Ji Won Park > Recent Status Updates

Four reader types I should strive not to be: (1) the hoarder who prides himself only in the number of books read (who also has no incentive to reread a book), (2) the summarizer who believes the value of each book can be contained in a few-line summary, (3) the marketer who lets short-lived sensations crowd out true gems, and (4) the evildoer who abuses the influence of old, widely-read books such as the Bible.

Sidd sounded like an elitist prick until the last chapter, when he understood the pain and pleasure of the "common people," summed up in his rebellious son.

Summary here: "https://www.pluggedin.com/book-review...". Unmotivated ending with meager impact. Arrogant of Helprin to think that he gave Hardesty enough presence for us to care about his daughter. The novel can be refactored into one around 200 pages -- filler characters removed, more purpose attributed to Pearly's revenge and Mead's bridge-building quest, and less (no?) deux ex machina (Athansor).

Three more "beautiful" female characters later, I'm still at a loss as to where all this is going. What kind of ending can justify pages upon pages of classic fairytale tropes spanning families, industries, and geographies? I set out to finish this monolith of a novel (~750 pages) but I'm beginning to think the time would be better spent reading computational theory...

(one paragraph to fall in love... really?), rendering this book closer in genre to surrealist caricature than fantasy romance. 2/2

Creatures and places can be as other-worldly as Helprin likes, as long as we readers are renting a place in his world through the act of reading. But not people and not the process of love. Those no writer has the license to make up. The only bridge between our world and his, they need to be at least relatable. Too bad that Helprin skimped on descriptions of the human connection... 1/2

Hate it when the girl is "beautiful" in an utterly unrealistic way. Beverly is "sensual" and "full-grown" but also a teenager having "great and obvious attributes of youth?" How does pushing the perfect-body agenda help the narrative? Enjoyed the gangs and the horse so far but the entrance of the female protagonist is sloppy and cliched at best.

Warwickian performance requires learning and changing faster than everyone else. Gawande's tips for being a positive deviant: 1) ask an unscripted question, (2) don't complain, (3) count something, (4) write something, (5) change. Offered to doctors but applicable to any discipline. This book elevates not only the writer's experience, but the field of medicine and the lot of practitioners as a whole.

"Finding a meaningful way to measure performance [...] is a form of ingenuity itself. What you actually do with that measure involves another type of ingenuity, however, and improvement ultimately requires both kinds."

How does Gawande make each paragraph so gripping? Maybe it's the subject matter. Will a book on astrophysicists' mission to constrain dark energy get me as tense? Probably not. Any other human venture, including pursuit of curiosity, would feel frivolous compared to saving lives.

Positive deviance as applied to improving compliance in handwashing.

Proofs are friendly (no "trivially true" dismissal so far!) and Chapter 1 has landed someone with some abstract algebra background easily onto the world of regular languages. The most useful theorem yet: if P is a closure property defined on a set D and A is a subset of D, then there is a unique minimal set that's a superset of A and has property P.

Wondering what I can do with AI safety research, aside from being a "mindful optimist."

Look into integrated information theory (IIT) pioneered by Giulio Tononi

As should any self-respecting scientist, Tegmark admits he can't say anything for certain about the impact of artificial general intelligence (AGI). But I suppose someone had to break the (infinite) possibility space down into descriptive scenarios. Love the running Omegas analogy

Malaney and Weinstein developed the gauge theory of economics to solve the index value problem as it related to inflation. Thinking like a physicist is an iterative process of understanding when, why, and how a model fails (the model's assumptions) and coming up with a more robust model. Inspired to write a book in grad school!

Sornette improved our understanding of ruptures. Bubbles and anti-bubbles are financial realizations of ruptures. Unlike black swans, dragon kings (Sornette's term for extreme events) are predictable. The Prediction Company harnessed the short-term predictability (efficiency) of the market. Sornette attributed regularities to dragon kings.

Black (of Black-Scholes-Merton model) was a physics outlaw. Farmer, Packard, and McGill brought nonlinear forecasting to high-tech derivatives trading (although the details of their work as part of Prediction Company remains an industry secret). Notably, they introduced black box models (algorithmic trading). Is AT still the dominant paradigm at D. E. Shaw, Two Sigma, Citadel? QOTD: Randomness hides structure.

Osborne wrote whole dissertations instead of proposals until one was accepted for awarding his degree. Mandelbrot wrote his dissertation without an advisor. Thorp struck it rich with Princeton-Newport.

Reads like a storybook!