Would love to read a gwern-essay on your archiving system. I use evernote, org-mode, diigo and pocket and just can't get them streamlined into a nice workflow. If evernote adopted diigo-like highlighting and let me seamlessly edit with Emacs/org-mode that would be perfect... but alas until then I'm stuck with this mess of a kludge. Teach us master, please!
A data point from me: I was much more stressed when I had my emails joint. I'd say that in the long run you want to have them separated even if you really enjoy your job.
Fair enough, though it is really hard to say what's supposed to go to the open thread (which really should be sticky so that it is bit more accesible). Massimo Pigliucci is a fairly known figure in the rationalist/skeptic/naturalist community. That doesn't mean that I endorse his views (by far not - and not specifically for this article).
As a counter-example a seemingly random comment on an somehwat related blog got a full blown reply from Luke (meaning his reply to Mark Linsenmayer), though part of your critique is that I didn't comment on the article (unlike Luke), which is fair enough - the reason being that I'm not familiar enough with Eliezer's original post.
Thank you vary much. I'll have a look at the appendix (the FAQ along more of your writings are on my ever expanding reading lists...). Thank you for all the work and thought you put into it!
Sorry, it wasn't clear from how I asked the question but I wanted a 2 sentence summary.... Gwern's FAQ is a monumental piece of work but the question is if it is even worth reading 50k words long document about it?
I agree and tried to be careful saying "some people" (which is not exactly good practice, I know). As I noted below Motl is a fascinating specimen. I certainly don't consider him to be a an authority on who is a crackpot or not, nor do I agree with many of his opinions or methods.
Still I think it is a strange mix of authors for this topic.
Gosh, thanks, fixed it... I know I'm not the first to screw this up, but still...
Yes, Motl has to be handled with lot's of care, though usually as far as physics goes I find him alright (unlike say climate change and a bunch of other stuff). His tone can be off-putting, but I see him still as a useful contrarian in some areas and generally an interesting case study of an extremely bright person with some strange opinions and a very... interesting personality (to put it mildly).
It is strange that "Forty Years of String Theory: Reflecting on the Foundations" doesn't have any of the bigger names from string theory (particularly, no Ed Witten?), but has pretty much the full list of controversial (some people would say outright currently crackpotish[1]) names like 't Hooft, Verlinde, Smolin and lately also Susskind. I am not picking sides, but this raises all sorts of red flags about it. I bet Motl will be all over this.
I'll have a look at Susskind's paper, particularly if he is railing against reductionism.
[1] 't Hooft's and Susskind's contributions to modern theoretical physics can't be understated, but their general reputation suffered in recent years.
I used diigo for annotation before clearly had highlighting. Now, just as you, use diigo for link storage and Evernote for content storage. Diigo annotation has still the advantage that it excerpts the text you highlight. With Clearly if I want to have the highlighted parts I have to find and manually select them again... Also tagging from clearly requires 5 or so clicks which is ridiculous... But I hope it will get fixed.
I plan to use pocket once I get a tablet... it is pretty and convenient, but the most likely to get cut out of the workflow.
Thanks for the evernote import function - I'll look into it, maybe it could make the Evenote - org-mode integration tighter. Even then, having 3 separate systems is not quite optimal...