…is really hard. You can fully comprehend the fallacy, its origins in cognitive psychology, its neuroscientific basis, even its status as an emergent behavior of billions of interacting neurons, neurotransmitter concentration gradients, and nonlinear electrical signals (and hell, even its status as an emergent behavior of putting some amino acids in a primordial stew and waiting 4 billion years). But you still can’t beat it.

I guess the more general lesson here is that self-awareness is over-rated. When people (who I don’t want to talk to for a long period of time) ask me what I do, I usually say “imagine a stereotypical computer science startup person”. This usually ends the conversation, but there’s some problems with it. a) it’s not really true and b) it kinda is true though. A desire to avoid being a wantrepreneur (also called a “startup tard” by the PI types) doesn’t keep...

written June 6, posted despite utter lack of relevance on June 24

I’ve been ironing out some workflows that will be useful throughout the rest of the summer. I’ve finally established my notetaking scheme: Workflowy for complicated nested lists that represent complicated thought processes and models, and Fetchnotes for 1D lists of stuff to remember (todo lists, book lists, papers to read, concepts to learn, etc).

There are four major projects I want to do this summer.

1) learn and do something cool with FPGAs

2) Figure out what deep learning is and how to use it as a black-box tool (if possible)

3) Oculus Rift (or other VR platform) development. Learn about the spectrum of headsets out there, the basics of the technology, what the factors were that led to its rise a few years ago (what trends was it piggybacking on), and finally do something cool with it. I’m thinking something...

Just watched The Matrix. Agent Smith had some really good points.

Why keep fighting? Do you believe you’re fighting… for something? For more than your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know? Is it freedom? Or truth? Perhaps peace? Could it be for love? Illusions, Mr. Anderson. Vagaries of perception. Temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose. And all of them as artificial as the Matrix itself, although…only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love.

Agent Smith

I didn’t realize this when I was a kid, but I’m kind of on Smith’s side philosophically. He represents purpose, and believes that everything should have a function and a purpose. The reason he hates humanity is that it doesn’t have a reason for existence in the grand scope of the universe. Importantly, his...

My final project proposal, submitted to my Human 2.0 class, taught by the Media Lab’s Hugh Herr (see his TED talk here).

A Dynamic Representation of Text

This project is founded on the notion that the conscious and rational part of our brain (the voice inside our head) is, while powerful, severely limited in bandwidth and fatigue rate. When we read, there is an ongoing process of converting the symbols of text into a thought, which must then must be synthesized into our mental model of the world. The conversion processes at work consume a lot of mental energy. Also glucose.

The current representation of text – static and abstract – is a poor medium of transferring knowledge. There are two layers of abstraction between text on a page and the thing it refers to. The earliest written languages involved a one-to-one mapping between concepts and symbols. Chinese is a good example...

There is a subtle inconsistency in Ray Kurzweil’s futurist manifesto The Singularity Is Near. He kicks of the book by defending his Theory of Accelerating Returns, plotting major historical events from various “lists” onto a logarithmic time axis.

http://squid314.livejournal.com/354867.html

These events are drawn from various lists published by Carl Sagan (the “cosmic calendar”), the Encyclopedia Brittanica, the American Museum of Natural History, and many experts in astrophysics, geology, anthropology, and history. There are various blog posts that criticize this approach and others that agree with it’s premise, if not the sketchy axes.

Later in the book, Kurzweil argues that any field that falls under the definition of an “information technology” can benefit from the exponential trend in computational power, whereas those fields that remain un-augmented will have to settle...

I’ve noticed that a most people aren’t capable of estimating the inherent difficulty of a given task/activity, instead relying on the frequency of context switching. Context switching is a concept from computer science, where it refers “the process of storing and restoring the state (context) of a process or thread so that execution can be resumed from the same point at a later time” (Wikipedia). In psychology there’s a similar concept called task switching, which refers to a person switching focus from one task to another.

Having to switch back and forth between modes of thinking is hard. If you are working on an algorithms problem set, then realize that you have an 8-page paper due the next day, it’s really hard to drag your mind out of logical, mathematical mode into humanist, causes-of-the-Seven-Years-War mode. Trust me, I know. And people don’t generally like things that are...

timing

When: the art of perfect timing

willpower

Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength

honesty

All Marketers Are Liars: the underground classic that explains how marketing really works – and why authenticity is the best marketing of all

dishonesty

The Honest Truth about Dishonesty

starting with why

Start With Why

organization

The Fifth Discipline: the art and practice of learning organization

The Organized Mind: thinking straight in the age of information overload

forming habits

The Power of Habit

story-telling

The Storytelling Animal: how stories make us human

checklists

Checklist Manifesto

animals

Animals Make Us Human

Single-mindedness

The Power of Full Engagement

The One Thing: the surprisingly simple things behind extraordinary results

Essentialism: the disciplined pursuit of less

focus

Focus: the hidden driver of excellence

morning routines

The idea of abstraction as a formalism largely emerged from computer science, though it has been the driver of human progress for a long time. It is the process of hiding the complexity of a system, often with the goal of building more complex systems on the shoulders of the old ones.

This is a powerful concept, and has enabled the human race to build things of remarkable complexity. One only needs to look at the features of microprocessor, billions of layered bumps carved into silicon with light and chemicals to see evidence of this.

No one mentions, though, the reasons for the “invention” of abstraction. Abstraction would not be necessary if humans could mentally store and manipulate systems of arbitrary complexity in the first place. At some point, thinking about complex emergent behavior in terms of lower level agents (i.e., thinking about a processor in terms of...

There is power in intellectual diversity.

The notion isn’t well integrated into the human psyche, as far as I’ve observed, perhaps because the language doesn’t exist to describe it in a concise way. People refer vaguely to things as “cross-disciplinary” with a sense of its positive connotation, but why is it a good thing in its essence?

Every concept learned by a person gives them a new supply of metaphors by which to understand the world. I often describe my current approach to life as a “breadth first search” of intellectual territory, drawing the term fro computer science, and I don’t know if I use that phrase to describe to approach or if the phrase enabled me to conceive of the approach.

I’m trying to identify some of the more useful and widely applicable examples of these concepts, to rid them of their domain-specificity and confer their power more widely.

One of these...