In my fresh attempt to blog daily, today is the first time that I don't know what to write about. I am sure this will happen frequently and getting over it is part of the point. Behaviours only become habits when you follow the rule.

I could tell you about that great podcast I just discovered, or the crappy film I watched last night, or I could show you a picture of where in the forest I put up the slaguggleholk this morning. But I won't do that today. Instead I'll just ramble on for a while. Stream-of-consciousness writing they call it, I think. This term might be something my brain just made up on its own but I won't look it up right now. If it isn't a real thing, it should be. James Joyce's Ulysses comes to mind in this context, but I might be wrong about that; I have never read it.

Damn, now I looked it up anyway: James Joyce's name had slipped my mind and of course Wikipedia tells you immediately that he is famous for stream of consciousness, so there's that.

Talking about consciousness, I used to roll my eyes when someone tried to tell that there is a point to "subjective first-person experience" as compared to the "objective third-person" perspective. I'm not so sure about that anymore, not because I've gotten into new-agey woo-woo kinds of things, but because it makes rational sense to me that there are things to learn about one's own mind by paying closer attention to what it does minute-to-minute.

More about that at a later time. For today this will suffice for me to feel good about having blogged something. Not setting goals too high at the outset of a new adventure is a good thing, they say. Whoever "they" are.

In November a Ural owl visited our garden. This might not be very spectacular, after all they are not that rare in middle and northern Sweden. But I had never seen one before and was glad it stayed long enough for me to go get the camera.

It is commom knowledge here that Ural owls can get pissy during the spring when they have offspring. The Swedish name for them is slaguggla which literally means "the owl that hits you".

Nevertheless I just built a nesting box this morning, from some scrap material:

The cube of 30cm on all sides, plus a half roof, is meant to mimic a dead tree trunk that has rotted away on the inside, leaving a cavity. My little book on animal shelters says this is what Ural owls like to nest in. Now I only have to find a good spot in the forest and a way to put it up; it is quite a bit larger and heavier than it looks in the picture.

Last night I read this piece in one of the Lesswrong books (pictured).

And just now this video flew by on Twitter. It is about meta discussion, the sphinx that both derails and guards conversations, be they with others or yourself.

I don't know about you, but I find this graph (source) extremely frustrating. There is no good reason why we in the EU vaccinate three times slower than the US, UK, or Chile for that matter (who bought the Chinese vaccine).

Yes, paying more per dose and subsidizing production early would probably have been unpopular at the time, but so much cheaper than not nipping the third wave in the bud right now. This is not hindsight talking, knowledgable people knew this all along and were listened to elsewhere. Kudos to the Brits who can rightfully feel smug about Brexit now, even though EU-countries were not prevented from bypassing the EMA in approval and procurement of vaccines - none did that, as far as I know.

More about vaccine manufacturing than you ever wanted to know.

Is it possible to change your mind too much? I am generally trying to be actively aware of confirmation bias, that is fitting every new bit of information into one's existing set of opinions. Plus I like the feeling of novel thoughts and how they tickle your brain.

This sometimes manifests in an instinct to run in the opposite direction when everyone agrees on something. Everyone thinks climate change will be catastrophic soon? Sure, but what about other solutions than admonishing people to behave differently? And aren't some the activists claims exaggerated? (Apocalypse Never by Michael Shellenberger is a book that tries to distinguish the science from the hyperbole; I should finish it some day.)

That same gut reaction seems to be my default in many areas. If I wanted to flatter myself, I would call it a "scientific mindset", to always question common wisdom, but I am not sure it really is that. Also it becomes potentially "dangerous" socially, in the sense that one can easily come across as obnoxious and unnecessarily crontrarian. And in the wrong context it can send the wrong signals as to how one gets sorted into the bins labelled good guy or bad guy.

Thus I am genuinely unsure whether I tend overcompensate when trying to correct my confirmation bias. After all, there often are good reasons that there is a widely accepted view, and quickly throwing out a strong prior is bad Bayesian thinking. In an extreme case, it would make me gullible, accepting new arguments or framings without weighing them properly against what I thought before.

Coincidentally, Scott Alexander wrote about the exact opposite today, trapped priors. Quite likely I have some of these, too, and I see no immediate reason why one cannot have too weak priors concerning one subject matter, and too strong ones in another.

Added 2021-03-12: Also closely related, I just heard Rob Wiblin in his podcst say the following, which gave me a chuckle:

I feel like I can notice a perverse aspect of this in myself when [...] you’ve kind of settled on what is kind of probably the true boring thing, the unexpected boring real conclusion just to some issue that has been controversial to you in the past. Then you’re like, “I’m bored of this. I have to find new takes, something new to say about this issue. [.. ] But what’s left?” What’s left is just bad takes, like dumb, unexpected contrarian takes.

We have had quite the winter here in Uppsala, Sweden. Many days my exercise was replaced by shovelling snow. It never became too much to cause real problems and we made it through the stretch of cold by emptying the firewood sheds.

Now all snow has melted already, but we are in that frustrating period called vårvinter (spring-winter) where everything is gray and ugly, snow and wet take turns, until spring finally comes at the beginning of May.

How difficult it is to consistently post on a blog! One easily gets awe-stricken by people like Tyler or Scott who put out large amounts of interesting material, without having this as their main gig.

I won't pretend I'll be able to get to their level anytime soon, but starting small and from scratch again should make it easier to form new habits. And practice matters in writing, they say.

To put it in different words: I have outsourced my babble to podcasts and books too much, and need to flex my own text generator again. Re-phrasing thoughts fosters their synthesis.

Recently, the book I have enjoyed most is Joe Henrich's The Secret of Our Success. The subtitle says very well what it is about: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter. I found the interaction between culture and biology totally mind-boggling and think that this is one of those great books that synthesize different areas of understanding into a compelling narrative, in a very accessible and entertaining way. Here is a good interview with him, by Tyler Cowen, if you want to get a preview.
Henrich has a new book out, The WEIRDest people in the world (review by Dan Dennet), which I am eager to read - alas my copy is stuck in the mail.

If one takes "big picture" books as a genre, then Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel certainly is one of the most prominent examples. I had not read it until last year and liked it very much. I continued straight on to his follow-up Collapse but have so far passed on the latest one, Upheaval.

Why we Sleep by Matthew Walker did not leave a permanent impression on me, mostly because I needed no convincing that sleeping is important. I easily average 8,5 hours per night and generally sleep well. What really peaked my interest though was this fantastic blog post that goes though the first chapter of the book and finds a plethora of errors; very worthwhile to check out!

Back to cultural evolution. This View of Life by David Sloan Wilson was certainly interesting as well, but not as captivating to my brain as Henrich's book above. The question whether group selection is real or not gets mixed into the subject matter and I find the debate around this both confusing and semantic at times.

Last for today is Camus' The Plague. I stumbled upon my old copy, in German translation, which I must have read many years ago. But I remembered nothing of it when I started reading the other day. It is of course very well written, but also a bit dense, which is why I only progress a few pages every night in bed.

The pleasures of homebrewing include cleaning up, a lot. This time because the yeast liked the wort a bit too much and decided to climb out of the airlock. 🙄

Ok, that title takes some unpacking: A Sonoff is a microcontroller that connects to Wifi and can switch some other electrical device on and off, pictured on the right. It is basically a remote switch that can be used for all kinds of purposes, from a manually triggered remote to some fancy home automation. To flash in this context means putting a new operating system (firmware) onto the microcontroller and Tasmota is the open-source firmware that everyone seems to love and recommend.

I have had two of these switches for quite a while, but never got around to converting them to Tasmota. Earlier today I finally did, following this guide for using a RaspberryPi. The Sonoff provides an old-school serial port and wants 3.3V power internally. The only thing I had available that can do both was my Pi Zero (left in picture), and I am happy to say that it worked without much fiddling around. The most tricky part was to physically hold the Sonoff button and cables in place while turning on the Pi, then waiting for it to start up to trigger the software transfer whithout losing the connection on the cables.

Not I have to decide what to do with the switches. Probably I will go back to installing Home Assistant for central control. I have tried several years ago but I expect it to have improved much since.