2024-09-28 Links Digest

Published: 2024-09-28

Tagged: links-digest

• Code to Read When Learning Go
  • 2013 article that points to a few increasingly complex Go projects. I've given Pat a reading-through and I'm crunching through, with much joy, through codesearch. Especially fun was the linked post by Russ Cox outlining how codesearch works, which simply brims with the pleasure of finding an elegant solution.
• Things You're Allowed to Do
  • A bullet list of actions you can take that for some reasons and for many people feel outside the realm of possibility. "Hire a researcher", "run surveys", "ignore the job application and reach out to someone directly." The advice there is interesting, but the nebulous shape it gestures towards is even more worthy of attention: have you truly and fairly considered the options you have?
• REVIEW: Sick Societies, by Robert B. Edgerton
  • I abhor the myth of the noble savage and, as punishment for that, I notice it rearing its ugly head everywhere around me. This review describes primitive practices that had me shaking my head in wonder--at their ingenuity--and in disgust--at the horrible suffering they caused. But more importantly, taken together, they put forth the question of: "How would I know which Chesterton's fences to knock over?"
• How to Fix DEI
  • Rachel Kleinfeld in a calm voice describes the utter failure of DEI: "But a serious 2009 review by Elizabeth Paluck and Donald Green that looked at 985 studies of antibias intervention found few that even met the methodological criteria for good evaluations. In 2021 they updated their review, adding two additional co-authors and looking at 418 more studies. They found unclear impact because of obvious methodological failures, along with serious concerns about publication bias and failure to publicly share data, which often hides researcher bias." What Kleinfeld only briefly touches on, indirectly, is the indignity of being subjected to dubious & manipulative DEI trainings.
• Seriously Bright Light vs. Winter Blahs
  • Around January each year, I feel like I'm running on vapors. Maybe it's spending more time indoors. But if it's a lack of light then I'm taking some pointers from this post and building myself a light that outputs at least 20,000 lumens in my small office space. Follow-on paper about effectiveness of this intervention.