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I had an interesting experience yesterday that made me realise that I have a sort of functioning immune system that lots of people IRL (including my parents, lol) don’t have. My wife asked casually, why are palms and soles lighter than skin everywhere else? So I started Googling https://t.co/i5naKy1qJs
The search results are obviously “contaminated”. I’m on a quest now, and nobody is going to give me exactly the information I want, exactly the way I want it. It’s too vague or too specific or entirely unrelated. (Also lol, y helo thar good ol’ Indian shadeism 👋🏾) https://t.co/csMWFXjWlG
So the next step, which is intuitive to me, is to start looking through Quora and Reddit Q&As. But I can’t assume that the most upvoted answers are necessarily correct. I’m just collecting data at this point. A lot of noise that’s not actually relevant (but always interesting) https://t.co/6fmud5iVdx
Over time you start looking for simple true/false statements that you can then attempt to verify: - melanin is a variable that affects skin color - stratum lucidum is an additional layer of skin on palms and soles You want to disentangle the chain of causes and effects https://t.co/k8cQmwHamv
@visakanv Do this long enough and you start correlating those with science pubs and start building a model about biochem & genetics. Then you make predictions about your skin mutations, and if you are like me, you narrow in on mutations that might cause your issues. https://t.co/5MofdbQQQy
Huh, and its really strange that I'm expecting lots of mutations in my serotonin, dopamine and melanin production associated genes. Its almost like I expect I have a genotype that predisposes for imflammation and brain growth changes.https://t.co/TnJai7OOts
The point of sharing this I guess is just to think out loud about my personal process of figuring things out. One of the reasons I think I wasn’t so great at school was that I don’t like working with received wisdom without verifying for myself that those models actually work
This is a thread about a book by a professor and teacher who struck me as incredibly sensitive to and supportive of this sort of curiosity-driven process https://t.co/nLobvvsWXV
this thread also makes me realise is that a big part of why I write is so I can think clearly without all of the inelegant clutter of (most) other people’s words, and models. It’s an act of compression. My goal is often to reproduce signal with less noise https://t.co/aPbOBPqysl
“Inelegant clutter” is also quite a semi-subjective thing - words are made up of other words, ideas of other ideas, models of other models. What is elegant to one person might be inscrutable to another https://t.co/oOaG1hD7vB
Interestingly though, (partially?) because we are social creatures using a communal language pool, personal sense-making can also benefit others. Which is a lot of the fun of Twitter https://t.co/aZ48FjJ6cI
Good way of putting it! You have to eliminate most of the hyperbolic reviews and look for clues in the genuine ones https://t.co/PeJcUAfdER
Googling well is a superpower https://t.co/3QxcHKwLZ0
Part of that is realising that Google can and has already been gamed (optimised for maximum mainstream engagement - a blandification is going on) and so you can’t entirely rely on front page results https://t.co/ZFw2pPoAHT
A dawning realisation derived from my obsessive bookmarking and note-taking: I don’t trust Google to consistently serve up content that’s thoughtful, nuanced, etc. It typically gives you something blandly palatable published on a major site. The good stuff is almost crowded out