@Links
Web Roundup: Links for September
Famous last words: “Why are you dodging [bullets] like this? They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.” “A 2012 survey of the top 100 psychology journals found that barely 1 percent of papers published since 1900 were purely attempts to reproduce previous findings.” More evidence that the standard education narrative (“more education, fewer problems”) is false. “From the referrer logs in our data set, we found that 20 to 40 percent of sales from email spam arise from users who actively open their spam folder and click on links to pharmacy sites.

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@Cognitive Science
Analogical Thinking: Concepts as Example Bundles
Analogy is our best guide in all philosophical investigations; and all discoveries, which were not made by mere accident, have been made by the help of it. —Joseph Priestley Words are not the stuff of thought. This is straightforward to demonstrate. Present someone with a quote — it can be anything, but for concreteness let’s say you go with a bit of Thoreau: “I was not designed to be forced.

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_(Note: this review originally appeared on a sister-site I’m building out, Top Financial Advisor, but I’m cross-posting it for readers here, as part of my ongoing book reviews. The last post in this series was the Advertising Secrets of the Written Word review and summary.)_ Ah, money. It doesn’t taste good. It doesn’t smell good. It can’t keep you warm at night, and it won’t love you back. But you can trade it for something that does.

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@Links
Web Roundup: Links For August
Useful Science is a super cool website, aimed at summarizing instrumentally useful science. Example from the site: “Thirty minutes of sunlight exposure in the morning makes it easier to wake up early the next day.” Bonus: my software tools to improve writing post is referenced in the site’s style guide. Economics Betting markets beat statistical models when it came to predicting Germany’s 7-1 win over Brazil.

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I made you a promise. I promised that book reviews were going to become a regular thing around here — you know, in my Born to Run review and summary, where I said: “I plan for this to be the first in a very long tradition of reviewing books, so stay tuned for more.” Well, now that I’ve published reflections on one month vegan, it’s time to stop procrastinating and make good on my word.

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Rewind. It’s August of last year. I’ve just published a post on the reasoning behind certain “strange” beliefs. It covers veganism, cryonics, existential risk, simulationism, polyamory, and singularitarianism. Then, in September, I write about the curious gender imbalance among vegans — that there are 3 woman-vegans for every man-vegan. If we take those as indicative of the feelings of past-me, I’ve been open to the idea of veganism for about 10 months now.

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@Uncategorized
Fixing VirtIO Code 39
I’m recording this here in case anyone else is unfortunate enough to encounter this Code 39 message, and so that she can avoid wasting several hours of her life attempting to fix it, by instead Googling it and reading this. Alas, it’s too late for me. If you’re attempting to install Red Hat’s VirtIO drivers onto a virtualized Windows box, and the whole thing seems to go okay, but then you receive the message “Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware.

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@Books
Born to Run: Book Review and Summary
I’m training for a half-marathon. As someone not terribly athletically gifted, it’s been slow-going. Since I was going to spend the 4th of July weekend on the beach, electronically-secluded, I picked up a dead-tree copy of the book, Born to Run. I’ve seen a lot of people transformed into, well, the sort of runners that run with religious fervor after reading this book and I thought, hey, if it worked for them, maybe it’d work for me.

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@Links
Web Roundup: Links For July
3 book recommendations straight from Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos: The Goal, The Innovator’s Solution, and The Effective Executive. Remember that list of data sets? Noel at The Armchair Scholar has put together a visualization of some of the crime data. Speaking of which, my friend Benn Stancil and the rest of the team at Mode Analytics have officially launched. The service enables users to easily visualize and analyze a number of different data sets, including quite a few of those in my list, so check it out.

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@Economics
Pareto Principle Examples and History
Economics consists of theoretical laws which nobody has verified and of empirical laws which nobody can explain. —Michal Kalecki For a very long time, the Pareto law has lumbered the economic scene like an erratic block on the landscape; an empirical law which nobody can explain. —Josef Steindl In the book that I’ve been writing on keeping up in the information age (subscribe via email to receive a copy when it’s finished), I’ve touched on both Sturgeon’s Law (“90% of everything is crap”) and the Pareto principle, as part of a section on filtering information.

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