The title of this post is another nerd-dad joke I probably should not have made, but which I simply could not resist.
Whatever the case may be, I’m happy that it’s out, just like this, the otherwise extremely modest 256th edition of the Weekly Head Voices!
A scene from our Saturday family and friends hike in Jonkershoek.
Today I only have three things (ok it turns out I have four!) I would like to mention.
Shielding you from the equal-odds rule
I’ve often read about this phenomenon, and internalised the idea, but today I found its original source.
It was in fact Dean Simonton’s research that brought us /the equal-odds rule/:
Simonton found that the probability of producing a highly recognized work product, such as an influential research article, is roughly the same for all contributors, whether eminent or not. This is what Simonton called the equal-odds principle. What distinguishes highly eminent scholars is the overall volume of works they produce. By sheer dint of productivity, those who reach professional eminence stack the odds in their favor of producing another masterpiece
(The quote above is from Simonton’s 2010 book Learning and Cognition: The Design of the Mind (p.224), but I retrieved it from the Sarnecka Lab Blog’s post on the topic.)
I think we can extend this to fields outside of academia. People who appear to produce a great deal of fantastic work do so by producing a greater amount of work in total than their peers.
According to Simonton, the ratio of great work to non-great work is similar for everyone. Those who succeed, are just producing that much more.
That’s a long story to explain that many of the posts on this blog are going to be just meh, and some just bad, but I have to make them all and put them here so that there can be good ones in between.
(Now that I write this, I’m sure I must have mentioned this before on this blog… can you help me find the post(s) in question?)
In any case, to help you work around this glitch in the creativity matrix, and to give new readers a more gentle introduction, I decided during my run this morning to start explicitly tagging posts that I personally really like.
I have only just started with this, and it will probably take a while to go through all of my older posts, but you can henceforth keep an eye out for the tag “my selection”.
P.S. or rather “pssst!”: This edition did not get the tag. Last week’s post #255 did!
Making TiL go fast
During the weekend I noticed that the super recently announced TIL (Things I Learned) section on my other website was not as fast I expected.
Turns out I was right.
The debugging and working-arounding were the source of an hour of two of entertainment, and a new blog post at the vxlabs.
Something he can never have
On the Saturday hike, I recounted this story to a friend, but it’s always tricky when at that point you’re unable to remember the two amazing dramatis personae.
Today I went searching to find the exact details, and was delighted to find that Kurt Vonnegut himself had written a poem about his experience with his friend Joseph Heller at some billionaire’s party.
Joe Heller
True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.
I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel ‘Catch-22’
has earned in its entire history?”
And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”
And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”
And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
Not bad! Rest in peace!"– Kurt Vonnegut
The New Yorker, May 16th, 2005