it is wild to me how people are so confident in their ability (or lack thereof) to assess something where they have no way of finding out the ground truth
"no this one time a girl told me she'd been flirting with me and i hadn't noticed, that proves i'm terrible at it"
yes and a million other times you didn't think someone was flirting with you and they actually weren't
how do you know what the false negative rate is?
Oct 10, 2022 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
is there some sort of a programming tutorial that isn't about writing code but about the concepts?
like db normalization, "mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive" interfaces, encapsulation, abstraction, DRY, etc
how to THINK like a programmer. how to model problem domains
i feel like a lot of people who don't write code for a living but eg. work with spreadsheets or with some no-code platform, work with Notion, etc, would benefit from that
ig it'd be hard to create practical exercises for that sort of thing
Nov 26, 2021 • 16 tweets • 5 min read
i was compelled to draw some pictures to make a case. read this QT and then continue below
a community forms around a location (physical or digital) and optionally around some idea or central figure
but the community is not the location, idea, nor figure. it is a coherent abstract entity, and we develop relationships on the basis of our shared relating to this entity
Jul 15, 2021 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
just a point re: preference cascades
i haven't read Kuran, so this is just my understanding from my country's cultural memory of communism >>
under a preference falsification regime, it's not necessarily that you, say, hate communism, but *believe* that most everyone else loves communism
you do have private conversations with your friends; you get the understanding that most people hate communism >>
Jul 15, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
last night i dreamed that i could see both jupiter and saturn with the naked eye—not as a bright dots, but nice little disks, with jupiter's colorful clouds and saturn's rings
when i have a great dream, it's typically not about what happened, but about seeing something beautiful
seeing a complex, futuristic city, or an unrealistically vivid galaxy spanning the night sky, or watching a scene from a great movie (that doesn't exist irl), or listening to incredible (non-irl-existent) music
those are the dreams that make me excited for hours after i wake up
Mar 24, 2021 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
today i read a blogpost about social class (not ssc, some other blog) and i realized that the most awkward date i've ever been on was awkward _because we were from different classes_
i'm working class, and the way i was used to doing dates was to get a 2 liter plastic bottle of freshly draught wine from a winery and go sit in the grass by the river and get drunk
she was one of those instagram girls, used to guys paying for expensive dinners and skiing trips
Mar 22, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
gonna write a self-bully bot that listens for every tweet of mine that starts with "hm" and replies with
"hMmmMmMmmMM? HMmmMMM????"
it will also reply to every tweet i make after 11 pm CET with "go to bed monk"
Nov 28, 2020 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
thinking about religion…
so, religion is not necessarily always theism
and by inversion, atheism is not necessarily irreligion
religion is a set of social institutions that are grounded in something spiritual or transcendental, but not necessarily supernatural, and that bind a society together
eg. nationalism can be a religion
Oct 20, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
so the replies helped me realize that what i was really meant by "having shit together" was executive function
so to restate my dilemma in better words:
i've been imagining that there's such a thing as a "correctly functioning brain"
- how to learn new skills
- how to acquire habits sustainably
- how to research knowledge
- how to run experiments
and…can you not combine these to learn anything in the world that is learnable?
…
Oct 20, 2020 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
when you're getting your shit together,
is there a phase shift where you get your shit together enough that it enables you to invest effort into improving the rate at which you get your shit together?
thus reaching escape velocity and being able to achieve anything you want?
or is getting your shit together more linear, where getting eg. from a FAANG job to being a multimillionaire entrepreneur would require the same kind of getting-shit-together-effort that got you from being a bum to a FAANG job in the first place?
