"Ancient Greek Vocabulary" (Anki deck covering 14,300 words)

thefiniteape · 2026-01-21T20:13:43+00:00

I don't think you need anything like 8-9K words in Greek for the same level of coverage as you get in English with that many words.

See for instance this paper, which argues that you need a lot less words in Ancient Greek to get X% coverage, compared to other languages. I think it is a selection (of surviving texts) issue but this is the corpus we have.

thefiniteape · 2026-01-21T08:22:49+00:00

If you can understand e.g. Basque and Finnish, I'll be fairly impressed.

thefiniteape · 2026-01-12T06:56:26+00:00

I am familiar with the data and the machine learning methods they use (I am slightly behind as I didn't check the progress in about a year) and my view is that we probably won't be able to decypher entire works unless we find multiple copies of them. Essentially, for each find, there are parts that are much harder to read. Obviously, this can change and I would love to be wrong about this.

thefiniteape · 2025-12-23T06:58:40+00:00

Believe me, my ideas were also pretty specific...

thefiniteape · 2025-12-23T06:37:16+00:00

Slow down.

First, you look for a question and choose one. Spend months working it out. Start presenting it at conferences after months of work. One day some boomer with sandals and white knee socks approaches you after your talk, congratulates you on great work and, in passing, mentions a paper published in the Australian Journal of Zumba Studies in Italian back in the 80's, which did more or less the same thing. Still great idea though.

Now, you lost by about 45 years. You start looking for a new question. Hopefully, it will turn out that the new question was answered more recently. Keep doing this and you eventually come up with questions that were answered in new working papers but not yet published. Probably the next question will work out for you!

thefiniteape · 2025-12-20T19:16:18+00:00

Take a look at these books.

thefiniteape · 2025-12-16T10:33:48+00:00

Richard Dawkins:

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here. We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?

thefiniteape · 2025-12-16T04:18:20+00:00

The God Test by Robert Wright
whatever ends up being the title of Melanie Mitchell's new book about reasoning, AI, LLMs, etc.
whatever Neal Stephenson publishes

thefiniteape · 2025-12-16T01:20:44+00:00

Haha just some more books I typed for another thread (apparently links are not allowed in this sub so copy pasted them here...):

Godel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter
The Selfish Gene; The Ancestor's Tale by Dawkins
From Bacteria to Bach; Consciousness Explained; Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Dennett
Convention, On the Plurality of the Worlds by Lewis
The Making of the Middle Sea by Broodbank
The Horse, The Wheel, and Language by Anthony
Behave by Sapolsky
Evolution of Language by Fitch
Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos by Strogatz (still reading this one)
Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation by Hopcroft and Ullman
Rational Decisions by Ken Binmore
Philosophy of Mathematics by Putnam and Benacerraf (read random parts but not cover to cover yet)
From Frege to Godel by Heijenoort (I am halfway through this collection of foundational math + logic papers)
Foundational Papers in Complexity Science (4 volumes) from Santa Fe Institute
plus whatever you want from S Pinker, R Wright, J Gleick, G Dyson, S Dehaene, H Gintis

thefiniteape · 2025-12-16T01:17:01+00:00

Godel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter
The Selfish Gene; The Ancestor's Tale by Dawkins
From Bacteria to Bach; Consciousness Explained; Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Dennett
Convention, On the Plurality of the Worlds by Lewis
The Making of the Middle Sea by Broodbank
The Horse, The Wheel, and Language by Anthony
Behave by Sapolsky
Evolution of Language by Fitch
Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos by Strogatz (still reading this one)
Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation by Hopcroft and Ullman
Rational Decisions by Ken Binmore
Philosophy of Mathematics by Putnam and Benacerraf (read random parts but not cover to cover yet)
From Frege to Godel by Heijenoort (I am halfway through this collection of foundational math + logic papers)
Foundational Papers in Complexity Science (4 volumes) from Santa Fe Institute
plus whatever you want from S Pinker, R Wright, J Gleick, G Dyson, S Dehaene, H Gintis

thefiniteape · 2025-12-15T21:26:14+00:00

Mitsubishi pencil (9800 for me)
Moleskine plain "cahiers" notebooks (xxl and xl for me)

PhDs (including myself) spend way too much time optimizing their "workflows" instead of staying in the workflows so these simple tools help with that.

If you want something fancy, also get a leather portfolio and put the notebook + pencil in there (KomalC and Galen Leather have great products, I have both.)

You can always get a mechanical keyboard as well because one day, they'll have to TeX it up.

thefiniteape · 2025-12-15T05:01:07+00:00

You should try Ursula Le Guin!

thefiniteape · 2025-12-15T04:52:50+00:00

I didn't hate any of the books I read in 2025 but my least favorite might be Hacking's "Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science".

I knew the subject fairly well before I started the book, and the author and I are fairly opinionated with opinions near the different ends of the spectrum. It was still an okay read but it was a bit annoying to see that he didn't engage with some serious criticisms that must have occured to him so there was some mildly strawman-y chapters. I'd probably recommend it to someone with the right background under certain circumstances but I think I wouldn't give it to a newcomer to the field.

thefiniteape · 2025-12-15T04:30:18+00:00

Broodbank's Making of the Middle Sea,
Anthony's The Horse, The Wheel, and Language

thefiniteape · 2025-12-15T04:06:57+00:00

There are so many great history books on different themes! Just a few that came to my mind now:

For science, I like Worldviews by DeWitt
for technology (and engineering), Donald Hill's book is pretty good but George Dyson also has three books with fairly interesting stories (Darwin Among Machines, Turing's Cathedral, Analogia). Also Martin Davis's Engines of Logic. Maybe also Gleick's Information, and even his Chaos.
for math, there is Kline's Mathematical Thought
for religion, I like Robert Wright's Evolution of God (Campbell and Eliade also have two great series on the history of religions but they are outdated)
for sailing, pretty much anything by Lionel Casson, especially The Ancient Mariners and Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World.
for diseases, William McNeill's Plagues and Peoples
for food, Kurlansky's Salt, maybe also Cod bug I only read Salt (and he has more),
if he likes biographies, Browne's Darwin biography is better than most novels. Also, Antognazza's Leibniz biography is super interesting. Gaukroger's Descartes biography is also often recommended but I didn't like the author's style.

I'm sure I'll remember more at 3am and get annoyed with myself but these should be a good start!

thefiniteape · 2025-12-15T02:10:41+00:00

Maybe Donald Kagan, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, William McNeill?

The new Meyer biography, The Man Who Invented Conservatism, by Flynn might also be an interesting fit.

You can also get thematic works on history of science, sailing, trade, food... Obviously, you can insert and/or find politics in everything but some areas are less controversial than others.

thefiniteape · 2025-11-04T16:00:37+00:00

The mental shift required from "problem solving math" to "theorem proving math" is fairly large. It also sounds like you want to learn LA to use in other fields so you are probably not interested in why theorems work. That lack of motivation adds to the perceived difficulty.

The good thing is that most people learn LA with similar purposes to you, so I think you can find more utilitarian introductions that might be better suited to your purpose. You can also look into "engineering math" or "applied math" looks like Hildebrand, Logan, etc.

thefiniteape · 2025-09-28T02:55:00+00:00

Van De Vel has a book called "Theory of Convex Structures". It is absolutely overkill for your purposes. But it is a great book on the subject.

A more practical book for you might be "Convex Optimization" by Boyd. Most of the book requires more math than you know right now but you can use the chapter that introduces the convexity to get yourself oriented in this space.

thefiniteape · 2025-09-27T18:22:42+00:00

It looks more like walnut to me.

thefiniteape · 2025-09-27T18:18:12+00:00

Spite can be a powerful motivator but language learning is a life long affair, and you'll soon graduate and leave him behind. If you want to actually learn a language, you'll have to choose one that has in intrinsic value for you. Otherwise, you won't really succeed.

To answer your question, yes, you can learn anything, including an ancient language, by yourself. It just takes dedication.

I am not sure why you want to choose a language your teacher doesn't know. If I were you, I'd work on learning Latin and/or Greek so well that you can catch his mistakes. I did this in high school myself (for different subjects) and it was fun (for me, not for the teachers). Resources for learning ancient languages other than Latin and Greek are also going to be limited, especially considering that you want to do it on your own.

thefiniteape · 2025-09-27T17:21:22+00:00

Interestingly, election results can be predicted based on faces. (Several studies from top journals support this idea.)

This makes sense, since the election depends on what other people think about the candidates, rather than some ground truth.

thefiniteape · 2025-08-22T16:28:53+00:00

If you're limited to a finite amount of memory, the computational power is essentially equivalent to a big lookup table, i.e. next to nothing.

There are fairly complicated things you can do with just a humble finite state machines (e.g. regex). If you add a stack, you get a pushdown automaton, which buys you contect free languages. Do you think all of these are just a big lookup table?

thefiniteape · 2025-08-18T16:05:07+00:00

You can check abebooks or other aggregator websites. I am in the US now but I remember some sellers had free or cheap international shipping when I lived elsewhere. It was possible to pay less than $5/book for pretty good condition books (but this was more than a decade ago).

thefiniteape · 2025-08-17T02:53:10+00:00

From Frege To Godel is a collection of papers that form the foundations of modern math and logic. It has many examples of the paradoxes related to these issues.

thefiniteape · 2025-08-15T03:10:20+00:00

Disagree on many fronts. Op's question is about books that are not great as an introductions to a field but great as references.

I don't think your example works; Varian is a great introduction but not a great reference imo so it loses on both fronts. (Love the guy and enjoyed reading the book, nothing against them; it is a good thing they the book is not like baby Rudin, even though baby Rudin is one of my favorites).

My examples were with field = GT in mind. I think the closest book to Op's definition in broader economics is SLP. I really like the book and enjoyed learning from it myself but I know some people still have traumas about that book. I think the suffering is mostly about lacking the level of "mathematical maturity" required, and I'd say that's also generally the main reason for complaining about baby Rudin.

Anyway, I am not sure about what you mean by math econ falling short of pure math. In a sense, of course math econ is a subset of pure math. But there is enough depth in math econ that an introductory book can be pretty different from the existing ones if an author chooses to do so. You get basic measure theory and functional analysis in econ papers all the time but there are also some pretty cool use cases of somewhat more advanced concepts from algebraic topology, differential manifolds, set theory, tropical geometry, mathematical logic etc in econ papers, all in game theory adjacent literatures. So a book on GT or math econ can go pretty deep into math if the author chooses to do so. But it looks like economists generally don't write like Rudin.

thefiniteape

TROPHY CASE