Hey there,
💌 Here’s your weekly dose of treats. Some things I thought were worth sharing this week!
Let’s scroll…
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Something to listen while reading
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Free access to My Favorite Links 💌
I've been working on updating/migrating some of My Favorite Links on my website. These include articles I've enjoyed, podcasts, tech, software, ideas, and personal philosophies. I thought that storing them in Notion is easier for you to navigate and process all of the interesting bits and pieces.
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Some notes on the book How to Have Impossible Conversations: A Very Practical Guide
teaser:
Engaging in respectful dialogue doesn't mean accepting their conclusions.
It means understanding not just what they believe but also why they believe it—in that process, maybe they’ll come to understand your reasoning, or see that their reasoning is in error, or vice versa
🔥 People work longer (and different) hours under lockdown
A new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research claims that the average lockdown working day worldwide is now around 48 minutes longer than before the pandemic.
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How to not fear your death
You exist, but one day you won’t. An Epicurean perspective can help you feel less afraid, and even grateful for life’s finitude.
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How to Create a Mind-Blowing Presentation
I’ve observed that people spend a lot of time sourcing, preparing, and analysing their data but tend to falter at the last mile when presenting their findings. It’s a real shame and double-whammy because not only do important, tedious, and challenging data work tend to be underappreciated, it all goes to waste when our audience can’t get the point we want to drive home.
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A College Degree Is No Guarantee of a Good Life
Higher education is often described as an investment. But it’s still unclear if it pays off in happiness.
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Young children would rather explore than get rewards
Researchers found that when adults and 4- to 5-year-old children played a game where certain choices earned them rewards, both adults and children quickly learned what choices would give them the biggest returns.
Inside the revolutionary Bell Labs Datacenter, 1960
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How To Overcome Dread Tasks
The sensation of thinking of a task can be pleasant or painful. This is because your brain is always predicting how rewarding any future scenario will be. You experience joy when your mind is imagining a future fantasy where you’ll be engaged in flow (“when you get to that weekend side-project, things will be interesting, time will fly by”).
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Possible takeaways from the coronavirus pandemic for slow AI takeoff
Really enjoyed gwern’s quick take on it:
(corona was x-risk on easy mode: a risk (global influenza pandemic) warned of for many decades in advance, in highly specific detail, by respected & high-status people like Bill Gates, which was easy to understand with well-known historical precedents, fitting into standard human conceptions of risk, which could be planned & prepared for effectively at small expense, and whose absolute progress human by human could be recorded in real-time happening rather slowly over almost half a year while highly effective yet cheap countermeasures like travel bans & contact-tracing could—and in some places did!—halt it. Yet, most of the world failed badly this test; and many entities like the CDC or FDA in the USA perversely exacerbated it, interpreted it through an identity politics lenses in willful denial of reality, obstructed responses to preserve their fief or eek out trivial economic benefits, prioritized maintaining the status quo & respectability, lied to the public “don’t worry, it can’t happen! go back to sleep” when there was still time to do something, and so on. If the worst-case AI x-risk happened, it would be hard for every reason that corona was easy. When we speak of “fast takeoffs”, I increasingly think we should clarify that apparently, a “fast takeoff” in terms of humans coordination means any takeoff faster than ‘several decades’ will get inside our decision loops. Don’t count on our institutions to save anyone: they can’t even save themselves.)
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The Overfitted Brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization
Contemporary neuroscientific theories generally view dreams as epiphenomena, and the few proposals for their biological function are contradicted by the phenomenology of dreams themselves. Now, the recent advent of deep neural networks (DNNs) has finally provided the novel conceptual framework within which to understand the evolved function of dreams.
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Some cool tweets…
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My Latest YouTube Video
This was also converted into a video below.
Picking Up 1 Piece of Trash a Day
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follow the white rabbit 🐇
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There is only one place, there is only one time, and there is only one mind. All the varieties of these things are just different ways of looking. There is no third person reality -- it's all first person. Mind is hardware and matter is software. The brain is a user interface for a filter. Atoms and planets are desktop icons on an incomprehensible computer. Physics and astronomy are squinting at pixels, that only fill themselves in when we look. Humans are some kind of experiment in not knowing that the universe is alive.
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That’s it! 👋
Thanks for reading!
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Just hit 3k subscribers today. A pretty exciting milestone! Thank you, everyone!
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🧠 Notes
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You can also reach out via Instagram, Twitter, or using gravitational waves.
That said, how’re you and yours doing this week? Any major changes to your status quo, or are things fairly locked-in and predictable at the moment?
I respond to every email I get—consider sending me a message and telling me a bit about yourself and what’s been up in your world.
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Have a great day ahead!
Robert