Recent content on Slater
The “Growth Mindset” stuff probably isn’t true, but it’s not hard to see why it might be useful. (“The falseness of a judgment is not for us an objection to a judgment; in this respect our language may sound strangest.”) If you believe in the growth mindset, you’ll probably try harder and work longer. You’re more likely to succeed or complete your…
The modern experience is that more technologically developed societies tend to be kinder and gentler. When we think about countries with generous welfare programs, with rehabilitory criminal justice systms, with animal rights legislation, etc., we tend to think of countries that are also technologically developed. If an evil djinn tells you that you have to spend a night in prison in some country,…
Primer on diffusion models that I wrote for our interview series with Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, Yang Song, and Sander Dieleman.
There are a couple of ways to make this argument. The first, and perhaps least courageous, is through an appeal to epistemic learned helplessness. A skilled sophist can construct a convincing argument for any claim, regardless of its truth value — so unless you’re willing to do a ton of work checking facts and validating syllogisms, you shouldn’t put much weight on how convincing an…
Post-scarcity science fiction tends to be low interpersonal conflict. In the Walle-E dystopia, everyone is fat and lazy, nobody is fighting or striving. In Star Trek and the Culture series, the conflict is mostly pushed to the frontier, where unassimilated civilizations still lurk — the assimilated tend to be so Enlightened and Reasonable that intense interpersonal conflict is unimaginable. When…
The anthropic principle says that we shouldn’t be surprised by necessary conditions for our existence, because of selection bias: if the conditions weren’t met, we wouldn’t be around to be surprised. The most famous example comes from cosmology, couertesy of Fred Hoyle. In 1952, the only known way of getting elements heavier than Lithium was through stellar nucleosynthesis.…
The General Crisis of the 17th Century Turchin’s Secular Cycles as background. Fischer’s The Great Wave as monetary history. Stone’s The Crisis of the Aristocracy for the effects on elites in England, and some interesting time-series; here’s one on the inflation of Peerage titles, re elite competition: Bitton’s The French Nobility in Crisis for the same stuff in…
December 2024. In 1592, English privateers captured the Portugese ship Madre de Dios during the Battle of Flores. The cargo — jewels, gold, spices, etc. — was worth about £500,000 at a time when the total GDP of England was about £20m; so this single prize was about 2.5% of GDP. Such comparisons are always inexact, but let’s apply the GDP perentage to the US today: the Madre de Dios capture…
November 2024. When you start reading diffusion papers, you’ll quickly come across an equation like this: $$dx = f(x,t)dt + g(x,t)dw$$ where $w$ is Brownian motion. When I first saw these, I admit that I just thought about the discretized version $$\Delta_x = f(x,t)\Delta_t + g(x,t)\Delta_w$$ and moved on. You can generate approximate samples in code easily enough: dt = 0.001 x_last = 0 t =…
November 2024. One way to read the history of technology is to look for things that are no longer crushingly expensive. As a ≈80 year old example: during World War II, a lot of American soldiers were stationed in the UK, where they met and married British women. The prohibitive cost of travel made this bittersweet for the girls’ families: Parents [of British daughters] often opposed such wartime…
June 2024 When I was an undergrad, I was excited by the idea of Galois theory — but disappointed with the first couple books I read about it. You hear about some guy proving the unsolvability of the quintic right before dying in a duel (exciting!) and then you spend a bunch of time pushing around the definitions of “normal”, “separable”, etc. to prove a correspondence…
October 2023. Johann Daniel Major, writing in 1670, contemplates the prospect of human flight and is Not Happy: What a completely new and dangerous appearance the world would have, how much more hazardous, indeed how much more abominable the world would seem to have become for all posterity. What treachery, robbery, and assassination, what other sins and shamefulness would be heaped upon one…
October 2023. Something I vaguely remember from undergrad is that Cauchy developed complex analysis from an analytic point of view, and then Riemann came along and re-did everything from a geometric and abstraction function theory point of view. Despite some efforts from Weierstrass, Riemann’s view dominated, and today complex analysis is mainly taught that way. But: The analytic perspective…
October 2023. I like reading arguments from the past that seemed convincing at the time but turned out to be very wrong. To that end, I picked up Barbour’s The Theory of Bimetallism, originally published in 1885. For context, Barbour is railing against the “Crime of 1873”, when the US stopped letting you walk into a federal mint with 0.77 troy ounces of silver and walk out with a…
October 2023 For a long time, the poor in Europe didn’t have any money. I mean that in the physical sense that they had no coins, paper bills, or other formal currency. Georges Duby notes that in eighth century Gaul, the only minted coins were made of gold and silver, too valuable for use in day-to-day transactions amongst peasants: More characteristic of the limited part played by money in…
Standing between supply and demand.
Review of Andrew Browning’s Book
I invest in infrastructure software at Bain Capital Ventures.
Words end when next character prediction is hard.
How fast have travel times from NY to SF improved, and what if they kept improving at that rate?