Best of Twitter - Week of September 27, 2021
The most counterintuitive facts in all of mathematics, computer science, and physics axisofordinary.substack.com/p/the-most-cou…
(posted before but this has additional items and is easier to access)
^ “A one-in-billion event will happen 8 times a month: https://gwern.net/Littlewood” — reading this article by gwern a few years ago really changed how I read news. With an increasing sample size, you can find arbitrary outliers, often multiple, and present them to your audience in any way you wish.
Worldwide, 30-year-old men have spent 10 years in school, on average. How many years have women of the same age spent in school?
(Go to the follow-up tweets after you answer)
This is a survey conducted by Hans, Ola, and Anna Rosling, which they discuss in their book Factfulness.
The correct answer is 9 years.
A monkey guessing randomly would get it right 1/3 of the time. It turns out that a country of monkeys would have beaten all human countries.
Most unnerving is that no one did worse than U.S. journalists. For every 8 monkeys who get the question right, 1 American journalist does.
On certain topics, it's good to remember that you're often being informed by the most delusional people in the country.
Very rarely I meet someone who really changes my way of thinking. @kaznatcheev (kaznatcheev.github.io) is one of these people. Check out his paper relating to Leslie Valiant's treatment of evolution: biorxiv.org/content/10.110… - evolution may be richer than I thought.
New essay: Issues with Bloom et al's "Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?" and why total factor productivity should never be used as a measure of innovation guzey.com/economics/bloo…
Key takeaways:
I always thought it was admirable of @Google to leave China in 2010 instead of bowing to censorship/info requests.
This piece from @ConradBastable (h/t @alexeyguzey) offers an alternative scenario — with interesting echoes in 2021.
^ post suggests Google could’ve fought China’s censorship
This is pretty amazing - people working 40-50 hours a week in VR blog.immersed.team/working-from-o…
Lots of potential in this new medium.
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Crazy 👀
Brian Armstrong @brian_armstrong