EnderViaAnsible

I think part of the problem is that Holmes's voice sounded artificial. To be effective, generally speaking, you would imagine the voice couldn't sound like you were trying to speak with a deep voice. (But surely studies have been done on this. Does it matter?)

But I agree with you. I've always "dressed up" in work situations, for example, because people respond more positively to me when I look sharp.

I think it witheringly stupid that people would assess my competence based on something so tangential, but if they are going to have a prejudice, why shouldn't I make it a prejudice in my favor (by dressing well instead of whatever I want to wear)?

Short men should be wearing hidden heel shoes, too. Those inches are worth a lot more money than the shoes are. Etc.

I'd actually be really interested to know what causes discrepancies in subject matter authorship in Wikipedia.

Physics, for example, is rife with very thorough articles, many of which are written for a graduate level. (Not everything is right everywhere, but a surprising amount for the volume.) Lots and lots of thoroughly explained equations.

Computer science is also very well documented, with numerous examples.

Materials science is very poor though, and with biology it seems to depend. Evolutionary theory seems popular but detailed taxonomy entries do not.

I'm curious why this is. Do professionals or enthusiasts in different fields really have such gaps in their willingness to contribute? In computer science, open source software could provide some prior art to convince people that Wikipedia is worth contributing to, but what about the rest?

I'm glad to hear of this class. I think I'll take it in order to see if I can learn some things I didn't know.

That said, the article is very poorly written. The author appears to not have a good understanding of what constitutes standards of proof in the social sciences, and in what way studies in social sciences ought to be spoken about.

(For example, they refer to a landmark Princeton study that "proved" money doesn't equal happiness, then states that some later studies with a different demographic "disproved" this.

But the first study did not prove anything by most meanings of the word, nor did the second disprove it. They provided evidence, suggested conclusions, invited interpretation...etc. You can't prove lasting things about changing statistical aggregates, nor prove things about individuals based on group statistics. That is not how statistics works.)

Then there is the cheesy bit where they show themselves "scoring points" on a professor who "concedes" that a car could be an experience, if you can focus on the experience of driving it...but frankly she's gently correcting them, not conceding a point. (Note that these scare quotes are my interpretation; they are not said in the article.)

I do think in general that I don't like this folksy let's-pretend-the-journo-knows-nothing-because-some-readers-won't style. Perhaps it's an imperfection of mine rather than the author's.

I'd rather they just tell me what they know or found out, or quote the authority, because I don't find the fact that they had a conversation with the authority human-interesting. (That is, I think they're angling for a human interest style in this sort of piece, but there is nothing of human interest in showing me you had a conversation with a person.)

I'm afraid I must strongly disagree with your comment, or at least your conclusion.

The existence of pain itself is predicated on its accurate coupling to injury, since the purpose of pain is inhibitory: this hurts, so stop doing it, [because tissue is injured], and it must not continue to be injured.

There are of course some counterexamples where this line of thinking fails: pain localized to previously amputated limbs comes to mind.

But overall I can think of very few instances where this is true. The magnitude of pain may or may not be proportional; the location may or may not be correct (as in referred pain); but in the vast majority of cases that can I bring to mind, pain very much does indicate tissue damage.

(And the biopsychosocial model of pain doesn't change that! The brain, after all, is tissue.)

He's also a double non-sequiter in most games he's modded into. Not only are there no trains, there are no trains with faces.

He stands out instantly as out of place in a way that some other in-jokes might not. Hank Hill might not look super weird in Left 4 Dead; presumably a number of middle-aged Southern men with an avid interest in propane were caught in the zombie apocalypse.

Because of this, it's funny even if you don't know who Thomas the Tank is. I think this is part of the reason for Shrek memes persisting as well (in addition to Shrek's extremely dedicated fanbase).

I think nearly all of us that aren't secretly abusing medication feel that ambivalence.

For me and I assume for others, it is not a fully adequate treatment. Some symptoms it fixes, some it helps with, some it does nothing for, some it actually makes worse. (In particular, impulsivity and inability to task switch accurately.)

Then there are the side effects, and the comedowns after tolerance builds.

Nevertheless you must still learn coping skills, still pursue other treatment (exercise, decent diet, sleep, CBT if needed), still struggle as the square peg.

I have used medication for roughly 5 years ish of 30 some years of life, intermittently. I'd say taking it is better treatment than not, but honestly, like you, I feel a deep ambivalence towards it. (Even resentment, sometimes.)

ADHD is objectively a bundle of true deficits, not just a set of traits society frowns on. Certainly these deficits weren't as much of a disadvantage in early human evolution, but if you can create metrics and show that people with ADHD perform worse at some generic tasks vs. average human beings-- and you can, we have-- this is not just a world that has been created that is inhospitable to them.

The ugly thing I've found, which accords with what you have said here, is that the best treatment for me is as many hours of sunshine as possible and several hours of vigorous exercise a day. (Thanks for teaching that, Marine Corps.)

But of course there are very few jobs with security, brain exercise, and mobility that give me this, and essentially no jobs that are compatible with it (that it is, where I could take this time off per day and still retain a job).

So of course I use medication and stick with jobs that drive me nuts, jobs that are terrible for me but pay well. I feel for the ADHD people who weren't gifted as decent a brain as mine, as if it weren't for that I doubt my employers would have been as indulgent of my other flaws from ADHD.

I think I'd add that my concerns aren't just, or even primarily, that they are trying to do something nefarious.

Rather, I tend to view issues as having a certain amount of public mindshare, and the success or failure of initial attempts at a solution tend to have an outsized influence on public willingness to assign resources to a problem.

So I think that if this is a poorly implemented solution, and fails, we may not try again for some time, even if the actual idea is perfectly workable. Since I also agree that this short term...uh...ism...is a genuine problem, I would very much like to see a successful solution to the trouble.

And I do mean the traditional public: this problem of poor implementation scuttling perfectly good ideas also afflicts the efforts of for profit corporations as much as it does democratically controlled public servants or charitably beholden non-profits.

I don't blame our OP for wanting more information. Certainly anything trumpeting the zeitgeist or offering a suspiciously tuned Worry De Jour should be evaluated carefully. (That is, it's obvious that "we want to fix short term ism in the stock market" will be a popular and marketable idea, whether that is the intention/actual end result or not.)

Even in the parts you've quoted, the language seems very careful.

They'll "ask" businesses not to give huge executive bonuses, but asking is free and non-binding. A large portion of the American public has been "asking" for this for a long time. Is the problem really that no one has asked?

They'll require "more information" about key milestones and plans for investors, which sure, that's nice for investors, or will be if it's more information than is usually given by CEOs to a board, which I doubt. (Investors already demand to know what the plan is, and even startups usually have plans for several years out even if they're goals more than plans.)

But is that actually the problem that causes short term ism? Are we insinuating that investors love long term investments and the only reason they don't make them is because CEOs don't tell them enough?

Etc. Now, maybe these worries are invalid, and the actual charter does actually prescribe effective regulations to solicit the desired behavior.

But to confirm that, we will need more information than the vague assertions provided in the article. Which is why our OP was trying to investigate the source documents.

(Also, doesn't it seem odd that a medium length article about an exchange's sole reason for existence contains almost no information about how that exchange intends to achieve the reasons for which if exists? Just assertions that it will do so with all language carefully qualified?)

The crux of it, I'd say, is that it ought to be regulated as a medical device, and the manufacturer ought to be required to prove it is safe. If it leaves any form of residue or serves a medical purpose in using it on a medical device, it ought to be regulated in the same way. (Comet can't be sold as an insulin needle cleaner, either.)

Not that medical devices aren't themselves the Wild West. Hip replacements? We used those without testing for decades. CPAP? Technically only available by prescription, but go on eBay and you can order what you like.

Our regulatory authorities in the U.S. are a real mess. And while I believe we can trust Americans not to poop where they sleep (i.e. knowingly sell lead contaminated products to their neighbors), it makes no difference if our addiction to cheap Asian imports means we get products from people who don't feel much distress if someone in a faraway country gets sick (and can't be arrested for making them sick, either, since there functionally no truly international law enforcement).

They also seem to miss a fairly obvious reason for the fearsome but humorous rabbits and snails:

Farmers, as most monks were, do not get on horseback and fight dragons but instead get on their knees and wage war with small rodents and snails that eat the fruits of their garden.

It's self deprecation. In annals recounting heroic deeds and legends, we have monks illustrating their own epic battles (and defeats) at the hands of the dastardly hares. Those fruit stealing @#$%s.

It double as a counterpoint to the notion of saintly innocent white bunnies, too.

"Christ bunnies me arse, little buggers will find themselves on their own cross if I catch them in me cloves again."

As I understand it, very small.

Most allergens are denatured by acid and enzymes in the stomach. Many food allergies, which typically are not the same kind of immunological reaction as seasonal allergies/allergic rhinitis, are caused more by the failure of epidermal barriers or acid attack than by mere exposure. don't become sensitized because you ate something so much as because your body allowed bits to get somewhere they are not allowed to be under any circumstances, which is why the outsized anaphylactic reaction food allergies often cause.

(...typically. In some cases it is cross reaction, where an antigen in food is too similar to some other antigen the body has previously identified as an invader. See for example the temporary meat allergy that can be caused by some Lone Star tick bites. And there are yet other causes of course...)

Seasonal allergies are usually mild because they are generally localized, peripheral, and provoked in tissues that are designed to give this response as a normal protective action.

(That is, your nose is correct to run or stuff in response to histamine release caused by pollen. Frankly, I feel some foreboding about what sequelae we will eventually discover to be caused by chronic H2 antagonist administration over decades, drugs like Claritin/Zyrtec that people are taking every day of their lives.)

So! While it is possible and some rare cross reactions have been observed (particularly in fruiting trees/eating fruits), as a general rule your seasonal allergies do not increase your food allergy risk.

Now, some people are at higher risk for both due to environmental or genetic circumstances. But there it is a prior immune dysfunction that caused both rather than one causing the other-- though it's an understandable intuition to connect them as your question does. Having one or the other makes it more likely you have both, but it one doesn't cause the other.

As the article notes, planting both actually reduces one of the problems: pollen. Female plants attract and capture pollen. So you will slightly increase litter while moderately reducing pollen.

Additionally, as the article also notes, all allergens are not created equal. Pollen is mostly notable insofar as it is allergenic; planting trees with low or nor allergenic pollen uncouples "pollen" and "pollen that causes allergies" levels.

Certainly plenty of prominent scientists have had extremely odd views, and this does not much change the validity of their work. It appears his work has been peer reviewed, although how often and by whom would be an excellent question.

The most troubling assertion is that of plagiarism. If he has really plagiarized Sabine Hossfelder, he is both foolish (plagiarizing someone so prominent would be noticed) and dishonest (which might suggest a more pervasive intellectual dishonesty).

The difficulty of course is that valid equations might be independently derived. I am curious to read why the accusations were made. I assume if they are credible that independent derivation is considered unlikely for some reason.

Incidentally, the UMMO cult is an interesting one. They're one of the more believable of the New Age-esque UFO channeling cults that sprang up in the aftermath of various New Thought (think Christian Scientists or Unity Church) and Seventh Day Adventist movements.

It's highly likely that UMMO originated as a fraud perpetrated principally by a Spanish psychologist, although there is strong evidence for other help and some evidence for the involvement of intelligence agencies, although with what motives it is difficult to say. Intelligence agencies frequently infiltrate or utilize such groups (see Richard Doty), but as there are a number of possible motivations it is impossible to suss out why in most cases.

UMMO is one of two UFO religions I'm aware of-- the other being Urantia-- where reasonably technical and somewhat correct scientific information is given at length by a channeled source. Both religions of course claim prophetic success, such as Urantia's claims about the star system Wolf 424.

They are somewhat unique in this respect, as while many other UFO religions utilize scientific concepts or language, it is not usually anywhere close to correct (or even comprehensible, sometimes).

The relevance here is that both religions have, in part because of this, and in part because they were promulgated within professional communities, attracted a disproportionate number of technically minded converts: computer scientists, engineers, physicists, and such. (Although notably few that directly study the field of the claims. A physicist, for example, is not necessarily more informed about Would 424 than other physical science professionals, and is not equivalent to an astronomer or astrophysicist, despite some overlap.)

I'll confess I'm very skeptical of this account, as a former Marine who has also experienced mild hallucinations on deployment and a registered polysomnographic technologist. (I don't interpret sleep studies as a career anymore, but I'm familiar with the literature and have published some modest research. While it has been some years, I also did a bit over a thousand sleep studies.)

First off: sleep is highly, highly, highly evolutionarily conserved. Essentially every complex lifeform with an active metabolism either sleeps or it does something that resembles sleep. Sleep as a practice is never lost via mutation or other evolutionary change.

There are zero examples of a speciation causing an organism that sleeps to stop doing so, and zero examples of an organism that doesn't sleep that has a common ancestor who does. ("Sleep" is broadly interpreted.)

It's difficult to describe just iron this rule is. Sleep shares this with just a handful of other systems, largely consisting of fetal development genes and other systems in which a single genetic change kills the organism.

And, in our experience, that's because going without sleep also kills the organism. In humans, the one example we know of that causes total inability to sleep is Fatal Familial Insomnia, a genetic prion disorder with 100% mortality.

Second, people are very, very, very bad at assessing whether they have been asleep. I cannot tell you the number of people I have seen who were asleep-- verifiably asleep, because I was watching their brain waves in real-time-- who, when woken for some reason or another, report they never fell asleep. I've seen people sleep the entire night and claim they didn't sleep a wink.

Third, people who are sleep deprived cannot accurately assess their acute impairment, and this is worse with chronic deprivation, not only because of worsened cognitive function but because the person no longer has a healthy baseline in recent memory to compare to.

People assess whether they're functioning well by comparison to yesterday and last week and this month. If they were sleep deprived then as well, they report the differences between that time and now, if any, NOT the actual absolute value of their impairment.

Fourth, and finally, the causative correlations between sleep deprivation and impairment are super robust. The parent article is describing people who are less affected, but still experience profound impairment. It just happens that their impairment is small relative to others. While so-called "short sleepers"-- the actual technical term for the healthy 6 hours a nighters-- do in fact seem to do find with somewhat less sleep, they also experience impairment when getting less than their normal sleep time.

Obviously, I can't verify for certain that our parent comment is mistaken in their perception.

But what I can say quite comfortably is that if what they say is true, they are a walking Nobel Prize. What they describe is not considered unlikely, it's considered fundamentally impossible.

Mind, it wouldn't be the first time distinguished scientists advised us if was impossible, and turned out to be wrong, but this would really be closer to the scale of "general relativity is wrong" rather than "oops, eggs are good for you.

Parent commenter: if you read this, and if you genuinely believe your experience is as described, please contact William Dement, "Bill" Dement, at Stanford University...ASAP!

He is the grandfather of sleep medicine and conducted the first scientific sleep studies in the world. I can say with total confidence that if what you say is correct, he will either drop what he is researching and study you, or find a researcher who can. And if what you say is true you owe it to the world and posterity to be studied.

Stories like this remind me that trust is an indispensable aspect of civilization. Ultimately we have to trust our road workers to do good work, our bank tellers to be honest, and apparently our archivists not to steal what has been entrusted to their care.

Also, it reminds me that our justice system(s) are mostly about punishment, because we can't actually prevent crimes, just act once they are already committed.

We must trust because we cannot verify, except in Phillip K. Dick novels and Tom Cruise movies. (China's dystopian work in this area notwithstanding.)

The sensible solution, I think, is requiring digital advertisers to support non-personalized ads as a fallback for tracking ads; that is, a digital advertiser would not be allowed to only offer personalized ads. Then allow content creators right of refusal for those consumers who don't wish to allow any advertising at all, and build software supporting this into major browsers. Supplement with things like Brace's Basic Attention Tokens and premium subscriptions.

Will people just make ad free browsers elsewhere that don't respect this? Yes, of course. But hopefully these will be few or niché, as even now many users do not mind personalized tracking and many don't want to move to a new browser.

And yes, content has to to be paid for. If content creators do not want to work for free, let them find alternate revenue streams or cease creating. (And the second is an option.)

The alternative is tantamount to saying creators or their paymasters have a right to personally track me simply because they created content that I happened upon, and it's the de facto situation right now, albeit with a vigorous arms race of advertisers and ad blockers.

While I largely agree with your sentiment, I'd like to note that alphabetizing only assists those who know what they are looking for.

In a bookstore, this is a virtue. But we appear to be dealing with a book barn. Perhaps the patrons of book barn have not wandered in by accident while searching for a bookstore :)

For OP: I think you might be better off photographing the ISBN and then using a service or script to do a lookup and associate that with a cover and title. Various editions might not have their covers recorded in a database, and titles will give many dupes, but an ISBN will uniquely identify a book.

Additionally, OCR'ing stylized text is problematic. I wouldn't expect easy reading of covers, particularly of used books.

As strange as it may sound, this is why I enjoy mysteries-- unexplained things-- very much. I should note that my definition of "mystery" is very broad. Many in my collection are rather mundane examples of unusual problems or unexplained data in different disciplines, many of which themselves are likely to have mundane (but currently unknown) explanations. The flyby anomaly, for instance.

The neat thing about mysteries is that because there is no resolution, you can rearrange the pieces many times when thinking about it. These "pieces" naturally lend themselves to the flash card metaphor. Using Anki for them means eventually some clue that you haven't included in your current pet theory pops up again to make you rearrange the pieces.

I've also used Anki for workouts: cards per exercise, spaced repetition is normal for training. It's also useful for reinforcing habits.

You can also use it to teach yourself positive thinking or other mental exercises. Use the cards to record general "truths" or positive general statements about you, life, your circumstances, etc.

One unique nicety of this is that it gives a fortune cookie feeling when you draw a card that is especially relevant to your current mindset, and feels more external than inventing a statement knowingly while in a poor state, which makes it feel more impactful.

Really, there are so many things other than rote learning for which Anki is a neat tool!

Majorities being > than minorities is an aspect of democracy in its natural state, for certain, but I would not go so far as to call it a feature. The bicameral legislature of the U.S. was designed precisely to avoid this "feature"!

I think that your heart is in the right place with this comment, but you seem to be suggesting that this is the (only) right way to relate to death: to interpret reminders of the deceased as positive opportunities to remember with love.

I think I agree that some people would benefit from a chance to this framing. However, I am not sure I agree that everyone will, or that those who prefer not to be reminded (particularly at random and unasked for) are turning up their nose at serendipity, as it were.

For me and perhaps for others, I find set and setting to be very important when remembering the deceased. How, where, and when makes a big difference in how such remembrance makes me feel, and whether it helps with acceptance and closure or not.

I find that intentional, set aside times for grieving rituals-- or celebration rituals, as is sometimes the case-- is the best approach. But being blindsided by loss hurts and profits little.

Perhaps your assertion that we worry about this too much is true, but I do take issue with your hidden assumption that merit is directly proportional to effort. That is, the org chart you present presupposes that only lazy, ill-motivated people stay at the bottom.

But the truth is that some people are not very good at anything, and many people will never be the best at anything, no matter how hard they try. Some people are born mentally slower, more socially inept, physically weaker than others. Some people are born into bad circumstances (and a bad childhood can screw your whole life up at worst), others are dealt a shit hand by fate. (Your insurance company can pay for your back surgery if you're rear-ended, but they can't guarantee it's fixed, or even bearable...)

None of the people in these categories are less motivated or more responsible for these problems than others...although, indeed, we tend to despise laziness more if the person is already bad at their job, and it is easy to mistake incompetence for a moral issue. (After all, why the cliché about malice and stupidity if not?)

So yes, all of the talented, motivated people with prolonged bouts of stable home lives, good backgrounds, good health, etc., will rise to the top and get paid accordingly.

Some of those talented and motivated people will be left behind by the system. Personally, I do think it matters what the system does in moderate case.

Most systems that work at all correctly reward and punish best cases and worst cases. But what about the middle? People who are not especially talented or especially qualified or especially stable or especially healthy? When these people enter the system, what happens to them?

I wonder how their feelings might change when the maintenance costs come home to roost, when their frequent driving involves them in an accident their insurance company refuses to cover (because they have personal use insurance), and now they have neither car nor job, etc.

Basically, it seems to me that there is a lot of deferred cost and risk and that people are, in general, very bad at assessing. Perhaps the job is not worth it if you factor in these long term factors, but most people have not yet had to factor them in. (As our OP said, data would be nice here. When do these costs come home for drivers? What do they say then?)

One thing I will say. Professionalization and licensure certainly brings its own hazards, but one thing it almost always does is drive up wages for the licensee. The taxi market in NYC is wacked out, but taxi drivers can usually enjoy a decent standard of living in major metros with licensed taxi systems.

My vote is for boring, unsexy industries that are always needed. Non-software focused. Warehousing. Power companies.

Preferably an industry halfway to monopoly. Companies that don't compete every day for survival don't worry as much about raises and have much less politics, because people aren't always on the edge of being fired.

There are a lot of interesting problems in those industries, but they're not flashy, so they rarely attract coattail riders, corporate cutthroats, and empty suit salesmen.

And frankly there are very few compelling and accessible problems in software at all in the private sector for software as such. Interesting problems you can use software to solve, yes. Interesting software problems (that aren't better situated at a research program at a university)? Not a whole lot.

Avoid volatile markets that suffer speculation or primarily employ low wage workers or minimal skills workers, or both. Not because poor or uneducated people are tough to deal with-- ime they are more pleasant than the college educated a lot of the time-- but because it makes it very easy for companies to lay off large sections of their work force. (Think agriculture or construction.)

Speculation causes booms and busts. Low wage work does the same as the market for work expands and contracts. Insecurity makes people cutthroat, and if they can fire their main workforce and rehire identical cogs two years later, then your job supporting those people can come and go, too. High skills labor force makes a company think twice about letting people go, because they might be hard to find again later. (You can fire your Fortran programmer, but good luck finding a replacement quickly and for the same price in two years...)

As you point out, leadership at a company can change all of this. They can foster a better culture. The problem is knowing this in the first place about an employer, attempting to get located inside the company wherever that magic happens, and then the insecurity of not being clear when the magic will end. (Either because you don't know what created the magic to begin with or because it's dependent on person exoduses that can't be predicted.)

The problem before (and I think what is still the problem):

1) We talk about very broad macronutrient classes as though much could be said about them that is meaningful. Fats are not interchangeable; carbs are not interchangeable; proteins are not interchangeable. Talking about grams of fat doesn't actually tell you much (nutritionally).

On a related note, calories are also not nutritionally generic, and our bodies are not simple input/output machines. Calories in / calories out is a gross oversimplification.

2) A substance that is eaten, and the same substance elsewhere in the body, do not have a direct 1-for-1 relationship.

Dietary cholesterol, for example, is not directly deposited in artherosclerosis, and the pathology may have nothing to do with consumed cholesterol at all. (That is, the problem may not be how much you eat, but what causes it to build up as deposits that aren't cleared away.)

3) Measuring blood plasma is a poor metric for many, many things. Intercellular, extracellular, and stored elsewhere (liver, pancreas, bone, etc.) often have nothing to do with plasma values.

And we know this. But we still use it because it's all we can easily do for now. So when we measure your nutrition by comparing blood plasma values of magnesium, for example, we are using a metric we already know correlates poorly with actual magnesium status.

4) Environment matters. Cellular environments are extremely complex. Speaking about nutrition without discussing the thousands of other molecules and tissue structure it interacts with, and where, isn't very helpful.

These factors-- conflating macronutrients, conflating consumption with pathology, using bad metrics for nutrition, and ignoring cellular environment-- are much of what results in all of this nutritional confusion.

We substitute fads or the latest half-understood data for real knowledge, because we don't have much real knowledge. (Despite being able to fill textbooks with what we do know.)

The translation of deficiencies into food cravings has always fascinated me. People with pica, for example, often compulsively eat non-foods that are in fact related to a deficiency they have. Anemics sometimes crave dirt (which does contain iron).

But how does it "know"?

Strange, the most celebrated people ever to live in the world have often been theists. Ardent theists, too, some of them.

Do you think Copernicus was intellectually stunted? Göedel? Do you think Mr. Rogers was emotionally stunted? Do sweeping generalizations usually make for nuanced views?

Please don't denigrate the attributes of people whose commonly held beliefs are unrelated to those attributes. Theists may be wrong but they not are inherently vacuous, malicious, or otherwise mentally deformed.