Wisdom Of The Week

"It’s 25 pages a day. That’s it. Just commit to that, and then do it. What will 25 pages a day get you?

Let’s say that two days out of each month, you probably won’t have time to read. Plus Christmas. That gives you 340 days a year of solid reading time. 25 pages a day for 340 days is 8,400 pages. 8,400. What I have also found is that, when I commit to a minimum of 25 pages, I almost always read more. So let’s call the 8,400 pages 10,000. (I’d only need to extend that 25 pages into 30 to get there.)

With 10,000 pages a year, at a general pace of 25/day, what can we get done?Well, The Power Broker is 1,100 pages. The four LBJ books are collectively 3,552 pages. 

Tolstoy’s two masterpieces come in at a combined 2,160. Gibbons is six volumes and runs to about 3,660 pages. That’s 10,472 pages.

That means, in about one year, at a modest pace of 25 pages a day, I’ve knocked out 13 masterful works and learned an enormous amount about the history of the world. In one year!"

- The Simple Plan To Read More

Quote of the Day

He who would accomplish little must sacrifice little; he who would achieve much must sacrifice much; he who would attain highly must sacrifice greatly.

-  James Allen

Quote of the Day

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?' There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.

- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

Quote of the Day

If we could first know where we are and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do and how to do it.

- Abraham Lincoln

Thinking About Emergence & Chaos - Robert Sapolsky

Quote of the Day

The best companies I visited, all through the years, were never very hurried. Maybe they used pressure from time to time, as a sort of amusing side-effect. But it was never a constant. Because you don’t get creativity for free. You need people to be able to sit back, put their feet up, and think.

- Oliver Burkeman quotes Tom DeMarco in his brilliant essay Why time management is ruining our lives

Quote of the Day

Books are the perfect entertainment: no commercials, no batteries, hours of enjoyment for each dollar spent. What I wonder is why everybody doesn't carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life.

- Stephen King

Democracy Is Dying as Technocrats Watch

Brilliant piece from one of most useful and practical thinkers of our generation - William Easterly.

My own field of economics can be so technical that whenever I give a talk mentioning values, I feel like I have to apologize. Yet economics is better equipped to defend values than usually believed. At the core of models of economic behavior is individual choice. Hidden in plain sight is the assumption that all individuals — whether male, female, white, black, gay, Muslim, or Latino — should indeed have equal rights to make decisions for themselves. The assumptions that guide analysis of what makes people better off embody the same respect for individual choice — we infer A is better than B for an individual if they voluntarily selected A over B. And if an individual chose something for himself or herself that did not make anyone else worse off, we say that overall well-being improved.

Although these principles are more than a century old in economics and are still at the core of our textbooks, they get sporadic attacks and less attention than they should due to our infatuation with evidence-based policy. Yet as Harvard University economist Edward Glaeser argued along the same lines in 2011, economics still has a “moral spine” beneath all the technocracy: “That spine is a fundamental belief in freedom.” As the economist John Stuart Mill said almost 150 years ago, the true test of freedom is not whether we care about our own rights but whether we care about “the rights of others.”

But can economics provide a conception of democracy that truly protects the “rights of others”? The field does indeed offer a potential defense against one of the core democratic dangers — the possibility that a tyrannical majority might vote to violate the rights of some minority group. Economists teach that it’s in a majority party’s interest to conduct a simple thought experiment before making political decisions: Since it’s impossible to know for sure that they will always be in the majority, and they could always wind up as part of some minority that some future majority decides to tyrannize, they should make political decisions behind a so-called “veil of ignorance” that sets aside their personal status and group affiliations. And anyone running that thought experiment faithfully would join a coalition to protect all future minority and individual rights.

Needless to say, the “veil of ignorance” thought experiment is ultimately a voluntary exercise. This year’s U.S. election tore the veil of ignorance to shreds and not for the first time. Many white men apparently did not perceive, or consider, this “ignorance” about the future, feeling confident that they will always have enough power to protect themselves and thus are free not to vote to protect the rights of others.

The long campaign for equal rights, by mixing eloquent moral appeals with “veil of ignorance” warnings, has nevertheless tried to make us all care just enough about other groups to forge a broad coalition in favor of democracy. Our technocratic age often sees such appeals as sentimentalism — more suitable for refrigerator magnets than serious debates. But Trump’s attack on core values required a response of such universal moral appeals — to white people as well as to minorities — instead of Clinton’s coalition of minorities and the 41-point plan of measurable outcomes on her website.

Democratic values have never been capable of defending themselves — equal rights require eloquent defenses capable of building broad alliances on their behalf. History offers plenty of inspiration. Abraham Lincoln: “Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.” Martin Luther King Jr.: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Elie Wiesel: “Wherever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must — at that moment — become the center of the universe.”

Or take this famous quote by an anti-Nazi pastor. It warns explicitly against the consequences of failing to respect the veil of ignorance:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Grand sentiments can’t sustain politics by themselves; technical expertise has its place. But the long reign of technocracy has deprived us of the moral weapons needed to defend the core values that are the foundation of democracy. We are sadly lacking in any figures remotely resembling King or Wiesel today. But we will not be able to fight back against Trump unless we can find once again a capacity for moral advocacy for democratic values.

Quote of the Day

Pleasantries are low entropy, biased so far that they stop being an earnest inquiry and become ritual. Ritual has its virtues, of course, and I don't quibble with them in the slightest. But if we really want to start fathoming someone, we need to get them speaking in sentences we can't finish.

- Brian Christian, The Most Human Human: What Talking with Computers Teaches Us About What It Means to Be Alive

Max Holiday Card 2016

Wish you all Happy Holiday !!

Quote of the Day

If everybody contemplates the infinite instead of fixing the drains, many of us will die of cholera.

- John Rich

Wisdom Of The Week

Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People by Maciej Cegłowski is the most important piece on AI I have ever read, period. Yes, seriously - I am using the word "ever". A simple reality most people forget and his talk is a remainder to those.

This business about saving all of future humanity is a cop-out. We had the same exact arguments used against us under communism, to explain why everything was always broken and people couldn't have a basic level of material comfort.

We were going to fix the world, and once that was done, happiness would trickle down to the point where everyday life would change for the better for everyone. But it was vital to fix the world first.

I live in California, which has the highest poverty rate in the United States, even though it's home to Silicon Valley. I see my rich industry doing nothing to improve the lives of everyday people and indigent people around us.

But if you’re committed to the idea of superintelligence, AI research is the most important thing you could do on the planet right now. It’s more important than politics, malaria, starving children, war, global warming, anything you can think of.

Because what hangs in the balance is trillions and trillions of beings, the entire population of future humanity, simulated and real, integrated over all future time.

In such conditions, it’s not rational to work on any other problem.

[---]

People think that a superintelligence will take over the world, so they use that as justification for why intelligent people should try to take over the world first, to try to fix it before AI can break it.

Joi Ito, who runs the MIT Media Lab, said a wonderful thing in a recent conversation with President Obama:This may upset some of my students at MIT, but one of my concerns is that it's been a predominantly male gang of kids, mostly white, who are building the core computer science around AI, and they're more comfortable talking to computers than to human beings. A lot of them feel that if they could just make that science-fiction, generalized AI, we wouldn't have to worry about all the messy stuff like politics and society. They think machines will just figure it all out for us.

Having realized that the world is not a programming problem, AI obsessives want to make it into a programming problem, by designing a God-like machine.

This is megalomaniacal. I don't like it.

[---]

So what's the answer? What's the fix?

We need better scifi! And like so many things, we already have the technology.

This is Stanislaw Lem, the great Polish scifi author. English-language scifi is terrible, but in the Eastern bloc we have the goods, and we need to make sure it's exported properly.

It's already been translated well into English, it just needs to be better distributed.

What sets authors like Lem and the Strugatsky brothers above their Western counterparts is that these are people who grew up in difficult circumstances, experienced the war, and then lived in a totalitarian society where they had to express their ideas obliquely through writing.

They have an actual understanding of human experience and the limits of Utopian thinking that is nearly absent from the west.

Quote of the Day

Don't let them tell us stories. Don't let them say of the man sentenced to death "He is going to pay his debt to society," but: "They are going to cut off his head." It looks like nothing. But it does make a little difference.

- Albert Camus

Quote of the Day

The only way we could remember would be by constant re-reading, for knowledge unused tends to drop out of mind. Knowledge used does not need to be remembered; practice forms habits and habits make memory unnecessary. The rule is nothing; the application is everything.

- Henry Hazlitt, Thinking as a Science

Quote of the Day

The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.

-  C.G. Jung

Quote of the Day

Strong people alone know how to organize their suffering so as to bear only the most necessary pain.

- Emil Dorian, Quality of Witness: A Romanian Diary, 1937-1944

Quote of the Day

If you are depressed you are living in the past. 
If you are anxious you are living in the future. 
If you are at peace you are living in the present.

- Lao Tzu

The Great A.I. Awakening

The issue with multilayered, “deep” neural networks was that the trial-and-error part got extraordinarily complicated. In a single layer, it’s easy. Imagine that you’re playing with a child. You tell the child, “Pick up the green ball and put it into Box A.” The child picks up a green ball and puts it into Box B. You say, “Try again to put the green ball in Box A.” The child tries Box A. Bravo.

Now imagine you tell the child, “Pick up a green ball, go through the door marked 3 and put the green ball into Box A.” The child takes a red ball, goes through the door marked 2 and puts the red ball into Box B. How do you begin to correct the child? You cannot just repeat your initial instructions, because the child does not know at which point he went wrong. In real life, you might start by holding up the red ball and the green ball and saying, “Red ball, green ball.” The whole point of machine learning, however, is to avoid that kind of explicit mentoring. Hinton and a few others went on to invent a solution (or rather, reinvent an older one) to this layered-error problem, over the halting course of the late 1970s and 1980s, and interest among computer scientists in neural networks was briefly revived. “People got very excited about it,” he said. “But we oversold it.” Computer scientists quickly went back to thinking that people like Hinton were weirdos and mystics.

These ideas remained popular, however, among philosophers and psychologists, who called it “connectionism” or “parallel distributed processing.” “This idea,” Hinton told me, “of a few people keeping a torch burning, it’s a nice myth. It was true within artificial intelligence. But within psychology lots of people believed in the approach but just couldn’t do it.” Neither could Hinton, despite the generosity of the Canadian government. “There just wasn’t enough computer power or enough data. People on our side kept saying, ‘Yeah, but if I had a really big one, it would work.’ It wasn’t a very persuasive argument.”

- More Here

Quote of the Day

The things that I really regret were not errors of judgement, but failures of feeling.

- Jeanette Winterson

Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes

The case for political moderation requires untangling some misconceptions.

Moderation does not mean truth is always found equidistant between two extreme positions, nor does it mean that bold and at times even radical steps are not necessary to advance moral ends. Moderation takes into account what is needed at any given moment; it allows circumstances to determine action in the way that weather patterns dictate which route a ship will follow.

But there are general characteristics we associate with moderation, including prudence, the humility to recognize limits (including our own), the willingness to balance competing principles and an aversion to fanaticism. Moderation accepts the complexity of life in this world and distrusts utopian visions and simple solutions. The way to think about moderation is as a disposition, not as an ideology. Its antithesis is not conviction but intemperance.

Moderates “do not see the world in Manichaean terms that divide it into forces of good (or light) and agents of evil (or darkness),” according to Professor Craiutu. “They refuse the posture of prophets, champion sobriety in political thinking and action, and endorse an ethics of responsibility as opposed to an ethics of absolute ends.” This allows authentic moderates to remain open to facts that challenge their assumptions and makes them more likely to engage in debate free of invective. The survival of a functioning parliamentary system, Sir William Harcourt said, depends on “constant dining with the opposition.”

The charge that moderates lack courage is easily put to rest by people like the French journalist and philosopher Raymond Aron. He was a man of deep, reasoned convictions who possessed a sense of proportion. A nonconformist, Aron was fearless in taking on the leading intellectuals of his time, including his friend Sartre. (Parisian students in 1968 avowed that it was “better to be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron.”) Aron strongly defended liberal democracy when it was fashionable to denigrate it. Playing off the Marxist claim that religion was the opium of the masses, Aron argued that Marxism was the opium of the intellectuals.

For Aron, political moderation was a fighting creed. Allergic to ideological thinking, he conformed his views to evidence. He retained his intellectual and political independence throughout his life. Aron believed that history teaches us humility, modesty and the limits of our knowledge. He was also skilled at the art of dialogue, engaging those he disagreed with critically but civilly. “As the last great representative of a distinguished tradition of European liberalism,” Professor Craiutu writes, “Aron attempted to disintoxicate minds and calm fanaticism in dark times.” Aron put it this way: “Freedom flourishes in temperate zones; it does not survive the burning faith of prophets and crowds.”

[---]

Moderation is a difficult virtue for people to rally around, since by definition it doesn’t arouse fervor or zealous advocates. But in a time of spreading resentments and rage, when truth is increasingly the target of assault and dialogue is often viewed as betrayal, moderation isn’t simply a decorous democratic quality; it becomes an essential democratic virtue.

In this immoderate age, moderation must become America’s fighting faith.

- More here on the new book Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes by Aurelian Craiutu

Quote of the Day

Wisdom Of The Week

Most firms have piles of data they aren’t doing much with, and far more data that they could collect at a modest cost. Sometimes they use some of this data to predict a few things of interest. Sometimes this creates substantial business value. Most of this value is achieved, as usual, in the simplest applications, where simple prediction methods are applied to simple small datasets. And the total value achieved is only a small fraction of the world economy, at least as measured by income received by workers and firms who specialize in predicting from data.

Many obstacles limit such applications. For example, the value of better predictions for related decisions may be low, data may be in a form poorly suited to informing predictions, making good use of predictions might require larger reorganizations, and organizations that hold parts of the data may not want to lose control of that data. Available personnel may lack sufficient skills to apply the most effective approaches for data cleaning, merging, analysis, and application.

No doubt many errors are made in choices of when to analyze what data how much and by whom. Sometimes they will do too much prediction, and sometimes too little. When tech changes, orgs will sometimes wait too long to try new tech, and sometimes will not wait long enough for tech to mature. But in ordinary times, when the relevant technologies improve at steady known rates, we have no strong reason to expect these choices to be greatly wrong on average.

In the last few years, new “deep machine learning” prediction methods are “hot.” In some widely publicized demonstrations, they seem to allow substantially more accurate predictions from data. Since they shine more when data is plentiful, and they need more skilled personnel, these methods are most promising for the largest prediction problems. Because of this new fashion, at many firms those who don’t understand these issues well are pushing subordinates to seek local applications of these new methods. Those subordinates comply, at least in appearance, in part to help they and their organization appear more skilled..

One result of this new fashion is that a few big new applications are being explored, in places with enough data and potential prediction value to make them decent candidates. But another result is the one described in my tweet above: fashion-induced overuse of more expensive new methods on smaller problems to which they are poorly matched. We should expect this second result to produce a net loss on average. The size of this loss could be enough to outweigh all the gains from the few big new applications; after all, most value is usually achieved in many small problems..

- This AI Boom Will Also Bust

Quote of the Day

The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental, nor do they result from from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink.

- George Orwell, 1984

Quote of the Day

I am alone in the midst of these happy, reasonable voices. All these creatures spend their time explaining, realizing happily that they agree with each other. In Heaven's name, why is it so important to think the same things all together.

- Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

Quote of the Day

If someone is making an effort to ignore you, he is not ignoring you.

- Nassim Taleb

Quote of the Day

I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain … In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar.

- Richard Feynman

What I've Been Reading

The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis.  What could we expect when a best writer of our generation writes about one of the best friendships of this generation? Only Michael Lewis can pull this off !!

That was another thing colleagues and students noticed about Danny: how quickly he moved form his enthusiasms, how easily he accepted failure. It was as if he expected it. But he wasn't afraid of it. He'd try anything. He thought of himself as someone who enjoyed, more than most, changing his mind. "I get a sense of movement and discovery whenever I find a flaw in my thinking," he said. His theory of himself dovetailed neatly with this moodiness. In his darker moods, he become fatalistic - and was so wasn't surprised or disturbed when he did fail. (He'd been proven right!) In his up moments he was so full of enthusiasm that seemed to forget the possibility of failure, and would run with any new idea that comes his way. "He could drive people up the wall with his volatility," said fellow Hebrew University psychologist Maya Bar-Hillel. "Something was genius one day and crap the next, and the genius the next day and crap the next." What drove other crazy might have helped to keep Danny same. His moods were grease for his idea factory. 

In Amos's company Danny felt funny too - and he'd never felt that way before. In Danny's company Amos, too, became a different person:uncritical. Or, at least uncritical of whatever came from Danny. He didn't even poke fun in jest. He enabled Danny to feel, in a way he hand't before, confident. Maybe for the first time in his Danny was playing offense. "Amos did not write in a defensive crouch," e said. "There was something liberating about the arrogance - it was extremely rewarding to feel like Amos, smarter than almost everyone." 

The men who revealed our innate stupidity couldn't control their innate biases that affected their friendship... And that should teach us so much about human nature.

Quote of the Day

The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs. Self-conceit often regards it as a sign of weakness to admit that a belief to which we have once committed ourselves is wrong. We get so identified with an idea that it is literally a “pet” notion and we rise to its defense and stop our eyes and ears to anything different.

- John Dewey

Quote of the Day

Nell, the Constable continued, indicating through his tone of voice that the lesson was concluding, the difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people—and this is true whether or not they are well-educated—is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations—in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward.

- Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age: or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

Quote of the Day

One characteristic of good metaphors is the contrast between prior, literal interpretation and the posterior metaphoric interpretation. Metaphors that are too transparent are uninteresting; obscure metaphors are interpretable. A good metaphor is like a good detective story. The solution shouldn't be apparent to maintain the reader's interest, yet it should seem plausible after the fact to maintain the coherence of the story. Consider the smile, "An essay is like a fish." At first the statement is puzzling. An essay is not expected to be fishy, slippery or wet. The puzzle is resolved when we recall that (like a fish) an essay has a head and a body , and it occasionally ends with a flip of the tail.

- Amos, Tversky, Features of Similarity

Wisdom Of The Week

You speak to an unusually wide audience for a research mathematician. What themes do you emphasise when talking to a broader public?

I think many people have been put off mathematics as young people. But actually what you find with children is they really enjoy it before they've had some adverse experience. A bad experience [is] probably because you were taught or you were in an environment where people were afraid of it. But the natural state I found in most children [is that] they find it very exciting. Children are born curious, exploring the outside world. I'm trying to explain to them [that] for people who carry on, [doing maths is] really an enjoyable experience – it's very exciting.

Now what you have to handle when you start doing mathematics as an older child or as an adult is accepting this state of being stuck. People don't get used to that. Some people find this very stressful. Even people who are very good at mathematics sometimes find this hard to get used to and they feel that's where they're failing. But it isn't: it's part of the process and you have to accept [and] learn to enjoy that process. Yes, you don't understand [something at the moment] but you have faith that over time you will understand — you have to go through this.

It's like training in sport. If you want to run fast, you have to train. Anything where you're trying to do something new, you have to go through this difficult period. It's not something to be frightened of. Everybody goes through it.

What I fight against most in some sense, [when talking to the public,] is the kind of message, for example as put out by the film Good Will Hunting, that there is something you're born with and either you have it or you don't. That's really not the experience of mathematicians. We all find it difficult, it's not that we're any different from someone who struggles with maths problems in third grade. It's really the same process. We're just prepared to handle that struggle on a much larger scale and we've built up resistance to those setbacks.

Yes, some people are brighter than others but I really believe that most people can really get to quite a good level in mathematics if they're prepared to deal with these more psychological issues of how to handle the situation of being stuck.

What do you do when you get stuck?

The process of research mathematics seems to me [to be] that you absorb everything about the problem, you think about it a great deal, all the techniques that you use for these things. Usually [the problem still] needs something else – so yes, you get stuck.

Then you have to stop, let your mind relax a bit and then come back to it. Somehow your subconscious is making connections and you start again, maybe the next afternoon, the next day, the next week even and sometimes it just comes back. Sometimes I put something down for a few months, I come back and it's obvious. I can't explain why. But you have to have the faith that that will come back.

The way some people handle this is they work on several things at once and then they switch from one to another as they get stuck. I can't do that. I get manic about it. Once I'm stuck on a problem I just can't think about anything else. It's more difficult. So I just take a little time off and then come back to it.

I really think it's bad to have too good a memory if you want to be a mathematician. You need a slightly bad memory because you need to forget the way you approached [a problem] the previous time because it's a bit like evolution, DNA. You need to make a little mistake in the way you did it before so that you do something slightly different and then that's what actually enables you to get round [the problem].

So if you remembered all the failed attempts before, you wouldn't try them again. But because I have a slightly bad memory I'll probably try essentially the same thing again and then I realise I was just missing this one little thing I needed to do.

How important is creativity in mathematics?

Well, creativity is what it's all about. I think outside there are different reactions to mathematics, one is [that the] general public think "Isn't it all known already?", or that it's somehow machine-like.

But no, it's extremely creative. We're coming up with some completely unexpected patterns, either in our reasoning or in the results. Yes, to communicate it to others we have to make it very formal and very logical. But we don't create it that way, we don't think that way. We're not automatons. We have developed a kind of feel for how it should fit together and we're trying to feel, "Well, this is important, I haven't used this, I want to try and think of some new way of interpreting this so that I can put it into the equation," and so on.

We think of ourselves as very creative. I think that's sometimes a little frustrating for mathematicians because we're thinking in terms of beauty and creativity and so on, and of course the outside world thinks of us as much more like a computer. It's not how we think of ourselves at all.

It could be a little like music. In some sense, music, you can just write it out in terms of numbers. I mean, they're just notes. It's up, down, up, down, put a rhythm in. It could be written out completely digitally, and it is. But you listen to Bach or Beethoven, that's not a series of numbers, there's something else there. It's the same with us. There's something very, very creative that we get very passionate about.
- Andrew Wiles: What Does It Feel Like To Do Maths?

Quote of the Day

If intelligence was a cake, unsupervised learning would be the cake, supervised learning would be the icing on the cake, and reinforcement learning would be the cherry on the cake. We know how to make the icing and the cherry, but we don’t know how to make the cake.

- Yann LeCun

Quote of the Day

Chance is commonly viewed as a self-correcting process in which a deviation in one direction induces a deviation in the opposite direction to restore the equilibrium. In fact, deviations are not "corrected" as a chance process unfolds, they are merely diluted.

- Amos Tversky, Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases
 

Quote of the Day

A general “law of least effort” applies to cognitive as well as physical exertion. The law asserts that if there are several ways of achieving the same goal, people will eventually gravitate to the least demanding course of action. In the economy of action, effort is a cost, and the acquisition of skill is driven by the balance of benefits and costs. Laziness is built deep into our nature.

- Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow 

Quote of the Day

Trust none of what you hear, some of what you read, half of what you see goes an old trader adage. As a trader and quant/mathematical statistician, I have been taught to take data seriously, trust nobody’s numbers, and avoid people naive enough to engage in policy based on lurid but questionable pictures of destruction: the fake picture of a dying child is something nobody can question without appearing to be an asshole. As a citizen, I require that the designation “murderer” be determined in a court of law, not by Saudi-funded outlets — once someone is called a murderer or butcher, all bets are off. I cannot believe governments and bureaucrats could be so stupid. But they are.

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Quote of the Day

Patience is a virtue, but there comes a moment when you must stop being patient and take the day by the throat and shake it. If it fights back; fine. I'd rather end up bloody at the end of the day, then unhurt with no progress made, no knowledge gained. I'd rather have a no, then nothing. I'd forgotten that about myself.

- Laurell K. Hamilton

Quote of the Day

Knowledge, then, can be dangerous because a rational mind may be compelled to use it in rational ways, allowing malevolent or careless speakers to commandeer our faculties against us. This makes the expressive power of language a mixed blessing: it lets us learn what we want to know, but it also lets us learn what we don't want to know. Language is not just a window into human nature but a fistula: an open wound through which our innards are exposed to an infectious world. It's not surprising that we expect people to sheathe their words in politeness and innuendo and other forms of doublespeak.

- Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

Arrival

I loved the movie !! Language affects our thoughts and at a higher level it also defines who we are and who we become. So be careful watching cable news, taking ideological political stance and seeing the world as my ideology vs. theirs.

Well, the movie doesn't cover any of the above except it defines how language affects our thoughts.

Memory is a strange thing.  We are bound by time.  By its order.

Are you dream in their language?

Quote of the Day

My reasons for refusing the prize concern neither the Swedish Academy nor the Nobel Prize in itself, as I explained in my letter to the Academy. In it, I alluded to two kinds of reasons: personal and objective.

The personal reasons are these: my refusal is not an impulsive gesture, I have always declined official honors. In 1945, after the war, when I was offered the Legion of Honor, I refused it, although I was sympathetic to the government. Similarly, I have never sought to enter the Collège de France, as several of my friends suggested.

This attitude is based on my conception of the writer’s enterprise. A writer who adopts political, social, or literary positions must act only with the means that are his own—that is, the written word. All the honors he may receive expose his readers to a pressure I do not consider desirable. If I sign myself Jean-Paul Sartre it is not the same thing as if I sign myself Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prizewinner.

The writer who accepts an honor of this kind involves as well as himself the association or institution which has honored him. My sympathies for the Venezuelan revolutionists commit only myself, while if Jean-Paul Sartre the Nobel laureate champions the Venezuelan resistance, he also commits the entire Nobel Prize as an institution.

The writer must therefore refuse to let himself be transformed into an institution, even if this occurs under the most honorable circumstances, as in the present case.

- Jean-Paul Sartre explanation for his refusal to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature

Wisdom Of The Week

Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so. Here are twenty lessons from the twentieth century, adapted to the circumstances of today.

1. Do not obey in advance. Much of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then start to do it without being asked. You’ve already done this, haven’t you? Stop. Anticipatory obedience teaches authorities what is possible and accelerates unfreedom.
2. Defend an institution. Follow the courts or the media, or a court or a newspaper. Do not speak of “our institutions” unless you are making them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions don’t protect themselves. They go down like dominoes unless each is defended from the beginning.
3. Recall professional ethics. When the leaders of state set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become much more important. It is hard to break a rule-of-law state without lawyers, and it is hard to have show trials without judges.
5. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives. When the terrorist attack comes, remember that all authoritarians at all times either await or plan such events in order to consolidate power. Think of the Reichstag fire. The sudden disaster that requires the end of the balance of power, the end of opposition parties, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book. Don’t fall for it.
6. Be kind to our language. Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does. Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying. (Don’t use the internet before bed. Charge your gadgets away from your bedroom, and read.) What to read? Perhaps “The Power of the Powerless” by V’aclav Havel, 1984 by George Orwell, The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz, The Rebel by Albert Camus, The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, or Nothing is True and Everything is Possible by Peter Pomerantsev.
7. Stand out. Someone has to. It is easy, in words and deeds, to follow along. It can feel strange to do or say something different. But without that unease, there is no freedom. And the moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.
8. Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.
11. Make eye contact and small talk. This is not just polite. It is a way to stay in touch with your surroundings, break down unnecessary social barriers, and come to understand whom you should and should not trust. If we enter a culture of denunciation, you will want to know the psychological landscape of your daily life.
12. Take responsibility for the face of the world. Notice the swastikas and the other signs of hate. Do not look away and do not get used to them. Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so.
19. Be as courageous as you can. If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die in unfreedom.

- Fighting authoritarianism: 20 lessons from the 20th century

Quote of the Day

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty or democracy?

- Mahatma Gandhi

Quote of the Day

Our ultimate goal, after all, is not a good death but a good life to the very end.

- Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

What Neuroscience Can Learn From Buddhism

Recently, neuroscience has to concede, maybe grudgingly, that Buddhism was right all along when it comes to the concept of the changing mind. The Buddhists call it anicca, the concept that everything is impermanent and constantly changing. Thus, Buddhists believe that life is a continuous becoming.

This concept is liberating because it brings an awareness that a person is not defined by what they think or their perception of themselves. With this awareness, there is a sense of positivism because it gives the person hope that they are constantly evolving into something better. Moreover, it gives hope that the possibilities to change themselves are endless.

Armed with the same belief that life is like a river continuously flowing, Buddhists do not attach themselves to things because they believe that when they do, they are going against the forces of the universe by controlling something to become stable.

Neuroscience also holds the same belief but they put it in a more scientific and rather complicated way. They call this state of impermanence neuroplasticity, which shows that the brain is malleable and can be easily molded to change opening yourself to great possibilities for growth.

Neuroplasticity also shows that from the time we are born and until we die, our brains continue to rewire itself finding new neural pathways to adjust to our changing needs. This process is what allows people to adapt to the different experiences they have.

- More Here

Quote of the Day

They will envy you for your success, your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status - but rarely for your wisdom.

- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms