faux_intellect

I highly recommend listening to the interviews Wallace did with Michael Silverblatt on KCRW's Bookworm.

https://www.kcrw.com/people/david-foster-wallace

Yeah, definitely. The vlogs are cool. Check out the amount of hard drives he ends up using https://youtu.be/Zlu5tkeTg9Y?t=4m54s

Casey started monetizing his channel much, much later. In my view, the footage he has amassed and shared on Youtube over the years shares parallels with what Tryniski is doing, namely, he has provided people with a visual account of what it is like to live in New York City at a particular time in history. While obviously different than what Tryniski does in that it is more autobiographical, I definitely think it'll be significant if not now then in the future, especially as the city develops more and changes over time. There's been a lot of footage he has captured that only he has captured, e.g., https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKOdMA97FGM

Casey Neistat is someone who comes to mind. He has chronicled so many moments of his life on video and shared them with the world.

From David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: "no single, individual moment is in and of itself unendurable"

Nice one. The Gang Solves the Gas Crisis is my favorite episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

For a laugh, I'd sure love to see the half-baked list of disabilities the author thinks solely merit a handicapped placard, which he has doubtless already compiled.

What sucks is that there tends to be a stigma that goes along with having a placard, because, among other reasons, it's sometimes the case that onlookers judge someone who puts up a placard on their mirror as if they are lying about their disability just to park closer. It's one of the reasons why people with legitimate disabilities tend not to use them when they have them, even at meters.

Author contributes to this by seemingly lumping people who have real, non-apparent disabilities with those who pretend to have a disability.

CMU's self-paced and free Open Learning Initiative classes on statistics might be helpful early on:

Empirical Research Methods: http://oli.cmu.edu/courses/future/empirical-research-methods...

Probability and Statistics: http://oli.cmu.edu/courses/free-open/statistics-course-detai...

Statistical Reasoning: http://oli.cmu.edu/courses/free-open/statistical-reasoning-c...

Andy Field also posted some great lectures that pair well with Discovering Statistics here: https://www.youtube.com/user/ProfAndyField/videos

Thanks for sharing this. It's always great to reread DFW. He had such extraordinary prescience about so many things.

Another bit of gold from that excerpt:

> First there’s some sort of terrific, sci-fi-like advance in consumer tech — like from aural to video phoning — which advance always, however, has certain un- foreseen disadvantages for the consumer; and then but the market-niches created by those disadvantages — like people’s stressfully vain repulsion at their own videophonic appearance — are ingeniously filled via sheer entrepreneurial verve; and yet the very advantages of these ingenious disadvantage-compensations seem all too often to undercut the original high-tech advance, resulting in consumer-recidivism and curve-closure and massive shirt-loss for precipitant investors. In the present case, the stress- and-vanity-compensations’ own evolution saw video-callers rejecting first their own faces and then even their own heavily masked and enhanced physical likenesses and finally covering the video-cameras altogether and transmitting attractively stylized static Tableaux to one another’s TPs. And, behind these lens-cap dioramas and transmitted Tableaux, callers of course found that they were once again stresslessly invisible, unvainly makeup- and toupeeless and baggy-eyed behind their celebrity-dioramas, once again free — since once again unseen — to doodle, blemish-scan, manicure, crease-check — while on their screen, the attractive, intensely attentive face of the well-appointed celebrity on the other end’s Tableau reassured them that they were the objects of a concentrated attention they themselves didn’t have to exert.

At this point, I think Google Scholar should step in and just put a replications section beside every scientific publication. People should be able to quickly and easily know how many times a study has been attempted to replicate and, of those attempted, how many times it has actually successfully replicated.

It's unfortunate that replications aren't taken more seriously these days, but it also doesn't help that, when there are actual replications, you have to scour the internet for them rather than having them readily available to you.