flâneur

Selena Zhang

17 followers · 8 following · 1489 views

on the atlas — 36

highlights — 59

  • Class 1 problems are caused by technology that is not perfect, and are solved by the marketplace. Class 2 problems are caused by technology that is perfect, and must be solved by extra-market forces such as cultural norms, regulation, and social imagination.
    The Technium: Class 1 / Class 2 Problems - https://kk.org/thetechnium/class-1-class-2-problems/
  • If you make experts more capable, similar ideas will often also help novices; but if you focus on educational use, you’re unlikely to transform real work in the field
    Exorcising us of the Primer | Andy Matuschak
  • Our system should be designed to help us engage in the projects and interests we find meaningful, rather than to “achieve learning goals”.
    Exorcising us of the Primer | Andy Matuschak
  • But even in that framing, you’re still saddled with a demanding extra constraint, one that your competitors don’t have. You need to produce an irresistible aesthetic experience while also ensuring that the player thoroughly learns some disciplinary topic. Sophisticated films and novels have carved out a successful niche, but how many of these works also manage to teach an abstract topic? It’s hard enough to make a profound aesthetic experience, and hard enough to convey an abstract idea thoroughly. Doing both simultaneously requires rare genius, no matter the aesthetic axis.
    Exorcising us of the Primer | Andy Matuschak
  • I’m suspicious of isolated learning—learning for learning’s sake. I most enjoy learning when it’s part of some larger meaningful activity, and when it helps connect me more deeply with other people I enjoy.
    Exorcising us of the Primer | Andy Matuschak
  • Anyone looking to extend human cognition must engage just as deeply with emotion.
    Exorcising us of the Primer | Andy Matuschak
  • this version of Moore’s Law is rarely ever discussed. According to mining expert Paul Gait, if you look at the number of labour hours it takes to mine and refine a tonne of copper, it has fallen rapidly and consistently over much of civilised history.
    The discovery of copper - Works in Progress
  • But most people, especially highly gifted people, do not really know where they belong until they are well past their mid-twenties.
    Managing Oneself
  • If the marketing vice president does not understand what these high-grade knowledge specialists are doing, it is primarily their fault, not hers. They have not educated her.
    Managing Oneself
  • A plan can usually cover no more than 18 months and still be reasonably clear and specific.
    Managing Oneself
  • feedback will also reveal when the problem is a lack of manners
    Managing Oneself
  • Far too many people—especially people with great expertise in one area—are contemptuous of knowledge in other areas or believe that being bright is a substitute for knowledge.
    Managing Oneself
  • he divide between "enhanced" and "unenhanced" already exists today due to limitations in who can and can't use ChatGPT.
    My techno-optimism
  • This core idea, that some technologies are defense-favoring and are worth promoting, while other technologies are offense-favoring and should be discouraged, has roots in effective altruist literature under a different name: differential technology development.
    My techno-optimism
  • But it was a good pain, and that’s what this was. This girl had become a woman. When I went back two years later, the girl came to me and gave the pills back. She said, “You don’t understand, this is not our way. And if I didn’t do that, I wouldn’t be a woman now.”
    Why Some Women Choose to Get Circumcised - The Atlantic
  • Some people in Africa believe that bodies are androgynous and that all male and female bodies contain male and female parts.
    Why Some Women Choose to Get Circumcised - The Atlantic
  • We have shaving your legs, or wearing makeup.
    Why Some Women Choose to Get Circumcised - The Atlantic
  • If I decide I don’t want to circumcise my daughter, that’s not an individual behavior. I would have to answer to my husband, to my mother-in-law, my mother-in-law would have to answer to her friends throughout the community, my father-in-law would have to answer to people in the community, so there’s societal pressure. So understanding what is a collective decision versus individual is really important.
    Why Some Women Choose to Get Circumcised - The Atlantic
  • Zizek ultimately describes this arms-length relationship to belief as a feature of post-modernity. If it feels false or inauthentic to claim an earnest belief, try displacing it onto someone else, and enjoy it vicariously through them.
    We Need More Content! - by Santi Ruiz - Regress Studies
  • Musk could personally fund the entire US political ecosystem on both sides for a whole two-year election cycle.
    Too Much Dark Money In Almonds | Slate Star Codex
  • Add up all US spending on candidates, PACs, lobbying, think tanks, and advocacy organizations – liberal and conservative combined – and we’re still $2 billion short of what we spend on almonds each year.
    Too Much Dark Money In Almonds | Slate Star Codex
  • you stop running against it. You stop calling them a deep state.
    All Aboard the Bureaucracy Train—Asterisk
  • Get leaders who don’t talk to the civil service like a king talks to his servants.
    All Aboard the Bureaucracy Train—Asterisk
  • the more risk that contractors are asked to take on, the more they’ll charge. And this adds up.
    All Aboard the Bureaucracy Train—Asterisk
  • you want to constantly deprivatize risk as much as possible,
    All Aboard the Bureaucracy Train—Asterisk
  • you need to have an in-house bureaucracy that can technically score things.
    All Aboard the Bureaucracy Train—Asterisk
  • the technical score ranges from 50 to 70%
    All Aboard the Bureaucracy Train—Asterisk
  • you can outsource the design to consultants, but the consultants need to be supervised by civil servants, not political appointees and not other consultants.
    All Aboard the Bureaucracy Train—Asterisk
  • The idea that a public policy grad from Harvard or Oxford gets to tell a scientist what to do — that’s a very American and British thing.
    All Aboard the Bureaucracy Train—Asterisk
  • When you tell the civil service that it’s always going to be on the lower end of the class system, you’re going to lose the best people. The best people will pick a career path that lets them be on top, which in this system means they’re doing many different things and never learn one thing well.
    All Aboard the Bureaucracy Train—Asterisk
  • a large public sector, because you need a large enough bureaucracy that can supervise all the contractors
    All Aboard the Bureaucracy Train—Asterisk
  • in all places with low construction costs and in most places with medium construction costs, the state does planning. They can contract consultants to help, but the state supervises them
    All Aboard the Bureaucracy Train—Asterisk
  • Linguistically, the term discrimination puts more emphasis on the agency of the decision maker
    Relative notions of fairness
  • If the personalized classifier uses more than k ≥ 19 binary group attributes, then for any hypothesis test there will exist a pair of probability distributions P X , G ,Y ∈ H 0 ,Q X , G ,Y ∈ H 1 for which the test attains a probability of error that exceeds 50%
    0cfc9404f89400c5ed897035e0d3748c-Paper-Conference.pdf
  • In this view, the distribution is immutable.
    Classification
  • Implicit in this formal setup of classification is a major assumption. Whatever we do on the basis of the covariates � X cannot influence the outcome � Y
    Classification
  • It’s like the nonweird closet.
    Ezra Klein on Why We’re Polarized (Ep. 86) | Conversations with Tyler
  • “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
    Chesterton’s Fence: A Lesson in Second Order Thinking - Farnam Street
  • they all may be very ungrounded in the bureaucratic or emotional or human or social realities of the thing they’re talking about. They’re very smart people, puzzling about how a system works from the outside.
    Ezra Klein on Why We’re Polarized (Ep. 86) | Conversations with Tyler
  • It’s like an intellectual culture that is very venture capitalist in its approach. So, it’s like, “Here are 20 ideas. They’re all very interesting. Nineteen of them are probably quite wrong, not even a little wrong, like very wrong. But that last one might be great, really important, and if you could just figure out which one it is . . .” Now, that works really well when the question is money, and it works less well when the question is, you’re trying to rebuild society in the image of your own ideas.
    Ezra Klein on Why We’re Polarized (Ep. 86) | Conversations with Tyler
  • building the future of our communication commons atop a business model that is about engagement mediated through the intensity of the viewers’ or audiences’ emotional reaction
    Ezra Klein on Why We’re Polarized (Ep. 86) | Conversations with Tyler
  • we end up focusing on, one, the easy cases rather than the hard cases, like fake news as opposed to real news. Everybody agrees that fake news is bad, and you shouldn’t have it. Real news can also be very bad in terms of what it emphasizes, or the quality of the work, and so on. But the question of how to handle it is much, much harder
    Ezra Klein on Why We’re Polarized (Ep. 86) | Conversations with Tyler
  • the amount of redistribution we do on the back end just seems ridiculously small to me
    Ezra Klein on Why We’re Polarized (Ep. 86) | Conversations with Tyler
  • Recently, one of my favorite questions to bug people with has been “What is it you do to train that is comparable to a pianist practicing scales?”
    Tyler Cowen is the best curator of talent in the world
  • Constraints give your life shape. Remove them and most people have no idea what to do
    How to Do What You Love
  • what happens when you quit and then discover that you don't actually like writing novels?
    How to Do What You Love
  • To be happy I think you have to be doing something you not only enjoy, but admire. You have to be able to say, at the end, wow, that's pretty cool.
    How to Do What You Love
  • The definition of work was now to make some original contribution to the world, and in the process not to starve.
    How to Do What You Love
  • The reason the young care so much about prestige is that the people they want to impress are not very discerning.
    How to Do What You Love
  • Another test you can use is: always produce. For example, if you have a day job you don't take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing?
    How to Do What You Love