timelets

timelets @ 2026-01-03T18:32:00

2026-01-04T03:13:36Z

Back to the Allison Gopnik interview, she makes two good points about a) school education in general and b) science education in particular:

I think it’s not a coincidence, for instance, that so many kids really want to do music and sports, even though we all say, “No, learn how to code. That’s the thing that will actually be helpful to you.” Because music and sports are among the few examples where we actually do this kind of apprenticeship. You do the thing, you get feedback, you try and do the thing again.

One of the things I say is, imagine if we tried to teach baseball the way that we teach science. How do we teach science? What we would do is, we would tell everybody about great baseball games when they were little. Maybe when they were in high school, they could throw the ball a lot to second base. When they were in college, they could reproduce great baseball plays, but they wouldn’t actually get to play the game until they were in graduate school. If you taught baseball that way, you wouldn’t think that people would be as good at baseball.
...
I think the current way that we do schooling is a good example of Goodhart’s law. We teach kids — because kids are so good at wanting to be skilled — we teach them how to be good at school, which we think is going to be correlated with the ability to do a wide range of things as an adult. Then it ends up being a separate kind of skill.

There's another interesting spot in the conversation where she discusses ADHD, and to me her thoughts rhyme with the Little Red Riding Hood (LRRH) story:

...we know and we just take for granted that little kids like two-year-olds — we say that they don’t pay attention, but what we really mean is that they don’t not pay attention. They’re paying attention to everything at once. That’s why two-year-olds are really distractible.

Then, as we get older, we get this more and more focused kind of attention. People vary in how much they end up within that state of focused attention. I think there’re lots of reasons to believe that an industrial schooled society really pushes people in the direction of having very focused attention. We really want people to have very focused attention.

In the LRRH story, the wolf initially takes advantage of the young girl because she's easily distractible. Ultimately, she overcomes her "distractibility" and develops focused attention skills, partially before and mostly after her resurrection, depending on the version. In essence, the fairy tale presents a recipe for modern education, which took off back in the Charles Perrault days. Is this a coincidence or confluence?

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timelets @ 2022-05-21T15:46:00

2022-05-21T22:48:05Z

https://patents.google.com/patent/US6993858?oq=US6993858

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timelets @ 2022-02-26T12:42:00

2022-02-26T21:04:08Z

This sounds like a Rapunzel story with a Trojan Horse twist:

A certain merchant, who was addicted to jealousy, had a wife that was a model of beauty and loveliness; and of the excess of his fear and jealousy of her, he would not abide with her in any town, but built her a pavilion without the city, apart from all other buildings. And he raised its height and strengthened its doors and provided them with curious locks; and when he had occasion to go into the city, he locked the doors and hung the keys about his neck....

So he called up one of his pages, who brought him ink-case[203] and paper and wrote her a letter, setting forth his condition for love of her. Then he set 168it on the pile-point of an arrow and shot it at the pavilion, and it fell in the garden, where the lady was then walking with her maidens...
...
came under the window and said to her, “Let me down a thread, that I may send thee this key; which do thou take and keep by thee.” So she let down a thread and he tied the key to it.
...
So the Prince returned to his palace and fixing the padlock, the key whereof he had given the lady, on a chest he had by him, entered therein. Then the Wazir locked it upon him and setting it on a mule, carried it to the pavilion of the merchant.

...

she hurried the Prince back into the chest, but, in her confusion, forgot to lock it. .... So they took up the box by the lid, whereupon it flew open and lo! the Prince was lying within. When the merchant saw him and knew him for the King’s son....

“Go in, thou, and take the King’s son; for none of us may lay hands on him.” So the Minister went in and taking the Prince, went away with him. As soon as they were gone, the merchant put away his wife and swore that he would never marry again.

-- 591st & 592nd nights. The King's Son and the Merchant's Wife.

--- https://www.gutenberg.org/files/54525/54525-h/54525-h.htm#c167

Jealousy, boredom, lust and deceit are punished here, with just one important exception — the Prince. He wins because in addition to being cunning and lustful he's also above the law. By comparison, in the Bath-sheba story, David was still the subject to Gods law, but only through the death of their first son. Moreover, their son Solomon inherited the kingdom through Bath-sheba scheming.

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Great time to have hair! Thank you, Mr. President!

2019-10-17T16:55:37Z

https://www.wsj.com/articles/unilever-cuts-prices-as-shampoo-rivalry-grows-11571302051

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Applied CT

2018-02-16T00:17:03Z

Bartosz Milewski gets it right when he says that CT helps navigate levels of abstraction.

https://youtu.be/sx8FELiIPg8?t=45s

I should try to explain timing as a structure with 3 (or 4?) levels of abstraction, e.g. Coecke's work helps map effort to duration.

https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/universal+construction

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Short-term vs Long-term

2017-12-26T07:57:05Z

Short-term looks like this:

X -> 1 ("in the long run we are all dead")

Long-term:

X -> 2
===========

As a side note, we can see that attempts to present the current tax reform as a tax cut limit the discussion to short-term. The authors of the strategy intentionally obfuscate long-term consequences because they don't have good answers about long-term risks.

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Quote of the Day

2016-12-31T02:30:10Z

quod si de nihilo fierent, subito exorerentur 180
incerto spatio atque alienis partibus anni,
quippe ubi nulla forent primordia, quae genitali
concilio possent arceri tempore iniquo.

But if they came from nothing, they'ld spring up,
Quite suddenly, at uncertain intervals,
At wrong times of year, since primal atoms
Would not be there for an unfavourable season.

- Lucretius, Trans. Melville, On the Nature of the Universe. Book 1, 180.

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