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
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
Yeah, I think that sums it up pretty well. You get so much reading thrown at you, you have to learn very quickly how to delegate or exchange tasks with others in your cohort, and you quickly learn how to read for what's important (and ignore the fluff).
Grad school can also be useful for developing a set of approaches for dealing with a new problem or puzzle, and for developing the toolkit for addressing that problem/puzzle.
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.
Brandon Hall
boosted
@bthall There's a fairly senior guy in my field who did something like this with some of his early (and very influential) work, and it was quite refreshing. The difference was that he'd learned how to do things better in the intervening years.
A quirk of the UK system is that I've had the luxury to satisfy that perfectionist streak a bit more than US colleagues pushing for tenure, and even then there are some papers where I would have done some stuff differently with what I now know.
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!
Brandon Hall
boosted
"Are you sure I can sign this entry in the notes as a medical student? Don't want people to, like, rip it out and disregard this advice about antibiotics"
"Why not! You're a valued member of the team!" 
😭
I'm a Christian philosopher that's studying economics.
I aspire to do weird but illuminative stuff w/ economics.
Joined Apr 2018
