reasoning

Julia Galef uses pictures to explain Bayes' rule, then tells three personal stories showing how she applies it to improve her thinking.

David Graeber's Talks at Google presentation on his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, covering the history of debt, the myth of barter and the Jubilee tradition.

Audio of Charlie Munger's 1995 Harvard speech on the psychology of human misjudgment, laying out a framework of cognitive biases and mental models for decision making. It covers factors like incentives, social proof and denial.

Psychologist Barry Schwartz argues in this TED talk that abundant choice makes people more paralyzed and dissatisfied rather than freer and happier.

Daniel Kahneman's Talks at Google lecture on his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, covering System 1 and System 2 thinking and the psychology of judgment and decision making.

An RSA Animate adaptation of a Slavoj Zizek talk on charitable giving and ethical consumerism. It argues that buying products that bundle a charity donation can sustain the system that causes the problems.

Dan Pink's TED talk argues that traditional carrot-and-stick rewards often fail for creative work, drawing on the candle problem and social science research. He points to autonomy, mastery and purpose as better motivators.

Gabe Newell of Valve speaks at UT Austin's LBJ School on productivity, economics, political institutions and the future of corporations. He discusses in-game economies and how Valve organizes work.

In a TED talk, behavioral economist Dan Ariely uses visual illusions and his research to show that people are less rational in their decisions than they think. He covers defaults, such as organ donation rates, and how choice framing steers decisions.

A 1997 Noam Chomsky talk at Northeastern University about the gap between free-market rhetoric and practice. He argues that business relies heavily on state intervention, and he discusses trade, NAFTA and labour versus capital mobility.

In this TED talk, Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman distinguishes the experiencing self from the remembering self, using examples such as vacations and colonoscopies. He explains how the two perceive happiness differently and what that means for economics, policy and self-awareness.

A TED talk by entrepreneur Nick Hanauer arguing that decades of 'greed is good' economic theory drove inequality and instability. He proposes an economics built on reciprocity and cooperation.

Hans Rosling makes the case that the washing machine was the greatest invention of the industrial revolution. Using Gapminder graphics, he shows how electricity and economic growth free up time for reading and learning.

Malcolm Gladwell's TED talk on how Howard Moskowitz found that there is no single perfect spaghetti sauce. He draws a larger point about choice, preference and happiness.

A full upload of Alan Kay's 1987 talk, with demos of several Smalltalk-era software systems and ideas about visual, kinesthetic and symbolic reasoning. It includes a Smalltalk program written by a 12-year-old and footage of the Rand tablet.

A two-hour live stream in which Aaron Hsu explains the architecture, design history and aesthetic of Co-dfns, his parallel APL compiler. He walks through the code and the reasoning behind its dense style.

A 2007 Google Tech Talk in which Cliff Click of Azul Systems presents a lock-free concurrent hash table that scales to 768 CPUs. He explains why it is correct by reasoning in a different way than usual happens-before and memory-order arguments.

Peter Alvaro's Strange Loop 2015 talk argues that query languages let you state what you mean, and applies that to distributed programming. It covers Datalog, Dedalus and the Bloom lineage for reasoning about distributed systems.

David MacKay's 2007 Google Tech Talk presents Dasher, a text-entry system driven by continuous gestures and a language model, reaching about 35 words per minute with one finger and 25 hands-free. It explains the information-theory reasoning behind the design.

Rich Hickey, creator of Clojure and designer of Datomic, gives a JaxConf 2012 talk that takes apart traditional database architecture. He presents a different way to think about databases and explains the reasoning behind Datomic's fact-based design.

Chandler Carruth's CppCon 2016 talk tries to defuse the heated debate over undefined behavior in C and C++. He explains from the compiler writer's perspective why UB exists and how it enables optimization.

Devine Lu Linvega of Hundred Rabbits talks about low-power, offline computing, esoteric languages and the Uxn virtual machine, informed by years of sailing the Pacific. The talk frames computing sustainability through a permaculture lens.

Edward Kmett speaks at the Boston Haskell meetup about type classes and the design tradeoffs of global coherence compared with other approaches to implicit instances. It covers why uniqueness of instances matters for reasoning and refactoring.

Ivan Krstic's Black Hat talk on Apple platform security, including the Find My design that uses elliptic curve key diversification to locate offline devices privately. It also covers hardware features such as the T2 chip and secure boot hardening.

David Weston's BlueHat IL 2023 talk traces the evolution of Windows security and previews Windows 11 and hardware advances. It ends with upcoming changes such as Rust in the kernel and fonts, signed binaries and adminless Windows.

Julia Galef introduces the soldier versus scout metaphor for two approaches to thinking, using the Dreyfus Affair as the illustration. She argues the scout mindset leads to better judgment.

Andrej Karpathy's CVPR 2021 presentation on Tesla's Autopilot, covering its vision-based approach, sensor choices and the scale of Tesla's deep learning compute cluster. This upload is a lower-quality copy of the talk.

Rich Hickey presents an extensive introduction to Clojure at the Boston Lisp meeting, assuming prior Lisp knowledge. It covers the language's design decisions relative to other Lisps.

Scott Long of Netflix presents the architecture of the OpenConnect content delivery network at NYCBSDCon 2014. He explains why Netflix runs FreeBSD 10 on its appliances and what the future holds.