Can I ask how you choose the articles and papers above? What sources do you check regularly which give you what you read, or how else do you find them?
Reading the “Late Night Thoughts on Reading Scientology” article is like looking into a mirror. It’s almost painful.
Why does my bedroom contain 343 books? (I counted just now.) Some of them I know and love, but many are on topics I have only mild interest in, contain only mediocre writing, and will probably never be read beyond the introduction – and this after throwing out half my collection once a year or so when I move.
Why does my hard drive contain thousands more books as PDFs, and my Kindle several hundred? Why do I have a hundred news feeds inundating me with thousands of blog posts, videos, and news stories a week, when only ten or so feeds really excite me? Why have I bookmarked hundreds of essays online in my “interesting, but I’ll get to this later” folder?
Why do I have ten or fifteen different hobbies I occasionally fantasize about pursuing, when one or two would be plenty to provide a social outlet and fill my idle hours? Why do I have a list of more than a hundred projects that would be “good to do some day”, none of which I’ve completed?
It’s definitely a common error in explore vs exploit. I’ve consciously tried to finish things and go through books/papers or admit it’s just not going to happen & delete them. (Painful, because it’s so similar to admitting failure. ‘No, I’m not going to work through that category theory textbook if I haven’t in the past 7 years. No, I’m probably not going to learn Prolog if I’ve had that text + source sitting around for 5 years.’ Even though they would all be good to know or read...)
Why do I have a hundred news feeds inundating me with thousands of blog posts, videos, and news stories a week, when only ten or so feeds really excite me?
Rereading, I have to object to this one.
Books, essays, and hobbies are consistent. If you enjoy your first few classes of fencing, you’ll enjoy the rest. Very few books will be wretched for the first few chapters and then abruptly become fantastic. And so, going through my book backlog, if I throw out the worst or most off-topic ones, I have lost little, and I have restored focus to my collection, avoiding distractions, and coming to terms with the limits of my ambition or interests.
But with news feeds, heterogeneity is the norm; I don’t have hundreds of news feeds of which only 10 are good, I have hundreds of news feeds among which are randomly distributed 10 good items today. At best, a particular news feed may have a higher probability of spitting out something I will benefit from that day, but if I delete all but the 10 best news feeds, I’ll wind up deleting many or most of the good future items. Reading LW or Reddit or HN does help, but I still wind up finding far too many interesting and relevant things only through having a few hundred RSS feeds.
“Overkill: An avalanche of unnecessary medical care is harming patients physically and financially. What can we do about it?”
Dear gods how I have seen this in practice, in family and colleagues...
This is also at least partially behind a growing distrust of the medical profession and medical science. When something works against your interests while claiming to work for your interests, trust fails.
I very much appreciate your regular and variegated list. I have to take care to not spend too much time on it and consciously select only those I expect to actually act on. In this case I sunk some time in the Programming Epigrams and devoted most time to read the meta-analysis of heritability. To the latter I propose some intro link: How to calculate heritability. Note that I do not agree with your conclusions here (I wonder whether I should comment there or here).
Everything is heritable:
“Meta-analysis of the heritability of human traits based on fifty years of twin studies”, Polderman et al 2015 (excerpts)
on the genetic basis of rat and mink tameness
Politics/religion:
“Misperceiving Inequality”, Gimpelson & Treisman 2015 (excerpts)
“Land without Plea Bargaining: How the Germans Do It”, Langbein 1979 (how the German legal system avoids our own reliance on plea-bargaining to send most defendants to jail without trial)
“The Nitrous Oxide Philosopher”
“The Science of Sex Abuse: Is it right to imprison people for heinous crimes they have not yet committed?”
“Why the future won’t be genetically homogeneous”
“Aged Heterogeneity: Fact or Fiction? The Fate of Diversity in Gerontological Research”, Nelson & Dannefer 1992
Statistics/AI/meta-science:
“The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks”
“Using N-of-1 Trials to Improve Patient Management and Save Costs”, Scuffham 2010
“Assessing Kurzweil: the results”
“A survey of Bayesian predictive methods for model assessment, selection and comparison”, Vehtari & Ojanen
“The Nine Circles of Scientific Hell”
“Leaving Office Feet First: Death In Congress”, Maltzman et al 1996
“Nuclear weapon statistics using monoids, groups, and modules in Haskell”
“Flat Priors and Other Improbable Tales”
Psychology/biology:
“Persistence of Long-Term Memory in Vitrified and Revived C. elegans”, Vita-More & Barranco 2015 (excerpts)
“The effects of oral iron supplementation on cognition in older children and adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis”, Falkingham et al 2010
“Historical Review and Appraisal of Research on the Learning, Retention, and Transfer of Human Motor Skills”, Adams 1987
“Programmer Interrupted”
“E unibus pluram: television and U.S. fiction”
2,4-Dinitrophenol
“What’s in a Color? The Unique Human Health Effects of Blue Light”, Holzman 2010
“Diving Deep into Danger”
“Late Night Thoughts on Reading Scientology”
Technology:
“Epigrams in Programming”, Alan Perlis
“Implications of Historical Trends in the Electrical Efficiency of Computing”, Koomey et al 2011
“How Much of the Web Is Archived?”
“Actual Facebook Graph Searches”
Economics:
“Overkill: An avalanche of unnecessary medical care is harming patients physically and financially. What can we do about it?”
“The Insourcing Boom”; “The March of Robots Into Chinese Factories”
“Jerven on Measuring African Poverty and Progress”
“Online price discrimination: Conspicuous by its absence”/”Price Discrimination and the Illusion of Fairness”
“On the front lines of humanity’s high-tech, global war on rats”
“Smart Machines and Long-Term Misery”, Sachs & Kotlikoff (excerpts); “The Ricardo effect in Europe (Germany fact of the day)”; “Four Futures: One thing we can be certain of is that capitalism will end”; “Has the ideas machine broken down?”; “The Post-Productive Economy”
“Harder Choices Matter Less”
Philosophy:
“The time resolution of the St Petersburg paradox”, Peters 2011
“The Space Child’s Mother Goose”
Fiction:
“Man And The Echo”
“Single-Bit Error”
“Toward an Algorithmic Criticism”, Ramsay 2003
Misc:
“A Rockslide in Action: An Arch Falls into the Sea”
Can I ask how you choose the articles and papers above? What sources do you check regularly which give you what you read, or how else do you find them?
Reading the “Late Night Thoughts on Reading Scientology” article is like looking into a mirror. It’s almost painful.
It’s definitely a common error in explore vs exploit. I’ve consciously tried to finish things and go through books/papers or admit it’s just not going to happen & delete them. (Painful, because it’s so similar to admitting failure. ‘No, I’m not going to work through that category theory textbook if I haven’t in the past 7 years. No, I’m probably not going to learn Prolog if I’ve had that text + source sitting around for 5 years.’ Even though they would all be good to know or read...)
Rereading, I have to object to this one.
Books, essays, and hobbies are consistent. If you enjoy your first few classes of fencing, you’ll enjoy the rest. Very few books will be wretched for the first few chapters and then abruptly become fantastic. And so, going through my book backlog, if I throw out the worst or most off-topic ones, I have lost little, and I have restored focus to my collection, avoiding distractions, and coming to terms with the limits of my ambition or interests.
But with news feeds, heterogeneity is the norm; I don’t have hundreds of news feeds of which only 10 are good, I have hundreds of news feeds among which are randomly distributed 10 good items today. At best, a particular news feed may have a higher probability of spitting out something I will benefit from that day, but if I delete all but the 10 best news feeds, I’ll wind up deleting many or most of the good future items. Reading LW or Reddit or HN does help, but I still wind up finding far too many interesting and relevant things only through having a few hundred RSS feeds.
I, for one, only put a book on a shelf once I’ve read it and lend out books from my collection on a regular basis...
Dear gods how I have seen this in practice, in family and colleagues...
This is also at least partially behind a growing distrust of the medical profession and medical science. When something works against your interests while claiming to work for your interests, trust fails.
Scott Adams has a very… explicit blog post on the topic.
I very much appreciate your regular and variegated list. I have to take care to not spend too much time on it and consciously select only those I expect to actually act on. In this case I sunk some time in the Programming Epigrams and devoted most time to read the meta-analysis of heritability. To the latter I propose some intro link: How to calculate heritability. Note that I do not agree with your conclusions here (I wonder whether I should comment there or here).