flâneur

Moses Won

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on the atlas — 30

highlights — 46

  • Whereas what actually happens is that given the ability to choose which stresses to take on, rather than it being an involuntary process, we choose a lot better in apportioning our efforts to the things we care about. One of the noticeable changes is that people take on fewer projects, but put more effort into those they do take on. Most of us, if we were taking a rigorous accounting, would be forced to admit that our project start:project finish ratio is quite bad by default.
    Neurotic Gradient Descent: Core Transformation
  • The harm in addiction we’ll argue is not to be found in the brains of addicts, but in their way of life.
    Embodying addiction: A predictive processing account - PMC
  • Surprises are data. Surprises are also what cause promises to be broken. But the human story begins when broken promises are forgiven, not when inconvenient truths are forgotten. History without forgiveness is just one damn thing after the other. A stream of surprising data that is all noise and fury signifying nothing.
    Blockchains Never Forget
  • Better history is more painful to write, but creates more powerful potentialities for action than mere ungrounded commitment. Remembering and forgiving is better than straight-up forgetting because the truth is a more powerful force than coercion in the long term.
    Blockchains Never Forget
  • For the act of recording to create social realities with the force of history behind them, they must represent a meaningful current consensus among all of those who will, in the future, seek to justify their actions on the basis of the record. You will not easily accept a record of history that spells future doom for you, and in that reluctance, and agency to act on that reluctance, lies the freedom of truth in the future.
    Blockchains Never Forget
  • forgive another human being. And remember what that means: to accept a memory but forbear from action on the basis of that memory.
    Blockchains Never Forget
  • Computationally, you can think of forgiveness as the adoption of beliefs that resolve the conflict between a historical imperative to act one way, and justifications required to act in a different way. It is more expensive because you now have to hold two sets of beliefs relative to the same action: memories (likely painful) that you will not act on, and an alternative set of beliefs that you will act on. Contrast the following pair of history-updates:
    Blockchains Never Forget
  • Forgiveness is a consequential behavior only when there are things you cannot un-remember
    Blockchains Never Forget
  • A socially irreversible event, once it is in the historical record, is potentially there for all eternity. Special steps must be taken to prevent the memory from affecting future realities; steps analogous to the golden repair veins on wabi-sabi cups.
    Blockchains Never Forget
  • Constraints from humans
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • Intrinsic complexity
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • Speed of the outside world
    Dario Amodei — Machines of Loving Grace
  • In computational terms, forgiveness is a decision to construct a justification for actions that is at odds with the justification supplied by history, leading to increased freedom of action. To forgive is to not be a prisoner of of history, without having to destroy it through erasure or rewriting. A temporal non-zero-sum game. To forget, on the other hand, is to destroy the past to free the present, a much weaker mode based on a temporal zero-sum game. The act of forgiveness recalls to mind the famous Viktor Frankl quote: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our p…
    Blockchains Never Forget
  • In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt argued that not only is forgiveness a uniquely human capacity, but that Christianity, by institutionalizing the behaviors of trespassing and forgiving within its theology (“forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us”), fundamentally rewrote the human social operating system. To forgive is to say, I cannot choose to forget, but I can choose to not let my memories affect my actions.
    Blockchains Never Forget
  • McCollum and Kennedy write in 1916 in the Journal of Biological Chemistry in their paper "The Dietary Factors Operating in the Production of Polyneuritis" (summarizing what proved to be their incomplete understanding of the time): "We would, therefore, suggest the desirability of discontinuing the use of the term vitamine, and the substitution of the term fat-soluble A and water-soluble B for the two classes of unknown substances concerned in inducing growth."[
    Elmer McCollum - Wikipedia
  • butter and egg yolk were not equivalent to lard and olive oil
    On the 'discovery' of vitamin A - PubMed
  • In 1881, Russian medical doctor Nikolai Lunin studied the effects of scurvy at the University of Tartu. He fed mice an artificial mixture of all the separate constituents of milk known at that time, namely the proteins, fats, carbohydrates, and salts. The mice that received only the individual constituents died, while the mice fed by milk itself developed normally.
    Vitamin - Wikipedia
  • The growth-supporting 'accessory factor' became known as 'fat-soluble A' in 1918 and then 'vitamin A' in 1920.
    On the 'discovery' of vitamin A - PubMed
  • This depicts the program’s theory of action (Patton, 1997) or theory of change (Weiss, 1998).
    3.2: What is Theory of Change? – Enhancing Program Performance with Logic Models
  • “Theory” may sound too academic for some, but it really just refers to: Expectations Beliefs Experience Conventional wisdom
    3.2: What is Theory of Change? – Enhancing Program Performance with Logic Models
  • I would say the big thing I'm personally obsessed about here is "what comes after?" in relation to this is– I tend to ask the question "how did they solve for distribution?" Because yeah there are definitely people who have had similar formative experiences and yet tragically they languish in obscurity. And the big difference I think is that they found, or fell into, some context where their unique perspectives and skills (often developed earlier in childhood) could be properly put to use towards outcomes that were valuable to other people.
    Childhoods of exceptional people - by Henrik Karlsson
  • A lot of it does not require sacrifices, though. It is just a way of viewing children: as capable of competence, as craving meaningful work, as worthy to be included in serious discussions. We can learn to view them like that, but it is a subtle and profound shift in perception, a shift away from the way we are taught to view children. When I read the biographies, it feels a little bit like getting new peers. Their way of being works on me. Gradually, I raise my aspirations.
    Childhoods of exceptional people - by Henrik Karlsson
  • Striving, even in an exaggerated degree, to call forth the activity of my faculties, by making me find out everything for myself, he gave his explanations not before, but after, I had felt the full force of the difficulties[.]
    Childhoods of exceptional people - by Henrik Karlsson
  • James would model patterns of reasoning by thinking aloud and ask John Stuart to recreate his thought, imitating the thought patterns. He would give him increasingly complex tasks (books or ideas that he wanted John Stuart to summarize and articulate), then he would scaffold John Stuart by asking questions that helped him solve the task, and he would coach and give feedback on how to improve.
    Childhoods of exceptional people - by Henrik Karlsson
  • Helping another person grow rapidly requires a deep and delicate bond, in my experience. A tutor can be demanding, expecting sincere effort from you, but if the firmness does not come from a place of respect—if they do not signal that they truly believe you are capable of more than you think—harshness is degrading
    Childhoods of exceptional people - by Henrik Karlsson
  • Aristocratic tutoring was not focused on measurables. Historically, it usually involved a paid adult tutor, who was an expert in the field, spending significant time with a young child or teenager, instructing them but also engaging them in discussions, often in a live-in capacity, fostering both knowledge but also engagement with intellectual subjects and fields.
    Childhoods of exceptional people - by Henrik Karlsson
  • A common theme in the biographies is that the area of study which would eventually give them fame came to them almost like a wild hallucination induced by overdosing on boredom. They would be overcome by an obsession arising from within.
    Childhoods of exceptional people - by Henrik Karlsson
  • First, they did this by reading books, by self-teaching. Second, when they grew more skilled they started reaching out to exceptional people, trying to convince them to bring them into their milieu
    Childhoods of exceptional people - by Henrik Karlsson
  • These naked apes, the humans, are intensely social animals. They obsessively internalize values, ideas, skills, and desires from the people who surround them.
    Childhoods of exceptional people - by Henrik Karlsson
  • Admittedly this part of the experience my not be as transferable for most teachers, but I do think there’s something generalizable in this. In any classroom environment, whether big, small, remote, or in-person, you want engagement and contributions from the students, but only in the right direction. A class full of ambient chatter is in some sense engaged, but without guidance, it’s unlikely to be in the direction of learning.
    3Blue1Brown - Tips for setting up remote lessons
  • The masking tape on the desk was to know what region is inside the shot of the overhead cam, though even then I’d occasionally write off-screen. The sticky notes on the overhead camera rig let me know where to point in the air to reference links and things on the screen.
    3Blue1Brown - Tips for setting up remote lessons
  • Another thing writing has taught me is how to think clearly, and for myself. I did not realize I had no original thoughts of my own until I started writing everything that came into my mind and realized that most of them were anxious ruminations or recycled arguments from ideologies that capitalized on my emotional vulnerabilities. If you do not know the source of your ideas, they are likely being twisted in translation and you are doing someone else's bidding. Writing taught me to trust my direct experience. I can read ideas, but I will not let them influence me before squaring up with my dir…
    Carmen on Journaling
  • Hey, are you really here? Journaling is all a game of telephone. Are you listening to the message?
    Carmen on Journaling
  • And considering the process for becoming an accredited therapist, it feels like this level of care and attention is the rule, not the exception.
    Convincing myself (and people exactly like me) to do therapy
  • I don’t know where to start when it comes to emotional problems — that’s why I’m in therapy.
    Convincing myself (and people exactly like me) to do therapy
  • Another part of the answer here is something called morphogen gradients, which are specific molecules that are distributed unevenly throughout the developing body, which tells cells where they are relative to the rest of the body. Levin argues that morphogen gradients aren’t enough to guide cells into building an eye or tail because the cells on either side of a given cut will have the exact same concentration of a morphogen, making it impossible to tell whether they should build a head or a tail. He argues that the bioelectric network instead does a body-wide computation of sorts that informs…
    A Revolution in Biology - by Kasra - Bits of Wonder
  • Sonic hedgehog (SHH) are morphogens
    Morphogen - Wikipedia
  • This definition concerns the mechanism, not any specific chemical formula, so simple compounds such as retinoic acid (the active metabolite of retinol or vitamin A) may also act as morphogens
    Morphogen - Wikipedia
  • all of these “diverse intelligences” are ultimately made up of parts, a large number of subunits that have their own competencies and lower-level intelligence, combining to produce something greater than the whole.
    A Revolution in Biology - by Kasra - Bits of Wonder
  • And in the very long run, it could be the answer to virtually all of biomedicine, including traumatic injury, birth defects, degenerative disease, cancer, and aging.
    A Revolution in Biology - by Kasra - Bits of Wonder
  • specific ion channels
    A Revolution in Biology - by Kasra - Bits of Wonder
  • The answer, at least in part, is that all along the body the cells of the worm have a gradient of “resting membrane potentials”, which is effectively a stable electrical state.
    A Revolution in Biology - by Kasra - Bits of Wonder
  • The question we asked earlier—how an egg cell expands into a full body—applies equally to how the planarian regenerates its entire body from just a tiny piece of tissue. (We can think of development itself as a kind of regeneration event.)
    A Revolution in Biology - by Kasra - Bits of Wonder
  • Theory of change is a funny phrase — I first heard it in the nonprofit community, but it’s also widespread in politics and really applies to just about everything. Unfortunately, very few people seem to be very good at it.
    Theory of Change (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)
  • A number of highly original (and to this day largely unchallenged) assumptions are implemented in MUSIC and its descendants about the best way to create sound on a computer. Many of Mathews' implementations (such as using pre-calculated arrays for waveform and envelope storage, the use of a scheduler that runs in musical time rather than at audio rate) are the norm for most hardware and software synthesis and audio DSP systems today.
    MUSIC-N - Wikipedia
  • Zakreski suggests five changes to make educational settings more supportive for gifted children: Level setting — dividing kids into classes based not on their age, but on how advanced they are in a given subject. Curriculum compacting — tailoring learning materials to cut out the content that gifted kids have already mastered, and replacing it with related enrichment or activities. Zakreski says this approach allows kids to move through material faster, while allowing time for creativity, and the hands-on application of what they’re learning. Bringing back classes like shop, art, and music — s…
    Is giftedness a form of neurodivergence - WHYY