I love the #EffectiveAltruism movement because people and organisations around it are focusing on what is really, really important — with an analytical mindset.
Often their ideas are so simple and powerful that I feel they would be pages of a hypothetical book entitled “Instructions for #Life”.
A recent example:
https://manuherran.com/what-can-i-do-to-prevent-my-own-intense-suffering/
What pisses me off the most about #ArturoPerezReverte is that, being so learned and having travelled so much, he has made a career out of stressing the uniqueness of mediocrity, ignorance and backwardness in #Spain. As if we were really unique for the worse. Or for the better. The more I travel and read, the more I despise that #chauvinism, and the more I recognise shared human experience. There are corruption, bigotry, embarrassing or absurd customs, and missed opportunities in every society.
@gasull
I'm glad there's much overlap in our way of thinking about these issues 😊
I take that point re the many personal areas one can improve by learning, thinking & discussing. I've applied the same argument to the news and to reading, although I still have doubts:
https://tripu.github.io/Vita/doc/logic#21-about-the-importance-of-reading
I'm curious: don't you feel bad somehow about being ignorant of a lot of politics and “the news”? And, do you read any books that are neither hugely entertaining per se nor actionable, but are widely considered paramount or influential (eg, “The Iliad”, “Walden”, “Das Kapital”)?
About #newsletters: I've been a daily reader of the NYT's “Morning Briefing”; recently I've subscribed to around 16 newsletters, from different outlets, from several countries, with varied editorial stances, in the three languages I can read — planning to share a detailed comparison, and keep only the two or three of them I consider best and mutually complimentary. (Hopefully soon on my GH.)
“On 28 June 2009, Professor #StephenHawking held a party at the University of Cambridge specifically for time-travellers, with Krug champagne and hors d’oeuvres. In order to prevent frauds from attending, the renowned theoretical physicist only announced the party after it had finished. Sadly, no one turned up.”
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/aug/08/facts-entertainment-16-fascinating-things-weve-learned-from-podcasts
@gasull
Interesting, thanks. I see what you mean. I've been considering for years a similar argument against the need/usefulness to/of keeping up with “the news”. I'm still undecided about that one.
What I don't like is that my “area of influence” is so tiny that your advice in practice would mean: “don't bother learning, reflecting and discussing with others about anything — except with colleagues about work, with your neighbour about where best to park the trash bin, and with your partner about what furniture to buy”…
#BryanCaplan on minimum rules to engage in intellectual #arguments:
“Remain calm, take nothing personally, use probabilities, face hypotheticals head-on, and spurn Social Desirability Bias like the plague.”
https://www.econlib.org/silence-is-stupid-argument-is-foolish/
This is all very important to me, and a constant source of frustration when debating with other people, so I just added it to #Vita:
https://tripu.github.io/Vita/doc/life#4-debates-and-discussing-with-people
“[Robin] DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory. […] It takes a special kind of ignorant for an author to choose an example that illustrates the mathematical opposite of one’s intended point, but this isn’t uncommon in #WhiteFragility, which may be the dumbest book ever written. It makes The Art of the Deal read like Anna Karenina.”
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-white-fragility
tripu
boosted
The plural of "index" is "indices".
The plural of "vertex" is "vertices".
The plural of "mutex" is "deadlock".
-- @agmlego
Important PSA for #conspiracy theorists out there:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/07/30/you-must-not-do-your-own-research-when-it-comes-to-science/#389f417c535e
Because #science, bitch.
“At a push, we can hear acknowledgement of the ‘#poor #white #male’ problem. But that’s as far as it ever goes. The underperformance of white #boys and men is not considered to be a problem worth solving. When figures come out showing the stunning attainment gaps between boys and girls, the interest lasts for about a day.”
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-lost-boys-the-white-working-class-is-being-left-behind
“While #white #workingclass #males are the largest disadvantaged minority, their cause is the least fashionable. In the intersectional pyramid of #victimhood, white males are at the bottom, tarnished by ideas of #toxicmasculinity and #whiteprivilege despite the fact that in Britain class has always been the most significant indicator of true #privilege. […] Dulwich and Winchester colleges turned down a bequest of more than £1 million because the donor, Sir Bryan Thwaites, wanted the money ring-fenced for scholarships for white working-class boys. Peter Lampl, founder of the Sutton Trust, a charity whose stated mission is to improve social mobility, described Thwaites’s offer as ‘obnoxious’.”
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-lost-boys-the-white-working-class-is-being-left-behind
Don't miss this if you are a human, especially if you like #drawing and #illustration. Especially if you are a #parent.
Especially if you are a #dad.
https://img.huffingtonpost.com/asset/599c4eae1e00003c00c5ec73.jpeg
(The last strip in Dan Dougherty's “Beardo” #comic series — https://www.beardocomics.com/beardo .)
I think it's important to realise that for us, #softwareengineers/#programmers, the ultimate “threat” of developments like #OpenAI's #GPT3 is *not* a system that would translate {natural language → programming language → machine code}. (That would be like training a robot to understand the description of a scene, have it paint the scene with oil on canvas using brushes, and finally scan the painting to obtain a digital image.) A truly intelligent (digital) system will dispose of #programminglanguages altogether, or use much less human-friendly alternatives as intermediate structures to manipulate, such as AST's or bytecode. Just bear that in mind when you prep to recycle your career…
Also about #OpenAI's #GPT3:
poor, poor #WolframAlpha…!!
