neilshevlin

I took one of his twitter polls where he asked a mathematical question. And the little Nasim shouting 'imbecile' worked in perfect symbiosis with the little Kahneman to engage System 2 and think about my answer.

There have been only a few things I have done with frequency in my life. Playing musical instruments in one of them. I have never been deliberate in practice. I have never sat down and made a schedule to practice playing the guitar or piano. But having a guitar always in visible line of sight has meant that I've practiced consistently everyday for years at a time so long as I have a guitar in the room.

Books don't have the ease of re-use. There's too much friction involved with a book. So I read whatever I please and give up frequently. Reducing this friction, in every domain, but especially in the sciences would have big impacts on my contributions to the field. If you could visualise and make learning slippery, ADHD people would likely perform much better. But the diligence is still needed. My musical ability has benefited enormously from knowing what I'm playing and recording the things I do play. The same thing can apply with learning. Technology can really shine at doing all of the boring stuff that your irregularly dopamine-ized brain refuses to do. We just havent gotten around to doing it. But it is necessary if you want to do great work.

It's definitely a tricky issue. While we do need natural resources to support a transition to renewables, the mining industry is comically slow to move on anything. Fortran might still be considered cutting edge to some companies.

This has real impacts. Because if your resource models are inaccurate, then your environmental impact is magnified. What's worse is that mine lifecycles are very long. Long enough to mean the decision makers when opening a mine, might not be around when the mine closes. Which can cause carelessness, especially if they don't live in the area.

Stricter environmental impact assessment rules might work. But geo-scientific research is underfunded. So making it harder to open a mine, might cause the overall funding for research to reduce. Causing our models, especially in the mineral exploration stage, to not really advance much. So nothing really gets done until some country deregulates the industry, and so the problem persists.

So moves like this can work, but the research has to be there to support the new age of mining. There's some trade off here, between mining and burning fossil fuels. But this seems to be an example of where the negative effects of mining more REM are local, where as the negative effects of burning more Fossil fuels are global. But it's not a binary decision in most cases.

Morrowind: Dense, lot's of lore and immersion. More open, and less guided. I think at this time the cult of linear narrative was in it's infancy. And so you could kind of do more of what you wanted in Morrowind.

Oblivion: Brilliant for it's time in terms of world building, graphics and size. Famous for it's goofy elements, story line and characters. It still kept a lot of that attention to detail, but you could see it was starting to make tradeoffs.

IMO, As time has gone on, TES had traded size and grandeur for attention to detail, and Tolkien-esque world building. Skyrim was beautiful and a good continuation of the series. But it successfully struck a great balance between open world role playing, and commercial accessibility for audiences more accustomed to a single player linear narrative experience.

I'm too young to have played Daggerfall or Arena, so someone else would have to fill you in.

Brainstorming itself might be over-generalised or not fit for the individual in all cases. But Osborne was really focusing on methodical approaches to creativity. Which is something we don't know enough about. But my thoughts on this have been:

1) Creativity for some, means that you have to be maximally bought in on the problem or task. Ever had your mind go blank when having to come up with ideas for something you just don't care about? If I've ever had to focus on being creative on a field I just don't even marginally care about, my mind goes blank. When you care enough you'll be plenty creative. The brainstorm is a framework, which works ok in low interest, and quite well in high interest. But it's not the cause of the outcome in high interest situations. The interest is.

2) The types of people who are most creative tend to suffer most from high buy in cost. That is, they wont waste time on issues they don't care about. They wont do something unless they really enjoy it. If you ask an artist to sit down and to think of creative ways to reinvent accounting practices, she's going to tell you to piss off, or some other. Even just for one hour. But they'll put out again and again creative suggestions for things they find interesting. Unless He or She is bought in, creativity can be nullified by a lack of interest.

I've always had a soft spot for Venus. The floating city idea is not my favourite, perhaps for research there could be applications. A monumental breakthrough in carbon sequestration, in method and cost might do it for Venus though. But I mean monumental. Back of the envelope calculations say there's about 460 Quadrillion metric tonne of CO2. Sooo, maybe at a cost 1c per metric tonne we could get it done with a current day cost of 4.6 Quadrillion US Dollars or so. Or all the worlds GDP for about 50 years. But that assumes that there would be no benefits from doing that. Could be other applications from the byproducts being sold.

We ran a summer camp program for college students for several years. It started with 40 college students and each year we started adding more people. What was interesting was that each year believed that it's group size was perfect, and that any bigger would just be too big. They said that at 40, 70, 120, 300 and beyond. I've never been able to fully understand why that is. But the fact that you get that at hackathons, summer camps and incubators alike, is really cool

On a good note, getting access to really high quality Earth observation data is really good for geophysics and geoscience research.

Not sure how immediately effective this is. But interest seems to prove there is a hugely underserved community of people with ADHD who could probably benefit from software tools to help deal with executive function deficits. But the best people to make the tools are those with adhd. And they tend to procrastinate making...

For the technical subjects, I haven't managed find a program more comprehensive as brilliant.org. It covers a great deal of the technical subjects to perhaps most of the undergraduate level of understanding.

I then supplement a course like brilliant, with udemy courses, guided project courses and then finally in to unguided personal projects. I can pass my CS exams, work full time, and not have to ever attend a lecture.

I only really decided to go to university to meet cool people and go to parties. There was a legitimate decision whether it was really worth it. Thankfully I live in a country where education is essentially affordable for a student, so I didn't stand to lose much.

My university has practically one of the biggest, most comprehensive libraries in the world. However, being an undergraduate, they don't actually allow me to borrow most of them, but a small sliver of 'undergraduate appropriate' books. But it's still extremely nice to be able to grab any book, free of charge and do some research. -> This is one of the main reasons I want to hang around in university.

Access to workshops, and labs is nearly always restricted to the people in the appropriate subjects. So I cant actually build anything physical, unless I belong to some mechanical engineering course. Figuring out a way to get around that would also be very nice for the future education system.

The tutor system in Oxford, Cambridge if it could be scaled, would be the final nail in the coffin for the traditional university. If I could get access to a person who is more knowledgable than me in a subject to help me understand what I don't know and give me pointers on what I probably need to learn would save me countless hours of just trying to know what I don't know.

I'm particularly excited that the author mentioned manufacturing in space. I can imagine a future where purchasing power is greater in space than in some countries on Earth. Which was often the cause of earth based risky emigration. I can see the same by the 2050's

Seems to back up. Most services working outside of incognito

I fell in love with this straight away. I'd love to be able to add my whole library tho.

Please feel free to add in any topics that interest you and you're competent in.

You could be as specific or as general as you like.

There are some examples on the google doc.

But you could have something like,

Introduction to philosophy.-> Nicomachean ethics, Discourse on the method, A treatise of human nature etc.

I plan on expanding this to something more scalable, but for now a google sheet should do.