A 2017 picture of two young owls, click to enlarge. Also, make sure to check out r/Superbowl!

I mentioned Scout Mindset, the new book by Julia Galef, just the other day. Now I am two thirds through the audio book, read by herself, and can wholeheartedly recommend it once more. It is quite close to what I expected from it.

One chapter is about calibrating beliefs, that is not only being aware of what you belive to be right, but also how confident you are about that, by assigning a probability to beliefs being correct. Then, in her own words:

Being perfectly calibrated would mean that your “50% sure” claims are in fact correct 50 percent of the time, your “60% sure” claims are correct 60 percent of the time, your “70% sure” claims are correct 70 percent of the time, and so on. Perfect calibration is an abstract ideal, not something that’s possible to achieve in reality. Still, it’s a useful benchmark against which to compare yourself.

She then provides opportunity to practice by answering trivia questions. This was more fun than I expected and you should click there right now and spend a few minutes on this!

I say this not only because it just so happened that I did well this time: My guesses about which I was 55%, 65%, 75%, 85% and 95% certain, turned out to be 50%, 67%, 80%, 100% and 100% correct, respectively. Probably a fluke. Full score sheet.

When I encounter news like this I cannot help but think of Greenwashing. Giant corporations like Unilever and Nestlé committing a billion dollars to protect tropical forests can sound like buying a way out of bad press.

But then I tell myself to be less cynical and appreciate that these organizations have a huge lever to do less of [wrong thing] and more of [right thing] and that we do indeed want them to be incentivized in that direction. Being suspicious enough to dismiss any positive initiatives as marketing ploy, does the opposite. It makes everyone less likely to get out of the bad equilibrium of unsustainable exploitation on the one hand, and righteous environmentalists scolding them on the other.

So, kudos to everyone behind the LEAF coalition! May you have a good plan for achieving the most good with the money.

Swedish blåsippa, German Leberblümchen, Wikipedia tells us the Common Hepatia is also called kidneywort or liverwort because people used to believe it treats disease in these organs.

This post is back-dated a few hours. Yes, I broke the blogging streak, but I have a good excuse: I watched Druk (Another Round) last night, a recent film with Mads Mikkelsen.

The plot is quickly summarized. Four teachers decide to test a psychologist's (apparently real) claim, that humans are born with blood alcohol level 0.5‰ too low and that one would perform better professionally and socially after correcting this deficiency. The experiment predictably goes well, until it doesn't.

Overall predictability is not a negative here though, it builds to a dreadful anticipation. The four protagonists go off the rails in different ways, as they increasingly see the reasons to do the experiment in the first place: a combination of boredom, existential angst and feeling lost in marriage.

The film's performances are great, the characters relatable and the ending is ecstatic and highly ambiguous. Recommended!

Addendum: I only now read that, by sheer coincidence, Druk won the Oscar for best international film the same night that I watched it. Nice.

I don't write the posts for this blog in advance. Sure, there are a few files with an idea or a link that I want to write about eventually. But nothing finished that I can release if I don't feel like blogging today, but don't want to break the streak. So I have to come up with something, right now.

As you might remember from previous posts, I live somewhat isolated in the forest. The town is only 20 minutes away, but still. There are no direct neighbours and in times like now, working from home, and because of the abysmal weather this week with another two days of snow in late April, it just so happened that I did not get out to meet anybody, or see anything new for quite a while. Except through the screen, of course.

This morning I therefore got in the car and drove downtown. Not to go shopping, I can resist that particular urge and like being frugal. But to take a long walk at a decent pace, like a small hike of ~7km, just to see something different. Towns-folk likes to take hikes in the woods, I do the reverse. At least today I did. Maybe that's part of how people get a bit weird after a few years living in the forest.

When I came by the cathedral,I went in. The early Saturday morning meant I was alone inside. It's been years since I've been inside. Gothic cathedrals are always uplifting, if you let them get to you. For me this means ignoring the religious veneer and see the whole as a cultural and aesthetic achievement. Plus, it is historically significant, with Gustav Vasa's pompous grave, among other things.

I hope I won't forget this once everything gets back to normal, the right now very appealing idea to visit all museums in town. I've never even been to the one for natural history during all the years I've been living here.

Last night I finally finished building my Lego Science Tower. The set is not official but originates from a crowd-funding effort by Bricklink. The sealed box had been sitting in my office for two years until I recently brought it home to have some fun with it.

You can see Newton's apple in the tree and Mendel's garden in front of the tower. The telescope on the top rotates and tilts by turning the knobs. Inside there is Pawlov's dog, Schrödinger's cat, a library and a chemistry lab, among other things. Overall a lovely design with ingenious attention to detail!

Time for another look at my recent browser history.

• MMAcevedo, a short story dystopia about mind uploading.
• Two Paths to the future with respect to artificial intelligence and human enhancement. This links to IQ shredders, a quite unpleasant concept.
• UV light for HVAC systems.
• Against Nostalgia (Zeynep Tufekci).
• Last time I linked to Monkey Mind Pong. Here is an explainer video by a professor in the field.
• Languishing, the middle-child of mental helath.
• Nuclear energy vs Renewables. It's probably true that there is some naturalistic fallcy going on, but as they say in the latest video by Kurzgesagt: Why not both‽

You know the saying "the exception that proves the rule". If you are a non-British European like myself, chances are that that this expression exists in your native language as well. To name just the tree that come to mind immediately:

• German: Die Ausnahme bestätigt die Regel
• Swedish: Undantaget som bekräftar regeln
• French: L'exception qui confirme la règle

The problem is that these treat the word prove as meaning to give proof for or confirm. It can mean that, for sure, but it can also mean to put to the test! Swedish even has the word pröva, with presumably the same origin as prove, which means exactly that.

Is it presumptuous to think that this would have been a better translation? After all, it does not really make any sense that an exception should count as evidence for a rule. It should diminish our credence in it, a good counter-example can completely disprove a rule. It makes however perfect sense to think that an exception tests a rule. In fact I was happy when I realized this misunderstanding some while ago because I never liked the expression before.

Nevertheless, I wonder if there is some language-thing going on here that I am missing. Can it be a simple mistranslation (which inverts the meaning of the saying!) that made its way into the other languages? If so, why did the expression stick anyway? Does it appeal to some paradoxical mindset or Straussian subtext?

Interlude: Five minutes pass, with me being annoyed that what I just wrote does not feel right. Until I finally look it up.

Here is the actual meaning: By pointing to an exception that is explicitly part of the rule, the rest of the rule can be implied. Like a sign that says "no parking from 9-5" would tell you that it is allowed the rest of the time. Or the sign outside work saying "smoking allowed", thereby passive-aggressively telling smokers to not do so anywhere else.

This make some sense. But as far as I remember, this is not how the expression is commonly used. The paradoxical meaning is dominant, in the context of real counter-examples. But maybe I am wrong about that, too.

"You lack ambition!" is an insult in some circles. I don't think it has ever been hurled at me directly, but it would be quite true, from some perspective. Meeting ambitious people who seem to know exactly what they want to achieve often alientates me. How can they be so certain? Havn't they just gotten an idea stuck in their head that consumes them?

There is mental freedom in not being as ambitious as others, at least if one manages to let go of feelings like envy, when the inevitable happens that someone "outcompetes" you.

Then again, "being ambitious" (or not) is just another one of the stories we tell ourselves. One of those stories that altogether make up our identity. While it is not fully arbitrary, genes and experiences play an important role, the story can be changed. The internal monologue and the picture of oneself that it upholds is malleable. What would happen, if I just picked an ambition and ran with it for a while, without questioning?

⥋

Poetry is generally not for me but I can get behind good prose that almost feels like poetry, for example Ambition by David Whyte which begins like this:

Ambition is a word that lacks any real ambition. Ambition is frozen desire, the current of a vocational life immobilized and over-concretized to set, unforgiving goals. Ambition abstracts us from the underlying elemental nature of the creative conversation while providing us the cover of a target that has become false through over description, overfamiliarity or too much understanding.

The full piece is best listened to in the author's own fantastic voice (9min). Text version here.