Feedback for learning Feb 01, 2021

I wish there were better (or more known to me) quantitative tests of skills that are good for me to have. I often find learning things when there is tight feedback pretty fun. For instance, I play geography and history quizzes on Sporcle with an addictive vigor, and enjoy learning various languages on Duolingo, and various facts via Anki. I used to memorize poetry from the bathroom walls. But none of these seems that useful (in Anki I mostly learn about famous art and art movements). And meanwhile, I fail to know all manner of things that would be good to know, and forget most of what I read. (For instance, I’d like to know many more details of machine learning, how the US government works, and what happened in most of history, and I wish I remembered the details of The Precipice or The Better Angels of our Nature or even War and Peace—which I haven’t read much of, substantially because I keep losing track of what is going on or who the characters are.)

Oceans of snails Jan 31, 2021

Somehow while knowing that a) ‘sea snail’ was a concept, and b) beaches were strewn with sea shells, which involve various snail-reminiscent spirals, I failed to reach the stunning conclusion that the oceans are substantially inhabited by these kinds of characters:

Play with neural net Jan 30, 2021

I found Tensorflow Playground pretty cool to play with, in case anyone is looking for the kind of intuitive understanding of neural nets that futzing with a thing with one’s hands contributes to.

One game you can play is pretending to be a training algorithm. How would you adjust the weights, if you wanted to classify which of two spirals a point comes from?

Top li'l pots Jan 29, 2021

I am a connoisseur of a certain genre of mostly-snack food, combining aesthetics, convenience and the idiosyncratic types of actual food that I like to eat (central examples of food whose substance I like, ignoring form, are parsley, farro, black lentils, pecans, craisins, dark chocolate, feta cheese, swedish crispbread, cream, ginger, brown or raw sugar on its own. Central non-examples are cinnabons, most cereals, cheetos, milk chocolate, cheese-flavored anything, pea protein, Coca-Cola, parmesan cheese, sweet potatos, spinach, beyond burgers.)

Here is a list of some of the best li’l pot style foods I have come across so far (not all literally in small pots). Links for illustration, not guaranteed to be value-for-money instances.

Unpopularity of efficiency Jan 28, 2021

I feel like ‘efficiency’ is often scowled at. It is associated with factories and killing and commercialization, and people who are no fun. Things are openly criticized for being oriented toward efficiency. Nobody hopes to give their children an efficient childhood or asks for an efficient Valentine’s day, unless they want to get it over with. I expect wariness in listeners at talk of efficient charity.

This intrigues me, because in what I take to be its explicit definition, ‘efficiency’ is almost the definition of goodness manifest. The efficiency of a process is the rate with which it turns what you have into what you want.

What is up with spirituality? Jan 26, 2021

What is up with spirituality? I mean, from an atheistic perspective?

In my experience, atheists tend to focus on the empirical question of whether there is an all-powerful supernatural creature behind all that we observe. And yeah, there probably isn’t.

But having won that point, what does one make of the extreme popularity of religion? I think the usual answer given is something like ‘well, we used to be very ignorant and not have good explanations of natural phenomena, plus we tend to see agents in everything because our agent detection software is oversensitive’.

Which might explain the question ‘Why would people think a supernatural agent controls things?’. But what seems like only a corner of religion.

Another big part of religion—and a thing that also occurs outside religion—seems to be ‘spirituality’—a cluster of things I find hard to describe, but which seem pretty disconnected from explanatory questions of where trees came from or why the crops failed.

Wordtune review Jan 26, 2021

Wow, Facebook is advertising an AI-driven writing tool to me. I think this is the first time I’ve seen a mainstream potentially useful product coming from all of this. Let’s see how it does. I’ve started by writing this paragraph quickly myself, and then I will rewrite it using Wordtune, to demonstrate its features. Then I may rewrite it further using its premium features or my more honed writing, all going well.

Tentative covid surface risk estimates Jan 25, 2021

My household previously made some highly uncertain estimates of the covid risk from bringing random objects that other people have recently been touching into our home, for instance salads and groceries an endless stream of Amazon packages. The official guidance is very vague, e.g. “…not thought to be the main way the virus spreads”. Our bad estimates were fairly low, so we decided to basically ignore it in our covid risk accounting, except for habitually taking some reasonable precautions.

Then the covid rates here increased by a factor of ten, so we decided it would be good to look at it again.

So today I tried to estimate this from this paper (HT Ben Weinstein-Raun and Catherine Olsson) in which a group of researchers swabbed various door handles and trash cans and crosswalk buttons and the like in a small Massachusetts city and measured the covid RNA detectable on them. They also used the amounts they measured to estimate the infectiousness if someone else were to touch the surface and then touch their face.

Here I offer you a draft of an elaborate Guesstimate spreadsheet on the topic, in case you are interested in such things.

Li'l pots Jan 24, 2021

As a pandemic-era purchaser of foods for a large household of time-thirsty researchers, I can tell you an interesting thing about the demand for cheese in this context:

1. If you spend a lot of money on a nice cheese, wrapped up in some fancy foreign label, there is a good chance that it will languish sadly in the back of the fridge for months until someone notices that it is moldy and throws it away, or makes a last-ditch attempt to cut up the whole thing and compel the group to eat it. Maybe on the way there, someone will take a single slice of it once, and move it in a zip-loc bag, where it will remain until the end.

2. If you spend a few dollars on a six-pack of generic single-serve cheese-cubes with nuts, they will fly from the fridge and you will be acknowledged for this triumph of shopping, and more such cheese will be needed by the next grocery order.

Who should you expect to spend your life with? Jan 23, 2021

Striking things about the figure below, which I got from Our World in Data, on time use [edit: oops, all only known to be true in America]:

• People spend increasing time alone over their whole lives, with the exception of roughly their twenties. This surprises me a bit because it seems like people like spending time with other people, and I would expect them to increasingly succeed at it with experience and time to acquire partners and families and friends.
• From 31 to 45, people spend more time with children¹ on average than they spend with any other category of person, including for instance partners and colleagues.
• You might think all this children time would be substituting for some partner time, but as the children time swoops downward by three quarters, partner time stays about the same.
• People are at a relationship-time-steady-state between about thirty and sixty. I imagine that many people start relationships in that time, so does that mean that they also stop them at about the same rate, or gradually reduce time with their partners at a rate matching others’ forming of new relationships? Are people radically less likely to start relationships after about thirty?
• People spend broadly decreasing time with every group except their partner over time, from some early peak for each trend—in the teenage years for friends and family, and in the 20s and 30s for colleagues and children. I wonder how many people just like being alone and with their partners more than most other options, and steadily optimize for that, once they have been sociable enough to find a partner in their early years.
• Coworker time peaks at age 25-30 and goes slowly downward before the retirement descent. Is that from people dropping out of the workforce? Earning themselves a nice private office? Some difference between junior and senior roles?
• People spend fairly consistent time with their friends after a decline from 18 to 40. Retirement doesn’t increase it. Spending three hours a day fewer with children doesn’t increase it. I guess those things go to solitude.

In other news, Our World In Data seems awesome.