There is nothing wrong with promoting perspectives that have political commitments; in fact, intellectual diversity requires this, because some viewpoints include political commitments.
and we're teaching them the worst habits in the world. And so we're giving them 12 years of the worst habits and then even their capability can't overcome that. That it's the super gifted athlete who literally has every bad habit in the book
the best teacher you had, like everybody remembers the one or two teachers who changed their life. It wasn't because they marked up your paper really well. That wasn't what did it for them. It was because you had some block. They saw you and they convinced you you could do so much more.
In 2021 I started using Tailscale in place of my hand-rolled Wireguard setup, and I haven’t looked back. It has to be one of my favourite pieces of technology ever.
I feel like a relevant insight in learning was um recognizing that like who matters more than what. So, like advice to any college student when they're choosing what courses to take. Uh, care a little bit less about your pre-existing interests because they're kind of arbitrary right now. and care a little bit more about whether like the person teaching it is a good educator and someone you resonate with.
You could imagine systematizing that or like having multiple different agents deliberately given different pieces of context and try to like compare and contrast there. Like we we don't have the same level of manipulation on our own context.
What's proven is if you properly architect it and have co- cloud code go into certain sub segments or have cloud help you build the architecture, you modify, refine it, lock it in and say just work on these few things
In short, whenever we have high-quality evidence that rigorously compares two teaching methods, the research invariably favors strong, direct instruction plus practice
I've written sometimes 10,000 word essays in you know, a couple of days and I've written them in you know, 3 months or 6 months. Uh I I feel like I did I I didn't learn very much from the ones that that that only took a couple of days.
had we freeze time, that piece of code could be decomposed in a matter of 3 to 6 months. But it took us 2 years to do that because as we peel out a piece of code, the business keep on going forward, right?
it's it's kind of purely a practical and empirical thing that we've observed that by teaching the model principles, getting it to learn from principles, its behavior is more consistent, it's easier to cover edge cases, and the model is more likely to do what people want it to do.
Tariffs, and especially the erratic implementation of them, are teaching our allies and enemies alike that the US is no longer a reliable trading partner.
And just like with social media, we're very easily affected by the bombardment of small pieces every single day, without realizing how bad it is for us.
Well, what we realized really early is that quantity of employees doesn't translate the quality of the product they produce. In many cases, it's the opposite. If you have too many people, they have to coordinate their efforts, constantly communicate, and 90% of their time will be spent on coordinating the small pieces of work they're responsible for between each other.
when you learn to play chess you have the grand the long-term goal is winning the game and yet you you can't you um you want to be able to learn from shorter term things like you know taking the your opponent's pieces um and so you do that by having a value function which predicts the long-term outcome
The value of research is usually in telling you which of two plausible theories is true, or which advice from different, seemingly sensible approaches works best.
Uh but it uh I think we kind of like know like roughly the puzzle pieces and it's something that we need to work on and I think if we work on it and we're a bit lucky and everything kind of goes as planned I think single digit is reasonable.
Because some people are simply better at school than other people, any pedagogical strategy, practice, or method that improves the performance of the worst students will also improve the performance of the best students
Re-read because I couldn't interest myself in a couple of other pieces of mind candy and thought "you know who did this sort of thing well...". Which got me thinking, again, about the relationship between this series and feminism.
I don’t think that Atlantis existed. I do think it was one of Plato’s many parables talking about putting it in an interesting story as a teaching device in his school.
So what he concluded was that he called remembering an imaginative construction, meaning that we don’t replay the past, we imagine how the past could have been by taking bits and pieces that come up in our heads.
Well, I like to say there’s no such thing as true or false memories. It’s like Johnny Rotten from the Sex Pistols, he had a saying that’s like, “I don’t believe in false memories any more than I believe in false songs.” And so the basic idea is that we have these memories that reflect bits and pieces of what happened, as well as our inferences and theories.
Criticism is what happens when someone with domain knowledge who is not trying to earn status by hurting you is able to help you see the world as it is. And those three pieces are the key, right? Because most of the criticism I've gotten in my life has come from people who felt like they would feel better if I felt worse.
At the end of the day, scientism still seems better than “no scientism,” given that the latter would leave the field open for highly irresponsible and also ideological -- ideological in all directions – pieces of policy advice.
Grade harder, grade softer, grade with words rather than numbers, hide the grades entirely—none of it works, because the problem was never the grades themselves. The problem was trying to be both a teacher and a cop at the same time.
What we could we could train people by saying, "Here's the recognition prime decision model. Now, you know, follow this." And that would be useless. Because of uh telling people the strategy isn't going to buy them anything. The intuition part is a reflection of the patterns they've built up through experience. And so there's no shortcut for that.
Though the book perhaps gets a little too math-ey by the end (and this is coming from someone who is literally teaching discrete mathematics to university students at the moment), Dantzig provides a compelling overview of what we mean when we talk about "numbers," and why this is a question that we must repeatedly keep re-visiting.
I was disappointed. I love Tim’s work, but this didn’t deliver in the way his past books have. There’s zero thematic organization, so you can’t reference certain topics you want to learn more about except in a few cases. While this has some interesting pieces, I doubt I’ll refer back to it like I have with Workweek, Body, and Chef.
Compassionate Inquiry is an in depth teaching and distillation of the approach I have developed to working with human beings beset by personal issues, health problems that need gently guided exploration, mental health challenges, addictions, relationship difficulties and, above all, an unhealthy relationship to their own selves.
If you were as I was and are contemplating diving into Rust, a couple of pieces of advice, for whatever they're worth: I would recommend getting both The Rust Programming Language and Programming Rust. They are each excellent in their own right, and different enough to merit owning both.
Discerning whether an institution is near failure is a difficult epistemic problem. There are many outwardly visible pieces of institutions that do not reflect their actual health.
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