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[0] https://www.goldmansachs.com/investor-relations/corporate-go...
[1] https://www.atlantafed.org/-/media/Documents/news/conference...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/silicon-valley-bank-bailout-yelle...
[3] https://money.usnews.com/investing/stock-market-news/article...
This core idea is getting at something important, something that other commenters are covering and is covered in this previous HN thread [0] about information addiction for example, but upon examination there are lots of ideas in this piece that bother me. I think my primary concern is the author's assertion that all passive consumption ought to be categorized as entertainment and all active creation ought to be categorized as effortful work. (I've seen way too many video game damage calculation spreadsheets for that to be the case.)
I'll highlight the author's conjecture that "edutainment is not learning but preparation for learning". Relevant, digestible, and yes sometimes entertaining collections of information are preparation for understanding (which typically requires application), which is preparation for mastery (which typically requires ten more years of application). I would argue this entire process is what encompasses learning, of which well-sourced information is a critical component for. I suspect there is some conflation here of entertainment with distraction, which is areal mind killer that ought to be addressed, but instead gets tossed away by the author during his Cal Newport reference in favor of his love for Twitter and vested interest in newsletter subscriptions.
The concept I feel the author is getting at via his edutainment strawman is that information acquisition is not sufficient for the fluency of understanding required for conceptual mastery. This is a concept that I think most HN readers and textbook exercise writers would agree with.
The possibility that the author may be missing this concept feels to me like it would explain a certain awkwardness about the entire article, which seems to rely on shoehorning a plethora of loosely-connected, name-dropped quotes and ideas into italicized slots of questionable logical integrity to support the presumption that everything entertaining must be useless, and everything educational must be hard. I've met way too many lazy smart people to believe that to be the case.
Our collective addiction to the conveniences of modern life is leading to the proliferation of carcinogenic materials and destroying the environment. Generations upon generations lived without these spoils uphill both ways without complaint. If the slightest suggestion of lifting some weight and going for a walk is enough to induce abject misery, it might be a good time to re-evaluate the way we do things.
Catechesis is a term associated with the Catholic Church as a form of systematic instruction of a set of dogmatic, ideological beliefs. Denouncing Odell's book as "catechistic indexing" is a serious burn, connoting the sense of a group of religious followers shallowly regurgitating the same dogmatically accepted facts (with or without adequate exposition or even any understanding in the first place), in the style that a religious leader might conduct a catechistic question and answer session. The abstract forces being referenced are essentially the attention economy's rehash of the same Marxist criticisms of capitalism that goes back centuries at this point, which the critic assumes that New Yorker readers (who generally self-select for a certain demographic of left-leaning and educated) would be overly familiar with. If you're looking for an introduction to those arguments, there's Richard Wolff's appearance on Lex Fridman's podcast last year [0] or you could try a more erudite overview like Vivek Chibber's talk, titled Consent, Coercion, and Resignation on the structural forces of capitalism [1].
Vidrun, born of the sea-wind through the spruce
Vidrun, green-tinged offshoot of my bough, joy and burden of my life
Vidrun, fierce and clever, may our clan’s wisdom be yours:
Never read Hacker News
On a practical level Davis focuses on accumulated mess as 5 things: (1) trash, (2) dishes, (3) laundry, (4) things that have a place and are not in their place, and (5) things that do not have a place.
The book adds some interesting psychological framing which I found helpful -- treating care tasks as morally neutral, for example. Her techniques target ADHD-types as well as people undergoing life changes (like Marie Kondo starting a family) or otherwise have strict time/energy constraints. Her Struggle Care website [0] has a pretty detailed primer on her philosophy.
The subject of the Quanta magazine article is a critical literature review which the article author describes as the "death knell for the serotonin hypothesis". The basis for your skepticism, "The fact that healthy people still get depression" could be addressed in the section of article where they explain how depression could be a catch all umbrella term for the presentation of symptoms with a wide variety of causes, potentially including stress, genetic predisposition, tryptophan depletion, or chronic inflammation. Inflammation from periodontitis or gut dysbiosis can exist within the threshold of otherwise healthy people, as evidenced by the attenuation of symptoms in sufferers of major depression by these interventions in the studies examined by the review I linked. Maybe the reason a lot more people haven't beaten major depression through these interventions is because when they go to the doctor, they get a script for an SSRI and a cognitive behavioral therapist and a kick out the door, instead of a root canal and some yogurt.
I encourage you to make a cursory effort to read the article and examine the currently available evidence in support or opposition to claims before confirming your own private conceptions on a topic.
[0] https://sci-hub.st/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30004130/
"Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users... we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers... we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm."
Google in 2003: Eric "You can trust us with your data" Schmidt convinces Sergey and Larry of the bonkers amount of money they can make with Adsense. They proceed to switch to the same advertising business model that hindered their early competitors.
Google in 2007: Buys out Doubleclick to maintain Adsense's monopoly and doubles down on surveillance capitalism.
Google in 2017: Loses $2.7 billion antitrust lawsuit in the EU for behavior biased towards advertisers and away from the needs of consumers. Who could have predicted this would happen? Response? No changes to business model, but oust a vocal supporter of the decision from Google-funded think tank New America. [1]
Google in 2023...
After reading Robert Whitaker's 2010 Anatomy of an Epidemic [2], I'm convinced that future generations will look back on this era of psychiatric treatment with the same critical eye that our generation points at Moliere's 17th-century leeches or George Washington's personal doctor treating his strep throat with several blood-letting phlebotomies -- an absolute iatrogenic travesty. The overprescription of potentially mania-inducing antidepressants in children and teenagers is especially egregious to me. Add in the perverse incentives of profit-driven pharmaceutical companies, and you get issues like Zyprexa's 2009 class action lawsuit, for example [3].
For those looking for a readable introduction to the potential link between chronic inflammation and depression, there is The Inflamed Mind by Edward Bullmore from 2018 which did some rounds on talk shows and the like.
[0] https://sci-hub.st/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30004130/
[1] https://sci-hub.st/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomy_of_an_Epidemic
[3] https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2009/January/09-civ-0...
The two share much ideological agreement, like when both offered great praise for Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic of Education of Man, but while Hegel generally quotes Goethe with veneration, Goethe seems generally suspicious of Hegel's philosophy -- in one meeting offering open criticism to Hegel about his dialectic, for example.
One work that goes into detail on both thinkers would be the late Walter Kaufmann's first volume of his trilogy Discovering the Mind, in which he offers an opinionated criticism of Kant and Hegel's obscurity and obfuscation by contrasting it with Goethe's thematic clarity.
While I am always happy to see new work focusing on the Weimar classicists, whose ideas serve as a stark contrast to dystopic forces from the brutality of the French revolution to the banality of corporate life today, I think I agree with this article writer about the weakness of Wulf's synopses. As compelling as Wulf's exposition is, it feels to me somewhat overpractical to constrain these powerful thinkers through the lens of a Socratic Know Thyself commandment in her emphasis on self-determination. Certainly there is a place for a feel-good, narrative-driven book like this, but I personally would point people towards the essays curated by Carroll, Giles, and Oergle in Aesthetics and Modernity or Leslie Sharpe's Cambridge Studies entry on Schiller for a drier but more thought provoking exploration of German Idealism and the valuable concepts it would spawn through the Frankfurt School in the twentieth century.
Schiller's concept of Spieltrieb is from his 1794 On the Aesthetic Education of Man, which describes a sort of idealistic, post-work state of man when given the liberty to merge his innate "Sinestrieb", the urge towards sensual and material gratification, and his "Formtrieb", the urge to establish moral order upon the world.
Schiller, alongside of Goethe and other Weimar Classicists, built on Kant's transcendental idealism to perform a sort of epistemological revalorization of the Greek concept of aesthetics, in contrast to previous enlightenment thinking which primarily focused on reason without regard for sentiment. Writing against the backdrop of the French Revolution, which Schiller felt had been co-opted by violent radicals and ultimately failed to achieve its lofty ideological goals, Schiller (being a playwright and novelist himself) believed that an appreciation for the arts could help develop the moral character necessary for a society to act as unified harmonious beings.
This concept has persisted as the pursuit of the aesthetic condition, a sort of post-revolution endgame to aspire towards where everyone, upon reaching some threshhold of education and appreciation for art, becomes happy and aspires to play and create works of art all day long. This aspirational outcome is referenced by political theorists like Marcuse, Adorno and the rest of the Frankfurt school whose work criticized what they saw as the inevitable unpleasant consequences of modernity and capitalism, e.g. commodification, the alienation of labor, and the devaluation of man.
Stanford encyclopedia on Schiller: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schiller/
I second the adventure game recommendations people have been listing, and for those with young children I'll add the Living Books series as an amazing set of experiences to enjoy together for early reading exposure. The Tortoise and the Hare [0] and Arthur's Teacher Trouble [1] are absolute masterpieces of kid-friendly humor.
[0] https://archive.org/details/TORTOISE1993
[1] https://archive.org/details/LivingBooks-ArthursTeacherTroubl...
After getting a handle on the fundamentals, the next step is just the accumulation of ideas. GMs use this word all the time in lectures and their post-mortem interviews. Some are common and obvious -- pressuring f2/f7, or yoloing a pawn storm in oppositely castled positions, or outposting an "octopus knight" on the sixth rank, for example. Other ideas require so much genius to see they become famous -- Fischer's Nh4!! at age 13, or Short's king walk, or Shirov's bishop sacrifice, for example.
Accumulating ideas is why studying openings can be helpful in the beginning -- you will learn common plans as well as the most dangerous ideas and traps by brute force just by looking at enough theory. But rather than this inefficient approach -- since you'll never remember every single possible move -- I would recommend studying books and lectures that cover common ideas in the setups you prefer. Specifically, work through the pawn structures you like from GM Mauricio Flores Rios's Chess Structures book, and then study grandmasters who match your style or otherwise inspires you in some way -- e.g. Fischer/Tal for tactical wizards, Karpov/Kramnik for positional specialists, Carlsen/Capablanca for endgame grinders, or Rapport/Jobava/Larsen if you are a weirdo -- and watch Youtube videos analyzing their games and/or buy a book with GM commentary of their best hits.
[0]: https://github.com/eehh-stanford/baydem/
[1]: https://github.com/MichaelHoltonPrice/price_et_al_tikal_rc
I just hope these devices are particularly well-regulated for sleep, however, because I imagine sending the wrong signal for even a few nights' sleep could do some serious damage.
[0] https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-perm...
What a strange post. This guy namedrops Scott Adams and writes a few lines referencing Adams' 2013 book How to Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big, but it's pretty unclear to me if he understood the point that Adams was trying to make. In Ch6 Goals vs Systems, Adams writes:
> To put it bluntly, goals are for losers. That's literally true most of the time... The systems-versus-goals point of view is burdened by semantics, of course. You might say every system has a goal, however vague. And that would be true to some extent. And you could say that everyone who pursues a goal has some sort of system to get there, whether it is expressed or not. You could word-glue goals and systems together if you chose. All I'm suggesting is that thinking of goals and systems as very different concepts has power. Goal-oriented people exist in a state of continuous presuccess failure at best, and permanent failure at worst if things never work out. Systems people succeed every time they apply their systems, in the sense that they did what they intended to do. The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system. That's a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.
Looking at the blog post author's emboldened claim, "Systems don't work without goals", and his implication that every olympic athlete who does not claim his or her medal emoji is a failure, it seems clear to me that he either missed Adams' point entirely or has his own agenda with respect to "goals" as a buzzword. I will also point out that the project that his blog links to is a $10/month subscription service that itself functions as a system to help people achieve their goals -- so perhaps this is someone who has a vested interest in this semantic battle.
Fiore -- decouple any self-judgment or self-validation from your work and its results, and stay focused on the task itself and why you want to finish it. "Lower the board" (see the link [0]) and avoid pressure messages to yourself like "have to" or "should" and focus on rational choices by committing to a schedule of your choosing that intentionally includes "unscheduled" time to relax and recharge.
Pressfield -- anthropomorphizes the concept of "Resistance" as an enemy that needs to be respected as formidable and systematically destroyed. It comes in many forms -- for you it seems like it calls itself "Anxiety" and is possibly attempting to transform you into a pod person. It is merciless and comes from both within and without. But once you can identify its attempts to derail you, you can approach the war with discipline, structure, and professionalism, and thus choose your battles with it intelligently, recognizing Resistance for what it is -- the hodgepodge collection of bricks forming the last wall between you and the choice to become who you already know you are.
My position is that it's fine to stand on the shoulders of giants and adopt the opinions of others with due credit, especially for topics outside of your field of expertise. All great thinkers have their influences, so it doesn't make sense to me to expect anyone to have a completely unique take on everything. Your collection of ideas and opinions that you have adopted is in itself unique, so there's no need to build an opinion from scratch on every topic.
In terms of concrete techniques for creativity, there's a couple books on this subject that might interest you -- Messy by Tim Harford [0], The War of Art by Steven Pressfield and The Accidental Creative by Todd Henry. Harford talks about stuff like cross-pollination, with the idea that well-known solutions for one medium could be considered breakthroughs in a different context. Pressfield talks about discipline/professionalism and using that to create an environment for your muse to visit. Henry takes more of a productivity-oriented approach, with tips to manage energy, avoid "assassins of creativity", that sort of thing.
For me personally, if I'm in a rut I like to go to the local library and just walk around the shelves until I see something interesting -- it can be pretty hit or miss, but every now and then I'll check out a book that leads to a creative thread worth following.
But one I thing I will note for you specifically, just from your choice of language in your post, is that it sounds like you tend to hold yourself to a very high standard. This is generally a good thing, but consider that you may subconsciously be putting a lot of pressure on yourself to be uniquely great. This can run the risk of developing an excessively critical attitude that can preclude you from giving yourself the freedom and space to make mistakes and explore ideas and activities that may not seem like they will lead to anything worthwhile at first glance.
Creativity generally isn't something that you actively pursue -- it is a process that ensues from letting inspiration marinate in your subconscious. So if you want to be more creative, I suggest pursuing more potential sources of inspiration, and more opportunities for subconscious marination -- long walks, meditation, yoga, etc.
An inspiringly optimistic spiritual outlook from the PGN standard, so thank you for that.
Technically, over the board one could just wait until their deceased opponent flags to claim a win, but in practice, for every occasion I'm aware of in high level tournament play, the remaining player will adjudicate the game honestly according to their evaluation of the position -- even if that means resigning out of respect for his or her opponent. See Karapanos-Zoler (2009), or Meier-Niyizibi from the 2014 Olympiad [1].
One more thing to note is that playing high level chess is in fact a strenuous activity; one grandmaster playing while wearing a heart monitor recorded burning 560 calories in two hours. [2] Top players like Carlsen or Caruana keep themselves in peak physical condition in addition to their chess preparation.
And although chess players as a demographic may have certain increased predispositions to conditions like Asperger's, schizophrenia, or cardiovascular diseases (likely due to the sedentary nature of the game), I'll relay something one older player once commented to me: that he has never found a documented case of a high level tournament chess player succumbing to Alzheimer's disease.
[0] https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1554879
[1] https://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1771703
[2] https://www.espn.com/espn/story/_/id/27593253/why-grandmaste...
But really, you could go as far back as Nietzsche if you wanted to ignore another perfectly apt warning:
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes back into you.
For the same target audience looking for free introductory coursework/exercises for Haskell, I'd recommend working through the Data61 Haskell course [3]. Brian McKenna has a nice Youtube series [4] covering it.
[1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/rust-by-example/index.html
[2] https://learnxinyminutes.com/
[0] 2700chess.com