nico λ

Søren Kierkegaard: “To dare is to lose one's footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.”

Yes, this was for a special purpose—to fight racism—but the Griggs decision made clear that the government was now authorized to act against racism even if there was no evidence of any racist intent. This was an opening to arbitrary power. And once arbitrary power is conferred, it matters little what it was conferred for.

Make debugging easier

There’s so many little tricks I’ve acquired over the years on making software easier to debug. If you don’t make any effort to make debugging easy, you’re going to spend unacceptable amounts of time debugging each issue, as your software gets more and more complex. You’ll be terrified to make changes because even a couple new... See more

Also, psychedelics have a fundamental discordance with allopathic research which can never be overcome. The placebo problem is unsolvable. And these medicines are customarily adjacent to non-directive therapy, and ongoing integration. We'll never be able to quantify those things in a trial format the same we we can for a blood pressure pill.... See more

The evidence here is a bit more mixed. There’s no relationship between extraversion and general intelligence. But smart kids tend to be more selective about who they like, and among the extremely intelligent there’s a negative relationship between life satisfaction and time spent with others. This latter finding isn’t necessarily causal (it could... See more

The problem is that when you make productivity personal, you put the pressure on individuals to figure out the tension between different roles in their life. You’re telling them: You figure out how you organize the work, how you execute it. The more you do, the better. Now you have this tension of: If I spend less time with my family, I could do

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Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of an individualism and personal independence that makes co-operation impossible. In general, important civilizations start

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Reciprocal Narrowing— refers to how the brain adapts to new experiences and environments. When we are immersed in addiction, this cognitive narrowing obliterates our capacity to see multiple perspectives. We become singularly focused on the thing, or ‘object,’ we are after. As a result, we become increasingly dependent on securing this object in... See more

It's really important to keep this model of "solve" in mind: a program solves a problem if it correctly returns true on all true inputs and correctly returns false on all false inputs.