Following in last year’s “tradition”, here is my annual roundup of some of the most interesting things I came across in 2018.

3Blue1Brown’s Video on the Uncertainty Principle

3Blue1Brown’s channel is full of high quality content, and just like last year, one of his videos this year makes it onto my list again. I have known about both the uncertainty principle and the Fourier transform prior to this video, but it never occurred to me that the two are connected. It was quite eye opening for me to see the fundamental nature of the uncertainty principle illustrated as an equivalence to the frequency and time domains of the Fourier transform. I’ve always found it amazing whenever two seemingly unrelated concepts turn out to have an intricate connection between them. At the same time, this video really showed the lack of depth to my understanding of both of these topics.

What Colour Are Your Bits?

This is quite an old post, from 2004, that has become a classic in the computer science crowd. I came across it just this past year, and found it quite interesting. The main post is very thought provoking, and touched on a lot of things that I’ve thought about myself in the past. The most memorable thing about this post however, was a more recent comment on it by psychoslave, from 2011:

Now to my mind, information is an action, not some static states. In-form-ation, the action of mapping a form with something which is not in it.

I’ve always viewed information, fundamentally, as a particular arrangement of bits (or some equivalents). But after reading this comment, and thinking about it some more, I found that to be insufficient. The raw binary data of a JPEG image is incomprehensible unless one knows about the context around it, i.e. the JPEG format specifications. In fact, the same set of bits can mean completely different things (e.g. a byte can be interpreted as an integer or as an ASCII encoded string character) depending on the context, or the “action of mapping the form” as psychoslave put it. In a sense, information is less about the specific set of bits that encode it, but more about how the meaning is mapped to the bits from the context.

Carnivore Diet Experiment

I’ve always been skeptical of anything related to nutrition, more so than about most other topics. This blog post about the author’s experiment on his own diet pushed my skepticism about nutrition even higher. It was pretty inconceivable to me that an all-meat diet could work, as I had thought that there must be something missing without vegetables. While this is true for typical meats, I underestimated (or rather, simply didn’t know) how many of these nutrients can be made up by eating offal, such as liver. On a related note, this piece from Grub Street is one of the better articles about nutrition that I’ve come across in 2018.

Scott Aaronson’s Post About Common Knowledge

I discovered this piece on Scott’s blog in 2018. I had read a bit about the concept of common knowledge (in the philosophical sense) before, but this post showed some more ways to apply the concept which are quite cool. Two notable examples stand out: applying the common knowledge concept to dating, and to how people behave under an oppressive regime. The latter was particularly intriguing to me, because I had been thinking a lot about how a moral person should act under extreme social pressure to conform to some immoral behavior. I found that viewing this with the lens of common knowledge helped with identifying (in a more technical way) the sources of the pressure against a person to act morally in these situations.

The Pike and Church Committees

Reading about the events surrounding these two committees in 1975 really surprised me on two fronts. One is the fact that I had not known about them until recently. This is probably in part due to my lack of knowledge of modern US political history. The other is that given the findings of these committees from the 1970s, people still seemed to have been surprised by the Snowden disclosures in 2013. Project SHAMROCK for example, which was exposed in 1975, is eerily similar to the PRISM program disclosed by Snowden 5 years ago. To me, even just given the little we do know about this topic from history, we should assume that no scale of government surveillance is beyond the realm of possibilities.

What Bodies Think About

I saw this video near the end of the year, when CRISPR was getting some attention in the media. Our level of ignorance about the basic biological processes that govern how our bodies function continue to astound me. This is a field where I feel the strongest sense of “the more you know, the more you realize how much you don’t know”. Maybe I’m just on the downhill part of the Dunning-Kruger effect curve, descending into the valley of ignorance.

When working with these biological processes (such as CRISPR), on one hand we should be careful when messing with things we don’t really understand, in case of devastating unintended consequences. On the other hand, the possibilities seem endless the more we discover, so the allure of fast-moving experimentation is more enticing than ever. Like most things, the challenge is getting the right balance.