Ted’s Blog

I stumbled across two very interesting books this summer (both available for free online):

1. David MacKay, Information Theory, Inference and Learning Algorithms (available here)
2. James P. Sethna, Entropy, Order Parameters and Complexity (here)

They remind me of the program that Graham postulated in How To Do Philosophy: start with the useful and crank up the generality.  For what I absorbed of them, the ideas covered appear to be both rigorous and with myriad interdisciplinary applications, something that can rarely be said about a more standard philosophical text.  It’s somewhat disturbing that I can’t think of a class at Amherst that would use either MacKay or Sethna as a textbook…

Two pieces that grabbed my attention recently:

1. Why Not Hang Them All: The Virtues of Inefficient Punishment, by David Friedman, son of Milton. (JSTOR, or Google Scholar.) Have you ever wondered why criminal justice systems around the world rely so heavily on imprisonment, despite the existence of more efficient alternatives such as fines and executions? Of all the rationalizations of this state of affairs I’ve ever heard or read, this is perhaps the most interesting and plausible one.
2. Lies We Tell Kids, by Paul Graham. Interesting and thought-provoking throughout. Graham’s consistency in writing original, well-structured essays is remarkable. Usually, there’s a tradeoff between originality and clarity—unfamiliar thoughts don’t have clichés associated with them, so they are more difficult to explain. (Imagine how much more difficult would economic and evolutionary explanations be to give without the mental shorthand of phrases such as “supply and demand” or “natural selection.”) Graham remains surprisingly clear even when his ideas are new to me. By the way, How To Do Philosophy and Mind The Gap are among the best short pieces I’ve ever read.

I don’t really understand what people mean when they talk about the “Amherst bubble”. I never experience the feeling of being taken outside this bubble, of my horizon suddenly broadening, if only for a precious short while. This lack of revelatory experience probably stems either from my never actually leaving the bubble, or from my never being in it in the first place. It’s not clear which—what’s clear is, no “leaving the Amherst bubble” experiences for me.

In contrast, the human-scale-bubble this article bursts is very tangible. When you pause to think of the galaxies stretching out orders of magnitude (in time and space) above you, how not to laugh at the seriousness with which you go about your daily life?

On a less mystical level, I like Hanson’s model very much: a minimal amount of math leading to a somewhat surprising conclusion (”If the probability of completing all the steps within the time window is low, then it turns out that for the cases where all the steps are in fact completed, the average time to complete each “hard” step is unrelated to how hard that step is!”). I’m almost upset to see it side-lined to make space for the substantive argument.

This is a sample post. If it works, more may be to come.

 Link.

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