Dameron Midgette's Bookmarks

In an article in the education journal Change last year, Dr. Wieman noted that the human brain “can hold a maximum of about seven different items in its short-term working memory and can process no more than about four ideas at once.”

“But the number of new items that students are expected to remember and process in the typical hourlong science lecture is vastly greater,” he continued. “So we should not be surprised to find that students are able to take away only a small fraction of what is presented to them in that format.”

It looks like we need
randomness in both energy output and expenditure, with a negative
correlation between the two. Just consider that we worked harder when
hungry (thus compounding the deficit), and conserved energy during
periods of feeding --exactly the opposite of the dictates of Platonic
"equilibrium". The effect is to make our net energy
"lumpier": large deficits followed by large excesses,
followed of course by large deficits, etc.

I am discovering
from the literature (under Art De Vany's guidance and based on his
ideas on metabolic switches) that three meals a day is for morons
--we need episodes of hunger punctuated brief by periods of
replenishing. Hunger improves insulin sensitivity, brain function,
etc. So it is a good idea to, counterintuitively, fast on days when
we need the
energy, rather than the opposite. Our Platonic "make sense"
indicates that you need to "eat well" during a period of
physical stress --the opposite holds true empirically: fasting chemo
patients do much much better. Without actual testing, every cancer
patient has been told to "eat well but not excessively".

The same applies to
thirst.

Theory came later, in a lame way, to satisfy
the intellectual bureaucrats. But that’s not what you tend to read
in standard histories of technology –I am convinced that, when
writing history, we project our mental biases in a way to produce
agency and increase the role of theory.

Mokyr’s other problem is that he focuses on applications that
are linear in nature, those that have tractable mathematics,
thin-tailed statistics: conventional engineering [Mediocristan]
–assuming theories work there. His ideas of “knowledge base” do
not apply to medicine or technology in the information age –where
an epistemic base causes mental tunneling. Indeed medicine is an area
in which theories and ideas have been bad for our health. Or take
economics: we still don’t understand the subject. So it is easy for
motivated researchers to focus on some applications in which
propositional knowledge can lead to consequences and generalize to
everything. This reminds me of a hotshot mathematician who gave a
lecture about “the uses of mathematics in society’ (producing
examples of traffic lights, cryptography, etc.). He did not consider
the non-mathematicized non-mathematicizable applications, etc.