Poutasi W. B. Urale

Are you someone who wants to - shake their faith in the scientific enterprise to its very core? - be motivated to be an even *more* conscientious researcher? - to read about an entertaining albeit horrific catalogue of scientific f*ck ups? Read this! us.macmillan.com/books/97812502…

Pilot didn't go well

Anglophone commenters love to attribute everything that happens in enemy territory to Bad Leaders, but when you talk about Western interventions in the Global South they become Hume with the billiard balls, pulling out a magnifying glass and saying "well you can't SEE causality"

The CCP also faced the fundamental problem of reconciling revolutionary politics with state bureaucracy. It turns out that these two things are probably mutually exclusive.

Finished "Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History", by Rebecca E. Karl. I was surprised to learn that Mao's schtick was not only to sell himself as voice of the masses, but also as a *critic* of CCP leadership.

Estimated cortical distance (mm) versus illusion strength in the Ebbinghaus illusion

Got my (7 months late) stimulus check, and now somewhat determined now to have a signature that looks as slick as Donny's

One more pop-culture reference - in "Ex Machina" (2014), a tech billionaire makes a very human-like AI by using machine learning on a bunch of social media data. I thought it was silly at the time but that may very well be the most plausible way of replicating the brain IRL. 3/3

I'll add that Borges' "On Exactitude in Science" is great, but an even better depiction in fiction of the incomprehensibility and enormous complexity of brains is found in Stanislaw Lem's "Solaris", in which scientists are bamboozled by a living, thinking planet. 2/3

A splash of cold water by @guitchounts. I'm sympathetic to the idea that there is a hard limit to understanding the brain in its entirety and why chasing general principles is a much more useful aim. 1/3 nautil.us/issue/94/evolv… via @NautilusMag

The most obvious - and extremely common - offense here is to assume that violence / authoritarianism / extremism happen "out there" in a bad world distinct from the United States, and to entirely ignore the real history of the US both at home and abroad for the last few centuries

I'd think it was kinda cool to see people occupy congress if it weren't for the fact that the people doing it this time are QAnon conspiracy theorists

@MyopicSquid My only issue with this is that you need more granularity + unnecessary visualisation

I've noticed a lot of my left-leaning friends vacillating about whether it is morally acceptable to vote or Biden. For me, the immediacy of climate change alone makes voting for sleepy Joe a no-brainer, and I have yet to see any convincing argument to the contrary.

"Ebbinghaus thickness illusion" The contour of the left inner circle appears to be thicker than that of the right counterpart, though they are the same thickness. psy.ritsumei.ac.jp/~akitaoka/sais…

This the one I was telling you about @SoheilMpour. Unreal!

Transnational matai: Examining the experiences of intergenerational global Samoan titled chiefs: royalsociety.org.nz/research/trans…

@MyopicSquid I'm just getting started so I don't know much about how the economy works, but I could give them compensation in the form of sticks and some shells I found on the beach.

Yep, still works on Animal Crossing. @MyopicSquid @sampendu @SoheilMpour