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Genetic magic
23andMe are now willing to guess where one’s ancestors are from at the level of counties. For instance, as well as thinking I have 19% Swedish ancestry, they now guess that it is primarily from Västra Götaland County. Which is in fact where my current Swedish relatives cluster. Their guesses in Ireland center on Cork, with Limerick and Tipperary next door 4th and 8th most likely (of 26 counties), and those two are where the few 17th-19th Century relatives I know about seem to have come from in Ireland, so that also seems pretty good.
Much as I believe all that stuff about one’s body being full of cells that contain genetic code that is shared by one’s relatives, and about historic movement and mixing of populations being low, it’s awesome to actually see someone take a fairly good guess at what part of what country your obscure relatives lived hundreds of years ago by examining your spit.
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Some things I'm looking forward to in 2021: probable post-pandemic edition
- Fewer deaths all around
- A giant party at my house
- A portion of the research I feel bad about not doing just becoming irrelevant (e.g. what’s the evidence about surfaces now? Are we badly underestimating the harms of long covid?)
- Leaving my house in an unprepared fashion and seeing where it takes me
- Whatever it was that I used to do in places other than my house, that I actually can’t seem to remember or explicitly pinpoint and plan from a distance, but which I vaguely miss (possibly this is basically just 4)
- Seeing friends who live in faraway places such as Berkeley
- Going on a cross-country train and embracing the general lack of hygiene and space
- Seeing non-household friends without inadvertently spending a fraction of my attention on air dynamics and mask stability
- The stakes of everyday personal choices being lowered enough that people being thoughtless or foolish isn’t a critical threat to friendliness, harmony or anyone’s life
- Helping the economy of restaurants and cafes recover
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What is it good for? But actually?
I didn’t learn about history very well prior to my thirties somehow, but lately I’ve been variously trying to rectify this. Lately I’ve been reading Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, listening to Steven Pinker’s the Better Angels of Our Nature, watching Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s documentary about the Vietnam War and watching Oversimplified history videos on YouTube (which I find too lighthearted for the subject matter, but if you want to squeeze extra history learning in your leisure and dessert time, compromises can be worth it.)
There is a basic feature of all this that I’m perpetually confused about: how has there been so much energy for going to war?
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The wild
The idea of art about nature doesn’t sound exciting to me in the abstract. Perhaps I remember that I am evolutionarily supposed to see it and go, ‘oh fantastic, it’s green and blue near each other, maybe I’m in for some reproductive success’, and that doesn’t sound very inspiring. (Yes, I know that simple evolutionary situations can feel inspiring from the inside.)
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Blog plant
I like to have plants in honor of things I’ve done. I’m not consistent or proportionate about it, and admittedly I also have quite a few plants that I intend to be in honor of things I haven’t yet done. But now that this blog has apparently functional comments and images and analytics, as well as words on pages on the internet, I declare it fully bloggy, and my effort to make a blog complete. Here’s my blog plant:
I welcome perspectives on good marginal improvements toward WSSP being a pleasing blog to interact with. (I’m aware that the subscription possibilities are not as salient as they could be.) It is a static site made using Jekyll and kept on Github, with its comments looked after by Disqus and its analytics by Google and its pictures by Photobucket.
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Why quantitative methods are heartwarming
From Twitter:
If you listened to my podcast w/Michael Sandel, you know we have very different views on whether markets are "degrading"
One thing I didn't mention to him: This bit in his book cracked me up – because I remember my friends & I found this aspect of Moneyball SO HEARTWARMING <3 pic.twitter.com/9W6Op30vF8— Julia Galef (@juliagalef) December 10, 2020
I haven’t actually seen Moneyball, but it does sound heartwarming, and I have had to hide my tears when someone described a payment app their company was working, so I’m probably in Julia’s category here.
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The institution of email
There seems to be a common phenomenon where people get messages, then fail to respond to them, then feel bad. And the rarer strategy of actually dealing with all of one’s emails promptly doesn’t even seem obviously better. Was that how things were with letters or telegrams? Is it just that there are so many messages now, because they are easy to send?
Could email, say, have gone a different way?
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Flights of wonder
Today I put up the last page in AI Impacts’ (primarily Ronny Fernandez’s) investigation into how human-made flying machines compare to evolved ones. (Relevant to how we expect human efforts to build minds to compare to evolved minds.) Evolution mostly won.
Some other interesting things I learned in the process of editing this:
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Unexplored modes of language
English can be communicated via 2D symbols that can be drawn on paper using a hand and seen with eyes, or via sounds that can be made with a mouth and heard by ears.
These two forms are the same language because the mouth sounds and drawn symbols correspond at the level of words (and usually as far as sounds and letters, at least substantially). That is, if I write ‘ambition’, there is a specific mouth sound that you would use if converting it to spoken English, whereas if you were converting it to spoken French, there might not be a natural equivalent.
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Walk to a San Francisco FedEx
Today I had three work projects so close to done that I might be able to put something up on each, which would usually encourage work enthusiasm. But when I started on the first, I was struck by a strong inclination to stop and do something else. I didn’t immediately, but the inclination remained. And such inclinations make work worse in themselves, because when each new sentence or next motion engenders a little flinch away from it, the whole thing gets so slow and encumbered and hard to concentrate on that it makes sense to be repelled by it. And the thought of moving to the next little bit on the other projects seemed similarly distasteful.
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EVERYTHING — WORLDLY POSITIONS — METEUPHORIC