Patrick McKenzie

Derek Thompson, for example, has written some... He's a chemical engineer and he's written some things which I barely understand.

I have enough of an engineering degree to appreciate half of the chemistry and I can't appreciate the full totality of why...

There's some path dependence.

If I had ended up working in a water treatment plant, I'd be writing about water treatment plants because I like writing.

And I am positive.

I know enough about myself to know that a discussion about how alum works in water treatment plants, which is something I read when I was like six, that could totally captivate me for multiple years on end.

And I would write about that if I was captivated by it.

I agree with the point Matt Levine made once, which is that finance and the tech industry have for a while been a relatively reliable way to turn intelligence into money.

Many good writers are very intelligent.

Not all people who are very intelligent are good writers.

I think it is a skill that more intelligent people could learn, but simply if we create an incentive system, which will tend to allocate

not yours truly, but descriptively, like a lot of the country's top brains into like particular fields where they will become experts at those particular fields, I would expect also a lot of the writing talent to be there because good writing is good thinking.

That's a Paul Graham quote, I think, but that is broadly true.

The Wall Street Journal said it, and the Wall Street Journal had never been wrong in my experience as a 19-year-old who didn't know a thing about anything.

So I had a whole lot of rigor chasing a decision that had no basis in fact.

So believing in the Wall Street Journal that all future engineers would be hired in places like India and China and not the United States.

And so there would be no future engineering employment in the United States whatsoever.

I made a spreadsheet of like, okay, here are the languages my university teaches.

Here's my best estimate of the number of people in that country who speak it, Americans who speak it, the amount of their software that gets sold here, amount of US software that gets sold there, blah, blah, blah, blah, multiply these together, sort by column H descending.

And this is like LARPing and having rigor here, but it felt like a good decision-making process to me in the time.