I was flying back from Pittsburgh this evening when the young man across the aisle from me noticed that I was programming. “What language is that?” he asked.<\/p>\n
I explained that it was GLSL, the language used to program shaders that run in GPUs (graphics processing units), like the one in your phone or laptop.<\/p>\n
We got to talking, and he explained that he does statistical programming for a financial firm. He told me that he had tried taking computer graphics in college, but had realized that he had no visual sense.<\/p>\n
I nodded sympathetically and told him “We choose what we’re good at.”<\/p>\n
But then I got to thinking, and realized that what I had said to him could be interpreted in two different ways. One interpretation is the obvious one — when we are good at something, then that’s what we choose to do.<\/p>\n
But another interpretation is that we choose<\/i> to be good at things. More specifically, we put in the time and effort to get really good at something when we enjoy it and are highly motivated.<\/p>\n
I suspect both interpretations are true: We choose something because we are good at it because we have chosen it, in an endless hall of mirrors.<\/p>\n
Ability and choice always co-exist in perfect quantum superposition. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was flying back from Pittsburgh this evening when the young man across the aisle from me noticed that I was programming. “What language is that?” he asked. I explained that it was GLSL, the language used to program shaders that run in GPUs (graphics processing units), like the one in your phone or laptop. … Continue reading “Ability, choice and quantum theory”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21036"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21036"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21036\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21038,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21036\/revisions\/21038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}