Notes from Maine - 2026/01/18

Growing up, my best friend (Patrick) was way more savvy than I was.

“You shouldn’t put your arm out the window,” I told him. We were little kids riding in the back seat of his mother’s Dodge Dart.

“Why?”

“My uncle was doing that and a car going the other direction chopped his arm right off,” I said. This was something that my older brother had told me and I took it as fact. 

Patrick had follow-up questions.

“Which uncle?”

“I don’t know,” I said. 

“How many uncles do you have?”

“One,” I said. My mother has younger sisters. My father had one older brother, David. 

“How many arms does he have?” Patrick asked. 

He had me there. Uncle David had two arms. From that day forward, I tried to think critically about the things my brother told me instead of just accepting them as fact. Not just my brother—I shouldn’t pin this all on him—I tried to judge any source of “information” to sort between rumor and fact. I don’t know why Patrick was so much wiser than I was. He had an older brother too. Maybe it was because his brother was closer in age, or just not inclined to make things up.

“Warm water freezes faster than cold,” I said one day in Patrick’s kitchen. Keith was there too. Keith is now a university professor and mathematician. He was not inclined to accept nonsense.

“Nope,” Keith said. 

“Yuh-huh,” I said. “Mrs. Peterson said so.” She was my seventh grade science teacher. I think her name was Peterson, but I’ve gotten that wrong before. Let’s assume her name was Peterson. She was an excellent teacher, but I have to admit that in this case she didn’t demonstrate the freezing warm water versus cold. She just told us that it was true. 

We experimented as best we could in the freezer, but we couldn’t prove anything. 

That day I had to take another step back towards logic. It occurred to me that a strange piece of information required more proof than just a respected source. First, they didn’t know if I was accurately parroting what I had heard. Second, they didn’t know Mrs. Peterson or whether or not she knew what she was talking about. Keith might have known her, actually. I think he went to the same middle school that I did, but I might have been lying or confused about what she said. My assertion wasn’t backed by any proof, and I found that to be very uncomfortable. Much later, in my work life or elsewhere when people tended to take my word for things, I almost missed those days when I couldn’t say anything without being questioned. It’s nice to have respect and authority, but that’s shaky ground. In most situations I would rather be correct than trusted.

It turns out that Mrs. Peterson had a point. The phenomenon of hot liquids freezing faster is called “The Mpemba effect“ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mpemba_effect). Later, talking to Keith (now Jim), he told me that he sometimes opens lectures by talking about the Mpemba effect. It’s good to be skeptical and seek proof for strange claims, but it’s also important to be able to revise and integrate information that’s contrary to one’s firmly held beliefs. I was an unreliable source and he dismissed what I was telling him. But there might be truth behind that claim. Aristotle, Bacon, and Descartes all wrote about warm water freezing quickly, but none of them were present in that kitchen. Keith was right to question my assertions.

For a while, it seemed like the Internet was the cure for that type of debate. If a kid starts talking about how water freezes, everyone can pull out their phones and look it up. That debate could have ended quickly just a few short years ago. We all would have ended up at Wikipedia and read about The Mpemba effect. The proof is not definitive there, but at least it’s somewhat supported.

I’m afraid we’re beyond that now.

I just went to one of the AIs and asked: “Does warm water freeze quicker than cool water?”

The Chatbot gave me a long blast of “yes, but no, but yes, but kinda, but no,” and then tried to show me a video. My answer back to that was short and studded with expletives. I do not accept videos as responses to questions. Videos are “content” and I was asking for “information.” I haven’t entered any custom instructions into the AI console except, “Never show me videos.” It always does. It apologizes profusely, but that doesn’t stop it from trying to show me more videos. This particular AI is Gemini, and I believe that it was trained extensively on YouTube data, so it doesn’t know any better. I’ve spent a decent amount of time on YouTube, and the percentage of those videos that contain unimpeachable facts is very close to zero. Everyone’s uncle on YouTube lost an arm by hanging it out the car window.

Maybe AI will get better, but at the moment it desperately needs a best friend named Patrick to set it straight.