United States Botantical Gardens
If only everything in the world looked as good in photographs as the flowers in the United States Botantical Gardens:
Pedagogical Strategies
My advice to teachers of mathematics: explain the intuition behind every theorem. Students can look up the statement of a theorem for themselves: you only add value if you give students a broader perspective by articulating the intuition that accompanies and underlies the formal details of a theorem. This intuition is not merely a sign [...]
Linear Regression and Decisions about Sampling
Lately I’ve been thinking about the optimal strategy for data collection when you plan to run a linear regression. Clearly, you want a sample of widely distributed points if you’re unsure that a strict linearity assumption is appropriate. If you already know from theoretical reasons that linearity is appropriate, then you know that you only [...]
Moral Responsibility
Responsibility, in the moral sense, is not a property of actors, but merely a confabulation on our part designed for one and only one purpose: to justify the suffering we inflict upon others. This holds equally well in regard to matters of retributive and distributive justice: responsibility is a mere holdover from an antiquated conception [...]
Social Scientism
I find extraordinary the readiness with which members of certain branches of the social sciences latch onto obscure and irrelevant findings in the natural sciences as means of buttressing their views. This habit convinces me that their work is, as Hayek would say, merely scientistic — that their life’s work is the application of a [...]
No One Ever Beats Vegas
It occurred to me today that the reason I find attempts to “beat Vegas” so odd is that I am nearly certain that, if you are smart enough to actually beat Vegas and yet you are not spending your time trying to beat Wall Street instead, you must be stupid. Consider this my proof by [...]
The Origins of Poverty
Among those with any compassion for the poor, there seem to be two schools: those who believe that the poor face difficult lives that make it impossible for them to function and those who believe that the poor face easy lives, but are constitutionally incapable of meeting even those limited challenges for some reason.
Status R-Quo
It occurred to me today that there should be a website devoted to web design called “Status R-Quo”.
Not from the Benevolence of the Pilot
Every time I have doubts about how safe flying is, I think to myself: It is not from the benevolence of the pilot that I expect not to die after crashing into a mountain, but from the pilot’s regard to his own interest. It amazes me how this line of reasoning seems to never enter [...]
The Value of Ideas
An 2005 article by Derek Sivers, entitled “Ideas Are Just a Multiplier of Execution,” has been making its way through programming blogs lately. In regard to software design, I think the article is very accurate: ideas are worth very little and execution is enormously more important. The most profitable software in the world is not [...]