I definitely think there is some internal misleading conflation of actually doing something wrong and having someone think you are. The source of this is not having a solid opinion of your own, a solid self, the confidence of your own views. For instance, I know there’s nothing wrong with hitting on a girl in public, and that’s my view, and I’m sticking to that. That’s what I believe. So if someone says otherwise, I can write that off as some crazy internet person. What do you really think? What do you really believe? Not what you’ve picked up from society, but what you truly believe. That seems to be missing here - like there’s no internal referent you can check in with. Add to that that a lot of this is social anxiety and fear of rejection, which will take any excuse it can get to avoid talking to someone and risking rejection.

Seems like one of the smartest computer scientists on the planet and I have a lot in common.

My recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been born a woman, or a gay man, or best of all, (completely asexual, so that I could simply devote my life to math, like my hero Paul Erdös did).

At one point, I actually begged a psychiatrist to prescribe drugs that would chemically castrate me (I had researched which ones), because a life of mathematical asceticism was the only future that I could imagine for myself.

via: https://nottoby.substack.com/p/the-internet-is-training-boys-and/comment/149005099

In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics. Now, on the contrary, I enjoy life; I might almost say that with every year that passes I enjoy it more…very largely it is due to a diminishing preoccupation with myself.

External discipline is the only road to happiness for those unfortunates whose self-absorption is too profound to be cured in any other way.

via: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=2091#comment-326664

In this post we will see how to extend reverse mode automatic differentiation to a language with first class function types, function application and lambda-abstraction. This method is not new, but we will give a new derivation of it by showing how it arises universally from noticing that the category of “additive lenses” is cartesian closed. In the end we will see that this idea sounds like it should revolutionise machine learning, but then doesn’t.

Some interesting ideas, although I won’t claim that I understand them all.

see: https://zenodo.org/records/18625249

Disco is taking out the bad and keeping only the good.

I had heard of Disco, but it does really seem like it sparks joy. Perhaps I should give it a try.

The problem with utopia Specifically with respect to status.

I really try to not care about status, but to not care is not not be human, it seems.

Nothing in life is certain except death, taxes and the second law of thermodynamics. All three are processes in which useful or accessible forms of some quantity, such as energy or money, are transformed into useless, inaccessible forms of the same quantity. That is not to say that these three processes don’t have fringe benefits: taxes pay for roads and schools; the second law of thermodynamics drives cars, computers and metabolisms; and death, at the very least, opens up tenured faculty positions.

via: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reversible_computing

I kept hearing moms were lonely, so why wouldn’t they text me back? Here’s what I learned, trying to make mom friends and (eventually) succeeding.

When a black man lives the same day over and over again, he tries changing his behavior to survive a police interaction.

“Better run, better run, outrun my gun…”

see: https://github.com/p2r3/bareiron

Two options:

1. don’t be controversial, i.e. assimilate
2. don’t get famous

Not only can misogynistic men still get laid, but the declaration that misogynists and incels are one in the same (or that a man who hates women must only feel that way because he can’t get any ass) reinforces the, dare I say, sexist belief that a man’s ability to obtain sexual partners is indicative of his moral value. It also directly confirms the idea that women are “vending machines who dispense sex for good behavior,” which this exact cohort of feminists have repeatedly countered.

Most theories and hypotheses in psychology are verbal in nature, yet their evaluation overwhelmingly relies on inferential statistical procedures. The validity of the move from qualitative to quantitative analysis depends on the verbal and statistical expressions of a hypothesis being closely aligned—that is, that the two must refer to roughly the same set of hypothetical observations. Here I argue that most inferential statistical tests in psychology fail to meet this basic condition.

see: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/jqw35_v1

via: https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/reads

These are books (and not-books) that had some lasting impact on me long after first reading them.

Kinkykikker explores the conversation every long-term couple dreads in this story on the realities of when passions fades while the love endures.

Put policy aside and think like the median voter: which candidate fucks?

Unfortunately true.