Reading list April 2020

Here’s my reading list collection for April 2020. I found lots of those resources already some while ago. Some of them, I only scanned through and read on particular sections. It gives some kind of relief writing noteworthy links and thoughts down and I will definitely look back at several of them when my understanding of the topics changed.

The Courage To Be Disliked: How to free yourself, change your life and achieve real happiness This sokrates-style dialogue introduced me to ideas of the Psychology of Adler quite in a moment of life where I also heard of it from other sources (see e.g. Man’s Search for Meaning). Quite inspiring and true in a lot of situations in life, but its ideas of dealing with trauma is quite extreme and might only apply for treated situations in times in which you need to look forward again.
Man's Search for Meaning How a psychologist from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society dealt with the experience in concentration camps. For finding purpose and strength in times of great dispair.
Aspects of Chaitin's Omega Since I have been working with a professor for computational mathematics and encountered introductionary topics of theoretical computer science and computability once more after my undergraduate studies, I try to follow some of the scientific content of that research field from time to time. Especially because it is one of several fields of which I still have huge difficulties in grasping its findings. Chaitin’s Omega is about the thought experiment of counting the probability of a turing machine halting at random input .. roughly speaking. And the aftermath of that thoughts developed into a complex mathematical field which seems to be highly philosophically inspiring.
An Intuitive Explanation of Solomonoff Induction This was pretty much the first easy-to-read article I encountered when starting reading on Solomonoff Induction. Highly inspirational and interesting if one might want to get deeper into how computational mathematics and probability theory tackle the idea of Artificial General Intelligence.
Solomonoff Induction During my wandering searches on various topics, I stumbled over this wonderful master thesis of Shane Legg. He conducted his PhD later under Prof. Marcus Hutter, titled ‘Machine Super Intelligence’. The work is definitely worth a read.
Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance As the corona pandemic is currently the topic number one, I thought I also add this influential blog post titled ‘The Hammer and the Dance’. It is so popular, it got cited in an internal confidential federal letter in Germany. And it summarizes some thoughts and numbers about our future scenarios pretty well.