As a researcher, analyzing data is one of my core responsibilities. While there are many tookits, libraries and languages dedicated to statistical analysis, I generally find myself using R. R does mostly what I want. But, sometimes it doesn’t. For example, I have a pretty specific workflow for building performant classifiers (especially the kind that […]
Month: October 2015
How You Can Use Success Spirals: A Tutorial
In my last post, I talked about one of the tricks I use to realize my ideals: success spirals. In this post, I’ll go into a bit more detail of how to create an effective success spiral. Success Spiral Summary To recap, a success spiral is a concrete instantiation of the principle of constant improvement: […]
Spiral Into Control: Using Success Spirals to Achieve Anything
In a previous post, I discussed how to realize your ideals with constant, incremental improvements. The key idea of that post was that drastic change, in theory, need not be drastic in practice. Rather, we can build up to drastic change from very modest beginnings. For example, if you want to exercise more, you can […]
Crises as catalysts for change
In the past few weeks, there have been a number of mass shootings in the US. In turn, gun control has again emerged as a central discussion point among politicians vying for the 2016 U.S. presidency. The arguments have been predictable: Many Republicans have been vocal that strict gun control regulations would not have prevented […]
Realizing Your Ideals with Constant, Incremental Improvements
We all have ideals of how we should spend our days, but few of us live up to those ideals. For example, if you’re anything like me, you probably want to wake up early, work with intense focus, meditate, exercise, cook a healthy meal, work on those personal projects you’ve been putting off for weeks (painting, learning an instrument, speaking a […]
On this blog
This blog will become great [1]. But this is only my first post, so I thought I’d cover some of my initial motivations for establishing a blog. In a future post, I hope to share more about how I started this blog, if any of you are interested in doing the same (short version: I’m using WordPress on […]