A friend on Facebook asked, generally, what the word pith or pithy meant to us. It means the core, or essence, and the word's also used to describe the central fiber in some plants- orange pith is the white stuff that goes down the center of the orange and around the segments under the peel. Pith helmets, the khaki vented hats on European jungle explorers and British people in India, were made from the pith of... I can't remember which plant, but, that's where they get their name. To be pithy means to be able to describe the essence of something.
The rest of the replies were that the word is a synonym for witty or dry humour- which is because of Oscar Wilde, I think. He's a wit, but he's also pithy. Stuff like, "There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it." It's a succinct description of life as well as an exact description of a Greek reversal, which is the crux of tragedy: discovering you do not want the thing you wanted. It's not particularly funny and it's not witty, unlike Wilde's alleged last words, "This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go." Implies the wallpaper is hideous, implies Wilde is gonna die real soon, and the wallpaper is so hideous it might actually be the thing that kills him, trivialising the meningitis. That's witty. But, sure, whatever people, keep liking all the wrong answers.
This is me in a nutshell, basically. All I'm good for is correctly providing answers and explanations to things people don't actually want to know because most people prefer confirmation bias. I'm a living, "well, actually." I don't necessarily *need* to be right, it bugs me more that other people are OK with being wrong. It's not like I go out of my way to learn a bunch of bullshit- I'm interested in things and I remember them.
We got new keys at work, and they're stiff in the locks to the point they don't go in or turn easily.
"Should we put WD-40 in the locks?"
"No! The lock isn't the problem, the key is. Put graphite on the key."
"Where do we get graphite?"
"A pencil?"
"That's brilliant!"
It's not brilliant. It's a simple combination of knowing that WD-40 is an oil lubricant, which will stay in the lock, and graphite is a solid lubricant which will stay on the key. Since the keys don't turn in the locks, the key needs the lubricant not the lock, so graphite is the better choice, and graphite is easily available in pencil form. Also it's what you put on the wheels of Cub Scout Pinewood Derby cars to make them turn better on the axels, to add the Slumdog Millionaire element.
This is why I get mad when that video of Justin Trudeau knowing the basic idea behind quantum computing gets trotted out to make him look like a genius. He either got briefed and he remembered what he was told, or he knew exactly two things: most computers operate on a binary system of being on or off, quantum computers operate on a system where the binary system can be simultaneously on and off, like Schrodinger's cat who is both alive and dead in the box. That's it. That's all you have to know and he simplified the quantum part by defining it as able to carry more information, which makes it technically wrong. No, it's still just on or off, there's no more information there, it's just that the computer is also working out the probability of whether it might be on or off rather than simply being on or off. Meaning that the computer, while deciding between an alive cat or a dead cat, is considering what it knows about cats and poison gasses and the amount of time that has passed to determine the odds that the cat is actually alive, and then it opens the box and the answer is whatever it decided. ...This is why quantum computers are still really not great at simple math. And I think neural nets are built around a similar idea- take what you can find from this background information and see what you get.
He knew two things, he just said them in a way that sounded like he knew more, and he got one of them basically wrong.
I don't think the problem is necessarily that other people are suddenly more stupid, or happier being ignorant. Shakespeare's audience has language exploding around them and he's repeating himself five times to get the point across. It's pretty clearly always been like this. I'm not sure what's different about me that I notice. Or care.
This way lies imposter syndrome. I think. The alternative is that I'm just that self-absorbed and believe I'm the smartest person in the room... except that if knowing things and being able to articulate them and extrapolate and speculate on the things we don't know is how we're defining smartest person in the room, I *am.* Me and Alexander Hamilton, I guess. So why should it be getting me down?
Because it's all I'm good for and it's singularly useless most of the time. It doesn't get me a better job, it doesn't make me particularly well-liked, but this is what I've got. And I don't particularly WANT to be well-liked, it's just standing out in the gulf between me and humanity going, "This, weirdo, is the problem."
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