Thoughts-posts

From Maclean’s article: Averages don’t capture the steepest declines, a point made colourfully by the head of the New Hampshire-based Center for Assessment. “We have a saying in New England,” Scott Marion told Education Week. “You can have one foot on a wood stove, and another on a block of ice, and on average you’re pretty comfortable.” Kevin Morby on his album, This is a Photograph: to free the flame from burning up inside to thunder like a motorcycle headed down the line to eat to weep to lay me down so sweet to sow to reap oh to let our glasses clink to time to time to time to time to time to time to time to time...

Links Tyler Cowen and David Perell Anna Gat Music: A Subversive History Agnes Callard on the Ezra Klein Show Me, being oh so witty Motivating questions How do we know when to push and when to rest, both at the micro level (e.g. in daily/weekly subproject level) and at the macro level (e.g. what projects to take on, when to quit a project)? What is the relationship between striving and acceptance?...

My comparative advantage (the craft of being nice :face_with_open_mouth_vomiting:🤢) It’s not often you see your CFO holding back tears. It’s even rarer when the reason he’s doing so is because you’re being fired. No, I wasn’t part of a mass layoff or a restructuring or a merger or anything like that. I just wasn’t very good at my job. We all knew it and I had already been interviewing at other places....

Confusion I am working through a task at work of reproducing a dataset using a long SQL script consisting of separate chunks of data manipulation and manual edits (to the data table, not the code). As often happens, documentation is less than perfect and I am left to figure out much of what I am doing in my own. This naturally leads to some confusion - what should I be looking for, how do I find an issue to correct, how should I correct the issue when I find it etc....

I put the questions to some friends of mine gathered for a barbeque today: how do we know what is proper social etiquette. Or maybe, the less boozhy way to put it is, how do we know how to behave around others? I often feel this most acutely when having people over for a meal, when it comes time to eat. I have been running around - chopping, toasting, tasting, roasting - and all of a sudden it’s time to eat and everyone is milling about, chatting, drinking and (hopefully) enjoying themselves, just as guests should be....

Focus To what extent can we manufacture focus (asking for a friend :tongue_in_cheek_emoji:) Canonical answers: Develop habits (if you get used to doing the same thing every day out will get easier to do the same thing every day) Organize your physical environment to minimize distraction and promote concentration Minimize your ambition set (i.e. Don’t have to many goals) Take care of your mental and physical needs (sleep, exercise, etc) My strategy:...

Associative and non-associative learning From the MIT Open Course Introduction to Psychology There are two types of learning: associative learning and non-associative learning. Associative learning is when you learn something new about a new kind of stimulus (that is, an extra stimulus). Non-associative learning is when you’re not pairing a stimulus with a behavior. Non-associative learning can be either habituation or sensitization. Habituation is when repeated exposure to a stimulus decreases an organism’s responsiveness to the stimulus....