Why quantitative methods are heartwarming Dec 12, 2020

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.

The institution of email Dec 12, 2020

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?

Flights of wonder Dec 11, 2020

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:

Unexplored modes of language Dec 09, 2020

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.

Walk to a San Francisco FedEx Dec 09, 2020

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.

Why are delicious biscuits obscure? Dec 07, 2020

I saw a picture of these biscuits (or cookies), and they looked very delicious. So much so that I took the uncharacteristic step of actually making them. They were indeed among the most delicious biscuits of which I am aware. And yet I don’t recall hearing of them before. This seems like a telling sign about something. (The capitalist machinery? Culture? Industrial food production constraints? The vagaries of individual enjoyment?)

What it really looks like Dec 06, 2020

A photograph taken during a discussion of how photographs often fail to capture scenes.

It seems to me that photos often don’t capture what the photographer saw in the scene (perhaps especially if the photographer isn’t really a photographer). But it’s kind of amazing that I think of this as ‘the photograph failed to capture what it was really like’, rather than ‘my perception failed to capture what it was really like, as evidenced by this photograph’!

Cultural accumulation Dec 06, 2020

When I think of humans being so smart due to ‘cultural accumulation’, I think of lots of tiny innovations in thought and technology being made by different people, and added to the interpersonal currents of culture that wash into each person’s brain, leaving a twenty year old in 2020 much better intellectually equipped than a 90 year old who spent their whole life thinking in 1200 AD.

Distanced Christmas book celebration Dec 05, 2020

I attended a friend’s wedding this year, that was in the form of a play which everyone was sent in book form, to read at the same time from different places. There were various interactive interludes, including phone calls with strangers I had been algorithmically matched with, and a big group Zoom. I liked it.

When I was a child, I had a ‘Christmas book’ that I liked, with lots of different nice things in it, like stories about the nativity, and about the Christmas ceasefire in World War I, and songs, and instructions for making foods and decorations, and descriptions of Christmas in other places.

How to unhurriedly take a short time? Dec 03, 2020

Everything I do feels hurried. And yet if I don’t hurry, everything I do takes forever. Is there some outside the box alternative that other people do? (Aside from least-bad compromises between the two?)