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If you want to define the debate in that way then sure, memory plus considered analytical skills is better than memory without analytical skills, but I don't think anyone was questioning that. People are more likely to question the importance of memorising things (because it's "boring") than of considered analytical skills.

One question that pops into my mind: can considered analytical skills actually be taught? I'm not sure they really can, they might be just plain old innate, in which case perhaps classes should focus on the thing that can be taught, which is stuff.

And you still need to have memorised things like what America is or who Hitler was.

Maybe you knew those things already before you started the class, which is nice, but no doubt there's a lot of other facts out there which you could have memorised which would help you in piecing together the historical narrative.

People criticise the rote-learning approach to things, but I think it's possible to go too far in the other direction. If, for instance, you teach your eight-year-old kids to memorise the capital cities of all the countries in the world, then that's not a huge deal of information right there, but at least you can guarantee that they've heard of every country on Earth, which puts them ahead of most adults.

Furthermore, they'll have noticed a bunch of patterns, like all the places starting with "San" or all the places ending with "-town" which can help them piece together things like which countries were Spanish or British colonies, which leads to an understanding of the history and culture of these countries, and so forth.

One maths class we were only warned that we had to use Euclidean paper.

I did great in exams with cheat sheets, but poorly in the few truly "open book" exams, because I didn't know how to properly prepare for an open book exam. My silly undergrad brain thought "Woohoo, open book, I guess I don't have to study all this stuff, I can just look it up when I get there" which led to two hours of feverishly flipping back and forth in the book.

Why should they?

I doubt it. Look at pearls or diamonds.

The sort of people who will pay extra for brand new ivory aren't going to bought off with fake ivory.

>I stated that if one has less money than someone else, they are much more likely to have to deal with things like being assaulted or killed or going without enough to eat etc.

So just to clarify, there's a lot of Harvard and Dartmouth graduates (in non-economics) going without enough to eat, are there?

I bet if I had a treadmill in my shower I'd have twice as many good ideas.

It's sad that so much of the internet consists of people trying to tell others what to do with their own time and money.

Go be generous with your own money, dude, and quit trying to be generous with other people's.

Thanks for saving me the trouble of reading it.

I'd also suggest that one of the reasons people perceive the study of human behaviour as unscientific is that it so frequently is.

Studies of human behaviour are inextricably bound up in politics. Many studies are designed, whether consciously or unconsciously on the part of the authors, to advance the authors' own political or social agenda.

Even if you avoid that problem, many studies are just plain statistically lousy, and employ deeply non-random samples.

And finally you've got the annoying problem that people know they're being studied and may modify their behaviour accordingly.

This gives me another idea: how about we fit criminals with body cameras?

Don't be mad that some other people's brains are bent on stuff of no particular benefit to you. Their brains, their choice.

Just be glad that some people's brains are bent on stuff of benefit to you, and concentrate, if you like, on what of general benefit you can do with your own brain.

"Sexiest job in tech" is a bit like "tallest midget".

In the form of time travel being talked about, the answers are:

a) Yes, you disappear from the time you were in.

b) Yes, you're in two places at once for the duration between your arrival and your departure

c) Forwards travel in time doesn't cause too many philosophical problems (since we're already doing it) which is why nobody talks about it. But there's no requirement to wind up exactly where you started.

Actually the only vaguely plausible-ish (though by no means convincing) designs I've heard of for physically realisable time machines work like this. You do some horrendous things with spacetime curvature and you get something that can send you back in time, but no further back than the point at which you constructed your horrendously curved spacetime thingy.

Paul Davis has a short book How To Build A Time Machine which does it this way, if I recall correctly (it's been a while since I read it).

The touchiness of certain varieties of nerds with bizarre hobbies occasionally just makes them look worse.

If you have a weird hobby, people are going to make fun of it. Heck, if you have a mainstream hobby then there's someone out there who's going to make fun of it too. There's no point in getting upset when they do, just laugh it off.

Everybody on this planet is a bit weird in one way or another, and we should all reserve the right to make fun of each other for our peculiarities.

Before people get too worked up about this they should consider it from the other point of view.

If you're going to get strict about getting paid for every hour you work, you'd better believe I, as your employer, am going to start getting strict about making sure you're really working for every minute of those hours. No goofing off, no idle chit-chat, just work.

How many of us would be willing to be held up to this standard? I sure as hell wouldn't.

Untrained thieves can also shoplift, which is a far easier and less risky way for thieves to steal goods.

Yeah, I know how they feel. I worked in the US for several years and something like a tenth of my salary was stolen by something called "Social Security".

Do I ever see any of that money again? Nope! Only if I work in the US for ten years do I have any hope of getting some money out of the Social Security system (if it's still going in its present form when I retire, which I doubt).

Sure. Bread. It's so convenient and easy, and it shows up in 90% of the things that you might be able to get for breakfast and lunch at the average food joint.

100 calories of nuts or broccoli costs a whole lot more than 100 calories of bread or rice, and this is reflective of the greater agricultural demands of pretty much everything else versus bread and rice.

Pretty much. You could probably come up with a diet that says you're not allowed to eat anything starting with a letter in the first half of the alphabet, and anyone who stuck to it would lose weight, because all of a sudden they'd be thinking carefully about what they ate rather than eating whatever took their fancy at any given moment.

Sticking to these diets is the hardest thing. I spent a few months on a paleo diet and got a bunch healthier, but it was really hard to find things to eat, and pretty expensive as well. I don't think dietary changes are worth it unless you can reasonably stick to them for the rest of your life, and anything that says "no X ever again" is likely to fall into that category.

I'm using Firefox 3.5, and a helluva lot of stuff doesn't work properly any more. For instance, I notice that reddit broke a few weeks ago and I can no longer vote or comment. Why? I have no idea.

"Why don't you just get a new browser?" you might ask. Because new versions of browsers don't work on OS 10.4.

"So why don't you upgrade your OS?" Because as far as I can tell, no upgraded OS that will work on this machine is still available. There's no upgrade path from here to there. OS 10.6 would run on this machine, and OS 10.6 would run the latest Chrome, but you can't get OS 10.6 any more.

So I'm stuck in a bind, with no other option than to throw this (perfectly good) machine out completely. I do have a newer machine, but I keep it in the office, and this one ought to be capable of doing everything I want from it, but web devs keep breaking things that used to work fine.

People love writing articles about how everything that happens in other countries is inevitably the west's fault. Just go up the causal chain far enough 'til you find a westerner doing something and bam, it's the west's fault. Non-western people in this worldview have no agency, they simply react to the things the west does, so it's no surprise that everything is always the west's fault.

Inevitably "the West's fault" in these sorts of articles should always be read as "the fault of Westerners with whom the author disagrees politically". When people blame "the west" it's always those other westerners buggering the west up for everybody, not those westerners of whom the author is one, who have the correct, enlightened political opinions.

Sure, it's possible, but good luck getting funding.

Doing research for profit is very tricky, which is why it almost inevitably winds up being done at a loss. The world is full of entities (such as universities and government labs) which would love to be able to do research at a profit, but they succeed only sporadically despite the advantages of lots of smart people and equipment.

The sort of research that can turn a profit is usually fairly incremental stuff (e.g. let's formulate a new kind of paint), and is done within large companies' own research labs with deep domain expertise and trade secrets you won't be able to get your hands on. You can try to invent an improved paint and licence it to DuPont if you like, but if they want it they'll probably have got there before you.

Bluer-sky stuff, on the other hand, takes really long timescales and large numbers of people, with low probability of success. You'll be competing against university researchers in the same field who aren't even patenting their work.

There is money to be made in the last mile -- taking technologies from the point where they're almost ready to hit the market, doing that little bit of extra research to bring them to market, patenting your method and watching the bucks roll in. But opportunities like that are rare and heavily sought after, and even then it usually involves a crapload of money and risk. You can build a startup around just one of these ideas if you can find one, but nobody will give you money to go around looking for them in general, just like nobody will invest in your gold mine until you've actually found some gold.

Or how about remote Aboriginal communities in Australia?

If you want to see what giving people just enough money to live on looks like, check out our remote Aboriginal communities where the government hands out enough money to live (mediocrely) on to everybody, so what's their incentive to get a job? What's their incentive to do anything?

The results? Well the worst one is massive substance abuse problems. If they can't get booze, they sniff petrol. Actually for the most part they sniff petrol and drink booze.

Highly educated creative-class people are the minority who can deal with free money without getting sapped of initiative, because (a) we tend to get satisfaction from work and (b) we can earn substantially more by working than by not working.

But for someone at the bottom end of society who couldn't earn more than minimum wage anyway, granting them minimum wage for doing nothing is probably the worst possible thing you can do to them. Even if some choose a life of honest toil for slightly more money, vast numbers will choose a life of idleness and substance abuse.

Obviously that would be part of the solution. But remember we're talking Baltimore here, not Buttfuck, Mississippi.

Compulsory abortion is a contentious issue, but at the very least I think it should be compulsory for anyone getting pregnant under the age of eighteen. If we have the legal fiction that <18 year olds are too immature even to be able to consent to sexual intercourse, I have no idea why we're okay with them actually having children of their own.

In the old days we used to adopt them out, but adoption has its own drawbacks. Now we as a society have become comfortable with the idea of abortion as not-murder I see no reason not to use it in cases like this.

This kind of shit is why I'm pro-abortion but anti-choice.

It's clear that the lower classes are doing a terrible job of raising their own children, despite the best efforts of the rest of society to educate them, they can't escape the terrible values and role models imparted to them by their parents. And yet...

>Before they turned 18, 40 percent of the black girls from low-income homes had given birth to their own babies

The biggest problem here is the "let's". Who is the "us"?

The problems of San Francisco's status as overcrowded tech hub could all be solved if only everyone could decide where the second Silicon Valley was going to be placed. If everyone woke up tomorrow with the belief that in five years some other city was going to be as big a tech hub as San Francisco, then it would happen. Everyone would rush to set up shop there -- startups, VCs, and the random other bits of necessary infrastructure like cat cafes and brunch places where you can queue for an hour and a half. But instead there's no consensus on where the second SF is, so there's defocused overflow in all directions -- to Portland, to Austin, to Seattle, to Boston, and so forth.

Anyway, if you want to build a nerd city in the middle of nowhere, you're somehow going to have to persuade half a million people to move there, and that takes more than some airy-fairy promises about how awesome it's going to be. Cities in real life usually grow slowly and organically over a period of centuries. When they grow fast it's because there's a compelling economic reason (e.g. a gold rush). You can't just make a city out of nothing; even if those half a million people would be happier if they all moved there together, the Nash equilibrium is for them all to individually not move there.

>nature intends to replace the parents with their offspring, using rules crafted by natural selection, not the parents' tastes.

In fairness, sex was invented at least 1.2 billion years before parents could have possibly had "tastes". The reason we reproduce sexually rather than just churning out clones of ourselves appears to be that we're more resistant to parasites/diseases if our genes keep constantly shifting into new combinations rather than hanging around for too long looking exactly the same.

This wouldn't necessarily be impacted by the parents' deliberate choice of a few specific alleles.

So? The world of GATTACA seemed pretty awesome. Everyone was smart and fit and healthy and good-looking.

In fact, life was so perfect that the writers had to postulate the existence of non-genetically-engineered people in order to have any drama at all. "Wouldn't it suck if you were born into this society without any genetic enhancement?" the movie asks. And the answer is: yeah, so you should genetically engineer your children.