Things I Learnt in 2023
Sudbury Valley School is a radically different school: it is 100% democratic with the children having decision making power, from setting rules and punishments to (apparently) deciding which teachers can keep their jobs each year! Via Stolen Focus by Johann Hari. See this article too.
The vast majority of people (including me) do not study well at all. Via Andy Matuschak’s live study recording with Dwarkesh Patel
Peer review is less than a 100 years old, as is Nature’s and Science’s prestige as top journals for scientific research. Via a book review of Making Nature by a reader of AstralCodexTen blog.
Idea that some people are ‘couplers’ and others are ‘decouplers’. For example, Dawkins is a decoupler because they are comfortable discussing the theoretical possibility of eugenics, separately from the morality or history of eugenics. Dawkins’ critics are more likely to be couplers. Via interview of Tom Chivers on ClearerThinking podcast.
There is a Japanese museum of rocks that look like faces.
Our ability to focus is low, and there are several large-scale societal causes for it: incentives in big tech, air pollution, modern indoor lifestyles, stresses of life, increase in information available, etc. Via Stolen Focus by Johann Hari.
ClearerThinking created the project Transparent Replications to carry out quick replications of psychology research in the biggest papers, to help tackle the replication crisis. Via ClearerThinking.
Abdullah Shoaib wrote a poem which can be read both top to bottom and bottom to top! And it has a positive message too.
Fernando Abellanas created a working space, complete with desk and chair, hanging underneath a bridge. I highly recommend seeing the pictures! Via Colossal.
Concrete is basically liquid rock. Via Veritasium on YouTube.
There are far, far more styles of tofu than vast majority of people know about. “I bit in. Out seeped a viscous, sulfurous liquid, rich as an egg yolk custard but clean as freshly ground soymilk. Firm tofu had sacrificed itself, melting into juice. My tongue refused to believe it. This was tofu?”. Via Asterisk magazine.
It is entertaining to watch how differently people behave when they are about to dive from 10m height. Via Colossal.
There is an optical illusion you can do straightforwardly with your hands, where it looks like one hand goes through the other. Via X via AstralCodexTen.
A detailed 4.5 year adversarial collaboration concluded that there is much less gender discrimination in tenure track positions than is commonly believed. Via SageJournals via AstralCodexTen.
GPT3 would behave in completely bizarre ways with the input ‘SolidGoldMagikarp’. Turns out it is because it is the username of a person who is part of the counting subreddit, in which people literally just count, so the username appears tens of thousands of times, messing up tokenization. Via LessWrong via AstralCodexTen.
There is a simple way for a group of people to find out the average income of the group, without anybody revealing their individual income to the group. Via Quora.
Having a spoon of vinegar diluted with water can reduce sugar spikes. Via Jessie Inchauspe on Zoe Science and Nutrition podcast, which contains several other tips and tricks to reduce sugar spikes.
There are different levels of indirect communication. Via LessWrong via Zwi Mowshowitz on ClearerThinking podcast.
Beeminder is a great tool to develop new habits. I have used it to get habit of flossing, reducing my consumption of sugary snacks and doing more exercise. And their blog contains various interesting insights into their designs, e.g. the idea of ‘Akrasia horizon’.
Sexual reproduction is superior to asexual reproduction because it prevents genetic hitch-hiking and clonal interference. Via Telescopic Turnip Substack.
3Blue1Brown provides an intuitive explanation for why the normal distribution is so important in statistics.
There is surprisingly accessible proof that there is no quintic formula, that does not use any Galois Theory. Via not all wrong on YouTube, which also includes a simple and elegant proof of the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra.
To go right while cycling, you first have to turn left. Via minutephysics and Veritasium
There are two kinds of speed for a wave, group speed and phase speed, and the group speed can be faster than the speed of light! Via wikipedia
In Denmark, there is a children’s cartoon John Dillermand, where the protagonist has an extremely long penis. Via John Oliver
Birds can gain height without flapping their wings, by riding on thermals. Via the book The Secret World of Weather by Tristan Gooley.
Etymology of cyanide: cyanide was first discovered by heating the dye Prussian blue, and cyan means blue.
Tippe tops are spinning tops that flip themselves upside down onto their unstable ends when spun. Via public lecture given by Tadashi Tokieda on interesting toys.
In the past couple of years, the best Tetris players in the world discovered and perfected a technique called rolling that looks like them stroking the back of the controller. Via aGameScouts videos on YouTube: short video introducing the technique and longer video about how it broke the game.
AI Image Generators have been used to create new style of images in which one image is subtley hidden in other. Via Jan Loos on facebook.
65 is a shockingly bad movie, whereas Everything, Everywhere, All at Once and Past Lives are both exceptional.