In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
Flowers are selective about what kind of pollinator they attract. Diurnal flowers use diverse colours to stand out in a competition against their neighbours for visual salience. But flowers with nocturnal anthesis are generally white, as they aim only to outshine the night.
did you know that, if you’re a hermit, you get infinite weirdness points?
✧*｡ヾ( >﹏< )ﾉﾞ✧*。
when making new words, i try to follow this principle:
label concepts such that the label has high association w situations in which you want the concept to trigger.[1]
the usefwlness of a label can be measured on multiple fronts:
how easy is it to recall (or regenerate):
the label just fm thinking abt the concept?
low-priority, since you already have the concept.
the concept just fm seeing the label?
mid-priority, since this is easy to practice.[2]
the label fm situations where recalling the concept has utility?
high-priority, since this is the only reason to bother making the label in the first place.
if you’re optimising for b, you might label your concept “distributed boiling-frog attack” (DBFA). someone cud prob generate the whole idea fm those words alone, so it scores on highly on the criterion.
it scores poorly on c, however. if i’m in a situation in which it is helpfwl for me to notice that someone or something is DBFAing me, there are few semiotic/associative paths fm what i notice now to the label itself.
if i reflect on what kinds of situations i want this thought to reappear in, i think of something like “something is consistently going wrong w a complex system and i’m not sure why but it smells like a targeted hostile force”.
maybe i’d call that the “invisible hand of malice” or “inimicus ex machina”.
i rly liked the post btw! thanks!
i happen to call this “symptomatic nymation” in my notes, bc it’s about deriving new word from the effects/symptoms of the referent concept/phenomenon. a good label shud be a solution looking for a problem.
deriving concept fm label is high-priority if you want the concept to gain popularity, however. i usually jst make words for myself and use them in my notes, so i don’t hv to worry abt this.
here’s the non-quantified meaning in terms of wh-movement from right to left:
for conlanging, i like this set of principles:
minimise total visual distance between operators and their arguments
minimise total novelty/complexity/size of all items the reader is forced to store in memory while parsing
every argument in memory shud find its operator asap, and vice versa
some items are fairly easy to store in memory (aka active context)
like the identity of the person writing this comment (me)
or the topic of the post i’m currently commenting on (clever ways to weave credences into language)
other items are fairly hard
often the case in mathy language, bc several complex-and-specific-and-novel items are defined at the outset, and are those items are not given intuitive anaphora.
another way to use sentence-structure to offload memory-work is by writing hierarchical lists like this, so you can quickly switch gaze btn ii., c, and 2—allowing me to leverage the hierarchy anaphorically.
so to quantify sentence , i prefer ur suggestion “I think it’ll rain tomorrow”. the percentage is supposed to modify “I think” anyway, so it makes more sense to make them adjacent. it’s just more work bc it’s novel syntax, but that’s temporary.
otoh, if we’re specifying that subscripts are only used for credences anyway, there’s no reason for us to invoke the redundant “I think” image. instead, write
it’ll rain tomorrow
in fact, the whole circumfix operator is gratuitously verbose![1] just write:
rain tomorrow
Surely, there is a clever mechanism that can fix this issue? So I went to the Wikipedia page of the Free-rider Problem and scrolled to the bottom, and lo and behold it was just sitting there: Dominant Assurance Contracts.
I feel like every assurance-contract proponent went through a moment like this. It’s like “Don’t Look Up” except wrt a civilization-scale solution. I’m tempted to think some people ‘just don’t get it’ because they’re missing gears-level models re coordination problems in the first place, but that would be hasty.
If you’re vegan and drink lots of tea (guilty), consider avoiding tea at least one hour before and after the time you eat iron-rich food. The worry is that polyphenols in tea bind with non-heme iron, forming a stable-ish complex that prevents absorption. There’s weak evidence that this makes a practical difference, but it was especially relevant for me since I drink tea almost exclusively.
From the available evidence there is no need to advise any restriction on tea drinking in healthy people with no risk of iron deficiency. In groups at risk of iron deficiency the advice should be to drink tea between meals and to wait at least 1 h after eating before drinking tea. (source)
Most studies have found no association between tea intake and iron absorption. However, drinking excessive amounts of black tea may inhibit the absorption of iron, and may harm people with anaemia. (wikipedia)
I was about to request clarification on this too. I don’t get
“science is the way of making beliefs come apart from their pre-theoretical pragmatic implications.”
And I would like to get it.
Endorsed. I think what you should do about deferral depends on what role you wish to play in the research community. Knowledge workers intending to make frontier progress should be especially skeptical of deferring to others on the topics they intend to specialise in. That may mean holding off on deferring on a wide range of topics, because curious scientists should keep a broad horizon early on. Deferring early on could lead to habits-of-thought that can be hard to override later on (sorta like curse of knowledge), and you might miss out on opportunities to productively diverge or even discover a flaw in the paradigm.
Explorers should mostly defer on value of information, not object-level beliefs. When someone I trust says they’re confident in some view I’m surprised by, I’m very reluctant to try to tweak my models to output what I believe they believe; instead I make a note to investigate what they’ve investigated, using my own judgment of things all the way through.
This seems like a question one shouldn’t be using statistical evidence to make an opinion about. It seems tractable to just grok (and intuify) the theoretical considerations and thus gain a much better understanding of when vs when not to decompose (and with how much granularity and by which method). Deferring to statistics on it seems liable to distort the model—such that I don’t think a temporary increase in the accuracy of final-stage judgments would be worth it.