flâneur

Katherine Slattery

3 followers · 9 following · 353 views

on the atlas — 54

highlights — 98

  • To make a long story short: Everyone winds up trying to demonstrate how little ability they have (so that little might be demanded of them) and how much need they have (so that much might be given to them).
    Intuitive Libertarianism - by Michael Huemer - Fake Noûs
  • This is the opposite of how inquiry, science, and figuring-things-out tends to work. Religions do often work this way, because they’re saying a lot of false shit.
    Why I wish Buddhists had a good anti-Buddhism litany
  • The oldest surviving Buddhist texts are from hundreds of years after Gautama allegedly lived. Compare Christianity, where scholars are wildly uncertain about what Jesus said and did even though we have written records from 20 years after his death.
    Why I wish Buddhists had a good anti-Buddhism litany
  • Over a sufficiently long time, random fluctuations could cause particles to spontaneously form literally any structure of any degree of complexity, including a functioning human brain.
    Boltzmann brain
  • But I'm not sure how necessary this is? Very few people have a philosophically rigorous argument that they shouldn't torture dogs and cats.
    Against Animal Cruelty - by Ozy Brennan - Thing of Things
  • This is an important point, because livestock producers commonly complain that animal welfare activists and consumers generally do not really know about hog well being. Paradoxically, it may very well be that hog farmers themselves are the least aware of the animals’ mental capabilities.
    Against Animal Cruelty - by Ozy Brennan - Thing of Things
  • In a sense, they showed that the only true continuous multivariate function is the sum, since every other continuous function can be written using univariate continuous functions and summing.[6]: 180
    Kolmogorov–Arnold representation theorem - Wikipedia
  • [I]n studying probability theory, it was vaguely troubling to see reference to "gaussian random variables", or "stochastic processes", or "stationary time series", or "disorder", as if the property of being gaussian, random, stochastic, stationary, or disorderly is a real property, like the property of possessing mass or length, existing in Nature. Indeed, some seek to develop statistical tests to determine the presence of these properties in their data...
    Mind projection fallacy
  • For myself: I've lived a life often centered on my creative pursuits, protecting those pursuits from many of the demands of the other. Such protection is necessary for individual creative contribution: individual creators find the world contains many forces attempting to co-opt their creative energy.
    The Sacrifices We Choose to Make
  • Thich Quang Duc's sacrifice wasn't an impulsive one-off, nor did it arise from some purely philosophical argument. It was the outcome of a lifetime of becoming.
    The Sacrifices We Choose to Make
  • he went through all this despite not knowing what the outcome of his actions would be. He must have wondered if his sacrifice would be in vain, ignored by the world. He never knew that he helped precipitate the end of the oppression of Buddhists in South Vietnam.
    The Sacrifices We Choose to Make
  • And I didn’t have a good answer to that, because it was obviously true. The best I could do was point out that this would delegitimize pretty much all discourse. Every piece of social commentary is most likely to go to the people who need it least.
    Should You Reverse Any Advice You Hear? | Slate Star Codex
  • (a) sometimes what I hear someone saying is not actually what they’re saying, or not what they mean, so repeating it back is part of an important feedback loop in clarify what the “complainer” is saying; (b) sometimes it is what they mean, but hearing it reflected back to them helps them realize that there is some discrepancy with other beliefs/values/etc.
    To listen well, get curious
  • A blamelessly written postmortem assumes that everyone involved in an incident had good intentions and did the right thing with the information they had. If a culture of finger pointing and shaming individuals or teams for doing the "wrong" thing prevails, people will not bring issues to light for fear of punishment.
    Accountability Sinks — LessWrong
  • Instead of measuring the relationship between X and Y by the variance explained, Information Theory measures the mutual information between X and Y, which you can think of as how much your uncertainty about Y is reduced by knowing X. Like "variance explained", mutual information depends only on the joint distribution of X and Y. But unlike regression, it does not require positing any model of how Y depends on X. This is powerful, because it gives you a fact about the X-Y relationship, not a fact about the goodness of some model.
    X explains Z% of the variance in Y — LessWrong
  • But this is a mistake, they are not meant to be polished endlessly, to ape at a forever gloss. Instead, the patina is a testament to its use, an indication that the object is alive. It is nice to polish occasionally, but only to admire a temporary brilliance before watching the beauty of aging again. Raw brass darkens, copper takes on a full scene.
    Patina and Intimacy - by Simon Sarris
  • Unlike photography, nothing is ever in a painting by accident.
    Patina and Intimacy - by Simon Sarris
  • The problem of science-in-a-high-dimensional-world is not to enumerate all variables which have any influence. The problem is to find a set of variables which determine the outcome, so that no other variables have any influence after controlling for those.
    Science in a High-Dimensional World — LessWrong
  • And, notably, in all five instances where subjects were consuming near or above 1.6g/kg of protein at baseline, further increases in protein intake uniformly led to further increases in FFM:
    Protein Science Updated: Why It's Time to Move Beyond the “1.6-2.2g/kg” Rule • Stronger by Science
  • I gave the example of the Nightwish concert above. I didn't know why I found it interesting, exactly, but I did. Making the Anki cards helped me understand why.
    How I use memory systems
  • Agnes Callard has made the striking observation that "twitter is a way to care about everything".
    How I use memory systems
  • Much work on "improving" both commercial products and academic research is focused on things which are easily quantified. Finding the "optimal" schedule. Studying people's memory response curves. And so on. This is the classic mistake of focusing on what you can easily measure, but which isn't all that important.
    Building a better memory system
  • people tend to lean overmuch on remembering facts, and not enough on constructing abstractions and multiple ways of understanding
    Building a better memory system
  • The larger point is that the way our memory (and our cognition in general) works is moulded by the systems we interact with.
    Building a better memory system
  • Any way you count it, transgender people are very disproportionately attracted to members of the same gender.4 Even if they’re cis, people who are attracted to members of the same gender are more likely to find it psychologically important to break gender norms in glaring, obvious ways that make sexist people mad at them. And there is no clear, unambiguous line where “it is psychologically important for me to obviously break gender norms” becomes “I experience gender dysphoria.”
    Book Review: Imagining Transgender - by Ozy Brennan
  • Freud called intellectualization a defense mechanism.
    In Search Of /r/petfree - by Scott Alexander
  • For the past three years, ~2 million people have taken complex peptides provided direct-to-consumer by a less-regulated supply chain, with barely a fig leaf of medical oversight, and it went great.
    The Ozempocalypse Is Nigh - by Scott Alexander
  • Part of their objection is ethical - some people have unusual genes that make them need higher doses, and it seems unfair to charge these people twice as much for genetic bad luck. But there’s also an economic objection - they want to charge the maximum amount the customer can bear, but if they charge a subset of people with genetic bad luck twice as much as they can bear, those people won’t buy their drug.
    The Ozempocalypse Is Nigh - by Scott Alexander
  • People feel compelled to finish books they’ve started – that’s just a tax on your reading.
    Tyler Cowen on reading fast, reading well, and reading widely - Driverless Crocodile
  • Over-abstraction happens because it's easy to be abstract. It's easier to say "red is a color" than to pause your thoughts for long enough to come up with the example of a stop sign. Abstraction is a path of least resistance, a form of mental laziness.
    The 5-Second Level — LessWrong
  • And my philosophy of reading is that no-one reads quickly. So someone once asked me “How long did it take you to read that book?” And I said, “Fifty-seven years.” I’m fifty-seven years old.
    Tyler Cowen on reading fast, reading well, and reading widely - Driverless Crocodile
  • But Turing's work is only 80 years old: think of all the physics that was still completely unexplained in 1765. (For example, there was no decent idea of what "heat" might be). Despite this, many people believed in Newton's program because of all the things it had explained, which until then had been more or less incomprehensible.
    The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul by Douglas R. Hofstadter | Goodreads
  • The Sokal Hoax to me was less about totally disproving all literary critical terms, and more about showing that it's really easy to get a paper published that no one understands.
    The Useful Idea of Truth — LessWrong
  • Taste is important both “in the large” (picking important problems) and “in the small” (picking approaches to solving those problems that will work well); I usually see people first become great at the latter, then the former.
    Impact, agency, and taste | benkuhn.net
  • Around that time it became clear that the pace of real technological change had overtaken authors’ imaginations; newly written cyberpunk fiction began to feel retrofuturistic, like someone writing about the present and getting it wrong.
    Welcome to The Future - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion
  • The ptomaine theory made correct predictions (fresh meat will prevent scurvy) even though it was completely wrong.
    Scott And Scurvy (Idle Words)
  • Third, how technological progress in one area can lead to surprising regressions.
    Scott And Scurvy (Idle Words)
  • And if I wasn't going to turn around yet -- if my best bet given the uncertainty was to check N more miles of highway first, before I turned around -- then, again, I'd get there fastest by choosing a value of N, speeding along at 60 miles per hour until my odometer said I'd gone N miles, and then turning around and heading at 60 miles per hour in the opposite direction.
    The correct response to uncertainty is *not* half-speed
  • An alternative categorization system is not an error, and borders are not objectively true or false.
    The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories | Slate Star Codex
  • Hume’s ethics restrict “bad” to an instrumental criticism – you can condemn something as a bad way to achieve a certain goal, but not as morally bad independent of what the goal is.
    The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For The Categories | Slate Star Codex
  • The best mechanism I could find is called "preferential attachment."
    Why is the distribution of the number of sexual partnerships power law distributed? - Quora
  • Power law relationships are notable because they are scale-invariant.
    Why is the distribution of the number of sexual partnerships power law distributed? - Quora
  • "Double Reversal Test: Suppose it is thought that increasing a certain parameter and decreasing it would both have bad overall consequences. Consider a scenario in which a natural factor threatens to move the parameter in one direction and ask whether it would be good to counterbalance this change by an intervention to preserve the status quo. If so, consider a later time when the naturally occurring factor is about to vanish and ask whether it would be a good idea to intervene to reverse the first intervention. If not, then there is a strong prima facie case for thinking that it would be good…
    Reversal test
  • So to get the most benefit from it, you should find whatever version of it most resonates you and then re-read it frequently to keep yourself on track
    My favorite essays of life advice
  • However, as we will see, this is not at all the case: the more fluid nature of quantum particles allows them to glide through a regular lattice, almost unimpeded, with a distorted energy spectrum the only memory of the underlying lattice.
    solidstate.pdf
  • Good listeners do often reflect words back—but not because they read it in a book somewhere. Rather, it’s cargo cult advice: it teaches you to imitate the surface appearance of good listening, but misses what’s actually important, the thing that’s generating that surface appearance.
    To listen well, get curious
  • What’s really going on is probably that your advice is bad, because you didn’t really listen, because you weren’t curious enough.
    To listen well, get curious
  • Most (but not all) contemporary authors agree that measurement is an activity that involves interaction with a concrete system with the aim of representing aspects of that system in abstract terms (e.g., in terms of classes, numbers, vectors etc.) But this characterization also fits various kinds of perceptual and linguistic activities that are not usually considered measurements, and is therefore too broad to count as a definition of measurement.
    Measurement in Science (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
  • The most surprising thing is that you wouldn’t let anyone steal your property, but you consistently let people steal your time, which is infinitely more valuable.
    Life Is Not Short
  • In fact, in all of the included studies where subjects started at (or above) 1.6g/kg, and then further increased their protein intake, those further increases in protein intake led to additional increases in FFM or LBM.
    Protein Science Updated: Why It's Time to Move Beyond the “1.6-2.2g/kg” Rule • Stronger by Science