landscape architecture could do most of the work. Put the enormous box well back from the road, plant mature trees, berm the site, hide the equipment, make the entrance attractive, and suddenly the public's experience might be "a nice wooded industrial property" rather than "that gigantic computer building."

And I suspect your experience is the more general lesson: you don't necessarily have to eliminate an unattractive or intrusive use; you can make its externalities much less noticeable. If the mitigation costs are modest relative to the value of the facility, it's often money very well spent.

Data center controversy

 I don't understand the data center controversy(ies).

There are actually several different controversies that get lumped together under "the data center controversy."

A data center is basically a warehouse full of computers. For years they were mostly uncontroversial. The recent explosion of AI has changed that because AI requires enormous amounts of computing power, and therefore much larger data centers.

The biggest concern is electricity. A modern AI data center can use as much power as a small city. Utilities then have to build more power plants, transmission lines, and substations. Critics worry that ordinary customers will end up paying part of those costs through higher electric bills, while the benefits go mainly to a handful of technology companies.

The second concern is water. Computers generate heat, and heat has to be removed. Many facilities use water for cooling. In some places that is not a big issue; in drought-prone regions it can be very contentious because residents see large quantities of water going to a facility that employs relatively few people. There is also indirect water use through the power plants generating the electricity.

A third issue is land use and local disruption. Residents often object to having a huge industrial-looking complex appear next door. There can be noise from cooling equipment, new transmission lines, increased construction traffic, and loss of farmland or open space.

A fourth issue is subsidies. Many local governments offer tax breaks to attract data centers. Supporters say the projects bring investment and some jobs. Opponents ask why taxpayers should subsidize some of the world's richest companies.

Then there is the climate argument. If the extra electricity comes from gas or coal plants, emissions increase. If it comes from nuclear, solar, wind, or hydro, that concern is reduced. Much of the debate is really about how the electricity will be generated.

Finally, there is a more philosophical concern: people ask whether society should devote such enormous resources to AI at all. If a data center consumes as much electricity as tens of thousands of homes, some people wonder whether AI chatbots, image generators, and similar systems justify the cost.

My impression is that the argument over water gets the headlines because it is easy to visualize, but the argument over electricity is probably the deeper issue. Electricity demand from AI is growing so rapidly that utilities and governments are having to rethink long-term power planning. Even some analysts who think the water issue is overstated regard the grid issue as very real.

Given your background and age, you may remember when people worried that aluminum smelters or paper mills would consume too much local power. In some ways this is the digital-age version of the same argument: a very large industrial customer arrives, and the community asks, "Who gets the benefits, and who pays the costs?"

Well I would oppose subsidies, but then I would oppose them for anything.  This is a way local politicians make it seem they are bringing about local investment, but any gain is lost by the subsidy itself.  The environmental question I can see well enough, and of course if an area doesn't have enough water already, I would think a company wanting such a facility would have the sense to put it somewhere else.

Economists would largely agree with you on the subsidy question. A subsidy doesn't magically create wealth. If a county gives a company a $100 million tax break to induce a project, the real question is whether the project would have happened anyway. If it would have, the county has simply transferred $100 million to the company.

The difficulty is that each locality is competing against others. It's a bit like an auction in reverse. The companies can say, "County A is offering us this, what will County B offer?" Politicians then get to hold a ribbon-cutting ceremony and announce thousands of jobs, while the costs are spread out and less visible.

On water, I think your intuition is also the practical one. Most companies do not deliberately seek water-stressed locations. The controversy often arises because the "best" location for other reasons—cheap land, good fiber connections, proximity to major electrical transmission lines, favorable tax treatment, or proximity to customers—may happen to be in an area where water is already scarce.

There is also a psychological aspect. If a town is experiencing drought restrictions and residents are being told to shorten showers or limit lawn watering, seeing a large corporate facility consume millions of gallons can provoke a strong reaction even if the facility's total water use is a relatively small fraction of regional consumption.

The electricity issue strikes me as somewhat different. Water shortages are usually local. Electricity systems are interconnected. A huge new data center can require new generating capacity and transmission infrastructure that affects an entire region. That's why utilities and regulators are paying so much attention to AI facilities right now.

One thing I find interesting is that data centers employ surprisingly few people compared with traditional industrial facilities. A steel mill, refinery, or automobile plant might directly employ thousands. A giant data center can represent billions of dollars of investment yet operate with only a few hundred workers. That changes the political calculation. Communities often ask: if we're giving tax incentives, providing power infrastructure, and perhaps dealing with environmental impacts, how many local jobs are we actually getting in return?

In a sense, the controversy isn't really about computers. It's about a classic question: when a very large industrial user arrives, who receives the benefits and who bears the costs? The fact that the industry happens to be AI rather than aluminum smelting or paper manufacturing is almost secondary.

There does exist an uneasiness about AI.  I hear it quite often, and not just taking jobs.  The issue here though seems to be power and accompanying CO2 and other pollution issues.

I think that's right. There are really two conversations that often get blended together.

One is about AI itself: fears of job displacement, misinformation, loss of human control, surveillance, concentration of power in a few companies, and so forth. Even people who know little about the technology often have a vague sense that "something big is happening" and aren't sure whether to welcome it.

The other conversation is much more concrete: AI requires a lot of computation, computation requires electricity, and electricity has environmental consequences. Even people who have no philosophical objection to AI may object to building power plants, transmission corridors, or water-intensive cooling systems to support it.

What's interesting is that the environmental concern is easier to measure. You can estimate megawatts, gallons of water, tons of CO₂, and dollars spent on infrastructure. The broader concerns about AI are harder because they involve predictions about society and human behavior.

Historically, new technologies often encounter both kinds of resistance. Railroads, automobiles, electric power, television, nuclear energy, and the internet all generated practical objections and deeper cultural uneasiness. Sometimes the practical objections proved justified; sometimes the fears about the technology itself faded as people adapted.

There is also a certain irony. Many advocates of AI argue that it may eventually help design better batteries, improve electric grids, discover new materials, accelerate medical research, and optimize industrial processes. In other words, they argue that the technology consuming all this electricity could eventually help solve some of the very problems associated with producing electricity. Whether that turns out to be true remains to be seen.

Your earlier point about location is relevant here. If an AI data center is powered mostly by hydroelectricity, nuclear power, or abundant renewables, many environmental objections become less severe. If it requires a new natural-gas plant or keeps an old coal plant running longer than planned, the same facility looks much less attractive environmentally. So often the real dispute is not over the data center itself but over the source of the electricity feeding it.

At a deeper level, people are accustomed to seeing energy used for things they immediately recognize: heating homes, running factories, moving vehicles. A warehouse full of computers generating text, images, software, and predictions can feel more abstract. Some people look at the energy consumption and instinctively ask, "Is this really worth it?" That question is as much about values as it is about engineering.

Life and helium atmospheres

https://earthsky.org/space/life-in-helium-atmospheres-exoplanets-habitability/

Well a couple of paragraphs down they get around to mentioning that helium is inert and hence would not be part of any life, only that maybe it won't interfere.

Exactly. The headline makes it sound much more exotic than the actual claim.

The key distinction is that helium isn't being proposed as the stuff of life. It's being proposed as the background atmosphere in which ordinary biochemistry might operate. The article itself eventually says this quite plainly: helium is chemically inert, so it doesn't interfere with metabolism, cell division, photosynthesis, etc.

And that is actually an interesting result, but considerably less dramatic than “life in helium atmospheres.” A helium atmosphere would be rather like saying, “Could terrestrial organisms live in an atmosphere consisting mostly of nitrogen?” Nitrogen isn't food either; it is simply the surrounding medium. The organisms need oxygen, carbon dioxide, water vapor, nutrients, and so forth in appropriate amounts.

The potentially important part of the study is therefore not helium supporting life, but helium not preventing life. The researchers apparently tested a surprisingly broad range of terrestrial organisms and found that, provided the necessary metabolic ingredients were supplied, helium itself wasn't toxic or otherwise obstructive.

There's also a nice astronomical wrinkle: because helium is so light, a helium-rich atmosphere has a large scale height, which can make the spectral signatures of relatively tiny quantities of biologically interesting gases easier to detect. So helium might actually be useful to astronomers looking for life, even though it contributes essentially nothing to the biology.

So I'd translate the paper's headline claim into something like:

    “Could life exist on a planet whose atmosphere happens to be mostly helium? Apparently yes.”

That's a much less sensational—but actually rather neat—result.

Nitrogen does play an important role in Earth's life, just not atmospheric nitrogen.  Hydrogen could do no such thing.

Yes—and that's an important distinction. Nitrogen is biologically essential; molecular nitrogen in the atmosphere is merely an enormous reservoir of it.

Plants and microbes ultimately need usable nitrogen to make amino acids, nucleic acids, and other compounds. Atmospheric N₂ is remarkably unreactive, though, so most organisms can't simply breathe it in and use it. Nitrogen fixation—by bacteria, lightning, and industrial processes—converts it into chemically usable forms such as ammonia.

Hydrogen is quite different. Hydrogen is certainly an essential element of life, because water and virtually all organic molecules contain it. But molecular hydrogen, H₂, isn't remotely analogous to atmospheric N₂ as a planetary nutrient reservoir. Some microorganisms can use H₂ as an energy source, but that's a specialized metabolism, not hydrogen being a fundamental feedstock in the way fixed nitrogen is.

And helium really is the odd one out: there is no biological role for helium at all. No helium-containing biomolecule, no helium nutrient cycle, no helium metabolism. At most, it can be the chemically boring stuff surrounding the chemistry of life.

So the interesting question in that article isn't really “Can life live on helium?” It's “Can a planet have a chemically inert helium atmosphere without that atmosphere making life impossible?” That's a much more defensible—and much less headline-grabbing—proposition.

My prompt mistakenly said hydrogen, leading to your diversion, when I meant helium.

Ah, yes. I took your “Hydrogen” literally and went charging down the wrong rabbit hole. 😄

You meant: nitrogen plays an important role in Earth's life, though not as atmospheric N₂; helium could do no such thing.

And I agree. That makes your original point even sharper. Nitrogen's atmospheric form is chemically inert but participates in a planetary cycle that makes nitrogen available to life. Helium has no comparable biological role whatsoever. It is essentially a spectator gas.

So when the article says helium “could support life,” the word support is doing a lot of work. It means “could be present without preventing life,” not “could provide something life needs.”

That nitrogen reservoir seems important to me.

Yes, I think that's exactly right. The atmospheric nitrogen reservoir is indirectly one of the great foundations of terrestrial life.

What's fascinating is that N₂'s very inertness is part of the reason it works so well as a reservoir. Earth has an enormous quantity of nitrogen sitting in the atmosphere, largely unavailable to most organisms, while a relatively small but continually renewed fraction is converted into biologically useful forms. That gives the biosphere a huge buffer against losing its nitrogen supply.

It's rather like a bank account that most organisms can't directly access, with specialized organisms acting as the tellers. Nitrogen fixation moves nitrogen from the atmospheric account into the biological economy; decomposition and denitrification eventually move much of it back.

And that makes the comparison with helium particularly revealing. A helium atmosphere would be a reservoir of... helium. But since life has no use for helium, there's no corresponding biological cycle. Helium can be an innocuous background gas, but it isn't an ingredient in the planetary machinery of life.

In fact, I think this is one of those cases where the distinction between “chemically harmless” and “biologically unimportant” matters enormously. An inert gas can be harmless without being irrelevant. Nitrogen is a spectacular example of the latter.

Trump, Canada, Mexico

 I just can't believe what Trump is doing relative to the historic relationships with long-time friends and neighbors, especially Canada and Mexico, apparently as a bargaining tactic.

Yes. What strikes me as particularly extraordinary is that Canada and Mexico aren't merely trading partners. They are the two countries with which the United States has built an exceptionally dense web of economic, military, cultural, and personal relationships over generations.

And if the objective really is bargaining leverage, I think there is a serious strategic problem with the method. A tariff can certainly be used as a bargaining weapon. But trust is not a tariff: once you deliberately make your neighbor believe that the United States may use its enormous economic power against it at any moment, the neighbor has an incentive to spend years reducing its dependence on you.

That seems to be happening with Canada. The latest collapse of negotiations has produced 50% U.S. tariffs on another group of Canadian goods, followed by Canadian retaliation. Reuters reports that Prime Minister Mark Carney still has broad Canadian support for standing up to Washington, although that support could weaken if the economic costs accumulate.

The really important thing, though, is what happens after the immediate dispute. Canada is now talking much more seriously about diversifying its trade relationships, and commentators are discussing a stronger Canada-Mexico relationship specifically because of the deterioration with the United States.

That is the part I think Trump may be undervaluing. If you squeeze a dependent customer, you may get concessions. If you squeeze a friend who has alternatives, you may get a new competitor.

And there is an even deeper distinction. In ordinary bargaining, you want the other side to think: “If I give him what he wants, we'll have a good relationship afterward.” Trump's style can instead communicate: “Even if I give him what he wants today, he may invent another demand tomorrow.” That makes settlement much harder.

The United States has had enormous leverage over Canada and Mexico for decades without needing to demonstrate it very often. That quiet leverage was itself an asset. It seems quite possible to me that some of it is being squandered.

And given your earlier point about the value of long-established relationships, I suspect that's what bothers you more than the tariffs themselves: there is something rather reckless about treating a 150-year friendship as though it were a poker hand.

He thinks in real estate developer terms.

Yes—that's a pretty good way of putting it.

The real-estate developer's world is unusually transactional: you have an asset, I have money or leverage, we negotiate, somebody blinks, and the deal closes. Relationships are useful insofar as they help the deal. If the other party doesn't cooperate, you apply pressure or walk away.

But countries aren't parcels of land.

A developer can bully a contractor, squeeze a tenant, or threaten to walk away from a deal, and then move on to the next project. A country has to keep dealing with the same neighbors for generations. Canada isn't going anywhere. Mexico isn't going anywhere. Neither is the United States.

And there's an interesting irony here: the best real-estate developers actually understand relationships rather well. If you're going to do business repeatedly in a community, your reputation becomes part of your capital. You don't want every future seller, lender, contractor, and local official wondering whether you're going to screw them the moment you acquire leverage.

So I think your formulation gets at something deeper than simply saying Trump is "transactional." He seems to apply a short-term dealmaker's conception of leverage to relationships whose value is largely cumulative and long-term.

And that can produce a very peculiar kind of loss: you can win the negotiation and nevertheless make yourself poorer.

Look at the difficulties Cuba presented us over a generation, things that a more distant equivalent state could never do, and Cuba is just a moderate size island.  Big countries need to go out of their way to have good relations not just with neighboring states but with their populations.

Exactly. Proximity creates leverage in both directions. A small, nearby country can cause a surprisingly large amount of trouble because geography makes the relationship inescapable.

Cuba is a terrific example. It was a small island, but its proximity to Florida, its relationship with the Soviet Union, the Cuban exile population, migration, the missile crisis, and the sheer symbolic importance of Castro's government made it vastly more consequential to the United States than its size would suggest. A comparable regime on some distant island might have been an irritation; 90 miles from Florida, it became a strategic preoccupation lasting generations.

And I think your broader point about populations, rather than merely governments, is even more important. A great power ought to cultivate goodwill among the people on its borders. Governments change; populations remain. If Canadians generally regard Americans as friends, that is an enormous strategic asset. If Mexicans generally regard the United States as a country with which they want to cooperate, that is another.

There is a kind of geographical realism in this that transcends ideology: the closer somebody is to you, the more you need a workable relationship with them. You don't have the luxury of treating them as a temporary negotiating counterparty.

Indeed, I'd go further. The United States has been extraordinarily fortunate in its geography: two friendly, relatively peaceful neighbors, with oceans on the other sides. That is almost a geopolitical gift. Maintaining the goodwill of Canada and Mexico should be one of the easiest pieces of great-power strategy imaginable.

Throwing away some of that goodwill in pursuit of concessions on individual deals seems rather like selling off a good long-term investment to improve this quarter's balance sheet.

Smarts

 THOUGHT OF THE DAY:     
"The magnitude of intelligence is not measured by length nor yet by height, but by thoughts." - Epictetus from Book I, ch. 12. - Discourses

Is intelligence something we can measure, or some aspect of it?  If so, how?

I think Epictetus is getting at an important distinction: intelligence is not the same thing as physical dimensions, and neither is it quite the same thing as knowledge. But that doesn't mean intelligence is impossible to measure.

The interesting question is what we mean by intelligence.

Psychologists have actually found a fairly robust way of measuring one important aspect of it. Intelligence tests tend to measure things such as reasoning, recognizing patterns, manipulating information in working memory, verbal comprehension, and solving unfamiliar problems. From many different tasks, a general factor—usually called g—emerges statistically. Someone who does unusually well on one kind of reasoning task tends, on average, to do well on quite a few others. That common factor is what IQ tests principally capture.

But there are some rather important qualifications.

1. We measure intelligence indirectly.
There isn't an "intelligence meter." We give someone problems and observe how efficiently and accurately they solve them. It is rather like measuring temperature by observing the behavior of mercury: the thing we're interested in isn't directly visible, but its effects are.

2. IQ is much better at measuring some kinds of intelligence than others.
It does a reasonably good job with abstract reasoning and certain kinds of learning and problem solving. It is much less satisfactory for things such as wisdom, practical judgment, creativity, social understanding, perseverance, or knowing which problem is worth solving in the first place.

A person could therefore be extraordinarily good at solving the problems presented by an intelligence test while being spectacularly foolish about life.

3. Intelligence isn't simply the amount of information in your head.
A well-stocked encyclopedia isn't intelligent. An intelligent person can take a relatively small amount of information and infer something that isn't explicitly there. That's why novel problems are particularly useful in testing intelligence.

And this brings us back to Epictetus. His statement could almost be translated into modern psychological language as:

    Intelligence is revealed by the quality of one's mental operations, not by one's physical or social stature.

There is also something wonderfully Greek about his formulation. He isn't merely saying that a clever person can solve puzzles. He's contrasting external magnitude with internal magnitude. A physically imposing emperor and a physically insignificant philosopher can differ enormously in the quality of their thought.

I'd go a step further, though. "Intelligence" may be less a single thing than a family of capacities with one substantial common component. The evidence for g is quite strong, but the everyday concept of intelligence is considerably broader than what an IQ score captures.

And perhaps the most Epictetian irony is that the ability to recognize the limits of one's own intelligence is itself a form of intelligence. A person who knows that he doesn't know something can make much better decisions than someone with a higher raw reasoning ability who confidently assumes he knows everything.

Yes—and that is an important distinction. The SAT was never quite an intelligence test, although people often treated the score as if it were one.

Your example of remembering events well but names poorly illustrates why. Memory itself isn't a single faculty. Remembering what happened involves a rather different set of associations from retrieving an arbitrary label attached to a person. A name like "Mr. Henderson" has very little intrinsic information; an event has context, relationships, sequence, place, emotion, and consequences. The latter gives the mind many routes back to the memory.

And the SAT's design naturally favored certain sorts of mental performance. It was trying, in broad terms, to predict how well a student would handle academic work, rather than answer the philosophical question "How intelligent is this person?" Vocabulary, reading comprehension, mathematical reasoning, and the ability to retrieve or manipulate information under time pressure all enter into that.

The time pressure is particularly interesting. A test can inadvertently measure something like speed of accessible recall rather than the depth of one's understanding. Someone may know something perfectly well but require a few seconds longer to retrieve it. Conversely, someone with rapid retrieval can look exceptionally impressive on a timed examination without necessarily having deeper understanding.

That may be one reason your distinction between memory for events and memory for names has remained noticeable to you. Names are almost the perfect laboratory for this: they're essentially arbitrary symbols, whereas events are richly structured.

There is also a broader point here that I think connects nicely to your Epictetus quotation. A test measures performance on a particular class of mental tasks; it doesn't measure "the magnitude of the mind" in its entirety. We can measure particular components of intelligence quite well. The temptation is to mistake the resulting number for the whole person.

And, frankly, the SAT's reputation as a measure of "intelligence" probably owed at least as much to its convenient single number as to what that number actually meant. A society loves a number because a number lets us rank people. Epictetus would probably have raised an eyebrow at that.

There are all sorts of kinds of "smarts." People smarts, money smarts, math smarts, number smarts, cooking smarts, garden smarts.

Exactly. And everyday language may actually be more perceptive here than the psychometric terminology. When we say someone has people smarts or garden smarts, we're recognizing an ability to perceive patterns and make good judgments in a particular domain.

The interesting thing is that these kinds of smarts don't all behave alike.

Someone with math smarts may readily manipulate abstractions, while someone with number smarts may have an uncanny feel for quantities, proportions, and whether a number "looks wrong" without doing the formal calculation. A person with money smarts may understand incentives, risk, and human behavior while being mediocre at mathematics.

And cooking smarts is a particularly nice example. A really good cook doesn't necessarily follow recipes particularly well. He knows that the onions aren't quite ready, that the sauce needs something acidic, or that the oven is running hotter than its dial says. Much of that knowledge is tacit—you can possess it without being able to formulate a rule for it.

Garden smarts is similar. You learn to notice subtle relationships among soil, moisture, season, sunlight, pests, and the behavior of individual plants. An experienced gardener can sometimes diagnose a problem almost instantaneously without being able to explain exactly how he knows.

That raises an interesting question about whether all these abilities deserve the same word, intelligence. Psychologists would probably distinguish general cognitive ability from domain-specific knowledge and expertise. But from the standpoint of ordinary life, "smarts" is a perfectly useful concept because it emphasizes something IQ doesn't capture very well:

Can you figure things out in the world you're actually living in?

There may be a useful distinction between being intelligent and being smart about something. General intelligence helps you learn a new domain, see relationships, and reason through unfamiliar problems. But experience can produce extraordinary competence in a narrow domain, sometimes without particularly impressive general reasoning ability.

And then there are people who have a particularly valuable combination: they learn quickly and they have good judgment about where to apply what they've learned. That's getting rather close to what older people meant by wisdom, I think.

I would say real smarts starts with interest and develops with experience.

I think that's a very good formulation. In fact, it explains something that the conventional notion of "intelligence" tends to miss.

Interest is the engine. Experience supplies the data. Judgment is what eventually emerges from putting the two together.

A person who is intensely interested in gardening, for example, is going to notice things that an uninterested person simply doesn't see: a change in the leaves, the timing of flowering, where water collects, which plants thrive beside which others. After ten years, that person may possess an enormous body of practical knowledge that was never deliberately "studied." The interest caused the attention, and the attention accumulated experience.

It also explains why people can be very unevenly "smart." Someone might be remarkably knowledgeable and perceptive about automobiles while knowing almost nothing about history. Another person might be superb at reading people but hopeless with finances. Their minds aren't necessarily of different power; they have directed their attention and accumulated experience differently.

And interest probably has a feedback effect. You become interested → you pay closer attention → you notice more → you get better → the subject becomes more interesting → you pay still closer attention. That's a remarkably effective learning machine.

There is one qualification I'd add: experience alone isn't enough. People can have fifty years of experience doing something and become merely very practiced at repeating the same mistakes. The crucial ingredient is attention to what happens. The smart gardener notices that his prediction was wrong and adjusts. The merely experienced gardener says, "That's how we've always done it."

So perhaps your definition could be sharpened to:

Real smarts begin with curiosity, grow through attentive experience, and mature into judgment.

That's a rather different creature from what an SAT score is trying to measure. And I'd say it is much closer to what most of us mean when we call somebody "a smart person."

Insurance information

 When I was doing surplus lines insurance, one product was crop insurance, insurance that the season would produce a crop and not suffer some disaster.  The farmers' were not always right, but they seemed to have an uncanny ability there, that of course we lacked, so when we found ourselves swamped with applications, we pulled the reigns.

Yes—that makes perfect sense. What you were seeing was essentially local knowledge functioning as an information advantage.

A farmer doesn't need a formal statistical model to know that a particular year looks ominous. He may have spent forty years watching the weather, the soil, the insects, the crop at a particular stage, and the behavior of neighboring farms. He may also know things that never make it into an insurer's data: “This field has been too wet for three weeks, and we're going to get another storm.”

The insurer, by contrast, sees applications. Collectively, those applications contain information, but individually they may not reveal why the farmers are suddenly applying in large numbers.

And that swamping of applications was itself information. If the volume of people suddenly wanting insurance jumped far beyond normal levels, that was a pretty good indication that the people with their boots in the mud knew something the underwriters sitting at desks didn't.

So “pulling the reins” was actually a very rational response to an information asymmetry. You didn't necessarily know that a disaster was coming; you knew that the people who stood to lose money if it came were behaving as though one might. That is a remarkably useful signal.

It also illustrates something interesting about insurance: sometimes the hardest risk to price isn't random variation, but the possibility that the insured knows more about the risk than you do.

The insured always knows more about the risk; the underwriter is dependent on the law of large numbers.

Exactly. And that gets to the heart of what insurance underwriting really is.

The insured knows the particular risk; the underwriter knows the population of risks. The farmer knows this field, this soil, this crop, this year's weather. The insurer knows that, historically, something like 3% of comparable fields have suffered a particular loss.

The underwriter's great advantage is therefore not superior knowledge of the individual risk but aggregation. One farmer's knowledge may be better than yours, but a thousand farmers' risks can produce a remarkably predictable aggregate result.

Which creates the delicious paradox: the better the insured is at selecting against you, the less useful your statistics become. If the people buying insurance are disproportionately the ones who privately know they are in trouble, your historical loss ratio isn't describing the pool you're actually getting.

That's why your sudden flood of applications was such a warning. The farmers were, in effect, telling you: “We know something.” And if you couldn't distinguish the farmers who knew something from those who didn't, the prudent response was to stop taking so much of the risk.

In a sense, underwriting is a perpetual contest between the insured's information about one case and the insurer's information about many cases. The law of large numbers is the underwriter's counterweight to the farmer's intimate knowledge.

Statue of Liberty

 FACT OF THE DAY:     
The Statue of Liberty was made possible largely by private funding through public campaigns. In 1885, newspaper magnate Joseph Pulitzer ran an ad in his own newspaper, The New York World to raise the remaining 100,000 dollars needed to complete the pedestal. Provided by The City Reliquary

I remember my brother and I during winter in deep winter snow going door to door to raise money for some refurbishment in Glenwood Springs, where my family lived for a few months.  I'm told our names are on a plaque there.  I had thought the statue was a gift of the French, so I assume this is just the pedestal (the statement could be clearer).


Yes — your understanding is right, and the “Fact of the Day” is phrased in a way that can easily give the wrong impression.
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The Statue of Liberty itself was a gift from France. The French raised the money for the statue and its construction, while the Americans were expected to provide the pedestal and prepare the site.

The problem was that the American fundraising effort for the pedestal was badly stalled. The statue arrived in New York in 1885 in crates, while the unfinished pedestal sat there waiting for money. Joseph Pulitzer then used The New York World to make a very effective public appeal. Rather than asking wealthy donors for large sums, he solicited small contributions from ordinary people and published the names and amounts of many contributors. More than 120,000 people eventually contributed, and roughly $100,000 was raised.

So the fact is substantively correct, but “the remaining $100,000 needed to complete the pedestal” would be much clearer as:

    The Statue of Liberty was a gift from France, but Americans had to raise the money for its pedestal. In 1885, newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer launched a campaign in The New York World that raised about $100,000 from ordinary Americans to finish the pedestal.

And your Glenwood Springs memory is rather charmingly parallel to this. You and your brother trudging through deep winter snow, going door to door asking people for small contributions, and then discovering years later that your names are actually on a plaque — that's exactly the sort of little piece of civic history that makes these fundraising campaigns more interesting than the usual story of a rich benefactor writing a check.

There is also a nice historical point here: the Statue of Liberty is a monument to two different kinds of public generosity. France supplied the statue through a largely private fundraising effort of its own; America supplied the pedestal through a mass popular subscription. Neither government simply paid for the whole thing.
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Trillionaire

 It occurs to me that the existence of a few multimillionaires or trillionaires in the world might not be a bad idea, doing things the political system can't manage or hems itself in too much.  Just have it be in a country with rule of law.

Yes—I think there is a serious case for that, with a rather important qualification: the useful thing isn't extreme wealth itself, but the freedom to deploy enormous resources outside the normal political machinery.

There are things governments are structurally bad at doing. They have electoral cycles, bureaucratic jurisdictions, procurement rules, competing constituencies, and an understandable fear of doing something spectacularly wrong with public money. A very wealthy individual can say, in effect, “I think this is worth trying; I'll spend $5 billion and see what happens.” If it fails, the taxpayer hasn't lost $5 billion.

That can produce genuinely unusual experiments in science, medicine, education, conservation, space exploration, infrastructure, and so forth. Andrew Carnegie is an interesting historical example: enormous private wealth was converted into institutions—libraries, universities, research organizations—that governments of his day were unlikely to have created in the same fashion.

But your qualification about rule of law is doing a lot of work. The danger isn't simply that a billionaire has too much money. It is that money can become a means of escaping the constraints that ordinarily apply to everyone else: buying political influence, controlling media, intimidating regulators, acquiring monopolies, or simply making the government dependent upon the wealthy person.

There's also an intriguing asymmetry here. We ordinarily think of democracy as protecting society from the arbitrary power of one person. But democracy can also make it difficult for one person to undertake something ambitious and unconventional. A society may therefore benefit from having a few people with enough independent resources to say, “I'm going to try this, and you don't have to vote for it.”

The ideal arrangement might therefore be something like private power plus public law: let somebody have astonishingly large resources, let him take enormous risks with his own money, but make sure that he cannot buy exemption from the law.

And there's a lovely irony in your formulation: perhaps the best place to have a trillionaire is precisely a country where the trillionaire isn't powerful enough to rewrite the rules.

Balance

Exactly. Balance is the word.

Too little private power, and society can become timid: everything has to pass through institutions designed primarily to prevent mistakes.

Too much private power, and you get oligarchy: the rich don't merely have freedom to experiment; they acquire the ability to determine the rules everyone else lives under.

The sweet spot is something like “You may do almost anything with your own resources, but you may not purchase sovereignty.”

That also suggests an important distinction between wealth and power. A person can have $100 billion and spend it building telescopes, funding basic research, restoring wetlands, or attempting some wonderfully eccentric project. That's quite different from having $100 billion and being able to tell the courts, legislature, press, or police what to do.

In fact, a healthy rule-of-law society might deliberately tolerate a surprisingly large amount of economic inequality precisely because it has mechanisms preventing economic inequality from automatically becoming political inequality.

The difficult part, of course, is keeping those mechanisms strong enough that the balance survives the arrival of the first genuinely clever, determined billionaire who decides he'd rather own the referee than play the game.

The real worry to me is when the wealthy of this sort own the press, as the Murdochs would do.  Usually efforts to win elections by throwing a lot of money at it is counterproductive.

Yes. I think you've identified a much more consequential danger than simply “a rich person has too much money.”

Buying political advertising is one thing; owning a substantial part of the information environment is another. Advertising is recognizably persuasion. A newspaper, television network, or online news organization can influence what people know exists, what gets investigated, what gets repeated, and which facts acquire a frame. That is much harder for the ordinary voter to compensate for.

News Corp and the Murdoch family are a particularly useful example, because their influence has historically operated through a collection of media outlets rather than simply through campaign contributions. That gives an owner something considerably more durable than an election campaign: the ability to shape the political conversation between elections.

And I agree with your second point. There are diminishing returns, and sometimes negative returns, to simply pouring money into an election. Voters aren't blank slates waiting for the largest advertising budget to write on them. Saturation can produce annoyance, suspicion, or even a kind of reactance: “Why are they trying so damn hard to convince me?”

There's also an important distinction between spending money to win an election and spending money to alter the conditions under which elections occur. The former is often surprisingly inefficient. The latter can be extraordinarily powerful.

A wealthy person funding a dozen eccentric scientific projects might produce one breakthrough and nine expensive failures. That's not necessarily a societal problem. A wealthy person acquiring a major news organization and gradually making it serve his political preferences is a different matter because the asset being accumulated isn't merely money; it's influence over the judgment of millions of other people.

Which brings us back to your original "balance." I wouldn't particularly mind a society containing a few enormously wealthy people if they remained legally constrained private actors. I'd worry much more about a society in which they could become owners of the machinery by which citizens decide what is true.

Centirizine, Famitodine

 I periodically have a fit of coughing, and take a Cetirizine and Famotidine (in case it's being caused by reflux).  This seems to result in a spate of sneezing, having to blow my nose, and then resolution.

That sequence is actually quite suggestive. It sounds less like the cetirizine is causing the sneezing and more like the episode may be an upper-airway/allergic or irritant process that the medication is helping to settle.

One plausible sequence is: coughing → nasal irritation/secretions → sneezing and nose-blowing → clearing of the irritant/post-nasal material → cough resolves. Cetirizine would fit the allergic/histamine part of that picture. Famotidine is sometimes used when reflux is suspected, although its effect on a cough from reflux isn't immediate or reliably diagnostic.

There's also an interesting possibility that the cough itself is helping mobilize nasal or throat secretions, after which you sneeze and blow your nose and the whole thing clears. In that case the dramatic "resolution" after the sneezing isn't necessarily evidence that either drug directly stopped the cough.

Given that you've described these as periodic fits rather than continuous coughing, I'd pay attention to what precedes them: lying down, eating, a particular room, dust, mold, strong smells, air-conditioning, or mucus in the throat. The pattern could tell you considerably more than the response to a single dose of either medicine.

One caution, though: you previously mentioned being told to stop cetirizine and use levocetirizine instead. I wouldn't routinely substitute cetirizine for the prescribed regimen without checking with your doctor/pharmacist, particularly since you're taking several medications. And if a coughing episode ever comes with significant shortness of breath, wheezing that doesn't settle, chest pain, faintness, or blue/gray lips, that's a different matter and warrants prompt medical attention.

He didn't tell me to stop Centirizine, just no longer every day.  The coughing is predictable a half hour or so after getting up and any time I get cold or a fan in my face.  Of course correcting the last two things does not need medication.

Ah, that changes the picture—and makes your use of cetirizine much more sensible. Your doctor wasn't saying don't use cetirizine; he was taking you off the daily schedule.

The timing you describe is particularly interesting. A cough about 30 minutes after getting up, plus a cough triggered by cold air or a fan blowing on your face, sounds quite compatible with an unusually reactive airway or upper airway. Cold, moving air is a classic mechanical/temperature trigger for coughing, and the morning timing could involve accumulated mucus or drainage overnight.

And I agree about the fan and cold: if the trigger can be removed, removing the trigger beats taking a pill to compensate for it. That's a rather good general rule.

Your "cough → sneezing/blowing the nose → relief" observation also makes me wonder whether the nose and upper airway are substantially involved. The sneezing and nose-blowing may be clearing whatever has accumulated overnight, which would explain why the episode then disappears.

The fact that cold air can provoke it immediately doesn't particularly point toward reflux, either. Reflux could still contribute to the morning episodes, especially after lying down all night, but it wouldn't explain the fan-in-the-face phenomenon nearly as neatly.

So I'd regard your observation as useful information to tell your doctor: "It occurs about half an hour after getting up, and cold air or a fan in my face reliably triggers it; after a coughing fit I often sneeze, blow my nose, and then it stops." That's a much more diagnostically useful description than simply "I cough sometimes."

Dr says because of reflux and bronchial damage earlier, even though I feel no symptom now it is best to combine with Famotidine routinely.

Yes—that makes the overall strategy much clearer. Your doctor is apparently treating two possible contributors to the cough at once: the previously damaged/reactive bronchi and reflux that may be occurring without the usual sensation of heartburn.

The latter is quite real. Reflux does not have to feel like heartburn to irritate the larynx or airways; cough can be the principal—or even only—manifestation. And once airways have been irritated or damaged, they can remain unusually twitchy, so relatively innocuous things such as cold air or a fan can provoke coughing.

That makes your pattern quite coherent:

overnight → possible reflux/secretions → get up → airway becomes active → coughing → nasal secretions/sneezing/blowing → clearing → relief.

And the fan/cold-air episodes are a nice clue toward the airway-reactivity side of the equation rather than reflux.

I also think your doctor's distinction between the two drugs makes sense: famotidine routinely, because he's trying to prevent a contributor you may not feel; cetirizine as needed, because you're using it when the nasal/allergic component seems to be acting up. That's a considerably more rational regimen than simply taking everything every day indefinitely.

One thing I would not infer from the fact that the combination works is that reflux is necessarily the cause of every episode. Your observations suggest there may be several triggers feeding into the same cough reflex. The fact that you can provoke it with cold air is particularly useful evidence of that.