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The Andrew Wakefield case

Published a paper in 1998 in The Lancet about the mumps, measles and rubella (MMR) vaccine that linked it to a rising incidence of autism. In 2004, Sunday Times found that he had financial conflicts of interest and stood to earn $43M per year selling test kits. In 2010, he was found to have deliberately falsified the results. Paper was retracted from The Lancet and he was barred from practising medicine. In a related legal decision, a British court held that "there is now no respectable body of opinion which supports Mr. Wakefield's hypothesis".

As is natural for cult leaders, he stays in the cult today because that's the only place he gets respect. I think this is a problem with society. We should be able to forgive and return respect to those who admit their errors.

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Created (3 years ago)

John Lennon's Imagine

Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us, only sky

Imagine all the people
Livin' for today
Ah

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too

Imagine all the people
Livin' life in peace
You

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man

Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world
You

You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one

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Created (3 years ago)

The Garden and the Stream

Essay (very aesthetic reading!) The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral

Short version notes.alexkehayias.com/the-garden-and-the-stream/

This experience has radically changed me, to the point I find it hard to communicate with a lot of technologists anymore. It’s like trying to explain literature to someone who has never read a book. You’re asked “So basically a book is just words someone said written down?” And you say no, it’s more than that. But how is it more than that?

This is my attempt to abstract from this experience something more general about the way in which we collaborate on the web, and the way in which it is currently very badly out of balance.

I am going to make the argument that the predominant form of the social web — that amalgam of blogging, Twitter, Facebook, forums, Reddit, Instagram — is an impoverished model for learning and research and that our survival as a species depends on us getting past the sweet, salty fat of “the web as conversation” and on to something more timeless, integrative, iterative, something less personal and less self-assertive, something more solitary yet more connected.

Things in the Garden don’t collapse to a single set of relations or canonical sequence, and that’s part of what we mean when we say “the web as topology” or the “web as space”. Every walk through the garden creates new paths, new meanings, and when we add things to the garden we add them in a way that allows many future, unpredicted relationships.

People say, well yes, but Wikipedia! Look at Wikipedia!

Yes, let’s talk about Wikipedia. There’s a billion people posting what they think about crap on Facebook.

There’s about 31,000 active wikipedians that hold English Wikipedia together. That’s about the population of Stanford University, students, faculty and staff, for the entire English speaking world.

No feeds

So here I am hooking up people's RSS/Atom feeds to my reMarkable #e-reader. As if the latest things they have to say are the most important?

In retrospect, it looks like a tragic attempt to get myself to actually read a bit of all these awesome folks' blogs.

I don't need a list of "great feeds", I just need a list of "great people", and their homepages. When will I mine their content to learn from it? I don't know… But when I do, I'll be able to write my own notes that link back to them where appropriate.

My garden will grow as a result of me delving into others' gardens. And that can be done any time. No more feeds, but still a "Blogroll".

What links here

Created (3 years ago)

On Autodidactism

#autodidacting

Using flashcards to memorize a memory castle of flashcards

Combination of SRS and memory castles.

For the thought experiment, instead of flashcards, suppose you have a stack of cheatsheets. You wanna memorize them. You go and put the cheatsheets in a memory castle.

In mindspace, you can alter the cheatsheets – the words are no longer confined to A4 sheets, and art can be three-dimensional and include the sense of touch.

Obama's insight about blue suits can be represented by Obama wearing a blue suit, e.g. Though the presence of a person would be overpowering, so persons should only be used for important insights. A framed Obama?

For advanced potential, perhaps add smell to different rooms – if you focus inwardly on really feeling that smell, you kind of will smell it, regardless of what your flesh nose is sensing. And then, turn your attention to the room, and it should come back more easily. To mint new memory objects, it may help to go in meatspace to smell the appropriate thing for that room.

For example… a Chinese-styled room, smelling of chai tea. Go smell some meatspace chai before even trying to envision it (because memory retcons itself, you may cause details to disappear forever).

Instead of words, you can have objects. Suppose you've read a book and written notes from it. Eventually these notes become a box of objects in your memory castle.

In meatspace SRS, you can put pictures of your memory rooms. Eventually you can even draw the objects you've created and put those drawings in SRS – along with the actual flashcards they represent! (Option: attach a random image to every flashcard, well before turning them into memory objects)

For a grace period, you practice on flashcards both on actual paper/SRS, and in mindworld.

Take care, don't create too many objects. You don't need as many flashcards as you think.

Memory objects can themselves hold memory objects. For example, in one room, you might find a Ribbing bike. On its saddle, you might find a Buddha statue. On his lap, you might find a flower. On the petals, you might find a fly. On the fly, you might find a crown. On the surface of the crown (really zoomed in), you might find a golden castle on a flat field of gold. Inside the castle, you might find a banquet. In the banquet, you will NOT find another Ribbing bike – don't reuse objects.

For true spaced repetition, try a Leitner system. Arrange your objects. Hold them, smell them – every time you handle an object. Arrange them in a system. Not necessarily numeric. Just "on that desk" is recent stuff, "upstairs on that bookshelf" is old flashcards, "in the wine cellar behind that scary vampire nest and in front of the liliputian" is some old but important stuff. Re-use things from your life. The amphitheatre, some notes on love and relationships in Momo's room, with whom you can have a conversation while you're at it. You would of course draw your imagination of Momo's room often.

Sketch, sketch, sketch. No need to sketch the memory objects in use (you can if you want), just sketch the rooms, the 'bases'.

Use emotion. Fear (the scary vampire nest) is one. A narrow bridge…

Flashcard front: Buddha Flashcard back: Buddha with rose on his lap

Flashcard front: Rose Flashcard back: Rose with a fly

etc.

Understanding political stances

In political elections, it would generally be nice if people just read the parties' promises direct from the source and avoided hearsay. When was the last time you did that? I mean their actual website on their "give me your detailed plan" page, not a flyer)? Well, people may rarely do it, but you can!

After that, if you think a party's program doesn't make sense, you could probably join their forums and simply ask them to rehash your confusion until you see where they're coming from. You should be able to play a good devil's advocate for every party, because you took the time to understand where they're coming from, even if you disagree on fundamental priorities.

Doing this will probably reveal holes in your understanding of society, both on economic topics and on how you ought to fit into society and the meaning of life itself. Be prepared that you'll have to introspect as well as study up. Then it will be clear that political debate is generally pointless with people who haven't tried to cover their own holes too: they don't know where their values come from.

Speed reading

I learned to speed-read by accident. The trick: watch movies and TV-shows without sound, then speed them up. As you get used to it, you can speed up more and more, and pretty soon you're no longer moving your eyes over every word, you're just getting the whole subtitle in one go.

Related

  • Learning
  • Incremental reading
  • spaced repetition

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Created (3 years ago)
Showing 101 to 104