obvious

Deepities and deepifuls

September 18, 2020
Image by Fallon Michael on Unsplash. (I'll leave you to decide if this is a deepity or a deepiful.)
A "deepity" (a term first used by Daniel Dennett) is an ambiguous statement with two meanings: 1. one is profound (but probably false or nonsense) 2. the other meaning is trivial or obvious (but true) These paired meanings can trick our brains into thinking that the idea is both profound and true: we experience the profoundness of one meaning while experiencing the truth of the other meaning. These are phrases that exploit the odd nature of our minds. Some examples are (arguably...
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The Value of the Unsaid Obvious

July 16, 2017
Some thoughts on the, potentially very large, value of ideas that are both obvious and obscure, and why I like to try to state the "unsaid obvious": The space of possible ideas is ABSURDLY, almost UNBELIEVABLY large. If we thought about a different idea every second for our entire lives, we wouldn't begin to scratch the surface. As a simple example, let's consider the number of two-player competitive games played on an 8x8 chessboard, where each player starts with 16 pieces and each piece...
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