Verifying myself: I am jasonmc on Keybase.io. QoBLiz2bpZXJTpj23CTzpN6aZemk_niqdRTy / keybase.io/jasonmc/sigs/QoBL…

Really sad news. In the world of academia, he was a rare thing. Worldly, curious, human with wide impact beyond his field of research. Be took real pleasure in life and lived to to the full

I still think about the Alan Watts adage - "every problem is just a question, asked the wrong way" implies something interesting - that the real path, to a fulfilled life might just be learning to ask only the right questions, at the right time, in the right way simple as

The Two Cultures.

Honestly I think it’s the horrendous driving more than the guns and drugs that would most put me off raising kids in America. You have far more control over your exposure to the latter two than the first.

Today we’ve lost a giant and a visionary: Prof. Daniel Kahneman has passed at the age of 90. The Princeton SPIA community shares our condolences with his family and all who knew him, learned from him, and loved him. bit.ly/4cy0arM

Claude Shannon (mathematician, electrical engineer, and cryptographer known as one of the fathers of information theory)

Computer history by Balenciaga

Of course that's your contention. You're a first year grad student. You just got finished reading some pop science author, Michio Kaku probably, you’re gonna be convinced of that until next month when you get to Sean Carroll, then you’re gonna be talking about how anybody taking the wavefunction seriously automatically believes in the Everettian multiverse. That's gonna last until next year, you’re gonna be in here regurgitating Leonard Susskind, talkin’ about, you know, firewalls and Einstein-Rosen bridges.

A cache of Polaroids from the set of HACKERS just dropped. I’m experiencing a lot of feelings about this. dazeddigital.com/fashion/gal…

"How do you learn to accept things you can’t change? Fundamentally, it boils down to one big hack: embracing death." @naval

People whose primary vibe is "I and my tribe are domain-expertise-endowed professionals, the people I criticize and mock are amateurs, and you should shut up" are really really uncool, and people should recognize the pattern and immediately unfollow anyone who exhibits it.

A lot of folks on here have some curious ideas about Queen Elizabeth’s relationship to British imperialism.

I don’t wish to sound apocalyptic about this, but one has the sense that at present our society is simultaneously characterized by wildly disproportionate accountability for trivial transgressions and zero accountability for profound institutional failure.

ENO the forthcoming documentary by @gary_hustwit announced today. To be released in 2023. More information here:hustwit.com/eno

Not breaking news here, but people have way too low a threshold for citing academic work that flatters their preconceptions. Doing good research is hard. The median paper is mediocre, leaves out lots of confounders and complications, and shouldn't change your priors much.

Wrote up a bullet point summary post of where I think things are at. Post #10 coming either today or tomorrow. WP: thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/12… SS: thezvi.substack.com/p/omicro…

Here’s a frustrating secret Today - in midst of Omicron - millions of Americans are begging for access to rapid tests, thousands dying daily. Get this: many manufacturers with very high quality rapid tests are begging To ship 100’s of millions of tests to US But can’t. 1/

It is oddly low status in the U.S. at the moment to be fully throated in support of one of the most amazing things humanity has ever produced. I think we have some responsibility to advocate for it as folks working in tech, lest some parts that make it work will be taken away.