acornax

Just imagine how much worse it would be if the graduate had an art history degree. I mean, it's fascinating but it doesn't tend to be relevant on the job.

The idea that university is job training just needs to go. The academic material may be relevant for work later on but it often isn't, and on the job there is way more to learn.

A fundamental problem a lot of this work has to confront is that interpreting motor behavior is generally the best way of interpreting brain activity.

The activity that's happening in the brain but never reaches the level of motor activity (in people that are not disabled and/or impaired in some way) is problematic to interpret as it is difficult to control and may not even be properly regarded as intentional.

Banks don't literally print money but they do create it when they issue loans.

It's a bit more complicated too - rather than the AAA ratings being completed unfounded, they often seemed to have justification (at least on the surface), as various kinds of CDOs were typically packaged with insurance baked in, to make them appear less risky to the ratings agencies' models. One big problem ended up being that a lot of those insurance payouts were theoretical, as the entity on the other end (often ultimately AIG) didn't have have the money to pay out when so many mortgages were defaulting.

But, yeah. The agencies didn't really have much incentive to be skeptical of their models.

This is wrong. In the book Soma is described to have roughly the positive effects of alcohol, without the negative consequences.

Strong correlation requires a large number of 'coincidences'

Not if they're already understood not to be...

I don't really agree that happiness itself is overrated, but certainly the pursuit itself is.

edit: I agree with your ninja edit.

How awful... I wonder where the thinks he learned this myth. Sad to see such misplaced confidence in a scientist.

They've actually been scaling QE back for quite a while now.

Isn't increasing pay like this just part of how the market rate adjusts? In this case it seems a bit extreme but it seems obvious that if a company is having a tough time attracting talent they should pay more.

Pressure from the board maybe..?

iirc authors have to pay Nature to submit their articles as well.

Read the quote again, you're begging the question.

Empirical evidence is experiential by definition - it can be material evidence if it relates to claims about matter, but it can also be evidence about other domains.

Ex. If God exists, then religious experience is empirical evidence of this. It is not probably not material evidence however.

Empirical evidence isn't material evidence.

Kind of a bad quote. Ornithology would be useful to birds if they could understand it.

Interesting that only Toronto and Vancouver are present for Canada.

Yes.

Mass starvation wasn't part of the cultural revolution. It happened as a result of the great leap forward which happened about 15 years before.