2019-Feb-5
To return to my grandmother’s family … the … sister, Lady Charlotte
Portal was … apt to express herself unfortunately.
On one occasion when she had to order a cab for three people, she thought a
hansom would be too small and a four-wheeler too large, so she told the
footman to fetch a three-wheeled cab.
On another occasion, the footman, whose name was George, was seeing her off
at the station when she was on her way to the Continent.
Thinking that she might have to write to him about some household matter she
suddenly remembered that she did not know his surname.
Just after the train had started she put her head out of the window and called
out, ‘George, George, what’s your name?’
‘George, My Lady’, came the answer. By that time he was out of earshot.
-Bertrand Russell, “Autobiography”
2018-Jul-16
(These are some questions, which may well be already addressed in the
literature, I haven’t checked.)
Should someone start selling insurance against online mob victimization and
other “life/career ruining” reputation attacks?
How should a country transition to futarchy,
if it starts with a highly corrupt government?
Should children be able to sue parents if they divorce, give birth out of
wedlock, etc?
People have a tendency, perhaps intentional, to claim that policies themselves,
rather than the policies’ apparent goals, are axiomatic good things.
Is this a vulnerability in futarchy, since then they would be voted on as
values rather than bet on as beliefs?
Why is betting psychologically safe in finance (that is, trading) but dangerous
in casinos? As binary options are prone to fraud according to Wikipedia, what
does that say about the viability of
prediction markets?
How should we apply and evaluate informal models, e.g. the broad theories of
Carl Jung and
Stephen Wolfram?
Does abstract/vague/informal/subjective/qualitative imply unfalsifiable or is
there a way of formalizing the informal?
If the health system is
inefficient, how
much of the problem is caused by doctors (and their guilds)? Similarly for
legal system and lawyers.
Why are “theories” helpful in science but “ideologies” unhelpful in politics?
Was Julian Simon right? What is the real relationship between population and
GDP in the short and long run?
People from Bertrand Russell to Tyler Cowen and Peter Thiel have remarked on
increasing societal risk/change aversion and the concomitant stagnation – what
is best to reboot “dynamism”: Move to a different country? Reform the current
one? Seasteading? Form more-dynamic enclave within the country? Work in
digital/crypto realm? Is this a farmer-forager
issue? Can foragers be dynamic?
If certain mental traits are
Zahavian signals that indicate computational resources, does this, pace Miller,
predict asymmetry in cognitive abilities between the sex that signals and the
sex that chooses, assuming \(P \neq NP\)?
In Japan, finding a defendant not guilty is culturally frowned upon, and
the consequences of this are predictably bizarre; see
link1,
link2.
Is there a hidden rationality here?
If tastes in physical beauty
change
a lot, to what extent can they be explained by sexual selection?
Why are criminals so disliked?
In schools, why do teachers but not students get comfortable office chairs?
Why does Microsoft employ developers in Seattle when they could get them
for half price
in Vancouver?
What’s the modern appeal of live music? Is there a more interesting way that
musicians can perform live than playing rehearsed songs?
Why do people get temporary disabilities (diseases) but not temporary
superpowers?
2018-Jun-20
One of the pleasures I’ve had over the years is to play four-hands piano music
with Edsger. … When we’re playing a Haydn waltz the thing I had to get used
to was that Edsger doesn’t count one-two-three, one-two-three it’s always
zero-one-two, zero-one-two.
-Don Knuth, 2000
2018-May-28
https://www.reddit.com/user/haikubot-1911/comments/?sort=top
Procedure:
Search for groups of sentences that form haikus.
Syllable counting can be done with pyphen.
Format the haiku-valid text into three lines and do capitalization.
Post the poems and measure quality with votes.
2018-May-25
1. Aakar Patel -
English and its influence on our national priorities
(2016).
This examines the peculiar phenomenon in India where the popular media, due to
the distribution of languages spoken and very high advertising revenues, ends
up being skewed towards elites and their issues, systematically biasing the
propagation of news information.
2. David Starkey -
When I hear the word ‘art’, I reach for my gun
(2017).
Starkey gives a sweeping account of the history of art, in a broad sense,
and illuminates the phenomena of Dadaism and modern art.
3. Edsger Dijkstra @
Joint International Seminar on the Teaching of Computing Science
(1992).
Dijkstra presents an algorithmic problem and walks through a solution based
on ideas in A Discipline of Programming, where formal semantics are used to
guide the search for an algorithm.
