tombert
I'm not saying that IQ is useless or anything, just that we should take the results with an appropriately large grain of salt.
Also, given the fact that you can study for IQ tests, I don't really think I agree at all that it's some immutable and objective fact of behavioral science.
Ultimately, I think there are more aspects of "value" than "being smart".
I do think there's value in saying things that are bothering you early on, so I'm not going to say that complaining is inherently "bad", but I will acknowledge that frequent complaining (especially to the wrong people) can lead to a lot of unhappiness and dissatisfaction with your life.
I don't think over-explaining everything has negatively affected my life though.
It would be a tight fit, but I still think within feasibility. We've gotten so good at shrinking video that it kind of feels like wizardry to me. Granted, I'm not sure there existed a computer in the 90s that was powerful enough to encode or decode it.
Like, it's baffling to me how much we can compress high-quality video nowadays. HEVC and AV1 and VP9 are all also very cool and they still sort of break my brain. I understand how they work but it doesn't feel like it should compress as well as it does.
The premise is that it's trivial cost to believe with very high potential reward and no downside if you're wrong. That's simply not true; if it turns out that there isn't a God, and if it turns out that there is no heaven or hell, and that this is the only life we get, then you have wasted everything for a false premise.
Maybe I'm just weird, but I can't actually choose what I believe. I can choose to go to church and I can choose to say I believe and I can choose to donate money to some religious institution, but I don't think I'm capable of believing something that I think is dumb.
Of course, this is just when they got caught doing it. Who knows how often it happens where they don't.
Software engineers make a lot of money, at least historically because of supply/demand mechanics. By suddenly and continuously flooding the market with lots and lots of software engineers, you effectively can bring down wages, since if people are unemployed long enough they're likely to take a lower salary.
Personally I've always greatly preferred self-guided learning. I never really did great with strict coursework, and instead have done a lot better when I am given more abstract lessons that I play with.
I'm a pretty weird dude, and I have no problem acknowledging that; it's possible that a lot of (most?) people do better with the more structured learning.
I had trouble with university the first time around, but it wasn't for the stuff that I thought was interesting. I did fine in my math classes and physics courses and the like; the thing that I struggled the most with were my "easy" courses (e.g. multicultural film). I just did not care about anything that wasn't math or computers, and as such I had trouble forcing myself to do the homework or study and of course I did poorly in the courses.
I've gotten a lot better at forcing myself to do boring work now, but ironically once I decided to do grad school and get my masters, I found it a lot easier. I didn't have to do any courses that I thought were boring. I got to focus on data structures and math and programming languages. You know, fun stuff! As such the masters was (comparatively speaking) a breeze for me because I didn't mind spending hours studying every day.
It occurs to me, though, that this advice might just be about me specifically, which I suppose is the point of the article.
I had never really played any "open ended" games before it; sometimes I would just load up the game to run around, with no goals of collecting any stars or making any progress or anything. The platforming controls were fun even when there wasn't any specific "goal", and to a six year old kid the worlds felt huge.
As a cynical grownup who more or less knows how to write software, I now know that a lot of the "gigantic" feeling you'd have in N64 games was smoke and mirrors, but I didn't as a kid. It felt like if I just swam to some yet-unexplored corner of Jolly Roger Bay there would be something waiting for me. It doesn't hurt that the music is actually really good (particularly in Jolly Roger Bay).
Without hyperbole, as a thirty-something now, I've probably played through the game around thirty or forty times; I have most of the stars pretty thoroughly memorized and I can get an "any%" completion in a couple hours. I will still load the game up every now and again on my MiSTer. Despite being one of the first big 3D platformers, I still think it's one of the best.
I know he's an adult and he's allowed to make his own decisions and he's allowed to throw his money away if he wants. I'm not his dad and I can't make decisions for him, but it seems really gross that there's an institution that exists seemingly purely to extract money from people who don't understand math.
So, simple question: why D? Keep in mind that "I think it writes pretty code" is a perfectly valid answer.
I almost never gamble, the last time being ~2012. I figured it might be fun to set aside like $100 and try the strategy regardless, content with walking away if I won the minimum bet. I actually won on my first bet and cashed out immediately.
I played the game for a grand total of like fifteen minutes, and even in that short time I ended up chatting with the fellow gamblers and ended up feeling a bit depressed. One guy there said he was down $700 because of the current long streak of red, and we were “due” for a black any time now.
He seemed like a nice enough guy and I tried to explain that each throw is basically an isolated event, so you’re never “due” for anything and the red streak can keep going for a very long time, well after you run out of money. I then realized he was not interested in a lecture from me about statistics and let it go.
My strategy worked, I won back the initial bet of $10, cashed out my chips, and left. I was happy to be $10 richer but it makes me sad how this guy might genuinely leave this vacation in severe debt because he doesn’t understand basic stats.
He then asked "isn't pretty much all power on earth outside of nuclear fission technically done by fusion if we give enough of a delay?". I didn't really have a rebuttal to that.