i remember when i was at university, studying for my phd, working with the smartest people i have ever known. what surprised and depressed me most was that they were so inconsistent. i wanted all these brilliant people to share my politics, which i felt obviously right. they didn't. i wanted them all to be nice people. they weren't. they weren't even consistently beautiful. the only thing they had in common was that they were all very smart.

it would be so nice if simple, visible, easy to measure, but ultimately facile appearances were strongly correlated with deep, complex, hard to measure, but important traits. life would be so much simpler.