fredcy

This site is an experiment using the IndieWeb approach to posting web content and connecting with other similar sites. I’m building the site with Hugo, and with that the Indigo theme that is designed to support IndieWeb.

Install opam and ocaml utilities. At this time this results in opam version 1.2.2 and ocaml 4.02.3. add-apt-repository ppa:avsm/ppa apt-get update apt-get install ocaml ocaml-native-compilers camlp4-extra opam Add repo needed for libsodium-dev (at least) that the Tezos installation scripts will install. add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php apt-get update Switch to Ocaml 4.03.0. [update: using 4.04.2 on 2017/09/05] opam init opam switch 4.03.0 eval `opam config env` Clone the tezos source repo to /opt/tezos.

The evils of the world are due to moral defects quite as much as to lack of intelligence. But the human race has not hitherto discovered any method of eradicating moral defects; preaching and exhortation only add hypocrisy to the previous list of vices. Intelligence, on the contrary, is easily improved by methods known to every competent educator. Therefore, until some method of teaching virtue has been discovered, progress will have to be sought by improvement of intelligence rather than of morals.

The Stoic: 9 Principles to Help You Keep Calm in Chaos – 99U.

You finish a thing by starting it until it’s done via How to Get Yourself to Do Things.

In “Golden Eggs and Hyperbolic Discounting”, the author argues that the liquidity brought by modern finance is not a good thing. By enabling the consumer to instantaneously borrow against illiquid assets, financial innovation eliminates the possibility for partial commitment. This has two effects on the welfare of the current self. First, the current self no longer faces a self-imposed liquidity constraint and can therefore consume more in its period of control.

In Resolving to Create a New You Ruth Chang argues that in making choices between alternatives that are on par (have much the same value to us) we should favor the choice that we can most fully commit to. Instead of being led by the nose by what we imagine to be facts of the world, we should instead recognize that sometimes the world is silent about what we should do.

In the book Breakdown of Will author George Ainslie presents a theory of decision-making where relative preferences for possible alternative outcomes vary over time, unlike the usual “rational” model where relative preferences remain consistent. His model is based on hyperbolic discounting where the value of a future pay-off is discounted more heavily than normal exponential discounting in the period near the pay-off time and less heavily in the long tail well before the pay-off.

The Creepy New Wave of the Internet by Sue Halpern | The New York Review of Books. The Internet of Things Watching Us is coming. I can’t see the efficiency being worth the loss of privacy in most cases. But I carry a tracker (cell phone) around like most everyone else anyway, so I know this can sneak in eventually and seem OK.

I believe in learning for understanding, critical thinking, and inquiry-based learning. But even so, real fluency still requires some drill-and-kill. The problem with focusing relentlessly on understanding is that math and science students can often grasp essentials of an important idea, but this understanding can quickly slip away without consolidation through practice and repetition. Worse, students often believe they understand something when, in fact, they don’t. via How I Rewired My Brain to Become Fluent in Math – Issue 17: Big Bangs – Nautilus.