Borrowing from the post, how about we categorise between a lone genius: someone who comes up with an idea using a combination of different means available to them such as collaboration, intense study, iterated experiments etc; and a solitary genius: one who’s completely withdrawn from the world and has chosen to rely solely on their cognitive prowess to come up with new ideas, independent of any interactions with the world or the processes and entities in it that are usually known to assist in the generation of new knowledge.
(Differentiating based on the o...
Not necessarily. Globalization has had many negative second-order effects. For example: As much as air connectivity has helped us travel across the world, it has also increased the risk of infections travelling longer distances quicker than if we had a localism-based model. If we are epistemically humble enough, it is not difficult to see how many COVID-like events might have happened in the past in various isolated parts of the world, that we do not know of, but never ravaged the entire world.
Globalization has benefits, not saying that it is not useful, ...
Neat article. Few things I myself have been struggling with and would like some insight into are:
One reason I can think of is the intersection of the English speaking populations of the world. India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Philipines, and Bangladesh constitute over 25% of the world population. And these are also some of the largest English-speaking nations. It seems to me that the only way to cater to their needs given that only a fraction of the population can speak fluently would be through reducing the number of redirections. This is to say that it would be surprising if the incentives of one of the largest dictionary manufacturers in the world were not affected by a customer base that large.
If I am understanding this correctly, I feel the map is multilayered.
First, you have the territory and the map within language itself, a few of the aspects of "linguistic freedom" in this context I feel can be addressed right away using existing linguistic tools like Polysemy, Metonymy, Metaphor, etc. They clearly tell you that the freedom that you are enjoying is due to the categorical representations(the map), which holds true even for non-existent and newly formed words with tools like aureation, retronym, portmanteau, etc. The only place I feel where ...
Mental model that works for me is that of Self-Organization (from cybernetics and complexity theory). Use interactions to enforce redundancy of potential command(See McCulloch). This way you still retain the agency as the command is initiated by you, but the emergence of order(i.e., the execution of that task in our case) can be orchestrated by changing the nature of interaction. One example would be to decentralise the decision making process when you sense the beginning of dissolution of willpower: commitment contracts(eg. beeminder), substitute activity...
I can understand the sentiment of being subtle, articulate, and precise as long as it remains within the bounds of "nitpickers gonna nitpick" or "dislikers gonna dislike" stage, but if you are treading in the realm where you have (or can possibly cultivate) haters, I don't think focusing on presentation works. Also, IMO, if the emotions have already gotten to the stage of being hateful, you might as well stand your ground and say what you have to say instead of selling nuance and subtlety as a point. The reason I say this is because it is a great heuristi...
I feel that framing matters here. For eg. Look at how the words tradition and celebration complement one another in some of these situations. In the case of Olympic fireworks or Times Square gathering, how much effect does the instinct to preserve a long-standing tradition come into play? but when you look at scientific accomplishments it is too disparate and of varying significance to even be equated with the likes of Olympics or a New Year’s Eve. I have a strong feeling that to be celebrated, an event must either form a part of an existing (celebratory) ...
Have you used Syntorial, the synth-learning/tutoring software? I think it makes great use of adaptive interactivity(learning), which I feel tools like brilliant or explorable explanations, although great in terms of UX, lack severely. In fact, I have also found Syntorial to be very effective in terms of memory-related things like remembering patches etc. I think it has that neat quality of helping with both learning/doing and remembering what you learn. Maybe you could look into that too for some inspiration.
Neat. I too have been logging for quite sometime now, the biggest cost initially for me was with Storage, but I've found some neat ways to handle the storage issues: 1) If you are on your desktop, create a private stream on YouTube using OBS --- obviously helps you save diskspace while also helping you maintain privacy and providing unlimited storage as these are basically just youtube videos that are kept private. 2) If you own a tripod, you can record your sleep patterns and do the same by mounting your smartphone on it and hooking it up to your PC and s...
Scale and Complexity? — Thinking in terms of variables and states works fine to some extent, but I think that it is always in the interactions between those variables that the states get screwed up(to a point of complete unrecognizability). And when you scale the number of variables, the interactions become too non-linear for effective management/monitoring of states. Cliched, but I feel disintegration of large is a more plausible event than coalescence of small, for with scale comes uncertainty and complexity.
Learnt this from my twitter/email exchanges with some productive people I know and it has been serving me quite well so far:
Don’t read the referenced articles before you’re done with the original/current one. (Maintain a document of references if needed)
If you already have more than 5 tabs opened on a same topic, switch to a new window instead of a new tab with just the current article. Helps with the distraction.
Read in multiple-passes instead of a focused single-pass.
3.1. Pass 1: Skim through the structure of the post and the comment section ...
I feel “self-fulfilling prophecy” does the same thing, but I like your term better — catchier, pithier, and more functional. :)
Exactly this. Studying behaviours and averaging it has reduced us into easily categorisable beings. The complexity just goes out of the window when the question itself has a design constraint that the answer is expected to meet. My idea is that even if there is an irreducible unit to which you can be reduced to—which I don’t think there is—the temporally emergent aspect of interactions with a larger whole such as the society that are combinatorially so large as to be intractable just do not allow for a siloed theory/inquiry to explain it all.
Culture-specific habits like eating with hands in India or with chopsticks in other South Asian countries. Could be considered a social norm but I don’t think they are, as these are mostly a matter of preference that can be changed without violating any social agreement.
It definitely has taught me some epistemic humility, and especially after reading contents by people like Eliezer, Gwern, and Scott I realized the amount of introspection that I had to do to be able to come to terms with the knowledge deficit I had. I always had an emotional alignment with their content, but the fact that these guys could think the way they do, and all using the same set of tools that I have has made me less envious and more curious in general.
My view: Although I think it is a neat thought experiment, my intuition is it is a false dichotomy to separate between compute and algorithm, and I think so because: narrowing the path dependence of a domain that consists of multiple requirements for it to evolve optimally to an "either/or" situation usually leads to deadlocks that can be paradoxical(not all deadlocks have to remain paradoxical, pre-emption/non-blocking synchronization is a way out) like the one above.
My answer: Not much difference, because twenty-year timescale doesn't seem very significa
I have/had all the problems that are mentioned in the post, but as of late I am observing that as I read more books on a single topic, it allows me to maintain my natural rythm without having to strain myself to be hyper-attentive. And the added benefit I see is even if I miss some quirky details in the first book due to lack of attention, it somehow starts to come together on its own by the nth book(for me it has been 2nd or 3rd). On the other hand, I don't think my attention span has improved drastically, but I would say that it has definitely improved b
When you say that the reversal tester loses the argument, do you mean that one could easily refute the rhetoric of the question posed, as in, homeostasis being the optimal condition, or one can counter that with a flaw in the rhetoric, as in, there is an implicit assumption there in the question of some sort that defeats the main intention of the question itself. If it is the second one, I am genuinely curious as to how that can be countered.
Remarkable achievements indeed, but I would also note that there is always more to it than meets the eye. He lives a solitary life now, but he was an active mathematician up until 2004-05 at Steklov. We don't know how his stay at Courant, Stony Brook, or UCB shaped his ideas. Additionally, his work builds upon Hamilton's Ricci flow, which he had been working on, more or less, since 1992, which happens to coincide with his time at Courant and Stony brook. We don't know the people with whom he was in regular correspondence. Also, the analogous results were p... (read more)