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Reading A Conflict of Visions

I have just finished reading A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell.

While I didn't love the writing style, I think the central premise is brilliant: underlying the politics and ideologies of different people is a specific vision of human nature.

  • The Unconstrained Vision: Some believe that humans can truly understand the complexities of how communities work. They argue that "advanced" individuals can mold society for the greater good.

  • The Constrained Vision: Others feel that societies are far too complex to be fully understood and that people are primarily driven by their own interests. In this view, trying to reshape society according to our own ideals often ends in disaster. Furthermore, because human beings have conflicting desires, no "ideal" solution can ever be found—only trade-offs and compromises.

While the first group evaluates outcomes and calls for intervention when results aren't "perfect," the second group simply aspires to maintain a social process that produces a "good enough" result.

Scatter 3D notebook widget

For the longest time I have needed a program to plot scatter plots in 3D with the ability of selecting points using a lasso tool. For instance, I needed to select some individuals in a plot showing genetic distances in order to know its geographical origin.

During a long time we used CurlyWhirly, but that software is not maintained anymore, then we moved to glue, but I always found that software a little too cumbersome for my taste. Many times I've looked for alternatives, but I found none.

Alas, I was resigned, but last december I heard about anywidget in the Talk Python Podcast, a library created to ease the development of marimo and jupyter notebook widgets. I have never programmed anything serious in Javascript, but I thought that maybe with the help of an AI tool and anywidget I could try to build a 3D scatterplot notebook widget to my liking, and I did it!

You can download the widget from its GitHub repository or from PyPI. We have already used it in our research on the history of the tomato.

uv seminar

uv seminar announcement

Today we will talk about uv, virtual environments, package dependencies, reproducibility and Python project management.

All the seminar materials can be found in its GitHub repository.

The seminar will be held in IBMCP at UPV at the Ricardo Flores room and is open for anybody interested in Python that is not yet familiar with uv.

Reading Bernoulli's fallacy

I have started reading Bernoull's fallacy by Aubrey Clayton.

It has some very nice ideas about bayesian and frequentists statistics, but so far I think that the philosophy behind bayesian statistics is much better explained in Scientific reasoning Reasoning: The Bayesian Approach by Colin Howson. Moreover, I think it really overstates the benefit that ditching frequentist statistics would do to science. In my opinion the scientific enterprise is something much more complex than just statistic reasoning. For instance, in genetics we use statistics, but the role of this kind of inference is somewhat secondary.

uv seminar

I have prepared a seminar about Python project management with uv. My idea is to teach it to PhD student's and scientists that are already using Python, but that are not yet aware of the modern tooling that could help them with reproducibility and package management.

The seminar will be held in IBMCP at UPV on the 18th of november and will be open for anybody interested.