arstin

English major here! I never got the McDonald's gig, but I am now helping the economy and keeping the world turning by making money as a useful software engineer. :)

I wouldn't use the stern-faced "useful" language, but I agree with you about it being perfectly fine to have a day job and pursue literary/artistic interests on the side. TS Eliot insisted on keeping his job as a bank clerk. Gladstone wrote serious history at night after discharging his duties as the English PM. Etc, etc.

Regarding choice of degree, the value of a liberal arts degree is difficult to argue for---and against. It's not like, say, math where you can do the proof or you can't. You can model the system such that transformations actually map onto transformations in the target domain or you can't. But I can often tell when someone has a (successful!) liberal arts degree by, to give one example, how careful they are with imprecise language. And, to give another, how light of a hold imprecise concepts have on them, how flexible and playful they are in such thinking (this has nothing to do with being unable to be "rigorous").

But also the fact is the system did not work for most people. Partly because most students just aren't suited for it...and that's fine. And especially with how broken college is now (for one, non-STEM subjects tend to allow the student to choose from a smorgasbord of unrelated courses instead of systematic growth over years). IMO far fewer people need to go to college, we should increase the funding and prestige of vocational school, and non-STEM subjects need to more regularly be taught again in a demanding way.

Just curious: why try to publish in an academic journal if you're not an academic?

In many fields, if you have the resources to do the research you wouldn't be asking this question. And fields where single author, more creative (let's call it) work is acceptable also seem to be areas with a broader audience beyond readers of narrow, often paywalled journals and could be more appropriate as a book, talk, blog, or arxiv post. And if you're not trying to be an academic, you don't need publications for treading water in your career.

(I'm not being critical of the ambition. Even if the reason is just ego or getting accepted into a group of people you respect, that's good enough reason for me!)

Yea I’ll admit I’m skeptical of dockless bikes as well. We have docks and since there’s basically always one within half a mile or (usually much) less, it works perfectly fine imo.

Maybe dockless would be nice on a beach with a boardwalk, but in a city? Where are they going to go? And I have a hard time imagining anywhere with a typical not NYC or main downtown area population density will keep them moving enough. I’m happy to be proven wrong though.

I'm an avid biker, and I also make heavy use of my city's shared bike program. I go more miles on my own bikes, but I ride shared bikes more often.

I think you're overlooking many significant use cases for shared bikes. Here's a few: - It's well below freezing out and you just want to quickly get from your apartment to the train station, drop the bike off and forget about it. - You won't be returning to that station to pick the bike back up later. - Bike to the grocery store. Walk back carrying several big bags. - Take the train into work in the morning, bike back when you have more time or energy. - Getting from one point to another where a cab would be overkill but walking take too long. - You want to bike to places, but don't want to deal with lugging your bike up 5 flights of stairs several times a day or don't have room to store it if you do.

The summary is that shared bikes let you ride in situations which you normally wouldn't. (And of course for many casual riders it can easily be their only bike.)

I don’t see why HN doesn’t require every down vote to have a comment. Judging from the sheets of gray on most threads, most down voted comments aren’t actually in violation of site policy, off topic, trolling, etc. It’s just a few little people disagreed. Which is fine! But it’s not constructive or interesting to just slap the commenter with your dick.

Yeah the Bible is typically overlooked these days. Even most Christians probably don't read it. And many of the type who discovered Seneca or Dogen through a self-help blog probably take pride in how intelligent and "rational" they are (for flowing along with the dominant current of our culture ha) in rejecting Christianity. But the Bible is literally just a library of different writings, the whole point of which is to give a complete picture of life, to furnish the imagination with stories and characters and lessons. Proverbs is a place to start I guess, though I'm hardly the person to ask. I remember liking the Gospel of Mark as a kid?

I order something or other from Amazon every couple weeks and, living in Chicago, have often gotten it via Amazon delivery for a year or two now. It just seems like one problem after another: not actually dropping the package off, hiding the package in a crevice between buildings, very often not arriving when quoted, rude calls from drivers because I'm not at home. Add to this problems with worker pay and treatment, and I'll stick to UPS whenever possible.

Well for one, Facebook, through crass negligence and a failure to own up to the duties that go along with their position in regulating the flow of information between people, played a key role in the election of an administration which supports the draining of countries, the extraction of resources, and the extinction of ecosystems...and if the recent stories about a lifetime cap on medicaid benefits are true, quite a few human deaths! (Obviously Facebook isn't solely or even mostly responsible, Monsanto is worse, yadda yadda yadda)

Thank you for the link! I was actually wanting to read a survey on this topic. I'm obviously sympathetic with the general approach of focusing on augmenting rather than replacing humans in teaching.

I confess I'm more skeptical of "data, data, and more data" than the author (from whence it comes? an A/B test of the video widget we wrote last week? the "anecdotes" of a skilled teacher with decades of experience can surely be more informative sometimes!), but I'm certainly eager to incorporate what good data is available!

This is such a complicated statement to respond to! :) You could follow the thread of irony, of the kinds of abilities "analysis" is equivocal between, of what relevance evidence might have...what it might be applied against, what might even count as evidence, and, obviously, what results we even want!

Here's just one bigger picture thought to consider. For a reasonably motivated and bright person, it's pretty easy to teach yourself programming (I'd be willing to bet most people on this forum are self-taught). And, after you get some basics, pretty easy to teach yourself nice tidy applied math-y things like Bayesian reasoning. Likewise it's easy to teach yourself science. One reason why is that in every case you can self-correct: the program doesn't work, the calculation is wrong, the world says otherwise.

That simply isn't the case with the humanities. You need the guidance of an expert for a while.

I'll leave it at that for now, just noting that to the extent humanities help with "analysis" it's probably going to be especially beneficial with messy, open problems where even the criteria for success may be vague and shifting. Thinking critically about product design rather than improving an algorithm, to bring it into HN.

I don't disagree, but to add some additional complexity: cog-sci-y "learning science" literature mostly just captures one (very significant!) part of what goes on in a college course...learning things in the sense of being able to then recall facts (WWI started from an assassination!), perform new tasks (implement a linked list!), develop specific useful habits (cite your sources!), and so forth.

I know the headline says the word "retention" and the content deals with this above stuff to some degree, but there's also different goals stated like inspiring students to want to learn, getting students to reflect on their inherited values, and becoming sensitive to experiencing themes in literature. For purposes like these, there's simply no point to covering a lot of material, and it may often be counterproductive.

I think one key point is stated in the article: no one thinks "slow teaching" should be the only method. But (anecdotally lol) I personally am glad I had a few seminars with a glacial pace, as those were the ones where I really learned how to write, plus how to think when facts aren't available or directly relevant.

Personally I think stepping back and asking what a course is trying to do is the first step. If it's to expose students to as much evo bio as possible, a slow teaching "philosophy" wouldn't be appropriate. If it's to get a group of people who might be hostile to the idea of evolution to consider the possibility ("reflecting on values"), I don't know what other approach could work.

I hate being a downer, but was anyone else struck by how...uninteresting so many of these answers were? I love reading this series, but it seems this year's question was just too hard. Seriously, I have no clue what I'd answer either...though it is fun to think about how to put a wider eyed spin on what's there! Like:

how can changing the tax rate affect motivation (how about "are there levers for manipulating motivation which go too far?"),

or what kinds of minds can solve the mind-body problem (us lol, instead what about "what is the history of understanding what we are in relation to the world and which new concepts might we use instead through which a sense of intractable puzzlement doesn't arise?"),

or can we design a machine that can correctly answer every question (how about "if we could design a machine to answer every question, what are its values such that it knows when to stop in any particular case?"),

or is there a fundamental difference between the physical and the biological world (how about "how should we understand the causal role of normative characterization in a kind of explanation which has been particularly well suited to biology?").

EDIT: of course some were very thoughtful! Like Aaronson asking "Can we program a computer to find a 10,000-bit string that encodes more actionable wisdom than any human has ever expressed?" or Bostrom "Which questions should we not ask and not try to answer?" or Dennett "How can an aggregation of trillions of selfish, myopic cells discover the unwitting teamwork that turns that dynamic clump into a person who can love, notice, wonder, and keep a promise?" or Pagel "Is a single world language and culture inevitable?".

Indeed! Google seems to have been doing a good job so far of trying to preempt being called a monopoly by not really abusing their power. (On the consumer services level at least, no opinion here on others.)

Yeah, I guess I agree with everything you say, really. But since you emphasize asking about the "ridiculous" quality, I'd just propose what's ridiculous (kinda? but too strong) is that switching from Google to DDG is just a matter of changing URLs for most people. Even going to a different search engine URL probably assumes a way more sophisticated mental model of how the web works than most users have. Second, the input box at google.com is just one way to do things through Google, there's also OK Google for example (which is built into many people's only internet devices), and of course the browser address bar.

I do wonder how problematic it is that the fact Google has it's fingers in a steadily increasing amount of stuff---from medicine and cars to music and home management, all centered around capturing and storing an increasing amount of our personal data---isn't as explicit to most people as it ought to be. Personally I don't have an opinion on whether or not Google should be considered a monopoly, though I'm glad other people are considering the issue more seriously than I.

"I'd be keen to hear why you think that switching to another search engine is ridiculous?"

I think you answered your own question: "I reckon that most users wouldn't even notice/realise if they were using another search engine".

For example, the other night I wanted to watch a movie. I entered the title in the Chrome address bar. Google was automatically used of course (yes it's customizable through a few menus, but for most people that means it's auto Google). The first result had an option to rent the movie. I clicked "Rent". Google Play was used of course. And I gave Google $3.

I don't personally mind this particular case, having long ago made the conscious choice to use Google Play over Apple or Amazon...or...ummm...for renting movies (mostly early Chromecast support). But it's a simple illustration of how Google isn't just a "search engine" that pulls up information you query when you want to surf the information superhighway. It's the automatic background interface for a great number of activities we do in our life. The fact most people probably don't even realize that is exactly one problem.

(And this has solutions of course, but it's one point to keep in mind.)

On the whole, I've probably learned more at conferences from talking shop over drinks than from the talks. Many talks are hastily put together and poorly presented. And many are simply above or below whatever my skill level for that thing might then be (which isn't too say they don't have value, but compared to actual conversations with new and knowledgable individuals...). Maybe "industry" conferences are different from academic ones though.

But don't worry, I've never actually went to a tech conference, exactly because of the huge cost combined with not usually wanting to go to most talks. So I'm not going to be that guy on your team! :)

Wow thanks for that Pearl link! I know how I'll be spending my afternoon......

Nice article. For anyone wanting to try more pepper, I like going to The Meadow when in NYC. Sometimes get a random vial of (expensive!) pepper. Plus you can sample a wall of bitters!

Any one else have a good source?

Some more info on how the old line that "saturated fat is bad" might not be so simple.

https://examine.com/nutrition/is-saturated-fat-bad-for-me/

You can even find people who are into various forms "traditional foods" (not diet trends like paleo...though maybe that too?) go further than more cautious articles like this in affirming -benefits- of saturated fat. Catherine Shanahan for example argues in Deep Nutrition that saturated fat can be good.

Stimulate fun discussion?

Organize your own thoughts?

Teach readers new things in a way that directly ties the information to their current experience?

And so many more.

I think this attitude vastly underestimates how messy of a process knowing actually is. To give just one point here: understanding a topic---even a single assertion---isn't like a switch, something you lack one moment and have the next. A researcher who can use knowledge about a topic in a wide variety of contexts (especially beyond their mechanical training) and who can map it into a wide variety of other systems has, for the most part, a better understanding than a researcher who can't. And of a course a layman who can't even work in a single system but has acquired a few "analogical" notions can have more understanding than someone who doesn't even recognize the concept.

Exactly because of how knowing works, I think articles like this can have an important place. They can open up new concepts for us (often little more than an empty node that can later be filled in). For experts in the broader field, they can give a quick impression of what other people are working on which might stimulate digging into more detail. And for experts on this topic, taking such writing seriously can have benefits like keeping their work in perspective and stimulating creativity (see Feynman's point about teaching physics 101).

And yes, these articles satisfy emotional needs. But what good thing doesn't?

Edit: I was mostly responding to the parent->parent, not so much disagreeing with the parent, who raised a good point.

Aye, Lightning Bolt was one of my favorite shows ever too. Had just finished college. Saw them play on the floor of a dive bar with just a few other local patrons. I stood right in front of the band---could have kicked the drumkit---with my body convulsing from the intensity. The whole experience was cathartic.

Oh yeah no denying the X improves on the 6, especially screen and camera. And if I took pics regularly I’d upgrade. One of these days...

What would make me personally enthusiastically pay a lot to upgrade would be a blazing fast e-ink display. Or a flexible, paper-like body that goes rigid when you’re holding it in your hand. Or a gizmo you can just keep in your wallet (maybe resting on your finger when you want to project a touch screen on your palm or on a bracelet for your arm).

More imaginatively, I suspect there’s a lot of potential for a new lo-fi platform that makes a different set of trade offs than the iPhone and its imitators. But every aspect of the design and production would need to be nailed though for it to be pulled off. And it would require a bit of a reshuffling of what we expect from our “body computer”.

Exactly, only 3.3 years ago. :)

I still use a beat-up 6 with a wonderful patina and have no interest in upgrading. For me the 6 seemed to be the point where everything was "good enough". Until there's a big advance in what phones are and can do (a bit more than the iPhone X ha), I'd rather just repair what's there.

Does anyone know about grassroots efforts to provide internet in major cities? Any links to follow updates or just for more info?

Being completely ignorant, it should be feasible with so many people in a few square miles.

I would absolutely contribute to an internet coop in Chicago were such a thing to get going. Even just to avoid the annual two hour phone calls to Comcast when I discover they added $100 worth of shit I didn't order to my bill without asking me.

Yea I usually don't even know exactly what I'm looking for. I'd love an ebook reader which can nail something roughly like the experience of browsing library stacks.

The relative straightforwardness is exactly the appeal to me. There are nights when nothing works better. I had people over to play games last week, for example, and turns out it had been a long day for all of us and we didn't really feel like anything too involved. Carcassonne was perfect. Same with playing with extended family at Christmas. You can explain the main rules in a few sentences and everyone enjoys it.

All that said, I almost always use an expansion or two (or three) to keep things varied and add depth.

Until just the past month I didn't have room for a dedicated dining table. My trick was to store a hollow door (yes, a closet door I carried back from Home Depot) behind my clothes in my closet. And when I had people over for board games and/or dinner, I'd pull out two saw horses from under my bed and place the door across them. Totally worked, and it even kinda looked trendy!

Chairs, of course, were assembled from various other uses around the apt, and I had a few slight, almost space-less lawn chairs if I needed extra. In my smallest apartment, I'd pull the door against the couch, so that three people could sit down. But this was obviously not ideal because they sunk much lower...

Perhaps some ancient ones, but also more modern historians. When this list was written almost 50 years ago it seems that tradition was already fading, and now...as far as I can tell...it's covered in dust. Old histories inevitably contain aspects we find mistaken (both morally and factually). But I personally love reading them for the strange perspective, the vigorous speculation, the calm judgement.

Gibbon was surely intended as a "Great Historian". And Macaulay (whose "Third Chapter" on the history of the people of England inspired generations of scholars). Maybe Michelet. Prescott. You can still find these all the time in battered Modern Library editions in used book stores.

For my money the greatest historian (who was surely meant) was Jacob Burckhardt, not-quite-incidentally a student of Schopenhauer and friend of Nietzsche. A modern edition will use footnotes to correct claims that turned out to be errors, and you're left with an elegant, sweeping vision of human activity, saturated with all the melancholy and resignation appropriate to the subject.

Two early twentieth century books I've read that probably fit the mold of "great historian" intended by this author are Webb's The Great Plains and Young's Victorian England: Portrait of an Age.

I think what the author means by "old great histories"---as distinct from the many old "scientific" histories that are now merely wrong---is that the historian takes human nature as the primary subject and uses historical fact, at least as best as can be ascertained, as the concrete medium for both exploring and shaping it.