What's taste in science, Why there are tragedies, Left-brained thinker is a myth

Weekly I/O #103: Jim Simons on Taste, Best Possible Worlds, Left-Brain Learning Myth, Procrastination and Head-Heart-Hand, Cognitive Scripts

If you're new to Weekly I/O, I share five things I've learned each week to help you and me better understand the world and live more fulfilling lives.

This week’s edition of the newsletter is exclusive to subscribers. If you'd like full access to this post and all the Weekly I/O archives, please consider subscribing!

Hey friends,

As mentioned last week, here's a list of things I'm enjoying learning this week (thanks to MR for the inspiration!).

1. How we built our multi-agent research system

2. Emerging Developer Patterns for the AI Era | Andreessen Horowitz

3. Leibniz on the Problem of Evil

4. "Context is that which is scarce" - Marginal REVOLUTION

5. Renaissance Technologies: The Complete History and Strategy

6. No Rivals: The Founders Fund Story - by Mario Gabriele

7. Tiny Experiments

8. Morris Chang's Autobiography Part 2

9. Video Games are the Future of Education - Nabeel S. Qureshi

10. The Steve Ballmer Interview: The Complete History and Strategy

I'll keep the list to a maximum of 10 for now. Also, thank you Sophia Soong for introducing me to the book Tiny Experiments.

Feel free to send me interesting things you've come across recently!

---

Input

Here's a list of what I learned this week.

1. Success in science depends less on raw intelligence and more on good taste. Knowing what’s a good problem to pursue and understanding your unique strengths determine long-term success.

Podcast: Renaissance Technologies: The Complete History and Strategy

Jim Simons wasn't the best mathematician at MIT. Reflecting on his abilities, he said, "I was a good mathematician. I wasn’t the greatest in the world, but I was pretty good." However, he became immensely influential, perhaps the most influential of his generation.

He recognized early that he had a different advantage that most of the super geniuses lacked: good taste. In his words:

"Taste in science is very important. To distinguish what’s a good problem and what’s a problem that no one’s going to care about the answer to anyway, that’s taste. And I think I have good taste."

Jeff Bezos had a similar realization. He wanted to become a theoretical physicist while he was attending college but noticed his peers who effortlessly outpaced him intellectually. Realizing he couldn’t outmatch the best theoretical physicists, he switched to computer science.

Jim may not have been the Michael Jordan of math, but he was a Hall of Famer. He even has a theorem named after him that became part of the foundation of string theory. But what truly set him apart, especially at MIT in the late 1950s, was how he could move between worlds. He was brilliant, but also cool, charismatic, and relatable. He could speak the language of the super-genius while understanding the world beyond academia. He wasn’t just another mind in the room. He was someone people wanted to follow.

That combination of brains, taste, and people skills, was essential in what would later become the magic behind Renaissance Technologies, the single best performing investment firm of all time.

This reminds me of people who want to be smart oftentimes think being smart and having important new ideas are identical and how Richard Hamming tried to answer "Why do so few scientists make significant contributions and so many are forgotten in the long run" in You And Your Research.

This also brings to mind Noam Shazeer, co-author of the Transformer paper and founder of Character.ai, who is praised for his research taste in this Dwarkesh podcast episode.

2. We live in the best of all possible worlds regardless of what happens. Imperfections contribute to greater beneficial outcomes because events perceived negatively are essential conditions for realizing an optimal overall reality.

Book: Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man, and the Origin of Evil

Why do tragedies and imperfections exist at all if God is omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good?

German philosopher Leibniz, the guy who happened to also invent calculus and binary arithmetic, faced this challenging question. He argued that the presence of suffering or imperfection could be required elements within an optimally balanced system. It's just like a chess player willing to sacrifice a piece to win the entire game.

Central to Leibniz's idea is the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which states that every event must have a valid explanation. In an infinite array of possible realities, only one arrangement can logically offer the greatest overall benefit, even if individual parts seem undesirable when viewed separately.

Critics like Voltaire in Candide mistakenly viewed Leibniz as saying every event is individually good. Instead, Leibniz emphasized holistic optimization. He emphasized that reality must be viewed as a complex network, and our frustration arises partly because human perspectives are limited, preventing us from seeing the full, intricate connections that justify seemingly imperfect details.

I found Leibniz's way of reconciling apparent contradictions in his belief interesting. At the end of the day, what we all need is meaning, and he tried to find the meaning by using the tools with which he's most familiar as a mathematician: forming a logical bridge between the existence of evil and the perfection of its creator.

I recalled this theory after finishing Permutation City, which also presents a different version of the Many-Worlds Theory. This also echoes what Viktor Frankl said about the Transitory Aspect of Life after surviving concentration camps.

3. "Left-brained" analytical thinkers are a myth. The idea that one hemisphere dominates math while the other handles creativity is scientifically unsupported because cognitive tasks always rely on integrated hemispheric cooperation.

Paper: Review on the Prevalence and Persistence of Neuromyths in Education

Have you heard someone describe themselves as more left-brained or right-brained?

The idea that one hemisphere dominates analytical thinking while the other handles creativity is appealing but not actually supported by neuroscience. This myth emerged because certain functions like language typically activate specific brain areas, especially in the left hemisphere for right-handed individuals.

However, brain imaging studies show that all cognitive tasks, from reading to problem-solving, utilize extensive neural networks across both brain hemispheres.

Even tasks once thought to be hemisphere-specific, like language, require constant interhemispheric communication through numerous nerve connections. For instance, when understanding spoken language, your brain employs the left hemisphere to decode words while simultaneously using the right hemisphere to grasp emotional tones or context.

The myth persists because it's comforting to simplify complex human abilities into neat categories. However, recognizing that the brain operates through cooperative hemispheric interaction rather than isolated dominance promotes better educational strategies.

This, along with the "I'm a visual learner" myth, are my two favorite neuromyths in education. It's also fun to learn that this myth is partially inspired by the fascinating split‑brain cases I noted before.

4. Procrastination is not laziness. It is a useful signal from the brain that something about the task, the mood, or the setting needs attention. Ask the Head, Heart, and Hand questions to debug and remove the cycle of shame and stall.

Book: Tiny Experiments