Author: gulley

When I was in grad school, my friend Larry Alder and I had a special term for when you truly understood something. Everyone knows that, armed with a little knowledge, you can sometimes wing it. Fake it. Multiple choice test? You’ll do okay. Of course, if you put in the time memorizing lists of facts, you can do better. You’ll probably even get a good grade in the class. But do you REALLY understand it? Really? This can be brutally important for some topics.

Let’s say you’re being grilled on a subject like, oh I don’t know, the area-Mach relation in a supersonic converging-diverging rocket nozzle. Of course you already know that

because duh, right?

Then again, that’s just a string of fancy letters and numbers. What assumptions does it depend on? Can you re-derive it on the whiteboard right now? Do you see how it’s implied by the conservation of mass flow? Do you understand the physical implication of the specific heat ratio? Can you explain it to me like it’s two in the morning, I’m going crazy, and I have to finish this godforsaken problem set before I go to sleep?

Because that’s how it was with me and Larry. We were in the same classes and we often helped each other with tough problems. There were times when one of us (probably me) would say “Well, I get the right answer, but I can’t explain why.” That’s KNOWING the answer. And there were other times when one of us (probably Larry) would say “What do you want to know? I can explain this a few different ways.” That’s OWNING the answer. That’s when you see how it slots snugly into the grid of everything else you know. How it’s not just interesting THAT it’s true, because of course it simply MUST be true.

I don’t claim that I owned many topics (including my old nemesis, the converging-diverging nozzle). But it was a useful distinction. I sometimes think of it like this: Tell me something you know. Now tell me something that will get you laid. The first of these is flashy knowledge, insubstantial. Ooh! Big boy knows some Greek letters! The second of these, well, that’s worth something. It’s hard to get to and it’s hard to fake.

This whole concept has been on my brain a lot recently because of Crepusculus. I’m sure you remember that Crepusculus is the festival that falls on the day of the earliest sunset (which is December 9th at my latitude). Without getting into it too much, the earliest sunset happens earlier than the shortest day (December 21st), because of something with the very grand name of Equation of Time. The Equation of Time, in turn, depends on two major factors: the elliptical nature of the Earth’s orbit (eccentricity) and the tilt of the Earth’s axis (obliquity). I’m not pretending to explain any of this here, but I will tell you that the eccentricity part is easy to understand and explain. But the obliquity part… I just couldn’t SEE it. I knew the equation, I read the explanations on various web pages, but I didn’t OWN it in a satisfying way. So that was the challenge I set for myself this year.

I’m happy to say I succeeded, at least to my own satisfaction. I wrote a bunch of MATLAB code and made some fun models. If you want to follow the technical discussion, you can follow along with the piece that I put on my work blog: The Perils of Obliquity. And as a bonus, I vibe-coded a JavaScript web app you can run here: Obliquity.

The main thing I wanted to ruminate on here was this crucial difference between the name dropping that passes for knowledge and the thorough embrace by which we push machines through the sky.

A century ago, the cost of shipping was a significant fraction of what you paid for, say, an article of clothing. As a result, goods were often manufactured close to where they would be sold. So, for example, the garment district in Manhattan is literally where the clothes were made. But when containerized shipping was introduced, the cost of shipping started to drop. Clever entrepreneurs realized that labor in Manhattan is crazy expensive. With cheap shipping, they could shift that work to lower cost locations in the Midwest. This was sound logic up to a point, but it wasn’t bold enough. Because shipping continued to get cheaper and cheaper still. What happens when the cost of shipping effectively drops to zero? In that case, you don’t move your manufacturing to Minnesota. You move it to Malaysia. It was one thing to see the cost of shipping was dropping. But it took some courage to see what the play was when shipping went to zero. Those who spotted the trend but only took half measures went bust. (For background on this, I highly recommend The Box by Marc Levinson.)

We live in an age where many forms of scarcity are being replaced by abundance. Something similar happened to the cost of computing. Young Bill Gates and Paul Allen were among the first to realize the implications of the crashing price of computing. Hardware would become commoditized, and all the leverage would pass to software. They made a bold bet, and I would argue that it worked out nicely for them. (For background on this, I highly recommend the Acquired podcast episode on Microsoft.)

Given this prologue, how should we think about what’s happening with artificial intelligence? Yet another expensive resource is suddenly getting cheap. The cost of How is collapsing. Let’s say you have, through close study and hard work, learned a difficult skill. You know how to compute integrals, or debug recursive sorting algorithms, or perform postorder traversal of a binary tree. I regret to inform you that Knowing How is no longer grounds for job security. You get a gold star and a pat on the head for being clever. But we now have cheap and unlimited access to vast quantities of How via Large Language Models.

What are the implications of all this? The first thought is “Hey, this is awesome. AI will show me how to write software more efficiently.” Which is no doubt true. But what is the bold bet? In a world where you don’t need to know HOW to program, all the leverage passes to people who know WHAT to program.

What are the coming skills we need to prepare for? What are the skills we need to train for? We need to help people with What questions rather than How questions. What should you build, and why? This means helping people with articulating intent and helping them with discerning and providing feedback on intermediate results. Intent and discernment are What skills. How skills are being devalued with every passing day. What is the bold bet? What happens when the price of How collapses to zero?

Don’t get left playing a How game in a What world.

I feel safe in asserting that you have a Visa card (or a MasterCard, which is basically the same thing). We all know what Visa does. But what IS Visa? That is to say, what is Visa the company? Somehow it’s just part of the landscape, like it must have been around forever. That’s what good infrastructure always feels like.

Here’s a related story. Last month, for the first time in my life, I traveled to another country and never once changed money. Not once. I was in England for a business trip, and during that weeklong trip, every single expense, from train tickets to candy bars, was conveniently paid for with a wave of my phone (which is linked to my Visa card via Apple Pay), or a tap of my credit card on the little Verifone device. It was so nice to return from overseas and not have my pockets full of heavy, unusable coins. It was pretty remarkable to me now, but I also know that in another year it will seem completely unremarkable. I’ll look back in wonder at this ancient, barbaric obsession with fiddly bits of paper and metal.

England has been ahead of us for a while when it comes to this kind of finance. The last time I went there, several years ago, my American credit card didn’t yet have a chip in it. So I was always the bozo slowing down the line at the coffee shop when I ordered my Flat White. The cashier would roll their eyes and look up the procedure for credit cards that you can’t just wave in the air (Bloody Yanks…). Patrons waiting behind me would shift uncomfortably: can you believe this guy?

But this last trip was an absolute breeze. The infrastructure that made it possible was a payment network that was started in 1958. It has taken something like sixty years for that infrastructure and the associated cultural changes to reach the point where I, standing 3000 miles from my home, can wave my phone at a vending machine and get a pack of gum. It’s another good example of how magic becomes physics. Here is something that seems like it shouldn’t be possible, and yet it is. And what happens next? Something astonishing quickly becomes “how the world works.” Gravity is like this too. Background magic.

Pervasive infrastructure has a way of disappearing into the background and then making it hard to remember what life was like before. Cell phone service, smart phones, the Internet, electricity, running water. It’s now hard to imagine life without any of these. And that makes it hard to think clearly about what a monstrous and slow-moving effort it was to put them in place.

If you’re curious about the Visa story, I have just the podcast for you. The Acquired podcast, which in general is very good, did this episode on the history of Visa.

Visa: The Complete History and Strategy.

When it comes to physical currency, the US has always been pokey compared to other countries. Our currency notes look practically identical. We can’t get rid of pennies. We can’t switch our singles to the eminently sensible dollar coin. We’re so conservative that it takes a major disruption for us to switch. Credit cards are that disruption. The revolution is finally here, and we’re using coins and paper money less with every passing day. I used to visit the ATM regularly to take out a small stack of 20s. Now I can goes many weeks without thinking about cash. Is Andrew Jackson too loathsome to honor on the 20? It hardly matters anymore. People will soon forget which presidents are on which bills.

It’s worth taking a little time to be grateful for the background magic of infrastructure. Cash is slowly fading into a minor supporting role. Novelty money. I won’t miss it.

Note: This is a story that originally appeared in the online journal BULL last March.

It was never part of the plan to have dinner with the tumor. But eventually it seemed like the only thing left to try. It didn’t go well.

We were introduced to the tumor by a doctor. That’s the way these things usually go. The tumor had made itself known to my wife by being a literal pain in the side. But it never introduced itself, not properly. It took a doctor to do that. The doctor showed us a picture he took and said, “Look. There he is. That’s the tumor.” He indicated sympathy, but he was, after all, a collector of things in jars. “It’s four centimeters across,” he said, circling it with a marker. With great tenderness he pressed the photo onto the first page of a large blank photo album. This unsettled me. I could only stomach a quick peek at the circled blob. I never did like looking at those pictures.

The tumor wasn’t welcome. We wanted it out. First we went after it with a shovel. Then we tried burning it. They both helped, but not enough. It wouldn’t go away. It wouldn’t take the hint. We knew from the start this thing was trouble, but now we knew it was big trouble. We had to go to the next stage.

The next stage… it makes me wince to describe it. There’s this fundamental problem. The tumor was part of my wife, fashioned from her flesh. There was no daylight between her and it. As if William Tell’s apple and his son were the same thing. You can’t shoot just the apple. There was no way to hurt the tumor without hurting my wife. But we had to hurt the tumor. We had to. The logic was inescapable: we had to hurt her. This job fell to me.

Every Monday afternoon, she would strap herself into the treatment chair and quietly say, “I’m ready.” Then, always trembling a little at the magnitude of my task, I would take the heavy treatment mallet by its long wooden handle and bring it smashing down. If it sounds medieval, that’s because it was. You should have seen how brave she was. “Let’s go! Put your back into it!” she would say. She’d catch me looking away, wiping my eyes, and she’d say “Don’t think about me. Think about that tumor!” And BANG! I’d swing that mallet like a railroad worker. When it was over, she would moan softly and stagger off to bed. Sweaty and shaking, I often needed an afternoon gin to settle my nerves.

But here’s the thing. It worked. It was medieval, but it did work. After all, we weren’t stupid, just desperate. My wife was a strong woman, an athlete. Long sinews and sturdy beams. She could absorb unbelievable punishment. Every time I hit her, I made that tumor suffer. And each week, after she had some time to recover, we could both smile about that: progress. There was a happy time. But it didn’t last. The tumor got smarter. It learned how to dodge the blows. My wife would slump in the treatment chair and speak so quietly that I had to lean in to hear her. It was hard to tell the difference between “let’s go” and “please no”. But I have to tell you, she was tough. So tough it made my eyes sting.

Eventually we had to admit that I was hurting her more than I was hurting the tumor. I was thrashing the one I loved, while the one I detested didn’t break a sweat. One day the doctor took out his big photo album and showed us a distressing snapshot: the tumor was smiling. He was looking straight into the camera and smiling.

That’s when I proposed dinner. My poor wife, she didn’t think much would come of it, but she was willing to try. And to my surprise the tumor agreed right away. So long as he could pick the spot. “It has to be Italian!” he said. But when we arrived, he ate a bunch of bread and then said “No. No, I want Mexican!” The bum. He didn’t care. That tumor would eat anything. He just wanted to jerk us around.

Over appetizers, I got right to the point. “Don’t you see you’re killing yourself? If you kill her, then you kill yourself.”

The tumor, cramming a wadded quesadilla into his mouth, stopped briefly and regarded me as though I were a child. Then he snorted and continued chewing. “I seem to be doing pretty well so far.” He grabbed a handful of chips from my wife’s plate. She was so thin.

I tried again. “All your eating is starving her. Look how thin she is. She’s your host. When her body gives out, you’ll be screwed.”

He leaned back and picked at his teeth. “So what do you want from me?”

“I propose a truce. We give you a nice corner of her liver and we split all the food with you fifty-fifty. That’s a great deal. You just have to stop growing like this.”

“Oh a deal, huh?” He stabbed the air between us with a broken corn chip. “And why should I trust you? You’ve been trying to kill me.”

I had to concede the point. “That’s true. But look, you’ve outsmarted us, and now we’re ready to deal. In fact, you’re so smart, you should see that I’m telling you the truth. The god’s honest truth! This is a good deal. Do it my way and you can live for decades. Do it your way, and you’ll be dead in a month.”

“Look, I’m not making any deal, and I’ll tell you why. One, you tried to kill me, so fuck you. Two, you failed, so fuck you. I can’t trust you, and anyway, you’re an idiot. And now you want a deal! The first chance you get, you’ll try to kill me again. And look at me…” Here he patted his plump pink belly, slick and striped with taut blood vessels. It was visibly larger than when we walked in. He was vast and warm, seeming to fill the room. “I’VE NEVER BEEN BETTER! Why should I settle for a little slice of liver? I want space. Space for me and space for all my children.” Here he opened his hand and gave a triumphant gesture to dark corners we hadn’t yet suspected. Small eyes peeked out from lung and kidney, from bladder and spleen, from her shattered stump of a pancreas. There were giggles.

It was a cruel blow, and he savored it. It gave me such a chill, such miserable sinking sickness, that I was unable to speak for few moments.

My mouth was dry. “You’ll lose it all.”

“No! Ha ha! You’re wrong.” He was scraping crumbs into his mouth now, licking his lips. He leaned forward. “You’re losing. You’re losing, and I’m winning! And I’m going to keep winning.” He started to push back from the table, then paused. He smiled. “But thanks for dinner!” And then he winked. That tumor winked at me. It was more than I could take. I lunged at him, but he dodged behind my wife and I nearly spilled her onto the floor. She looked at me and shook her head. So gently. Her eyes were full. “We should go,” she said.

“See you later!” said the tumor. But I never saw him again. I might have. I had the chance. The doctor kept filling up the photo album. But I never looked. And soon enough, the day came when the doctor closed that book and handed it to me. With great purpose and solemnity. As if I wanted it.

The only satisfaction I take from the whole wretched affair is that the tumor really was wrong. And I really was right. Did he have time to think about our offer as the world collapsed around him? Does it matter? To be proven right only required the sacrifice of my best friend and lifelong companion. So my only satisfaction was not much satisfaction after all. Still, in my revenge fantasies, I see the tumor howling as he spins into the vortex of oblivion.

And of all the indignities great and small, it burdened me that he, the tumor, got a place of honor in the center of her chest when they took her away from me. In a better world, she would go one way, and he would go the other. But they were inseparable even to this bitterest of ends.

Only really, I can say now they have gone their separate ways. When I picture her now, I see her smiling and strong. Glowing. Radiant. Free. I see her all by herself.