I’ve lumped in some philosophy notes, since I don’t yet have a good way to bulk-extract highlights from pdfs, and most of the philosophy I read over break was pdfs. Ah well — enjoy the ones that were webpages, along with some random stuff that didn’t fit anywhere else!
Derek Parfit’s essay tackles perhaps the most fundamental questions possible:
Why does the Universe exist? There are two questions here. First, why is there a Universe at all? It might have been true that nothing ever existed: no living beings, no stars, no atoms, not even space or time. When we think about this possibility, it can seem astonishing that anything exists. Second, why does this Universe exist? Things might have been, in countless ways, different. So why is the Universe as it is?
These questions might seem to require causal answers, but Parfit notes that such answers are impossible at this level:
Even an infinite series of events cannot explain itself. We could ask why this series occurred, rather than some other series, or no series.
Even appeals to quantum fluctuations or God don’t solve the problem:
In Hawking’s phrase, ‘What breathes fire into the equations?’
Many dismiss these questions as unanswerable or meaningless:
Many people have assumed that, since these questions cannot have causal answers, they cannot have any answers. Some therefore dismiss these questions, thinking them not worth considering.
But Parfit disagrees:
Even if these questions could not have answers, they would still make sense, and they would still be worth considering. I am reminded here of the aesthetic category of the sublime, as applied to the highest mountains, raging oceans, the night sky, the interiors of some cathedrals, and other things that are superhuman, awesome, limitless. No question is more sublime than why there is a Universe: why there is anything rather than nothing.
One approach to these questions comes through the “fine-tuning” observed in our universe:
Many physicists believe that, for life to be possible, various features of the Universe must be almost precisely as they are.
This fine-tuning resembles finding a meaningful pattern:
Suppose that, with an optical telescope, we saw a distant pattern of stars which spelled out in Hebrew script the first chapter of Genesis. According to this view, this pattern of stars would not need to be explained. That is clearly false.
Parfit compares different cosmic possibilities. The “Many Worlds Hypothesis” suggests our universe is just one of many with different initial conditions:
On this Many Worlds Hypothesis, there is no need for fine-tuning. If there were enough Big Bangs, we should expect that, in a few of them, conditions would be just right to allow for complexity and life; and it would be no surprise that our Big Bang was one of these few.
These other worlds provide an explanation for fine-tuning without appealing to God:
On most versions of the Many Worlds Hypothesis, these many worlds are not, except through their origins, causally related. Some object that, since our world could not be causally affected by such other worlds, we can have no evidence for their existence, and can therefore have no reason to believe in them. But we do have such a reason, since their existence would explain an otherwise puzzling feature of our world: the appearance of fine-tuning.
Parfit then introduces the concept of “cosmic possibilities”:
Cosmic possibilities cover everything that ever exists, and are the different ways that the whole of reality might be. Only one such possibility can be actual, or the one that obtains. Local possibilities are the different ways that some part of reality, or local world, might be.
He distinguishes several cosmic possibilities, including the “All Worlds Hypothesis” (every possible local world exists) and the “Null Possibility” (nothing exists):
Of these different cosmic possibilities, one must obtain, and only one can obtain. So we have two questions: which obtains, and why? These questions are connected. If some possibility would be easier to explain, we have more reason to believe that this possibility obtains.
Parfit proposes that some cosmic possibilities would require less explanation:
If some cosmic possibilities would be less puzzling than others, because their obtaining would leave less to be explained, is there some possibility whose obtaining would be in no way puzzling?
The Null Possibility would need the least explanation, but reality doesn’t take that form:
Reality, however, does not take its least puzzling form. In some way or other, a Universe has managed to exist. That is what can take one’s breath away. As Wittgenstein wrote, ‘not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.’
The All Worlds Hypothesis might be the next best explanation:
If all these worlds exist, we can ask why they do. But, compared with most other cosmic possibilities, the All Worlds Hypothesis may leave less that is unexplained.
With all other cosmic possibilities, we face additional questions:
On any version of the Many Worlds Hypothesis, we have a similar question: ‘Why do just these worlds exist, with these elements and laws?’ But, if all these worlds exist, there is no such further question.
Parfit then explores the “Axiarchic View” that reality exists because its existence is good:
- It would be best if reality were a certain way. (2) Reality is that way. (3) (1) explains (2).
This could offer an explanation of the whole of reality:
We are now supposing that, of all the countless ways that the whole of reality might be, one is both the very best, and is the way that reality is. On the Axiarchic View, that is no coincidence.
Finally, Parfit suggests that mathematical beauty might explain reality:
Perhaps reality is the way it is because its fundamental laws are, on some criterion, as mathematically beautiful as they could be. That is what some physicists are inclined to believe.
Non-anger does not entail non-violence.
Martha Nussbaum’s essay is a powerful examination of anger’s role in our moral and political lives. She offers a careful dissection of this emotion that greets most of us daily — in personal relationships, workplaces, and increasingly in our political discourse.
Nussbaum builds her argument on Aristotle’s definition: anger is both poisonous and popular. It’s a response to perceived wrongful damage to something we care about, accompanied by a desire for payback. This desire for payback, she argues, is conceptually essential to anger — without it, what you’re feeling is something else entirely, perhaps grief.
Aristotle says that anger is a response to a significant damage to something or someone one cares about, and a damage that the angry person believes to have been wrongfully inflicted. He adds that although anger is painful, it also contains within itself a hope for payback.
But Nussbaum’s key insight is that the payback idea fundamentally does not make sense. I really, really buy this. Desserts aren’t real. When someone wrongs us—whether through betrayal, violence, or insult—making them suffer doesn’t restore what was lost:
Let’s say my friend has been raped. I urgently want the offender to be arrested, convicted, and punished. But really, what good will that do? Looking to the future, I might want many things: to restore my friend’s life, to prevent and deter future rapes. But harsh treatment of this particular wrongdoer might or might not achieve the latter goal. It’s an empirical matter.
The payback mindset makes sense in only one narrow context—when the problem is solely about status or rank. When we want revenge purely to lower someone else’s status and raise our own, the math works. But this focus is, as Nussbaum argues, “self-centered and objectionably narrow.”
She offers a framework of three paths for the wronged person:
Path one: she goes down the path of status-focus, seeing the event as all about her and her rank. In this case her payback project makes sense, but her normative focus is self-centred and objectionably narrow.
Path two: she focuses on the original offence (rape, murder, etc), and seeks payback, imagining that the offender’s suffering would actually make things better. In this case, her normative focus is on the right things, but her thinking doesn’t make sense.
Path three: if she is rational, after exploring and rejecting these two roads, she will notice that a third path is open to her, which is the best of all: she can turn to the future and focus on doing whatever would make sense, in the situation, and be really helpful. This may well include the punishment of the wrongdoer, but in a spirit that is deterrent rather than retaliatory.
Nussbaum finds her exemplar in Nelson Mandela, who had to struggle against the demand for payback in his own personality through disciplined meditation. Mandela understood deeply that there could be no successful nation when two groups were held apart by suspicion, resentment, and the desire to make the other side pay for the wrongs they had done.
His approach was radically forward-looking. Even in prison, he learned Afrikaans and studied the culture of his oppressors. Importantly, Nussbaum points out that non-anger does not entail non-violence — Mandela was willing to use violence strategically when non-violence failed, unlike Gandhi who believed they were inseparable.
Perhaps most moving is Mandela’s interaction with his prison warder:
I took it upon myself to break the tension and a possible resentment on his part that he has to serve a prisoner by cooking and then washing dishes, and I offered to wash dishes and he refused … He says that this is his work. I said, ‘No, we must share it.’ Although he insisted, and he was genuine, but I forced him, literally forced him, to allow me to do the dishes, and we established a very good relationship … A really nice chap, Warder Swart, a very good friend of mine.
Nussbaum observes that Mandela could have easily seen this as status-inversion or payback — the once-dominating Afrikaner doing dishes for the once-despised ANC leader. But Mandela asked only: how shall I produce cooperation and friendship?
Mandela’s approach demonstrates what Nussbaum calls “the Transition” — moving beyond anger’s retaliatory tendencies toward forward-looking reason and generosity. This transition is what we desperately need in our personal and political lives, which are too often dominated by payback and status concerns.
Great read from Caitrin Keiper, helpful not only for the attention to detail, but also for the great bibliography.
Elephants protect humans, inherit generational trauma — even from humans! — and form what seem a whole lot like the deep, emotional bonds we see between ourselves. They learn from their elders and bawl real tears when human authority figures chastise them, though they don’t seem to experience romantic love. How, then, should we reflect on the immense otherness of the Other? To what extent ought we protect these thinking, feeling beings?
The website LettersOfNote.com is a wonderful, weird archive of real epistles between all kinds of people in all times and places. A striking proportion of them, however, seem to be letters from former slaves to their erstwhile masters — some forgiving and generous, some righteously sly, a few burning with revenge, all at varying degrees of written literacy, but uniformly powerful for this reason: they say, _I have a mind. I have an independent soul that never once belonged to you although my labor and all the circumstances of my life unjustly did. You found it convenient to believe that I was not a thinking, feeling person just like yo**u_ — _no doubt supported by elaborate rationalizations from the whole world around us which ought to have known bette**r_ — but you cannot deny this anymore, because here I am, free and awake. I love. I think. I speak. I know.
It must be emphasized that the direct comparison here is not from the harm and injustice of animal captivity to those of human slavery, but in the ability to command the attention of someone in power who does not want to acknowledge them at all. To the extent that elephants and other animals have thoughts and memories and feelings and experiences that they are capable of expressing in their own tongue, what a disadvantage it is to them that we have not cracked that code.
Some other great excerpts: > But when you ask what these things mean as lived, as translated into capabilities and actions, you find yourself back in the mushy territory of observing quasi-mythical or very-human-seeming behavior and trying to analyze its significance from the outside. And in the category of things you might be prone to romanticize, at the very top there is a faculty that also tops the list of features supposed to distinguish man from animal — and that could, if properly deciphered, unlock the rest of elephant experience for us in a way nothing else will. “The Romans fancied that the elephants had reason, and understood the language of men, though they could not answer them,” the nineteenth-century historian John Ranking observed. The Romans were not alone. What elephants may be lacking most of all is not language but the Rosetta Stone to prove they have it and clue us in to what on God’s green earth they’re talking about all the time.
In Coming of Age with Elephants, Joyce Poole tells the story of a ranch herder whose leg was broken by a matriarch in an accidental confrontation with her family. When his camels wandered back without him in the evening, a search party was sent out. He was eventually discovered under a tree, attended by a female elephant who fiercely prevented anybody from approaching. As they were preparing to shoot her, the herder frantically signaled for them to stop. When they were finally able to draw her far enough away for them to go and get him, he explained that
after the elephant had struck him, she “realized” that he could not walk and, using her trunk and front feet, had gently moved him several meters and propped him up under the shade of a tree. There she stood guard over him through the afternoon, through the night, and into the next day. Her family left her behind, but she stayed on, occasionally touching him with her trunk. When a herd of buffaloes came to drink at the trough, she left his side and chased them away. It was clear to the man that she “knew” that he was injured and took it upon herself to protect him.
From whence come these altruistic actions? Are they the product of blind instinct in the animal, the residue of ancestral behavior benefiting kin, whereas for humans they would be a generous and morally commendable choice? Or is the truth somewhere in between, some combination of the two, for both of us? Poole illustrates how the standard framework of evolutionary theory is problematic in describing even highly survival and reproduction-oriented interactions:
As a behavioral ecologist, I have been trained to view non-human animals as behaving in ways that don’t necessarily involve any conscious thinking and that their decisions have been simply genetically programmed through the course of natural or sexual selection. But in the course of watching elephants, I have always had a sense that they often do think about what they are doing, the choices they have, and the decisions that they are making. For example, when a young musth male is threatened by a high-ranking musth male, his usual response is to drop out of musth immediately. He lowers his head, and urine dribbling can cease in a matter of seconds. Many biologists would explain this phenomenon simply by arguing that males who behave in manner X live to produce more surviving offspring than males who behave in manner Y, and thus the trait for behaving in manner X is passed on to future generations. Thus, male elephants today automatically behave the way they do because they have been programmed through the successful behavior of their ancestors to do so. … Although I rely on such explanations myself, as I have gotten to know elephants better I have been more and more convinced that they do think, sometimes consciously, about the particular situations in which they find themselves. In the case of the young musth male, I believe that he may actually consider his options: to keep dribbling, stand with head high, and be attacked, or to cease dribbling, stand with head low, and be tolerated. In other words, the male may in fact have some conscious control…. With dominance rank between males changing on a daily basis, a male needs to be able to adjust his behavior accordingly. From past experience he knows the characteristics of his rival’s body size, fighting ability, and how that rival normally ranks relative to him, but if his rival is in musth he also needs to assess whether he is in full musth and what sort of condition he is in. All of this information must be assimilated on a daily basis and gauged relative to his own condition. Can so complex an assessment be carried out without thinking? And I wonder whether the more parsimonious explanation wouldn’t be that they think.
I met another elephant a few weeks later, standing outside a temple dispensing “blessings” in exchange for a coin for the handler and, if you felt like it, a banana for the elephant, which would be eaten peel and all. Then, for one magical moment, the trunk was laid across the crown of your head in benediction. I stood in line with coins and bananas getting blessings all afternoon.
These were both thrilling experiences, but looking back, those elephants were conscripted into unhealthy, lonely lives precisely because of the monetary potential in tourists like me. In the same vein but worse, luxury resorts in Thailand keep baby elephants on hand to entertain and delight visitors. Where and how these babies are obtained — and what becomes of them when they are more than a year or two old and no longer useful for the purpose — is a dismal thing to contemplate; and in any case, no elephant that young is well off separated from its mother and family, no matter how lavish the accommodations.
The 2008 anthology Elephants and Ethics, an outgrowth of a Disney Animal Kingdom-funded conference, is a detailed guidebook to this and the many other ins and outs of elephant captivity. (A few chapters deal with global issues such as poaching and culling, but overall it is a very Western-oriented handbook, as the vast bulk is concerned with the small minority of elephants held in zoos and circuses.) The book gets deep in the weeds of this stuff with some weird dilemmas. The managers of captive-breeding programs, for example, would by and large like to avoid birthing male elephants because they are hard to house as they grow older — they can’t be kept with the female groups that live together, they can’t be kept in close quarters with other males, and they are especially dangerous to handle when they start going into musth. Breeders correctly sense that sex-selective abortion would be a nonstarter with the public; would in vitro fertilization with screened embryos be any better? Would it be possible?
reminds me of In-ovo sexing for chicks.
The good news for elephants is that, as the most charismatic (and most mega) of the so-called charismatic megafauna, they have many friends. Countless organizations exist to save them from all kinds of harms — hunting, habitat loss, circuses, any number of other things that until even very recently we’ve found acceptable. These groups and their messages have not been ineffective, either, with the audiences that they reach. But even a basic aim such as an animal this magnificent should not be slaughtered to make carvings out of its teeth turns out to be dazzlingly hard to effect. It is one thing to boycott ivory and even pass international laws against it; it is another to confront the situation on the ground, entangled in a web of other issues.
One particular story highlights many of them, recounted in a strange and disturbing 2010 New Yorker essay by Jeffrey Goldberg. The bare facts are these: in 1994, the dedicated conservationists Mark and Delia Owens hosted a film crew from ABC to document their anti-poaching efforts in Zambia. In 1996, the show aired, preceded by a warning of violence “which might be upsetting to viewers.” The warning was referring to a scene that showed a suspected (but unarmed) poacher being shot to death on camera. Under threat of legal action, the couple left the country immediately and have never been back.
This is paywalled — if you want to get around it, email me.
Hajek has a great of heuristics in philosophy, and had a good piece from 2014 with some starters:
But he has even more! My notes:
Be very careful when you see the word “the,” because it could be wrong in two directions — there could be none of the thing, or there could be many of the thing. (Is it possible there’s A nearest possible world, or can you asymptotically approach such that there’s always infinitely many worlds that’re nearer, but no world that’s nearest?) Sometimes this is implied, e.g. when you have to maximize something, which, Hajek notes, just means “to achieve THE greatest amount of that quantity.”
Look out for similar worries with a(n) x, which presupposes that ∃x. What if there are no xes?
Sorites paradoxes are everywhere — how do you draw a line / choose one thing when choosing only one would be arbitrary? Hajek classifies three ways to do so:
It could also be the case that, even if there could, in principle, be arbitrariness, we don’t encounter it in everyday life. Hajek calls this “Nature is Kind,” but I think it also includes fallacy of the beard-type situations.[^2]
Small changes in a usually lead to small changes in b. Some ways out — choose extremes. If you aren’t sure which animals are too sentient to factory-farm, just stop eating animals.
Problems with this approach include that this logic can go both ways — maybe cannibalism is ok?
The most salient thing to me here, though, is that > continuity-based arguments must appeal to some sort of metric, at least loosely specified—some measure of ‘distance’ according to which we can judge roughly how close entities or cases are to each other. (It need not be numerical, but it must be more than merely a comparative ordering.) Disputes might arise over the choice of metric, and favouring one metric over another might appear to be arbitrary.
There are interesting analogies with mathematical continuity here, including problems that pop up at infinity.
There are also problems with meta-similarity — if we think of paradoxes as vectors in paradox-space and solutions as vectors in solution-space, we might want to require that similar paradoxes have similar solutions. Of course, this isn’t foolproof: first, if we have paradoxes A, B, and C, the gap in paradox-space between A and B might be equal to the gap between B and C, but the former and the latter might be solved in different way. Second, surely the paradox most similar to A is A itself… but there might be more than one way to resolve A!
Existence doesn’t come in degrees, but perception does. Or maybe the concept does come in degrees, but our definition has a universal quantifier.
An intensional notion is one for which truth value may fail to be preserved under replacement of co-referential expressions; an extensional notion is one for which truth value is preserved.9 I submit that extensional notions are easier to think about and to deal with; intensional notions are more opaque to us. The typical cases that I will consider are ones in which we begin with a modal notion, and replace it with some quantificational notion. But the heuristic covers other cases as well.
Replace talk of necessity or possibility with talk of what’s true at all or some (accessible) possible worlds.
Replace talk of counterfactuals with talk of what’s true at the nearest antecedent worlds.
Replace talk of norms with universal quantification over all norm-abiding agents. For example, replace ‘one has a moral obligation to treat others as ends rather than means’ with ‘all morality-abiding agents are agents who treat others as ends rather than means’.
Venn diagrams! Kripke trees!
Similar to the above, with good links to further papers.
Kelley’s list of philosophy moves (so far) includes:
- pluralism — “Neither X, Y, nor Z are exclusively correct. The suitable account is a pluralist view which accommodates them all.”
- the tripartite distinction — “We can organize our analysis of this concept by distinguishing ontological, epistemological, and methodological claims.”
- conceptual gradience — “It’s not fully this way or that way; it is somewhere along a spectrum—this concept admits of degrees.”
- multi-dimensional models — “criterial pluralism + conceptual gradience = multidimensional model of X.”
- kind to particular — “There is disagreement about this well-known kind. But it’s not a kind; it’s a particular.”
- the meta-question shift — “we examine not the content of the topic but the way we have hitherto been posing the central question about the target of our analysis.”
- concept elimination — “This concept is incoherent, has no referent, or holds no promise for doing the work we thought it would. We should dispense with it altogether.”
- substance to process — “The phenomenon of concern has traditionally been conceptualized in terms of ‘stuff’. But it might better be thought of as a process.”
- meta-moves — combinations of the foregoing moves
No, not the excellent [Peter Wildeford original](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wkuDgmpxwbu2M2k3w/you-have-a-set-amount-of-weirdness-points-spend-them-wisely.
Why are vegans different? Because vegans don’t always stop at “I don’t eat animal products.” Noisy vegans follow it up with “and you shouldn’t either”. That’s the problem.
There’s a big difference between you making choices according to your values, and you telling other people to make choices according to your values. If you tell other people they should make choices according to your values instead of their values, then other people won’t like you. This isn’t because you’re being weird. It’s because you’re telling other people to do things they don’t want to do.
I don’t buy this totally — people still think it’s weird when you aren’t making them do the thing — but I think it’s directionally correct.
You learn the rules as soon as you’re old enough to speak. Don’t talk to jabberjays. You recite them as soon as you wake up every morning. Keep your eyes away from screensnakes. Your mother chooses a dozen to quiz you on each day before you’re allowed lunch. Glitchers aren’t human any more; if you see one, run. Before you sleep, you run through the whole list again, finishing every time with the single most important prohibition. Above all, never look at the night sky.
Choose your ending for this post:
- Something about crucial considerations; is the thing you’re working really hard at even the right thing to aim for?
- Something about the difficulty of aligning AI with “human values” when human values have differed so much across times and cultures (19th-century Christian beliefs; 19th-century Buddhist beliefs; 21st-century atheist beliefs).
Other points to note when life revolves around the mission: You’ll go far away. You’ll marry pragmatically, probably to someone who already cares about the mission — it’s simpler that way. You’ll divide labor with your spouse. You can turn everyday interactions into ways to advance the mission.
Google’s Starlink competitor, but instead of using satellites, it uses line-of-sight — imagine if lasers replaced radio, and you’re somewhere close. Especially as the radio bands get more and more clogged…
Anyway, > “As long as these two boxes can see each other, you get 20 gigabits per second, the equivalent of a fiber-optic cable, without having to trench the fiber-optic cable.” Light bridges have complicated gimbals, mirrors, and lenses to zero in on the right spot to establish and hold the connection. The team has figured out how to compensate for potential line-of-sight interruptions like bird flights, rain, and wind. (Fog is the biggest impediment.) Once the high-speed transmission is completed from light bridge to light bridge, providers still have to use traditional means to get the bits from the bridge to the phone or computer.
I’m still working on this, because I’m a big “no worries if not!” guy.
if something matters to you, own it. ask directly. if it’s a small thing, ask casually. if it’s a big thing, ask confidently. but don’t camouflage desire with self-effacement.
. stronger alternatives:
- let me know what you think.
- can you help with this?
- does this work for you?
- i’d love your thoughts.
- would appreciate a quick response.
Tracking the history of pineapples, from status symbol to canned convenience. Fun, light read.
Ok, so there are these two companies in the sorta HR-Saas space. One (Rippling) is alleging that the other (Deel) embedded a spy inside their company.
According to the lawsuit, Deel’s spy spent over four months obsessively and systematically accessing Slack channels where he had no legitimate business interest. He searched Slack more than 6,000 times – allegedly swiping confidential sales pipeline data and internal customer interactions.
Armed with this stolen information, Deel allegedly obtained an unfair and illegal advantage to: > - Intercept and counter Rippling’s sales efforts by learning which customers Rippling was pitching in real time. - Preemptively retain customers who were considering switching from Deel to Rippling. - Poach Rippling employees by using stolen contact details, including private phone numbers, to aggressively recruit them – sometimes making offers without even interviewing the candidate. - Distort media narratives by misusing confidential Rippling information to counter negative press about Deel’s own misconduct.
What makes Rippling so confident that this is the case?
Well, they made a brand-new slack channel and added only the CEO, a board member, and the company’s general counsel. They then sent messages about customers they were allegedly “defecting” from Deel to Repling, to Deel’s general counsel, head of legal, and outside counsel.
Within hours of sending the letter, Deel’s spy inside of Rippling searched – for the first time – for this empty and never-before-used Slack channel, proving that Deel’s top executives or its legal representatives were running the covert espionage operation.
Crazy!
Everything demands attention. I’ve turned off notifications on my phone, and I need to make sure this doesn’t backslide into me checking it more often to make up for the lack of pings.
I have friends who observe a digital sabbath, abstaining from the internet from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday, which I really respect but haven’t been able to keep — all my PDFs are virtual, and I don’t have the money or time to print them all out. I’m going to leave my phone at home when I go for my morning run + gym sessions this quarter, though — I can use strava, spotify, and my lift tracker from my smartwatch, and I need to get my mind accustomed to not having my phone on me at all times.
Great article from Shawn Quek on frats at UChicago. For color, my date and I got flashed within 5 minutes of going to our first frat party during o-week. I’ve been to three frat parties in my four years here, and even that was too many.
A close reading of misconceptions from the Harry Potter canon, finding that many things we take for granted aren’t grounded in the books. And there’s a whole appendix for Cursed Child.
Film Hermione is po-faced and prim and proper; book Hermione has a pronounced streak of semi-criminal ruthlessness and is snogging an eighteen-year-old international sports star when she’s fifteen.
Another complication is JK Rowling’s poor maths skills, which can result in flatly contradictory information. For example it’s absolutely categorically stated in the books that Harry’s second year at Hogwarts begins in autumn 1992, which definitely places Dumbledore’s death in 1997; but because Rowling has difficulty thinking about the eight-month offset between the academic and calendar years, on her website she originally had Dumbledore dying in 1996, and she drew up a Weasley family tree which had Fred dying in 1997. She also initially announced that young Albus Severus Potter was starting at Hogwarts on 1st September 2016, until the Twitterati pointed out that she was a year early.
Anyway, the cupboard one:
The Dursleys make Harry sleep in the understair cupboard but it’s big enough to hold Harry, Vernon and a bed at the same time without apparent difficulty. We know that an actual off-the-floor bed is meant, not just a matress or bedroll on the floor, because Harry loses his socks under it and when he finds them there’s a spider on one of them, which would be most unlikely if the sock had been pressed flat against the floor. So it’s a proper bed, and even if it’s a small child’s bed it’ll be at least 55” by 27” and if a camp bed, 6ft by 2ft, plus space to crane over and rummage underneath it. So Harry’s cupboard must be able to accommodate a bed at least 55” long plus two people, one of them a very bulky adult man, and must be the size of a small room - albeit a windowless room which presumably has a severely sloping ceiling at the stair end, and is only full-height for a few feet at the other end. It’s described as dark, but must be badly lit rather than unlit (unless Harry is using a torch in there), because Harry is able to see to find his socks and to pick a spider off them.
It could at a pinch be only about 6ft by 4ft if you assume that Harry sat on the bed and Vernon stood with his knees pressed against the side of the bed. Otherwise, it sounds as if it probably resembles the understair cupboard at a cottage where I used to live, which extended along under the upstairs landing and was about 12ft long by just under 4ft wide. That may still sound tiny to Americans and Australians, but some older houses here in Scotland include windowless internal rooms of about that size, and they are regarded as suitable for use as bedrooms. When I was looking to rent a place I viewed a modern house just outside Edinburgh which included a room which was being advertised as a child’s bedroom and which, OK, did have a window, but which proved to be around 5ft square and mainly occupied by a 30”-square wooden box containing a water tank, leaving just an L-shaped area of floor-space, 30” wide and wrapped around two sides of the tank. Harry’s cupboard-room would probably be considered adequate and even rather cute for a child’s bedroom if it were all that was available and was properly lit and decorated: it’s the fact that he is given this tiny room while Dudley has two full-sized rooms and that little effort has apparently been made to make it comfortable which is cruel.
A lineage of 422,374 English people (1600 to 2022) contains correlations in social outcomes among relatives as distant as 4th cousins. These correlations show striking patterns. The first is the strong persistence of social status across family trees. Correlations decline by a factor of only 0.79 across each generation. Even fourth cousins, with a common ancestor only five generations earlier, show significant status correlations. The second remarkable feature is that the decline in correlation with genetic distance in the lineage is unchanged from 1600 to 2022. Vast social changes in England between 1600 and 2022 would have been expected to increase social mobility. Yet people in 2022 remain correlated in outcomes with their lineage relatives in exactly the same way as in preindustrial England. The third surprising feature is that the correlations parallel those of a simple model of additive genetic determination of status, with a genetic correlation in marriage of 0.57.
This is one of things that sounds super obvious, and that people have done peer-reviewed studies on anyway. There’s a questionnaire set from the 1980s that has been a standard for long-term memory tasks since its inception, but that list sucks now.
in 1980 most people knew the answer to the question “What is the name of the Lone Ranger’s Indian sidekick?” (Tonto; 1980 probability of recall = .87).
The paper also introduces credences and peer judgements, by asking participants to assert their confidence that they’re correct and how confident they are that their peers would correctly answer the question.
A rant from Eric Eckholm that I take as “edtech data collectors have never heard of the tidyverse.” Literally just put it all in dynamodb.
Either way, basically every school or school division has access to some canned report in their student information system that tells them about how many absences each student has. There are probably some slight differences in how these reports look, but generally they look something like this:
| Student ID | Excused Absences | Unexcused Absences | Total Absences |
|---|---|---|---|
| 12345 | 1 | 1 | 2 |
| 23456 | 2 | 5 | 7 |
… what can actually help us answer a question that informs what we do for little Tom B and students like him – is data structured like this:
| Student ID | Date | Attendance |
|---|---|---|
| 12345 | 9/1/24 | Present |
| 12345 | 9/2/24 | Excused Absence |
| … | … | … |
| 23456 | 9/1/24 | Present |
| 23456 | 9/2/24 | Present |
… I imagine end-users don’t think much about what the structure of the database tables looks like…because that’s not their job. But the unfortunate side-effect of this is a naive adherence to the reports that already exist, or to slight tweaks on the reports that already exist, and then trying to squeeze these stones until they yield water.
Thomas Jefferson’s life sucked. He couldn’t write in the winter because his ink would freeze. During his presidency, one in four children died before their fifth birthday. He had to supply his own water from cisterns scattered throughout his plantation.
The great European cathedrals were built over generations by thousands of people and sustained entire communities. Similarly, the electric grid, the public-water supply, the food-distribution network, and the public-health system took the collective labor of thousands of people over many decades. They are the cathedrals of our secular era. They are high among the great accomplishments of our civilization. But they don’t inspire bestselling novels or blockbuster films. No poets celebrate the sewage treatment plants that prevent them from dying of dysentery. Like almost everyone else, they rarely note the existence of the systems around them, let alone understand how they work.
Jefferson believed that an informed citizenry was necessary to democratic self-rule — a mandate that extends all the way out to understanding the systems that envelop us. It’s easy to see why he believed this: Voters who understand how we are entwined with these systems will support maintaining and expanding them for our children and grandchildren. Food, electricity, water, and public-health systems obviously make our individual lives more comfortable. But they are also essential to our collective economic prosperity. Failed infrastructure is one big reason why so many poor countries remain poor. As a citizen and a parent, I don’t want our country to get anywhere near that territory.
There’s another, equally important reason for thinking about the systems around us. Water, food, energy, public health — these embody a gloriously egalitarian and democratic vision of our society. Americans may fight over red and blue, but everyone benefits in the same way from the electric grid. Water troubles and food contamination are afflictions for rich and poor alike. These systems are powerful reminders of our common purpose as a society — a source of inspiration when one seems badly needed.
More pro-monarchy than I would’ve thought — but I think that’s just a sign of the times: > That every Part of the Conduct and feelings of the Americans tends to that Species of Republick called a limited Monarchy I agree.— They were born and brought up in it.— Their Habits are fixed in it: but their Heads are most miserably bewildered about it. There is not a more ridiculous Spectacle in the Universe, than the Politicks of our Country exhibits.— bawling about Republicanism which they understand not; and acting a Farce of Monarchy. We will have as you say “but one great Man” yet even he shall not be a great Man.
I also, am as much a Republican as I was in 1775.— I do not “consider hereditary Monarchy or Aristocracy as Rebellion against Nature.” on the contrary I esteem them both Institutions of admirable Wisdom and exemplary Virtue, in a certain Stage of Society in a great Nation. The only Institutions that can possibly preserve the Laws and Liberties of the People.
The last thing he wrote, declining an invitation to Washington for the 50th anniversary of American independence. He speaks most highly of freedom and individual rights — something I wish everybody in politics would remember.
The general spread of the lights of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.
All people are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. The point of politics and policy should be something like “make it as easy as possible for each individual to make the choices that help themselves and others the most.” You can’t do this by privileging some folks over others.
To whom much is given, much is required.
Or as I like to put it, with great power comes great responsibility.
Not that hard, apparently. The problem is how the bullets handle once they shoot: > The silver bullets are surprisingly hard, and even after impacting solid surfaces, there’s very little deformation. I’m glad we got these sized properly prior to shooting them, because they’re harder than we’d hoped. The ideal hunting round flattens on impact, forming a mushroom shape that limits penetration depth and increases the diameter of the wound. Unless we really slow them down or find some way to address the issue, these are going to create a .44 caliber hole right through the target. It’s not what we’d hoped for, but it’s something that the itenerate werewolf-hunter should be aware of.
People talk about unconditional love and conditional love. Maybe I’m out of the loop regarding the great loves going on around me, but my guess is that love is extremely rarely unconditional. Or at least if it is, then it is either very broadly applied or somewhat confused or strange: if you love me unconditionally, presumably you love everything else as well, since it is only conditions that separate me from the worms.
A pragmatic theory of communication: > Nit-picking other people’s communictation isn’t helping you understand them; it’s a shadowy way to tilt the arena in your favor. If your communication practice makes communication harder, something is off.
Also, apparently he’s on the Big Bang Theory? That’s what I get for never watching TV. My favorite is #2: > Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth.
During my college years, one of my dorm mate’s dads was a famous Hollywood producer. He once said to me, “You want everyone to know your name and no one to know your face.”
I’ve recently gotten into Beeminder for making habits stick, but they’re also a great source of practical wisdom! Some of my favorites from their blog, which I’ve been reading over the last few days:
help the important compete with the urgent — by creating urgency for important tasks.
The Anti-Ontology Principle
For coders, premature optimization is dangerous. For nerds like me, adding categories or rules or systems before we’ve seen many of the things you’re categorizing or ruling or systematizing.
I tried to be conscious of this while writing this linkspost — I started with individual links as fifth-level headings and agglomerated them together as I saved more of them. Go Hayek! Let the order emerge spontaneously instead of imposing it top-down!
Similar to above — premature optimization is dangerous, you should mechanical-turk it until you can’t. Do things that don’t scale. Don’t commit to a course of action until you have to.
In software development, you should be simple and consistent and dumb and predictable. Don’t make your program magical.
Unnecessary complexity is bad. > Never add a setting speculatively, i.e., by imagining what a user could want.
“I guess we can ship that as long as we include a setting to opt out of it” should be a glaring red flag.
The Anti-Robustness Principle
Code-philosophically, when a program gets input that’s slightly wrong but it’s easy to convert it to what you know the input was meant to be, it’s a Very Bad Idea to actually do that. Instead you should say “that input is Not Exactly Right so everything will break now”. It sounds crazy but is so, so true! Being forgiving leads to cruft and technical debt and baffling future bugs.
They use an example that’s close to my heart — I’ve had to sigh through the same thing while TAing CS classes: > When I’m teaching Python my students are constantly making mistakes like writing if blah == "y" or "Y" and are then mystified when that branch always runs no matter what they type. It makes me so angry when I have to explain how the string “Y” is getting silently converted to True.