About

For years, I've had a backlog of things I've wanted to write about. This blog is intended to be my outlet for some of these. Here are a few of them:

• Fleshing out the ideas behind the Qualia Diversity Project
  • What is qualia diversity?
  • Aphantasia and language acquisition
  • "Funes the aphantasiac"
  • How to talk about mundane qualia
  • Results from the Qualia Diversity Survey
• "Dissonance and integration": a talk I gave in February 2024 about a particular mental model of what integration means, inspired by some of David Chapman's writing
• Telling the story behind a Twitter thread, now lacunary due to an account deletion, about my experience as a mathematician with aphantasia (and my mother's loving but misguided naches)
• Some reflections on teaching
  • Parts of speech and mathematical notation
  • A realization about ways in which my attempts to mimic my favorite lecturers led me to poorly serve non-native English speakers in my classes
• Many short notes on being effective tech work, particularly in software engineering
• My idiosyncratic reading of one of my favorite paintings
• My distaste for seatbelt laws and why reading Parfit forced me to reconsider this (and several others preferences and beliefs I'd once held)
• My favorite way to tie a Münter hitch and why it reminds me of Conan the Barbarian
• Razors
• Diffuse costs and concentrated benefits
• Postel's Law in real life: of the heart, of interpersonal communication
• Interstellar communication
  • The link is to an only slightly successful attempt to get ChatGPT to come up with and explore some ideas I'd been tossing around in my head for awhile
• What are the implications of parts of self (as in internal family systems, but also more generally) for the private language argument? Same question about the implications of Parfit's Relation R, replacing the intra-cognitive dimension with the inter-temporal.
• Is plagiarism good, actually? Featuring: parts of self, processing systems at different scales (is it plagiarism if one neuron copies another without attribution?; what is the most relevant scale to inquire about?; does causal emergence help us here?), civilization advance and civilization capacity, the trap of "mind fighting mind", and reflections on the US vs. China.
  • And in making an argument that plagiarism "is good, actually", am I falling into the trap of being contrarian but not meta-contrarian?
• Two strategies for teaching skills that can't simply be described (body movement, mental moves, ...); and what to do after (Wittgenstein, Kornfield)
  • Describe accurately and hope for the best
  • See where they are then cue/nudge
• Which is "the best" book on a given technical subject? Likely the second one you study.
• Musings on some lyrics that I find moving
• Creating a future self that will be pleased with who they are, subject to the constraint that at each moment until then, the present self is aligned with the project of doing so
• Types of memory: spontaneous recall, stimulated recall, and recognition
  • Ways software tools could improve by not conflating these
  • Aphantasia does not implyprosopagnosia
  • Recognition is like using a hash function
• Free will, revealed preferences, and infinite regress (no original ideas here, just connecting some dots in a way that was useful for me)
• An in-the-wild example in which it matters whether you interpret the word "comprise" according to its traditional (prescriptivist) definition or the more recent usage (approximately, "composed")
• Seeing the world through different primary senses; the example of freshly baked bread

If any of these particularly interest you, let me know. Maybe I'll prioritize writing it sooner than the others.