"True apologies are precious. They’re a secular process of remediation, drawing on moral intuitions shared by many religious traditions. They encourage membership in one’s moral community because they are fundamentally relational: They heal the bond between wrongdoer and wronged. By temporarily humbling the perpetrator and vindicating the victim, they pave the way for both sides to make up. Apologies … Continue reading The Corruption of Apology
Category: blog post
Forer Statements As Updates And Affirmations
"The Forer Effect is a trick used by astrologers, psychics, and social psychologists...What statements show a Forer effect? Wikipedia just says they should be vague and somewhat positive. Can we do better?......Or you could phrase them as affirmations, or arguments for self-compassion...- Scott Alexander, "Forer Statements As Updates And Affirmations." astralcodexten.substack.com. July 26, 2022 I found the concept … Continue reading Forer Statements As Updates And Affirmations
Scam World
"Despite growing out of the 2008 financial crisis, Bitcoin has led to the creation of a faster, leaner and crueler crisis of its own, an unregulated hellscape where the elites have found yet another way to get rich off of the backs of regular people’s money. Whatever “noble” goals Bitcoin and cryptocurrency allegedly has or … Continue reading Scam World
The Invitation to Critique
"To build a prototype and expose it to critique is to make yourself very vulnerable...But you invite people in because you know that you can’t do the thing you want to do without their honest response......By contrast, Davey worked very hard on restoring that little Norfolk church, but he also sought help of every kind … Continue reading The Invitation to Critique
Success: Deserve Has Nothing to Do With It
"It’s fashionable now to object on principle to the idea that writing is hard. Writing isn’t hard, this camp says; working in coal mines is hard. Having a baby is hard. But this is a category error. Writing isn’t hard the way physical labor, or recovery from surgery, is hard; it’s hard the way math … Continue reading Success: Deserve Has Nothing to Do With It
Schools of Virtue
"Marion Turner, professor of English literature at Oxford University, put it frankly: “I’m not trained to teach students how to be good people, and that’s not my job.”It’s a fair point. It is very pleasant to make a list of intellectual virtues, but why should we believe that academics can teach students courage, humility or … Continue reading Schools of Virtue
A Turning Point in Cancer
"The narrative has been incubating for many years, but in recent days we are witnessing some extraordinary progress in treating and monitoring cancer. The convergence of genomics of the cancer—be it from the person’s DNA or tumor directly or the blood (known as liquid biopsy)—matched with the appropriate therapy is leading to outcomes that are … Continue reading A Turning Point in Cancer
What a Bear Market Looks Like
But for those of us who were investing in tech and tech startups back in 1999-2002, that time will forever be etched in our minds. It was a brutal period during which our belief in the Internet and its potential was sorely tested. Many friends and colleagues left the sector and never returned.So while crypto … Continue reading What a Bear Market Looks Like
What’s The Best Lossless Image Format?
Looking at the test results, the bottom line is that most modern lossless image formats, like WebP and JPEG XL, provide big gains in efficiency compared to even the most optimized PNG.-Johannes Siipola, "What’s the best lossless image format? Comparing PNG, WebP, AVIF, and JPEG XL." siipo.la. July 27, 2021. I've been favoring png over … Continue reading What’s The Best Lossless Image Format?
Open-Tent Policy
"I think a lot about this thread because it reminds me of a lot of interactions I see online, where someone who thinks they know more than others about a topic falls into gatekeeper mode.Look, I get it, there are people who think they are experts on given topics, who know everything. I think, for example, … Continue reading Open-Tent Policy
Schopenhauer’s Stratagems
"A brilliant move is to turn the tables and use your opponent's arguments against him or herself."-Arthur Schopenhauer, "Schopenhauer's 38 Strategems, or 38 Ways to Win an Argument," excerpted from The Art of Controversy Further proof that philosophy can also be sophisticated trolling.
Woke or Witch-Hunt?
"At the protest, I met Tulsi Patel, a postdoc at Columbia. Patel tells me about a new bullying policy at Columbia, which she helped to write, to deal with “power-based harassment” that doesn’t fall into the already illegal categories like sex and race-based harassment. “We recommended calling it the Office of Conflict Resolution, just to … Continue reading Woke or Witch-Hunt?
The Map by Venkatesh Rao
"If only, the argument went, you could discover the exact opposite territory — not literally; that was in the middle of the ocean, but some sort of training-data antonym in latent space — and the exact set of tweaks to make to the training code, the Antimap would emerge at the Antipode, and begin its … Continue reading The Map by Venkatesh Rao
Online Techno-Polymath Guy
"I was discussing with Sam the “genre,” so to speak, of the Online Techno-Polymath Guy. You know this guy. He (and it’s usually a he) has his own website, probably hand-crafted in Kirby, Github, or WordPress, as well as a well-regarded, personable Twitter presence. He keeps track of everything he reads, writes pithy blog posts on esoteric subjects. … Continue reading Online Techno-Polymath Guy
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