51–60 of 88 posts
Huh? Is this true? If I had particles with unknown half-times, I think I would expect the older particles to stay around longer, if that makes sense. (It is possible that there is no 'I expect' in the probability theory sense, like in the two envelopes problem.)
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The bible is a hugely influential book. It is probably the most referenced book in western literature, art, and history. Reading a book is not the same as agreeing with its premises. One must also judge a book by their historical context.
My AP Lit teacher in high school encouraged us to read the bible - not for any type of religious reason - but because it is so frequently referenced by western literature, especially in older texts. If you don't pick up on the biblical allegories when reading something like Shakespeare then you'll miss critical details.
You do not need the whole bible for that. The bible contain way more then cultural references and a lot of that more is mindnumbing boring.
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I definitely would stock the Bible, yes -- with the argument that Western societies and cultures are riddled with biblical metaphors and everyday customs, so it does make sense for the kids to be familiar with them. Not sure about stocking e.g. Mein Kampf, though. This one I would probably pass, due to disgust towards what the Nazis did. From another angle, I might be "brainwashed" here -- by the cultural meme that t…
Mein Kampf is worth at least a skim, because it demonstrates that Hitler was a human being. History positions him as an inhuman monster, and rightly so metaphorically . We are conditioned to think that he was uniquely evil in an otherworldly sense, totally unlike us, and someone like him could never arise again because we don’t have monsters these days. But he wasn’t a unique demon. He was a human, with human emotion…
If you want to know who Hitler was as a human, read either "Hitler, by Kershaw Ian" or "Third Reich Trilogy by Richard Evans".
If you want someone to realize Hitler was not unique, make them read about other genocides, about Italy at the same time, about Stalin, about Japan, about slavery, about genocide of native americans and so on.
Also, I would highly NOT recommend it for someone who does not know actual German history, because that book contains ... well quite a few untrue claims. If you are in general interested in that period and read a lot, nothing wrong with reading it. But if you are not and this is the one historical book you decided to pick and recommend over all the others, then I have hard time to believe you are neutral in your pick.
I like to use the Lindy effect as an everyday heuristic, quite often for choosing what books to read. That is: if a book has been highly relevant, say, for the past 20 years, it may have considerable relevance 20 years from today as well. Conclusion: I will think about buying that physical book for my home library, so my children would have a carefully-filtered collection of "classics" from many eras by the time they…
> As a result, I almost never buy (or often even read) current-day bestsellers. I like this strategy because it maximizes the value you get out of old books while you minimize the value of new books. A phenomenal and important book could be published today but the optimal strategy is to die before the Lindy effect becomes apparent and let another generation enjoy its value. This makes sense because books have a finit…
Let's say there are two universes U1 and U2 and a book A which is identical in both. In U1, book A gets 100 readers, while the same book in U2 gets 1000 readers. I think most people would say that the book has the same value in both universes, independent of how many read it.
Maybe your thought process involves the physical condition of a book (there is more wear and tear as it passes through more readers), but I'd like to understand your point of view.
I really wish that we, software developers, apply Lindy rule while choosing library/framework/language/SaaS tool etc., Lot of developers underestimate the value of collective brain power that has gone into making a system mature, not to talk about community and ecosystem support. I was extremely hesitant to get onboard Golang bandwagon 5-7 years ago. I reluctantly said OK to try it out in a non critical service and a…
I like to use the Lindy effect as an everyday heuristic, quite often for choosing what books to read. That is: if a book has been highly relevant, say, for the past 20 years, it may have considerable relevance 20 years from today as well. Conclusion: I will think about buying that physical book for my home library, so my children would have a carefully-filtered collection of "classics" from many eras by the time they…
You overfit for classics and skip on maybe very entertaining contemporary reads. Feels weird to me to hipster out on the "I build a library of classics only". With this approach you'd never read Dark Matter, which is one of my favorites in the past few years. I also don't care about rankings, top sellers etc. etc., but contemporary stuff is still worth the read. Feels very weird to me tbh.
So on the one hand recency bias results in us giving undue attention to new books. On the other hand we are too forgiving to classics. There is no lesson here. Finding the right books to read is hard and you can't trust reviews.
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I definitely would stock the Bible, yes -- with the argument that Western societies and cultures are riddled with biblical metaphors and everyday customs, so it does make sense for the kids to be familiar with them. Not sure about stocking e.g. Mein Kampf, though. This one I would probably pass, due to disgust towards what the Nazis did. From another angle, I might be "brainwashed" here -- by the cultural meme that t…
Better to read Evola
There's a subset of this I think about sometimes, not sure if it's actually a thing or been looked at/is valid. Let's say I'm waiting for a package to arrive and it's late. As each minute passes, does the chance of it coming the very next minute increase or decrease? One could say it increases because since it will eventually come and I have passed all the previous minutes they haven't come, then the remaining minute…
Replace it with waiting for a bus and you have a classic textbook example for teaching Poisson process! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_point_process https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/122722/please-expl...
A bus arrival has some kind of multimodal distribution, where the bus either comes on time or very late, with some noise in each case.
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> As a result, I almost never buy (or often even read) current-day bestsellers. I like this strategy because it maximizes the value you get out of old books while you minimize the value of new books. A phenomenal and important book could be published today but the optimal strategy is to die before the Lindy effect becomes apparent and let another generation enjoy its value. This makes sense because books have a finit…
Why do you think books have a finite value divisible by the number of readers they get? That sounds like a very odd claim to me. Let's say there are two universes U1 and U2 and a book A which is identical in both. In U1, book A gets 100 readers, while the same book in U2 gets 1000 readers. I think most people would say that the book has the same value in both universes, independent of how many read it. Maybe your tho…
Here is one way, I use the Lindy effect as a mental model: When picking a tech stack for a software investment and you want a reasonable expectation that it will still be actively maintained 10 years from now, you need to go back in time by 10 years. I’ve found this 10 years time horizon a useful one to work with, based on version histories of various bits of software I build upon. For example, for Python, this takes…