👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
It’s a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and life’s big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.
An isocolon is a rhetorical device in which consecutive clauses use the same number of words or syllables. The most common form of the isocolon is the tricolon, which has three such parallel elements. The most famous example, of course, comes from Julius Caesar:
Veni, Vidi, Vici ~ I came, I saw, I conquered
Or, as the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair once said (also being an example of epizeuxis):
“Education! Education! Education!”
Related to the tricolon is the hendiatris, which also features three elements, though these needn’t necessarily have the syllabic regularity of the tricolon. Rather, working off the inherent memorability of things that come in threes, the hendiatris is about expressing one idea in three ways, or building up the picture of a particular idea from three different but related angles.
Take France’s legendary national motto, created during the revolution:
Liberté, égalité, fraternité
They are three different ideas — freedom, equality, and brotherhood — but they all speak to the same notion of an enlightened, liberal, rational, and just political system. And, most importantly, it’s catchy.
Such is the power of the number three, which seems to have intrinsically memorable quality. Why? Something about triangles, perhaps. Whatever the reason, it’s no coincidence that so many mottos or famous lines come in the form of a hendriatris.
As Mark Antony says in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:
“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!”
And as Abraham Lincoln said in his Gettysburg address:
“...of the people, by the people, for the people...”
Or, as we say in tennis:
Game, set, and match!
The motto of the Olympics takes this form, too:
Citius, Altius, Fortius ~ Faster, Higher, Stronger
And that famous modern aphorism:
“Live, Laugh, Love”
If you want to make something memorable, then, hendiatris is probably the way to go.
One more thing. If you find this issue valuable, can you do me a favour and click the little grey heart? It helps get the word out about this budding newsletter. 😍
Q: How do we identify a pseudo-intellectual?
In college I had a batchmate who had a unique gift of appearing to be smart without actually being smart. He was kind of a phoney, but he was very good at it. There was literally no match for him!
He specifically had this innate ability to come up with scientific-sounding terms, concepts, definitions on the spot that visibly screamed how much more he knows than his counterparts. He repeatedly used this superpower of sorts to win several awards in science exhibitions.
This one time he impressed the judges (who were professors from reputed universities, mind you) by rebutting their questions with the concept of something he called the “tolerance of an image” (instead of giving a real answer).
He not only had enough presence of mind to come up with a fake term with a plausible definition on the spot, but he also had enough panache to make it convincing. Although in reality, a simple internet search would reveal there’s no such concept such as the tolerance of an image in existence.
But it was 2008–09, and smartphones (and by extension, the habit of staying online every waking moment of the day) wasn’t all the rage, so you might say this is why he kept getting away with his act. And you would most probably be correct.
But if you think that, given the power of the internet, pseudo-intellectuals like him won’t stand a chance today in 2023, you would be surprised.
Today, let’s talk about intellect. More precisely, let’s talk about how it is way easier than you think to “sound” intellectual without actually having any real intellect. In other words, let’s discuss the difference between a scientific intellectual and a literary intellectual.
What makes someone a scientific intellectual? The scientific intellectual is someone who can recognise the writing of another scientific intellectual. And this is what makes them different from someone who is a literary intellectual. You see, the literary intellectual would not be able to tell the difference between lines jotted down by a scientist and those by a silky nonscientist.
This is even more apparent when the literary intellectual starts using scientific buzzwords, like “uncertainty principle,” “space-time,” “parallel universe,” “relativity,” or “tolerance,” either out of context or, as often, in exact opposition to the scientific meaning.
By dumping a kitchen sink of scientific terms and references in dialogue (or writing), one can make another literary intellectual believe that their material has the stamp of science.
But, to a scientist, science lies in the rigour of the inference, not in random references to such grandiose concepts as general relativity or quantum indeterminacy.
For instance, if you read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time you would realise that, although the text does not exhibit humongous equations, it seems as if it were translated from the language of science. Yet it also has artistic prose.
Michael Faraday was an impoverished Londoner without formal education who, without knowing mathematics, wrote one of the best books of physics ever written, virtually devoid of equations.
Science is method and rigour. It can be identified in the simplest of prose writing. So if someone really knows what they are talking about, such rigour can be spelled out in plain and simple language (be it English, Hindi, or Spanish) without using any “scientific” terms.
You must have heard of The Turing Test. It’s named after the brilliant British mathematician, eccentric, and pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing, who developed the theoretical foundations for modern computing and who was also a leading figure in the development of artificial intelligence.
The Turing Test is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human.
It is done by having a human judge engage in natural language conversations with another human and with a machine, and deciding which of the two they are conversing with.
In Fooled by Randomness Nassim Nicholas Taleb remarks that the converse is also true. A human can be said to be unintelligent if we can replicate their ideas by a computer (which we know is unintelligent) and fool a human into believing that it was written by a human.
So the questions is, can one produce a piece of work that can be largely mistaken for Derrida, or Popper, or Hegel, or even Taleb entirely randomly?
The Sokal Hoax was a publicised incident in which a physicist named Alan Sokal submitted a deliberately absurd and intellectually dishonest paper to Social Text, a leading cultural studies journal, in an effort to expose what he saw as the intellectual dishonesty and lack of scientific rigour in some elements of the field.
The article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” was published in the journal’s spring/summer 1996 Science Wars issue. It proposed that quantum gravity is a social and linguistic construct.
Three weeks after its publication in May 1996, Sokal revealed in the magazine Lingua Franca that the article was a hoax.
Today, it is fairly easy to do something like that using ChatGPT. You can produce grammatically sound but entirely meaningless sentences that sound like Jacques Derrida, Camille Paglia, and such a crowd who like to communicate using scientific-sounding words.
Here are some examples:
The différance between the supplement and the trace is fundamentally undecidable, as it constitutes the very condition of possibility for the possibility of signification itself.
The phallogocentric logocentricity of the metaphysics of presence is undermined by the trace, which decenters the subject and exposes the impossibility of self-presence.
The principle of the death drive, as the foundation of the modernist aesthetics, undermines the stability of the traditional values and the assumption of social progress.
The heterogeneous pastiche of the Dionysian principle exposes the limitations of the Apollonian rationality and the deconstruction of the patriarchal monotheism.
These are random at best and meaningless at worst but, owing to the complexity and fuzziness of these thoughts, the literary intellectual can be easily fooled into believing that these “words” contain value.
But, if you do the same for philosophers like Popper, Taleb, Poincaré, Hayek, you get something interesting:
The concept of the barbell strategy, as the foundation of antifragile portfolio design, undermines the stability of the mean-variance optimisation and the assumption of a smooth distribution of returns.
The open society, as the condition of the possibility of the growth of knowledge, is founded on the epistemological principle of fallibility and the ethical principle of tolerance.
The principle of the imaginary numbers, as the foundation of the complex plane, exposes the limitations of the real numbers and the fallacy of the Pythagorean theorem.
The principle of the spontaneous order, as the foundation of the liberal social theory, exposes the limitations of the rationalist planning and the fallacy of the socialist calculation.
Notice, even though ChatGPT tries to produce “grammatically sound but meaningless sentences,” they aren’t really meaningless or random or even fuzzy, unlike the previous set of examples. These are some of the core ideas proposed by these thinkers.
It is hard to resist discussion of pseudo-thinking without a comment on the father of all pseudothinkers, Hegel.
Hegel writes a jargon that can give even ChatGPT a run for its money. This passage from the German “philosopher” was detected, translated, and angrily criticised by Karl Popper:
Sound is the change in the specific condition of segregation of the material parts, and in the negation of this condition; merely an abstract or an ideal ideality, as it were, of that specification. But this change, accordingly, is itself immediately the negation of the material specific subsistence; which is, therefore, real ideality of specific gravity and cohesion, i.e.—heat. The heating up of sounding bodies, just as of beaten and or rubbed ones, is the appearance of heat, originating conceptually together with sound.
If you pay close attention, some business speeches belong to this category in their own right, except that they are less elegant and draw on a different type of vocabulary than the literary ones.
In fact, let’s do an experiment. We can randomly construct a speech imitating that of the CEO of a big company to ensure whether what they are saying has value, or if it is merely dressed-up nonsense from someone who was lucky to be put there.
How? Simply select randomly five phrases below, and ask ChatGPT to connect them by adding the minimum required to construct a grammatically sound speech.
We look after our customer’s interests / the road ahead / our assets are our people / creation of shareholder value / our vision / our expertise lies in / we provide interactive solutions / we position ourselves in this market / how to serve our customers better / short-term pain for long-term gain / we will be rewarded in the long run / we play from our strength and improve our weaknesses / courage and determination will prevail / we are committed to innovation and technology / a happy employee is a productive employee / commitment to excellence / strategic plan / our work ethics.
You’ll get something like this:
Our expertise lies in providing interactive solutions that help us to serve our customers better, and we are committed to innovation and technology as a means of positioning ourselves as a leader in the market and creating shareholder value.
Or…
We position ourselves in this market as a company that is committed to innovation and technology, with a focus on providing interactive solutions that help us to serve our customers better. Our strategic plan, combined with our commitment to excellence and our focus on innovation, will guide us on the road ahead to success.
If this bears too close a resemblance to the speech you just heard from the boss of your company, then I suggest looking for a new job.
The whole point of the Reverse Turing Test is that you cannot (rather shouldn’t) call yourself a philosopher unless you understand statistics, mathematics, and society.
You shouldn’t call yourself a feminist who is fighting for women’s equality without understanding evolutionary biology, human history, and the role of society on human behaviour.
In short, you shouldn’t call yourself a scientific individual if your “jargonned” thinking can be easily replicated by an AI.
Without rigour, you are a phoney.
Today I Learned
Thomas Midgley, Junior was an engineer by training and the world would no doubt have been a safer place if he had stayed so. Instead, he developed an interest in the industrial applications of chemistry.
In 1921, while working for the General Motors Research Corporation in Dayton, Ohio, he investigated a compound called tetraethyl lead (also known, confusingly, as lead tetraethyl), and discovered that it significantly reduced the juddering condition known as engine knock.
Engine knock, also known as pinging or detonation, is a knocking or pinging noise that occurs when the fuel in an engine’s cylinder ignites spontaneously, rather than as a result of the spark from the spark plug. This can cause the fuel to burn unevenly, which can lead to a loss of power and efficiency, as well as potentially damaging the engine.
Even though lead was widely known to be dangerous, by the early years of the twentieth century it could be found in all manner of consumer products. Food came in cans sealed with lead solder. Water was often stored in lead-lined tanks. Lead arsenate was sprayed onto fruit as a pesticide. Lead even came as part of the composition of toothpaste tubes. Hardly a product existed that didn’t bring a little lead into consumers’ lives.
However, nothing gave it a greater and more lasting intimacy than its addition to motor fuel.
Lead is a neurotoxin. Get too much of it and you can irreparably damage the brain and central nervous system. Among the many symptoms associated with over-exposure are blindness, insomnia, kidney failure, hearing loss, cancer, palsies and convulsions.
In its most acute form it produces abrupt and terrifying hallucinations, disturbing to victims and onlookers alike, which generally then give way to coma and death. You really don’t want to get too much lead into your system.
On the other hand, lead was easy to extract and work, and almost embarrassingly profitable to produce industrially — and tetraethyl lead did indubitably stop engines from knocking.
In 1923 three of America’s largest corporations, General Motors, Du Pont and Standard Oil of New Jersey, formed a joint enterprise called the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation (later shortened to simply Ethyl Corporation) with a view to making as much tetraethyl lead as the world was willing to buy, and that proved to be a very great deal.
They called their additive “ethyl” because it sounded friendlier and less toxic than “lead,” and introduced it for public consumption (in more ways than most people realised) on 1 February 1923.
Almost at once production workers began to exhibit the staggered gait and confused faculties that mark the recently poisoned. Also almost at once, the Ethyl Corporation embarked on a policy of calm but unyielding denial that would serve it well for decades.
When employees at one plant developed irreversible delusions, a spokesman blandly informed reporters: “These men probably went insane because they worked too hard.”
Altogether, at least fifteen workers died in the early days of production of leaded gasoline, and untold numbers of others became ill, often violently so; the exact numbers are unknown because the company nearly always managed to hush up news of embarrassing leakages, spills and poisonings.
At times, however, suppressing the news became impossible — most notably in 1924 when, in a matter of days, five production workers died and thirty-five more were turned into permanent staggering wrecks at a single ill-ventilated facility.
As rumours circulated about the dangers of the new product, ethyl’s ebullient inventor, Thomas Midgley, decided to hold a demonstration for reporters to allay their concerns.
As he chatted away about the company’s commitment to safety, he poured tetraethyl lead over his hands, then held a beaker of it to his nose for sixty seconds, claiming all the while that he could repeat the procedure daily without harm.
In fact, Midgley knew only too well the perils of lead poisoning: he had himself been made seriously ill from over-exposure a few months earlier and now, except when reassuring journalists, never went near the stuff if he could help it.
Buoyed by the success of leaded petrol, Midgley now turned to another technological problem of the age.
Refrigerators in the 1920s were often appallingly risky because they used insidious and dangerous gases that sometimes seeped out. One leak from a refrigerator at a hospital in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1929 killed more than a hundred people.
Midgley set out to create a gas that was stable, non-flammable, non-corrosive and safe to breathe. With an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny, he invented chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs.
Seldom has an industrial product been more swiftly or unfortunately embraced. CFCs went into production in the early 1930s and found a thousand applications in everything from car air-conditioners to deodorant sprays before it was noticed, half a century later, that they were devouring the ozone in the stratosphere. As you will be aware, this was not a good thing.
Ozone is a form of oxygen in which each molecule bears three atoms of oxygen instead of the normal two. It is a bit of a chemical oddity in that at ground level it is a pollutant, while way up in the stratosphere it is beneficial since it soaks up dangerous ultraviolet radiation.
Beneficial ozone is not terribly abundant, however. If it were distributed evenly throughout the stratosphere, it would form a layer just 2 millimetres or so thick. That is why it is so easily disturbed.
CFCs are also not very abundant — they constitute only about one part per billion of the atmosphere as a whole — but they are extravagantly destructive. A single kilogram of CFCs can capture and annihilate 70,000 kilograms of atmospheric ozone.
CFCs also hang around for a long time — about a century on average — wreaking havoc all the while. And they are great heat sponges. A single CFC molecule is about ten thousand times more efficient at exacerbating greenhouse effects than a molecule of carbon dioxide — and carbon dioxide is of course no slouch itself as a greenhouse gas. In short, CFCs may ultimately prove to be just about the worst invention of the twentieth century.
Midgley never knew this because he died long before anyone realised how destructive CFCs were. His death was itself memorably unusual. After becoming crippled with polio, Midgley invented a contraption involving a series of motorised pulleys that automatically raised or turned him in bed. In 1944, he became entangled in the cords as the machine went into action and was strangled.
Timeless Insight
This is how you think you form beliefs:
You hear something.
You think about it and vet it, determining whether it is true or false.
Only after that, you form your belief.
But it’s not true. We usually don’t engage in such level of scrutiny about everything we hear. It turns out we actually form abstract beliefs this way:
We hear something
We believe it to be true
Only sometimes, later, if we have the time or the inclination, we think about it and vet it, determining whether it is, in fact, true or false.
While the process of formation of beliefs isn’t the most accurate, we all can appreciate the fact that it is surely very efficient.
What I’m Reading
One reason we rush so quickly to the vulgar satisfactions of judgment, and love to revel in our righteous outrage, is that it spares us from the impotent pain of empathy, and the harder, messier work of understanding.
— Tim Kreider, We Learn Nothing
Tiny Thought
A better thing is more challenging to convince others that it’s better than a mediocre thing.
Before You Go…
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, reading recs. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋