Action Figure Daniel

Category: Reading

  • “Caste” by Isabel Wilkerson

    • Silent earthquakes are a thing
    • “We did not build this broken house, but it is our house now”
    • Castes are about power, not feelings
    • In America, race is a strawman that maintains the caste
    • Virginia colony had a special form of enslavement more extreme than in England
    • We are shocked when the actors do not match the expected containers
    • Rooting out offenders helps us think we solved the problem but does little
      • (Offenders are people who crossed a line. Excising them pushing them out of the system… but the system still remains.)
    • Color does not indicate race (multiple “races” have the same shades)
    • Color is a fact; Race is a social construct
    • Caste is not inherently hatred
    • Casting is based on
      • Assumption of divine will and laws of nature
      • Heritability
        • “If you can act your way out of it, then it is class not caste”
      • Endogamy and marriage control
        • (Restricting marriage to intra caste)
      • Purity vs pollution
        • Their degradation justified their degradation
      • Occupational hierarchy
      • Dehumanization and stigma
      • Terror as enforcement, cruelty as control
      • Inherent superiority vs inherit inferiority
    • Dominant group threat syndrome
    • True Alphas do not need to yell
    • Omega’s act as a jester and pack glue
      • Because they can poke fun at everyone, they can defuse and mellow the group
    • Culture is built to subordinate castes successes more than almost anything else
    • “There is never ‘caste’ only ‘castes’”
    • Caste usually trumps class
    • We usually tend to defend our caste even if sacrificing self-interest
    • Tolerance is not love; we need to love, not just tolerate

  • “Indebted” by Caitlin Zaloom

    Note: I continue to be shocked at how bad the Federally sponsored Student Loan system is. Part of it is because, well, Government, but part is because it is big business and vested parties do not want to see the money slow.

    • College is a hope for a better life through income
    • It is also a symbolic acceptance of middle-class “values”
    • Having to rely on government loans conflicts with the core concepts of independence
    • For agrarian cultures, the entire economic system was based on free child labor
    • Loans Direct requires repayment fresh out of college
    • Planning requires stability, not the other way around
    • Stuff feels important to have
    • Future planning requires balance between providing now for providing later
    • Standard forms–like FAFSA–render families liable to the government and infer appropriate relationships
    • We blame the poor of having bad financial skills but do not have financial education
      • (It is interesting to me the mandating teaching financial literacy is so strongly opposed in so many places. I have not delved far into the reasons, but a cursory review seems to be that “teaching about money is the family’s responsibility”. I concur. As is all other education. I find this stance folly for three reasons:
        • teaching about money does not seem to have been adequate heretofore,
        • teaching about money in the classroom does not preclude families from teaching at home–just like any other subject–and,
        • how can the financially illiterate be expected to teach at all, if not well, something they do not know)
    • Higher education transitioned from a “national” benefit (“this benefits the country”) in the 1900’s to a family benefit (“this mostly benefits a family”) in the 1980’s
      • With this transition, grants (for the public good) were replaced with loans (for the private good)
    • Middle-class parents shield kids from financial conversations, which is often a bad thing
    • Parent PLUS is based on credit history, thus unequally distributing benefits
    • Children can feel stymied if they are making financially based decisions

  • “Remember” by Lisa Genova

    • How to remember
      • Get the information
      • Weave it together
      • Store the woven information
      • Fetch the memory
    • Storing the memory takes time and can be interrupted
    • There is no “memory bank”
    • We rebuild memories, not replay them
    • We can only remember what we pay attention to
    • You have 15-30 seconds to pay attention to sensory input and convert them into memories
    • Three memories: things we know, things we do, and what happened
    • Self-testing is important to remembering
    • Space out your learning
    • Repetitive learning and recall
    • Meaning can improve memory retention
    • Tying to something autobiographical enhances memory
    • Episodic memories are very plastic
    • Every time we remember, we save a new version of the memory
    • Descriptive language affect memory
    • “Ugly sisters”–words similar to what we are looking for–distract us… keeping us looking in the wrong place
    • Prospective memory–listing things now to remember later–is something we are not good at
    • Be precise when trying to remember to do something for the future
    • Stop replaying or sharing memories to forget them faster
    • Forgetting is important to drop irrelevant information and declutter the mind
    • Your physiology is part of your memory context
    • Sleep aids muscle memory
    • Naps provide short term boosts

  • “13 Bankers” by Simon Johnson

    A fascinating history of Finance and Banking the US from the earliest days (1776) through the financial collapse of the Great Recession (2008).

    An industry that makes so much money has to be good at managing themselves

  • “Noise” by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass R Sunstein, Jonathan Todd Ross

    • Bias (variance from the target) and noise (variance from others) appear is most organizations
    • System noise compounds rather than balance (cancel) out
    • Most people are content with maintaining a single world view
    • Focusing on common language allows us to avoid developing common standards
      • Conflict avoidance helps support this
    • (Feedback is really important to making consistent decisions)
    • Verifiability does not affect our estimates
      • (Just because something can be verified does not mean we are better at estimating it)
    • Decisions require predictive and evaluative judgements
    • Bias and noise are independent errors
    • Avoid mixing your values and facts
    • Waiting a few weeks to make a second guess helps improve personal guess
    • To get most accurate average estimates
      • Get input from other people
      • Ask yourself a second time, weeks later
      • Ask yourself to guess again, assuming your first guess is wrong
    • Summing up votes can have a huge boost in accuracy
    • Crowds are only wise if people register views independently from each other
    • Discussing ideas with others often intensifies original beliefs
    • “We do not need more accurate weights than our measures.”
    • “Frugal rules” (algorithms with few inputs) are often better than complex algorithms but not as good as ML
    • People are often willing to trust an algorithm until it makes a bad decision
    • Most things happen in “the Valley of the Norm” where it is easy to explain after the fact
    • Using comparisons instead of labels for more accurate judgements at scale
      • 7 is the magical number of categories
    • We like casual stories of explanation, even if they are not rational
    • Intelligence has a strong correlation with financial success
    • Open minded is better than strong confidence
    • Documenting each step helps to reduce bias due to information exposure