arstin's comments

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.