Ideas Worth Exploring

Optimization is about maximizing or minimizing something. The math behind how you do that has taught me some important life lessons, including: (Gradient descent) Incremental progress with regular course corrections will eventually get you where you want to go. (Soft constraints) Giving yourself some wiggle room can help you avoid black and white thinking. (Local minima) Sometimes things have to get worse before they get better. (Multi-objective optimization) Managing the tradeoffs between multiple conflicting goals can help you reach both goals better. (Overfitting) Optimizing too hard can actually make you worse off, and so it’s important to know when to quit. 

Links: 

Joggling: https://www.designreview.byu.edu/collections/being-the-best-in-the-world-is-easy 

Exchanging money for time: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cvDtmPNCyrkpg4d4F/units-of-exchange

https://www.clearerthinking.org/tools/value-of-your-time-calculator 

Russian internet trolls: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_web_brigades 

I’ve been interested in investing recently, the idea that if you have money then you can use it to make more money. This is a really important topic that I wish my past self had understood better, and so I’m going to break the usual rule of only doing science so that I can dive into this other thing that interests me, which is figuring out what the evidence says is the best way to invest money.

If we want the globe to stop warming, then we need to get to net zero greenhouse gas emissions. Methods to reduce emissions include: renewable energy, electric vehicles, feeding seaweed to cows to stop them from burping so much, turning poop into jet fuel, and resurrecting the mammoths. We’re also going to cover what individual people can do to make the most difference in the fight against global warming. 

Also, here are just a couple of the sources I used while researching this:

https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-land-use-drives-co2-emissions-around-the-world/ 

https://www.iea.org/energy-system/transport/electric-vehicles 

https://rmi.org/press-release/evs-to-surpass-two-thirds-of-global-car-sales-by-2030-putting-at-risk-nearly-half-of-oil-demand-new-research-finds/ 

https://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/article/four-lifestyle-choices-most-reduce-your-carbon-footprint 

https://clearpath.org/tech-101/steel-101/

Climate change will cause droughts, floods, heat waves, and might even make our vegetables less nutritious. In this episode we will talk about some of the consequences global warming will have on animals and humans, and how much of an impact we should expect. This is the second of a 3-part series on climate change. 

A couple sources:

World Economic Forum data https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Quantifying_the_Impact_of_Climate_Change_on_Human_Health_2024.pdf 

IPCC Report on Extreme Weather Events https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_Chapter11.pdf 

TierZoo video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hNb0sD7bD8 

Octopus blindness https://www.ucdavis.edu/blog/warming-ocean-could-harm-octopus-vision

Cow burps and car emissions are making the atmosphere heat up. This is the greenhouse effect, and it’s the same thing that turns your car into an inferno in the summer, with some nuance added. In this episode, we will discuss the physical science behind global warming. This will be the first of a 3-part series on climate change. 

If you ever encounter a situation where you think “who’s going to give in first?” it’s probably a game of chicken. This is the dynamic that shaped the arms races of Cold War, much of modern politics, and probably also quite a few of your interactions with other people. The game of chicken can be analyzed using game theory, and we’re going to start that discussion with a Reddit story of a guy who ruined his relationship by pretending not to know what a potato is. 

What do tic-tac-toe, international politics, and animal grooming behaviors have in common? Much more than you might expect. In this episode we’re going to talk about game theory, a field of economics that lets us analyze social interactions by treating them as multiplayer games, and then using math and science to understand the best strategies to win those games. This episode is the first part, where we will focus on four games: cake-cutting, the ultimatum game, coordination games, and the prisoner’s dilemma. 

Polymers are everywhere. There are dozens of types of plastics, but there are also biological polymers such as DNA and proteins, and together, most of the materials you use every day are made of one of the two types of polymer. Even I’m made out of polymers! Let’s talk about what they are and why they’re taking over the world. 

Gambling, advertising, politics, and household chores. What do these have to do with each other? They’re all areas where your brain can steer you wrong when making decisions, as we’ll see in today’s episode. We’re going to be talking about one of the most influential ideas in the science of judgment and decision making, called dual process theory. This model is explained clearly in the book Thinking Fast and Slow by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. The book talks about psychological research on how our intuition and reasoning work, and explains where our brains tend to make mistakes, and how to correct those errors. In this episode, I compare your intuition, your System 1, to a robot doing paperwork, and your reason, your System 2, to a detective. I then talk about six heuristics and biases: anchoring and adjustment, loss aversion, availability, attribute substitution, representativeness, and confirmation bias, and how these affect your decision making. 

A walk through the history of the universe, starting with the Big Bang and the creation of the elements in stars, moving through the first molecular replicators, the RNA world hypothesis, and the evolution of life by natural selection. Punctuated equilibrium. The extreme destruction caused by the asteroid that extincted the dinosaurs. The development of animal culture, except for octopuses, which are uncultured cephalopods. Human intelligence, modern civilization, and what lies ahead of us: extinction or spreading throughout the stars. And the possibility of civilization powered by black holes before the universe finally succumbs to heat death. Enjoy!