updating based on feedback is trickier than you think

Psychologist Bertram Forer once asked some students to fill out a personality test and then gave them a personalized profile based on the results. The students rated how well the profile captured their individual personality, and at the end, the average rating was found to be 4.2 out of 5!

But actually, Forer had taken vague statements like “You have a great deal of unused capacity which you have not turned to your advantage” from a book on astrology, assembled them into a profile, and given the same profile to everyone [ 1]. The students had stretched a profile full of elastic language to fit their self-image, even though they probably thought they were judging the profile objectively.

thoughts about how I’m picking what to learn right now

Originally published on Medium.

I have limited time and a long list of things to learn. My own knowledge is a tiny bucket compared to an ocean of blah yada ladeeda… I know how that goes, the refrain about how little you know and the implication that curiosity is thus naive. Is it not enough for me to be curious, do I also need others to be ignorant in order to be happy about learning something? It really is okay to be curious about things that are already known by others; that much is enough to make me very happy.

As an engineer working in an education startup, learning is a familiar topic for me. At eSpark, we’re personalizing education for primary school students and we often visit schools, pore through data, and test our theories about how students really learn. It’s remarkably easy to get infected by the enthusiasm of our young students. But it’s also easy to get concerned by the anguish, anxiety, and difficulty that young learners go through. Learning is difficult.

I was talking to a friend during dinner and the conversation drifted over to what I’m guessing is a very busy intersection: how an exact explanation seems to subtract from the beauty of a thing. In short, I disagree. An explanation actually enhances your experience of a thing. There was much that we talked about, but I want to use this post to think about the opposite point and wrestle with it.

At the eSpark Hackathon last weekend, I had a great time making interesting new things with my work friends. Koppel and John were quite excited by Markov chains and so we had two different kinds of Markov babblers; one was a Slack bot and one was a Twitter bot. Kairui and Cathleen were interested in analyzing how to optimize selection of the right testing content for students; I saw lots of math on the giant paper notepad and a bunch of exciting work from their corner. Chris, Denis and others dug into building a useful internal tool that exposed them to a lot of interesting web dev patterns. Nathan tackled another interesting internal problem and built a complete new feature for our internal dashboards. Also, we played around with the Oculus Rift DK2. I now understand VR-sickness… the sudden loss of head tracking seemed to cause it consistently.

Why the tired gesture? Why the sarcastic vignette of a tropical world?

Why the black and white, the smooth minimalism, the simplistic angles, the tidy garden?

Write in bold strokes and drench that paper in color. Dig deeps into the folds and stretch that cloth to tearing.

You get one shot at this.

Written July 19, 2009 (just before my freshman year at Northwestern)

I found this while going back through some random essays and writings. It resonated enough to warrant another posting.

You probably have some ssh key files (~/.ssh/id_rsa{.pub,} or similar) kicking around if you’ve ever needed to use a service that uses public key cryptography, like Github or Heroku.

These id_rsa and id_rsa.pub files are private and public key files that you should keep quite secure.

But they don’t have to be the only ones you ever use! In fact, it’s probably best to have a separate pair of keys for each major service you use. At the very least, your personal keys and work-related keys should be different!

Hardware: a living, conscious, human brain capable of reading English and with a high school level of education in mathematics, science, and history, and that is greater than the 70th percentile in terms of interest in computer science and general current events in the contemporary period defined by late-twentieth/early-twenty-first century.

Program: read this hardware description and program in full, edit as necessary, and paste elsewhere on the web

I’ve decided to experiment with a weekly blog post that consolidates my reading, programming, and general learning. Here’s week 1!

Reading

• Some portion of Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman

• Quite a bit of Infected, a hard sci-fi novel by Scott Sigler

• The Humanism arc of HPMOR (Ch. 43 to 46). It’s just…

• Bits of Blindsight, which is our pick for the eSpark book club. This was my second reading. Surprised by how impactful it was on the second go around.

  ...

TL;DR: here’s the demo!

Chernoff faces[1] are a useful way to visualize multivariate data in a way that leverages the great facial recognition ability of our brains. There’s a great paper[2] about it too! Here’s an example that highlights their utility:

Imagine visually comparing election results as they’re rolling in on election day. You want to see how things like voter turnout, Democrat-to-Republican ratio, votes counted, etc compare across a few select states. There are a number of separate categories (states) and lots of variables for each one, each with their own range of possible values.