October Links

October 31, 2018

A running list of great essays, papers, and videos I've seen this month.

• Video interviews, conducted in 1929, with people born in the 1820s!


• Volitional philanthropy is a great new term for an underrated skill. See this tweet by Patrick Collison and this blog post by Tyler Cowen for the gist.


• For an intro to spaced repetition techniques for memorization, see this wonderful new interactive post from Nicky Case. For a longer discussion, check out Michael Nielsen's essay on Augmenting Long-term Memory. Also, see my command-line-based spaced repetition app on GitHub!


• Heuristics for philosophical thinking


• I've started a new Github repository for experimenting with new ideas and for reproducing old results in AI/ML. The first Jupyter Notebook explores an important property of artificial neural networks -- that they are universal function approximators. Specifically, I examine the relationship between model complexity and goodness-of-fit.


• Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity


• Here's an exciting new paper by the Berkeley SETI Research Center / Breakthrough Listen group, who I worked for last summer. Using Residual CNNs, the team discovered 72 new FRBs (!!!) in a single 5-hour observation with the Green Bank Telescope.