December 2020 Links

A list of some of the things I found interesting in December.

Low-Tech Magazine: “Low-tech Magazine questions the blind belief in technological progress, and talks about the potential of past and often forgotten knowledge and technologies when it comes to designing a sustainable society. Interesting possibilities arise when you combine old technology with new knowledge and new materials, or when you apply old concepts and traditional knowledge to modern technology”. Sample articles: The Curse of the Modern Office, Well-tended fires outperform modern cooking stoves, Why we need a speed limit for the internet.

Evangelia Aleiferi: Cartesian Double Categories with an Emphasis on Characterizing Spans.

Owen Lynch: Haskell’s Children (Owen’s whole blog is worth reading).

Tobias Fritz has put up some slides discussing our new preprint about comparison of experiments (with Paolo Perrone and Tomás Gonda).

I’ve been rereading Bayesian Updates Compose Optically by Toby St Clere Smithe.

Michael Nielsen: Principles of Effective Research.

Applied Divinity Studies: Isolated Demands for Rigor in New Optimism. “More likely, solar power has been making great strides on a pretty consistent basis for decades, and the only recent break is in how high-status it is to say that out loud.”

Jules Hedges: Compositional Game Theory Reading List

Jason Collins: Principles for the application of Human Intelligence

George on LessWrong: Machine Learning May Be Fundamentally Unexplainable. “When we say that we “understand” physics what we really mean is that there are a few dozen of thousands of blokes that spent half their lives turning their brains into hyper-optimized physics-thinking machines and they assure us that they “understand” it.”

Amanda Askell: In AI Ethics, “Bad” Isn’t Good Enough.

A map of properties of logical theories: https://forkinganddividing.com/

r/math: Most overpowered theorems in math?