Knowing

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.

Strange Loops

A Strange Loop occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through the levels of some hierarchical system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started.

The 3-voice Canon Per Tonos from Musikalisches Opfer BWV 1079 exhibits a strange loop. Successive modulations make one expect to hopelessly far from the starting key, but after six modulations, the original key of C minor is restored!

Why Even Read Papers?

While tutorials and docs help you write code right now, the academic papers can help you understand where programming came from and where it’s going. You also understand the paths that foundational academic research did not take. There’s a lot of things that are old that are new again, over and over and over. The idea of Stack Overflow is that someone else has had your problem before; the idea of academic papers is that someone else has thought about this problem before.

The Relativity of Wrong. Isaac Asimov. chem.tufts.edu . Sep 1, 1989.

John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.

The Four Color Theorem does not claim that 4 colors suffice to color a planar map. Instead, 4 colors are sufficient to color any planar graph so that no two vertices connected by an edge are colored with the same color. For any \(n\), there is a map that requires at least \(n\) colors.

#education

Societal Preference for STEM Over the Liberal Arts

Not everyone can [wants to?] take the sciences, but they were pushed out of their passions into applicable degrees like Business and Communications.

The initially high economic return to applied STEM degrees declines by more than 50% in the first decade. People who major in LA don’t get first jobs that are as lucrative, but they do catch up.

Governments tend to claim a shortage of STEM workers (who are valued for innovation and national defense), and allocate funds for increasing the student pipeline. However, the fact that STEM wages have stagnated, and new grads struggle to find jobs casts doubt on the claim. Furthermore, the data is murky (e.g. who is classified as STEM, is a STEM degree a pre-requisite for a STEM job) that it can be massaged to support a specific policy.