Category: Reading

Grant Sanderson of 3Blue1Brown YT fame explains convolutions. I had watched part of this video a little while ago, & had put it out of my mind (I’m a nerd but not that much of a nerd, who am I kidding?). Yesterday I came across this paper that predicts micro-spatial economic growth using neural networks, using daytime satellite imagery (as opposed to the nighttime lights that have been used previously), and with better results. The technique they used involves convolutional neural networks, so a good time to go back down that rabbit hole again. I won’t claim to understand it well enough to explain it to someone (yet). Their Github repo is here

Jason Zweig’s 2017 post on “resolutions” was referred to again by Rob Walker (of the Art of Noticing fame). Making some of these my own through the course of this year. A favourite:

Eat more crow. It’s the most nutritious of all brain foods.

Albert Wenger’s “Philosophical Start to 2023“:

try to find middle paths between ignoring threats and despairing about them, between dismissing opportunities and glorifying them, and between asceticism and hedonism.

John Zimmer found a TikTok video of a year3 teacher that had plenty of lessons for public speakers everywhere on the power of a prop.  He also links to a previous post with some excellent examples of using props in corporate presentations.

I’m wrestling with the ideas & arguments that Brink Lindsey posits in his unmissable substack called “The Permanent Problem“. (The line is inspired by the economist John Maynard Keynes’ claim, “for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem — how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.”). In this essay “The Global Fertility Collapse“, he paints a rather grim outlook that has its roots in the successful improvement in living standards of a majority of the world’s population.

John Hagel, Increase the power of your narratives.  Distinguishing between stories & narratives has been a practical way to improve my communication, both with myself and with those around me. Re-reading this multiple times during the course of the year.

DeepMind, UCL Course on Reinforcement Learning. My colleague Andrew has been telling me about this for a while. After (finally) watching the DeepMind AlphaGo documentary yesterday, I finally started to watch the series.

Doug Savage’s cartoon on New Year Resolutions

VC Fred Wilson has a 2 part post on his observations on 2022 & his predictions for 2023. TL;DR: Buckle up for a tough few months, and keep eyes peeled out for opportunity.

Ben Kuhn: Why & how to write on the internet. Worth reading in full. There are several rabbit holes to go down if you care about any of it.

Terrence Eden explains:

We have to accept that failure is an option. More than that, it is an inevitability. We have to make peace with the fact that False Positives and False Negatives can only ever be reduced – not entirely eliminated.

The Ultimate Guide to Writing Online

“Lines of closeness over time” pic.twitter.com/sh9MTxNvnN

— Rich (@Duderichy) June 17, 2022

Scott Aaronson, with some assistance from GPT-3:

There is a fundamental difference between form and meaning. Form is the physical structure of something, while meaning is the interpretation or concept that is attached to that form. For example, the form of a chair is its physical structure – four legs, a seat, and a back. The meaning of a chair is that it is something you can sit on.This distinction is important when considering whether or not an AI system can be trained to learn semantic meaning.

Drowning in a sprawling new project, a team spins in trial and error, fumbling around and trying to discover the shape of the desired outcome. Realizing they need to ground their work, the leads come up with a simple principle. “Whatever we ship, it needs to have these ingredients: speed, stability, security, and simplicity.” These key ingredients can come in many forms, but they must be present. This simple formula energizes the team, giving just enough organization to retain individual agency while providing enough structure to keep everyone is on the same page.

There is power in framing fluid, ambiguous, and flexible environments in terms of a few key ingredients. Especially in organizational cultures that trend toward being non-hierarchical, capturing the essence of desired outcomes can provide a valuable organizing technique. Chosen well, key ingredients can become a team’s core values. Finding the right set of ingredients is definitely a challenge — though veterans of your domain can provide you with a good starting list.

Taken too far, though, this approach falls into essentialism. We are tempted with a quest to find the ultimate key ingredients: the essence of it all. Essentialist adventures tend to end badly. They shift focus from the utility of a loose categorization to the inflexibility of finding the perfect one. If you’ve ever spent too much time arguing about the names for phases of a process or the one true way to refactor code, you’ve experienced essentialism’s gravitational pull.

Source