Change blindness
Antidepressants are awesome. (At least they were for me.) It’s now been about a year since I started on SSRIs. Since my prescription is about to run out, I scheduled a meeting with a psychiatrist to discuss whether to stay on them. Since my health care provider has changed, I went to my previous one and got a copy of my patient records to bring to the new one. And wow. It’s kinda...
Read MoreDeepDream: Today psychedelic images, tomorrow unemployed artists
One interesting thing that I noticed about Google’s DeepDream algorithm (which you might also know as “that thing making all pictures look like psychedelic trips“) is that it seems to increase the image quality. For instance, my current Facebook profile picture was ran through DD and looks sharper than the original, which was relatively fuzzy and grainy. If you know how DD...
Read MoreLearning to recognize judgmental labels
In the spirit of Non-Violent Communication, I’ve today tried to pay more attention to my thoughts and notice any judgments or labels that I apply to other people that are actually disguised indications of my own needs. The first one that I noticed was this: within a few weeks I’ll be a visiting instructor at a science camp, teaching things to a bunch of teens and preteens. I was...
Read MoreAdult children make mistakes, too
There’s a lot of blame and guilt in many people’s lives. We often think of people in terms of good or bad, and feel unworthy or miserable if we fail at things we think we should be able to do. When we don’t do quite as well as we could, because we’re tired or unwell or distracted, we blame and belittle ourselves. Let’s take a different approach. Think of a young...
Read MoreHarry Potter and the Methods of Latent Dirichlet Allocation
My summer job involves topic modelling, using machine learning tools to automatically learn different topics that some set of documents covers, so that the documents could then be classified by topic. I haven’t done this before, so I don’t yet have a good intuition of how currently available tools work. To develop that intuition, I’m playing around with different tools and...
Read MoreThings that I’m currently the most interested in (Jan 21st of 2015 edition)
* Creating social environments that actively support and reinforce people’s growth, as well as the incentivizing the development of valuable projects. Our environment has a huge impact on us. The topics that we happen to see or hear discussed around us will, if not quite determine the topics that we spend our time thinking and ultimately caring about, at least vastly influence those topics....
Read MoreSaving the best moments
A combined productivity/mood thing that I’ve been doing recently is this: whenever I do something that I deem to have been worth doing, even if it’s something really small, I write down a few words that record that I’ve done it. At the end of the day I elaborate on those descriptions a bit, so that I can actually remember what they were referring to even afterwards, and save...
Read MoreOn the plane
Mine is an eleven-hour flight: I’m sitting between two people, a woman on my left, by the window, and a man on my right, by the corridor. We’ve hardly spoken to each other: she once asked if I preferred to have the window open or closed, and I spoke to him when I needed to go to the bathroom, apologizing and then thanking him for making room for me. Still, in this cramped space...
Read MorePlans need motivational components
One of the most valuable things that I got out of the Center for Applied Rationality’s recent workshop, but which took a while to really sink in, is that a plan isn’t finished until it also includes a component for how you’ll actually get yourself to carry it out. I think that people in planning mode have a tendency to think of themselves as magical robots, as in “once I...
Read MoreLooking back at 2014
2014 was one of the best and worst years of my life. It started with the worst: in the first three months or so, my girlfriend and I broke up, the part-time job I was doing started feeling unmotivating, and I realized I didn’t have the energy to both do the job and work on my thesis at the same time. Romance, work, studies: three major spheres of my life, all crashing down around the same...
Read MoreSocial media saps more than just short-term attention
The prevalent wisdom about why social media is distracting is that it provides a constant opportunity for immediate distraction. There's a lot of truth to that, but in addition to sapping our short-term attention, it also affects long-term attention.
Read MoreHelp and you’ll be helped is the law
I like reading self-help books of the “how to become rich and famous and successful at everything you want to do” genre. They don’t necessarily always provide much in the way of actually useful tips, but they do provide nice motivational boosts as well as helping foster a growth mindset. Recently, I’ve been glad to find that there seems to be a common theme in the advice...
Read More1. Ainulindalë
Posthuman of the Rings, part 1.
Read MoreBayes Academy Development Reports 1-2
I’m finally making real progress with my academy game instead of just planning. I’ve posted two development reports on Less Wrong: Bayes Academy: Development report 1 Bayes Academy Development Report 2 – improved data visualization Feedback is welcome, either here or over there. The source code is up on GitHub. Share this:TweetShare on...
Read MoreThings that helped make me more social
I find that after many years of being mostly shy-ish and uncertain, I’m starting to – still not consistently, but considerably more often – act confidently and competently in social situations. There seem to have been a bunch of things that have affected this. One is that anything that makes me feel generally better also tends to help me out in social situations: if I’m...
Read MoreEvent report: CFAR’s rationality workshop, England
I just got home from a four-day rationality workshop in England that was organized by the Center For Applied Rationality (CFAR). It covered a lot of content, but if I had to choose a single theme that united most of it, it was listening to your emotions. That might sound like a weird focus for a rationality workshop, but cognitive science has shown that the intuitive and emotional part of the...
Read MoreTrying out something new
I have a fashion/lifestyle blog these days. It’s in Finnish, but the pictures should be language-neutral. Share this:TweetShare on Tumblr
Read MoreArguments and relevance claims
The following once happened: I posted a link to some article on an IRC channel. A friend of mine read the article in question and brought up several criticisms. I felt that her criticisms were mostly correct though not very serious, so I indicated agreement with them. Later on the same link was posted again. My friend commented something along the lines of “that was already posted before,...
Read MorePredictive brains
Whatever next? Predictive brains, situated agents, and the future of cognitive science (Andy Clark 2013, Behavioral and Brain Sciences) is an interesting paper on the computational architecture of the brain. It’s arguing that a large part of the brain is made up of hierarchical systems, where each system uses an internal model of the lower system in an attempt to predict the next outputs of...
Read MoreAvoiding unnecessary interpersonal anger
Mental checklist to go through whenever you feel angry at someone for not doing something that you expected them to do, or for doing something that you expected them not to do. Applies regardless of whether the person in question is a co-worker, friend, relative, significant other, or anything else: Ask yourself whether you clearly communicated your expectation to them. Ask yourself whether...
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