Fordrus

As person with a similarly vicious voice, part of the answer lies in cognitive behavioral therapy techniques - information is the enemy of hyper-criticism (usually, anyway).

The voice of your own critical judgment can be vicious, but if you're on board with that you're not, nor are you somehow supposed to be, some kind of rational Messiah with all the perfections and answers, but rather regular person doing their best, subject to the usual problems and issues that beset humans all the time, it's much easier to remind the voice, almost as if going one voice deeper - giving the hyper critical voice it's OWN voice - that it's being harsh to a standard that virtually no one has ever or will ever meet, that there are reason you or other did things the way they did (even if those reasons include "we didn't have time to research any other way, and the resources that would've made it possible or trivial like it feels now came about after we finished this.").

Anyway - basic idea here is to give you voice a voice and whip back around and overflow into the regular critical space where criticism can be healthy instead of incessant and damaging. I hope it works for you! It works fairly well for me, but I'll admit freely that sometimes I do feel like such a massive twat that BOTH voice roll their eyes at me. XD

I love a good name, one that is spelled such that many/most native speakers of the language will pronounce it approximately correctly when they see it, and isn’t too difficult to spell, but also lets a person feel a baseline differentiation - to not be drone#6472567.

I am <banal name>#4235862, and I DO find that annoying. Often cannot even differentiate me from the many holders of my name by adding my last initial, or even my entire last name.

I have a depressingly banal name and have experienced pretty serious annoyance about it. I wouldn’t say depression, but when society already makes me feel like a faceless drone, being <banal name>#476 exacerbates the problem substantially.

Sometimes mental illness turns a person into the moral equivalent of a natural disaster. We don’t exactly blame natural disasters for arriving. They didn’t intend malice towards us. But we don’t therefore let them destroy our homes or kill us because there was no malicious intent behind the disaster. We batten down the hatches, make our homes storm and earthquake proof, we douse fires in water and build protective cellars.

Sometimes when mental illness turns a person into a malicious abuser, we have to protect ourselves regardless of whether we blame them fully for their actions or not. Nature turns the person into a disaster (sometimes, it’s not like EVERY case is like this), and when it does that, we’re justified in doing want it takes protect ourselves, to keep from being abused or harmed - not blaming them doesn’t mean we have to go out and stand in the storm, so to speak.

Here’s wishing you peace and happiness. :)

The issue is that an extremely sensitive negotiation (interviewing and hiring process) is utterly disrupted by their presence, so nobody is in a good position to legally challenge them. If almost ANY non compete is in place, the potential employer is highly likely to make the decision not to bother with the candidate. Proving that it was because of the noncompete is difficult (making it difficult to prove real damages).

They would almost certainly fall apart in court, but the systems they disrupt don’t survive long enough to move them into court.

There isn’t some function we can feed a different argument here to value agreeableness more highly though. I generally agree, but that more collaboration would be good isn’t so much the question - the question is HOW these tweaks can be done.

Man, so many memories. I was involved in a MUD called Dragonstone and had so much freaking fun, when I first entered college I had to stop cold turkey because every time I tried to announce that I had to quit to get my homework done, saying goodbye to treasured online associates made me so sad I couldn't follow through on leaving.

I also started one of my own, which gave me my first brush with people doxxing me (not as serious back then - I was more worried that one of them would figure out how to hack my computer - I was not a terribly sophisticated user of the internet back then - probably still am not today. XD)

I learned a bit about algorithms from our head coder, and we put our heads together to make an herbalism system that he should still be quite proud of, I think. Listing each room as a terrain type, a list of herbs that could grow in that terrain, and a random chance that the herbs would grow in any given room.

Man, what a strange time and exciting time that was! :)

Seems like it might be tasty milk, but I have neither time nor space to care for a cow. XD :D

On the other hand, I valiantly tried a number of variations of “learn C++ in a weekend” when I was a teenager, and finding most of them too difficult/annoying, presuming prior knowledge I didn’t have, I decided programming just wasn’t for me and focused on my violin playing. Now I’m neck-deep in bioinformatics and machine learning, enjoying more than almost anything else ever.

In other words, I’ll cop to thinking you’re weong about this, and that sometime in the future, you or someone else will return to a thread similar to this one, wishing that someone had flattened out and simplified at least some of the technical aspects of this stuff so that you could move forward without such massive frustration that you would give up even despite substantial (but not invicible) motivation.

Well, banning the practice is the first step towards doing exactly that. The whole world is a lot more understanding of the stance, "Sorry, we cannot go and rescue [person X]," when person X got in trouble because of illegal activity they were performing - and there are few more effective methods of making someone adopt the stance espoused by your proposed note, "I forbid you from rescuing me," than making the practice illegal.

So, essentially, I agree, I just think this is the proper way for Nepal to go about de-prioritizing this particular problem. :)

FANTASTIC, many many thanks!!! With that in mind, I can move forward in relative peace, again, very grateful!! :)

I'm finishing up at WGU in Software Dev but sure wouldn't mind switching to CS proper - I keep hearing this and "soon," but can't pinpoint the source of the rumors whatsoever - do you know where you heard / got the impression that CS was coming to WGU?

A very simple hypothesis as to why doctors can argue this effectively but teachers cannot is that teachers are not as powerful a lobbying group as doctors.

Doctors have effectively been able to defend their "turf," from hostile encroachment, while teachers have not, not because the situations do not contain substantial parallels, but rather because doctors are politically strong while teachers are politically weak.

There is substantial argument that our focus on standardized testing is literally ruining the advantages traditionally associated with a Western Education.

But then, perhaps I would be a "below-average" teacher, and my opinion might therefore similarly be discarded as worthless. We'll never know for certain, because I don't make a habit of boarding sinking ships - especially when I'm slated to receive blame for their sinking after boarding them. (And I did at one point very much want to enter the field of secondary school education.)

(Slight modification: I won't board a sinking ship and take blame for it's sinking after the fact without some substantial advantage, such as excellent remuneration, being offered as well - teaching offers no such advantage, except perhaps self-actualization, and I can neither eat nor sleep in that.)

Oh... oh my Gosh..... it's full of... he globally declared his LOOP INDEXING VARIABLES?!

I really appreciate him making that available, fantastic little cautionary tale, clearly from an enthusiastic and thoughtful learner of Java - glad he's made good progress since then, though, that's... I mean, dang it is REALLY bad, but it is also amazing as a sort of exercise in him just knowing what he wants to do and finding (bad) ways to make it happen. And that's admirable, even if it is also horrifying to see unfold. :D

But one main alternative to that value neutral statement and one major outcome of truly caring about the context of technology is literally Ludditism- like, if we figure out a way to make unlimited free energy with zero waste, do we REALLY want to restrict that because it'll bankrupt the coal industry? Does it become the inventor's responsibility to care for coal miners displaced by her/his new tech?

I am in the end for your argument - that is, I think you are generally correct that we need to consider the context, but I am at a loss as to how to regular that sentiment, because the 'care about context' sentiment gets to its absurd extremes REALLY FREAKISHLY FAST.

Example: I can say with some ease that Uber has gone rogue and is bad in it's context, but I am not joking or hyperbolizing about the previous suggestion about coal and free energy. What about radical lifespan increase? Rich people will start living 5x as long as poor people, making them functionally different SPECIES from us, especially in the context of humanity currently (they'd be like elves to our low men). Our alternates are reasonably scarce - we can push for regulation, but seeing as the regulators are captured by private interests at present, THAT has AT LEAST as much possibility to run amok and extend beyond those of us who push to begin it as our science/technology does!

So neo-feudal hellscape or no, I assert right back at you: technology and science are value neutral, or even automatically value positive by virtue of increasing knowledge, and this argument is detached from "we need to regulate the stupid crap Uber/whoever else is up to," that you're making. Fighting the argument you want to fight here merely leads into a rat's nest of impossible options. I say stand above that and regulate behavior before regulating technology, and where that is impossible, adapt to new reality and/or revolt, because getting lost in squirrel fantasy rat's nest of regulatory oversight on what technology is even allowed to HAPPEN isn't going to prevent that hellscape - it'll speed our descent into it.

>How is TV better than an iPad?

The iPad IS more dangerous than the T.V. BECAUSE it is so much more engaging. Unless you have super-cable-satellite T.V. with more channels than you could possible ever watch - and sometime still even then - TV watching becomes boring, and people are drawn to do other things. iPad often does not do this - which makes is simultaneously less dangerous (because it is more engaging and therefore educational in some sense) and more dangerous (because the impetus to leave and go away can express itself by loading up a different app or even popping onto the app store for a new free one, or by going on the internet or even youtube with their incredible variety).

I still use and iPad with my little boy, but I always try to be using to together - we talk about what he sees and hears, we watch Daniel Tiger and I sing the songs and ask about specific things he sees on the screen, etc. I feel like this is a good compromise, even if it ruins the otherwise potent ability of the iPad to engage him so I can do other things - I'm willing to sacrifice the other things in most cases. :D (I am somewhat horrified at how simple it is for us both to just get absorbed in one thing or another and spend too much time NOT doing all those talking/playing/interacting things with stuff on the iPad, though! So simple, takes effort and energy to refuse to fall into that trap! :) )

This is incredibly beautiful. I don't like to think of things as unbeatable, but I prefer to think of them as quests that the hero can't be expected to complete presently. In video games it's not at all uncommon to encounter obstacles early in the game that require items or abilities from later in the game to overcome - if later in the game is 75 years from now, there's a lot of time you have to play without getting at whatever is behind that special-item-only breakable wall.

One of my semi-secrets is that my family's struggles with Depression led me to study Neuroscience in college after almost completing a degree in German Literature. I am literally the only one of 5 siblings and my mother not to be on depression medication for at least some period of my life - I like to joke that I vampire-drained the happiness out of them and caught ADHD in doing so. I don't share that joke with them. My father is not the sort of person who would admit to depression ever, and I therefore don't know his feelings on the subject.

In other words, I quit my other program to search for the silver bullet. I knew from the start that the silver bullet is as great a fantasy as the werewolf itself, but I mourn so much for those who experience little to no improvement from our current medicines - these are the weapons I would arm people with as they fight their inner demons, no guarantee of success, but no small boon in their battle, either! Yet some people's demons clearly experience as much effect from my offered armaments as they would from a giant tickling feather - and it is to their especial detriment, because others, even doctors, seldom have understanding of their particular demon's resistance to their usual solid steel.

Someday, that holy mystery your dad recited about the brain will be as much as thing of the past as geocentrism, or so I tell myself, and so I hope, but for now, all I can do is keep fighting, I hope you're able to continue your fight with at least moderate success, as well. Of note, in my judgment, which I know is not worth much - what a laugh after all, a stranger's judgment on the internet - it seems to me that despite everything, you are doing a bang up job fighting your battle, and I hope it continues to go so well, with as few lost months and hopeless weeks or years as possible, and also, it seems to me that your Dad must have done a reasonably good job fighting his battles, as well, and I hope I am neither offensive nor cruel in saying so. It's just, it's always so difficult to judge someone, your mention about Bruce's friend who murdered his parents is quite excellent, because that question troubles and comforts many minds: Not only do I wish I were so much more, but what exactly would I be if I were so much less than I am? A murderer or serial killers? A bomber? An abusive spouse and parent? With great faith that we're not living up to our potential, staring down in the opposite direction of our potential can be harrowing but in its way, darkly comforting, even if its a sort of stupid comfort (at least, in my head and heart, I can't really claim it as a resounding accolade that "At least I wasn't a school shooter!" - yet sometimes, I just have to sit back and say it in my mind, and be thankful that I haven't gone to that extreme. It seems to me that your werewolf did a reasonable job of not eating you or your mom, even if he still wounded you with his claws over the course of his life, and I guess I wanted to offer his memory that praise).

Forgive my rambling diatribe, still lots of reflection to do on your piece, I hope you have a wonderful day. :)

"It didn’t cure his depression, any more than you can cure a werewolf by ripping out his fangs."

I don't have the same issues as the author's father, but I've often thought of almost exactly this analogy when treating my own issues. The idea sometimes is to make the condition tolerable, and at least for me, that would be the first order of business upon learning I was a werewolf: to remove my ability to harm others while wolf-ified. This is a tremendous article, I love it and I'm going to save it and maybe read it with my dad - not because my dad is like your dad, OP, but more because a few of your experiences line up really well with a few of ours. I'll read it with my wife too, because the story of how you remember your dad when you were young - I want to be that kind of Dad to my son. So, so, so much. Except without the later issues and whatnot. I do wonder just how possible it is, but I intend to give it a shot! :)

It's altogether possible that you're correct, but I'd say that most of the responsibility lies in this: if you look at pondwater with your naked eye, you can see cloudy pond water. If you look with a carefully made glass bead, you can see bacteria and protists, and thereby make a TREMENDOUS discovery: unicellular organisms. But if you want to get even CLOSER and understand more about what parts make up the organisms and other things at greater magnification levels, you're going to need a bigger, better microscope, and that will cost more money, require more care and understanding to correctly operate, and be able to scan less total area at a time.

In other words, much of the problem we face in the current scientific age is due to the fact that our instruments are now electron microscopes and Hadron Colliders, instead of carefully made glass beads and simple mirrors.

It's similar to problem faced in software of managing increasing complexity. No silver bullets known of yet for all those problems, just chronic application of powerful minds to the problem. :)

I think we are understanding each other very well! Yes, learning to "sell ourselves" and highlight our own successes well enough to influence social structures when we need to is a hard problem, we're trained quite strongly and mostly correctly that "rooting one's own horn" is quite rude, and even in cases where it isn't actually rude or is expected, we STILL have to tread lightly! (For example, resumes and interviews are functionally places where we're given ORDERS to tout our achievements- yet there's still an invisible line you can cross that'll mark you as a braggart if you go overboard!)

But on the other hand, people can only make decisions based on information that is actually available to them, and so the quiet industrious worker in he corner who rarely pipes up and silently gets the job done but does nothing to make certain his/her contribution is noticed is passed over, because the boss can't magically know that quiet worker is the excellent contributor they are without something imparting that info- good managers will try to understand who's truly contributing in ways like that but even very good managers are frequently subject to imperfect information!

Anyway, I'm glad your advisor told you that, and I'm glad you shared that with me, yours is a succinct way of describing that, I'm almost tempted not to post this reply, as I'm uncertain it adds anything more of value than an emphatic "yes I agree!"

Short story: from German Literature to Neuroscience, after a family member was diagnosed with mental illness. Once In Neuroscience, almost literally no research questions I was interested in could be answered without substantial computer science expertise, started taking compsci courses and ABSOLUTELY LOVED THEM. And thus: Bioinformatics!

Well, ah, I'm paused at the moment, my wife got semi-unexpectedly pregnant after quite a number of years unsuccessfully trying to do so - she is a salesperson and makes more than me (I was an intern at a genomics startup at the time) so I am being the dad, finishing school, and working on side projects while we map out what we do next - We're planning on swapping roles as soon as I'm finished with school and it's otherwise workable. That does mean I'm focusing more on programming than the data science/bioinformatics side of things, but I'll keep my eyes open for opportunities there too, never know exactly what will happen. Also, the baby is totally amazing, and I adore being his Dad, seriously, I wish stay home dads were a much more common thing than we are, it's freaking fantastic, makes me wish things worked differently to facilitate a pair of parents staying home with anc raising a child as their primary function. :)

When I was still in the humanities (German Literature Major), my program was making a MAJOR push for all graduates of the major to be able to articulate to others and interviewers the skillset they'd gained during their time at university, and I found it quite useful and helpful, even though I can't remember too much about the specifics.

I even talked to one of my professors personally about the push, in which I mentioned how the humanities in general are not amazing at 'selling' their contribution to human progress (she enthusiastically agreed - this was a sign that some of us were 'getting it') - part of that deficiency shows is via the incredible antipathy the internet holds towards the Literature major who then becomes a starbucks barista.

I don't always love salespeople, and I often chafe at the thought of having to emphasize my own efforts in an attempt to gain leverage with those of higher status than myself (a situation known to some as 'playing politics') - yet salesmanship is literally universal to the human condition (really want yammer more and explain what I mean by that, but it is time to shutdown for the day. :) )

I cannot express how fantastically hilarious I found that expression, I am absolutely going to be using that as shorthand for the position from here on out!

I often have the same worry when it comes to people asserting that state governments should be more able to function like smaller countries- I worry in particular that to some traditional enemies it would our individual parts "small enough to drown it in the tub."

Well, it was two clinics: a running shoe store in Utah that does not sell vibrams, and then a university physical course called "Jogging.". I already in the vibrams back then, but was not permitted to use them in the class, this was probably 5 years ago now. The strongest feedback about the general difficulty of hitting midfoot properly in shoes with a heel was in the jogging class, I asked about it in the running test at the shop as well. I've visited with doctors on the topic as well, but I suppose I csn't say that I have visited a medical clinic dedicated to helping you run correctly just yet. :D

The major problem was that I could overdo the motion, hitting on the ball of my foot, or underdo it and hit the heel, but hitting the sweet spot for middle foot landing is- well, I can agree with the way you put it, but I'd intensify the statement: the feedback from a well-shoed foot is so weak that an inexperienced person like me will literally not be able to tell the difference between a foot strike that is actually correct and one that is not. My understanding is that a your shoe's heel on a midfoot strike actually still generally touches first, it just does not hit as hard, bit then, like I said, I never really mastered this.

I should mention, well, both the class and the shop took detailed video of me running, from multiple angles, and analyzed them with me, along with analyzing the sole of my regular running shoes (I did own both vibrams and regular running shoes at the time, the vibrams we're sort of my special cases, most especially because they were quite annoying to wear if it rained substantially!)- but analyzed where the wear and tear was on my regular running shoes.

Having been to a run clinic, I can absolutely call bull on the claim "Footwear is irrelevant, here.". At least the run clinic I went to assured me multiple times that my impression that wearing "trainers" specifically and greatly increases the difficulty of running "correctly" by striking with the middle of your foot with slightly bent knee. The large heel of virtually all training shoes makes landing in the middle of your foot extremely difficult - especially if you're unfamiar with that way of landing your foot.

Footwear does matter, at least until you know intuitively how to do the motions. I never did master a mid foot strike, the closest I was ever able to get was not landing on my heel quite as hard, essentially rolling off it quickly.

I liked the pair of vibrams I wore until I wore through the rubber sole, but they are a bit expensive, and my foot shape means me pinky toe doesn't really fit up into the to things, I rather thought it unnecessary overall to separate the toes. I've been on the lookout for good places to run entirely barefoot as well, but I'm not as daring as some. :)

I agree the the posturing is not the essence of the infection, and didn't mean to communicate that. It does make wading through papers substantially more difficult, however, and that is a sincere and severe annoyance, though the tendency to hoard knowledge for fear of being scooped is a greater one.

Your comment about reagents from one manufacturer failing while another succeeded brings back fond memories of trying to make our own botulinum neurotoxin to study neurons- and the rest about hoarding institutional knowledge reminds me why I tried to get out of that. I was one of those ambitious undergrads, but I permitted myself to wilt under the insanity of a system in which I KNEW that a partnered laboratory knew exactly what to do, but they were forbidden to share the knowledge because of politics. By the time I had cut through the wasteful uselessness, I discovered that the only sane person there, one who had been willing to share knowledge, she had actually DIED.

And so I merrily skipped over to the bioinformatics department, which has issues as well but in which I was able to manage them fairly effectively. :D

While this is partially true, it is also DEFINITELY true that there is a large amount of academic posturing going on in the field of Molecular Biology, at least. I've read MANY papers that could've been both more exactly and more simply written if they'd avoided needless jargon. Yet my own experience with it indicates that they probably had to put in the jargon in order to get published- so much so that they may have been required to do a re-write or two to insert more 'academic language' to get accepted. Quite annoying.

My Gosh, that is an extremely salient and DEEPLY DEPRESSING point.

I've been drawn to question what to do about that quite often, but I havent happened across an acceptable answer as yet.

Importantly, the same research that indicates that kids would do better starting later also indicates that they (teenagers, at least, who were also the indicated population in the study about later start benefits) will generally have trouble getting to sleep much before midnight, regardless of when you 'send' them to sleep.