doneata

Maybe relevant, from Conversations with Tyler (Ep. 184, with David Bentley Hart):

  COWEN: Let’s say Poland, Slovenia, Czechia, which have a lot of Catholicism in their backgrounds — they seem to be converging on Western norms, living standards much more than, say, the EU members to the East: Bulgaria, Romania.

  HART: Well, they had certain advantages to begin with, too, but better relations. Again, I don’t think it has any particular... To be honest, Polish Catholicism is basically culturally very much like Slavic Orthodoxy. There, you’re going to find that culturally, Catholicism and Orthodoxy are closer to one another in many ways than Catholicism in the East is with Catholicism in the West.

  Trying to draw causal ties between what are very complex social histories, I just think is a mistake. There’s no way of saying one way or the other. Greek democracy flourished in the modern age for a while after Greek independence in the early 19th century, and Greece remains Orthodox, too. Even more than Poland, it is committed to a set of real democratic norms. In Poland, there are stronger reactionary forces at present than there are in Greece.

and also from Ep. 192, with Jacob Mikanowski:

  MIKANOWSKI: [...] I think that idea of an Orthodox disease is maybe a figment of geography more than a deeply cultural matrix that we think. I’m not — I think we could be optimistic about Croatia and Romania simultaneously. Bulgaria maybe too. I’m not sure that I believe in a kind of Orthodox curse. I think it has more to do with how things shook up internally in former Yugoslavia and where those countries are in relationship to that industrial core of Germany, Austria, Switzerland.

I see that Matthias has responded and issued an apology on his website: https://felleisen.org/matthias/Thoughts/Apology.html

Here are video recordings of similar material, but taught at Google in 2009 by Sussman and Hanson:

https://archive.org/details/adventures-in-advanced-symbolic-...

You might be also interested in checking the post "The Best Textbooks on Every Subject" from LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xg3hXCYQPJkwHyik2/the-best-t... For each topic they look at at least three alternatives and provide a brief argument for their recommendation.

This paper, "Programming by Numbers: A Programming Method for Novices", presents a recipe of how to design recursive functions:

https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/254242/1/p_by_numbers.pdf

And the "The Little Schemer" book has a series of exercises that expose recursive thinking:

https://www.amazon.com/Little-Schemer-Daniel-P-Friedman/dp/0...

Hope this helps!

Stephen Dolan's pearl "Fun with semirings" might be relevant:

http://stedolan.net/research/semirings.pdf

But I would also like to know what other resources Neel has to recommend.

What is the current state of collaborating on Anki decks? I see there is the CrowdAnki plug-in – this exports decks to a JSON file, which can be version controlled and uploaded to Github. But how well does this work in practice? I feel it would be nice to have a more integrated way of collaborating on decks.

Sort of related, but on a more humorous note, a short film about a man who has only 1500 words left to live:

https://www.shortoftheweek.com/2016/05/25/1500-words/

This is a set of lecture notes compiled for a third-year computer science course at the University of Nottingham. At a quick glance they seem surprisingly crisp and readable despite being hand-written and rather succinct. Probably a more thorough text on the matter is "Semantics with Applications: A Formal Introduction" [1]. Does anyone have any other recommendations?

[1] http://www.dis.uniroma1.it/~degiacom/CogRobCourse01/NielsonN...

Hello! A more general question: What are some of your favourite resources (books, articles, conferences) on information visualization? I'm familiar with the works of Tufte and Cleveland, but I was curious if you have any other recommendations. Thanks!

> The real question is what the goal is and whether user are getting more value from more likes versus fewer favorites.

I agree; the goal should be indeed improving the net positive contributions to people’s lives. I was happy to find out that there is some work directed at designing products for human values; see Tristan Harris's project, "Time Well Spent":

http://timewellspent.io

You can find the videos of the Programming Languages class together with the slides and handouts here:

http://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/cse341/13sp/