Posts on fredcy

Hoax of the Century

Sat, 01 Apr 2023 13:24:13 -0500

In A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century, Jacob Siegel presents a history and analysis of recent “anti-disinformation” efforts in the U.S.

I’m skeptical about some of his conclusions but I appreciate the detailed history he presents and I’m increasingly concerned about efforts to control what we (the populace) think because (according to some powers that be) we can’t be trusted to think for ourselves.

The United States is still in the earliest stages of a mass mobilization that aims to harness every sector of society under a singular technocratic rule. The mobilization, which began as a response to the supposedly urgent menace of Russian interference, now evolves into a regime of total information control that has arrogated to itself the mission of eradicating abstract dangers such as error, injustice, and harm—a goal worthy only of leaders who believe themselves to be infallible, or comic-book supervillains.

AI and Reflective Equilibrium

Thu, 09 Mar 2023 10:28:40 -0600

The proposals to combine neural networks with model and rule-based reasoning remind me of reflective equilibrium in political philosophy. In this metaphor, the case-based results of a neural network correspond to intuitions, and the models and associated rules correspond to explicit principles and beliefs.

In an AI system comprising both neural network and model/rule-based reasoning components, a management layer (with human intervention?) could perhaps intermediate and adjust the two components to strive for consistency between them (and perhaps self-consistency in the neural network part). The management component could look for patterns in the case-based results from the neural network side and create and adjust the model and rules to correspond. Similarly, the neural network weights and biases could be adjusted when the results differ from what is consistent with the model/rule side.

ChatGPT as search engine

Wed, 01 Mar 2023 10:21:02 -0600

I keep notes in text files using the Emacs Org-Mode, and I often search through those files using grep. I got thinking about a book I read years ago that, among other topics, discussed (near as I can recall) a note-taking application that allowed quick incremental searches through a large textual document. But I could not recall the author, so I asked ChatGPT using some sketchy criteria:

What is the name of the guy who died a few years ago who wrote about software user interface design? He proposed a personal journal application that allowed easy searching through one composite file.

Modern AI

Mon, 27 Feb 2023 12:22:05 -0600

I’m excited, and concerned, to see Artificial Intelligence become capable after so many years of failed promise. Back in the late 1970s I took a college¹ course surveyed the state of the art in AI. At that time there was very little practical application as the technology was weak and the hardware was limited. The course comprised only readings and we did not write or run any code.

In the 1990s I wrote a simple rule-based application intended to help software developers in a large organization² satisfy a set of process-management requirements. The rules were expressed in a declarative format much like a decision tree, and my program³ converted those rules to operational code in a simple survey dialog program. This was perhaps my favorite project in my career.

Tezos Tickets

Tue, 05 Jul 2022 12:00:00 -0500

Here my understanding of tickets in the Jarkarta protocol of the Tezos blockchain, from the perspective of a developer interested in working with tickets.

A ticket comprises a creator, a value, and an amount.

A ticket’s creator (or ticketer) is the address of the contract that created the ticket. Tickets are created only by the TICKET Michelson instruction in that smart contract’s code.

A ticket’s value is set by the creator when it creates the ticket, and cannot be changed later. Such a ticket value can be any comparable type in Michelson: int, string, bytes, etc.

Default ACL in Tezos v10.1

Sat, 07 Aug 2021 08:30:00 -0500

TL;DR: Configure the tezos-node RPC port with --rpc-addr localhost:8732 rather than (or in addition to, if providing remote RPC access) --rpc-addr :8732

Default ACL for RPC

The v10.1 release of the Octez software adds a new default ACL for RPC feature, and the way it works is subtle.

If the listening address resolves to the loopback network interface, then full access to all endpoints is granted

If the listening address is a network address, then a more restrictive policy applies.

Building Tezos 8.0

Tue, 22 Dec 2020 14:23:05 -0600

Building and running Tezos version 8.0 on an Ubuntu 18.04 system was a bit more complicated than usual. Here is a build procedure that works.

Install rust

Follow the directions at http://tezos.gitlab.io/introduction/howtoget.html#install-rust. This only needs to be done once on any given build machine.

Get the version 8.0 code

Assuming one already has the ’latest-release’ branch checked out, just do the usual

git pull

Start the build as usual

make build-deps

This will work for a while and then fail with a message about “fatal: unknown value for config ‘protocol.version’: 2”.

COVID-19 Info

Sun, 29 Mar 2020 08:38:06 -0500

Here are some sources I’ve found useful and which seem reliable.

91-divoc
Trajectory of cases, by state
Rt Covid-19
Interactive visualization from John Hopkins data
Worldometer: global
Worldometer: US
Johns Hopkins map
Financial Times tracker (incorporates some of the above)
COVID-19 projections
The Peter Attia Drive Postcast

(The CDC seems to have stopped incorporating state data into its totals starting about March 16, so I don’t find their data useful.)

Web Sign-In

Thu, 30 Jan 2020 11:16:47 -0600

Yesterday I got web sign in working with this site. With that I’m able to login to indieweb.org via github.com, which is currently the only supported web-sign-in method for the sites that I’ve connected with (per the links on the page footer here).

I’ve also got this site connected to webmention.io which I think will collect and store any cases where other similar sites might link to pages on this site. Eventually I’d like to have full WebMention support on this site, similar to what’s described at IndieWebify Your Hugo Website.

IndieWeb

Wed, 29 Jan 2020 10:58:20 -0600

This site is an experiment using the IndieWeb approach to posting web content and connecting with other similar sites. I’m building the site with Hugo, and with that the Indigo theme that is designed to support IndieWeb.

Building Tezos on Ubuntu 14.04

Wed, 23 Nov 2016 17:46:37 +0000

Install opam and ocaml utilities. At this time this results in opam version 1.2.2 and ocaml 4.02.3.

add-apt-repository ppa:avsm/ppa
apt-get update
apt-get install ocaml ocaml-native-compilers camlp4-extra opam

Add repo needed for libsodium-dev (at least) that the Tezos installation scripts will install.

add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php
apt-get update

Switch to Ocaml 4.03.0. [update: using 4.04.2 on 2017/09/05]

opam init
opam switch 4.03.0
eval `opam config env`

Clone the tezos source repo to /opt/tezos.

Virtue via intelligence

Wed, 18 May 2016 22:45:00 +0000

The evils of the world are due to moral defects quite as much as to lack of intelligence. But the human race has not hitherto discovered any method of eradicating moral defects; preaching and exhortation only add hypocrisy to the previous list of vices. Intelligence, on the contrary, is easily improved by methods known to every competent educator. Therefore, until some method of teaching virtue has been discovered, progress will have to be sought by improvement of intelligence rather than of morals.

The Stoic: 9 Principles to Help You Keep Calm in Chaos – 99U

Mon, 01 Feb 2016 17:28:13 +0000

The Stoic: 9 Principles to Help You Keep Calm in Chaos – 99U.

How to Get Yourself to Do Things

Mon, 01 Feb 2016 17:27:12 +0000

You finish a thing by starting it until it’s done

via How to Get Yourself to Do Things.

Costs of Financial Innovation

Mon, 01 Feb 2016 17:24:15 +0000

In “Golden Eggs and Hyperbolic Discounting”, the author argues that the liquidity brought by modern finance is not a good thing.

By enabling the consumer to instantaneously borrow against illiquid assets, financial innovation eliminates the possibility for partial commitment. This has two effects on the welfare of the current self. First, the current self no longer faces a self-imposed liquidity constraint and can therefore consume more in its period of control. Second, future selves are also no longer liquidity constrained and may also consume at a higher rate out of the wealth stock that they inherit. The first effect makes the current self better off. The second effect makes the current self worse off (since the current self would like to constrain the consumption of future selves).

Committing to choices

Sun, 11 Jan 2015 16:37:23 +0000

In Resolving to Create a New You Ruth Chang argues that in making choices between alternatives that are on par (have much the same value to us) we should favor the choice that we can most fully commit to.

Instead of being led by the nose by what we imagine to be facts of the world, we should instead recognize that sometimes the world is silent about what we should do. In those cases, we can create value for ourselves by committing to an option. By doing so, we not only create value for ourselves but we also (re)create ourselves.

Breakdown of Will

Tue, 09 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

In the book Breakdown of Will author George Ainslie presents a theory of decision-making where relative preferences for possible alternative outcomes vary over time, unlike the usual “rational” model where relative preferences remain consistent. His model is based on hyperbolic discounting where the value of a future pay-off is discounted more heavily than normal exponential discounting in the period near the pay-off time and less heavily in the long tail well before the pay-off.

The Internet of Things (Watching Us)

Wed, 26 Nov 2014 16:14:28 +0000

The Creepy New Wave of the Internet by Sue Halpern | The New York Review of Books.

The Internet of Things Watching Us is coming. I can’t see the efficiency being worth the loss of privacy in most cases. But I carry a tracker (cell phone) around like most everyone else anyway, so I know this can sneak in eventually and seem OK.

Memorization and Repetition Still Needed for Learning

Mon, 06 Oct 2014 00:03:05 +0000

I believe in learning for understanding, critical thinking, and inquiry-based learning. But even so, real fluency still requires some drill-and-kill.

The problem with focusing relentlessly on understanding is that math and science students can often grasp essentials of an important idea, but this understanding can quickly slip away without consolidation through practice and repetition. Worse, students often believe they understand something when, in fact, they don’t.

via How I Rewired My Brain to Become Fluent in Math – Issue 17: Big Bangs – Nautilus.

Managing WordPress via git

Fri, 03 Oct 2014 14:31:15 +0000

I reorganized my self-hosted WordPress system to use git to manage the WordPress code and to move the content outside of the WordPress directory. That way I should be able to do a simple git pull and git checkout $newversion to update my WordPress. I’m also keeping my content directory under change management (separately) so that I can update plugins through the web and be able to roll back.

$HOME/blog/wordpress is a git clone of git@github.com:WordPress/WordPress.git. I make no local changes in this. In particular, all of wp-content is unchanged (I make it unwriteable by Apache to be sure).

Can’t be understated

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 19:58:04 +0000

According to FirstRead,

the Iraq war’s effect on American politics can’t be understated, even 10 years later

So, according to that, anything that can be said is overstating the effect. One can’t state anything less about the effect.

Of course, they mean “should not be understated” rather than “can’t be understated”. But they could probably care less.

Google Reader, RIP

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 13:30:38 +0000

Google just announced that Reader will be unavailable as of July 1. Damn!

This makes me think that I should never rely on Google products for anything important. Docs, calendar, etc. Time to start looking for alternatives to each.

Perfect health diet

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 23:42:45 +0000

For the last month I’ve been trying the Perfect Health Diet and I’m pleased. My weight has remained low where it had dropped when I was sick. My strength is mostly back to where it was before I fell ill. It feels like my energy level is improved and my attention span is perhaps better than it was.

At first the name of the diet seemed pretentious but I get that it’s a play on how the authors, a husband and wife team, both have PhDs. Their book is clearly written and presents a convincing case for the benefits of their diet plan. I came to it via the Paleo book by Rob Wolf, which also makes a good case but puts me off with its sophomoric writing.

Making better decisions

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 15:41:42 +0000

New Scientist mag has a May 2007 article on “Top 10 ways to make better decisions“. Here is what I got from it.

Don’t fear the consequences
> Rather than looking inwards and imagining how a given outcome might make you feel, try to find someone who has made the same decision or choice, and see how they felt. Remember also that whatever the future holds, it will probably hurt or please you less than you imagine. Finally, don’t always play it safe. The worst might never happen – and if it does you have the psychological resilience to cope.

blogging

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 19:06:34 +0000

This blog has languished. I tend to put more stuff on Facebook these days (http://www.facebook.com/fredcy).

Predicting happiness when making choices

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 20:44:59 +0000

From “Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth” by Diener and Biswas-Diener, 2008:

There are several predictable thinking errors people commonly make that lead them to incorrectly predict their own future emotions in general, and future happiness in particular:

Focusing on a single salient feature or period of time in a choice, rather than looking at the big picture.

Overestimating the long-term impact of our choices.

Forgetting that happiness is an ongoing process, not a destination

Paying too much attention to external information while overlooking personal preferences and experience.

Trying to maximize decisions rather than focusing on personal satisfaction.

Confusing wanting something for liking it later, and forgetting to evaluate whether we will enjoy the choice once its novelty wears off.

The good news is that by identifying these errors and learning about why they occur, we can guard against them. We may never be able to overcome them entirely, but we certainly can reduce their impact on our lives. By considering a wide range of information, by remembering our ability to cope and adapt, by tapping personal experience, and by remembering that happiness is an ongoing process, you will be far more likely to make decisions that will make you optimally happy. To make good happiness forecasts, get some experience when you can, and check with others who have had similar experiences to the one you will have. Focus on the entire picture, not just on some salient aspect of it, and think what it will be like after a year, not just during the initial period when things may be either more stressful or more exciting. By becoming a good happiness forecaster, through practice and experience, you will substantially increase your psychological wealth.

Your brain is like a pile of sand

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 14:09:42 +0000

From Disorderly genius: How chaos drives the brain

your brain operates on the edge of chaos. Though much of the time it runs in an orderly and stable way, every now and again it suddenly and unpredictably lurches into a blizzard of noise.

systems on the edge of chaos are said to be in a state of “self-organised criticality“. These systems are right on the boundary between stable, orderly behaviour – such as a swinging pendulum – and the unpredictable world of chaos, as exemplified by turbulence.

Work that can’t be done over the wire

Thu, 21 May 2009 17:29:41 +0000

From Heidegger and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

[According to Princeton economist Alan Blinder] the labor market of the next decades won’t necessarily be divided between the highly educated and the less-educated: “The critical divide in the future may instead be between those types of work that are easily deliverable through a wire (or via wireless connections) with little or no diminution in quality and those that are not.” Binder goes on to summarize his own take: “You can’t hammer a nail over the Internet.” Learning a trade is not limiting but, rather, liberating. If you are in possession of a skill that cannot be exported overseas, done with an algorithm, or downloaded, you will always stand a decent chance of finding work. Even rarer, you will probably be a master of your own domain, something the thousands of employed but bored people in the service industries can only dream of.

Distraction and Attention

Wed, 20 May 2009 14:54:26 +0000

From In Defense of Distraction:

“Where you allow your attention to go ultimately says more about you as a human being than anything that you put in your mission statement,” [Merlin Mann] continues. “It’s an indisputable receipt for your existence. And if you allow that to be squandered by other people who are as bored as you are, it’s gonna say a lot about who you are as a person.”

Positive emotions make us more vulnerable

Tue, 12 May 2009 15:26:11 +0000

From What Makes Us Happy?:

… positive emotions make us more vulnerable than negative ones. One reason is that they’re future-oriented. Fear and sadness have immediate payoffs—protecting us from attack or attracting resources at times of distress. Gratitude and joy, over time, will yield better health and deeper connections—but in the short term actually put us at risk. That’s because, while negative emotions tend to be insulating, positive emotions expose us to the common elements of rejection and heartbreak.

Self-control via strategic allocation of attention

Mon, 11 May 2009 14:25:10 +0000

From Don’t in the New Yorker:

What, then, determined self-control? Mischel’s conclusion, based on hundreds of hours of observation, was that the crucial skill was the “strategic allocation of attention.” Instead of getting obsessed with the marshmallow—the “hot stimulus”—the patient children distracted themselves by covering their eyes, pretending to play hide-and-seek underneath the desk, or singing songs from “Sesame Street.” Their desire wasn’t defeated—it was merely forgotten.

Once you realize that will power is just a matter of learning how to control your attention and thoughts, you can really begin to increase it.

Calendar as information central

Fri, 08 May 2009 18:22:02 +0000

I think Scott Adams is right, “the biggest software revolution of the future is that the calendar will be the organizing filter for most of the information flowing into your life”. Sharing calendars is still too hard, and when we solve that problem I expect it to be hugely useful. I expected shared calendar technology to become mainstream years ago and it still hasn’t happened. Just what is the roadblock?

Tired, or energized?

Mon, 04 May 2009 20:39:29 +0000

From an essay by Milton Glaser:

“… there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.”

Yet more on DFW

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 13:17:23 +0000

From The Unfinished in The New Yorker:

The central issue for Wallace remained, as he told McCaffery, how to give “CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.” He added, “Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.”

Welfare for grifters and marks

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 18:45:42 +0000

From Foreclosures Are Not the Problem. Those Who Build Financial Time Bombs, and Those Who Pick Them Up, Are the Problem on Angry Bear [emphasis added]:

But the real problem, the cause of this whole mess, is simple: every few decades, our economic system morphs into a structure that rewards making things less than it rewards creating financial time bombs with multi-year fuses. We’ve been rewarding the financial time bomb makers more and more since Reagan took office. And this is also the second time since Reagan took office we’ve been bailing out the financial time bomb makers at great cost to the rest of us – the previous time was during the S&L crisis.

What DFW wanted his writing to do

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 18:04:21 +0000

Here is an excerpt from “Looking for a Garde of Which to be Avant: An Interview with David Foster Wallace” as it appeared in the Spring 1993 issue of Whiskey Island magazine published by Cleveland State University.

But there are a few books I have read that I’ve never been the same after, and I think all good writing somehow addresses the concern of and acts as an anodyne against loneliness. We’re all terribly, terribly lonely. And there’s a way, at least in prose fiction, that can allow you to be intimate with the world and with a mind and with characters that you just can’t be in the real world. I don’t know what you’re thinking. I don’t know that much about you as I don’t know that much about my parents or my lover or my sister, but a piece of fiction that’s really true allows you to be intimate with …. I don’t want to say people, but it allows you to be intimate with a world that resembles our own in enough emotional particulars so that the way different things must feel is carried out with us into the real world. I think what I would like my stuff to do is make people less lonely. Or really to affect people.

Trust depends on emotions

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 15:12:37 +0000

The emotional states inside us are very, very real and the product of biological evolution. They are helpful to us in our attempt to survive. Experimental economics and behavioral sciences have recently shown us how important they are to us as social creatures: To cooperate you have to trust the other party, even though a rational analysis will tell you that both the likelihood and the cost of being cheated is very high. When you trust, you experience a physiologically detectable inner glow of pleasure. So the inner emotional state says yes. However, if you rationally consider the objects in the outside world, the other parties, and consider their trade-offs and motives, you ought to choose not to cooperate. Analyzing the outside world makes you say no. Human cooperation is dependent on our giving weight to what we experience as the inner world compared to what we experience as the outer world.

DFW is dead — long live DFW

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 15:48:04 +0000

David Foster Wallace is dead, reportedly a suicide. Damn. His writing is some of the most powerful stuff I’ve ever read, very frustrating and yet giving and instilling a difference perspective on things.

Here’s a quote from a commencement address that he gave. It’s not really representative of what I’ve read from him, but gives some insight into what mattered to him and what, ultimately, may have done him in.

“Least Common Denominator” should be Greatest Common Divisor

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 18:37:32 +0000

Many people use the phrase least common denominator to describe something as being base or common. It connotes something that appeals to most people, something that we all value. It is the intersection of what we all value, in the set-theory sense. But in arithmetic the LCD is the union of the prime factors of the denominators (including the multiplicity of those factors).

Perhaps greatest common divisor is a better metaphor for what is typically described as an LCD, the GCD being the intersection of prime factors.

upgrading WordPress, or how to turn 30 minutes into several hours

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 03:04:09 +0000

It took maybe 30 minutes to upgrade from WordPress 2.2 to 2.6, including time to revisit my notes on how I’ve done it before and to scan the official install/upgrade notes. But then it took a couple of hours to figure out why categories were gone and how to fix it. Long story short, I had to manually build the wp_terms table rows based on the old wp_categories rows. The SQL given in a forum note, lost categories after 2.6 upgrade, did the trick. But what a waste of time.

Thoughts on a Station Platform

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 19:24:43 +0000

“It ought to be plain
how little you gain
by getting excited
and vexed.
You’ll always be late
for the previous train,
and always in time
for the next.”
-Piet Hein

Investment strategy by Nicholas Taleb

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 18:05:15 +0000

A Times Online interview with Nicholas Taleb includes this one-paragraph bit of investment advice:

[T]he good investment strategy is to put 90% of your money in the safest possible government securities and the remaining 10% in a large number of high-risk ventures. This insulates you from bad black swans and exposes you to the possibility of good ones. Your smallest investment could go “convex” – explode – and make you rich. High-tech companies are the best. The downside risk is low if you get in at the start and the upside very high. Banks are the worst – all the risk is downside. Don’t be tempted to play the stock market – “If people knew the risks they’d never invest.”

The Spacing Effect in Learning

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 18:01:39 +0000

The spacing effect: it’s possible to dramatically improve learning by correctly spacing practice sessions. The idea is to rehearse (restudy) when the likelihood of recall drops to certain point. Repeating this flattens the “forgetting curve” (likelihood of successfull recall over time).

Long-term memory, the Bjorks said, can be characterized by two components, which they named retrieval strength and storage strength. Retrieval strength measures how likely you are to recall something right now, how close it is to the surface of your mind. Storage strength measures how deeply the memory is rooted. Some memories may have high storage strength but low retrieval strength. Take an old address or phone number. Try to think of it; you may feel that it’s gone. But a single reminder could be enough to restore it for months or years. Conversely, some memories have high retrieval strength but low storage strength. Perhaps you’ve recently been told the names of the children of a new acquaintance. At this moment they may be easily accessible, but they are likely to be utterly forgotten in a few days, and a single repetition a month from now won’t do much to strengthen them at all.

Purpose of consciousness

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 14:30:19 +0000

Nicholas Humphrey writes about Questioning Consciousness and concludes with this. Concerning the purpose of consciousness, given that it seems not to be essential to anything we do (according to him), he says:

I think the plain and simple fact is that consciousness—on various levels—makes life more worth living.
We like being phenomenally conscious. We like the world in which we’re phenomenally conscious. We like ourselves for being phenomenally conscious. And the resulting joie de vivre, the enchantment with the world we live in, and the enhanced sense of our own metaphysical importance have, in the course of evolutionary history, turned our lives around.

Learn and Help Learn

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 23:55:04 +0000

Here is some good stuff from the closing section of the Mindsets book by Carol Dweck:
“When people change to a growth mindset, they change from a judge-and-be-judged framework to a learn-and-help-learn framework.
Every day presents you with ways to grow and to help the people you care about grow. How can you remember to look for these chances? Each morning, as you contemplate the day in front of you, try to ask yourself these questions.

Cognitive dissonance

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 21:34:40 +0000

The following appears in a blog entry about the bear market (emphasis mine):

“People tend to ignore, reject or minimize any information that conflicts with their positive self-image,” their preconceived ideas and their ideological convictions, says John Nofsinger, Washington State professor of behavioral finance, in “Investment Madness.”
“The avoidance of cognitive dissonance can affect the decision-making processes in two ways. First, you can fail to make important decisions because it’s too uncomfortable to contemplate the situation,” Nofsinger says.
People hate conflicting data so much they get nervous when their preconceptions are threatened. Their brain freezes, they self-sabotage and do nothing–and their worst fears become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The second way we handle conflicting information: “Your brain will filter out or reduce negative information and fixate on positive information,” Nofsinger says. Unfortunately, “if you ignore negative information, how are you going to realize that an adjustment in your portfolio is necessary?” Plus, you miss lots of opportunities.

Focus on effort, not talent

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 19:55:53 +0000

A recent article in Scientific American Mind, The Secret to Raising Smart Kids, discusses research suggesting that it is better to praise kids for their effort than to praise them for being smart. Here are some quotes:

Hint: Don’t tell your kids that they are [smart]. More than three decades of research shows that a focus on effort—not on intelligence or ability—is key to success in school and in life

teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on effort rather than on intelligence or talent, helps make them into high achievers in school and in life.

Robert Shiller on the housing boom/bust

Sat, 08 Sep 2007 18:58:54 +0000

Robert Shiller considers causes of the recent housing boom, and possible bust.

In this paper, I will consider, from a broad perspective, the possible causes of this boom, with particular attention to speculative thinking among investors. I will argue that a significant factor in this boom was a widespread perception that houses are a great investment, and the boom psychology that helped spread such thinking. In arguing this, I will make some reliance on the emerging field of behavioral economics. This field has appeared in the last two decades as a reaction against the strong prejudice in the academic profession against those who interpret price behavior as having a psychological component. The profession had come to regard all markets as efficient, and to reject those who say otherwise. Now, however, behavioral economics is increasingly recognized, and has developed a substantial accumulation of literature that we can use to give new concreteness to ideas about psychology in economics.

Spinoza’s freedom

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 18:32:53 +0000

Spinoza was a thoroughgoing determinist who held that absolutely everything that happens occurs through the operation of necessity. For him, even human behaviour is fully determined, with freedom being our capacity to know we are determined and to understand why we act as we do. So freedom is not the possibility to say “no” to what happens to us but the possibility to say “yes” and fully understand why things should necessarily happen that way. By forming more “adequate” ideas about what we do and our emotions or affections, we become the adequate cause of our effects (internal or external), which entails an increase in activity (versus passivity). This means that we become both more free and more like God, as Spinoza argues in the Scholium to Prop. 49, Part II. However, Spinoza also held that everything must necessarily happen the way that it does. Therefore, there is no free will.

Confidence

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 17:04:46 +0000

As the plane begins its descent to LaGuardia, Trudeau remembers something interesting, something from his teens, when he had a summer job working at Time magazine.

“As I was walking out the building one day on my lunch break, two-thirds of a block away this spectacularly beautiful young woman in a very short miniskirt was walking toward me . . .”

Not sure where this is going, but I’m taking notes as fast as I can.

Startups

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 14:15:56 +0000

Paul Graham writes on Why to Not Not Start a Startup. Given his success with supporting projects at Y Combinator, his perspective is valuable. His essay presents a case against reasons that he has heard for not creating a startup company.

So here’s the brief recipe for getting startup ideas. Find something that’s missing in your own life, and supply that need—no matter how specific to you it seems. Steve Wozniak built himself a computer; who knew so many other people would want them? A need that’s narrow but genuine is a better starting point that one that’s broad but hypothetical. So even if the problem is simply that you don’t have a date on saturday night, if you can think of a way to fix that by writing software, you’re onto something, because a lot of other people have the same problem.

trac

Tue, 16 May 2006 13:00:41 +0000

We’re going to use trac in conjunction with subversion to manage the code for our PowerSchool deployment project. The ticket system in trac looks decent. I’m not so sure about “milestones” — my one attempt to edit a milestone ran into trouble when I entered the date value wrong and fixing that value required entering all the milestone’s fields from scratch. I either screwed up, or the interaction design of that part of trac is poor.

Selenium

Sat, 06 May 2006 01:04:08 +0000

The Selenium software for testing web apps looks promising. We’ve got a boatload of pages to get going in our PowerSchool deployment project and I’m hoping to use something like Selenium to automate some of the testing.

I experimented creating a test using the Selenium IDE plug-in with Firefox and ran into a glitch right away. The page I’m testing does a redirect to force the connection into SSL/https. The IDE tool captures the session OK but when I try to run the test from Selenium on the host it hangs at the point where the conversation switches to the SSL port. I tried starting out in SSL but then it hangs when the ultimate page redirects back to a port 80 connection. Rats.

WordPress blog

Sat, 06 May 2006 00:11:48 +0000

Seems like time to give blogging another shot. (How did I ever get to be such a late adopter).