Showing posts with label math. Show all posts
Showing posts with label math. Show all posts

Saturday, August 30, 2014

Will Dan McLaughlin be a professional golfer by 2018? [non-China]

The efforts of Dan McLaughlin to become a professional golfer through sheer determination are fascinating for anyone who's wondered about the roots of high ability. Given that he's already more than halfway through his 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, I wondered if it was possible to say by now whether or not he'll succeed.

CIW: Sports: Dan McLaughlin from Chicago Ideas Week on Vimeo.

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

On knowledge and the meaning of "ex aequali" [non-China]

The advantages which Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia have brought to the curious mind are enormous. The amount of knowledge available to me at any instant is greater by a thousandfold than in the pre-internet era. I use Google and Wikipedia every day, and can't imagine going back to paper encyclopias and libraries.

Yet, as Socrates reminds us in the Meno, not all facts available to us are truely knowledge. Some, Socrates says, should rather be considered merely true opinions, since we believe them to be true without knowing why they are true.

But what the internet brings us is not even true opinions, but merely the capability to acquire such opinions. That is, it hasn't actually made us more knowledgeable, it's just given us the tools to more easily acquire opinions.