Summary of the week
- Research: Research went a bit better this week. I think I hit on a pedagogy for explaining what I’m doing. I’m still struggling with putting it as a priority. I’m not really working hard, or at least not consistently. I feel somewhat disappointed in myself these days. I don’t feel I’m really trying to do good work.
- Non-linearity: Read an article about the non-linearity of life, that should should prepare yourself for ‘meaning’. I’m not sure that life is as non-linear as they say. I think most of the preparation is achieved through the small aggregation of things day today.
- Knowledge asymmetry: The epistemic tint to probability is something I really engage with. That idea of knowledge asymmetry we don’t know whats on the other side of the wall yet we can reason about it somehow with probability.
- Fellers on chess: A recurring theme in my head was also Fellers explanation of formal system as Chess. The rules of Chess are plain to see, once you identify as a pawn, all your states are well defined. No one really asks what a pawn ‘means’, there is no intuiting that we’re trying to compare with real life.
- I started getting interested in decision psychology. Looking at how our emotions about information affects how we update our beliefs with that information.
- Poincare: Mathematics structures ideas, it does not invent them. A paraphrase from Poincare but something I’m thinking about with my research work.
- discussion group: I think sometime I should try and focus on is getting into a position where I can get better feedback on what I’m learning. It seems also that statistics and probability are tools, what questions to I want to look at?
- Dynamical systems: Unfortunately I don’t yet have the mathematical chops for modelling physical systems to really engage with the content here but this is a really interesting area. Machine learning plays a roll too in that the systems you model don’t have to be physical.
- Optionality: I think an example of optionality is consistency in learning. In that, maybe you’re not totally interested in it now but it may be useful in the future, or you’re fairly confident you will have an interest in it in the future.
- Contexts: I think the environemnt and context I put myself in is important. For instance, I feel this week I’ve had too much tolerance for bullshit information (watching YT sporadically etc.) I think this has subconscious affects. My sources of information should be more system 2 generating.
- Questions: If I was to die tomorrow, what questions would I want answered? I’ve been frustrated when I take a step back, what do I actually want to figure out? What interests me? Where I go wrong here may be in trying to find a question with importance, which is kind of ridiculous.
- I ain’t scared of nothing: phrase from Hamming’s walk, it reminded me of emotional response to being stuck, not feeling you’ll ever get it. Sometimes, its a sense or fear that you won’t get it. It’s interesting, the more conscious I become to emotional responses to learning the more clearly they are just made up barriers. I don’t mean they’re necessarily easier to get through when you see them that way.
Stomach is upset again today (curious, same as last week).