The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius

Side note: there might be coming more new essays from pg again:

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1198189199641452544

Resonance and Harmony. Just too frikkin fascinating, in music, physics, history, contemporary culture, neuroscience...

I really enjoyed this article. For me, I have two main ones. Professionally, it is four freedoms computing and ways to empower people with it. Privately though, since I got out of the military, has been an obsession with geopolitics and geostrategy. You might be surprised how interrelated I increasingly think the two are.

I love that he chose bus tickets, because I used to collect UK bus tickets. I started because I used to repair bus ticket machines (made by Almex Control Systems ltd) in the early 1990s.

I was putting a few examples on Instagram, but I don't really understand how Instagram chooses to crop images so I stopped until I have time to work it out. https://www.instagram.com/p/B1JpyfXHLRG/?utm_source=ig_web_c... If you're interested in classifying things you can sort tickets out in several ways -- by bus company operator, by year, by colour, by machine. If you're interested in social history you can use tickets to illustrate some small points - here's a "workman return" which would probably have a different name today: https://www.instagram.com/p/B1Lpy4kHKWR/?utm_source=ig_web_c...

Through this I met other transport ticket collectors, and other transport enthusiasts ("bus spotters", railway enthusiasts).

Paul starts his essay by mentioning natural ability. He then describes this obsessive interest as a third requirement, which implies to me that obsessive interest is not necessarily part of natural ability.

I'd be interested to know whether obsessive interest is something that can be learnt, or whether it's a feature of neuro-diversity and thus part of natural ability. One of the diagnostic criteria for autism is "fixed and repetitive interests".

I'm also interested to know whether people think their interests are obsessive. I stopped collecting transport tickets in the late 1990s, but I only found out a few years ago that the amount I know about UK bus tickets and ticket machines is unusual.

Often, you can get close enough to make it a useful approach. Start from the easiest parts, and then gradually drill deeper while making sure that you're building up a solid understanding, without taking unclear, obscure shortcuts. This is not always easy, but the payoff can be quite real.