nico λ

Snapshot of a “theoretical” life

– Loves learning for its own sake; regards wisdom as a permanent quest.

– Accepts leisure (scholē) not chiefly for recreation but for reflection.

– Feels reverence for what is permanent and overarching—nature, being, the divine—rather than for shifting public opinion.

– Skeptical of power when it threatens the

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Good thinking is about pushing past your current understanding and reaching the thought behind the thought. This often requires breaking old ideas, which is much easier to do when the ideas are as rigid as they get on the page. In a fluid medium like thought or conversation, you can always go, “Well, I didn’t mean it like that ” or rely on the fact... See more

Many scientific theories assume constructs that are not directly observable (muons, genetic drift) but whose existence is inferred. In mental health research, psychiatric diagnoses play such a role. We assume that constructs, such as schizophrenia or alcohol use disorder, exist but we can only observe the signs, symptoms, and course of illness that... See more

Sometimes my reactions are so rapid that I don’t have time to take in where I am before I start telling stories about what’s happening and what action needs to be taken.

The contrarian’s enemy is not only random conformists. It’s also ridiculously smart people who have studied the topic in incredible depth and concluded that they’re wrong. And as we all know from certain creative offshoots of rock, paper, scissors, high-IQ mega autists beats public intellectual.

Every time I was held up as an example in English class, I wanted to crawl under a rock and die. I didn’t do it! I didn’t study at all, half the time I did the homework in the car on the way to school, those essays for the statewide competition were thrown together on a lark without a trace of real effort. To praise me for any of it seemed and... See more

You might wonder: why bother with this, when we could call len(user_db.users) ? One answer is that len(user_db.users) is more tightly coupled, which is usually undesirable. Coupling is when one part of the system depends on another part.

Assess the trade-off you’re making between quality and pace, make sure it’s appropriate for your context

There’s always a trade-off between implementation speed and how confident you are about correctness. So you should ask yourself: how okay is it to ship bugs in my current context? If the answer to this doesn’t affect the way you work, you’re... See more