Or: The post I needed to read right now In which I am unhappy about a piece of blogging advice and provide myself with what I need to hear instead. I’ve been feeling the nagging dissatisfaction of not having written a blog post in ages. When I think about it too much, a part ofContinueContinue reading “How to write perfectly adequate blogposts”
Category Archives: Reflections
Turns out: the outside world is real
You see, I don’t usually indulge in solipsism, but this time, I really wasn’t sure whether the outside world was real. I hadn’t checked in a while, after all. Recently, some of my friends (especially from outside London) seemed to think that not leaving one’s house even for a walk is taking the whole distancing thingContinueContinue reading “Turns out: the outside world is real”
Is Resilience a Paradigm?
My take on the decade-old discussion of what a paradigm is, and why that’s important (or not) to current debates in risk and disaster reduction.
Increase resilience to Global Catastrophic Risks? Or avoid them altogether?
After recently learning about two different paradigms (“risk” and “resilience”) for approaching threats, I am formulating my first thoughts on when we should use one, and when the other way of thinking.
Learning to ask action-relevant questions.
This is the first of several research skills I wish I’d known about before doing research myself. I hope this post will help others to not struggle in the same way!
Winter
The one where I take a step back, but ferociously so; again, and again – it feels like I’ve always been saying the same thing.
Anyway, this is what I think you should think about before the end of the year. Please do.
Scalable Randomness
I’ve recently been reading “The Black Swan” (by Nassim Nicholas Taleb) and “How to Predict Everything” (by William Poundstone), and was stunned by their overlap. Granted, interleaving your reading is probably not the best way to steer clear of confusion, but I would literally read a section on Zipf’s law in bed before sleeping toContinueContinue reading “Scalable Randomness”
The stories we make up about ourselves
What storytelling has to do with our own need for identity and narrative.
The bookshop as remedy
I have been spending a lot of time at Blackwell’s, recently. The bookshop as remedy, reading as a cure for the ailments of the mind. This accompanied by a desire to touch, smell, and possess books, which doesn’t mean that borrowing books off friends is unattractive, but, still, not quite the same. My kindle rests,ContinueContinue reading “The bookshop as remedy”
How good are we at predicting the future?
After getting a bit lost in the question of whether we should in principle be able to have a clue about future ramifications of our actions, I would like to turn back to questions of how well we’re actually doing so far. It looks like, for long-term projections, we are indeed pretty clueless. This document,ContinueContinue reading “How good are we at predicting the future?”
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