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Stay Curious.
Make the most of your college experience.
Jeff Hulett
Curator, The Curiosity Vine
Stay Curious.
The Curiosity Vine is an idea incubator.
Our contributors have experience and interest in a variety of high-impact topics, such as science, technology, conservation, mathematics, data science, public policy, economics, and others. Our objective is to promote early-stage ideas, enable idea collaboration, and test idea purchase.
TCV platform is curated by Jeff Hulett.
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TCV's ideas are used to provide seminars, write books, build businesses, and especially to help people.
So take a look around the site, feel free to ask or answer your own questions, and enjoy your own curiosity exploration!
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Featured Posts
Demystifying Backpropagation: The 300-Year-Old Calculus Rule Powering Modern AI
Modern artificial intelligence systems rely on an underlying algorithm to learn: Backpropagation. Whether predicting text, recognizing images, or translating languages, neural networks depend on this universal mechanism. The core mathematical mechanism behind backpropagation is not a recent invention. The algorithm relies on a calculus rule formulated by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1676: the chain rule. To understand how modern AI works, we examine how this centuries-old mat
Bridging the AI Divide: Moving Higher Education from Hesitation to Integration
"If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they will rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks." — Socrates (in Plato's Phaedrus) Educators have long questioned how new tools alter human cognition. Socrates was not warning against algorithms, but the newest technology of his era: the written word. New classroom technologies seld
Making the Invisible Hand Visible: How Choice Architecture Operationalizes Economics
The Invisible Hand is an observation of our human nature. Adam Smith studied how people naturally operate within social settings. He then applied those behavioral insights to explain how societies generate lasting wealth. Long-term empirical trends support his core insights. Over the past two centuries, global economic data reveals unprecedented rises in real gross domestic product per capita alongside dramatic increases in global life expectancy. In 1776, Adam Smith publishe
The Vessel and the Truth: How I Found Meaning in Faith
"Does God exist?" This question is as old as humanity. People still debate it with great energy. I struggle with this question. I find it to be polarizing and distracting. Instead, I find there is a different, more helpful question to ask. Instead of existence, the better question is about meaning and behavior. It asks: "How Do You Choose To Live?" As such, my answer is simple. I choose to live as if God exists. Some might label this position as agnostic. Agnosticism answers
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An Investment in Emergence: 35 Years, Four Children, and the Generational Power of Everyday Faithfulness
Looking back on our journey together, my wife Patti and I feel such gratitude. We met over 40 years ago at the beginning of college and now approach our 35th wedding anniversary. Over those decades, four wonderful children (three sons and a daughter) blessed our lives, ranging from 31 down to our youngest, David, who is 25. Born roughly two years apart, watching them grow from energetic kids into healthy adults remains the great privilege of our lives. Recently, David got eng
Jeff Hulett
Aug 205 min read
Book Review: Finding the Balance in The Soul of Money
Recommend with caveats. Lynne Twist’s The Soul of Money is a book arriving like a deep breath in a room full of suffocating consumerism. It is an exploration of "sufficiency"—the idea that we are enough and have enough. If you’ve ever felt the relentless pull of "more" or found yourself nodding along to Morgan Housel’s The Psychology of Money , this book serves as a spiritual and philosophical companion to Housel’s more pragmatic take on wealth. However, as someone who writ
Jeff Hulett
Mar 244 min read
The Quiet Wealth of Parenting: 10 Practical Lessons for Raising Thriving Children
It's not about money or perfection; it's about presence, governing our seeking, and being a self-learner. Discover the 10 Practical Parenting Lessons from "The Quiet Wealth of Enough" that teach resilience, self-learning, and the true meaning of wealth for raising healthy, happy children. These lessons come from a deep understanding of the behavioral and cognitive sciences, financial education, teaching, and the practical experience of raising four confident, resilient, an
Jeff Hulett
Nov 29, 20252 min read
How Not to Be Fooled by Statistics
Modern life is surrounded by data and statistics, from scientific breakthroughs and medical diagnoses to policy decisions and everyday purchases on consumer marketplace platforms. Statistical inference, at its core, is a future-focused process, designed to help us navigate uncertainty and make prospective choices. Yet, for all their power, statistics prove profoundly misleading if one does not understand the fundamental assumptions which underpin them. To truly navigate this
Jeff Hulett
Nov 3, 20259 min read
Statistics, Bias, and the Better Way to Learn: Moving Beyond the Streetlamp
The foundations of modern statistics—statistical moments, correlation, regression, the chi-squared test, and ANOVA—are indispensable tools powering every field from finance to pharmaceuticals. Yet, their origins are deeply unsettling. Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, and Ronald Fisher, the brilliant minds who established these methods, were devoted proponents of eugenics, a pseudoscientific movement aimed at selective breeding [Kevles, Daniel J. 1995]. Their principal motivation
Jeff Hulett
Oct 12, 20258 min read
Data IS Biased: How AI Distorts Our Perceptions (and what you can do about it)
First off, you need to get over it. Please repeat after me: "Data is biased. Data is always biased." Don't you feel better now?! In our messy, real day-to-day lives, data suffers from the "4 Nevers" of the knowledge problem. Knowledge, and therefore data, is: Never Complete, Never Static, Never Centralized, and Never Invariant. (Click here to learn more about the 4 Nevers.) Now that you know this, it's time to discuss 1) how bias is presented in the GenAI world and 2) wh
Jeff Hulett
Oct 10, 20255 min read
Designing Humanity: What the Eugenics Era Warns Us About Building the GenAI Future
The Peril of “Scientism” — When Science Pretends to Know What It Cannot Friedrich A. Hayek once warned us: “the curious task of economics...
Jeff Hulett
Oct 7, 20255 min read
Racism Rewired: How Neuroscience and Economics Expose a Broken Logic
A simple image, a profound implication. First, extend your two hands in front of your face and make fists. Hold them together, thumbs...
Jeff Hulett
Oct 6, 20257 min read
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