Academic urban legends

An essay on the prevalance of rumors and urban legends in academic writing. Categories [[Academic Articles]] Author Ole Bjørn Rekdal Sour...

Algorithms of Thought

Functions for moving [[mindset]]s. If the mind is in state S then running a set of mental operations that will move it to state S'. The algorithm is often an external prosthesis, as it can be d...

Andy Matuschak

Avoid defaulting to the ignorance prior

In a situation where I'm assessing an uncertain thing, I'm often tempted to default to the uniform ignorance prior - assigning an equal probability to all potential outcomes. This is almost...

Consensus Statement on Morality

Article A joint statement from several moral philosophers in 2010 on what they believed to be the basic tenants of morality. Morality is a natural and cultural phenomenon The building blocks...

Contrarian Investing

Author:: Michael Mauboussin Source:: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1JNYa0SFZtai-x5NsI_EoB9x0Tw-Z5uVs Related to:: [[investing]] Contrarian investing focuses on the disconnect between...

DARPA

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. As of 2019 it had 220 employees and a budget of $3.427 billion. [[The 2019 executive budget allocated 118.1 billion for Federal R&D ::rmn]]

Decision Support Systems

Automated or semi-automated systems for assisting users in making or executing decisions. Overlaps with [[Tools for Thought]]

DeepGreen

A 2008 DARPA project seeking to unify simulations and real time data to create a decision support tool for in-the-field commanders.

Humans are leaky virtual machines

I posit the way we understand other people is by simulating versions of them on our wetware. It's like how a computer can run many copies of other software as virtual machines. If I'm in a...

Lifting off the digital plateau with military decision support systems

Categories #Paper Source https://archive.vn/wip/efNwb An overview of the history, design, and eventual failure of DARPA's futuristic command and control sy...

Mindsets are the context for thoughts

I have been journaling consistently for two years now. One of the benefits of this log of thoughts is seeing the trends and patterns in my thinking. In particular I've begun to notice that cert...

Negotiating as if your life depended on it

Author:: Chris Voss Notes It's interesting to see how much overlap there is between relational meditations and hostage negotiation. The right to say no, the right to veto, is crucial. Pe...

Never make an unending commitment with no potential outs

I try to be a genre-savvy type of guy, and I avoid making errors that would cause me to sigh at the shitty writing if I saw a protagonist doing it in a book. So things like summoning something whic...

Pattern languages

Categories #Concepts Sources Joshua Kerievsky, Maggie Apppleton Related to [[Digital Garden]] [[strategies]] Pattern Languages convey exp...

Pixel art

Research as a stochastic decision process

Categories #Article Author Jacob Steinhardt Source https://archive.vn/27Rvs In a project where there are independent sources of uncertain...

Satisfaction and progress in open Ended work

Categories #Article Author [[Andy Matuschak]] Source Satisfaction and Progress in Open-Ended Work Notes Execution mode and open-ended wor...

The best general advice on earth

Categories #Article Source   Notes An essay excerpted from an 1890's book on psychology. It emphasizes the importance of making your nervous system - your...

The bitter lesson

Author:: Rich Sutton Source:: https://archive.vn/sD0RM The biggest lesson from [[AI]] research is that general methods that leverage computation are the most effective by a large margin. This i...

The fda's perpetual process machine

Categories #Article Author Paul Romer Source The FDA's Perpetual Process Machine Related to [[FDA]] [[Bad Institutions]] ...

The kek wars

Author John Michael Greer Sources (1)(2)(3)(4) Very interesting! Probably bullshit, but thought provoking with some important kernels of truth. I wonder what t...

Timeful texts

An inspiring vision of redesigning books for deeper engagement. Categories #Article Author [[Andy Matuschak]] Source Timeful Texts ...

To understand the mistakes you make, record and review your mistakes.

Creating a mistakes log where you can record, without personal judgement, the mistakes you make, is an effective tool for [[postmortems]] and for detecting patterns. I use a [[mistakes]] tag in my ...

Tools for Thought

Use the first person instead of the second person

Note: preliminary, not settled Recently a friend expressed a conviction that it would be better for me to own my thoughts and feelings by using language that expresses those thoughts and feelings ...

User interface: a personal view

Author [[Alan Kay]] Source http://worrydream.com/refs/Kay%20-%20User%20Interface,%20a%20Personal%20View.pdf I read McLuhan's Understanding Media and und...

Why is there still a mask shortage

At the beginning of the pandemic there was a frantic search by governments, companies, and individuals to get medical grade masks, specifically N95s. This culminated in federal-state standoffs, NFL...

Xhosa meme plague

In the 1850s the Xhosa, a Nguni ethnic group in Southern Africa, engaged in a riot of self-destructive behavior. In 1856 a fifteen year old Xhosan girl received a divine message from her ancestors;...

Charts for Charles

A term that stuck with me from a management training I took in 2013. The CEO of a company was metrics oriented, and wanted teams to create and use charts and metrics to make their decisions. Months...

Functional Decision Theory

Functional Decision Theory (or FDT) is a [[decision theory]] model that brings the decision making algorithm itself into the decision process. In FDT, correct decision making centers on choosing th...

heuristic

Intellectual Horror

Intellectual Horror: The feeling of contemplating a mindset vastly different from your own that conflicts in some way with how you view the world.

mindset

open question

Tag for a thing I'm puzzling

postmortems

A practice of reviewing failed (or partially failed) projects and identifying lessons and updates.

productivity

Ratio of work to effort.