@Uncategorized
What’s deadlier: HIV or Smallpox?
The annals of history are strewn with smallpox-infested corpses. The idealist thinks, “Ah, the past. What a barbaric era!” The cynic thinks, “Open your eyes. We have traded smallpox for the horrors of HIV/AIDs.” To which we respond, as always, show me the numbers: smallpox killed an estimated one-third to one-half a billion people, while AIDs has killed 30 million people, a tenth as many. Terrible-future proponents would be better off scaring children with scenarios where tobacco use doesn’t peak and fall off in the developing world (India, China, and others) like it has in the USA, in which case we could see staggering death tolls, with one WHO report projecting as many as a billion tobacco-related deaths by the end of the century.

Read more

@Excerpt
Feynman on the Supernatural
The nurse recorded the time of death, 9:21 P.M. He discovered, oddly, that the clock had halted at that moment —just the sort of mystical phenomenon that appealed to unscientific people. Then an explanation occurred to him. He knew the clock was fragile, because he had repaired it several times, and he decided that the nurse must have stopped it by picking it up to check the time in the dim light.

Read more

Men with lower T performed better than other groups on measures of spatial/mathematical ability, tasks at which men normally excel. Women with high T scored higher than low-T women on these same measures.1 Our findings are the first that present the relationship between testosterone and the broad range of general IQ in childhood. The boys of average intelligence had significantly higher testosterone levels than both mentally challenged and intellectually gifted boys, with the latter two groups showing no significant difference between each other.

Read more

@Excerpt
Sir John Harington on Treason
I thought about titling this as “Sir John Harington on Selection Effects,” but treason seemed more compelling. Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason. —Sir John Harington

Read more

@Philosophy
How To Get Started With Anything
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system. —Gall’s law All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. —Ralph Waldo Emerson The point of the post is this:

Read more

@Math
Reading Math: Tips and Heuristics
Reading math is tough. So tough that even Fields Medal winner Bill Thurston wrote about his near-constant confusion. To make it a bit easier, try out these heuristics. The difference between the poet and the mathematician is that the poet tries to get his head into the heavens while the mathematician tries to get the heavens into his head. —G.K. Chesterton Visualize it: Build a mental image. Lines, triangles, donuts.

Read more

@Excerpt
Thurston on Confusion
Mathematics is a process of staring hard enough with enough perseverance at at the fog of muddle and confusion to eventually break through to improved clarity. I’m happy when I can admit, at least to myself, that my thinking is muddled, and I try to overcome the embarrassment that I might reveal ignorance or confusion. Over the years, this has helped me develop clarity in some things, but I remain muddled in many others.

Read more

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds. John Maynard Keynes Ah, being a good person. Consider the following. A man who only restrains from murdering people most of the time will not be considered a good man. He’s a murderer, even though he doesn’t always murder the people he meets.

Read more

@Philosophy
Is belief a choice?
‘Snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white. —Alfred Tarski Is belief a choice? Let me ruin the surprise: Yes, you get to choose what to believe. If you want to believe that you can fly, you are free to believe that. Reality, however, is a hostile place. It does not care about what you believe. Jump from a cliff and you will not fly, no matter how much you wish it to be so.

Read more

@Excerpt
No, I Love You More
Kaprio, Koskenvuo, and Rita (1987) noted that in the week following the death of a spouse, suicide rates are elevated almost tenfold for women, and almost seventyfold for men. —Well-Being: Foundations of Hedonic Psychology The original study is here.

Read more

You've read this far⁠—want more?

Subscribe and I'll e-mail you updates along with the ideas that I don't share anywhere else.

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.