Tyler Cowen and Patrick Collison wrote two months ago a piece in The Atlantic calling for a new discipline, Progress Studies that would be very much applied and focused on improving the human condition. In my previous links post I linked to no less than eight manifestos or responses of some kind that were published some time after the original article, all show some degree of approval of this new proposal.
In contrast, Twitter was a snakepit of snide and snark for a few days, with - what seems - mostly anth…
Paper argues that the performance (citations) of a scientific team is highly impacted by the performance (citations) of the weakest performing team member.
Preventing the collapse of Civilization, by Jon Blow. He argues software is becoming worse, and that this is masked by ever improving hardware.
A Case for Oxidation: Why the Rust programming language is great
How does the sensation of touch arise, at a mollecular level?
Fujitsu simulates a quantum computer with a classical computer (They built a digital …
Pascal's Wager is an scenario where there is a potential for an infinite reward (heaven) and that overrides every other consideration.
Pascal's Mugging is an scenario where the theological considerations are replaced with a more mundane setting, where we are faced with a being who claims to have supernatural powers, that will pay us greatly if we pay them a small sum in advance. I think the earliest example I could find online of this particular case was this 2000 paper from Alex Tabarrok, who presents a s…
Here at Nintil I claimed last year that it is unlikely that there is some new useful fundamental physics coming.
When I've made this point in front of an audience, sometimes I've had to clarify myself a lot. I still think it's all mostly addressed in the post itself -, but the topic can do with some extra clarification. In this post I will also point to what I regard as the only candidates I'm aware of for useful fundamental physics
Useful fundamental physics
Fundamental physics
By fundamental physics I mea…
Nintil aims to be the world's best blog as per my own criteria of what the best blog is, and one of my requirements is correctness, I want the things I say here to be accurate. It's hard to keep track of everything I've written, and I may overlook things. Sometimes it's just easier to see mistakes in other's work rather than on one's own.
That's why, in the spirit of Donald Knuth I'm launching the "Prove me wrong, earn money!" rewards program. It covers everything I've published since 2017-01-01 a…
One of the Collison questions is
Is Bloom's "Two Sigma" phenomenon real? If so, what do we do about it?
Educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom found that one-on-one tutoring using mastery learning led to a two sigma(!) improvement in student performance. The results were replicated. He asks in his paper that identified the "2 Sigma Problem": how do we achieve these results in conditions more practical (i.e., more scalable) than one-to-one tutoring?
In a related vein, this large-scale m…