List of ideas

Following list contains (among other things) topics, principles, phenomena, physical laws that fascinate me and I didn’t yet have time to write a full blog post about them. This list is continuously evolving.

Some items on the lists deserve maybe only a few sentences. Some may be worthy of entire scientific fields of study.

More meaty ideas may be extended by sub-ideas.

The main purpose is to write those things down as they pop into my head, so that they are not lost in the chaos of my thoughts.

Here we go:

  • Writing as an active learning method
    • rephrasing something serves as a check against the illusion of understanding, similarly to teaching
    • more accurate metacognition about one’s own abilities
  • Kuramoto and the emergent synchronization
  • The unreasonable effectiveness of simple harmonic oscillators
  • Applicability of knowledge
    • usefullness of a piece of knowledge
      • d(e, p) = degree to which the principle p (or model, knowledge, understanding, physical/mathematical law, idea, thinking framework…) can explain event e
      • usefulness(p) = E [d(e, p) / time_to_understand(p) ], e ~ event distribution - probability that event e will happen in your life.
      • heuristic that selects principles to understand should consider value function v(event), or which says how important is for me to understend event e (financially, personally)
  • The unreasonable effectiveness of random exploration
    • the unexpected and fundamentally unpredictable positive consequences of random exploration. How to fight sterile order by carefully crafted disorder.
    • exploration vs. exploitation tradeoff
  • My vision of myself hinders my own progress