What if we understood more things?
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One of the hardest questions I’ve had to answer as part of the project formerly known as epistemic spot checks is: “how do I know what to write down?” This will be kind of meandering, so here’s the…
Tl;dr: being easy to argue with is a virtue, separate from being correct. Introduction Regular readers of my blog know of my epistemic spot check series, where I take claims (evidential or logical)…
My goal was to come up with a system for reading a book. I eventually identified that as the wrong goal, but came up with a pretty great system for doing the much better goal of “how do I answer a …
I love my two cats dearly and they bring a lot of joy to my life, but they also bring other things, like poop, and fur. When I tried to research mitigations for any of these it was 100% SEO listic…
The Problem The WHO estimates that depression and anxiety together account for 75,000,000 DALYs annually, making up ~5% of total DALYs. In “Measuring the Impact of Mental Illness on Quality of Life…
Last year I discovered, much to my chagrin, that always-on internet socializing was costly for me. This was inconvenient both because I’d spent rather a lot of time singing the praises of social me…
Epistemic spot checks typically consist of references from a book, selected by my interest level, checked against either the book’s source or my own research. This one is a little different t…
It took me a long time to realize that Bell Labs was cool. You see, my dad worked at Bell Labs, and he has not done a single cool thing in his life except create me and bring a telescope to my thir…
Scott talks about a bit of medical theater, in which companies demand doctors notes to allow people to bring in their own chairs to work; he is often the person in best position to provide that not…
If one person is wrong, they’re wrong. If a lot of people, some of whom got extremely rich off of their wrong ideas, are wrong, there’s a good possibility I’m the wrong one. At …
After modest amounts of research, here is how I am currently categorizing the homeless problem. This should be taken as a snapshot of my thoughts, not information for people who have actually thoug…