Brandon Hall @bthall@scholar.social
I'm a Christian philosopher that's studying economics.
I aspire to do weird but illuminative stuff w/ economics.
Joined Apr 2018
@gzt Please mention it here if you find something you like for variable labels.
Brandon Hall
boosted
I've rediscovered my love of fake (and funny) Confucius sayings. 😂
I love how simultaneously irreverent and reverent it is towards #philosophy to attribute funny sayings to philosophers.
Brandon Hall
boosted
my two big tips for PhD students:
1. be very skeptical of doing anything that's not putting a roof over your head or going in your dissertation.
2. try to make it so what's paying you is also going into your dissertation.
3. BONUS TIP: it helps if your ideas work, but if they don't, fail quickly. don't fail slowly.
Brandon Hall
boosted
latex, code, academia
Algorithms-in-maths people: Is there a good way of replacing lines 7-11 in attached image? I want to store all y:=f(x) that satisfy some property over all x in X, but also for each y found, the largest value of g(x). Lines 7-11 seem excessively obvious and distracting
latex, code, academia
@w_pettersson
Wow, I hadn't seen Latex used like this before! Very cool!
@thatguyoverthere
Ah yes, that's kinda like the practice of rubber duck debugging in the programming world, which takes it to a real extreme: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging
Brandon Hall
boosted
I made a simple prototype of my idea for a skateboarding trick logging system using a free mobile app that lets you setup databases. After trying to use it a bit, I've figured out that my idea for a web app that does the same thing would be very tedious to use without a lot of additional designing and engineering (learning on my part) in its current, rudimentary form. Yay for less expensive (in terms of time and effort) methods of testing ideas! I'll write up my learnings soon.
It's funny how finally articulating your question(s) to an expert, especially with the hope of them helping you with it, leads you to figure out a likely solution(s).
I sent a question to some experts in quant and right as/after I hit the send button I got what feels like the solution. Don't worry, I wrote it down! (Here in the EDIT section, if you're curious: https://reddit.com/r/statistics/comments/ooofof/weekly_rstatistics_discussion_what_problems/h6a8p1d)
Brandon Hall
boosted
@bthall The thing about grad school is that the process that for me helped me learn how to think more critically was
1. Reading complex texts everyday
2. Writing weekly analyses and arguments based on those texts
3. Getting those analyses ripped to shreds, and being pushed to think and go deeper
4. Having my hubris destroyed (thank God)
Grad school is just doing those things all the time hyper-intensively and in a guided fashion BUT grad school isn't the only way to do those things.
For those of you that have had that experience or perceived it in others, please let me know and give me a description of it.
I've heard things about grad school that suggest to me that I might not want to go through the experience (highly political and stressful), but I'm quite interested in developing/acquiring for myself what I have perceived in others who have gone through it.
From talking with professors and people who went to grad school (mostly PhDs, I think), my impression has been that in grad school / while pursuing their PhDs, beyond acquiring more knowledge about their field, they learned/developed an interesting sense of thinking about problems and a mindset or orientation towards addressing them that I haven't quite found among people that haven't gone through the grad school / PhD process.
I critiqued my past papers on social media — here’s what I learnt
Brandon Hall
boosted
I think I need to have more fun, especially to do more unstructured play. For work I've been grinding through assignments for months, and in my free time I've mostly been doing things that have some sort of objective behind them. And this is exhausting and stressful.
@Giulia
The second session sounds cool! Any idea if the sessions are recorded and will be publicly viewable?
Do any of you have resources you'd recommend for learning about how to design digital user interfaces for data entry / collection in the field?
I've been reading PDFs of #statistics #books on my e-reader, which is only grayscale. Lots of figures are using color to let the reader differentiate between distributions and data points, which doesn't help me at all due to the grayscaling. But I'm kinda more amused by the process of inferring which things are which than I should be. 😂
Do any of you have papers that you recommend about how to go about choosing a name for a concept you've come up with?
I have gone through about seven name ideas so far and each one is well-established but for a significantly different meaning.
Brandon Hall
boosted
COVID-19 Isn't Crashing the Internet ... Yet
https://www.pcmag.com/news/covid-19-isnt-crashing-the-internet-yet
@gzt
I agree. (And I think that I count as a creationist?)
@Cyborgneticz
Lmao one of my college friends just sent me a photo from my university. Apparently I wrote my name on a whiteboard in the tutoring center over a year ago and no one's erased it yet!
I'm a Christian philosopher that's studying economics.
I aspire to do weird but illuminative stuff w/ economics.
Joined Apr 2018
