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! I can’t quite perceive the rising canon....

Going to a talk is difficult for everyone because nobody understands the whole thing, but it’s especially difficult for undergraduates because they still expect to. is a rich resource for understanding scholarly literature. Browse it. Some of the listed items are familiar, e.g. Google Scholar, SCImago, Sci-Hub, but it’d be informative to zoom out to the larger picture, e.g. good alternatives to Google Scholar. Why Even Read Papers?...

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 Flat Earthers Earth’s curvature is nearly 0....

Pop Quiz: How Well Do You Know the World?; Factfulness [Hans Rosling; Anna Rosling Rönnlund; Ola Rosling];

Why People Are [Epistematically] Irrational About Politics;

A collection of instances in which I believed something that wasn’t true. A reminder to read not to believe, but to weigh and consider . 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....

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....

Informal Fallacies; An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments [Ali Almossawi]; Formal & Red Herring Fallacies;

Rationality: From AI to Zombies [Yudkowsky, Eliezer]; Overly Convenient Excuses; Against Rationalization;

Brandolini's Bullshit Asymmetry Principle; Calling Bullshit [INFO 270]; On Bullshit [Frankfurt]; Deeper Into Bullshit; A Kind Word for Bullshit: The Problem of Academic Writing; The Fine Art of Baloney Detection [Sagan];

01. The Case for the Scout Mindset; 02. Developing Self-Awareness; 03. Thriving Without Illusions; 04. Changing Your Mind; 05. Rethinking Identity;

Informal Fallacies; Formal & Red Herring Fallacies;