Kat’s Kable #28
- How politics makes us stupid - An excellent piece about herd mentality, why we make the decisions we collectively make, and why group think is not the best way to get the most rational results. It’s not only about politics, but about science. I had gone to a science communication workshop last week, and a lot of what this piece resonates with what I learned there; about how important the role of science communicators to convince society. It turns out that mounting evidence of climate change makes some people believe less in it. Also, smart individuals are dumber at collective thinking. Food for thought.
- We Asked 8,500 Internet Commenters Why They Do What They Do - Five Thirty Eight is a wonderful data-driven blog, and internet commenting is something that has always been something that’s interested me. Couple this with the previous piece.
- How Should a Society Be? - Heavy, intellectually stimulating. In the age of machine intelligence and artificial assistants, what is our role? Where will humans stand? Also, Brian Christian (the author) talks about how open one should be with science, and where that gets us. If you read any one thing, this week, this may be it. About AI and related dangers:
Many people have made the point that this is one of these very abstract things that lurches into being a practical problem when you start talking about self-driving cars. I was having a conversation with Peter Norvig at Google about self-driving cars and the trolley car problem. He made the point that, yeah, if you’re programming a self-driving car, it’s a little bit like a trolley going down the track. On one side is one person, on the other side is five people, and there’s this button that you can press—Oh, too late, you only had 50 milliseconds to make the choice. When you take computational constraints into account, it’s just a completely different problem than it is if you have this pause button on the universe where you can sit and think about the consequences. - Inside a Moneymaking Machine Like No Other - Finance’s blackest box. A profit of $55 billion in 28 years. Worst five-year period? A 0.5% deprecation. The Medallion fund is open to only 300 employees of the fund, and 90 of them are PhDs in math or physics.
Goals. - A practical guide for learning meditation through the art of gaming
I’ve still got a way to go, but maybe one day I’ll be able to calmly decide how to place each piece and build a bigger tower—or at least learn to watch my tower fall, pick up the pieces, and try again. After all, who knows what pieces will fall from the sky? I can only try to work on staying focused and keeping a cool head while they do.
Maybe that’s how you really win the game. - The Unmanufactured Impact of a Plastic Best Friend - This is heartbreaking. Talks about the significance of plastic toys to autistic children.
We were all secretly relieved when Saartje fell off a narrow canyon during a hike in Green River, Utah. The mourning process was extravagant, more so than the loss of a family pet. In the following days, my son cried, became insomnious, drew pictures of the plastic head, made imitation Saartje’s with pinecones or pieces from other broken dolls. In his own associative way, he went through the seven stages of grief. Finally, somewhere around Christmas, when we adopted a dog, our son found Watty in a catalogue (she’s a Playmobil dog-walker), and our relief was not unlike when a heartbroken teen begins dating someone new after a particularly bad break-up.
- The True Story of Nintendo’s Most Coveted Game
His hands, normally steady in his trade, turned clammy and uncertain. It was maybe the most beautiful copy of Stadium Events that Tod had found. There was no way he could let it go: a pristine copy of the game, complete with its manual, the cellophane still attached to the box. He stood up, paced, sat back down – a wreck. His wife was standing behind him, yelling, “Buy it! Buy it!” He typed the bid at the last second: $25,000, an admittedly outrageous amount of money.
There was a delay. Finally, the words popped up: Tod was the winner. - The Evolution of ‘Like’ - Entertaining!
Like has morphed into a modal marker of the human mind at work in conversation.
- My Dad Was a Forger for the Resistance - Sarah Kaminsky learnt quite late in her life that her father was a forger for the resistance against the Nazi rule. She then, through a series of interviews with him, brought out a book about his life. In those interviews, they weren’t father and daughter, but rather confidants. Touching tale. I’m planning on reading this book soon.
- Ukraine’s Berry-Pickers are Reaping a Radioactive Bounty - Thirty years after the nuclear disaster, local berry-pickers earn a good living. What’s the hidden cost of their wares?
Polesian berries are still sold to the rest of the world, and picking berries is very lucrative here; you can earn in a week what a schoolteacher earns in a month.
The women and child pickers are revitalising the Polesian economy on a modest, human-powered scale. They are quietly and unceremoniously doing what development agencies and government programmes failed to do: restoring commercial activity to the contaminated territory around the Chernobyl Zone.
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