there  could  be  snakes  in  here

New Aesthetic (art n.): Best defined visually . That slightly grating half-digitised gimmick that every other alt rock album of the last 7 years has used: surface learning (n.): superficial, merely verbal , resentful, and test-driven education. No engagement, no internalisation , no critique. Forgotten within months. Most of the 'learning' in the world is just this. chinny reckon (sarcastic English interjection): Liar! See also Itchy Chin , Chinny chinny ... My peers used this to mean "I wonder" in response to an obvious question. damnit operator (computing n.): "!"; an error-suppressing manual override of some language feature. e.g. style inheritance priority (in CSS) or nullability (in C#). farm (computing n.): Set of servers all slaved as one. adult supervision (n.): Whereby a startup hires an older, outsider CEO. Started as a joke, but it is now reified. UQ (academic n.): uncertainty quantification; a multidisciplinary ...

I got a temp job in an official statistics department at the age of 23. Somehow; while I was nominally educated (economics & philosophy), I'd never written any code, never simulated anything, never calculated a PDF , and never actually analysed more than 50 rows of data. Most notably, I'd never heard of principal components analysis (nor any unsupervised learning, tools with which one can discover the ' joints ' of nature without really putting one's mental framework into the mix). We (they) built a PCA model of childhood poverty, letting the algorithm find the most important parts of the phenomenon, making them fall right out of the data, heedless of the Marxism or Malthusianism or indeed mindlessness of the modellers. Despite my tiresome anti-realism and anti-quantoid convictions, I could see the philosophical implications were huge. So here I am.

(or, rather, How many hours have I spent explicitly doing maths? ) Formal education Preschool . 300 hours of counting? Primary school. (4? per week * 40 weeks x 7 years) = 1100 Secondary school (6 years) S1+S2: (3? per week * 40 weeks * 2) + homework (80), revision (40) = 360 Standard Grade: (3? per week * 40 weeks * 2) + homework (160), revision (50) = 450 Higher Maths: (3 per week * 40) + homework (100), revision (100) = 320 Physics: (2 * 40 * 1) + home (50) + revision (50) = 180 Chemistry: (2 * 40 * 1) + home (50) + revision (50) = 180 =~ 1800 Higher education Economics = (4 hours * 24 weeks * 4 years) + homework (200) + revision (200) + thesis (100) = 900 Cryptography = 100 Half a BSc in Maths = 16 hours per assignment x 23 assignments + (60 hours study x 4 courses) = 600 ~ 1600 ~ 5000 hours. Researches My own writing hasn't been very mathematical so far. But I've done a bunch of recreational bits and warmup pieces, and read boo...

PSA : It took me many years to internalise the formal methods I know now.* I use "internalise" as distinct from "learn", because, let's face it: we all "learn" statistics in uni, in the sense of briefly knowing a tiny set of teacher passwords , of knowing what a mode is, and of knowing how to dumbly apply two canned tests of inference.** But almost no-one with that badge on their resume actually remembers, actually uses, and was actually changed by contact with it, the driest and most nutritious method. My measure of internalisation is if you use the method, without prompting by school or advisor, in your investigations. Internalisation requires some understanding, but I'm not saying that I have any deep grasp of these things. I just appreciate their power, and use them as well as I can where I can. First contact with algebra: 2000 Internalised algebra: 2012 . First contact with Analysis: 2003 Internalised Analysis: Not yet. ...

From 2008: the first original philosophical argument I remember making: Searle: "all purely syntactic systems lack subjective experiences." Searle: "I have subjective experiences." So Searle: "I am not a purely syntactic system." (modus tollens, 1&2) The only system that Searle has knowledge about the subjective experiences of is himself. So if Searle is not a purely syntactic system, he has no knowledge of what it is like to be a purely syntactic system, He cannot therefore cannot assert premise 1. (5 & the knowledge account of assertion ). If Searle is a purely syntactic system, (1) is false. (by 2) Therefore premise (1) is either unwarranted or false. (by 6&7) (These days I wouldn't use infallibilist knowledge as the baseball bat I did; I'd go at him with probabilism instead. And I'd do something against Searle's odd dichotomy between representational machines who are 'pure' syntax vs those wh...

(Not a portrait of me by Frederic Leighton .) Name: Not Clive James, Not Robin Hanson Age: Missed most of the Twentieth Century Address: Almost nowhere, really. Nationality: Not a great deal. I don't participate in Scottish culture any more than I have to by merit of enculturation. Languages: I can't speak Gaelic, Spanish, Cornish, Saxon, nor many many others... Non-interests: Sport, war, conlangs, Tarski, collecting anything, scale-modelling, Dr Who, surfing, bell-ringing, spelunking. Education lapses: At Secondary level: No economics, no philosophy, no gender, no business studies, no psychology, no politics, no French, no Chinese, no grammar (properly). I'm also quite bad at geography. Tertiary: No law, no anthropology, no engineering, no geology, no medicals, no German philosophy to speak of. Code : I don't know any functional languages (unless you count the pariah JavaScript ). I've never used a static code analyser, or rigorous optimisation withou...

(c) Alberto Magnelli (c. 1909) For the first time in a year I really want home internet access. I want an m4a convertor, and a script that downloads TVTropes and the Stanford Encyclopaedia*, and to know the Gaelic for Gordon. Also I want the history and present disposition of the Argentine punk band Boom Boom Kid, and to hear my DJ mate’s new playlist, and to prove to my flatmate that Pluto has not been reinstated as a planet by an appropriate authority , nor do Chinese people customarily use newspaper for condoms. Why go without? After all, there’s no strong argument against it: the ‘information overload’ hypothesis is really not well-founded, the educational potential of the net is, at last, better than most IRL schools’ [citation impossible], and one can avoid almost all of the unbelievably horrible things on it almost all of the time. I go without because four hours a week at the library is enough and because, these dry days, I actually read instead. (There's also...