Month: February 2014

Gentlemen, Formerly

To discover that a gentleman today only has to brush his teeth, console his crying girlfriend, and barbeque with confidence would have terrified men like William Byrd II. Aside from not becoming a true gentleman, Byrd feared more than anything that he and his kind would become irrelevant in the New Colony’s future. He feared that all he had achieved to become a true gentleman, all his Greek and social climbing and hard-won backroom dealing, would be overwhelmed by the tide of immigrants whose mashed-up social customs would swallow up him and his friends. His class of elite and educated English gentlemen wouldn’t be needed or respected. I can almost see the beads of sweat forming on his forehead as he writes about the Scots-Irish.

Victorian Calling Cards

Victorian calling cards were a social grace, with their own detailed guidance for design and use (Archive.org web view of Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics and at Home, by Emily Post, 1922). Calling or visiting cards ranged from basic engraved cards to rather elaborate pieces with flaps and frills, hand-tinting and transparent images, though men typically had more sparse cards. Men also could use acquaintance cards to politely declare their interest in a young lady, with text and/or illustrations.

Intelligence is exponentially hard

there’s only a runaway effect if creating intelligences is a linear problem: 2x as intelligent is 2x as hard. it is much more likely it is an exponentially hard problem.

2023-02-11: A similar argument, there may be diminishing returns to intelligence

For most problems in the universe, there are massive diminishing returns to intelligence, either because they are too easy or too hard. We are obsessed with the narrow band of things that some humans can do and others can’t, like graduate from college, or at the extremes what is feasible for a genius of 160 IQ but not a regular smart person at 120, like write a great novel or make a discovery in theoretical physics. But the category of things that either all humans can do or no humans can do is probably larger than the one of things that some humans can do and not others.