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Mental Attitude While Learning Distinguish Mere Facts From Conclusions or Opinions Discriminate between mere statements of facts, necessary conclusions which follow therefrom, and mere opinions which they seem to render reasonable. There’s no need to perform an experiment to verify that the atomic weight of oxygen is 16. That the sum of the angles of a plane triangle equals two right angles is not a mere fact, but an inevitable truth....

Tracking on the Internet Screenshot from a [2012 study of third-party online tracking](#mayerMitchellThirdPartyWebTracking). The red boxes show content (at least the visible ones) served by third parties. When the browser requests a third-party resource embedded on a web page, the snippet below is a subset of the HTTP headers sent by the browser to the third party. GET http://youtube.com/watch?v=gHStnhGx1P Cookie: id=35c192bcfe0000b1... Referer: http://www.nytimes.com/ The combination of the cookie and the referrer makes third-party tracking possible....

Targeting Ads Based on Mood NYT’s nytDEMO launched perspective targeting, an ad product that allows advertisers to place ads based on the sentiment that the content is predicted to evoke . ESPN, USA Today, and Oracle’s Grapeshot have similar products too. How successful is this approach? Google, the largest online advertiser, does not mention it in their ads targeting help page , but Google is not in the publishing business either....

Notes Mediocristan vs Extremistan: In Extremistan, one single observation can disproportionately affect the outcome. Universa, a hedge fund made to exploit black swans, made 3,612% in March 2020 amidst the coronavirus crisis. Taleb is an advisor on the fund. However, on a ‘normal’ day, Universa is always losing money. If finance were Gaussian, then the 2008 crash (more than 20 std) would take place every several billion lifetimes of the universe....