eating meat, less nutritious veggies & the future of ethics
CC#39 - Symbolic Regression to Infer the Laws of Physics, Successful Researchers and Founders & The National
Hey there and welcome to ✨ CuratedCuriosity - a bi-weekly newsletter delivering inspiration from all over the internet to the notoriously curious.
Things I Enjoyed Reading.
🥩 Why It’s Ok to Eat Meat - Jordan Lofthouse & Dan Shahar [Podcast]
While I am not necessarily endorsing meat consumption, I found it very interesting that for once someone dares to publicly discuss this ‘unpopular opinion’.
‘Is it possible to develop an ethical framework that is ahead of our time? And if so how?’ Thought provoking, well-written article trying to answer these questions.
Once, pretty much everywhere, beating your wife and children was regarded as a father's duty, homosexuality was a hanging offense, and waterboarding was approved -- in fact, invented -- by the Catholic Church. Through the middle of the 19th century, the United States and other nations in the Americas condoned plantation slavery. Many of our grandparents were born in states where women were forbidden to vote. And well into the 20th century, lynch mobs in this country stripped, tortured, hanged and burned human beings at picnics. Looking back at such horrors, it is easy to ask: What were people thinking? Yet, the chances are that our own descendants will ask the same question, with the same incomprehension, about some of our practices today. Is there a way to guess which ones?
🧑🔬 Researchers and Founders
What do (successful) researchers and startup founders have in common? A short, but insightful collection of thoughts.
The best people in both groups spend a lot of time reflecting on some version of the Hamming question—"what are the most important problems in your field, and why aren’t you working on them?” In general, no one reflects on this question enough, but the best people do it the most, and have the best ‘problem taste’, which is some combination of learning to think independently, reason about the future, and identify attack vectors.
Food for Thought.
🪐 Scientists have been able to distill the laws of physics from raw data i.e. they fed decades of NASA data to a symbolic regression algorithm and it came up with an extremely good equation to describe planet movements.
🥗 Alarming summary of evidence on fruits and vegetables becoming less nutritious over time due to factory farming techniques and potential other factors.
🤨 What does ‘almost certainly’ or ‘probably not’ actually mean to (different) people?
Random Stuff.
😬 Interesting collection of thoughts on ‘how often should you criticize other people’?
“Complain less” is one of the very best pieces of wisdom. That is positively correlated with criticizing other people less, though it is not identical either.
🎨 Collection of comparisons of human drawings and DALL-E 2 drawings in response to the same prompt.
🌤 An article (including the generating R code) about one guy’s quest to find Cities with Nice Weather
Personal Update.
Danish summer is treating us really nicely over here! Hope everyone else also gets the chance to enjoy some good weather and fill up those Vitamin D resources!
Looking forward to two intense (and hopefully productive) weeks ahead before heading off to a summer school first and then holidays.
Got to see The National in concert in Copenhagen this weekend - loved it!