Why Are There 7 Days In a Week? EXPLAINED

Why does it feel like the world is falling apart? | Brian Klaas

Life is Short (How to Spend It Wisely)

3 Questions That Will Get Your Finances — and Life — on Track

 3 Questions That Will Get Your Finances — and Life — on Track

Question One: I want you to imagine that you are financially secure, that you have enough money to take care of your needs, now and in the future. The question is, how would you live your life? What would you do with the money? Would you change anything? Let yourself go. Don’t hold back your dreams. Describe a life that is complete, that is richly yours.

Question Two: This time, you visit your doctor who tells you that you have five to ten years left to live. The good part is that you won’t ever feel sick. The bad news is that you will have no notice of the moment of your death. What will you do in the time you have remaining to live? Will you change your life, and how will you do it?

Question Three: This time, your doctor shocks you with the news that you have only one day left to live. Notice what feelings arise as you confront your very real mortality. Ask yourself: What dreams will be left unfulfilled? What do I wish I had finished or had been? What do I wish I had done? What did I miss?

How the US Is Destroying Young People’s Future | Scott Galloway | TED

Why do some people always get lost?

 Why do some people always get lost?

Experience may matter more than innate ability when it comes to sense of direction.

BOB HOLMES, KNOWABLE MAGAZINE - 4/14/2024, 3:55 AM

Like many of the researchers who study how people find their way from place to place, David Uttal is a poor navigator. “When I was 13 years old, I got lost on a Boy Scout hike, and I was lost for two and a half days,” recalls the Northwestern University cognitive scientist. And he’s still bad at finding his way around.

The world is full of people like Uttal—and their opposites, the folks who always seem to know exactly where they are and how to get where they want to go. Scientists sometimes measure navigational ability by asking someone to point toward an out-of-sight location—or, more challenging, to imagine they are someplace else and point in the direction of a third location—and it’s immediately obvious that some people are better at it than others...

Change the argument

I was reviewing our video streaming services (Hulu, Netflix, etc) to see if there was an opportunity to trim some monthly fees. A few years back we moved from an expensive satellite service to an only streaming solution to save money. I'm never satisfied so I'm always looking for great deals in addition to keeping track of when promos end and cancelling those services. It's a fun game.

We also have a honest to goodness good old-fashioned antenna up in the attic that gives us about 100 channels. 

Today I had a random thought - what if we just stopped watching so much TV? Then the cost falls to zero. 

Black box auditing is fine

 Black box auditing is fine

Black box auditing is fine

Last week I read this paper entitled “Black-Box Access is Insufficient for Rigorous AI Audits” with some excitement, since I do black box algorithmic auditing at my company and I was looking forward to knowing what more I could do with even more access. Also, it was written by a bunch of smart people from MIT, Harvard, Northeastern, Stanford, and so on.

But I’m not very impressed! Actually I think this paper is a weird result of what happens when academics write about stuff that mostly happens outside of academia. In particular, and I’ll skip a lot of things, I want to focus on their section entitled “Limitations of Black Box Audits,” because of the five bullet points they include, they are all wrong. I’ll just go through them one by one:

1. Black-box methods are not well suited to develop a generalizable understanding.

Their argument here is that you don’t understand weird inputs that could lead to strange behavior. They argue it causes the black box auditor to rely on heuristics. But that’s not at all true! When I audit algorithms, either with private companies who provide the data, or follow my instructions, or with regulators or enforcement agencies that insist on the data from the companies deploying algorithms, we always use all of the historical data that we can get our hands on. In other words, we do not rely on heuristics or synthetic inputs, we instead see how actual people were actually treated by these systems. This is a much more thorough black box audit, and it doesn’t require “understanding,” which I think is a misleading and unattainable goal; even the coders don’t really “understand” algorithms (just ask them).

2. Black-box access prevents system components from being studied separately.

Yes, that’s true! And no, that’s not a flaw! Audits are not supposed to identify where things go wrong, they are supposed to decide whether something is going wrong. From the perspective of an auditor, if certain stakeholder groups (say, black patients in the case of Optum) are being treated badly, then that’s the point of the audit. The question of what exactly went wrong and when is the problem of the folks who set out to fix the problem, but they are not auditors.

3. Black-box evaluations can produce misleading results.

The example they give here is that an algorithm can pass statistical tests of non-discrimination but still have underlying flaws in reasoning. But I’d argue, as an auditor, we don’t actually care what the underlying reasoning looks like as long as it *consistently* passes the discrimination tests! Of course, it’s likely that there should be a battery of tests rather than just one. I’m happy to talk endlessly about how to design such a battery.

4. Black-box explanation methods are often unreliable.

Yes, true, but that’s because explanations of algorithms are almost always nonsense. I’d suggest you stop trying to understand “how an algorithm thinks” and start testing whether an algorithm is causing meaningful harm to stakeholders.

5. Black-box evaluations offer limited insights to help address failures.

True, but again, not a problem! If you want to be an engineer paid to fix problems, don’t call yourself an auditor. Indeed there would be a conflict of interest if that were the same job, because you’d be incentivized to find problems to fix, or to only find fixable problems, etcetera.

If one of the authors of this paper wants to discuss this with me, I’d be more than happy to. We could even have a public conversation, since I live in Cambridge!

Consequences

 Consequences

Frederick Lewis Donaldson created a list of seven social sins that was soon popularized by Gandhi. One hundred years later, it’s more relevant and more urgent than ever.

Wealth without work.
Pleasure without conscience.
Knowledge without character.
Commerce without morality.
Science without humanity.
Religion without sacrifice.
Politics without principle.

When we create these imbalances, we pay for them.

“We used to do that”

 “We used to do that”

When electricity came along, there was a swath of industries that were trapped in an old way of thinking. The only ones that thrived were able to walk away from what they used to do and eagerly embrace something new.

When the internet was young, the major book publishers had everything they needed to create a dominant search engine. After all, they were in the business of organizing the world’s information. With just one exception, they didn’t even consider it. That’s because they believed that their job was to sell books to bookstores.

This is even more urgent for individuals. What you were trained to do, what you did yesterday… that’s a gift from your past, not an obligation. Beginning the analysis with, “what I used to do was…” is a great way to open the door to what you’re going to do tomorrow.

Understanding Consciousness Goes Beyond Exploring Brain Chemistry

 Understanding Consciousness Goes Beyond Exploring Brain Chemistry

The science of consciousness has not lived up to expectations.

Over the summer, the neuroscientist Christof Koch conceded defeat on his 25-year bet with the philosopher David Chalmers, a lost wager that the science of consciousness would be all wrapped up by now. In September, over 100 consciousness researchers signed a public letter condemning one of the most popular theories of consciousness—the integrated information theory—as pseudoscience. This in turn prompted strong responses from other researchers in the field. Despite decades of research, there’s little sign of consensus on consciousness, with several rival theories still in contention.

Your consciousness is what it’s like to be you. It’s your experiences of color and sound and smell; your feelings of pain, joy, excitement or tiredness. It’s what makes you a thinking, sentient being rather than an unfeeling mechanism.

Can Life Really Be Explained By Physics? (featuring Prof. Brian Cox)

Change Your Life – One Tiny Step at a Time

Is the control of knowledge power? | DW Documentary

Know Yourself Better by Writing What Pops into Your Head

 Know Yourself Better by Writing What Pops into Your Head

The exercise of writing down unfiltered thoughts enhances self-knowledge

For decades, physician and author Silke Heimes has been leading groups in therapeutic exercises to put thoughts and feelings down on paper. Heimes, a professor of journalism at Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences,  points to abundant evidence that writing for five to 20 minutes a day can improve health, diminish stress, increase self-confidence and even kindle the imagination. A writing routine, she argues, is a form of mental hygiene that almost anyone can benefit from.

So how do you start? What happens if—as every writer fears—the page remains blank? And how do you get rid of an overcritical inner censor? Heimes, director of the Institute for Creative and Therapeutic Writing in Darmstadt, explains how to overcome inhibitions and open up your inner world...

Todays Question

 Q: When is chaos better than order?

A1:  A box full of k-cups works better for me than an under brewer storage drawer.

A2: ...

Occam's Razor - rational principles explained

The unsurprising confusion about ‘per capita’

 The unsurprising confusion about ‘per capita’

A car cut me off on the highway the other day. The car was going nearly 100 mph.

Was the car a new Porsche 911 GT3 or a used Toyota Camry?

The thing is, there are more than 1,000 times as many Camrys on the road. But our instinct is to pick the vivid and distinctive answer.

The per capita crime rate in rural areas is often dramatically (sometimes five or ten times) higher than it is in most cities...

Become Who You're Afraid To Be | The Philosophy of Carl Jung

Embrace your shadow

10 Unexpected Ways to Feel More Alive

 10 Unexpected Ways to Feel More Alive

1. Do something because you genuinely want to

2. Make someone’s day

3. Reconnect with your younger self

4. Focus on what your body can do instead of how it looks

5. Get absorbed in a flow state

6. Break out of your usual routine

7. Embrace your extraversion or introversion

8. Take a walk in nature

9. Stand up for what you believe

10. Appreciate the basic fact of being alive