Patrick Berzai @patrickberzai

@eyyankees Thanks for vindicating me with Yankee haters, Cody! I knew you’d work out better than Tucker.

A self-taught Irish schoolteacher wrote a book in 1854 that almost nobody read for 80 years, until a 21-year-old MIT student picked it up and realized it could be used to design every computer in human history. His name was George Boole. The book is called An Investigation of the Laws of Thought. Boole was born in 1815 in Lincoln, England. His family was poor. He left school at 16 to support them. He taught himself Latin, Greek, French, German, and Italian. Then he taught himself mathematics. By 19 he had opened his own school. By 24 he was publishing original papers in the Cambridge Mathematical Journal, competing with men who had spent decades inside the best universities in Britain. He never had a degree. He never had a mentor. In 1849, Queen's College in Cork hired him as a professor anyway. In 1854, he published his masterwork. What he built inside it was something nobody had attempted before at this scale. He turned logic into algebra. Before Boole, logic was philosophy. You argued in sentences. You reasoned in paragraphs. It was powerful and completely impossible to automate, because there was no formal system underneath it, just language. Boole stripped it down to arithmetic. He showed that every act of human reasoning could be reduced to operations on two values. True or false. One or zero. AND, OR, NOT. If both conditions are true, the result is true. If neither is, the result is false. Every judgment a human mind makes, every decision, every deduction, could be written as an equation following those rules. Logicians read it. They found it interesting. Engineers building machines had never heard of it. For 83 years, the book sat there. Then in 1937, a 21-year-old MIT master's student named Claude Shannon was working on a thesis about electrical relay circuits. Switches that could be open or closed. Current that either flowed or didn't. He read Boole and understood something nobody had connected before. An open switch is a zero. A closed switch is a one. A circuit with two switches in series only carries current when both are closed. That is AND. A circuit with two switches in parallel carries current when either is closed. That is OR. Shannon proved that every possible logical relationship Boole had described could be physically built using wire and switches. That single insight is the foundation of every computer ever made. After Shannon, chip designers stopped thinking about electricity and started thinking about logic. Every transistor on every processor running right now is implementing a Boolean operation. Every if-statement in every codebase is Boolean logic. Every database query using AND or OR. Every neural network threshold that fires or doesn't fire. All of it is running the algebra of a self-taught schoolteacher from Lincoln who died 160 years ago. The strangest part is what happened to Boole at the end. He was walking to class in November 1864 when he got caught in a rainstorm. He lectured for hours in wet clothes. He went home sick. His wife, Mary, believed in homeopathic medicine and thought the cure should mirror the cause. She wrapped him in wet sheets and poured cold water over him repeatedly. He died a few days later. He was 49. He never saw a transistor. He never saw a circuit. He never saw a single physical machine run a single one of his rules. His book is in the public domain. Free to download. Most engineers use the word Boolean dozens of times a week. Almost none of them know who they are saying. The man whose logic runs inside every phone, every server, and every AI model on Earth died soaking wet in a small Irish town, 83 years before anyone figured out what he had actually built.

@GinaMuscato People pay attention to the game more at PNC but no Coca-Cola slide.

@BullandBaird I really like it. And the Trump building is about as beautiful as you can make a glass building.

@mattvanswol @kbean511 I could be wrong, but I think that roller coaster is called “The Fahrenheit” which features a steeper than vertical drop. If you go, I highly recommend.

@colorblindk1d This used to be true in Irish enclaves (like Southie and Charlestown) in Boston. No snitching honor culture.

@ZeekArkham What has been lost is literally no one who has ever run track doesn’t know it’s an absolute no-no to go to another teams tent/area. So Anthony was in the wrong by the time anyone ever even had to mention anything to him. Everything is down-stream of that.

@heterodoxan Did you also experience it as oikophobia? My experience (although I wasn’t progressive, but work w/them) is signaling status was done via oikophobia displays. I work in ads: nothing sums up attitudes more than these charts. People chose to lose money instead of be competent.

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@zeitclip Literally no one who has ever run track doesn’t know it’s an absolute no-no to go on another teams tent. No one should have ever even had to mention it to Anthony. And once they even had to say something, he should have left. Again, ZERO track people dont know this. Zero.

@to34137 @AuronMacintyre Yes. So isn’t it hilarious that Bilton is the guy with whom Pelley lost it? Like, who did Pelley think he was yelling at?

@UsingLyft No. No one should ever have had to ever even tell Anthony to leave. Not a single person who has ever run track wasn’t told that you don’t go into another teams tent. Especially at invitationals. Literally no one doesn’t know that at all track meet.

@heterodoxan lol, you don’t hafta! The hueristic IS instructive (and predictive) where politically fraught -isms and -ologies serve as the moral user interface for reality. But the source code —the operating system — that underwrites all of it is anti-competence.

@heterodoxan I work in east coast tech/advertising bubbles. The disdain they have for working class white men is off the charts. There is no attempt to empathize, even as they advertise at them. Ginning up Platner is the most I’ve seen them even try. Give ‘em credit. It’s a step.

@NYSSofficial It’s positively Knoblauchian.

@AuronMacintyre I think the best heuristic is from the Fronde — western leaders are the noblesse de robe. x.com/patrickberzai/…

Patrick Berzai @patrickberzai

2 months ago

A heuristic I use in the book is the noblesse d’epee (the competence class) vs the noblesse de robe (the compliance class) who were in a civil war of elites in France called The Fronde. These categories are essential to understanding our modern times. open.substack.com/pub/creditwort…

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@DisaffectedPod It’s hard to believe someone who looks like this would make fun of anyone else’s appearance, especially someone who accuses the whole world of having personality disorders.

@DisaffectedPod Sounds good.

@E92184306 @extradeadjcb My brother had his spikes stolen at a track meet in high school when the freshmen who were guarding our area were afraid to make some people leave. None of them were black.