Short article today, in part because I spent so much time on the past few, but also because I've spent a lot of time on some other drafts that I hope to finish in the next month or two.

Tag index for Org mode blog

The static generation behind Entropic Thoughts broke a while back, and I had to replace explicit recursion with an iterative loop. Yes, apparently I have written that many articles now.

Full article (1–3 minute read): Tag index for Org mode blog

Flashcard of the week

Darwin! He couldn't literally observe the distant past when he worked on the theory of evolution, but he figured out some ways he could reason about what must have happened in the past based on how things look today. This question concerns one of those methods, namely discordance.

How does historical inference based on discordance work?

Although it's part of being able to answer the flashcard, I think a useful hint is that "discordance" in this context means that there is something that doesn't fit in with the rest of the system. There's some part of the system that seems useless, or like it actively works against the rest of the system.

It's another useful hint that Darwin assumes the system itself tries to optimise away discordant parts, either because they work against the system, or because they require energy that could be put to better use for more utilitous parts of the system. (In software terms, useless code still consumes some engineer-minutes every now and then, so there's pressure to remove it.)

If there is a part of the system that fulfills no discernable utility, then one can reason that the system or the environment must have undergone a recent change that produced that part as residue.

We might not know exactly what events occurred in the past, but discordance gives us a hint at what sort of events there may have been.

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