Setayesh Dashti > Recent Status Updates

“In their deepest heart of hearts, the great majority of psychologists think that talk of “truth” is unscientific (not to say vulgar)… namely it’s got to turn out to be some sort of association, either among ideas or between ideas and the world… and it’s not hard to imagine a machine that can form associations. Imagining such machines is what connectionists do for a living.”

“The ways in which different kinds of things are similar to one another aren’t, in general, similar to one another.”

“Tokening M(X) pretty generally doesn’t cause want to think its associates; a good thing to since if it did one thinking would be forever, getting derailed by one’s associations…
your cognitive lexicon isn’t network of associations. It’s a system of files… associationism took the thinking out of thinking…”

Yes and that’s why word2vec models are NOT models of natural language semantics

“THERE IS, AS A MATTER OF PRINCIPLE, NO SUCH THING AS A PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORY OF MEANING” (capitalization is from Fodor himself, delightful)

The history of the world is just the history of weapons.

Strangely, I think I am grieving for the end of my acute grief. The loss that made a hole at the center of my life is less on my mind than sundry concerns that have filled the hole in. And I suppose that is right and natural, but it’s hard to accept.

I had sort-of decided I don't like the author from the beginning, but when she went to Oxford and didn't enjoy it (particularly the fact that she didn't appreciate Blackwell's) made me certain that we would not get along

The discussions are quite interesting but the urge to turn our dark moods into something productive is driving me insane

I felt that I wqs leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world… A door had shut, the low door in the wall I had sought and found in Oxford; open it now and I should find no enchanted garden.

“I am in good spirits, and happy, and therefore not the best of storytellers.”

داستات زخم شمشیر، از دورهٔ المپیاد در تابستون ۹۲ تا دسامبر ۲۰۲۴ در آکسفورد در سال آخر دکتری.

My man Chomsky mentions “the Guardian Council of clerics” as an instance of political guardianship alongside “the technocratic and policy-oriented intellectuals of the progressive knowledge society” and “bankers and corporate executives”. I’m pleased

When the asked me what I wanted to be I said I didn’t know.
‘Oh, sure you know,’ the photographer said.
‘She wants,’ said Jay Cee wittily, ‘to be everything.’

For god’s sake who writes indices without subscripting them :((

Where has subtlety gone to? :/ “Another [person] had found herself declared unverifiable for writing online that killing of many people by another people was a genocide. Another had been unverified for defaming the oil conglomerates by saying they were directly responsible for climate catastrophe. Another had been unverified for speaking at a protest about people’s right to protest.”

I was really excited to read it and it didn’t disappoint! What a lucid explanation of soundness and consistency.

The grammar of a sentence is part of a computational description of the problem the brain is solving, while the parser is an example of an algorithmic solution to that problem.

“Self-similar Self-similarity”. On the concept of symmetry in mathematics. In particular, about objects that have non-isometric symmetry, meaning that symmetry there is not distance-preserving, which leads to the discussion of the symmetry of the symmetry groups of each object and automorphism. Apparently the author elsewhere proves that the automorphism tower does complete eventually!

“Darkness, Light, and How Symmetry Might Relate Them”. A fantastic, beautifully written essay on four types of darkness in the universe: absence of light, dark colors, neutrinos, and dark matter, as well as a brief introduction to different ways of theorizing about dark matter which includes supersymmetry. Loved the essay and loved the subject matter.

There is much more to darkness than the absence of light.

“Entropy and Symmetry in the Universe”: on whether the universe is symmetric or not - apparently not! Charge symmetry and parity symmetries are shown to not hold, and entropy shows that time is arrow-like and asymmetric. But this also enables life on Earth. Super cool.

Ch. 1: Planetary systems: from symmetry to chaos. About how chaos is deterministic but randomness is not, describing how resonance of moons brings order to systems of planets, but resonance overlap causes chaos in some asteroid belts. A bit too technical but beautiful nonetheless.

What an amazing opening paragraph. So beautifully written.

Achille-Cléophas Flaubert, jousting with his younger son, asked him to explain what literature was for. Gustave, turning the question back on his surgeon father, asked him to explain what the spleen was for: ‘You know nothing about it, and neither do I, except that it is as indispensable to our bodily organism as poetry is to our mental organism.’ Dr Flaubert was defeated.

Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t.

Form isn't an overcoat flung over the fesh of thought (that old comparison, old in Flaubert's day), it's the flesh of thought itself. You can no more imagine an Idea without a Form than a Form without an Idea.

“'It seems to me, alas, that if you can so thoroughly dissect your children who are still to be born, you don't get horny enough actually to father them.” (Flaubert)

“Violence disrupts the extractive economy”. Is it Acemoglu or Kuang? Who’s to tell?

nothing is better than re-reading your middle school's favorite book when you're ill, bedridden and homesick!

Note to self: don't start a lengthy book you don't have a good feeling about, you're not gonna be able to drop it and you miss out on all the good things you could read instead