Lately, I have been fascinated by probability theory, statistics and anything in general which kind of pertains to economics, finance or real-life management of one’s resources or as it pertains to gambling. I have been looking to tickle this mind mainly through reading fantastic papers. Papers which do not alter fundamentals but provide a different way of seeing the world around us and are as self-complete as possible. More importantly, these papers need to give us wisdom instead of just preaching math and building theoretical frameworks.

Now, I wish I had the intelligence and exposure or the time to read one paper every-day but unfortunately that not being the case the many papers I have come to become fascinated with I hardly complete and most get shelved. I have taken a liking for this one right now after reading this blog-post trending at HN for example. There is yet another resource which is fascinating for its core idea: of curating fantastic papers from diverse areas of human study and letting the community annotate over them. In other things, I have also been lately really occupied with particular articles at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I have a friendship which means I can get nice PDF versions of these articles. Here are some which have been occupying me lately:

1. Computation Complexity & Computability and Complexity: After reading the aforementioned blog-post.

2. Philosophy of Statistics & Bayes’ Theorem: For aforementioned reasons.

3. Plotinus: Yours humbly from being an atheist is now slowly blooming to an agnostic. Another post begging to be writ. Details will come :)

4. Aristotle’s Logic & The Traditional Square of Opposition: This has been after a general reasoning class where we were learning syllogisms and I was particularly troubled by some aspects of the “some” quantifier. The past few days I missed writing posts during has largely been due to a contribution of not knowing what to write about and being excited about writing something on syllogisms. But I did not want to do this without prep, failed to prep and failed to write any posts as well. That was brutal but I do mean to complete it and have it up here in the near future. Hold tight.

5. The Problem of Induction: I have yet to read this but there are many places which lead me to this one. My own work with palm rejection, the above-mentioned article on the philosophy of statistics and the class on syllogism fueled my fascination with the idea of induction and with David Hume’s ideas in general.

See you tomorrow,
Avi.

P.S. Oh and here is a sweet song for you today.