Weeknote for 10/18/2020

Posted on October 19, 2020 by Andy

Christmas labels

😐

No progress last week. I was too preoccupied with the rest of life.

Fiction

🙂

I finished my Thomas Ligotti book, Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe. It’s an omnibus of his first two short story collections, with a lot of interesting ideas rendered in Gothic prose. It’s not my favorite style, but I was impressed with how much work must have gone into each sentence.

I’m glad I listened to his philosophical treatise first, Conspiracy Against the Human Race. It gave me a framework for understanding his stories. In Ligotti’s mythology, our universe borders a universe of horrors that are only too happy to visit if given an opening. Ligotti’s characters find various ways to oblige them. One of these ways is madness, which Ligotti treats as a way to perceive this unseen world, as opposed to being a tragic result of this otherworldly contact (as in Lovecraft) or simply an extension of humanity’s natural fog of confusion (as in Evenson).

You might think listening to hours of Ligotti would drag me into the doldrums, but I actually found some of it inspiring. His many interesting ideas made me wonder how I could adapt them for my more benign purposes. One that stood out to me was a priest whose secret theology involved “salvation through suffering.” Although his meaning was macabre, it got me thinking about how more traditional Christianity could be viewed from this angle. We’re not really meant to pursue intense, gratuitous suffering, but we can benefit from accepting the pain we encounter in life, especially from persecution, and there’s a certain desirable difficulty in some of the disciplines, such as fasting.

Politics

😌

I voted. It took most of the week. These days I like to research the candidates and propositions so I can feel relatively settled about my votes, and I started researching this election’s ballot at the end of the week before last. For the candidates I use the local newspapers’ endorsements as a guide, along with the judicial ratings of the county and state bar associations. For the propositions I try to find discussions in articles and forums. After some tough voting decisions and three attempts to find a drop-off box, the ballot is finally out of my hands. A load off my mind.

Posted in Christmas labels, Fiction, Politics, Weeknotes | 1 Comment

Weeknote for 10/11/2020

Posted on October 17, 2020 by Andy

Christmas labels

😐

I made substantial progress. I doubt I’ll finish this week, but probably by the end of the month.

Fiction

🙂

I finished my Brian Evenson collections. These were A Collapse of Horses, Windeye, and Fugue State. Some stories were more satisfying than others, but overall I felt a kinship with his theme of knowledge and how it can go bewilderingly wrong. It was the topic of practically every story. To quote from “Black Bark,” “Every time you think you have the world figured, trust me, that’s just when the world’s got you figured and is about to spring and break your back.”

Music

😎

I switched my dark ambient listening from Pandora to Spotify. Pandora no longer knows how to choose songs for my dark ambient station, so I’ve given up on it. I used the seed and thumb-up songs from that station plus some other songs I’ve collected to start a Spotify playlist. Spotify’s suggestions have been so good I’ve been able to add 92 songs for a total run-time of 19 hours, and I’m still adding. Soon I’ll be able to maintain an ominous mood for a solid day.

Posted in Christmas labels, Fiction, Music, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 10/4/2020

Posted on October 9, 2020 by Andy

Christmas labels

😐

I got started. That’s about all the progress I made. I also realized a week late that October’s project month started this week, not last week, so I shorted last month’s project. But it doesn’t matter, since I’m hoping to finish this one early and return to last month’s project.

AI

🙂

I listened to Lex Fridman till the start of October. The interviews that stood out to me were Michael Kearns, who takes an analytical look at AI ethics, and Whitney Cummings, who offers uncommon perspectives on several AI issues along with philosophical and neuroscientific takes on dysfunctional relationships, addiction, and the meaning of life.

Fiction

😎

I started listening to Brian Evenson. I’m going through three of his short story collections: A Collapse of Horses, Windeye, and Fugue State. I finished the first one last week, but I’ll wait till next week to comment on them.

I watched a bunch of SFF reviews and recommendations. These came from two channels: Daniel Greene and Media Death Cult (H/T my boss for that one). Here are Daniel Greene’s top ten fantasy series and his dream team of authors for creating the perfect fantasy book. Here is Media Death Cult’s first top 10 sci fi books list, second, third (though I didn’t get to it that week), and top 100 list. Both channels have a very community feel, and they make me want to get back into SFF.

TV

🙂

I finally finished the Netflix show Dark. They wrapped it up clearly enough that I could follow the ending without sorting out the whole morass of preceding detail. The show has plenty of substance to chew on, so if you like philosophy and complicated sci fi mysteries and you don’t mind the TV-MA rating, I recommend it.

I’m giving Twin Peaks another try. I wanted something weird to watch for October, and thanks to the many screenshots from Black Lodge Cult on Twitter, I settled on Twin Peaks. I watched the first few episodes several years ago, but it didn’t grab me enough to continue. This time I’ll watch the whole thing.

I started over with the pilot, and I was surprised at how much I’d completely forgotten. I wondered if I was watching a different edit, but I suspect it’s just my highly selective memory. I was also surprised at how gripping some of it was. I have a new respect for David Lynch.

Music

😎

I discovered some new jazz artists to follow. Normally I have to make myself listen to jazz, but these carry me along.

And of course there are plenty more where those came from—namely, the world, but more specifically YouTube.

Here are some brands I’ve run across that showcase musicians on their channels:

Posted in AI, Christmas labels, Fiction, Music, Sleep, TV, Weeknotes | 1 Comment

Weeknote for 9/27/2020

Posted on September 29, 2020 by Andy

Productivity

😐

I avoided almost all naps, and I added more rules to actually be productive. I made an exception and allowed a nap on Saturday to catch up on sleep, because I was still staying up too late. But for most of the week, I found that I was still wasting the time I wasn’t napping, so toward the end of the week I added some evening productivity rules, such as doing harder things soon after work, things I would normally put off. This got me to take a walk on Thursday, which I hadn’t done in ages. Saturday, however, was very unproductive, and I spent a ridiculous amount of time on YouTube. There sure are a lot of video essays on there.

Learning

😐

I inched forward a bit more on the mnemonic dictionary generator. Clearly I’m not very motivated on this project, even though I keep being reminded of how useful it will be. I imagine sleep would restore my motivation. Last week was the end of the project month, so I have a reprieve. But I’m hoping to zip through October’s project and return to the dictionary generator.

Christmas labels

🙂

October is my new Christmas project month. Last year I decided that since starting the labels in November still ended in crunch time on Christmas Eve, this year I’d start earlier. So we’ll see how starting in October turns out. The past few years’ projects have been complicated, but this time I’m returning to simplicity, so hopefully I can finish in a week or two.

AI

🙂

I’m listening to Lex Fridman until October 1. After that I’ll listen to spooky stories for a while, and I have an upcoming book discussion with my department at work, so somewhere I’ll be fitting in The Man in the High Castle. Then I’ll carry on with Lex.

Last week the interview that stood out to me, other than all of them, was with David Ferrucci, whose aims and ideas for AI overlap a lot with mine. We both want AI to help us think and discover through discussion, and we share the notion that understanding is built on mental frameworks. It’s a key part of my modeling project.

Music

😎

Fall is in my ears. Now that fall is here, I’m collecting more videos for my Autumn Ambience playlist, and I’m enjoying this Cozy Autumn Instrumentals playlist.

A kindred piano spirit. From that playlist I discovered pianist Matt Stewart-Evans. His track “Reach” is very similar to the kind of song I would’ve written growing up.

Posted in AI, Christmas labels, Learning, Music, Productivity, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 9/20/2020

Posted on September 20, 2020 by Andy

Memory

😐

I finally carved out some time to set up the new version of my dictionary-making app. This week I’ll continue the setup and start working with my language sources.

AI

🙂

Kai-Fu Lee‘s AI Superpowers is about being human. I thought it would be about a tech arms race between China and the US, largely because that was the thrust of the Frontline episode I discovered it on. But the book didn’t carry that tone. It was more about the cultural differences in the two tech industries, China’s technical and economic strategies and ambitions apart from exporting communism, AI’s potential benefits and its threat to the workforce, and a very personal look at an alternative to UBI—incentivizing caring occupations that will be more valuable when AI has overrun the others. The last three chapters were the highlight for me.

The Transpacific Experiment by Matt Sheehan was an unexpected gem. I got it on sale sort of on a whim because the topic seemed interesting and the reviews were good. Little did I know it was some quality reporting and directly related to AI Superpowers. Sheehan helped Lee with that book, and the books complement each other well. Outside the topic of recent tech development where they overlap, Lee expands on the AI theme, while Sheehan expands on the other arenas in which the two countries interact. He covers education, technology, real estate, movies, immigration, and politics.

These two books nuanced my understanding of China and raised my interest in its people and its progress.

I’m on my next stretch of The Lex Fridman Podcast. Musicians, podcasters, and Spotify listeners might like his interview with its chief R&D officer, Gustav Soderstrom. I’m still deciding how long this phase will be and what book(s) will occupy the next intermission.

Music

🙂

Sunday I played outdoors with the worship team at my church’s second site. It was nice to see people in person and spend some time outside, even though it was windy and a little cold in the shade.

Jacob Collier has inspired me again. A music transcription stream by one of my favorite speedrunners got me thinking about Jacob Collier again and his own streams diving deep into the details of his compositions. Ideas cascaded out of that river (though not really musical ones), and if I can sustain my motivation, we will see what comes of them.

People

🙂

Tuesday I had an outside dinner with Jeremy. We hung out at Panera and talked about books from our childhoods, among other topics. I might try to capture some of those old reads on Goodreads, though I’m very hazy on the dates. It’d be interesting to see how my memory is jogged about books I’ve forgotten. And I revisited the idea of listening to the books we were assigned in school that I never completely read because I was only a fake good student.

Productivity

🤔

I’m pushing myself to nap less. My productivity is disrupted by naps and my sluggish recovery time afterward, so at the end of the week I enacted a plan I’ve had in the back of my mind. I’m resisting the urge to lie down during the day when I’m tired, because it very easily leads to accidental napping. It worked well the two days I tried it. Next week I’ll report on how it went this week.

Video

🙂

I’ve been watching animal videos. Intrigued by material I sometimes see about animal minds (e.g., NOVA’s “Bird Brain,” Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds), my attention has recently drifted to watching videos of octopuses and other intelligent animals. (BTW, it’s not octopi, and octopodes is uncommon.) Here’s a giant Pacific octopus communing with her aquarist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Here’s a sea life hobbyist demonstrating how to play with a pet octopus. And here are apes with very human-like reactions to magic tricks. Over the years I’ve also been collecting a mental menagerie of my favorite animals, so those are making appearances too. Here’s a pet owl revealing its true nature.

Posted in AI, Memory, Music, Music composition, People, Productivity, Sleep, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 9/13/2020

Posted on September 13, 2020 by Andy

Life maintenance

😐

I spent last week getting through regular and freelance work. Somehow that seemed to take up all my time, other than naps and miscellaneous tasks.

I have a new Remicade schedule. After my upcoming infusion, I’ll do 6-week intervals (down from 8 weeks) for about three cycles and see how that affects my symptoms.

Memory

😐

I didn’t work on the mnemonic dictionary. My plan this week is the same as last week’s.

AI

🙂

I got to my first stopping point in The Lex Fridman Podcast. I listened to his interview with Kai-Fu Lee, the author of AI Superpowers, and now I’m listening to the book. This first batch of interviews gave me some people to look into further, especially Vladimir Vapnik with his mathematician’s approach to machine learning, Juergen Schmidhuber and his interesting ideas on meta-learning, and Jeff Hawkins, who is making progress on a general theory of neuroscience.

Video

🤔

Watch Dan Olson’s quietly stunning demonstration of the earth’s curvature. Stay for the chilling gaze into the abyss of our bizarre politics. I’ve been trying to identify why the feeling evoked by this demo was so familiar, and I just realized it’s the feeling I got during the solar eclipse, when I was at the right place and time to see the natural world being totally itself and totally real, yet totally strange. For this and other reasons, I suspect it’s a video I’ll be pondering for a while.

Posted in AI, Health, Memory, Videos, Weeknotes, Work | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 9/6/2020

Posted on September 7, 2020 by Andy

Productivity

🤔

It’s time for some changes. My motivation has been waning lately. Last week I couldn’t summon the drive even to make a time block schedule, let alone follow it. And despite the importance of my math project, I didn’t have much energy for that either. I think it’s a combination of tiredness and the sameness of my life at home, probably some other factors too. So I’m thinking of adding some variety by doing some housework and getting out more.

Math

🤔

A controlled English format for note-taking. I didn’t catch up on my prealgebra notes like I’d hoped, but in the process of trying I opened an interesting line of thought to explore. One of my quests in note-taking is to find a somewhat rigorous way to format them that will make them easy to write and powerful to use through automation. RemNote takes care of some of the automation. But I’m still working out how to use RemNote’s format while balancing rigor, ease of writing, and ease of reading. Since math is so algorithmic, I thought about trying to write my notes like a program. But this made them hard to read.

My little epiphany was that for the flashcard-oriented format of these notes, the programming paradigm I needed was probably a rules engine, where the “conditions” are the memory cues (Descriptors in RemNote) and the “actions” are the items to recall. I also need an English-like syntax using words like “is” rather than symbols like “==”. In other words some type of controlled English.

But this week starts Thinkulum project month September, and I’ve decided to take a break from math for at least a couple of months. More on this in the next section.

Learning

😐

This month I’m returning to my mnemonic substitute dictionary. I worked on this back in March but then put it on hold for math. Lately mnemonics has come up again a few times, and I think I’d like to try to finish the first release of this project by the end of the year. Other than setting up a new app with Cement, I’ll start by looking at classifying the concreteness of English words using data from Wiktionary.

AI

😎

I listened to Stuart Russell’s Human Compatible, a book about keeping AI on our side. Here’s a video interview covering some of his ideas. The book is an exceptional discussion of the issues with a promising proposal for a solution. I highly recommend it. I wondered if it would just be a repeat of Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence, but Scott Alexander’s book review convinced me to buy it.

I’m listening through The Lex Fridman Podcast. It consists of his interviews with important people in AI and related fields. Every episode has been good so far. Other than getting to know the field, my reason for listening is that I recently joined his Discord server, and I figure the podcast will make me a better participant, assuming I can get myself to participate. I’m kind of bad at group interaction.

There are around 120 episodes, and I don’t want to get burned out, so I’m going to take breaks. My plan is to listen through the Kai-Fu Lee interview and then listen to Lee’s book AI Superpowers. Then I’ll find a new stopping point for another break.

People

🙂

My family took another stab at remote Go Fish. We had our bi-weekly family Zoom call, and this time we played Go Fish online via PlayingCards.io. It took a little figuring out, but it worked well and was fun. My sister won again.

Posted in AI, Learning, Math relearning, People, Productivity, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 8/30/2020

Posted on September 1, 2020 by Andy

Productivity

😐

The black hole of time swept back through last week. I’ll try time blocking again this week, a technique I experimented with earlier in the year, though my plans will be less ambitious this time.

Math

😐

I finished learning RemNote and transferring my notes. I was able to make more progress last week because more of my project time evaded the black hole. I’ve come up with a template for my notes on each topic, so I’ll probably fill in the gaps in my earlier notes at some point, but for now I’ll continue the prealgebra notes from where I left off. Then I can get back to algebra.

AI

🙂

David Vernon’s Artificial Cognitive Systems: A Primer is a helpful overview of the issues and options. I picked this one up a while back because it covered some of the cognitive architectures I’d just discovered. Deep learning has always seemed to me like only a piece of the cognitive puzzle, and I wanted to see what work had been done assembling more of the picture. The book is compact yet nuanced, and it gives me lots of directions for further research.

Rebooting AI by Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis gives me still more directions for research. Most of the book is about the ways deep learning is a dead end for AGI, but I was already on board with that notion. I was more interested in the constructive part of the book toward the end. For example, I want to look into the idea that concepts are defined in terms of the theories they’re embedded in.

I was a little unsure of the book’s audience. It seemed to be written for the general public but also appealed to the AI community to change its focus. Maybe the authors were targeting newcomers to the field.

Posted in AI, Math relearning, Productivity, Weeknotes | Leave a comment

Weeknote for 8/23/2020

Posted on August 23, 2020 by Andy

For having done so little, I sure have a lot to say.

Productivity

😐

A temporal black hole passed through my week. It’s the only explanation for where the time went and how little I got done. I suppose there’s one other explanation, that my prednisone ended and left me to my own devices to deal with the sleep schedule it had scrambled for me. But I had a reset at the end of the week in the form of an involuntary early bedtime, so maybe this week I can recover.

I’m trying a new anti-procrastination technique. A lot of tasks involve physical objects. In the past I’ve tried putting these objects out of place in plain sight so I’ll be reminded to do the task and the materials I need will be easy to grab. But this isn’t enough, because if I’m determined to procrastinate, I get used to having the objects out of place, and they fade into the scenery.

So I’m trying something new—putting the objects in the way of other everyday tasks. For example, a few weeks ago I needed to vacuum. So I plugged the vacuum cleaner into my bathroom outlet, and I made a rule that I couldn’t unplug it until I’d done the vacuuming. This made it inconvenient to recharge things like my electric toothbrush. I still put it off a few days, but the vacuuming got done.

The next rule I need is to spend my tired and lazy moments making a bit of progress on my projects rather than scrolling through social media.

Math

😐

I started transferring my notes to RemNote. My time for this project fell into the black hole, so I’m still working on the notes. Hopefully I’ll finish that early this week and I can return to learning.

AI

🙂

I finished The Quest for Artificial Intelligence by Nils Nilsson. Some thoughts:

  • I didn’t realize the author was the inventor of the well-known A* pathfinding algorithm, which he developed for a well-known robot named Shakey.
  • Competition was a major driver of research at certain points. For example, the reaction of the US to Japan’s Fifth-Generation project in the early 1980s. Another was DARPA’s Grand Challenges for automated driving in the early 2000s. Well don’t look now, but China wants to be the AI king. I should read Kai-Fu Lee’s AI Superpowers soon.
  • Military agencies have been another major source of funding in the US since way back in the 1950s. Early on it was from the Office of Naval Research and ARPA.
  • Even though AI winters sound like doom for research, AI research continues during them, just with less funding, and I’d say we’ve recovered from the major one in the late ’80s. Judging by Nilsson’s account, progress plodded before that period and zoomed afterward.
  • The book reinforced my observation that AI is less about perfect reasoning and more about making the most of the system’s limitations. Here and there a theme of idealism vs pragmatism surfaced. A prominent example was the debate in computer vision between reconstructing entire 3D scenes and processing only the elements relevant for action (see the faculty page of Yannis Aloimonos).
  • Expert systems could help with my modeling project. Creating them involves a step called knowledge acquisition. The old approach consisted of interrogating subject matter experts to build the knowledge base. The questioning methods they used could be instructive.
  • Thinking about all this AI reminds me that I have a long way to go and I need to keep moving. Maybe I should pretend I’m already in grad school and study like I have deadlines.

People

🙂

Monday night my family played Go Fish over Zoom. Since Go Fish involves passing cards between players and we were each playing with a physical deck, we took some time to improvise new rules.

  1. Since we didn’t have a seating arrangement, our turn order was from youngest to oldest.
  2. Instead of passing cards, each player had a discard pile for cards they had “passed” to another player. The player receiving the cards would look through their draw deck for the corresponding cards. If it didn’t have enough of the right cards, the player would take them from the discard pile.
  3. Since everyone had the same amount of cards and could all theoretically collect every set, the winner was the first to five sets. The game still took an hour.

One interesting effect of using individual decks is that it was helpful to know which sets each person had collected, because other players were still collecting those sets, and only the players who hadn’t collected them could pass those cards. Our cameras didn’t show the sets we’d collected, so we had to be reminded of other players’ collections or remember on our own.

Another effect is that the game worked less well if some of the players shared a deck, because someone might pass cards to one of the deck-sharing players that were used up by the sets that their deck-sharing partner had collected.

And a final thing I learned is that playing games in a recurring video call is a nice way to pass the time.

Tuesday I went in to work for a team picnic. We have a team lunch a couple of times a year. It was a fun conversation, as usual, and for social distancing we were able to spread ourselves out over three picnic tables and an uncomfortable canvas folding chair. I wasn’t in the chair, but it was a conversation topic at one point.

Nature

😰

Thursday morning I found a wasp in my bathroom. It was hanging out on my toothbrush. Scary. It took a long time to figure out what to do about it. Thankfully it seemed to not like flying, and eventually as it crawled across the floor, I plunked a food container over it, slid a piece of paper underneath, and took it out to the balcony. I nudged the container partway over the balcony’s edge so the bug could fly out. Since it was such a sluggish creature, I expected it to take a while, but a few minutes later it was gone.

Posted in AI, Math relearning, Nature, People, Productivity, Weeknotes | 2 Comments

Weeknote for 8/16/2020

Posted on August 17, 2020 by Andy

Health

🤔

My immune-suppressing prednisone level is low, but I’m still avoiding indoor crowds. This is mostly to avoid possibly delaying my ulcerative colitis treatments at the hospital, which would happen if I exposed myself to known or suspected cases of COVID. My UC is doing surprisingly well right now, unusual compared to my typical symptoms on Remicade and compared to other times I’ve tapered off prednisone.

Project management

🤔

I began rethinking my project management. I want better ways to assess the state of each project, especially when I juggle several at once and progress in several areas for each one. This amounts to (1) defining the tasks for each project so I can see what’s finished and unfinished, (2) externalizing more of the work I normally keep in my head, and (3) better organizing the results of my work as another way of seeing what’s finished and unfinished.

I also want to simplify project tasks where possible so they’ll have a better chance of fitting into the short time frames I end up giving them when I’m juggling. And I want better ways to manage R&D projects, which are unpredictable and are also the majority of my projects.

To define project tasks and organize my work, I listed the typical kinds of projects I do these days (writing, learning, and programming) and listed a basic workflow for each type. Then I created a set of folders in Notion to act as a template for writing projects. Next I’ll create templates for programming and learning projects, in whatever software makes sense for them.

To manage task dependencies I’m looking at ProjectLibre. I would’ve tried DigiSpoke, but I couldn’t even sign up.

Learning

🤔

My new learning goal is to be able to teach what I’ve learned from start to finish. I realized this while trying to answer why I was revisiting all the prealgebra I’d just covered. It’s because the content was still a jumble in my mind, definitely not in a state for an orderly recital. This reminded me that a start-to-finish explanation from recall has, in fact, always been my goal when learning anything. It’s a natural test for whether I’ve absorbed all the material. And I hate the feeling of disappointment, annoyance, and embarrassment I get when I think I’ve learned something, but then I try to tell someone about it and I can’t. So now this will be my standard goal, and I’ll design my learning workflow around it.

RemNote may replace both my notes2flashcards app and Anki. The more I think about all this project management, the more I want to start creating my modeling tool, because what I need is a highly structured way to track all my project data and writing. I vaguely remembered there are new note-taking apps that might work along these lines, and I stumbled across RemNote. It’s basically an outliner combined with a spaced repetition reviewer, the kind of study tool I’ve been looking for all this time. (LearnObit is similar but seems harder to use.) I’m working through the tutorials.

Math

🙂

Math is my game. I’ve barely touched a computer game in several years, so normally I think I’m just not in a playing mode right now, and I wonder when I’ll get back to it. But last week I found out this is a lie. Tuesday the Midwest had a big storm that knocked out my power for eight hours. While lying in bed to supposedly sleep, I occupied my mind with designs for my math student simulator program. And after catching myself having fun working things out, I realized that for me this simulator is a toy for playing with math. So I concluded that math is my current game, and the object is to figure out how it works.

Space

😎

Space 2.0 by Rod Pyle is an inspiring crash course in the global space economy. It’s nicely organized and covers all the topics I expected and a few more, and it ends with ways to get involved. I recommend it. My favorite chapter was 14 on space infrastructure, the system of tech in space that will enable all this exploration and settlement, such as cyclers—spacecraft that fly on a continual circuit to places like the moon and Mars to transport people and supplies.

Another good resource is a Discord server I joined, Rocket Emporium. In addition to the features listed on that page, the server maintains a long list of space-related websites, movies, books, and software. This will all be useful for the wiki page I’m planning about keeping track of all this stuff.

AI

🙂

I began my journey through AI history with the late Nils Nilsson. You can get the PDF version of The Quest for Artificial Intelligence for free from his faculty page. So far I’ve learned that a lot of the themes of current research started very early in its history, including both the symbolic and connectionist paradigms and applications such as games and military intelligence. In fact, some of the themes go back even further. People have been dreaming of creating artificial life for millennia. One attempt was Jacques de Vaucanson’s Digesting Duck.

Social issues

😎

Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist is a welcome signpost in the form of a memoir. The book is organized by topic and covers a wide range of them with fairly short chapters and many pointers to further study. Stamped from the Beginning was kind of a slog for a non-history person like me, but this one was more personal and philosophical, so it was more my style. He was also less imperious than I expected. The book is about his development as an antiracist, and he doesn’t consider himself to have arrived. He doesn’t see racism or antiracism as an unchanging, pervasive identity but only a description of specific attitudes and behaviors that can be mixed within a person and shifted over time. And he urges activists to be self-critical.

On the other side of things, a recent conversation pointed me to some Black conservatives. These were Thomas Sowell, Glenn Loury, Walter Williams, Jason Riley, and Coleman Hughes. I may look into some of them soon. Hughes wrote a helpful introductory piece on Sowell.

Posted in AI, Health, Learning, Math relearning, Project management, Social issues, Space, Weeknotes | Leave a comment