Highlights
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2025-01-17 16:20 And we have been growing up in a world that increasingly prioritizes abstract thought and classification. Like, instead of dealing with specific animals, we learn from a young age to start grouping them into classifications. Like, I have a toddler now, and I realize even as I’m reading him storybooks, everything is about generalizing Abstract ideas. There’ll be a cow that actually looks like a cow in one book, and then a purple one that looks more like a human in another book. And he’s learning to connect this abstraction of a cow to all these different sorts of characters.
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2025-01-17 16:20 Most people doing PhDs don’t study what interests them. They study what other people think they should be interested in. And for me, I realized I just couldn’t function like that. I needed to really care about what I was doing. And it fits so much with what’s in your book is because I had taken two years off, I felt like I was so hopelessly and frighteningly behind my peers who were already almost finishing their PhDs
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2025-01-17 16:20 I realized that all these people were lining up to try to be, like, the next NFL beat reporter. Whereas I had this oddball skills where I was a totally average scientist at best. And then you bring that over to a sports magazine and suddenly I’m a Nobel Prize winner, and realizing this thing that was totally ordinary in one place is suddenly totally extraordinary in this other place, and that if I could do something interesting with it, I wasn’t even competing with anybody.
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2025-01-15 19:37 And so that was the first thing that made me skeptical. And when I asked after that data, the response I got were basically like, people were inconsistent on their retrospective accounts of how much practice they did.
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2025-01-15 19:44 This was back in 2006, and Malcolm had argued in the Tipping Point that innovative policing was the reason that crime had gone down in the 1990s.
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2025-01-17 16:19 I absolutely come to the problem as a generalist. So here’s what’s interesting to me. As a crime specialist, I haven’t had a really innovative idea in that area in at least a decade. Somehow I used up all my ideas. It’s hard for me to see things with fresh eyes, but I definitely wouldn’t want to debate me on a crime related subject.