This reflection comes out way late again. Books I read this year: On Liberty by J.S. Mill: A liberal classic. On the face of it, nothing Mill advocates is considered radical from our modern point of view. But it’s still and inspiring defense of the value of liberty. Furthermore, you get the sense that The Riverside Shakespeare: I’ve read through all the plays and corresponding commentary. At first I struggled but I eventually habituated to the language. Read more...

It’s surprisingly difficult to find clear definitions for these terms online: seed = plant embryo fruit = seed container nut = hard-shelled fruit grain = small, hard seed cereal = grain-yielding plant “A legume is a plant in the family Fabaceae” according to Wikipedia. A pulse is legume seed. Beans, lentils, and peas are all pulses. As far as I can tell there’s no real definition for these.

In a Twitter thread I’m unable to rediscover, commenters were touting Chat-GPT’s chess abilities. If I remember correctly, one commenter pointed out this capability demonstrated Chat-GPT wasn’t simply a “stochastical parrot” because the most efficient way to encode the many possible sequence of moves involves creating some model of a chess board. I believe I’ve come up with a similar argument with the following conclusion: the dumbest superintelligent tool AI is aligned. Read more...

Books I read in 2022: The Genetic Lottery by Kathryn Paige Harden: The book argues that inequality is in part determined by genetic differences and that egalitarians should embrace this. I came to this book not know what scientists mean by “heritability” or how they measure it but came away from it with a basic understanding of the current state of the nature-nurture debate as it relates to education and class. Read more...

Books I read this year: Bowling alone by Robert D. Putnam: Classic book on social alienation in America. I’d like to see more updated statistics and international comparisons. Aside from generational succession, the main driver of the fall in social capital seems to be technological change. This make me pessimistic and I wonder how today’s communitarians hope to solve this problem. Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis: I took fairly detailed chapter by chapter notes. Read more...

Hello and welcome to my blog! Blog purpose In this blog I will write about the things I’ve been working on or thinking about. The content will be varied: ranging from shorter posts reviewing media I’ve recently consumed, to longer posts about topics I’ve spent time researching, to the occasional how-to on a tech problem I’ve struggled with. If all that sounds interesting, checkout the RSS feed in the sidebar. I hope you enjoy! Read more...