Links and thoughts, 5/2016

I’ve put all the links for this month in this workflowy. (See April’s post for an explanation of the organization.) Because this post is late, I’ve also put in some links from the first few days of June.

Here are some highlights.

• Notes on conceptual fiction h: Saying something is in the genre of “conceptual fiction” is more informative than saying something is “science fiction”. Conceptual fiction sacrifices realism to allow playing with ideas.
• Scott Aaronson:
  • Quora session

    • Advice to PhD students

      Grad school, together with your postdoc, are your time to leap for the moon. It’s not preparation for anything else; it’s the thing that you’ve been preparing for. This is when there’s a very good chance that you’ll think many of your most original thoughts and do much of your most important work.

  • The 8000th Busy Beaver number eludes ZF set theory h
• Science/technology
  • Traffic jammin’ h: Self-driving cars (Berkeley Science Review)
  • Gene editing can now change an entire species forever (TED talk)
• Conversations and interactions
  • Honing mode vs. jamming mode h (Malcolm Ocean)
  • Insights from hypnosis
    • Beware the bind h (agenty duck)
    • Clean language vs. leading language (cognitive engineer)
    • On pacing and credibly signaling (cognitive engineer)
  • A series of posts on the culture of interactions. They are related to/in response to Ask and Guess and Tell culture:
    • Against tell culture h (thingofthings)
    • Nuance culture h (thingofthings)
    • Reveal culture h (Malcolm Ocean)
      • Trust-powered feedback loops h
    • Against being for or against tell culture h (agentyduck)
    • Crocker’s rules h (LessWrong)
• For fun: Math department releases classification of safe spaces

Books

• In the land of invented languages, Arika Okrent. notes, goodreads
• Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us, Claude Steele. post, goodreads
• Science fiction
  • Babel 17, Samuel Delaney. goodreads
  • Embassytown, China Mieville. notes, goodreads