Love how everything is very detailed and layed out strategically. Many books on this topic suffer from lack of explanation and of the inherent presumpLove how everything is very detailed and layed out strategically. Many books on this topic suffer from lack of explanation and of the inherent presumption that the reader already knows everything there is to know. That's not always the case and this book remedies that....more
Edge or no edge - a fun walk in the garden of ideas, overused and niche ones.
Ideas that I love: - The Longevity Factor - The Illusion of Explanatory DeEdge or no edge - a fun walk in the garden of ideas, overused and niche ones.
Ideas that I love: - The Longevity Factor - The Illusion of Explanatory Depth - Synaptic Transfer - Emergence - Babylonian Lottery - Referential Opacity - Antagonistic Pleiotropy - Transcriptome - Fallibilism - Equipoise - Ansatz - Homophily - Lenghth-biased sampling - Construal - Bisociation - Decentering - Verbak overshadowing - Liminality - Non-ergodic
Other nifty stuff: Q: If you asked 100 people on the street if they understand how a refrigerator works, most would say yes. But ask them to produce a detailed, step-by-step explanation of exactly how, and you’d likely hear silence or stammering. This powerful but inaccurate feeling of knowing is what Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil in 2002 termed the illusion of explanatory depth (IOED), stating, “Most people feel they understand the world with far greater detail, coherence, and depth than they really do.” (c) Q: “Like all men in Babylon, I have been proconsul; like all, I have been a slave.” —Jorge Luis Borges, Lottery in Babylon The lottery in Babylon begins as a simple game of chance. Tickets are sold, winners are drawn, a prize awarded. Over time, the game evolves. Punishments are doled out alongside prizes. Eventually the lottery becomes compulsory. Its cadence increases, until the outcomes of its drawings come to underpin everything. Mundane events and life turns are subject to the lottery’s “intensification of chance.” Or perhaps, as Borges suggests, it’s the lottery’s explanatory power that grows, as well as that of its shadowy operator, the Company, until all occurrences are recast in light of its odds. “Babylonian lottery” is a term borrowed from literature, for which no scientific term exists. It describes the slow encroachment of programmatic chance, or what we like to refer to today as “algorithms.” Today, as in Babylon, we feel the weight of these algorithms. They amplify our product choices and news recommendations; they’re embedded in our financial markets. While we may not have direct experience building algorithms—or, for that matter, understand their reach, just as the Babylonians never saw the Company—we believe them to be all-encompassing. (c) Q: “Non-ergodic” is a fundamental but too little known scientific concept. Non-ergodicity stands in contrast to “ergodicity.” “Ergodic” means that the system in question visits all its possible states. In statistical mechanics, this is based on the famous “ergodic hypothesis,” which, mathematically, gives up integration of Newton’s equations of motion for the system. Ergodic systems have no deep sense of “history.” Non-ergodic systems don’t visit all their possible states. In physics, perhaps the most familiar case of a non-ergodic system is a spin glass that breaks ergodicity and visits only a tiny subset of its possible states—hence, exhibits history in a deep sense. Even more profound, the evolution of life in our biosphere is deeply non-ergodic and historical. The universe won’t create all possible life-forms. This, together with heritable variation, is the substantial basis for Darwinism, without yet specifying the means of heritable variation, whose basis Darwin did not know. Non-ergodicity gives us history. (c)...more
It's breathtaking how he shares his love for all the gizmos that make the hardware we all love to use.
QWow! This guy's incredible with what he does.
It's breathtaking how he shares his love for all the gizmos that make the hardware we all love to use.
Q: I saw chips that I could never buy in the United States, reels of rare ceramic capacitors that I could only dream about at night. My senses tingled; my head spun. I couldn’t suppress a smile of anticipation as I walked around the next corner to see shops stacked floor to ceiling with probably 100 million resistors and capacitors. (c) Q: After Chumby, I decided to remain unemployed, partly to give myself time for discovery. For example, every January, instead of going to the frenzied Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, I rented a cheap apartment in Shenzhen and engaged in the “monastic study of manufacturing”; for the price of one night in Las Vegas, I lived in Shenzhen for a month. I deliberately picked neighborhoods with no English speakers and forced myself to learn the language and customs to survive. (Although I’m ethnically Chinese, my parents prioritized accent-free fluency in English over learning Chinese.) I wandered the streets at night and observed the back alleys, trying to make sense of all the strange and wonderful things I saw going on during the daytime. ... At night, I could make out lone agents acting out their interests and intentions. (c) Q: Trade shows always feel like a bit of a strip tease, with your breath making ghostly rings on the glass as you hover over the unobtainable wares underneath. (c) Q: My guess is that robots are expensive to build and maintain; people are self-replicating and largely self-maintaining. Remember that third input to the factory—rice? Any robot’s spare parts have to be cheaper than rice for the robot to earn a place on this factory’s floor. (c) Q: In reality, however, it’s too much effort to explain this concept to end customers; in fact, quite the opposite happens in the market. Putting the smooth zippers together involves extra labor, so the zippers cost more; therefore, they tend to end up in high-end products. This further enforces the notion that really smooth zippers with no tiny tab on them must be the result of quality control and attention to detail. My world is full of small frustrations like this. For example, most customers perceive plastics with a mirror finish to be of a higher quality than those with a satin finish. (c) Q: Increasingly, our technology infrastructure is becoming a monoculture managed by a cartel of technology providers. Everyone carries identical phones running operating systems based on the same libraries and uses one or two cloud services to store their data. But history has proven that a monoculture with no immunity is a recipe for disaster. One virus can wipe out a whole population. Universal access to technology may allow the occasional bad actor to develop a harmful exploit, but this bitter pill ultimately inoculates our technological immune system, forcing us to grow stronger and more resilient. Wherever that threat comes from, a robust and vibrant culture of free-thinking technologists will be our ultimate defense against any attack. (с)...more
The Fair, the Foul, and the Creepy. Algorythmic secrecy and negligence, collateral consequences.
I'm pretty sure this is one of those books that are tThe Fair, the Foul, and the Creepy. Algorythmic secrecy and negligence, collateral consequences.
I'm pretty sure this is one of those books that are the ones we return again and again and again. This is a very timely wake up call to our robotized, socially inept, befuddled in the social networks draggle world. We are gonna live dystopia soon. Or maybe are already, have been for some time and it just hasn't registered.
Some ideas in here are really naive but even so, it's refreshing to see someone giving a damn about any and all of it and not just basking under the dubious glow of some personalized discount coupons that bomb one's mailbox after they are done surfing some stuff online.
Q: Consider just a few of the issues raised by the new technologies of ranking and evaluation: • Should a credit card company be entitled to raise a couple’s interest rate if they seek marriage counseling? If so, should cardholders know this? • Should Google, Apple, Twitter, or Facebook be able to shut out websites or books entirely, even when their content is completely legal? And if they do, should they tell us? • Should the Federal Reserve be allowed to print unknown sums of money to save banks from their own scandalous behavior? If so, how and when should citizens get to learn what’s going on? • Should the hundreds of thousands of American citizens placed on secret “watch lists” be so informed, and should they be given the chance to clear their names? (c)
... or ... Welcome to the fishbowl and lots of fun living dystopia!
Q: Amateur epistemologists have many names for this problem. “Unknown unknowns,” “black swans,” and “deep secrets” are pop u lar catchphrases for our many areas of social blankness. There is even an emerging fi eld of “agnotology” that studies the “structural production of ignorance, its diverse causes and conformations, whether brought about by neglect, forgetfulness, myopia, extinction, secrecy, or suppression.” (c) Q: Alan Greenspan, once the most powerful central banker in the world, claimed that today’s markets are driven by an “unredeemably opaque” version of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” and that no one (including regulators) can ever get “more than a glimpse at the internal workings of the simplest of modern fi nancial systems.” (c) Q: But what if the “knowledge problem” is not an intrinsic aspect of the market, but rather is deliberately encouraged by certain businesses? What if financiers keep their doings opaque on purpose, precisely to avoid or to confound regulation? That would imply something very different about the merits of deregulation. (c) Q: What we do and don’t know about the social (as opposed to the natural) world is not inherent in its nature, but is itself a function of social constructs. (c) Q: But while powerful businesses, fi nancial institutions, and government agencies hide their actions behind nondisclosure agreements, “proprietary methods,” and gag rules, our own lives are increasingly open books. (c) Q: Credit raters, search engines, major banks, and the TSA take in data about us and convert it into scores, rankings, risk calculations, and watch lists with vitally important consequences. But the proprietary algorithms by which they do so are immune from scrutiny, except on the rare occasions when a whistleblower litigates or leaks. (c) Q: In his book Turing’s Cathedral, George Dyson quipped that “Facebook defines who we are, Amazon defines what we want, and Google defines what we think.” We can extend that epigram to include finance, which defi nes what we have (materially, at least), and reputation, which increasingly defi nes our opportunities. (c) Q: Transactions that are too complex to explain to outsiders may well be too complex to be allowed to exist. (c) Okay, that's much too much. It's people who should be working to better their judgement and understanding of the world, not the world dumbing down to their level. Though, of course, today's transparency isn't precisely transparent. Just look at the mess that is IFRS9. Q: Perched on Teo’s shoulder, as seen through the glasses, was a small dragon. ... It looked as though it couldn’t decide whether to nuzzle Teo or tear out his jugular. I sympathized. (c) Q: “Dr. Davis says BPD has something to do with sensitive people being raised in ‘invalidating environments.’ Whatever that means. So I guess, you know, don’t invalidate me.”(c) Q: A homeowner who followed the instructions on “Where’s the Note” reported that he took a 40- point hit on his credit score after his inquiry. In the Heisenberg- meets- Kafka world of credit scoring, merely trying to fi gure out possible effects on one’s score can reduce it. (c) Q: (One casino tracks how often its card dealers and waitstaff smile.) Analysts mine our e-mails for “insights about our productivity, our treatment of co- workers, our willingness to collaborate or lend a hand, our patterns of written language, and what those patterns reveal about our intelligence, social skills, and behavior.” (с) Q: Automated systems claim to rate all individuals the same way, thus averting discrimination. They may ensure some bosses no longer base hiring and firing decisions on hunches, impressions, or prejudices. But software engineers construct the datasets mined by scoring systems; they defi ne the parameters of data-mining analyses; they create the clusters, links, and decision trees applied; they generate the predictive models applied. Human biases and values are embedded into each and every step of development. Computerization may simply drive discrimination upstream. (c) Q: Bewitched by matching and sorting programs, a company may treat ever more hires as “purple squirrels”— an HR term of art denoting the exact perfect fi t for a given position. For example, consider a health lawyer qualifi ed to work on matters involving Zone Program Integrity Contractors, but who does not use the specific acronym “ZPIC” on her resume. If automated software is set to search only for resumes that contain “ZPIC,” she’s probably not going to get an interview. She may never fi nd out that this small omission was the main, or only, reason she never got a callback. (c) Q: Then there’s the growing use of personality tests by retailers... Writer Barbara Ehrenreich encountered one of those tests when she applied for a job at Walmart, and she was penalized for agreeing “strongly” rather than “totally” with this statement: “All rules must be followed to the letter at all times.” (c) Q: For example, a company might find that every applicant who answered “strongly agree” to all the questions above turned out to be a model employee, and those who answered “strongly disagree” ended up quitting or being fired within a month or two. The HR department would be sorely tempted to hire future applicants who “strongly agreed,” even without knowing how such professed attitudes related to the job at hand. (c) Q: In 2012, Latanya Sweeney, former director of the Data Privacy Lab at Harvard and now a senior technologist at the Federal Trade Commission, suspected that African Americans were being unfairly targeted by an online service. When Sweeney searched her own name on Google, she saw an ad saying, “Latanya Sweeney: Arrested?” In contrast, a search for “Tanya Smith” produced an ad saying, “Located: Tanya Smith.” The discrepancy provoked Sweeney to conduct a study of how names affected the ads served. She suspected that “ads suggesting arrest tend to appear with names associated with blacks, and neutral ads or no [such] ads tend to appear with names associated with whites, regardless of whether the company [purchasing the ad] has an arrest record associated with the name.” She concluded that “Google searches for typically African- American names lead to negative ads posted by [the background check site] InstantCheckmate .com, while typically Caucasian names draw neutral ads.” After Sweeney released her findings, several explanations for her results were proposed. ... let us suppose that (for what ever reasons) web searchers tended to click on Instant Checkmate ads more often when names associated with blacks had “arrest” associations, rather than more neutral ones. In that case, the programmer behind the ad- matching engine could say that all it is doing is optimizing for clicks— it is agnostic about people’s reasons for clicking.114 It presents itself as a cultural voting machine, merely registering, rather than creating, perceptions. (c) Q: Anyone may be labeled in a database as “unreliable,” “high medical cost,” “declining income,” or some other derogatory term. Reputation systems are creating new (and largely invisible) minorities, disfavored due to error or unfairness. Algorithms are not immune from the fundamental problem of discrimination, in which negative and baseless assumptions congeal into prejudice. They are programmed by human beings, whose values are embedded into their software. (c) Q: In Maryland, fifty-three antiwar activists, including two nuns and a Democratic candidate for local office, were placed on terrorist watch lists. (c) Q: An unaccountable surveillance state may pose a greater threat to liberty than any particular terror threat. It is not a spectacular danger, but rather an erosion of a range of freedoms. ... Mass surveillance may be doing less to deter destructive acts than it is slowly narrowing of the range of tolerable thought and behavior.(с) Q: We should not have to worry that the fates of individuals, businesses, and even our financial systems are at the mercy of hidden databases, dubious scores, and shadowy bets. (с) Q:...more
Wow! I totally loved how clean-cut were the wordings and the references and the framework of the author's research. We got all the concepts without thWow! I totally loved how clean-cut were the wordings and the references and the framework of the author's research. We got all the concepts without the oversimplification of all the important and interesting matters that seem to be permeating the popular science these days and that make it seem dull, watered-out, lifeless and a tad dim-witted. This one skipped simplifying matters for the sake of the readers who like simpler words. Let them whip out their dictionaries, if they must, but the text remains concise and readable and involving and not determined to seduce every preschooler out there into reading it. Thank goodness, at least some contemporaries can both write in good English and lay research out as it is without trying to oversimplify things (and lose half the good stuff in the process).
Takeouts: - Energy and information flows. - Patterns and wave-frames in everything. - Emergent qualities of complex systems. - Nonlocality / entanglement....more
Lots of interesting takeouts in bite-sized chunks. While generally I strongly dislike such structure to any material, this is a lucky exclusion to thiLots of interesting takeouts in bite-sized chunks. While generally I strongly dislike such structure to any material, this is a lucky exclusion to this rule. Q: if you are delusional, can’t concentrate for more than 8 seconds, forget people’s names as soon as you are introduced, and can’t stop thinking about sex or food, congratulations. You have a normal human mind. (c) Q: Cognitive doodling A morbid obsession with death affects around 15 per cent of people, but obsessive thinking in general is quite common. We tend to characterise wandering thoughts as random, or loose chains of association, but if you find your mind constantly meanders back to familiar territory you are not alone. Like cognitive doodling, obsessive or ritualistic thinking might just be a way of occupying the idling mind. However, such thoughts once carried an evolutionary advantage, as they prepared us for dealing with future risk. That would explain why they are often to do with possible threats, such as uncleanliness. (c) Q: More than one in ten US college students remember similar imaginary worlds and two-thirds of children under the age of seven have imaginary friends. Nor is the phenomenon the preserve of childhood. Agatha Christie reportedly still spoke to her imaginary companion at the age of seventy, and Kurt Cobain addressed his suicide note to his childhood imaginary friend Boddah. More commonly, adults indulge their imaginations through novels, movies and daydreaming. Why do we spend an inordinate amount of time immersed in worlds that exist only in our heads? (c) Q: Defining imagination is difficult. If it is the ability to transcend the here-and-now and use our minds to travel through time and space and beyond, then that includes everything from daydreaming about unicorns, to visualising an event from last weekend, and figuring out how best to get to a social occasion across town that evening. If you go with that definition, then we are constantly using our imagination. (c) Q: Imaginary friends serve all kinds of purposes, from being plain old fun to vehicles to express fears, explore emotions and to run experiments on the mysterious adult world. Psychologists talk about a division of labour between childhood and adulthood. The former is a kind of research and development division, where we can experiment with the world and develop our creative minds unencumbered by worries about survival. The skills we acquire during this period prepare us for adulthood – the production and marketing division. Imaginary friends may also help children cope with real-life difficulties. Child psychologists have found tantalising evidence that imaginary friends provided some sort of mental support to kids who came from disadvantaged backgrounds, were stuck in the US foster care system or were coping with the extreme stresses of war and conflict. Some studies also suggest that children with imaginary friends have stronger theory of mind – meaning they are better able to understand and relate to the mental states of other people. (c) Q: The brain is one of the most energetically expensive organs in the body, accounting for 20 per cent of calories we burn, despite taking up just 2 per cent of our body mass. Curiously, it burns energy like billy-o regardless of what it is doing. (c) Q: Daydreaming network By studying patterns of activity in the default network, neuroscientists think its job is to daydream. That may sound like a mental luxury, but its purpose is deadly serious. It would make the network the ultimate tool for incorporating lessons learned in the past into our plans for the future. (c) Q: We are all collections of memories. (c) Q: That is what memory researchers are now starting to realise: memory is what allows us to imagine the future. The first inkling that this may be the case came out of studies of people with a type of amnesia that destroys their autobiographical memories. These people often struggle to make plans, as if being robbed of their past has also robbed them of their future. (c) Q: ... home truths about our ancestors, who clearly enjoyed sexual liaisons with Neanderthals... (c) Q: Most of us have superstitions, even though we know rationally that they cannot work. Yet superstition is not entirely nonsensical. Our brains are designed to detect patterns and order in our environment and to assume that outcomes are caused by preceding events. Both abilities evolved for good reason. Our ancestors would not have lasted long if they had assumed that a rustling bush was caused by the wind rather than a lion. But this survival adaptation leaves us wide open to misattributing effects to causes, such as a football team winning because they’re wearing lucky underpants. In other words, superstition. (c) Q: Why do humans have sex in private? ... Our innate demand for privacy probably evolved in response to our increasingly complex sexual politics. For a start, women won some control from men by evolving concealed ovulation and continual sexual receptivity to confuse paternity. Then our ancestors did something completely different from other great apes – males and females started sharing parental care. Monogamy was born, and along with it the need to strengthen the pair bond. Privacy may have emerged as a way to increase intimacy. But as well as strengthening relationships, clandestine mating also makes it easier to get away with infidelity. ... Another very human trait, envy, may also play a part. Since men can never get enough of it, sex is a precious commodity and therefore best enjoyed covertly to avoid inciting covetousness. Like food in a famine, somebody who has plenty would be wise to eat it in private. A sexual act, even among consenting adults, has a high probability of upsetting someone. Parents or community members may disapprove and for children it can lead to the creation of rival siblings. So perhaps clandestine copulation simply follows the precautionary principle. (c) Q: Art is a form of intellectual play, allowing us to explore new horizons in a safe environment. (c) Q: ... language can influence perception. Greek, for example, has two words for blue – ghalazio for light blue and ble for dark blue. Greek speakers can discriminate shades of blue faster and more accurately than native English speakers. Language also affects our sense of space and time. For English speakers, time flows from back to front: we ‘cast our minds back’ and ‘hope for good times ahead’. The direction in which our first language is written can also influence our sense of time, with speakers of Mandarin more likely to think of time running from top to bottom than English speakers. Some peoples, like the Guugu Yimithirr in Australia, don’t have words for relative space, like left and right, but do have terms for north, south, east and west. They tend to be unusually skilled at keeping track of where they are in unfamiliar places. (c) Q: Language can even shape your memory. Spanish speakers are worse at remembering who caused an accident than English speakers, perhaps because they tend to use passive phrases like ‘Se rompió el florero’ (‘the vase broke’) that do not specify the person behind the event. To a large extent, you are what you speak. (c) Q: Thanks to a Maasai tradition known as osotua – literally, umbilical cord – anyone in need can request aid from anyone else. Anyone who’s asked is obliged to help, often by giving livestock, as long as it doesn’t jeopardise their own survival. (c) Q: Tribalism and the discord it engenders are frighteningly easy to induce, as social psychologists have long been aware. More than 40 years ago, the late Henri Tajfel showed that dividing a group of strangers into two teams based on arbitrary criteria such as whether they preferred the paintings of Klee or Kandinsky triggered their tribal instincts. Members of the Kandinsky tribe behaved favourably towards team-mates while treating members of the other team harshly, and vice versa. Since then, many experiments have revealed how the flimsiest and most transient badges of identity can trigger people to divide themselves into ‘us’ and ‘them’ – even the colour of T-shirts randomly assigned by psychology researchers can do it. (c) Q: Bands of brothers Our innate tribalism sometimes leads to something called ‘fusion’, where individual identities are subsumed by the group. An effective way to induce this is ritual: synchronised activities, from liturgical recitation to military goose-stepping, seem to make people more likely to follow orders to be aggressive to others. Rituals that produce shared suffering, pain and fear are especially good at catalysing fusion, which explains the bizarre and often dangerous initiation ceremonies seen in warrior cultures and university drinking clubs. Intense and terrifying shared experiences have a similar effect. During warfare, groups of soldiers often fuse into ‘bands of brothers’ who are willing to die for one another even if they don’t believe in the cause they are fighting for. (c) Q: ‘Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.” ‘“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”’ In Lewis Carroll’s day, believing impossible things would more than likely have been seen as a sign of mental imbalance. Today, we know that it is quite normal. Six before breakfast is probably about par for the course. (c) Q: The world would be a boring place if we all believed the same things. But it would surely be a better one if we all stopped believing in our beliefs quite so strongly. (c) Q: Unenviable choice It seems then as if we are left with the unattractive choice between a continuous self so far removed from everything constituting us that its absence would scarcely be noticeable, and a self that actually consists of components of our mental life, but contains no constant part we could identify with. (c) Q: the temporally extended self, which is an awareness of one’s continuity in time. Insight about this can be found in the case of a man known as N.N., who lost the ability to form long-term memories after he had been in an accident. The damage to his brain also left him without foresight. He described trying to imagine his future as ‘like swimming in the middle of a lake. There is nothing there to hold you up or do anything with.’ In losing his past, N.N. had also lost his future. Brain-imaging studies have since confirmed that the same brain systems that underlie our ability to recall past events also allow us to imagine the future. (c) Q: Epigenetic markers are chemical tags added to DNA that alter the activity of genes without altering their genetic sequence. They are added to (and removed from) DNA throughout life in response to environmental factors such as diet, stress and pollution. ... Of course, epigenetic markers could be seen as being just another form of nurture. But the fact that they are etched onto the genome means they are also nature. Our epigenetic profiles are shaped by the environment, which in turn influences the activity of our genes, which in turn shapes our behaviour, and so on in a complex interplay that blurs the old distinction between nature and nurture. (c) Q: Evolved randomness? Epigenetics may be a way for evolution to hedge its bets. Within our genome, there are hundreds of regions where epigenetic patterns appear totally random – they are neither genetically predetermined (nature) nor set by the environment (nurture), and they vary widely from individual to individual. These regions include many key developmental genes. One possible explanation is that the randomness is an evolved feature. Many animals have to survive in a constantly changing environment. Random epigenetic changes produce lots of variation in genetically similar offspring, increasing the chances that some of them will survive. (c) Q: Women most dislike their space being invaded from the side, men from the front... We survive crowds by dehumanizing those around us. We avoid eye contact, wear blank faces and avoid contact. (c) Q: Far from being pathological, though, positive illusions are viewed as being a marker of a healthy mind. The only people who appear immune are those with clinical depression, a state known as ‘depressive realism’. Whether they are realists because they are depressed or depressed because they are realists is not clear. (c) Q: ...if you want to come across as unflappable, adopt a slow and relaxed gait. (c) Q: You probably think you will always be in your mother’s heart, and she in yours. And you’d be right – quite literally. After you were born, you probably left tiny bits of yourself inside your mother. And you got stuff from her, too: her cells take up residence in most of your organs, perhaps even your brain. They live there for years, decades even, meddling with your biology and your health. The same is true of your own children and your brothers and sisters. Sure, your blood, skin, brain and lungs are made up of your own cells, but not entirely. Most of us are walking, talking patchworks of cells, with emissaries from our mother, children or even our siblings infiltrating every part of our bodies. Welcome to the bizarre world of microchimerism. (c) Q: Moving marbles... Embodied cognition... Unconscious climbing... Creative posturing. (c) Q: ... rationality quotient (RQ) ... RQ also measures ‘risk intelligence’, which defines our ability to assess probability. ... RQ ... depends on something called metacognition, which is the ability to assess the validity of your own knowledge. People with high RQ have acquired strategies that boost this self-awareness. One simple approach is to take your intuitive answer to a problem and consider its opposite before coming to the final decision. This helps you develop keen awareness of what you know and don’t know. (c) Q: People who are ignorant about something often display preposterous overconfidence in their own abilities. (c) Q: Many researchers who work on the mind–body connection think what really matters is having a sense of purpose in life. Having an idea of why we are here and what is important increases our sense of control over events, rendering them less stressful. One study of a three-month meditation retreat found that the physiological benefits correlated with an increased sense of purpose in life. The participants were already keen meditators, so the study gave them lots of time to do something important to them. Simply doing what you love, whether it’s gardening or voluntary work, might have a similar effect on health. (c) Q: ...realism can be bad for your health. Optimists recover better from medical procedures such as coronary bypass surgery, have healthier immune systems and live longer. ... Just as helpful as taking a rosy view of the future is having a rosy view of yourself. High ‘self-enhancers’ – people who see themselves in a more positive light than others see them – have lower cardiovascular responses to stress and recover faster, as well as lower baseline cortisol levels. Whatever your natural disposition, you can train yourself to think more positively, and it seems that the more stressed or pessimistic you are to begin with, the better it will work. (c) Q: ... a gnawing suspicion that Sir Oliver had been a few envelopes short of a stationery set. (c) Q: Many families of HERVs seem to be important in normal brain function.... Taking control Viral DNA that has infiltrated human eggs and sperm – and so can be passed down the generations – does not only form genes. These HERVs, as they are called ... can also play a role in regulating the expression of other genes. Promoters are DNA sequences that help to activate or repress the expression of genes. Of 2,000 promoters from the human genome, nearly a quarter have been shown to contain viral elements. Even an important protein such as beta-globin, one of the main constituents of the oxygen-carrying molecule haemoglobin, is partly controlled by a retroviral fragment. (c) Q: ...the median artery is present in human embryos but according to textbooks it normally dwindles and vanishes around the eighth week of pregnancy. An increasing number of adults now have a median artery, up from 10 per cent at the beginning of the twentieth century to 30 per cent at the end. Over the same period, a section of the aorta lost a branch that helps supply the thyroid gland. (c) Q: A major component of true friendship is behavioural synchrony – friends must be in the same place at the same time to establish and maintain a relationship. Endorphins seem to promote friendship by making synchrony feel good. (c) Q: Falling fertility rates around the globe mean a growing percentage of people are firstborns. We may be heading for a world where fat, stroke-prone, conservatives are in the majority. (c) Q: If anyone ever accuses you of getting emotional, you can comfort yourself that emotions push us to act, and without them we’d never get anything done and society wouldn’t function. (c) Q: The word nostalgia – from the Greek nostos, to return home, and algos, pain – was coined by medical student Johannes Hofer in 1688, to describe a disorder observed in homesick Swiss mercenaries stationed in Italy and France. Hofer saw nostalgia as a disease whose symptoms included weeping, fainting, fever and heart palpitations. He advised treating it with laxatives or narcotics, bloodletting or – if nothing else worked – by sending the soldiers home. (c) Q: humans can be seen as members of an elite club of species in which adulthood has become so long and complicated that it can no longer all be given over to breeding. Just like long-sightedness and inelastic skin, the menopause now appears to be a coordinated, controlled process. Recent research suggests that it is not a meandering, stumbling deterioration but a neatly executed event that is a key part of the developmental programme of middle age. It liberates women and their partners from the unremitting demands of producing children, and gives them time to do what middle-aged people do best – live long and pamper. (c) Q: Don’t linger too long Excessive conscientiousness also gets in the way. Adults are better than children at devising and sticking to practice regimes, but these can backfire. Left to their own devices, most adults segment their sessions into blocks. When learning salsa dancing, for instance, they may work on a specific move until they feel they have mastered it, then move on to another. The approach may bring rapid improvements at first, but a host of studies have found that it is less effective overall. Instead, you’d do better to take a carousel approach, rotating quickly through the different skills to be practised without lingering too long on each one. Although the reason is unclear, it seems that jumping between skills makes your mind work a little harder when applying what you’ve learned, helping you to retain the knowledge in the long term...(c) Q: Dressing up for a date can really pay off. Scientists at Sweden’s Uppsala University took pictures of women wearing three different outfits: a dowdy ensemble, their everyday clothes and their glad rags. The women kept their expressions neutral and only their faces appeared in the photos. Asked to rate the attractiveness of the photos, a panel of men consistently chose pictures of the women in their finery, even though the clothes were not visible. It seems that women unconsciously project feelings about their appearance into their facial expressions. (c) Q: So perhaps what parents mistake for hyperactivity at parties is just sugar-fuelled kids concentrating on having fun. (c)...more
A surprisingly sane account by a BCG alumnus and an academic on how to get work to be healthier and more productive.
Basically: the 'work not 12 hrs a A surprisingly sane account by a BCG alumnus and an academic on how to get work to be healthier and more productive.
Basically: the 'work not 12 hrs a day but using your head', principle. Supplied with sane storytelling, nice academic research bells and whistles, large statistical pool and a nice self-review of methods used (incl. their up and downsides).
Very clear writing. Rational line of thinking. Good text structuring. Well thought-out considerations. Lots of good logic (which is rarer than one would want to think).
What's not to like about this goodness?
🐅✁✃✁✃✁✃ 🐅Takeouts:🐅 🐅✁✃✁✃✁✃ 🐅Continuous learning. 🐅Loops at work. Opportunities For Improvement. 🐅10 000 hrs of practice is just one of the ways to go about learning new things. Loops can shorten that time period significantly. 🐅Doing less but better. 🐅Passion needs to go w/o self-harm. 🐅Dreams should be followed with due caution and diligence. 🐅Small drivers of big results. 🐅Being not just SMART but smart. 🐅Asking questions is the way to go. Stupid questions rule! 'What if' ones as well!...more
Yes! Mouthwatering DS for readers. The ultimate pleasure for people enamored with: - data science, - stats, - history, - reading, - books, - writing...
NumbYes! Mouthwatering DS for readers. The ultimate pleasure for people enamored with: - data science, - stats, - history, - reading, - books, - writing...
Numbers and words can work together, if you take it all in in a particular way!
So, Neil Gaiman works with doors and coats, Palahniuk orgasms throughout his books, Gillian Flynn is all about pissed girls with runner hair (kidding... not!), James Patterson's work's always about murders by killers & kidnappings, Janet Evanovich is maybe too much into doughnuts on car backseats, John Grisham's heroes ntural habitat includes courtrooms, offices & they seem to often need money plus jurors, Jean Auel gives us steppe wolves and totam clan caves, Douglas Adams lets us get just a peek into the prefect galactic spaceship, Ayn Rand can't do without her transcontinental proletarian comrades (ouch - was that just her or those notorious amphetamines writing?), Steinbeck is into rabbits, RL Stine can't do without creepies (in all the innumerable Goosebumps books) and backpacks and sneakers that cried (kidding! almost...), Rick Riordan is always on about monsters and titans and camps, CS Lewis goes on and on about that lion and kings and dwarfs & witches of his, George RR Martin gives us all the dragons, unsullied, cloaks and ladies that we could've ever wanted... Seems about right!
And we all love to read easy stuff. Or easy stuff gets read more these days. Or... whatever...
And yep. One totally can judge a book by its cover!
Q: If you follow U.S. politics you might see the Flesch-Kincaid formula pop up once a year when it’s time for the State of the Union. It has become a popular pastime to evaluate the complexity of these speeches, for doing so reveals an undeniable trend. When comparing all of the State of the Union addresses from America’s founding to the present, the Flesch-Kincaid test shows a steady decline in the sophistication of our political speech. If you’re being optimistic, politics is reaching a wider audience. If you’re being cynical, politics is getting stupider by the decade. In an article in the Guardian, titled perfectly “The state of our union is . . . dumber,” the authors used Flesch-Kincaid to determine that the annual presidential State of the Union Address has gone from an eighteenth-grade level pre-1900, to a twelfth grade level in the 1900s, and it’s now sunk below a tenth-grade level in the 2000s. The role of the State of the Union has changed over the years. After all, when Washington was addressing Congress in 1790 it was meant as an actual addressII to Congress. The event has transformed into a national radio and television spectacle, making it important to reach every corner of America, regardless of age and education. (c) Q: There aren’t just more guilty pleasures representing popular books. The pleasures have gotten guiltier. (c) Q: The New York Times bestseller list holds a rarefied place in the book world. To have written a New York Times bestseller is to have made it. And for the general public, the list often serves as the public face of fiction, a guide to what’s worth reading. Yet in the last fifty years, there is no way around it: The books that we’re reading have become simpler and simpler. There are two reasons this could be happening. The first would be that all popular books today are filled with simpler sentences and more monosyllabic words. The alternative is that the New York Times bestseller list is getting “dumber”—as the Guardian would put it—because more books of a “dumb” genre are reaching the top. I’ll call this the “guilty pleasure” theory. If quick reads like thrillers and romance novels now make the list more often than they did thirty years ago, the median reading level would move down even if each genre’s grade level stayed the same. I’ve checked both theories, and the answer, it turns out, is: both. (c) Q: The growing presence of guilty pleasures is not the sole reason for the decline in bestseller reading levels, however. If we break down bestsellers by genre, we find that there has been a long-term shift within those guilty pleasures. Thrillers have become “dumber.” Romance has become “dumber.” There has been an across-the-board “dumbification” of popular fiction. (c) Q: Or consider sobbed. It may not be the most common verb in the sample of 300 books, but it is revealing. Women use it to describe men and women, but men do not use it to describe themselves. If “real men” don’t cry, fictional men don’t sob. ... Male authors describe their female characters as kissing at a higher rate than their male characters. Female authors do the opposite, describing their male characters kissing more often. (c) Q: There aren’t just more guilty pleasures representing popular books. The pleasures have gotten guiltier. (c) Q: Though it is the most prevalent, the Flesch-Kincaid test is just one of many tests of reading level. Most use sentence length as a large component. Today’s bestsellers have much shorter sentences than the bestsellers of the past, a drop of 17 words per sentence in the 1960s to 12 in the 2000s. This means any of these similar tests will show similar declines. One interesting alternative is the Dale-Chall readability formula. While it too uses sentence length, it has a separate component that factors in the number of “complex” words that appear in a text. In 1948 Edgar Dale and Jeanne Chall compiled a list of 763 words they did not consider complex. From this list it’s possible to count the number of “complex” and the number of “not complex” words in a text.VI The thought is that it’s not just sentence length that can make a book hard to follow for young readers, but the number of words that are unfamiliar. (c) Q: If you are familiar with the Rowling novels, you might start to hypothesize about what contributes to their “quietness.” Does the fact that much of the action in the series revolves around sneaking about Hogwarts have anything to do with this? If so, does this make the novels appear more “quiet” than they are? Or is the “quiet” sneaking action a perfect example of the subdued action compared to an American series? (c) Q: So Pynchon’s variety is seen not just in his lack of anaphora, but in the variety of his sentences as well. In the sample of all fifty authors seen in the previous chapter, Pynchon ranks near the bottom when we look at the percent of sentences that use his top ten openers. (c) Q: Bradbury was deciding upon which word was his “favorite” when he chose ramshackle and cinnamon. And if we look at the numbers, he does indeed use these words more often than other writers. Of the fifty authors I’ve used throughout this book as examples, ranging from J. K. Rowling to Vladimir Nabokov and Agatha Christie to Jane Austen, none used ramshackle as frequently as Bradbury. And just one of the fifty, Toni Morrison, used cinnamon more often. In his ode to cinnamon, Bradbury mentions that it reminds him of reading the labels on spice boxes in his grandma’s pantry. Without reading Bradbury’s explanation, would it have been possible, with a bit of statistical sleuthing, to detect this memory? (c) Q: On the other hand, there can be tic words that writers end up leaning on a lot, to the point where they appear hundreds of times in a book and can even disrupt the reading experience. For instance, in the same collection of favorite words, Michael Connelly contributed his favorite as nodded. Connelly has written seven number one bestsellers and seen two of his movies be adapted into major films (Blood Work, starring Clint Eastwood, and The Lincoln Lawyer, starring Matthew McConaughey). He said this of his favorite word and his main character Harry Bosch: He’s a man of few words. He reacts by nodding, so “nodding” ends up in all my books. I had an editor who pointed out that Harry nods too much. In fact in one book he nodded 243 times. (c) Q: And it makes perfect sense that a color, such as mauve, would be one of Nabokov’s “cinnamon words.” He was known to have synesthesia. ... Given the unique way Nabokov described his thoughts, it seems as if the “cinnamon word” method was able to succeed in landing upon a word that was unique to him. His love of mauve is extraordinary, but he uses all colors more than other writers as well. If you use the 64 standard Crayola Crayon names as a definitive list of colors, Vladimir Nabokov uses around 460 color words per 100,000, which is remarkably high. The same colors appear just 115 times per 100,000 in the Corpus of Historical American English. (c) Q: Not everyone’s “cinnamon words” may be as telling as Nabokov’s, and the method isn’t perfect. For a number of authors, the words reflect the unique tone of a book or subject matter. Jane Austen’s top three are civility, fancying, and imprudence, while Agatha Christie’s are inquest, alibi, and frightful. For authors like J. K. Rowling, where I chose to include just the one series for which she is best known, the words are representative of that universe itself rather than any words representing a likely favorite. The top three “cinnamon words” for the Potter series are wand, wizard, and potion. For Fifty Shades they’re murmurs, hmm, and subconscious. And for Patterson’s Alex Cross books we get killers, murders, and kidnapping—which could function well as a tagline. (c) Q: These words too are sometimes taken over by subject and setting (Suzanne Collins’s fallback words of the Hunger Games series include district and games), and they tend to be drier, blander words. But they can also be revealing of the inner mechanics of certain authors’ writing—the devices and tics they tend to fall back on to keep the plot moving or to get from one scene to the next. Gaiman fills the gaps with walking; Cheever’s reality is shifting, focusing on how things seem; Stine’s Goosebumps books are filled with staring and crying; some authors focus on feel, others on want. (c)...more
An incendiary read for all the unabashedly hilarious realities of the world we're stuck in...
Q Maybe there was a mutiny overnight. Maybe the captain anAn incendiary read for all the unabashedly hilarious realities of the world we're stuck in...
Q Maybe there was a mutiny overnight. Maybe the captain and first mate fell overboard. You’re not sure. But it’s clear the crew is in charge now and they’ve gone insane. … You can’t tell them this because they’ve banned acknowledgment of physical reality. ... As waves wash over the deck, they’re awarding themselves majestic new titles and raising their own salaries. You look on in horror, helpless and desperate. You have nowhere to go. You’re trapped on a ship of fools. … Plato imagined this scene in The Republic. He never mentions what happened to the ship. It would be nice to know. Q What was written as an allegory is starting to feel like a documentary, as generations of misrule threaten to send our country beneath the waves. ... Facts threaten their fantasies. Q Donald Trump was in many ways an unappealing figure. He never hid that. Voters knew it. They just concluded that the options were worse—and not just Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, but the Bush family and their donors and the entire Republican leadership, along with the hedge fund managers and media luminaries and corporate executives and Hollywood tastemakers and think tank geniuses and everyone else who created the world as it was in the fall of 2016 ... Q Trump might be vulgar and ignorant, but he wasn’t responsible for the many disasters America’s leaders created. Trump didn’t invade Iraq or bail out Wall Street. He didn’t lower interest rates to zero, or open the borders, or sit silently by as the manufacturing sector collapsed and the middle class died. You couldn’t really know what Trump might do as president, but he didn’t do any of that. Q Happy countries don’t elect Donald Trump president. Desperate ones do. In retrospect, the lesson seemed obvious: Ignore voters for long enough and you get Donald Trump. Yet the people at whom the message was aimed never received it. Instead of pausing, listening, thinking, and changing, America’s ruling class withdrew into a defensive crouch. Beginning on election night, they explained away their loss with theories as pat and implausible as a summer action movie: Trump won because fake news tricked simple minded voters. Trump won because Russian agents “hacked” the election. Trump won because mouth-breathers in the provinces were mesmerized by his gold jet and shiny cuff links. Trump won because he’s a racist, and that’s what voters secretly wanted all along. None of these explanations withstand scrutiny. They’re fables that reveal more about the people who tell them than about the 2016 election results. Q In 1970, the year after I was born, well over 60 percent of American adults ranked as middle class. That year, middle-class wage earners took home 62 percent of all income paid nationally. By 2015, America’s wealth distribution looked very different, a lot more Latin American. Middle-class households collected only 43 percent of the national income, while the share for the rich had surged from 29 percent to almost 50 percent. Fewer than half of adults lived in middle-income households. A majority of households qualified as either low-income or high-income. Q Forty years ago, Democrats would be running elections on the decline of the middle class, and winning. Now the party speaks almost exclusively about identity politics, abortion, and abstract environmental concerns like climate change. Q Democrats know immigrants vote overwhelmingly for them, so mass immigration is the most effective possible electoral strategy: You don’t have to convince or serve voters; you can just import them. Republican donors want lower wages. Q But is diversity our strength? The less we have in common, the stronger we are? … Nobody knows. Q The cost of having other people cut your grass is always higher than you think. Q From Iraq to Libya to Syria to Yemen, America has embarked on repeated military adventures in the Middle East. None of these wars were waged in response to a genuine existential threat, and none were popular over time. … Thousands of Americans have died fighting abroad. The wars have cost more than a trillion dollars and damaged America’s credibility and prestige on the world stage. Enough money has been spent on recent conflicts to retire all student loan debt in America. Yet the world is less stable than it was fifteen years ago. Q One of the main lessons our elites seemed to derive from 9/11 is that the best way to fight Islamic terror is to welcome huge numbers of immigrants from places known for Islamic extremism. Q Democratic government is a pressure-relief valve that keeps societies from exploding. In a democracy, frustrated citizens don’t have to burn police stations or storm the Bastille; they can vote. Once they come to believe that voting is pointless, anything can happen. Wise leaders understand this. They’re self-reflective and self-critical. When they lose elections, they think about why. Q Maybe America’s most effective government agency is the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates plane crashes. Any time a commercial aircraft goes down, the NTSB combs the site of the crash, trying to reverse-engineer what happened. Its investigators figure out what went wrong in order to prevent it from happening again. The NTSB is so good at its job that, since 2009, there hasn’t been a single fatal accident involving a domestic air carrier. If our political and intellectual elites ran the NTSB, they’d respond to plane crashes by blaming Vladimir Putin. They’d claim the aircraft was piloted by racists, or had too many white men on board. If you dared to point out a mechanical malfunction, they’d accuse you of bigotry against part manufacturers, and then ban quality control for good measure. Q By redefining immigration as a moral issue, elites have shut down debate over its costs. Q The talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the way. It happened to the Ottomans. Max Boot is living proof that it’s happening in America. Q Listed in one place, Boot’s many calls for U.S.-led war around the world come off as a parody of mindless warlike noises, something you might write if you got mad at a country while drunk. (“I’ll invade you!!!”) Republicans in Washington didn’t find any of it amusing. They were impressed. … Everything changed when Trump won the Republican nomination. Trump had never heard of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He had no idea Max Boot was a Leading Authority on Armed Conflict. Trump was running against more armed conflicts. He had no interest in invading Pakistan. Boot hated him. As Trump found himself accused of improper ties to Vladimir Putin, Boot agitated for more aggressive confrontation with Russia. Boot demanded larger weapons shipments to Ukraine. He called for effectively expelling Russia from the global financial system, a move that might be construed as an act of war against a nuclear-armed power. The stakes were high, but with signature aplomb Boot assured readers it was “hard to imagine” the Russian government would react badly to the provocation. Those who disagreed Boot dismissed as “cheerleaders” for Putin and the mullahs in Iran. As Boot’s posture on Russia became more reckless and bellicose, his stock in the Washington foreign policy establishment rose. In 2018, he was hired by the Washington Post as a columnist. The paper’s announcement cited Boot’s “expertise on armed conflict.” Q In speeches, war is never a bloody slog where eighteen-year-old boys get castrated by land mines, blasted apart by grenades, or pointlessly massacred in friendly-fire accidents, though that’s exactly what it is. Q By sending aid and weapons to the Afghan resistance, Reagan helped weaken the Russian position in Afghanistan, and ultimately the Soviet Union itself. ... decades later you’ve got to wonder how wise it was to arm Muslim extremists waging a holy war in Southwest Asia. Both Osama bin Laden and Taliban founder Mohammed Omar got their first taste of warfare in the Afghan mujahideen… America had played a leading role in training its own enemies … Q By the end of Clinton’s second term, the United States was bombing Iraq an average of three times a week, at the cost of more than $1 billion a year… America has remained in a state of almost permanent war. Q They viewed Gaddafi as a deeply immoral man. That’s all the justification they needed to take him out. So they did. Q On Election Day 2016, after eight years of rule by the nominally “antiwar” faction of U.S. politics, American troops were stationed on roughly eight hundred military bases in seventy nations. The Pentagon was dropping bombs on at least seven different countries. Barack Obama was the first president to serve two full terms, and preside over war for every single day of them. Q Liberals discovered that war was an expedient form of social engineering, not to mention politically popular. Want to save children? Bomb their country. ... How often do bombings actually improve people’s lives? Do children on the ground really like them? Who knows? Follow-up stories on the aftermath of cruise missile attacks are notably rare in American media. Q The signature characteristic of America’s foreign policy establishment, apart from their foolishness, is the resiliency of their self-esteem. No matter how often they’re wrong, no matter how many disasters they unintentionally create, they never seem to feel bad about it. Q Political figures cycle in and out of government, from lobbying to finance to contracting and back, growing richer at every turn. In Washington, prosperity is all but guaranteed. To the rest of the country, this looks like corruption, because, essentially, it is. Q Washingtonians hate change. More than anything, they hate to be told they’re wrong, or their ideas are stupid, especially when they are. Q Republican voters had a different reaction. They understood that adults sometimes change their minds based on evidence. They themselves had come to understand that the Iraq War was a mistake. They appreciated hearing something verboten but true. Q A large and growing proportion of Americans under thirty, the country’s most liberal cohort, don’t believe in unfettered free speech... A 2017 Cato Institute survey found that 52 percent of self-identified Democrats, of all ages, viewed government suppression of offensive speech as more important than the unfettered right to say whatever one wants. Q In order to foster a culture in which those with alternative political views could feel safe sharing their opinions, Google fired James Damore. For the crime of sharing his alternative views... Damore was a thought criminal, and his crime was raising the wrong questions. Q An open society needs open discourse or else it is merely an echo chamber. Q Even Representative Maxine Waters of Los Angeles, an open black nationalist, doesn’t choose to live around the people she represents. Waters doesn’t live within the bounds of her own district. She lives in a six-thousand-square-foot, $4.3 million spread in Hancock Park, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Los Angeles. How did Waters afford a house that expensive after forty years of working in government? I asked once. She didn’t answer, but did call me a racist. Q When the people in charge retreat into fantasy, and demand that everyone else join them there, society itself becomes impervious to reality. The entire population develops the habits of fact-avoidance and lying. After a while, nobody can see a crisis, or even admit one exists....more
Q: Алгоритмические искажения и непостижимость процессов Я уже отмечал, что все данные создаются, а не обA lot of logic and fun and logical fun. Reread.
Q: Алгоритмические искажения и непостижимость процессов Я уже отмечал, что все данные создаются, а не обнаруживаются. Это становится чрезвычайно важным в сфере больших данных и алгоритмов машинного обучения. Особого внимания заслуживают две потенциальные проблемы. Во-первых, алгоритмы могут поглощать и воспроизводить любые искажения, присутствующие в исходных данных. Во-вторых, в силу непостижимости большинства процессов машинного обучения их трудно критиковать или перестраивать, если не понимать исходные данные и их ограничения на уровне эксперта. Однако у многих конечных пользователей алгоритмов такие знания отсутствуют. Исследование, результаты которого были опубликованы в апреле 2017 г. в журнале Science, показало, что алгоритмы анализа больших массивов англоязычных текстов перенимают гендерные и расовые предвзятости, заключенные в языке. Это лишь верхушка айсберга, указывающая на необходимость критического анализа, поскольку при отсутствии его получается, что мы учим машину поддерживать социальное неравенство, разного рода предубеждения и неравноправие69. Не говоря уже о компаниях, использующих эти алгоритмы для бесконтрольного продвижения своей позиции. (c) Well, yeah. Garbage in, garbage out. Same old. Q: Обучение с умом: десять простых советов, как нейтрализовать сетевые искажения 1. Не позволяйте эмоциональному воздействию управлять вашими действиями в интернете: если тема важна, сосредоточьтесь на верификации, происхождении информации и обоснованности чужих заявлений. 2. Изучайте историю редактирования и ссылки: постарайтесь установить, как и где в действительности появилась информация, получившая широкое распространение. 3. Не ограничивайтесь простым и сиюминутным: всегда идите дальше первой страницы результатов поиска, самых цитируемых ресурсов и наиболее популярных решений. 4. Доставляйте себе удовольствие глубокого погружения в интересующие вас темы и предметы, не ограничиваясь обзором бестселлеров и модных новинок. 5. Сочетайте преимущества больших и малых игроков: целенаправленно используйте маленькие сети и сервисы параллельно с крупными. Стремитесь по возможности изучить разнообразные личные рекомендации, обзоры и рекомендуемые ссылки. 6. Используйте социальные медиа, чтобы выбраться из «эхокамеры»: целенаправленно обращайтесь к людям и источникам, чьи взгляды и опыт отличаются от ваших собственных. 7. Не замыкайтесь в узких кругах: даже если ваши друзья проводят все время на каком-то одном ресурсе, не пользуйтесь единственным сервисом больше, чем всеми остальными, вместе взятыми. 8. Изучите собственный «пузырь фильтров»: проанализируйте, каким образом результаты поиска и рекомендации подстраиваются под ваши собственные историю и предпочтения, и подумайте, как можно изменить ситуацию. 9. Не ограничивайтесь сегодняшним днем: изучайте прошлое, стремитесь к большей перспективе, целенаправленно охватывайте поиском годы, а не месяцы. Сопротивляйтесь постоянному давлению текущего момента. 10. Всегда запрашивайте первичные данные: что измерялось и что не измерялось, как проводились измерения, какие предвзятости и ограничения могут содержаться в заявлениях, сделанных на основе этих данных? (c) Q: Постарайтесь хотя бы ненадолго освободиться от лихорадочной суеты новостных и социальных медиа, и вы заметите, что стали видеть мир совершенно иначе. Многие сайты, поисковые системы и социальные сети, выбирая критерии релевантности, делают акцент на свежесть и новизну. Это сочетается с преобладанием информационных потоков как способа представления информации с упором на модные темы и сиюминутность. (c) Q: Стратегии обнаружения связаны с выяснением того, что именно нам нужно узнать; они открывают пространство для исследования и предлагают различные точки зрения. Таким образом, можно выделить четыре категории знания и незнания. 1. Выявленное знание («известное известное»): вещи, о которых мы знаем, что они нам известны; чтобы получить информацию о них, обычно достаточно одного клика и точно сформулированного поискового запроса. 2. Выявленное незнание («известное неизвестное»): вещи, о которых мы знаем, что они нам неизвестны, и в силу этого, очевидно, требующие изучения; решить эту задачу поможет продуманная стратегия поиска. 3. Невыявленное знание («неизвестное известное»): вещи, известные нам, но не идентифицируемые нами как знание в процессе изысканий; успешный процесс выявления откроет перед нами спектр различных источников знания. 4. Невыявленное незнание («неизвестное неизвестное»): вещи, которых мы не знаем и сами не осознаем этого и которые, следовательно, можем обнаружить слишком поздно или не обнаружить вообще. Эти четыре категории можно представить в виде диаграммы, восходящей к технике психологического тестирования — окну Джохари (она была названа в честь создателей, Джозефа Луфта и Харрингтона Инхама, разработавших ее в 1955 г. в «Западных тренинговых лабораториях»). Цель данной техники — помочь людям лучше разобраться в своем уровне осведомленности. (c)...more
Q: Редкие авторы, которые что-либо говорили о Языке Птиц, отводили первое место проблеме происхождения языков. Язык Птиц восходит ко временам Адама, исQ: Редкие авторы, которые что-либо говорили о Языке Птиц, отводили первое место проблеме происхождения языков. Язык Птиц восходит ко временам Адама, использовавшего его для того, чтобы присвоить, согласно повелению Бога, имена и названия всем сотворенным вещам и живым существам. (…) старые авторы разделяли lingua generale (универсальный язык), и lingua cortesana (язык двора), то есть дипломатический язык, потому что он скрывал в себе двойной смысл, соответствующий двум различным наукам: науке о видимых вещах и науке о глубинах познания». (c) Q: И далее: «Язык Птиц использовался в средние века философами, учеными, литераторами, дипломатами. Рыцари, принадлежавшие к тому или иному ордену, и рыцари странствующие, трубадуры и менестрели… общались между собой на языке богов, называемом также веселой наукой или веселым знанием, то есть на Языке Птиц. Он несет с собой дух и букву рыцарства, истинный характер которого раскрывают перед нами мистические шедевры Данте. Это был тайный язык кабальеро, кавалеров или шевалье, рыцарей. Посвященные и мудрецы античности знали его в совершенстве». И, наконец, на Языке Птиц написаны «… книги Франсуа Рабле и Сирано Бержерака; „Дон Кихот“ Сервантеса и „Путешествия Гулливера“ Свифта; „Сон Полифила“ Франческо Колонны; сказки Шарля Перро и т. д….» (c)...more
Fucking brilliant! We are so clever these days that we are going more stupid by the second. We are so deeply thinking that we can't think about thingsFucking brilliant! We are so clever these days that we are going more stupid by the second. We are so deeply thinking that we can't think about things slightly to the side of our daily experience. Our expertise is so advanced it's going to be useless real soon (if it isn't already!). Love it!...more
Takeouts: - The Joshua Tree Epiphany; - Very interesting explanations of the WHY of how some things matter visually and work better, ultimately; - Some vTakeouts: - The Joshua Tree Epiphany; - Very interesting explanations of the WHY of how some things matter visually and work better, ultimately; - Some very brilliant examples that give even to me, a steadfast adversary of trend aimed at 'making all the things look pretty', a thorough appreciation of properly formated text, grafics, infografics, etc; - Tips and tricks! Very cool!
A must read for consultants, editors and other miserable beingsdriven professionals tasked with endless formatting!
Q: Our eyes like to see order ; it creates a calm, secure feeling. (c) Yeah, if so, our eyes are OCD a bit. Q: … even if the overall presentation is a wild collection of odd things and has lots of energy. (c)...more
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