Let's figure out what matters and how to get it
This is my post for day 30 of the Inkhaven writing retreat. If you ve ever played video games, you might be familiar with the concept of a mini game. Mini games are a separate, smaller game within a larger game, with different rules and a well-defined context. They can add more novelty to the player s [ ]
This is my post for day 29 of the Inkhaven writing retreat. Here is an idea for a research project I would do if I had infinite time. The Epic of Gilgamesh, often called the oldest piece of literature, is known to us only through a large collection of fragmentary tablets buried in the ground. [ ]
This is my post for day 28 of the Inkhaven writing retreat. Learning a language is notoriously difficult. You have to learn a thousand things before you can hold even a basic conversation at the grocery store. The gap is huge. It s widely recognized that children have some kind of biological advantage in learning their [ ]
This is my post for day 27 of the Inkhaven writing retreat. I grew up just about at pace with the rise of the internet, laptops, and smart phones. It was fast enough that I could tell it was revolutionary, but slow enough for me to stay up to date. Along the way, I saw [ ]
This is my post for day 26 of the Inkhaven writing retreat. Okay, so you might just know the answer to this one. If so, I think it could still be fun to imagine you don t, and play along. I was once chatting with a friend who knew a lot about biology. I don t remember [ ]
This is my post for day 25 of the Inkhaven writing retreat. In a previous post, I described the state of what I called being a policy . I contrasted this with habits, heuristics, and plain old conscious deciding. I think a reasonable response to this would be, why would one want to be a policy ? [ ]
This is my post for day 24 of the Inkhaven writing retreat. Imagine you re in the ancestral environment. (People do that, right? That s normal?) The only thing you know about the shape of the world is what you ve seen with your own eyes. You and your tribe have roamed around quite a bit, so you ve [ ]
This is my post for day 23 of the Inkhaven writing retreat. Oracle bone script is considered the oldest known form of written Chinese. When you look at it, this makes sense; it looks more primitive , more pictorial, less unified in its stroke patterns. Bronze script, the next one, looks more like modern Chinese. But [ ]
This is my post for day 22 of the Inkhaven writing retreat. The basic promise of science is this; by using the scientific method, you can figure out how the world works, and thereby take better actions to get the outcomes you want. This is the primary justification for funding scientific endeavors with taxpayer dollars. [ ]
It s day 21 of 30 days of daily blogging at the Inkhaven writing retreat. The social accountability structure is doing an excellent job at causing me to actually write something every day. This kind of structure is rare and valuable; you can t just go out and get 40 people to do a daily goal with [ ]