Hi, I'm Owen Hsiao (蕭為謙).
I spent several years as a software developer, then quit to travel. Eastern Europe, Turkey, China, Japan, Southeast Asia. I usually stay a while in one place rather than pass through, because what I want to see is how people actually live.
Those years taught me something: a lot of what I took for common sense turned out to be local habit. That didn't make me a relativist. It made me want to work out which things are actually universal.
What I put here is the stuff I'm still trying to understand: statistical fallacies, cognitive bias, how memory and learning actually work, the mathematics behind twelve-tone equal temperament, and occasionally a small tool I built. Writing is how I think things through. Most of these pieces started before I had an answer.
Everything I've written is listed below, most recent first.
