Summary of Week
Far from the most productive week. I started to feel a small bit burnt out towards the end. Partly, I think, because of the new workout schedule and partly because I just couldn’t push myself to do probability study.
I’ve found that CBT/Stoic kind of thinking has helped at times. Just to stop me being irrational. It’s not perfect but being aware of it, like a placebo seems a good thing nonetheless. For instance, I started to notice the stress I add to when I eat food, that it needs to be this perfect setting. I’m trying to get more conscious of when I do this, so that hopefully I can slow down when eating and/or not be stressed about it ending.
I think it’s time to change the time horizons on the probability stuff, I think I can add in a programming course and also probably the time to put my research project first, taking it a lot more seriously.
Hoping to focus on what I’d like to use probability to do. Or just more generally what I’d like to do on my run. This along with podcasts on consciousness maybe.
I’d hope to get back on track reading about the grid and energy related policy and progress, this something I’ve been neglecting I would say. It might be worth reconsidering finishing what I started with the microgrid stuff. I think if I was as dogmatic about that as I was about probability theory I would have a bit more to show.
I wonder if learning any skill requires that ‘long approach’. This morning on my run, listening to Brad Stulberg where he talks about ‘good enough’ it also appeared with Owen Livesey talking about people in jiu-jitsu burning bright but for a very short time. Tyler Cowen also mentioned before to stop working before you’re burnt out. It all seems to circle the idea of consistency over blind passion or determination for any skill that will grow over a lifetime. This applies to fitness goals as well, where training to failure is not optimal and will impeded muscle growth progress.
Stulbergy talked about the interlocking roots of redwoods. It reminded me of the parable of the redwood from Simmler but with an oddly different way of looking at things.
Some ideas from the week
- From Hume, the notion of the coherence in the storytelling we have. He’s perhaps to sure aboutthe three connecting principles of all ideas: resemblance, contiguity and causation, but detatils elements of a composition that each new actor or event must follow by some connection. “The strong connection of events facilitates the transfusion of passions” as we read through the story.
- ”Man becomes good and happy at the same time”, Socrates unites the idea of the good life with what you should do. What
you should do is embody practical wisdom of ethical matters.
the love of wisdom transforms the soul so that it functins in a way that can be expected to result in a good life. This functioning must be identified, and Socrates identifies it as the expertise in the life of virtue. Now the problem of becoming good is tractable… To become virtuous it is necessary to have practical wisdom about ethical matters.
- ”My first reaction was, its useless to make anything”, Feynman in the weeks after the Trinity test. The contrast of power must have been just something else. Like the gates of hell opening for an instant.
- Viewing an LCA in computational terms. The representation is whats most important, that an algorithm or computation is the most flexible representation.