Brain Ticklers, Ed. 44
Links for October 2023 that [carnivas thinks] will tickle the brains of his [purportedly] intelligent friends (and his future-self if AGI lets him live).
No time for social niceties, folks. I do hope you are well. On to the links:
History (or its first draft)
Nuktas in Hindi and where they come from!
How English words evolved on a foreign continent (called America)
A very funny review of The Alexander Romance - about the stories of Alexander the Great, developed over 1000+ years.
Society
A guide for teachers using ChatGPT in their classroom—including suggested prompts.
When you start to doubt yourself: A very poignant note from a UX designer, who has been impacted by the 2023 churn with jobs.
Men who post often on social media are seen as feminine
Several cognitive biases (e.g., bias blind spot, hostile media bias, egocentric/ethnocentric bias, outcome bias) can be traced back to the combination of a fundamental prior belief and humans’ tendency toward belief-consistent information processing
Among popular cuisines of the world, India stands at a (what I think as) poor 9th spot. Also: China & Thai people hate Indian good, while Indians enjoy those.
Japanese toilet culture - Goes beyond the popular washlets. Amazing. I would like to live in such a place. They apparently auto-generate flushing noise when you fart inside, so you aren’t embarrassed. True customer obsession, this is.
Interesting-Perspectives
Any supportive device that degrades your ability to perform the activity unaided is an enfeebling support. In contrast, a strengthening support not only helps you do something while supported, but also makes you better at doing the thing “by yourself” once the support is taken away. (However, it will be a judgment call on when a strengthening support becomes enfeebling, or vice versa. Ha!).
The humanities are in danger, but humanists can’t agree on how—or why—they should be saved. “The idea that students develop a greater capacity for empathy by reading books in literature classes; about people who never existed than they can by taking classes in fields that study actual human behavior does not make a lot of sense”.
[Maybe related to the above] Academics need to think harder about the purpose of their disciplines and whether some of those should come to an end. (I think this will automatically happen as the enrollment rates for those disciplines decline, and the current set of academics retire. Trust the market forces, I say)
The rise of digital culture and the democratization of taste have diluted the potency of traditional class signals: physical mannerisms, refined elocution, knowledge of rarefied music and art, and proper manners. But the absence of overt snobbery and exclusive know-how hasn’t disappeared status rankings altogether. Instead, it’s made them more contingent on actual money. (If nothing else, read this. Such a good read. Don't want to? Then this is the shortest summary: Go earn a lot of money, that's what matters).
Science & Technology
McKinsey says developer productivity can be measured, and there is a mighty pushback from Pragmatic Engineers in two parts.
Artificial intelligence could help us talk to animals - You can listen to some funny noises in the article
Surgeons are using Meta’s Quest 2 to simulate procedures, allowing doctors to practice from home. Nice.
Signal has apparently taken the first step in advancing quantum resistance—a layer of protection against the threat of a quantum computer being built in the future that is powerful enough to break current encryption standards. Beyond a cursory understanding of public-private keys, I have no clue how these things work, but this seems important.
Telling an AI model to “take a deep breath” causes math scores to soar in study. (Okay, don't worry - It's just that its data set where the phrase 'take a deep breath' exists has better results)
By autonomous driving, you always think of cars, don't you? Or, at best, trucks? But there is this company which makes tractors. I guess this could be a good breakthrough to bring further productivity gains in agriculture?
In a direct one-v-one cage match, an asexual organism would have much better fitness than a similarly shaped sexual organism. And yet, all the macroscopic species, including ourselves, do it. What gives? Hilarious and interesting note on evolution.
Perso-Dev
Is it better to be a relatively large fish in a small pond, even if you don't learn to swim as well? A significant factor contributing to students’ academic self-concept is how they compare themselves to other students in their school or class. High-achieving students in a low-achieving school (big fish, little pond) have a greater academic self-concept and do better than equally talented students in a high-achieving school (little fish, big pond). For the record: I thoroughly disagree with the conclusions here. You can see some arguments here, here etc. but broadly, I think if you don’t aim higher (or think big!), you will end up mediocre. The point to think is about how to help such students (as parents/educators) to not get overwhelmed with the big pond. Not tell them to avoid it.
The development of one’s unique virtues is a process that inevitably involves overcoming the resistance in yourself and in your environment, and learning to be comfortable with discomfort.
You can make the experience of working on difficult tasks feel less difficult overall if you deliberately end your work with a set of easier tasks, even if they add more items to do. This is because we apparently 'average it out’ than, 'sum'. It is left as an exercise for you to see how related this is to Kahneman and colonoscopy. (aka Peak-End rule)
Here's someone who shares his steps to lose 20 pounds (approx. 9 Kg) in 3 months. I did the reverse of this (almost every step there) for a year and also had the reverse effect (gained 20 pounds)
Random
The world is slowly realizing that note-taking apps are designed for storage, not sparking insights. I am glad I didn't jump into the bandwagon of this second-brain thing with Roam, Obsidian and all that. I stuck to Evernote for 14 years, and after they got bought by some PE firm (and their future uncertain) moved to Joplin (which appears closest to Evernote).
A good review of an old biography of Elon Musk. Clear parallels to the Steve Jobs story, though the other man seems to have built the capacity to tone down or lower the instances of boorish behavior.
The prophetic perfect tense is a literary technique used in the Bible that describes future events that are so certain to happen that they are referred to in the past tense as if they had already happened
Finally, the auto-industry has come up with an idea that I have had since I was a kid. Anyway, I can probably do parallel parking without a struggle.