lorxus-is-a-fox

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

Following the Greek War of Independence and the establishment of the Greek Kingdom, Athens was chosen to replace Nafplio as the second capital of the newly independent Greek state in 1834, largely because of historical and sentimental reasons.[48] At the time, after the extensive destruction it had suffered during the war of independence, it was reduced to a town of about 4,000 people (less than half its earlier population) in a loose swarm of houses along the foot of the Acropolis

very strange how athens was a big deal pre like 300 BC, only significant for sentimental reasons for over 2000 years (i mean, it had the academy into the 6th century, but my understanding is that was *all* it had, and after that it was really just a random country town with a big history), and then since the mid 19th century has become the largest city in greece

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ok but show us the rest of the tier list though. where are my favorites, 22 and 31?

learning music theory taking me places i don't feel safe in

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learning music theory taking me places i don't feel safe in

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When I was in the hospital, they gave me a big bracelet that said ALLERGY, but like. I'm allergic to bees. Were they going to prescribe me bees in there.

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“Because people have begun to lose their hopes and forget their dreams. So, the Nothing grows stronger.”

The Neverending Story (1984)

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Deal with werewolves in two easy steps! (and stay safe trick-or-treaters! Use this guide if you encounter any big bois tonight :D)

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[lorxus-is-a-fox]

there's a post going around about the replication crisis in psychology, including the heuristics and biases program heavily cited in Yudkowsky's Sequences. And it seems to be written from the perspective of someone who never cared about heuristics and biases research in the first place, and thinks it just amounts to the triviality that people aren't perfectly rational. So maybe I'll take a moment to explain the significance this stuff had to me.

Some context is that my training is in statistics. As a statistics expert I'm supposed to be able to tell you stuff about "estimators", procedures for estimating unknown quantities from data. Some classic estimators: the mean and the median. So I'm supposed to be the guy that knows that

the sample mean is closer on average to the true mean than the sample median, for "well-behaved" data (and I should be able to quantify how close using the standard error, and calculate the ratio of standard errors to say how much worse the median is)

the sample median is less affected by outliers (which we like to quantify as the "breakdown point")

The statistician is looking beyond estimates, like an early estimate of the mass of the Higgs boson, to estimators, to speak in scientific generality about how an estimator performs.

And what Yudkowsky told me is I could take that perspective to my own thought. I could look beyond my judgment of a particular fact, to "heuristics" that produce those judgments in an understandable and lawful fashion, even when these are rapid intuitive judgments rather than deliberate following of steps. Like a statistician, we could talk about how well a heuristic works, and when it fails, the way the sample mean fails in the presence of outliers. A heuristic and a bias.

This is not some triviality "humans are biased" any more than the field of statistics is the triviality "estimates aren't exactly correct". I learned specific heuristics, and specific biases. One thing people don't realize about Yudkowsky is that a lot of his "just do the math" vibe was a prescription for specific biases. Representativeness heuristic, mostly works, no need to do the math, but when base rates differ significantly there's the bias of base rate neglect, which you can recognize and mitigate if you know Bayes' theorem. Your everyday judgments of value are mostly good but when they involve quantities you haven't visualized you may suffer from scope insensitivity, recognizable as deviation from an expected value calculation. That's the origin of "shut up and multiply", not as a platitude, but as advice for dealing with scope insensitivity. And now I'm wondering, were these real? Base rate neglect and scope insensitivity, I mean. Did they make it through the replication crisis or not?

This is a personal story, but millions of people read "Thinking, Fast and Slow" (I think; at least a million) and whole chapters are wiped out. I think I'm wondering what held up, and many people don't even know that this interesting book they read a few years ago has some stuff they'd be better off unlearning. Which stuff? I saw a blog post a long time ago that went through one chapter, noting what people had tried to replicate, but what about the rest of the book?

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[lorxus-is-a-fox]

twisting and bitturning

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an ornithologist pointed a microphone at a bird sitting alone on a wire and caught the sound of the bird singing a song at a decibel so low that it would be impossible for another bird to hear it, meaning the bird was singing quietly to itself I love life

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This Red Fox/räv wasn’t nearly as excited to see me as I was to see her. Värmland, Sweden (March 9, 2025).

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

Hazel's moving her cubs again. She seems to be doing this a lot. Hopefully she hasn't moved them too far away. The cubs also don't seem thrilled about the move!

This camera only caught two of the cubs being moved but the other camera caught four.

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

“The word “monster” comes from the Latin “monstrum”, “that which is shown forth or revealed.” The same root also appears in the English word “demonstrate” and several less common words (such as “remonstrance”) that share the same sense of revealing, disclosing or displaying. In the original sense of the word, a monster is a revelation, something shown forth. This may seem worlds away from the usual modern meaning of the word “monster” - a strange, frightening, and supposedly mythical creature - but here, as elsewhere in the realm of monsters, appearances deceive. Certainly monsters are strange, at least to those raised in modern ways of approaching the world. […] The association between monsters and terror, too, has practical relevance, even when the creatures we call monsters fear us far more than we fear them. The myth, the terror and the strangeness all have their roots in the nature of the realm of monsters and the monstrous - a world of revelations where the hidden and the unknown show furtive glimpses of themselves. If we pay attention to them, monsters do have something to reveal. They show us the reality of the impossible, or of those things that we label impossible; they point out that the world we think we think we live in and the world we actually inhabit may not be the same place at all.”

— - John Michael Greer, “Monsters”

[lorxus-is-a-fox]

Reblog to unleash this cat on your mutuals

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reblog to bonk the person you reblogged it from with a hollow cardboard tube