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gwern comments on June 2015 Media Thread - Less Wrong Discussion
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Everything is heritable:
Politics/religion:
Statistics/AI/meta-science:
Psychology/biology:
Technology:
Economics:
Philosophy:
Fiction:
Misc:
Can I ask how you choose the articles and papers above? What sources do you check regularly which give you what you read, or how else do you find them?
Reading the "Late Night Thoughts on Reading Scientology" article is like looking into a mirror. It's almost painful.
It's definitely a common error in explore vs exploit. I've consciously tried to finish things and go through books/papers or admit it's just not going to happen & delete them. (Painful, because it's so similar to admitting failure. 'No, I'm not going to work through that category theory textbook if I haven't in the past 7 years. No, I'm probably not going to learn Prolog if I've had that text + source sitting around for 5 years.' Even though they would all be good to know or read...)
Rereading, I have to object to this one.
Books, essays, and hobbies are consistent. If you enjoy your first few classes of fencing, you'll enjoy the rest. Very few books will be wretched for the first few chapters and then abruptly become fantastic. And so, going through my book backlog, if I throw out the worst or most off-topic ones, I have lost little, and I have restored focus to my collection, avoiding distractions, and coming to terms with the limits of my ambition or interests.
But with news feeds, heterogeneity is the norm; I don't have hundreds of news feeds of which only 10 are good, I have hundreds of news feeds among which are randomly distributed 10 good items today. At best, a particular news feed may have a higher probability of spitting out something I will benefit from that day, but if I delete all but the 10 best news feeds, I'll wind up deleting many or most of the good future items. Reading LW or Reddit or HN does help, but I still wind up finding far too many interesting and relevant things only through having a few hundred RSS feeds.
I, for one, only put a book on a shelf once I've read it and lend out books from my collection on a regular basis...
Dear gods how I have seen this in practice, in family and colleagues...
This is also at least partially behind a growing distrust of the medical profession and medical science. When something works against your interests while claiming to work for your interests, trust fails.
Scott Adams has a very... explicit blog post on the topic.
I very much appreciate your regular and variegated list. I have to take care to not spend too much time on it and consciously select only those I expect to actually act on. In this case I sunk some time in the Programming Epigrams and devoted most time to read the meta-analysis of heritability. To the latter I propose some intro link: How to calculate heritability. Note that I do not agree with your conclusions here (I wonder whether I should comment there or here).