Last night I finally finished building my Lego Science Tower. The set is not official but originates from a crowd-funding effort by Bricklink. The sealed box had been sitting in my office for two years until I recently brought it home to have some fun with it.

You can see Newton's apple in the tree and Mendel's garden in front of the tower. The telescope on the top rotates and tilts by turning the knobs. Inside there is Pawlov's dog, Schrödinger's cat, a library and a chemistry lab, among other things. Overall a lovely design with ingenious attention to detail!

Time for another look at my recent browser history.

• MMAcevedo, a short story dystopia about mind uploading.
• Two Paths to the future with respect to artificial intelligence and human enhancement. This links to IQ shredders, a quite unpleasant concept.
• UV light for HVAC systems.
• Against Nostalgia (Zeynep Tufekci).
• Last time I linked to Monkey Mind Pong. Here is an explainer video by a professor in the field.
• Languishing, the middle-child of mental helath.
• Nuclear energy vs Renewables. It's probably true that there is some naturalistic fallcy going on, but as they say in the latest video by Kurzgesagt: Why not both‽

You know the saying "the exception that proves the rule". If you are a non-British European like myself, chances are that that this expression exists in your native language as well. To name just the tree that come to mind immediately:

• German: Die Ausnahme bestätigt die Regel
• Swedish: Undantaget som bekräftar regeln
• French: L'exception qui confirme la règle

The problem is that these treat the word prove as meaning to give proof for or confirm. It can mean that, for sure, but it can also mean to put to the test! Swedish even has the word pröva, with presumably the same origin as prove, which means exactly that.

Is it presumptuous to think that this would have been a better translation? After all, it does not really make any sense that an exception should count as evidence for a rule. It should diminish our credence in it, a good counter-example can completely disprove a rule. It makes however perfect sense to think that an exception tests a rule. In fact I was happy when I realized this misunderstanding some while ago because I never liked the expression before.

Nevertheless, I wonder if there is some language-thing going on here that I am missing. Can it be a simple mistranslation (which inverts the meaning of the saying!) that made its way into the other languages? If so, why did the expression stick anyway? Does it appeal to some paradoxical mindset or Straussian subtext?

Interlude: Five minutes pass, with me being annoyed that what I just wrote does not feel right. Until I finally look it up.

Here is the actual meaning: By pointing to an exception that is explicitly part of the rule, the rest of the rule can be implied. Like a sign that says "no parking from 9-5" would tell you that it is allowed the rest of the time. Or the sign outside work saying "smoking allowed", thereby passive-aggressively telling smokers to not do so anywhere else.

This make some sense. But as far as I remember, this is not how the expression is commonly used. The paradoxical meaning is dominant, in the context of real counter-examples. But maybe I am wrong about that, too.

"You lack ambition!" is an insult in some circles. I don't think it has ever been hurled at me directly, but it would be quite true, from some perspective. Meeting ambitious people who seem to know exactly what they want to achieve often alientates me. How can they be so certain? Havn't they just gotten an idea stuck in their head that consumes them?

There is mental freedom in not being as ambitious as others, at least if one manages to let go of feelings like envy, when the inevitable happens that someone "outcompetes" you.

Then again, "being ambitious" (or not) is just another one of the stories we tell ourselves. One of those stories that altogether make up our identity. While it is not fully arbitrary, genes and experiences play an important role, the story can be changed. The internal monologue and the picture of oneself that it upholds is malleable. What would happen, if I just picked an ambition and ran with it for a while, without questioning?

⥋

Poetry is generally not for me but I can get behind good prose that almost feels like poetry, for example Ambition by David Whyte which begins like this:

Ambition is a word that lacks any real ambition. Ambition is frozen desire, the current of a vocational life immobilized and over-concretized to set, unforgiving goals. Ambition abstracts us from the underlying elemental nature of the creative conversation while providing us the cover of a target that has become false through over description, overfamiliarity or too much understanding.

The full piece is best listened to in the author's own fantastic voice (9min). Text version here.

A ceiling detail in Strängnäs cathedral.

How does it work that we remember things? If I tell you to remember the number 6, and you do, how exactly does your brain achieve that?

The standard answer is that the physical representation of memory, the engram, is encoded in the synapses between neurons, while each neuron behaves mechanically, aggregating the inputs into firing an output once an activation threshold is reached. In this model each neuron does not store information.

It turns out though that there is experimental evidence that individual neuron can indeed do just that, remember things, for example a certain time-span. I just read this interview which talks about this paper. See also this Twitter thread.

The provocative thesis is that there is some, very much not understood yet, molecular mechanism inside neurons that encodes information directly within a single cell. Somewhat analogous to how DNA encodes information, but with different purpose and coding between molecules and information. Our current situation may be similar to how inheritance was mysterious a hundred years ago, until the structure of DNA was discovered and understood.

As usual, when a small group goes against the scientific mainstream, it is quite impossible to have a well-founded opinion as a layman. But even if the experiment that shows memory in a single neuron eventually gets debunked, we have learned something. If however it turns out to be right, that the whole idea to look for the engram between cells instead of within them is a mistake, then this will quite likely be one of the most exciting scientific revolutions in modern times!

Do you remember the number I asked you to above? No matter if you do or not, you have no direct knowledge why that is the case. Introspection does not help. Finding out through experiment is our only hope.

I almost forgot: The paper linked above is by scientists from Lund, Sweden! So I'm keeping my fingers crossed for a "local" Nobel prize in the future.

Added 2021-05-05: Another article about it.

I had seen her TED talk before and had noticed her name pop up in my timeline on Twitter from time to time. But I admit I did not really have Julia Galef's work on my radar until recently, when I added her podcast to my rotation. So far it has been very good and I intend to check-out the large backlog eventually.

But first, I'll dive into the book that she just released: The Scout Mindset. See her Twitter for teasers, or listen to her being interviewed about it here.

I did not mention it in my Star Trek rewatch, but Julia is certainly right that Spock is not very logical, and quite annoying.

P.S.: See her explain Scout Mindset through activist examples in this video.

Winter is not completely over yet – we had 5cm of snow just the other day and it took two days to melt – but the preparations for the next one have already started.

I have never been good at doing push-ups. Upper body strength in general has never been my thing and I have always preferred low- to medium-intensity exercise, endurance like running.

However, I recently had the idea to change that and I remembered that logging progress helped me more than ten years ago to get into running. Even though I no longer do that (I wear my old GPS clock as a watch, but never turn it on when I go running), keeping tabs might just work as a motivation-hack once more. For added effect, I hereby make this commitment public, which is something that I hear people claim also keeps you from abandoning the routine.

Thus, here is the plot of max and median set sizes, and total number of push-ups every day, for the last ten days:

I will occasionally post a plot like this with updated numbers. The script that makes the plot is here.

Whenever we encounter some statement or proposition, we cannot help but react to it. This is often automatic, sometimes even subconscious. The kind of reaction we get depends to some extent on what is being said, certainly, but not only. To a larger extent our own mental state is more crucial.

How well does the statement fit into our current world model? How unexpected is it? How flattering or insulting is it? What is the intention of the speaker?

There is considerable freedom in interpretation, but it is a kind of mental freedom that is easy to overlook. The difference between adopting a positive reading or a negative one of someone's argument is huge. It is the difference between strawmanning and steelmanning, and the difference between getting offended and curious.

I find that, with a little practice, it becomes possible to take almost nothing personally and to notice my own reactions a bit more clearly, which lets me choose the direction, to some extent. The most sympathetic reading of what is being said is a good default to strive for, I believe. Not because I want to appear "nice", although that might be a welcome side-effect, but because it actually is less mental effort and frees me from being caught up in ruminations about some possible negative subtext that my brain manages to notice, or invent.