Action Figure Daniel

Category: Notes

  • “Seeing With Fresh Eyes” by Edward Tufte

    • Autocorrelation, serial correlation, bang-bang duplicate,  or pseudo-replications are when a piece of data follows another without new measures
    • There is a difference between having questions to be solved by a database and poking around a database looking for interesting answers to question
    • Early screening boosts “survival time” in useless ways
    • Adjust measures to avoid errors rather than modeling them away
    • “Guide to Bad Data” by Chris Groskopf
      • Values missing
      • Zeros replace missing values
      • Data missing that you know should be there
      • Rows or values duplicated
      • Total differ from aggregates
      • Suspicious values present
      • Spreadsheet have 65536 rows or 255 columns
      • Margin-of-error to large or unknown
      • Benford’s Law fails
      • Too good to be true
    • Fix bad names immediately
    • Survivor bias: “Most medieval castles were made of wood”

  • “Time Travel” by James Gleick

    • Concepts of time travel started in 1914
    • 1876 was the first record of a centennial celebration
    • No one pondered the future or the past until the 20th century
    • New (remote) lands filled the roles of time travel in fiction
    • We should not think about time as the same as space
      • We cannot freely move through time like we can through space
    • “What the balloon does for space, the time machine does for time”
    • Prior to clocks, time was relative based on the setting
    • Newton has to define time so acceleration could happen
    • “If the speed of light is fixed then time cannot be.”
    • The Olympics replace starting pistols with speakers to ensure everyone can hear the signal at the same time
    • “Souls cannot move that fast so one needs to wait”
    • We are always looking into the past
    • All time was local until the train
    • Is the arrow of time because of entropy?
    • “You cannot stir things apart”
    • In many Latinx cultures, you look forward to the past and back for the future
      • (This makes a lot of sense because you observe the past, in front of you, and cannot see the future coming behind you)
    • Eternity is “outside of time”
    • Nostalgia originally meant “homesick”, not wanting a different time
    • In 1955, we redefined “a second” from a fraction of a day to an independent time frame
    • A nano second is about the length light travels a foot
    • Mental Time Travel let’s us project forward and back over time
    • “Now” is generally 2-3 seconds lumped together by the brain
    • We need at least 1/10th a second to accurately differentiate the order of two events

  • “Chaos: Making a new science” by James Gleick

    • Science became really interesting when looking at weather
    • Warm coffee just cools; Hot coffee has convection
    • Modern scientist have iterated on the past but that assumes everything that came before was true
    • “Sensitive dependance on initial conditions”
    • Physics and maths divorced in the 30’s but started getting back together in the 60’s
    • When studying systems, scientists tended to assume oscillation was around a steady state
    •  Measuring non-standard shapes requires an infinitely small measuring tool
    • Fractals allow for infinite length in a finite space
    • “Dimensions” are the number of identifiers needed to identify a single point
      • At a distance, a ball of string is a point and so one-dimensional; up close it is a one-dimensional object arranged to occupy three dimensions
    • All physical touching is described by fractals
    • Turbulence is very poorly understood and may be unknowable
    • The Manhattan project was really about turbulence
    • Attractors bring stability, even if not predictability
    • Poincare return map
      • Cross sections of the transit to track movement over time
    • In order to be universal, it has to have scale
    • Universality was originally rejected from publication
    • Flow = shape +  change or motion + form
    • Control the space so you can manipulate time
    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandelbrot_set
    • “In biology, randomness is death”
    • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnsley_fern
    • Computer experimentation really let fractals take off
    • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenz_system
    • Random (spread out and undefined) vs chaos (deterministic and patterned)
    • Chaos brings a wealth of information (because steady states can have their information compressed)
    • A map needs to simplify the things it maps
    • Giving mosquitos a photo burst at midnight will destroy their circadian signals
    • Mode locking is when things lock into frequencies
    • “Is it possible that mathematical pathology, i.e. chaos, is health and that mathematical health, which is the predictability and differentiability of this kind of structure is disease?”
    • Snowflake’s non-equilibrium phenomenon
      • They have 6 sides based on the stress of surface tension

  • “The Chaos Machine” by Max Fisher

    • People who trust the system do not spend much time researching
    • Intermittent Variable Reinforcement
      • Abusers veer all over making them unpredictable and alluring
    • Self-esteem is a gauge of how much we are accepted and valued by our peers
    • Facebook subsidizes mobile data charges in developing countries
    • Silicon Valley took “anti-social drop-out” to mean “genius”
    • The core ideal is, “free, unfiltered speech.”
    • While young male gamers?
      • In the 80’s, the American video gaming industry collapsed
      • Reagan cancelled regulation that prohibited advertising to children
      • Toy companies started pushing gender self-engagement
      • Japanese game companies picked boys because parents spend more money on them
    • Larger social groups tend to become more violent and strengthen hierarchy enforcement
    • Twitter started as a text message rely service
    • Morality is emotionally triggered, not rationally triggered
    • Global shaming can easily spin out of control
    • Domesticated animals have shorter tails, softer ears, shorter faces, and a star-shaped pattern on their forehead
    • Communication allowed for the “tyranny of the cousins”
    • Moral signaling scales with audience size
    • Machine Learning built SPAM filters that were better than any human built filters
    • ML super-powered YouTube’s algorithms
    • Additionally, Google set a goal to 10x view in several years around the 2020 election
    • Humans tend to accept things that are similar to things we have already accepted
      • (This is why Slippery Slope fallacy gets so dangerous)
    • Repetition makes things more believable (and comforting)
    • Mashing together people who disagree does not boost tolerance
      • You have to compel them to engage together
    • Having user comments adds a social context to media that detaches our rationality
    • People generally do not want to share misinformation, but want to be social; once they decide to share, they decide it must be true
    • Motivation, attention, design
    • Moral words overwhelm almost regardless of the context
    • Morality is actually tied to what we thing our peers think
    • We use a subset of people, social referents, as a short cut
      • “If <insert name> hates it then it must be bad”
    • “Everyone feels this way”
    • YouTube recommendations really quickly go to the fringe and never come back (because these illicit the most responses)
    • For the algorithms, watching is endorsing
    • Terrorism is in part a theatrical display
    • Citizen movement has dropped as Social Media raised
    • “We’re a society, not just a market.”

  • “Making Sense of Chaos” by J. Doyne Farmer

    • Complexity Economics shift from “as if” models to “as is”
    • Models should fit the facts with plausible inputs
    • ‘Complicated’ (many moving parts) and ‘complex’ (outputs are not easily calculated) are not synonymous
    • Modern economies are ecosystems
    • Money is a contract, contracts live on balance sheets
    • “What are the nodes? What are the communities?”
    • Only 35% of improvements come from within the industry, the rest come from the supply chain
    • Technology typically shifts unemployment between industries
    • Risks are about known events, uncertainty is about the unknown
    • Chaos pervades complicated systems but is rare in simple systems
    • Data that look chaotic can have solid, short run predictions
    • Games enter a static state when they are not competitive
    • Leverage adds volatility that lead to crashes
    • When pressure is applied to a fluid, it is stable. When extreme pressure is applied, turbulence occurs.