Athena Jiang recently published a great post detailing some of her learnings from books she read throughout 2017. I loved the idea of curating a list of learnings and remembered a list of ~10 facebook posts I had saved and felt were worth revisiting in the future. Here they are:
1. Post by Ozzie Gooen on Tools For Finding Scientific Research:
Scientific publishing is one of humanities richest and densest sources of rigorously tested knowledge. Yet the industry is wrought with inefficient and inequitable practices. For one thing, published scientific research, which is in no small part funded by our tax dollars, is frequently locked behind paywalls and kept out of reach of those who would benefit from it most.
The more we can make scientific research open to the public and innovate tools which facilitate and amplify new research, the more effective and better off we will all be. We need better ways of (a) reproducing and verifying experimental results, (b) collecting and sharing data for experiments, (c) searching for, aggregating, and visualizing the landscape of relevant papers, (d) evaluating the quality and accuracy of a paper and its results, (e) involving more peers in a fair review process, (f) facilitating the republishing of derivative works, (g) publishing living, ongoing, and interactive research which is amenable to revision, rather than static, flat documents, (h) more research tools for tracking and auto-citing sources and their journeys as they conduct research, (i) more innovative publishing models which make research accessible to undeserved parties.
For a deeper understanding of the challenges, I also suggest also reading:
- Research Debt (https://distill.pub/2017/research-debt)
- 2014 : What Scientific Idea is Read For Retirement? (https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25514) by Brian Christian, author of Algorithms to Live By (which you can also read online for free on Open Library)
- Here’s a post I made 3 years ago called: “The Next Generation of Academic Publishing”
Here are a few players making ripples in the space:
- DAT: A tool like dropbox which is open, decentralized, version controlled, and specifically built for freely sharing large academic data sets.
- Openknowledgemaps.org: A visual interface to the world’s scientific knowledge. (disclaimer: I’m an adviser)
- Openjournal.foundation: A community-run working group with reps from over 15+ institutions (PLOS, Internet Archive, DOAJ, BASE, Dissemin, LOCKSS, PeerJ, rOpenSci, et al) who work together towards the mission of universalizing access to open scholarly research. (disclaimer: I’m on the organizational committee for this program)
2. Post by Teon Lamont on “Sharing Our Common Voice” — Mozilla Releases Second Largest Public Voice Data Set
I am a sucker for big open-datasets, especially those with the potential to improve how communication and knowledge exchange is done around the world. For book lovers and Artificial Intelligence + Machine Learning researchers interested in the structure of books, you may also be excited to hear the Internet Archive recently release a large public book dataset with 850k books and ~42M book pages!
3. Post by Ben Aldern’s Winning Humanity’s Existential Game with Daniel Schmachtenberger
At the end of the day, everything eventually boils down to the survival of planet and the human species. It may seem pretty extreme to spend time thinking about problems like that, but even more so the reason I think it’s important is, the average person just isn’t thinking along these lines. It’s not profitable to do so. Most people are going about their lives; I think its very easy to live in the now and to not stop to think about all the various ways we can be blindsided by catastrophe. Or to consider how our actions may be contributing to this catastrophe. Or what actions we could take to plan for or mitigate the risks.
I think it’s worth spending a few moments of time each year to refresh your understanding of the likelihood of possible risks — whether they are pandemics, near-earth-objects, weapons of mass destruction . At lease shape an opinion so you can use your voice and your tax dollars to try and have these issues prioritized.
4. Post by Otavio Good: “A visual and intuitive understanding of deep learning”
It’s just a solid talk and I’ve been a fan of Otavio ever since I hear him speak at Super Happy Dev House 6 years ago.
5. Post by Corey Breier via Halim Madi: “What personality trait is the core of your identity? Who would you be without it?”
As also suggested by Epicurus as critical to happiness, I think it’s important to make time for self-reflection and to challenge who we are. How else can we know who it is we wish to become?
6. Post via Justin Lane sharing: “Hunter-Gatherer Social Networks and Reproductive Success”
This paper is interesting in that it provides some of the first evidence for fitness implications of network centrality in hunter-gathers (or, in societies with simpler structure, how social centrality impacts quality of life):
“Individuals’ centrality in their social network (who they and their social ties are connected to) has been associated with fertility, longevity, disease and information transmission in a range of taxa. Here, we present the first exploration in humans of the relationship between reproductive success and different measures of network centrality […] Contra predictions, degree centrality was negatively correlated with reproductive success, a relationship again dependent on age in the Agta […] Mothers with the highest betweenness and closeness in the Agta reported significantly more instances of sickness. However, this relationship appeared significantly mediated by number of living offspring for betweenness. Number of dependents significantly predicted cases of reported sickness”
7. Post by Ozzie Gooen on Open Philanthropy’s Grants Database:
I appreciate how thoughtful and intentional Ozzie is when it comes to (lower case) effective altruism and making good decisions. He has a great sense of morality, does his research, and it doesn’t hurt that his projects exhibit very tasteful design. Ozzie was the first person to teach me about Open Philanthropy (and its former parent prior to spin-off, GiveWell — a group which researches the best charities to support). I similarly thought the idea behind Open Philanthropy (big bets on perhaps less certain philanthropic moonshots) was a great idea and I was especially grateful for their transparency and initiative of creating a public database of their grants.
8. Post via Jackson Kernion:
The Intellectual Achievement of Creating Questions — Daily Nous by Justin Weinberg
This essays provides an interesting lens why present-day philosophy, as a system, could be argued as ineffectual at answering questions.
“When I’ve asked people […] which academic disciplines are particularly representative of intellectual achievement […] the top answers have been physics, biology, and computer science. […] These are disciplines that can be characterized as taking up questions that are important to advancing our theoretical and practical understanding […] Furthermore, these disciplines are good at answering their questions
I think the answer to ‘how does philosophy do at providing correct answers to philosophical questions?’ is terribly. [… Philosophers have] been working on the same questions for 2000 years. […] The more I think about it, the more I am surprised at how little impact this failure has on what philosophers do, or how they understand what they are doing when they do philosophy.”
I thought Jackson’s commentary was interesting that philosophy is, in some ways, a mechanism for debating and rationalizing circumstance:
An under-appreciated point, I think, is that philosophical conversation is, to a certain extent, organized by market forces. Philosophers aren’t going to be interested in sitting around and agreeing with each other. Instead, they’re incentivizes (sic) to look for the most important areas of disagreement and then go off and think real hard about that area.
9. Post via Long Now Foundation:
“Leonardo Da Vinci’s To Do List (Circa 1490) Is Much Cooler Than Yours”
This could have easily have been click-bait — and I would have still clicked it. I am a big fan of reviewing people’s organizational systems and seeing how their priorities, articulations of goals, ambitions, and structures contrast. One thing that struck me about Da Vinci todo list is that nearly all of his goals were focused on getting people to do things for him. If your experience is anything like mine, getting people to do things is one of the most time-consuming things you can do. One of the biggest bottle-necks in book publishing? Back-and-forth and latency between authors and editing. In order to be productive during this time period, a few things would have had to be true. One, you’d have to make very good use of your time when you were able to meet with these people. Two, you’d have to be able to get access to these people (which itself was likely a difficult task).
Today (depending on the industry) many of us asynchronously interface with machines and systems almost as much — if not more — than we do individuals. When people hit challenges in their field, one’s first instinct is to check online and find a community which has also hit this issue, in hopes they have publicly documented a solution or are willing to help quid pro quo.
What I appreciate about Da Vinci’s style, is many of his todos were actually a list of questions he intended to look up. And I think few people have the discipline to record the questions they have in a list. This type of organization is as useful today as it was then.
I also learned that Da Vinci wrote using mirror script.
10. Post by Spencer Greenberg’s on the topic of Educational Curriculum for the Present Day:
Designing a curriculum for the modern day. This (creating a living map of the world’s knowledge) is essentially my life’s goal and so I was delighted to read Spencer’s perspective and to see the topic receive attention.
“If you were redesigning high school education from scratch, what material would you put into the curriculum of (let’s say for starters, very well resourced) high schools that is generally not taught in high schools today?”
