The most successful skill is if you don't just have one, but you have variety and you can switch between them and you can use context to switch between those.
It’s a very interesting book, but for some reason Michio Kaku’s style doesn’t spark me as much as Briane Greene’s or Stephen Hawking’s or Neil deGrasse Tyson’s.
A few months ago I read an essay about silence by Amir Zadnemat in 3 Quarks Daily, called "The Symphony of Silence: An Exploration of the Sound of Absence"*. The most interesting section was a riff on various kinds of silence, especially in spoken language, each communicating something very distinct despite the fact that objectively each silence sounds (or I guess doesn't sound) identical:
They get women to sleep with them, but they attract both men and women and cause them to surrender their better judgment and make bad choices in a variety of contexts, including the voting booth.
And then there were people who used it as a moral cudgel. Like you should be if you're not using TDD, you're not professional. And that's just such People can write very good software with a wide variety of workflows.
I'm willing to buy it sort of low enough down when, you know, progress is relatively simple, um, but but higher up you start to get to shape the way in which you you do the exploration and it's interesting, you know, people we are starting to shape it in in in interesting ways.
we've been gifted uh just this incredible variety of machines which we don't understand really at all and we just have to go and sort of try and understand them on a you know, one-by-one basis.
Um, there's just too many interesting ways of combining things. There's too many sort of deep ideas waiting to be uh, discovered and when it you know, not only we, but but nobody ever is going to to discover most of them. So, choices about how to make how to do the exploration actually matter quite a bit.
Like any addictive consumer product that routinely exposes users to graphic sex, extreme violence, and anonymous sexual predators, social media in its current form causes a variety of harms to people of all ages. But we allow adults (often defined as age 18) to make decisions that are bad for them.
We have a whole variety of different mental mechanisms at our disposal gifted to us by, you know, a few million years of evolution as a social species. And yet we've made rationality the gold standard.
If you do too much exploration, you can have your team feel a little bit too scattershot, just trying a 100 different random ideas. What's the through line? What's the strategy? How do you pattern match, you know, successes across them? And if you do too much in exploitation, which is often the MMO of growth teams, it can lead to this like saturation and stagnation where you're just locally maximizing a thing.
so it's not a simple matter of programming it's not you know typing into a keyboard until or or I guess asking cursor to do something until a piece of software emerges, it's exploration, it's discovery, it's posing hypotheses and validating or invalidating those again and again and again.
But for a variety of reasons I think it makes more sense to stay agnostic about forecasts of potential GDP growth, and focus more on the signals the current performance of the economy is sending.
However, current understanding and evaluation of world models in artificial intelligence (AI) remains narrow, often focusing on static representations learned from training on massive corpora of data, instead of the efficiency and efficacy in learning these representations through interaction and exploration within a novel environment.
A unique lens on work in the late 90s that still resonated when I read it in 2018. It's a soulful exploration of how to maintain your humanity, creativity and inner fire in environments that often prioritize conformity and efficiency.
A simple and tested method for communicating and connecting with anyone, Supercommunicators is an exploration of the psychology and neuroscience of communication — and how to use those skills at work, home and in life.
The MVP as a practice of building a hacky product as quickly and cheaply as possible to validate the product does no longer work. Many product categories are already saturated with a variety of alternatives, and to truly test the viability of any new idea you need to build something that is substantially better.
I don't think we necessarily want there to be one big super intelligence. We want to empower everyone to both have more fun, accomplish their business goals, just everything that they're trying to do. We don't tend to have one person that we work with on everything, and I don't think in the future we're going to have one AI that we work with.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow resonated with me for personal reasons, but I think Zevin’s exploration of partnership and collaboration is worth reading no matter who you are.
If we collectively devoted the same levels of investment and inventive power and entrepreneurship to developing more and better legal pathways for people to move across borders to needed jobs, including a variety of modalities for labor mobility, we could solve the growing challenge of labor scarcity.
I think at the level of bacteria, not much variety. I think we would get how many times you say you want to run it a million times? I would say at least a few hundred thousand will get bacteria again.
But the researchers who have investigated this find that scientists do the same thing. They have something that's called knowledge shields, the way all of us do, that that a a a variety of techniques for explaining away inconvenient data and anomalies. But what we're effectively doing is we're holding on to our story.
The book Moonwalking with Einstein explores humans' relationship to memory, our ideas of knowledge, and how that's shifted over time. But it begins with an exploration of competitive memorization and the techniques used by memory champions.
There's a book, which isn't in the five I've chosen (though it could well have been), Peter Godfrey Smith's Other Minds, which I think is a beautiful exploration of other minds.
Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid: A masterwork from 1979 that focuses on how cognition can emerge via a variety of hidden neurological mechanisms. I always regretted blazing through GEB in college for a class. This is the summer when I finally get to reread it slowly and carefully.
I honestly don't recall that much from this book. I read it fairly early on in my Apollo exploration. I'd recommend Eyles' Sunburst and Luminary, above, as a better starting point if you're interested in the computers that flew Apollo.
This documentary was a solid telling of the story of that mission, and of the later-in-Apollo scientific goals and geological exploration that was achieved, as well as a wistful look back at the story of the last humans, to date, to set foot on the moon.
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.
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
korrents.com.
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.