Ideas Worth Exploring

Optimization is about maximizing or minimizing something. The math behind how you do that has taught me some important life lessons, including: (Gradient descent) Incremental progress with regular course corrections will eventually get you where you want to go. (Soft constraints) Giving yourself some wiggle room can help you avoid black and white thinking. (Local minima) Sometimes things have to get worse before they get better. (Multi-objective optimization) Managing the tradeoffs between multiple conflicting goals can help you reach both goals better. (Overfitting) Optimizing too hard can actually make you worse off, and so it’s important to know when to quit. Links: Joggling: https://www.designreview.byu.edu/collections/being-the-best-in-the-world-is-easy Exchanging money for time: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cvDtmPNCyrkpg4d4F/units-of-exchangehttps://www.clearerthinking.org/tools/value-of-your-time-calculator Russian internet trolls: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_web_brigades 

I’ve been interested in investing recently, the idea that if you have money then you can use it to make more money. This is a really important topic that I wish my past self had understood better, and so I’m going to break the usual rule of only doing science so that I can dive into this other thing that interests me, which is figuring out what the evidence says is the best way to invest money.

If we want the globe to stop warming, then we need to get to net zero greenhouse gas emissions. Methods to reduce emissions include: renewable energy, electric vehicles, feeding seaweed to cows to stop them from burping so much, turning poop into jet fuel, and resurrecting the mammoths. We’re also going to cover what individual people can do to make the most difference in the fight against global warming. Also, here are just a couple of the sources I used while researching this:https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-how-land-use-drives-co2-emissions-around-the-world/ https://www.iea.org/energy-system/transport/electric-vehicles https://rmi.org/press-release/evs-to-surpass-two-thirds-of-global-car-sales-by-2030-putting-at-risk-nearly-half-of-oil-demand-new-research-finds/ https://www.lunduniversity.lu.se/article/four-lifestyle-choices-most-reduce-your-carbon-footprint https://clearpath.org/tech-101/steel-101/

Climate change will cause droughts, floods, heat waves, and might even make our vegetables less nutritious. In this episode we will talk about some of the consequences global warming will have on animals and humans, and how much of an impact we should expect. This is the second of a 3-part series on climate change. A couple sources:World Economic Forum data https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Quantifying_the_Impact_of_Climate_Change_on_Human_Health_2024.pdf IPCC Report on Extreme Weather Events https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_Chapter11.pdf TierZoo video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hNb0sD7bD8 Octopus blindness https://www.ucdavis.edu/blog/warming-ocean-could-harm-octopus-vision

Cow burps and car emissions are making the atmosphere heat up. This is the greenhouse effect, and it’s the same thing that turns your car into an inferno in the summer, with some nuance added. In this episode, we will discuss the physical science behind global warming. This will be the first of a 3-part series on climate change.