Wonderful introduction to meta-science. I've been obsessively tracking bad science since I was a teen, and I still learned loads of new examples. (RemWonderful introduction to meta-science. I've been obsessively tracking bad science since I was a teen, and I still learned loads of new examples. (Remember that time NASA falsely declared the discovery of an unprecedented lifeform? Remember that time the best university in Sweden completely cleared their murderously fraudulent surgeon?)
Science has gotten a bit fucked up. But at least we know about it, and at least it's the one institution that has a means and a track record of unfucking itself.
Ritchie is a master at handling controversy, at producing satisfying syntheses - he has the unusual ability to take the valid points from opposing factions. So he'll happily concede that "science is a social construct" - in the solid, trivial sense that we all should concede it is. He'll hear out someone's proposal to intentionally bring political bias into science, and simply note that, while it's well-intentioned, we have less counterproductive options.
Don't get the audiobook: Ritchie is describing a complex system of interlocking failures. I need diagrams for that sort of thing.
Ritchie is fair, funny, and actually understands the technical details. Supercedes my previous fave pop-meta-scientist, Ben Goldacre....more
...a life is like iron. If you make good use of it, it wears out; if you don't, rust destroys it. So too we see men worn out by toil; but sluggishn
...a life is like iron. If you make good use of it, it wears out; if you don't, rust destroys it. So too we see men worn out by toil; but sluggishness and torpor would hurt them more.
Here's the first paragraph of this fitness book, stronger writing than you'd ever expect:
Physical strength is the most important thing in life. This is true whether we want it to be or not... Whereas previously our physical strength determined how much food we ate and how warm and dry we stayed, it now merely determines how well we function in these new surroundings we have crafted for ourselves as our culture has accumulated. But we are still animals – our physical existence is, in the final analysis, the only one that actually matters. A weak man is not as happy as that same man would be if he were strong. This reality is offensive to some people who would like the intellectual or spiritual to take precedence. It is instructive to see what happens to these very people as their squat strength goes up.
A salvo(!) This message is repulsive, unjust, and almost exactly fits my experience. (Though he is being imprecise: better to say "the most important foundation", a key instrument rather than the highest terminus. Though even then it's not "most important", since it neglects an even larger nonintellectual effect on my philosophy of life, love.) I was once a very unhappy young man with a tragicomic existential view - and so many fixable, concrete, absurdly powerful options, absurdly unknown to me. The lifter is Sisyphus, happy. Weights are a strong psychological intervention, perhaps the third-strongest for me.
Lots of reasoning from first principles, which is satisfying and gives it an Athenian air, but which I can just barely evaluate. Luckily it is just so easy to check if he's right (for your case).
[image]
The force of gravity acting on the bar is always acting straight down in a vertical line. Therefore, the most efficient way to oppose this force is by acting on it vertically as well. So not only is a straight line the shortest distance between two points, but a straight vertical line is also the most efficient bar path for a barbell moving through space in a gravitational framework.
Your bench press strength doesn’t adapt to the total number of times you’ve been to the gym to bench or to your sincerest hope that it will get stronger. It adapts to the stress imposed on it by the work done with the barbell. Furthermore, it adapts to exactly the kind of stress imposed on it. If you do sets of 20, you get good at doing 20s. If you do heavy singles, you get better at doing those.
“good technique” in barbell training is easily and understandably defined as the ability of the lifter to keep the bar vertically aligned with the balance point.
Rippetoe is the source of the recent renaissance in cheap simple barbells (dozens of muscles recruited at once) over circuits of giant single-muscle machines. He tells a plausibly mean story about the economic perverse incentives that led to the latter, 1980-2010.
There is too much detail here - he discusses variants of the movements and the debate over them. But what a trivial criticism that is! I think most people could skip two-thirds of the book, since there's detailed kinematics for each move, instructor tips and gym-building tips, but it's interesting throughout. You could get the key parts from the final Programme section, then the "what not to do" chapter closing sheets. Warm-up sets chapter was very useful.
if your schedule does not allow time for proper warm-up, it does not allow time for training at all... [The squat] should be carefully and thoroughly prepared with a couple of empty-bar sets, and then as many as five sets between those and the work sets.
There's an abrupt shift in tone, in the chapter on lifting for kids: he starts citing University press books and listing comparative numbers for his claims. So this is a crusade for him.
It is unlikely that you'd learn form from this alone, even like reading it and applying it live with a mirror. It is unlikely that you could find a PT with this much physical knowledge or clarity.
He's quite bitchy, which I like but you might not:
if you continually miss workouts, you are not actually training, and your obviously valuable time should be spent more productively elsewhere.
If you're not increasing your weight, you're not training, and so not following his programme. The obsession with increase is still not mine. Strength, yes, exertion yes, but constant expansion? I aim for 100kg squat, and expect to attain it this year. Not herniating weight, not kneecapping weight, not sclerotic weight: nice big weight. Maybe once I get there I will grow bored, will again be confounded by the power of concrete body on worldview, and have to start climbing again. He thinks everyone gets injured eventually. But is this under the permanent revolution programme?
Ambition is useful, greed is not. Most of human history and the science of economics demonstrate that the desire for more than is currently possessed drives improvement, both personally and for societies. But greed is an ugly thing when uncontrolled and untempered with wisdom, and it will result in your program’s progress coming to an ass-grinding halt.
you’re a little fluffy around the belly, you have obviously already created the conditions necessary for growth. You’ll usually start out stronger than the skinny guy, and because your body hasn’t got the problems with growing that skinny guys do, strength gains can come more easily for you if you eat correctly.
I've been doing a derivative of this program since October, no trainer, lots of missed sessions, just the primary exercises, 1 hour and out, a scaled-up ordinary diet, and saw decent gains, +50kg onto my initial squat. Rippetoe claims that this could be achieved in half the time with many gallons of milk and much more aggro, and I see no reason to doubt this.
---
Philosophical aspects of lifting:
* As above: The body helps determine the mind. You should be wary of your own philosophy, not just because of your local social conditioning, but also because of your diet, your habits, your daily kindness, and your bench. The lifter is Sisyphus, happy.
* No excuses, no wiggle room, no ambiguity: lifting a lot without injuring yourself is a brute fact, unbiased. Rippetoe: "cause and effect cannot be argued with or circumvented by your wishes and desires."
* 'He's a growing loon!' my granny would say, justifying my early gluttony. Well, twenty years later here I am again, a growing boy. Artificial growth, body neoteny. What does a sense of increase, of coming potential, do to you?
*
"Waiting until soreness subsides before doing the next workout is a good way to guarantee that soreness will be produced every time, since you’ll never get adapted to sufficient workload frequency to stop getting sore.
* There are so many ways to do it wrong. (Only some of those wrong ways break you - the others just slow you down or confuse your body.) Rippetoe focusses on five movements, out of however many thousand physiologically possible ones. These are picked for excellent reasons, tested over decades.
*
Exercise is the thing we must do to replicate the conditions under which our physiology was – and still is – adapted, the conditions under which we are physically normal. In other words, exercise is substitute caveman activity, the thing we need to make our bodies, and in fact our minds, normal in the 21st century.
*
Psychologically, 20 [rep max] work is very hard, due to the pain, and lifters who are good at it develop the ability to displace themselves from the situation during the set. Or they just get very tough.
* I live in my head. But the hip drive out of a deep squat is such a strong strange confluence of forces, vaguely under my control but more accurately an explosion I light the fuse on, that I am driven to notice and appreciate neuromuscular marvels.
---
Book epistemic status: Decades of personal experience plus strong amateur theory plus distilled folk wisdom, in a domain with rapid and unambiguous feedback. He's quite open about unknown things, e.g. the molecular nature of soreness. Sometimes a little defensive, against experts less near to the metal. Sample:
Most sources within the heavy-training community agree that a good starting place is one gram of protein per pound of bodyweight per day, with the rest of the diet making up 3500–6000 calories, depending on training requirements and body composition. Although these numbers produce much eyebrow-raising and cautionary statement-issuing from the registered-dietetics people, it is a fact that these numbers work well for the vast majority of people who lift weights, and these numbers have worked well for decades.
Why trust my opinion at all? I've followed Rippetoe's programme inconsistently for 4 months and still got good returns - worth it for mental health alone. I know sophomore biology and physics, and nothing he says here contradicts any of it....more
Pleasant, readable, sensible. This bit's good, tells you exactly how most social science is limited (it stops at inferential, and sometimes manages toPleasant, readable, sensible. This bit's good, tells you exactly how most social science is limited (it stops at inferential, and sometimes manages to mess even that up):
pinch yourself, and remember what you are. What do you see?
I see bundles of proteins and lipids arranged in a giant colony of cells, lives given ov
pinch yourself, and remember what you are. What do you see?
I see bundles of proteins and lipids arranged in a giant colony of cells, lives given over to the implementation of a wet protein computer that thinks it's a person... Look at us, the first species among the animals that can figure out what the stars are, still tightly bound to impulse and social pressure. (Notice how silly it is, monkeys acting all serious and wise as they try to affect the course of history.)... [but still] see the lost monkey who's trying to steer an entire universe...
Consequentialism for humans. Important because it is rare for discussions of "demandingness" or "scrupulosity" to speak about specific behavioural patterns or phenomenology. (It also has the most important part of self-help, an awareness that positive advice is never universal: "remember the law of equal and opposite advice. For every piece of advice useful to one person, there is some other person who needs exactly the opposite advice.")
(I put off reading this for a whole year, and felt bad about it. So.)
He'd have you move from external motivation to intrinsic motivation because it's more sustainable, and so more effective. He's quite radical about this, ditching normal moral psychology:
the way that most people use the word "should," most of the time, is harmful. People seem to use it to put themselves in direct and unnecessary conflict with themselves... imagine the person who wakes up feeling a bit sick. They say to themselves, "ugh, I should go to the pharmacy and pick up medication before work." Now picking up meds feels like an obligation: if they don't get meds, then that's a little bit of evidence that they're incompetent, or akrasiatic, or bad... this disconnects the reason from the task, it abolishes the "why". The person feeling sick now feels like they have an obligation to pick up medication, and so if they do it, they do it grudgingly, resenting the situation... Now imagine they say this, instead: "ugh, if I went to the pharmacy to pick up medication, I'd feel better at work today."
Your true shoulds, if I could show them to you, would not look like a list of obligations. Your true shoulds would look like a recipe for building a utopia.
Many treat their moral impulses as a burden. But I say, find all the parts that feel like a burden, and drop them. Keep only the things that fill you with resolve, the things you would risk life and limb to defend.
I find it amusing that "we need lies because we can't bear the truth" is such a common refrain, given how much of my drive stems from my response to attempting to bear the truth.
"Badness" is not a fundamental property that a person can have. At best, "they're bad" can be shorthand for either "I don't want their goals achieved" or "they are untrained in a number of skills which would be relevant to the present situation"; but in all cases, "they are bad" must be either shorthand or nonsense.
Wouldn't Nietzsche in his better moods (or Laozi at any time) smile?
---
The strategy is roughly:
1. Find something to care about. (Obstacles: hiding in bed, defensive relativism or nihilism, hiding in routine.) 2. Drop all obligations and see what you still care about. 3. Build intrinsic drive (change environment, train willpower and habit) 4. Draw on the fact that the world is broken as fuel 5. See guilt as an alien concept, unnecessary for the higher goals.
An important distinction:
* Listless guilt: feeling bad because you feel you should do something with your life, but not really thinking about what. * Specific guilt: feeling bad because of unmet obligations to a particular goal. * Akrasia guilt: feeling bad because you're not following the endorsed plan.
---
One startling bit: some people report that following his advice has "broken" them, in the sense that guilt was indeed propping up their lives. His response is, "good":
Some people, when they stop forcing themselves to do things because they "should," will do a bit less to improve the world. They'll bow a bit less to social pressure, and insofar as the social pressure was pushing them to do what you think is good, you might count that as a loss. Some people don't care about things larger than themselves, and that's perfectly fine, and making them more resilient to social pressure might lose the world some charity.
I expect that far more charity is lost from people convincing themselves that their altruistic desires are external obligations and resenting them. I expect that most people who feel obligated to improve the world and only do it because they "should" will become much more effective if they stop forcing themselves...
You can recover from breaking a few parts of yourself, so long as you're modular rather than fragile.
(This attitude is strongly reminiscent of the person Scott Alexander is incredulous about at the end of this great, great piece, though with instrumental harm.)
I'd probably be more cautious, and advise you not to read this if you don't have lots of slack, support, and stomach for horrible facts. (Soares finds intrinsic motivation in attending to how awful the world is, how much it needs fixing.)
Each post repeats its point at least three times, which I suppose is intentional pedagogy, but it made me skim a lot. Soares also often links forward to posts you haven't read yet, confusingly.
I'm not particularly guilt-ridden or scrupulous, on the scale of things, but I still found this good. Not sure I buy everything in it, but the rough method (move from vague to specific guilt, and then view the specific guilt as an external and unhelpful force in the light of your specific goal) seems sensible.
If the following worldview or prose doesn't appeal to you, it's not for you:
you will not be measured by the number of moments in which you worked as hard as you could. You will not be judged by someone rooting around in your mind to see whether you were good or bad. You will not be evaluated according to how unassailable your explanations are, for why things you couldn't possibly have prevented were the things that went wrong.
You will be measured only by what actually happens... this is the driver that takes the place of guilt... All we need to do, in any given moment, is look upon the actions available to us and take whichever one seems most likely to lead to a future full of light.
Why should we listen to self-help, unless the author has done something impressive? I don't know if you find thesethings impressive, but they serve....more
‘Look, the thing about Leonid Vitalevich is that he argues like that because he believes, he genuinely believes, that it’s argument that settles th
‘Look, the thing about Leonid Vitalevich is that he argues like that because he believes, he genuinely believes, that it’s argument that settles the issue. He is not scoring political points, or pleasing his friends, or giving shrewd knocks to his enemies. He expects to persuade people. He thinks that scientists are rational beings who respond to logic if you show it to them. Of course, he judges everybody by himself. He makes his mind up according to induction and deduction. Therefore, everyone does.’
‘An innocent, then?’
according to his daughter... he wrote to every Soviet leader from Stalin to Andropov [telling them they were doing it all wrong]... without making any reference to demand or to markets, Kantorovich had discovered a demand-like logic in the structure of production itself. In his scheme, it was the volume of planned output that was to be maximised, not the customer’s satisfaction, but he had still introduced the idea that the utility of the output to somebody should be the guide to how production was configured.
What is a question mark? An exclamation mark in middle age
Reminder of what a book can be and almost never is. Above mere nonfiction and mere fiction. A deep and moving treatment of one of the most important questions (how can we make everyone happy?) and my current fixation (how can we make people realise the giant romance and supreme moral imperative of technology and work?). A light on the ignored gears that drive the world, the terminally boring made fascinating by the sheer force of understanding and curiosity and taste. A celebration of an unjustly obscure great man, Leonid Kantorovich, and woman, Raissa Berg, and man, Alexander Galich. A moving portrait of a great and terrible man, Nikita Khrushchev. Comically well-researched (he reads Brezhnev's tailor's memoirs; he visits the dance hall; "all of the tattoo designs here are authentic, and can be found in Danzig Baldaev et al., Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia (Gottingen: Steidl, 2004)"), synthesising a vast literature (and but also a single sampled path taken though its indeterminacies). I care for every character, including the monsters. Real tragedy - for some of them really did mean well.
We begin in the confident rationalism of catch-up-growth in a socialised economy. It's easy to forget that even the capitalist economists briefly glumly agreed that the reds had the edge in growth:
If he could solve the problems people brought to the institute, it made the world a fraction better. The world was lifting itself up out of darkness and beginning to shine, and mathematics was how he could help. It was his contribution. It was what he could give, according to his abilities. He was lucky enough to live in the only country on the planet where human beings had seized the power to shape events according to reason, instead of letting things happen as they happened to happen, or allowing the old forces of superstition and greed to push people around. Here, and nowhere else, reason was in charge...
Seen from that future time, when every commodity the human mind could imagine would flow from the industrial horn of plenty in dizzy abundance, this would seem a scanty, shoddy, cramped moment indeed, choked with shadows, redeemed only by what it caused to be created. Seen from plenty, now would be hard to imagine. It would seem not quite real, an absurd time when, for no apparent reason, human beings went without things easily within the power of humanity to supply, and lives did not flower as it was obvious they could. Now would look like only a faint, dirty, unconvincing edition of the real world, which had not yet been born. And he could hasten the hour, he thought, intoxicated. He gazed up the tram, and saw everything and everybody in it touched by the transformation to come, rippling into new and more generous forms, the number 34 rattlebox to Krestovsky Island becoming a sleek silent ellipse filled with golden light, the women’s clothes all turning to quilted silk, the military uniforms melting into tailored grey and silver: and faces, faces the length of the car, relaxing, losing the worry lines and the hungry looks and all the assorted toothmarks of necessity. He could help to do that. He could help to make it happen, three extra percent at a time...
When a market is matching supply with demand, it is the actual movement of the potatoes themselves from place to place, the actual sale of the potatoes at ever-shifting prices, which negotiates a solution, by trial and error. In the computer, the effect of a possible solution can be assessed without the wasteful real-world to-ing and fro-ing; and because the computer works at the speed of flying electrons, rather than the speed of a trundling vegetable truck, it can explore the whole of the mathematical space of possible solutions, and be sure to find the very best solution there is, instead of settling for the good-enough solution that would be all there was time for, in a working day with potatoes to deliver...
The theory in their heads was universal in its reach, and their expertise was supposed to be universal too. They were the agents of humanity’s future, which they were to manufacture by being, in the present, experts in human nature. In this sense, even the grimmest of them was, professionally, a people person. They acted as progress-chasers, fixers, censors, seducers, talent-scouts, comedians, therapists, judges, executioners, inspirational speakers, coaches, and even from time to time as politicians of the representative variety, carrying a concern of their constituents to the centre for attention
The Plan:
Gosplan’s annual output of commodity allocations... 11,500 pages in seventy volumes [nearly all computed by hand, recalculated hundreds of times each year]
Spufford does more to make me feel Khruschchev's coarseness, idealism, and vitality than reading his smuggled memoirs did, and despite S often using the same direct quotes:
They tried to crush us over and over again, but we wouldn’t be crushed. We drove off the Whites. We winkled out the priests, out of the churches and more important out of people’s minds. We got rid of the shopkeepers, thieving bastards, getting their dirty fingers in every deal, making every straight thing crooked. We dragged the farmers into the twentieth century, and that was hard, that was a cruel business and there were some hungry years there, but it had to be done, we had to get the muck off our boots. We realised there were saboteurs and enemies among us, and we caught them, but it drove us mad for a while, and for a while we were seeing enemies and saboteurs everywhere, and hurting people who were brothers, sisters, good friends, honest comrades...
at last it was becoming possible to make good on all the promises which they’d fed to people during the hungry years. All well and good, he thought, because we really meant them, we weren’t trying to hoodwink anyone, but there’s a limit to how long you can keep going on that kind of diet. You can’t make soup out of promises. Some comrades seemed to think that fine words and fine ideas were all the world would ever require, that pure enthusiasm would carry humanity forward to happiness: well excuse me, comrades, but aren’t we supposed to be materialists? Aren’t we supposed to be the ones who get along without fairytales? If communism couldn’t give people a better life than capitalism, he personally couldn’t see the point.
Khrushchev had taken the advice of experts. He had tried to do the virtuous thing, the anti- Stalinist thing, and it had just made him a mass-murderer again... Fire hoses were used to wash the blood off the ground, and when stains still remained, the square was repaved overnight with a fresh layer of asphalt. The bodies were distributed to five different cemeteries, and buried anonymously, in graves already filled with more peaceful bones. Relatives were never told what had become of the dead. It was as if they had suddenly evaporated...
Working for the future made the past tolerable, and therefore the present. But now no one wanted his promises. The hours gaped. There was too much time to think, and no means to lose the thoughts again in action. He couldn’t rid himself of what he thought now. Little by little, in the most undisciplined way, things he had never wanted to remember drifted up from the depths; foul stuff, past hours and minutes it did nobody any good to recall, leaving their proper places in oblivion and rising up into the mind, like muck stirred up from the bottom of a pond to stain the clean water above... So much blood, and only one justification for it. Only one reason it could have been all right to have done such things, and aided their doing: if it had been all prologue, all only the last spasms in the death of the old, cruel world, and the birth of the kind new one. But without the work it was so much harder to believe. Without the work the future had no heft to keep the past at bay. And the world went on the same, so it seemed, unchanged, unredeemed, untransfigured.
Spufford manages this without knowing Russian!
Your mental picture of the Red Army’s advance into Nazi-occupied Europe is not complete if it does not include, alongside the mass rapes and the dromedaries pulling baggage wagons, the sight of Eddie Rosner and his band playing ‘The Chattanooga Choo-Choo’ among the ruins of cities
The crux, the point at which the dream died, and forever:
If they could produce a million tons of steel, they could produce a million tons of anything
(No.)
Throughout this book, it is necessary to remember that, on certain crucial points, most people in the Soviet Union will have known less about its history than does an averagely-informed Westerner in the twenty-first century
Where the United States (for example) was a society ruled by lawyers, with a deep well of campus idealism among literature professors and sociologists, the Soviet Union was a society ruled by engineers, with a well of idealism among mathematicians and physicists. Law, economics, history were sterile, insignificant fiefdoms, ruled by ‘little Stalins’, pint-sized intellectual stand-ins for the great mind in the Kremlin. After Stalin’s death, these subjects had to be revived by incomers from engineering and the pure sciences – who brought with them the engineers’ faith in the solvability of problems, and the scientists’ uncompromising delight in pure pattern.
The deep inequality of the state which sacrificed all values except growth and equality:
life was pretty good up at the top, with a salary twenty times, thirty times the wages on the shopfloor, as steep a relative reward as the spoils of any capitalist executive. There’d be a car and a cook and a housekeeper, and a fur coat for Mrs Red Plenty to wear when the frost bit. There’d be a dacha in the country, from whose verandah the favoured citizen could survey the new world growing down below
The reserved car lanes for Party officials is only the most visible division.
One remarkable bit involves the distinction between the original revolutionaries and the professionals (represented by Kosygin and Brezhnev). The sociopaths and mops. The most egregious and tragic goodharting in human history.
It almost looked like Paris. But he had seen Paris. Moreover he worked in film: he saw this city, and he couldn’t help but notice the way its surfaces habitually turned face-outward to be seen, instead of inwards for the comfort of the inhabitants. He recognised the thinness of the scrim, the cutting of corners where the audience would have its attention elsewhere and be content to register a general blur of grandeur. Those doors would be out of focus anyway: who needed to make sure they actually fitted their frames? The skyscrapers blocked out bold volumes of air, the walls of the city were receding planes, leading the eye back to a sky painted on glass. Moscow was a set, and like all sets looked more convincing from the middle distance than close up.He had started to brood lately on what was behind it; on what you would find if you peeled back a corner of the painted hardboard...
There had supposed to [have been] a space preserved inside the Party for experiment and policymaking, but the police methods used on the rest of Russian society crept inexorably inward. The space for safe talk shrank with the list of candidates to succeed Lenin as the embodiment of infallibility, till, with Stalin’s victory over the last of his rivals, it closed altogether, and the apparatus of votes, committee reports and ‘discussion journals’ became purely ceremonious, a kind of fetish of a departed civilisation...
They were social scientists who thought principle required them to behave like gangsters. But their successors – the vydvizhentsy who refilled the Central Committee in the thirties – were not the most selfless people in Soviet society, or the most principled, or the most scrupulous. They were the most ambitious, the most domineering, the most manipulative, the most greedy, the most sycophantic; people whose adherence to Bolshevik ideas was inseparable from the power that came with them... Stalin had been a gangster who really believed he was a social scientist. Khrushchev was a gangster who hoped he was a social scientist. But the moment was drawing irresistibly closer when the idealism would rot away by one more degree, and the Soviet Union would be governed by gangsters who were only pretending to be social scientists.
On top of everything else it is, it is one of the great works of scientist fiction, an actual depiction of actual thought (though as usual, not the steps of the mathematics).
She had her own professional vision which removed her, in some ways, even further from everyday human sympathies, when she was looking through her science’s eyes. She too was a believer in a world that could be reduced, along one dimension of its existence, to information: only in her case, it was the information of the genes, not the information of the computing circuit, which stood as the pattern of patterns. And once you had seen it, once you had parted the curtains of the visible world and seen that human beings were only temporary expressions of ancient information, dimly seen in tiny glimpses by the light of science’s deductive flashlight, but glimpsed enough to tell that it was vast, and intricate, and slowly changing by indifferent rules of its own as it went on its way into a far future – then all the laws and plans of the self-important present looked like momentary tics and jitters in comparison. A dark message, posted from the past to the future; a dark armada, floating through time. Dark masses, moving in the dark. Dark water. Dark ocean swell...
The hard light of creation burns within the fallible flesh; outshines it, outshines the disappointing world, the world of accident and tyranny and unreason; brighter and brighter, glaring stronger and stronger till the short man with square spectacles can no longer be seen, only the blue-white radiance that fills the room. And when the light fades the flesh is gone, the room is empty. Years pass. The Soviet Union falls. The dance of commodities resumes. And the wind in the trees of Akademgorodok says: can it be otherwise? Can it be, can it be, can it ever be otherwise?
: All of my reviews, all of my essays were written in the glow and shadow of other things I should've been doing.
All procrastinators put off things they have to do. Structured procrastination is the art of making this bad trait work for you. The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, such as gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they find the time. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because accomplishing these tasks is a way of not doing something more important.
If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him to do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely, and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important...
Doing those tasks becomes a way of not doing the things higher on the list. With this sort of appropriate task structure, you can become a useful citizen. Indeed, the procrastinator can even acquire, as I have, a reputation for getting a lot done.
Procrastinators often follow exactly the wrong tack. They try to minimize their commitments, assuming that if they have only a few things to do, they will quit procrastinating and get them done. But this approach ignores the basic nature of the procrastinator and destroys his most important source of motivation. The few tasks on his list will be, by definition, the most important. And the only way to avoid doing them will be to do nothing. This is the way to become a couch potato, not an effective human being...
The second step in the art of structured procrastination is to pick the right sorts of projects for the top of the list. The ideal projects have two characteristics -- they seem to have clear deadlines (but really don't), and they seem awfully important (but really aren't). Luckily, life abounds with such tasks. At universities, the vast majority of tasks fall into those two categories, and I'm sure the same is true for most other institutions...
At this point, the observant reader may feel that structured procrastination requires a certain amount of self-deception, since one is, in effect, constantly perpetrating a pyramid scheme on oneself. Exactly... what could be more noble than using one character flaw to offset the effects of another?
--
Work and study pressurise my life. They give me a structure to defy, a gravity assist. I am happiest laden with obligations, when the set of tasks that is my life flies just out of control. I think the mechanism is this:
1. I require a steady stream of variety. 2. Having a job makes my days closely resemble each other. 3. Intolerable resentment. I am forced to produce creative sparks to satisfy my basic drive.
SP is related to how great I feel when I don't have to go to a party, to my sadly efficient approach to grades, to how giving work to a busy person is a good way of getting it done quicker, i.e. an implausible linear increase of output with increasing things to do. I read more fiction when doing a stats degree and learn more stats when in work.
---
Antecedents of Perry and me.
Fernando Pessoa:
I often wonder what kind of person I would be if I had been protected from the cold wind of fate by the screen of wealth... to reach the tawdry heights of being a good assistant book-keeper in a job that is about as demanding as an afternoon nap and offers a salary that gives me just enough to live on. I know that, had that past existed, I would not now be capable of writing these pages, which, though few, I would undoubtedly have only day-dreamed, given more comfortable circumstances. For banality is a form of intelligence, and reality, especially if it is brutish and rough, forms a natural complement to the soul. Much of what I feel and think I owe to my work as a book-keeper since the former exists as a negation of and flight from the latter.
Nietzsche:
the struggle against the ecclesiastical oppression of millenniums of Christianity... produced in Europe a magnificent tension of soul, such as had not existed anywhere previously; with such a tensely-strained bow one can now aim at the furthest goals... we have it still, all the distress of spirit and all the tension of its bow! And perhaps also the arrow, the duty, and, who knows? The goal to aim at...
Geoff Dyer:
The best circumstance for writing, I realized... were those in which the world was constantly knocking at your door; in such circumstances, the work you were engaged in generated a kind of pressure, a force to keep the world at bay. Whereas here, on Alonissos, there was nothing to keep at bay, there was no incentive to generate any pressure within the work, and so the surrounding emptiness invaded and dissipated, overwhelmed you with inertia. All you could do was look at the sea and the sky and after a couple of days you could scarcely be bothered to do that.
Zach Weiner:
[After months of working only on my main goal] I took on a job doing closed captioning because I found it [made for] an easier time writing. Just something about talking to people and watching weird media made the writing a lot easier. My new theory of self was that you can't write well unless you have a little strife in your life. I worked at the closed captioning job for 4-6 months and by then I was making enough money on the site to responsibly quit my job.
The problem was I didn't want to quit my job and have readership fall off because I couldn't write, so my crazy idea was to go back to school. I thought, it'd to be this weird environment, with younger people, and that would be good...
---
Is this platitudinous? It is possible that the grand narration above is delusional, and that the only actual content here is "A lot of people work better under pressure". Don't think so though.
This has zero relevance for almost everyone; and about 3 quarters of the book can be skipped by almost all of the remaining people (specifics about thThis has zero relevance for almost everyone; and about 3 quarters of the book can be skipped by almost all of the remaining people (specifics about the big tech companies and particular language warts). Even so, it's good that it exists; it's an impressive distillation of Computer Science lore and heuristics, which thus lets smart outsiders in.
I was dismayed to open it and find 100 pages of fluff (the curse of the ebook: book proportions not being completely obvious), but the algorithm challenges start after, don't stop, and are very good. (Don't panic: doing half of them way over-prepared me for my interview.) The non-coding 'brain teasers' are helpful if, like me, you weren't a puzzle geek in youth.
Actually I was - but only because my lăoshī was a saucy linguistics grad who warned me not to practice the tricky phoneme 日 or 入 on the street, or eveActually I was - but only because my lăoshī was a saucy linguistics grad who warned me not to practice the tricky phoneme 日 or 入 on the street, or ever to shout “3-8!”.
Anyway this is funny and valuable for understanding the place’s (otherwise inaccessible) working-class or web or queer registers – and for generally not seeming like a prig.
So: language is fossilised sociology; Chao excavates what would take us decades. She begins with slurs of all sorts, but doesn’t list any homophobia – claiming it isn’t a well-rooted hatred there (…). There’s loads and loads of ableism, though. Gets more serious as it goes, with whole chapters on gay culture and web ‘activism’ (恶搞 is ‘evildoings’, lulz). This turns up details like the infallibly hilarious “potato queen”. I also loved her decoding the ancient innuendoes: 云雨 (clouds and rain), 鱼水之欢 (the fish and the water, happy together), 余桃 (sharing peaches), or “playing the bamboo flute” or “bamboo harmonica”.
(BTW, the title term is 牛屄 – ‘Cow-cunt’ – and means “Awesome!”. It is generally not included in mainstream Hanzi keyboard programs.) ...more
Verbose, thoughtful and extremely well-implemented. On the "normal" side of a growing tradition of artful tech textbooks – Why’s Poignant Guide to Ru Verbose, thoughtful and extremely well-implemented. On the "normal" side of a growing tradition of artful tech textbooks – Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby, Learn You a Haskell, Land of Lisp. Hides the specific things you need to know about JS – its mad liberal syntax, semicolon insertion, functors, – among a My First Programming. But no harm in seeing what one knows already.
Was looking for an intro text for my academic mates who aren't techie mates: this turned out to be it.
Covers all the important boring stuff (file forWas looking for an intro text for my academic mates who aren't techie mates: this turned out to be it.
Covers all the important boring stuff (file formats, coding practices) and a bit of the flashy stuff (CNNs, Keras) and was written specifically to drag maths PhDs into basic competence.
Much, much more my style - opinionated, joined-up, irreverent - though not my speed ("this book gives you the mental tools and attitude you need to goMuch, much more my style - opinionated, joined-up, irreverent - though not my speed ("this book gives you the mental tools and attitude you need to go through most Python books and actually learn something"). Shaw is a beautiful mind in a slightly unhinged shell:
Which programming language you learn and use doesn't matter. Do not get sucked into the religion surrounding programming languages as that will only blind you to their true purpose of being your tool for doing interesting things.
Programming as an intellectual activity is the only art form that allows you to create interactive art. You can create projects that other people can play with, and you can talk to them indirectly. No other art form is quite this interactive. Movies flow to the audience in one direction. Paintings do not move. Code goes both ways.
Programming as a profession is only moderately interesting. It can be a good job, but you could make about the same money and be happier running a fast food joint. You're much better off using code as your secret weapon in another profession. People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect. People who can code in biology, medicine, government, sociology, physics, history, and mathematics are respected and can do amazing things to advance those disciplines.
Collation of results from a very grand project: to channel young careerist thousands into better tasks in higher gear. If you have the will to do wellCollation of results from a very grand project: to channel young careerist thousands into better tasks in higher gear. If you have the will to do well, you should read the website, and think through the planning exercise here.
Unlike everything else I've read about career development, since it talks about work and success without being nauseating....more
Heinous illusions leech £200bn off the world’s vulnerables, annually. The problems of CAM have been covered with more originality and verve by GoldacrHeinous illusions leech £200bn off the world’s vulnerables, annually. The problems of CAM have been covered with more originality and verve by Goldacre / Singh & Ernst, but Offit covers its history, as well as some newer meta-analyses (2005: n=136,000 finds increased mortality from dosing vitamin E. 2008: Cochrane (n=230,000) concludes multivits correlate weakly with increase in cancer and heart disease risk, further confirmed in 2011).
But you can’t hear these ideas too often: there’s no such thing as conventional or alternative medicine (only stuff that works and stuff that doesn’t); everything is chemicals; origin is irrelevant to chemistry; too much of a good thing is lethal; the natural is not always or generally good.
Offit is too quick to jump from the conclusive weak-magnitude evidence against multivitamins (particularly overdosing vitamins A, C, and E) to his attack on all supplementation. For instance: some two-thirds of the world is deficient in vitamin D; few people get enough magnesium through their food; and it’s uncontroversial that vegans should supplement B12. But we’re not really in conflict, because he’d change his mind if he looked at the evidence, and we each accept that (publically-funded) science will out the truth.
Prose 2/5, ideas 4/5.
(I read this under an edition called Killing Us Softly.)...more
These essays are fumbling attempts to put into words lessons that would be better taught by experience. But at least there’s underlying math, plus
These essays are fumbling attempts to put into words lessons that would be better taught by experience. But at least there’s underlying math, plus experimental evidence from cognitive psychology on how humans actually think. Maybe that will be enough to cross the stratospherically high threshold required for a discipline that lets you actually get it right, instead of just constraining you to interesting new mistakes.
everyone needs to learn at least one technical subject. Physics; computer science; evolutionary biology; or Bayesian probability theory, but something. Someone with no technical subjects under their belt has no referent for what it means to "explain" something. They may think "All is Fire" is an explanation.
A very modern sort of rationalism, with buckets of scientific insights and a few genuine innovations* unified into a grand theory of reason and action: probability theory + decision theory. An ongoing concern.
Yudkowsky’s writing suffers from this thing where we incorporate the ideas, but everyone begrudges the insight they glean from him and forget they thought otherwise. This is perhaps because his site carried a heavy pall of nerdiness (fan-fiction and Streisanding), a status deficit which prevents people from according the ideas their actual merit. His dismissive attitude to high-status people and ideas also drives a lot of people crazy, sometimes making them unable to care if the ideas are right. So we minimise his contribution to the life of the new mind, some of the brightest prospects in the dark world. This is unfair but the new mind is the main thing, and broader than him already.
The section intros by Rob Bensinger, written a decade later, are helpful, but this book may need refreshing every decade, because of the replication crisis. This is no insult.
*Some of Yudkowsky's new ideas (not the mere popularisations):
The abstract research chain into FAI: i.e. logical uncertainty, tiling, corrigibility, value learning. The leading academic textbook on AI gives a full page to his ideas. Pascal's mugging (see final footnote here). A new completeness theorem in probabilistic logic, discussed by a big-name mathematical physicist here. The term "Friendly AI" Probably the first to tie the Jaynesian probability calculus plus the Heuristics and Biases program plus rule-utilitarianism.