offering 1 - first

Greetings and welcome to the first installment of my weekly offerings of urls that I find roaming across the zeitgeist. Some of these things might be too specific to understand or not really to your taste. That’s fine. Although I would be thrilled if even just one person found something they truly enjoyed. Finally, I’d really appreciate any feedback you might have for me, as I want to improve my writing and the structure of how I do these things.

40 rods to the hogs head - Tera Melos

• I’ve been listening to this on repeat. Beautiful jam, 8 minutes of tasty mathy punk goodness.

Time for a Change: Introducing irreversible time in economics

• I was delighted by Ole Peters’ lecture on ergodicity in economics. He points out that the field has been working under wrong assumptions and that many problems can be solved by considering the ergodicity of systems. He explains ergodicity: how in economics systems, time and ensemble averages are different, and because of that only time averages are relevant for individuals, and what that means for economics going forward. He also gets into the history of probability, utility and ergodic theory, I always appreciate when a lecturer goes through the trouble of telling the stories of ideas.
• A related concept you might be more familiar with is the  Kelly criterion  (also known as the scientific gambling method) where the optimal bet is a fraction of your wealth found by maximizing expected utility (the logarithm of wealth, because we value more money less when we already have a lot). The formula is f∗=expected net winningsnet winnings if you winf∗=expected net winningsnet winnings if you win

Enacted experiences have incredible potential as a mass medium

• About the Enacted Experiences I won’t get much into it, but Andy taps into something I’ve known intuitively for a while: interactive experiences are a huge deal and video-games are just the tip of the iceberg. I haven’t read the whole thing carefully yet but can’t wait to.

• About the format: Andy’s notes are a treasure trove of good practices and an inspiration, if you click a link to another note, it’ll open it to the right on the same screen you’re reading.  Click here  if you’re interested about his (awesome) note taking philosophy.

SSC: Evolutionary Psychopathology

• I didn’t really read this carefully but my friend Misha sent this to me after a conversation about “fast life strategies”. Some people go hard and fast, shine bright, die young and the strategy is definitely adaptive seeing as it’s still around today.

• The book subdivides “fast” and “slow” strategies into 4 categories, which SSC associates with Hogwarts houses, which I thought was a neat and memetically fit way to represent these. Personally I’m trying to stick around for a while.

arxiv vanity

• is a tool for turning pdfs in the  arxiv  format into html. I use it to import papers into roam so I can annotate them later. (highlights first and bold second)

Thanks for reading!