Would You Believe That This Is It?

I could do that, I just need more time.

In life we are constantly wishing we had more of something: time, money, friends, energy, etc., and we develop plans to try and meet these goals. We alter our diets, our schedules, we start exercising or reading more. Often times these changes result in significant improvements to our lives. Yet, we never have the energy, the time, or the money that we want. Even when we do succeed in making changes, something else comes up and blocks further progress.

Let's say you want to write a book. You change your schedule to allow for dedicated writing time. However during that time, you're unmotivated. You diet and exercise and read interesting books, trying to kindle the enthusiasm you know you have, but now you have no energy left to write. You have the time, but only to spend staring at a blank page.

Sometimes I can't tell if I'm discovering a cool new hobby, or just getting old. Regardless, today I come to you with a tale of a little endeavor of mine.

In early 2020, a family member took a job far from home and, because of the nature of the work, would therefore be out of cell service for large swaths of time. As a gag, we decided to communicate via long-form letters over email as well as the occasional postcard. Later that year, in the grips of a pandemic, my D&D group went virtual, but that came with several drawbacks—including the sudden lack of the ability to pawn chewing gum off of me during games.¹ So, before our first virtual game, I mailed every one a pack of gum, to be opened on the call.

It was fun, a cheap little laugh. However in the time since, my occasional appreciation for the mail has become nothing short of a deep and profound predilection.

We like to believe that we can predict the future. We believe it because it's true, at least in part. Physical systems obey known physical laws and so even fairly complex systems can be understood and predicted with stunning accuracy. Every branch of science makes predictions. Planes fly, servers compute, and dams generate power all through the strength we have to predict the future, if only in the short term. In our human world, we see pollsters predict elections with better-than-random odds, doctors performing research and intervention at global scales, and even disease propagating at predictable rates.

It's stunning just how good we are at this in the modern world. We're so good at predicting the future that much of the financial world relies on it as a hedge against the unforeseen. Short term catastrophe is easier to bear when you can predict that good times can and will return.

Yet there is, of course, much we cannot predict and two main reasons why.

Something about hearing the phrase "Claude's Soul Document" got me thinking again about a problem I've long pondered. Software folks, like myself, have a long and proud history of taking words that exist and coopting them, manipulating the meaning of those words into feeble shadows of their former selfs. Tech people and tech companies do this on accident and on purpose, both because it can be useful to reduce a human concept to something simpler to quantify and because its easier to market and sell. Machine Learning, an academic term, becomes Artificial Intelligence and the word "Intelligence" is defined down in order to be achievable.

But before we get too far down the Current Events rabbit hole, let's take a step back.

Personally, I love it when Computer Science research accidentally stumbles on human truths, like this gem from an IEEE paper in 1995: