Howdy yall!
It’s finally happened! I’ve finally finished my undergrad and moved to Brooklyn! Times are tumultuous and the happenings be hazardous. Amidst this whirlwind of change there is a deep excitement for the future. I don’t start work till October, which given how time works now is about a decade away. Plenty of time for many schemes :)
There’s no long form post updates, but several small tidbits as well as the specs for some intents/projects I’m diving into.
Big Projects
Blogging about the Brain
All quarantine I’ve been building a more comprehensive understanding of the mind. I’m getting better at reading papers and hunting through the literature to find what’s relevant to my interests. This summer I want to turn more of that research into writing. I plan to be writing a lot more. Some of it will be deep-dive research posts, others will be more “here’s a bunch of leads for further exploration”. I’m intent on improving both as a writer and as a researcher and want to have a lot of output this summer.
Some broad questions I’m digging at:
Finding ways to integrate Global Workspace Theory with Predictive Processing.
Exploring the role of attention in both of the above theories.
How the mind constructs a map/understanding of itself.
How the creation of language shaped consciousness.
Breaking away from the System-1/System-2 dichotomy and getting a more diverse understanding of types of processing the brain can do.
Here’s a high context scatterbrained thread that collects some of the ideas I started to pull together.
Commitment: This newsletter is now going to be a weekly occurrence. I won’t always have new full length posts each week, but I’ll at least put out a “this is what I’ve been learning + a few links”. Time to hone my writing skills!
Math and Meaning
One of my “enough of a stretch to make me nervous” goals for the summer is to get through this book, Vector Calculus, Linear Algebra and Differential Forms: A Unified Approach. I can’t remember how I ended up with this textbook, but what I love about it is how it motivates everything.
I’m taking a very “meaning first” approach to studying this quest. The book Where Mathematics Comes From and reading more about the history of mathematics have both further cemented in my mind the importance of meaning and metaphor for understanding maths, as opposed to a sterile axiomatic approach. I’m hoping to gain a solid sense of “what sort of thing” differential forms are (supposedly they’re great for physics, which I want to learn more of later). Some questions I’ll have in mind as I read:
How can I visualize this?
What other theorems, properties, or structures does this relate to?
What is the purpose/use/affordance of this piece of math?
How can a metaphorically map this to something I understand, while keeping an asterisk on the mismatch?
“Pithy Nuggets”
Dunning-Kruger, not as seen on TV
(^above image is a clickable link)
A twitter thread in which I look at some critical responses to the methods and conclusion of the original Dunning-Kruger work.
tldr; “The least competent are the most overconfident” is a tautology at best, or a nasty fully general counterargument at worst.
Conflict Is Not Abuse (book)
This is the best book I’ve read in the past few months. It tackles some really difficult topics with precision and compassion. It looks at ways conflict (struggles between equals) can get conflated with abuse (power over another), and how this leads to conversations and repairs being shut down, making the situation worse.
I’ve got so many thoughts about this book that I’ll probably need to make an entire post at some point.
A Burglar’s Guide to The City (book)
This book turned out to be less of a guide and more of a lovely exploration of the way that architecture shapes and informs the sorts of crimes that are committed in a city, as well as the way a city is policed.
Quantum Country and the Mnemonic Medium (essay)
I’d seen Andy Matuschak on twitter before, but hadn’t realized he was an ancient sorcerer of great power. Quantum Country is an essay the aims to actually teach you the basics of quantum mechanics in a way you’ll remember. The idea is to embed spaced repetition directly into the medium in which you are doing your leaning. If you’ve never heard of spaced repetition before, check out Gwern’s comprehensive guide. I’m very excited about this idea and can’t wait to see where it goes!
Non-Euclidean Navigation (paper)
Just yesterday I found out there’s a whole scientific literature based on putting people in VR worlds that break normal physics to see how they cope. This paper in particular tries to answer questions about what sorts of structures our minds use to navigate the physical space around us.
This research put people into VR environments that were non-metric, which means the triangle inequality doesn’t hold, which basically means that it can be shorter to take a detour than go directly to where you want to go.
People were put into a maze that secretly had a wormhole, and everyone managed to navigate it and figure out shortcuts just fine and didn’t even realize there was anything weird going on. They conclude that people’s cognitive maps only record local information, and aren’t embedded in any sort of global metric-Euclidean coordinate space.
Unrelated to this paper, but amazingly cool is this rendering engine for non-euclidean games:
That’s all for now, see yeah next week!
Stay Lucky,
Hazard