Going the distance involves long periods of non-excitement.

It’s a weird world this simulated universe we’re part of. It’s dangerous to go poking around too deep under the covers. What do we do with the coincidences. Do we chalk them up to nothing more than that, or do we look for deeper meaning? I can know, and as what’s now called a data scientist I do know, that the odds of strange things happening are 100 percent. Everything that happens to us is highly unlikely. At the same time, I also know this: what we know (or think we know) about how the universe works is just a tiny fraction of what we could know. I know that our information is incomplete, inaccurate, biased by the preconceptions of those we learn from, and likely to be overturned within years or decades. I know that all of our models are simplified, and that we have many reports of things that do not fit the established, mainstream scientific view.

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As the complexity of our work lives increases, the marginal return on hours worked grows ever more exponential (and ever more flat at first).