Tragically I gave up on the Plate Tectonics study before answering my most important question: “Is Alfred Wegener the Balto of plate tectonics?” Let me back up. Balto Balto is a famous sled dog. He… | Continue reading
I was approached by a client to research the concept of 20% time for engineers, and they graciously agreed to let me share my results. Because this work was tailored to the needs of a specific clie… | Continue reading
Tl;dr: being easy to argue with is a virtue, separate from being correct. Introduction Regular readers of my blog know of my epistemic spot check series, where I take claims (evidential or logical)… | Continue reading
Sometimes people imply that epistemic spot checks are a waste of time, that it’s too easy to create false beliefs with statements that are literally true but fundamentally misleading. And sometimes… | Continue reading
The date is November 10th, 2019. Covid has plausibly started, but I don’t know it yet. I am a huge fan of Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast, and have been conducting my own lit review on civili… | Continue reading
When I began what I called the knowledge bootstrapping project, my ultimate goal was “Learn how to learn a subject from scratch, without deference to credentialed authorities”. That was too large a… | Continue reading
I love my two cats dearly and they bring a lot of joy to my life, but they also bring other things, like poop, and fur. When I tried to research mitigations for any of these it was 100% SEO listic… | Continue reading
Introduction There is a lot of praise for weekly reviews. There is noticeably less doing of weekly reviews, even among the people doing the praising. It’s a very hard habit to keep up. We could spe… | Continue reading
My goal was to come up with a system for reading a book. I eventually identified that as the wrong goal, but came up with a pretty great system for doing the much better goal of “how do I answer a … | Continue reading
When I began what I called the knowledge bootstrapping project, my ultimate goal was “Learn how to learn a subject from scratch, without deference to credentialed authorities”. That was too large a… | Continue reading
About a year and a half ago I did a retreat at a monastery. I was trepidatious about this retreat. It was designed to make you a little sleep deprived and a little undernourished, which I ag… | Continue reading
How to Take Smart Notes (affiliate link) posits that students who handwrite lecture notes gain as many facts and more conceptual understanding than students who type notes to the same lecture, beca… | Continue reading
Epistemic spot checks typically consist of references from a book, selected by my interest level, checked against either the book’s source or my own research. This one is a little different t… | Continue reading
Spoilers for Season 1 of The Good Place. If you have not seen The Good Place yet, I recommend it, and despite my usual lack of care around spoilers, I do not recommend you read this. There is a sur… | Continue reading
After modest amounts of research, here is how I am currently categorizing the homeless problem. This should be taken as a snapshot of my thoughts, not information for people who have actually thoug… | Continue reading
When I was a kid, my dad told me the parable of the first physician to realize you should maybe mothers would not suffer quite so many horrifying deaths if doctors washed their hands between autops… | Continue reading
Introduction MDMA (popularly known as Ecstasy) is a chemical with powerful neurological effects. Some of these are positive- the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) has sho… | Continue reading
Recently I listened to Econtalk’s episode on the doctor-patient relationship, which was primarily about a study showing that hospitalized patients did better when their care was supervised by… | Continue reading
Scott talks about a bit of medical theater, in which companies demand doctors notes to allow people to bring in their own chairs to work; he is often the person in best position to provide that not… | Continue reading