grepherder
If you thought he could've meant that people who aren't good could be amoral instead of being indecent, then you are most likely, although not absolutely wrong. Keep in mind amorality for a human is not well-defined, it is more often used to describe non-intelligent life or abstract entities. Society would consider an amoral person "immoral" in a casual sense of the word, because a person who is indifferent towards morality is per definition likely to commit immoral acts if there are no repercussions.
Either this is just another insincere sentence thrown in to fill the article, or the author's intuition is terrible. Something along these lines: "They are engaged with something amoral, therefore they must be amoral!", genious. A farm or the act of farming is also amoral, so I guess you expect farmers to be pretty indecent. Really, it's been so many years and why do journalists still think these filler sentences help their article?
But... You (you, with the coding = literacy idea) are seriously overestimating the masses. I'm not sure why, might be due to some bubble effect. I don't live in SV or anything that resembles it. And my view is that even if you decide to go with the coding = literacy analogy, you will run into trouble because most people are not even literate beyond the absolute basics they can get away with. I'm speaking about professionals, and even a certain "majority" of college graduates. I'm speaking about a randomly sampled manager from a medium sized enterprise. Ask this guy to write a single page essay about something he knows about. I'm talking about writing, the kind of literacy we're talking about in the coding = literacy analogy. If you are really in a bubble, you might be surprised that only a minority of people living in the first world can write coherently beyond the length of a twitter update or an SMS. So, I would suggest to find another analogy for your public campaigning if you mean learning coding as in learning to code beyond hello world or fizzbuzz.
Another problem: where are those magical people that want to increase productivity? Most professionals I know don't even work most of the time! And they want to get away with the absolute minimum that can still achieve the maximum possible return. This is basic human behaviour. I don't endorse it, and I don't say this is everyone's standart behaviour, so no need to take offense, but I don't think anyone would argue against that what I posit here holds for the majority. Now, you want these people to learn coding to increase their productivity? Good luck. I'm sincerely all for it, and I will even help in ways that I can, excuse my cynicism.
Some things you mentioned don't add up. You don't have to be a human database to play chess as a hobby, even at club level. Playing at club level can be fun, and can definitely be a healthy hobby which doesn't take more time than any other sports or any other gaming activity. If it's not fun for you, or if you obsess over how better you could get if you just studied this or that opening, or how you'll never even reach 2200 ELO, then chess is probably not for you or not fit to be a hobby for you, that is true.
In short, thinking you would gain more mentally that would help with your engineering skill-set by playing chess instead of just, well, studying and working as an engineer, is fallacious to begin with. If there aren't any such studies, which I doubt, then why would you assume that? Of course, if all you want to do in life is being a better engineer, then anything but doing that is a "huge waste of time", not just chess.
But I think I still understand you emotionally as we had similar thoughts. Maybe, like me, you too rationalized your time spent in chess by saying to yourself that it helps your focus and concentration at work etc., but that's really not any more logical than rationalizing smoking, in the end you're just fooling yourself spending time doing something you enjoy. I'd think this was obvious, and I knew it even when as I was doing it myself. Maybe you just needed that external heads-up, from that older engineer you mentioned.
On a completely different note, I could still argue chess is not entirely useless in that sense. Compared to legos, you're forgetting that chess is a social activity. You're facing real people, and beating them can build confidence, and losing also has its lessons - socially, not chesswise. I've learned a lot about competition at a young age, and I've experienced what "winning" and "losing" is like. This is different than team sports, because you're out there alone by yourself, with no luck involved. And although we don't share the same success with him, a friend who doesn't spend more than a few hours per week playing chess became rather successful (2000+ ELO), and I see that it made him a lot more confident. Also for what it's worth, a lot of people - you may find the notion stupid - perceive him to be a very smart person, which is pretty valuable socially. I think that is an incredible value gained for that effort, arguably more efficient than a college education considering all this talk nowadays about the bubble.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_script#History
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_alphabet#History_and_d...
Exactly. I didn't mean to suggest that you can actually "learn" those 100 words in a meaningful way. That treshold is also difficult to measure indeed, I also can't back that up besides anecdote without spending some time looking into research. Anyway, my point wasn't that at all. I was actually trying to state it's not realistic to assume a 100 word per day acquisition, because that would mean you would spend 4-5+ hours a day _just_ to know certain translations of those words, without any context or very little if any. I'm talking about something very mechanic that would gain you very little in real language acquisition terms for the effort you spend. Unrealistic scenario unless you're trying to win a bet.
Also, it's worth to note that this depends strongly on how you actually define new words, i.e. what kind of inflections etc. you consider to be distinct words. In languages where you can derive an average of 3-4 new words for every word you learn this can become almost trivial.
Your point? Daniel Tammet is an autistic savant. And some people have eidetic memory. There is little relevance unless we find a method to recreate these traits in "normal" people, there is by no means any evidence that every human has latent super powers.
As a normal person having nevertheless high language aptitude, I reached C1 or very close to C1 in about 6-7 months. I say close to C1 despite reaching C1 level in a test, because I don't think it's fair to claim you have every capability for C1 as described by CEFR just because you passed a 4-hour test, in certain ways you just cheat by learning for the test. Anyway, even that was with a very generous amount of immersion, about a minimum of 8 hours a day including long hours of grammar practice. Still, despite praises from native speakers, at that time I wouldn't assert that I was fluent in speech or writing. Now to claim you can be "fluent" in 5 months just by studying 30-60 minutes a day is a bit outrageous.
I can't tell you how much our brain can really "absorb" and "retain" in one day, but there are very real limits in language acquisition after a certain age. I won't say it's impossible, but to realize your claims, we definitely need a magic pill or surgical operation / cybernetics.
About the Pirate Party's take on this: I don't think there's a mature consensus yet. According to a recent poll (http://www.taz.de/!89247/) only 6 percent sees the party as postgender.
The linked video and the comments it generates are an excellent example of this.
Wow, I do this instinctively all the time, but to be frank I feared it was just a stupid obsession of mine and suspected it could be detrimental, that it made me less efficient. I'm relieved to know this is an advised method of managing your mind, even if there isn't of course much science behind it. Anecdotally, this does help with my concentration.
Am I the only one that doesn't agree with this, at least in general? I mean, the idea behind the advice is of course sound, just a basic form of keep it simple stupid. But in this case, why? This isn't engineering, it's about communication of thoughts. And thoughts can be abstract. I find I can think more efficiently and also more rationally when using abstractions, especially ones I'm familiar with. Just like chunking in memory, there is data I have ready when you speak of mortality, instead of trying to explain to me in plain words that people die.
That said, it might just be me (or people like me). I have to constantly make a conscious effort of writing and speaking less abstractly, just to not annoy people. It might have to do with the fact that English is not my native tongue, and as I don't use it in my daily life, I lack the touch for concreteness to make sense to me that easily.
But to be against a work of fiction that _parodies_ negative concepts, like objectification of women, which is clearly what LSL is about if you ever played it, is not acceptable from a freedom of speech perspective. Once you start finding disagreements with parodies, you're on a slippery slope. Next thing you are disagreeing with religious or political parody. A parody is about conveying a negative concept humorously after all, if the common mindset found the concept agreeable, it wouldn't be called a parody in the first place.
This really just boils down to saying, "the society is too stupid to understand subtleties, so we better keep humor and entertainment direct and remove any irony/parody/cynical/dark humor". There are countries where this mindset is common, and censorship is what it leads to, I know this because I've been there.
Academic science is an entirely different story. It's a growing body, and it grows by using previous information in its body, so any probability of disruptive/wrong data entering the system has to be reduced as much as it can with strict discipline. To apply the same standard to our daily lives is absurd - you could as well be against spoken conversation because it's too lossy and converse using pen&paper - speech recognition is tricky after all.
This doesn't take much more than common sense to get - you could formalize it for specific cases statistically, maybe using shannon entropy and such - anectodal information is still information and the loss of information by virtue of not being backed up by scientific method is in most cases insignificantly low - just think of it as an efficient compression algorithm.
If you aren't ethically against lossy audio/image/text compression, there is no reason to take such a strict stance against anectodal information. Most times it's very useful, just have your rationality filter/bs detector and the like on at all times like they should be.
Concerning the other point, it's also true but it's something else entirely. I never meant a mathematician will outdo someone with software engineering education, obviously he will at least have to read about good software engineering practices. I can also confirm your experience, from firsthand account even, as someone who began coding to do basic applied math. Thinking mathematically generally leads to (at best) efficient but unreadable, one-time-use-only code.
Also, beware - correlation fallacy. In my experience it doesn't have anything to do with the education itself, I believe you can easily generalize and say the average person taking up mathematics has a better analytical mind than the average CS major who's in it for the hype.