Onryx

Smart people, meaningful conversations, curated lectures

[Onryx @onryxxx]

@0xFinrex formula super! thx

[Onryx @onryxxx]

@FinSci thanks!

[Onryx @onryxxx]

@baronbags thx mann

[Onryx @onryxxx]

@0_xSan You've piqued my interest, I'll take a look at it

[Onryx @onryxxx]

@itsak1to That's definitely the most useful thing I've heard today

[Onryx @onryxxx]

@CortexaX I'll listen to this in the background

[Onryx @onryxxx]

@carm1nee I'd rather watch this than sit there mindlessly scrolling through TikTok

[Onryx @onryxxx]

@0xVenix That tweet sounds really interesting

I'll check it out tonight and see if it's really true

[Onryx @onryxxx]

In 1995, she had three hours a week and a growing fear that she wouldn’t have time to discover anything. In 2024, she received the Kavli Prize for this discovery.

So she stops looking for volunteers and climbs into the machine herself.

Nancy Kanwisher used her own brain as the subject. In 1997 she published the paper identifying the fusiform face area, a patch of cortex that fires for faces and stays quiet for almost everything else. Not for objects. Not for houses. Faces.

That one result cracked the field open. After it came regions for places, for bodies, for pitch, for the sound of speech, for the meaning of a sentence, and one, found by her own former student, that activates when you think about what someone else is thinking.

You are using one of them right now to read this line, and it does almost nothing else.

In 2024 she received the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience for it.

There is also a video where she decides that hair is getting in the way of teaching this, has a graduate student shave her bald, and lets them draw the cortex directly onto her scalp in colour. Her comment on it was that it grows back.

The entire MIT course is free. 9.13, The Human Brain, filmed in spring 2019. Every lecture, the slides, the reading list, the assignments. No login, no cohort, no waitlist.

She spends the first lecture on a question that sounds philosophical until she starts showing scans: is the mind one general-purpose machine, or a collection of specialised parts that were never designed to agree with each other.

Then she shows you the parts.

What it costs you is the rest of your life quietly knowing that the sense of being one single person in there is something your brain assembles, not something it starts with.

[Onryx @onryxxx]

@m444k_ Probability theory is an interesting subject

[Onryx @onryxxx]

@isssa0x Only 80 minutes, I'll save this

[Onryx @onryxxx]

@vmrmax exectlyy

[Onryx @onryxxx]

Yale, spring 2008. A standard undergraduate finance course, and halfway through the semester its subject matter stopped being theoretical. Bear Stearns did not go bankrupt. It was sold to JPMorgan in an emergency deal backed by the Federal Reserve, in March, mid semester.

Shiller kept to the syllabus and pulled the collapse into the lectures as it happened.

The man teaching it was not a neutral observer.

In March 2000 he published a book arguing that the stock market had become a bubble. The Nasdaq peaked that same month and then fell by more than 80 percent over the next two years.

In 2005 he put out a second edition warning about American housing. He showed that in some areas median home prices had reached six to nine times median income, far above anything in the historical record. Prices peaked in 2006.

So the course you are watching is a man being right for the second time, on camera, while it happens.

Then look at who walked into that classroom that spring.

Carl Icahn. Stephen Schwarzman. David Swensen, who ran Yale's endowment and had taken it from about a billion dollars to twenty three billion. And Larry Summers, who closed the semester with two lectures on responding to a financial crisis, delivered while the financial crisis was still unfolding.

Nobody in that room was speaking with hindsight. They did not have any yet.

What the course actually teaches is narrower and more useful than a crisis autopsy. It is about why prices move far more than the underlying facts justify, why that gap is not noise, and why the people inside a bubble are not being stupid.

Five years later Shiller received the Nobel for exactly this work.

He shared it with Eugene Fama, whose theory holds that the bubbles Shiller spent his career documenting cannot reliably be spotted at all. The same committee, the same year, gave the prize to both sides of the argument.

All 26 lectures are free. Open Yale Courses hosts the video, the audio, full transcripts, the syllabus, the reading list and the actual exams with solutions. No login, no cohort, no waitlist.

What it costs you is watching someone who had already called two bubbles explain, in real time, why the next one always looks different from the inside.

[Onryx @onryxxx]

@0_xSan Since 1984, he's definitely had experience in this

[Onryx @onryxxx]

@0_xSan I'm definitely going to need this formula later on

[Onryx @onryxxx]

@Neighboritto Thanks for the interesting info

[Onryx @onryxxx]

@0xkumaa thannks ma

[Onryx @onryxxx]

@0xWifter I've already saved this

[Onryx @onryxxx]

@0xVenix I don't even know what to say... thx for the incredibly helpful lecture