Completely superficial side-issue question: Twice in this post you very conspicuously refer to “Daphne Koller and the other guy”. The other guy is clearly Nir Friedman. Why the curious phrasing? (The sort of thing I’m imagining: Nir Friedman is known not to have actually done any of the work that led to the book. Nir Friedman is known to have actually done all of the work that led to the book. Nir Friedman is known to be a super-terrible person somehow. You are secretly Nir Friedman. I don’t expect any of these specific things to be right, but presumably there’s something in that general conceptual area.)
According to my subjective æsthetic whims, it’s cute and funny to imagine the protagonist as not remembering both author’s names, in accordance with only being a casual formal epistemology fan. (The mentions of casual fandom, family archives, not reading all of chapter 3, &c. make this a short story that happens to be told in the second person, rather than “you” referring to the reader.)
I expected there to be some wordplay on “casual”/”causal” somewhere, but I’m not sure if I saw any. This is obviously a central component of such a post’s value proposition.
Completely superficial side-issue question: Twice in this post you very conspicuously refer to “Daphne Koller and the other guy”. The other guy is clearly Nir Friedman. Why the curious phrasing? (The sort of thing I’m imagining: Nir Friedman is known not to have actually done any of the work that led to the book. Nir Friedman is known to have actually done all of the work that led to the book. Nir Friedman is known to be a super-terrible person somehow. You are secretly Nir Friedman. I don’t expect any of these specific things to be right, but presumably there’s something in that general conceptual area.)
According to my subjective æsthetic whims, it’s cute and funny to imagine the protagonist as not remembering both author’s names, in accordance with only being a casual formal epistemology fan. (The mentions of casual fandom, family archives, not reading all of chapter 3, &c. make this a short story that happens to be told in the second person, rather than “you” referring to the reader.)
I expected there to be some wordplay on “casual”/”causal” somewhere, but I’m not sure if I saw any. This is obviously a central component of such a post’s value proposition.