https://www.asimov.press/p/nature how Nature became a prestigious science journal: first by publishing fast and, later, by courting lots of submissions so they became more selective by necessity. it wasn’t always considered “good”; its credibility waxed and waned under different editors.
“The Bézier curve is named after French engineer Pierre Bézier(1910–1999), who used it in the 1960s for designing curves for the bodywork of Renault cars”.
they’re a polynomial basis with the convenient property that you can define them by any number of points and they’ll form a smooth curve between them. Widely used in industrial design. those computer graphics programs where you can drag points and distort curves accordingly? Bézier curves.
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/05/20/pretending-to-care-pretending-to-agree/ VGR classic. very complicated; once again revolves around his dichotomy of “hotter” people with a lot of social feelings and involvements, vs “cooler” people like himself who are disengaged. I’m definitely the former, and as his model predicts, I sometimes experience the difficulty of having to hide how I feel (“pretending to agree”) and never experience the difficulty of having to hide that i don’t feel anything (“pretending to care”). And then he goes into technology having an individualist, “exit”, bias; anti-communitarian, anti-emotion. I have never really bought this dichotomy. I’m a believing individualist, a fan of technology, a thinker, and sometimes a loner who’s attached to my privacy and autonomy, but I literally never feel this blah indifference or detached un-involvement from social/emotional issues. I think that’s just a thing where temperaments differ.
Short version is that you should keep your epistemic identity small. Avoid things like “I am <political faction>”, because they will make you think <beliefs associated with the political faction> regardless of evidence.
But you should choose your instrumental identity consciously. (See also: use your identity carefully.) Things like “I am the kind of person who does X” communicate to your System 1 that you want to do X.
This requires some more thought on how to keep these two separate; how to prevent the kind of failure where identifying as “someone who does X” makes me believe that “I do X”… even if I actually don’t, or only do rarely. It probably help to keep records on how often you do X, so that your beliefs come from the records, not the identity itself, but I am not sure whether this is the entire answer, or I missed something important.
links 1/6/25: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/01-06-2026
https://archive.ph/xGv5E rationales, stated and unstated, for US action in Venezuela
https://www.asimov.press/p/nature how Nature became a prestigious science journal: first by publishing fast and, later, by courting lots of submissions so they became more selective by necessity. it wasn’t always considered “good”; its credibility waxed and waned under different editors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9zier_curve
“The Bézier curve is named after French engineer Pierre Bézier(1910–1999), who used it in the 1960s for designing curves for the bodywork of Renault cars”.
they’re a polynomial basis with the convenient property that you can define them by any number of points and they’ll form a smooth curve between them. Widely used in industrial design. those computer graphics programs where you can drag points and distort curves accordingly? Bézier curves.
https://read.isabelunraveled.com/p/manifest-rationally decent article on “manifestation” without woo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomsday it takes 30 hours to read Ulysses out loud.
https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/ argument to AI-skeptic engineers that they should be using coding agents.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter,_Peter,_Pumpkin_Eater he originally murdered his wife
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/05/20/pretending-to-care-pretending-to-agree/ VGR classic. very complicated; once again revolves around his dichotomy of “hotter” people with a lot of social feelings and involvements, vs “cooler” people like himself who are disengaged. I’m definitely the former, and as his model predicts, I sometimes experience the difficulty of having to hide how I feel (“pretending to agree”) and never experience the difficulty of having to hide that i don’t feel anything (“pretending to care”). And then he goes into technology having an individualist, “exit”, bias; anti-communitarian, anti-emotion. I have never really bought this dichotomy. I’m a believing individualist, a fan of technology, a thinker, and sometimes a loner who’s attached to my privacy and autonomy, but I literally never feel this blah indifference or detached un-involvement from social/emotional issues. I think that’s just a thing where temperaments differ.
https://www.corememory.com/p/exclusive-retro-hopes-it-has-found-alzheimers-trial Retro Bio enters the clinic for Alzheimer’s! I know people there and I’m rooting for them.
Made me think about “keep your identity small” and epistemic vs instrumental rationality.
Short version is that you should keep your epistemic identity small. Avoid things like “I am <political faction>”, because they will make you think <beliefs associated with the political faction> regardless of evidence.
But you should choose your instrumental identity consciously. (See also: use your identity carefully.) Things like “I am the kind of person who does X” communicate to your System 1 that you want to do X.
This requires some more thought on how to keep these two separate; how to prevent the kind of failure where identifying as “someone who does X” makes me believe that “I do X”… even if I actually don’t, or only do rarely. It probably help to keep records on how often you do X, so that your beliefs come from the records, not the identity itself, but I am not sure whether this is the entire answer, or I missed something important.