Earlier quoted context omitted.
Huxley and Heinlein were born only 13 years apart, so now, over a century later, maybe we can lump them into, if not the same generation, at least the same Zeitgeist. Somewhere I'd read about a fighting-game AI which had access to all of the human player data (so not the spirit, but knowing the joystick inputs would be a good proxy for "pwn the technique") and was unbeatable, so the programmers nerfed it by giving it…
To riff on your wife's grokking, the number of effective participants increases faster than what one would usually expect: there's what you know,what you know what other academics know, and what other academics know you know Ditto for "industry" but there the default data structure (nominally) is ____, so perhaps sophistication is monotonic (not accounting yet for immigration, oligarchal or otherwise psychopathic/imb…
> "Everything is very simple in industry, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen production." —not CPGvC
Have you heard Niklaus Wirth's joke about God nerfing academia? (via https://cacm.acm.org/blogcacm/niklaus-wirth-or-the-importanc... )
> On the seventh day of creation God looked at his achievement. He was pretty happy at the result. He started looking at the list of professions and felt good: all —policeman, minister, nurse, street sweeper, interior designer, opera singer, supermarket cashier...— had some advantages and some disadvantages. But then He got to the University Professor row. The Advantages entry was impressive: long holidays, decent salary, you basically get to do what you want, and so on; but the Disadvantages entry was empty! That could not be. For a moment, a cloud obscured His face. He thought and thought and finally His smile came back. What had happened is that He had invented colleagues.