Lionel Humphreys
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on the atlas — 4
- Mentalizing and heuristics as distinct cognitive strategies in human teaching | Nature Human Behaviour1 savers
- How to Grow a Mind: Statistics, Structure, and Abstraction | Science1 savers
- Elif Batuman · Get a Real Degree2 savers
- Curius / Onboarding2621 savers
highlights — 7
it has been found that abstractions in HBMs can be learned remarkably fast from relatively little data compared with what is needed for learning at lower levels. This is because each degree of freedom at a higher level of the HBM influences and pools evidence from many variables at levels below. We call this property of HBMs “the blessing of abstraction.”
How to Grow a Mind: Statistics, Structure, and Abstraction | ScienceThat’s the torture of walking into a bookshop these days: it’s not that you think the books will all be terrible; it’s that you know they’ll all have a certain degree of competent workmanship, that most will have about three genuinely beautiful or interesting sentences and no really bad ones, that many will have at least one convincing, well-observed character, and that nearly all will be bound up in a story that you can’t bring yourself to care about. All that great writing, trapped in mediocre books! Who, indeed, has time to read them?
Elif Batuman · Get a Real DegreeIf you take ‘good writing’ as a matter of lucidity, striking word combinations, evocative descriptions, inventive metaphors, smooth transitions and avoidance of word repetition, the level of American writing has skyrocketed in the postwar years. In technical terms, pretty much any MFA graduate leaves Stendhal in the dust. On the other hand, The Red and the Black is a book I actually want to read. This reflects, I believe, the counterintuitive but real disjuncture between good writing and good books.
Elif Batuman · Get a Real DegreeDespite the recent trend in viewing fiction as a form of empathy training, I’m pretty sure that writing short stories isn’t the most efficient way to combat injustice or oppression.
Elif Batuman · Get a Real DegreeThe implication is that ‘personal experience’ is insufficient grounds for a novel, unless it is entangled in a ‘large-scale trauma’
Elif Batuman · Get a Real DegreeThe basic novelistic claim – ‘my early writing imitated the conventions of earlier literature, and wasn’t about my comically mundane and eternally surprising life’ – is politicised and dehistoricised: ‘my early writing imitated the conventions of privileged literature, and wasn’t about my people, whose sufferings have rendered them more raucous and hilariously alive than the uptight sons and daughters of privilege.’
Elif Batuman · Get a Real DegreeStarting [at a young age] he’s read everything that he could find about business. The subject that interests him, he’s read newspapers, biographies, tra
Curius / Onboarding