Confessions of a researchaholic

Just (belatedly) finished this book, which I found to be very easy and enjoyable to read, and full of interesting insights and perspectives.

The humans are essentially programmable and thus can advance faster than biological evolution which constrains other kinds of life forms on earth.

Our language and writing systems facilitate the preservation and transmission of knowledge across space and time beyond our individual brain capacity, and our ability to cooperate in large numbers allows us to build complex societies and technologies as well as to wield great damages to our environments.

This is an excellent overview of the evolution of biological intelligence and the relationships to the progress of artificial intelligence so far, covering the five major stages of steering, reinforcing, simulating, mentalizing, and language. Perhaps the major takeaway is the hierarchical structure of different brain components specializing in different tasks, analogous to the computational higher-order and global workspace theories as surveyed in https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.08708.
The text is very easy to follow and the illustrations are nice to look at.

I guess it is more intimidating to draw Taliban fighters than Caltrain passengers.

I avoid Duolingo Pro so that I won’t have enough hearts to to too many exercises.

I finished watching all 3 episodes of the movie version of Atlas Shrugged just to see what the fuss is about without having to spend days reading the book.

A bunch of industrialists and intellectuals were fed up with the socialist government, and decided to go on strike to form their own community in the mountains, while the economy and society crumbled.
It is basically a libertarian (and a bit technology) fantasy from an author who grew up in the Soviet Union, offering some reflections for the current government policies leaning towards state intervention.

I heard from a podcast/blog about this book offering important lessons for finance, so I borrowed the annotated digital version from the local library and read it via hoopla.

In a nutshell, the book is a fable (or a collection of individual but connected fables) where having partial information about the future can be more perilous than having no information at all, as one may misinterpret the information, take actions with unintended consequences, or just be psychologically paralyzed by the uncertainty and eventuality.

From the perspective of CS/ML, the book is also a cautionary tale about the dangers of over-fitting, as the characters in the book are trying to fit the information they have to their own actions and narratives (or vice versa).
And the danger of partial information applies not just to the future but also to the present and the past, as we often have to make decisions based on incomplete information.

This book introduces metaphors as ways for us to think about one concept (often abstract or more difficult to understand) in terms of another (often concrete or more familiar, grounded in our experiences), e.g., “argument is war” and “time is money”, highlights their importance in how we think, communicate, and act, and then discusses the relationships of metaphors with respect to objectivism and subjectivism (basically as a middle way that covers issues that both are trying to address).
The most interesting part to me is the end of the book where the authors discuss how metaphors can influence how we understand each other and ourselves, art, culture (ritual), and politics.