Jeff Giesea, reviewing Alison Espach’s The Wedding People, on periodic self-reckonings — what it looks like to accept a truth about yourself you’ve been avoiding. My mid-life has been a constant (sometimes unpleasant) process of coming face to face with all my insanity and shadow and somehow being ok with it. You need to come out to yourself right now — Jeff Giesea
Kurtis Hingl on AI enabling multiverse analysis of scientific papers in the (approaching?) post-PDF era. Beyond sampling and design-based uncertainty, there’s a third kind — the non-standard error, or what would have happened if a different researcher had made different defensible choices at each node of the analytical pipeline. Hingl proposes that AI can map the path-space cheaply enough to actually report it. Science is still persuasion — Kurtis Hingl
Hollis Robbins on living without voluntary mental imagery — about 2-4% of people are aphantasic, and recent data (Eker et al. 2024) suggests aphantasic students earn higher undergraduate grades than peers. ~60% still have visual dreams, which means the pathways are intact and what’s missing is voluntary control. I’m endlessly interested in this topic, because I’m mostly aphantasic, though as I’ve done more visualization work, it feels like it’s improved a little bit. I do wonder whether verbal or conceptual acuity is sort of a recompense. Aphantasia and Mental Modeling — Hollis Robbins
Among the people I interact with the self reported aphantasia seems much much higher probably because I have a biased sampling.
If you have aphantasia, how can you recognize anything? If someone asks you to find the green apple in a basket of fruit, why wouldn’t you pick the yellow banana?