Some thoughts on Henry James
In some of the early novels of Henry James, he seems to be experimenting with removing essential elements of a quintessential Jane Austen novel like Pride and Prejudice and then seeing what happens.
When bullies change
There are a few instances in which I have seen people cease to engage bullying behaviours. These have all been children or adolescents. In most of these cases, maturity appears to be the cause and I suspect it’s because they begin to see overt bullying as too crude for their age rather than necessarily wrong.
The trouble with PDFs
A pdf is not a good format for human knowledge retrieval. This is particularly the case when it comes to technical documents such as research papers which comprise features like tables, figures and references in addition to text.
An unused playground
I saw a fox today. It climbed on top of a pile of rubble and walked around a little bit and then climbed down on the other side. It wandered around for a little while and then it ran back towards a fence and then I lost sight of it behind several mounds of earth.
ChatGPT rabbit holes – a new form of digital addiction
A while ago I spent several days compulsively chatting to ChatGPT telling it my views about books, films and history and getting it to validate them. These are the kinds of topics about which I would start reading page after Wikipedia page and fall down a rabbit hole, endlessly following links and getting a kick out of mindlessly consuming largely unimportant details. ChatGPT is much worse because you can’t run out of stuff to read even on the most obscure topic. You can simply continue requesting it to generate more junk.
An instance of the placebo effect?
This blog post describes an interesting experience of solving a mathematical problem that occurred when I was completing a quantum computing course. My goal in writing the post is not to provide a formal demonstration of the placebo effect but to reflect on the learning process and explore the curious ways in which solutions can emerge.
On first seeing the moors
The thing about moors is that there is nothing to see for miles around yet they are anything but monotonous. They invite you to walk on them for hours together without tiring. When you are on the moors you have little desire to walk anywhere else even though there are beautiful fields everywhere around.
Sleeping v Waking Up
It is generally more important to wake up on time than to sleep on time. In the sense that the short-term consequences are much more severe for oversleeping compared to staying up late. The risks are also more immediately apparent.
Pensamientos sobre la verdadera innovación
Me llamó la atención que cada vez es más difícil discerner si algo es verdaderamente innovador o no. En tiempos anteriores, esto era obvio.
The Doubt Detective
I recently read an article by Scott Alexander called “The Cowpox of Doubt”. It appeared to make an analogy between weak arguments against theories like homeopathy or the moon landing hoax, and inoculation. Like how inoculation involves using a weak pathogen such as cowpox to build immunity against a stronger pathogen like smallpox, presenting weak arguments against a position leads people to end up becoming immune to much stronger arguments against the same position.