16 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2023
    1. What signals are available to participants,and how are they compiled into estimates of rank? Their modelassumes that knowledge of rank is noisy, but not (statistically) biased.While we can build more-sophisticated models of the biases in ourjudgments, however, Kawakatsu et al.’s (1) success highlights thevirtues of simplicity. It is possible, for example, that, even if the sig-nals are not accurate at first, we might act to make them so.

      In the fraternity and other social spaces, how does one correct for a "bad first date", a botched meeting, or a lone bad day? Does statistical thermodynamics as a model provide clues? How would rank be determined here in an unbiased way? What about individual chemical affinities and how chemical interactions change and/or bias the samples?

  2. Jan 2023
    1. When I create a new note, I write and link it as usual. Then I call up a saved search in The Archive via shortcut. I then go through the notes of my favorites and see if the fresh note is usable for one of my favorites. In doing so, I make an effort to find a connection. This effort trains my divergent thinking.

      Sascha Fast juxtaposes his new notes with his own favorite problems to see if they have any connections with respect to improving on or solving them.

      This practice is somewhat similar to Marshall Kirkpatrick's conceptualization of triangle thinking, but rather than being randomly generated with respect to each other, the new things are always generated toward important questions he's actively working on or toward.

      This helps to increase the changes of forward progress in specific areas rather than undirected random progress.

  3. Dec 2022
    1. What greater education and skills allow an individual to do is to move fur-ther up in the overall queue of people looking to find a well-paying and re-warding job. However, because of the limited number of such jobs, only a setamount of people will be able to land such jobs. Consequently, one’s positionin the queue can change as a result of human capital, but the same amount ofpeople will still be stuck at the end of the line if the overall opportunities re-main the same.

      There is a direct analogy to statistical mechanics and thermodynamics to be drawn here.

  4. Nov 2022
    1. In 1971, Eno co-formed the glam and art rock band Roxy Music. He had a chance meeting with saxophonist Andy Mackay at a train station, which led to him joining the band. Eno later said: "If I'd walked ten yards further on the platform, or missed that train, or been in the next carriage, I probably would have been an art teacher now".[24]

      How does idea density influence the rate of creativity?

      What are the thermodynamics of creativity? I've probably got enough material for a significant book chapter if not perhaps a book on this topic.

      May need a more public friendly name. Burning Creativity?

  5. Oct 2022
    1. He argued that God gazes over history in its totality and finds all periods equal.

      Leopold von Ranke's argument that God gazes over history and finds all periods equal is very similar to a framing of history from the viewpoint of statistical thermodynamics: it's all the same material floating around, it just takes different states at different times.

      link to: https://hyp.is/jqug2tNlEeyg2JfEczmepw/3stages.org/c/gq_title.cgi?list=1045&ti=Foucault%27s%20Pendulum%20(Eco)

  6. Sep 2022
    1. For millions of Americans who are living pay-check to paycheck and precariously close to the poverty line, normal life eventslike the birth of a child or temporary loss of a job can send them below thepoverty line. But poverty spells tend to be short, and they are caused by the riskassociated with normal events that happen to most of us across the life course.They are just more catastrophic for some than for others.

      Can poverty be modeled after a statistical thermodynamic framework? How might we move the set point for poverty up significantly to prevent the ill effects of regular, repeated poverty?

      What does the complexity of poverty indicate? Within the web of potential indicators, what might be done to vastly mitigate the movement of people in and out of poverty? What sorts of additional resiliency can be built into the system?

  7. May 2022
    1. scanned for solutions to long-standing problems in his reading,conversations, and everyday life. When he found one, he couldmake a connection that looked to others like a flash of unparalleledbrilliance

      Feynman’s approach encouraged him to follow his interests wherever they might lead. He posed questions and constantly

      Creating strong and clever connections between disparate areas of knowledge can appear to others to be a flash of genius, in part because they didn't have the prior knowledges nor did they put in the work of collecting, remembering, or juxtaposition.

      This method may be one of the primary (only) underpinnings supporting the lone genius myth. This is particularly the case when the underlying ideas were not ones fully developed by the originator. As an example if Einstein had fully developed the ideas of space and time by himself and then put the two together as spacetime, then he's independently built two separate layers, but in reality, he's cleverly juxtaposed two broadly pre-existing ideas and combined them in an intriguing new framing to come up with something new. Because he did this a few times over his life, he's viewed as an even bigger genius, but when we think about what he's done and how, is it really genius or simply an underlying method that may have shaken out anyway by means of statistical thermodynamics of people thinking, reading, communicating, and writing?

      Are there other techniques that also masquerade as genius like this, or is this one of the few/only?

      Link this to Feynman's mention that his writing is the actual thinking that appears on the pages of his notes. "It's the actual thinking."

  8. Nov 2021
  9. Sep 2021
    1. In thermodynamics, a diathermal wall between two thermodynamic systems allows heat transfer but do not allow transfer of matter across it
  10. May 2021
  11. Feb 2021
    1. Thereare also a few books on statistical thermodynamics that use infor-mation theory such as those by Jaynes, Katz, and Tribus.

      Books on statistical thermodynamics that use information theory.

      Which textbook of Jaynes is he referring to?

    2. Levine, R. D. and Tribus, M (eds) (1979),The Maximum Entropy Principle,MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

      Book on statistical thermodynamics that use information theory, mentioned in Chapter 1.

    3. Katz, A. (1967),Principles of Statistical Mechanics: The Informational TheoryApproach,W.H.Freeman,London.

      Books on statistical thermodynamics that use information theory.

  12. Oct 2020
    1. Chetty is also using tax data to measure the long-term impacts of dozens of place-based interventions, such as enterprise zones, which use tax and other incentives to draw businesses into economically depressed areas.

      It wasn't this particular piece of text, but roughly at about here I had the thought that these communities could be looked at as life from an input /output perspective in relation to homeostasis. Essentially they're being slowly starved out and killed in a quietly moral yet amoral way. As a result entropy is slowly killing them and also causing problems for the society around them that blames the them for their own problems. Giving them some oxygen to breathe and thrive will fix so many of the problems.

  13. Dec 2019
    1. Many people luck out like me, accidentally. We recognize what particular path to mastery we’re on, long after we actually get on it.

      Far too many people luck out this way and we all perceive them as magically talented when in reality, they're no better than we, they just had better circumstances or were in the right place at the right time.

  14. Jul 2019
    1. There are, in these places, a few narrow paths to success, and 99 ways to falter.

      This has to have been done by design as statistical thermodynamics would indicate better probabilities.