Quarterly Cup 2024 Q4 Retrospective

There is an experiment by LessWrong user dkl9 where they try to figure out how their mood is affected by music. Aside from the difficulties of running with no replicates11 Which is what always happens when one experiments on oneself only., they had a fairly good setup going. You can read their article for more details22 Some of those details are improvements on the basic design I’ve laid out here., but for the sake of this article, we can pretend the experiment worked like this:

Subscribers to the weekly Entropic Thoughts newsletter know that in every newsletter, I share one interesting flashcard from the past week. The newsletter has now run for six months, and this is a compilation of the flashcards that have been selected, for the benefit of non-subscribers.

The compass does not actually point to true north. This is because the magnetic north pole is not quite on the actual northernmost point of Earth – our slushy rock, and its magnetic field, are two separate things. The dynamics of spinning suggest that the magnetic field will be roughly aligned with the true north–south axis, but this is no guarantee.

I have 32 gb of working memory on my laptop, of which I make 28 gb available to the Linux vm I work in. It seems like ghc sometimes eats way too much of this (when building a very template-heavy module), causing the system to start thrashing and it’s not a pleasant experience.

I am convinced there exists something we can call statistical literacy. Unfortunately, I don’t yet know exactly what it is, so it is hard to write about.