outofcuriosity's comments

There've been other studies to this effect, though, and not just for adolescents. Papers often attribute the effects to a combination of lifestyle comparison, echo chambers, and emotional contagion. Check this one out: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full.pd

Now imagine your entire friend network is nonstop angst. I'd go mad, too.

It could be a just-so story, but I think overuse of SNSs allows our social skills to atrophy. The brain repurposes structures that go underused, and the structures that maintain one's face-to-face social functioning are no different.

Maintaining relationships in realspace is different than maintaining them in the async-y & memetic environment of cyberspace. Of course there is granularity--one can have a healthy analog&digital relationship, but if a SNS connection is a part of an individual's requirement for a friendship, then there is probably some deficit the individual is unaware of.

I'd also argue that this is symptomatic of the growing pains heavy internet users experience in their adolescence-to-young-adult stage. The group self-selects for introverts who have a preexisting difficulty with social interaction. However, we all require some social interaction (analog or digital), to greater and lesser extents, and so it perpetuates.

Books and art end up being a better outlet, but in my experience that's a discovery which people can only make for themselves.

Manufacturing environments are probably among the best use cases for "the Internet of Things" but also magnify the security concerns tenfold. Stuxnet was a similar attack on networked manufacturing infrastructure, and it proved that if you give a sensor/automation network control over manufacturing processes, you create a massive vulnerability in the supply chain itself.

If a Russian student owns my Nest and makes my home freezing cold in the winter, I reconfigure or replace the device and its fine. If the automation system in a Siemens plant gets bricked, that's millions of dollars in damage before considering lost revenues.

The Risk Managers are gonna go wild for this one...

"...there have been multiple other apps that required me to use my Facebook credentials to log in. Facebook, it seems, is now core to the mobile Web experience."

Most social networks provide very little that a blog and an email address don't, and for that modicum we pay with our privacy. Personally, I don't think the convenience of OAuth is worth what the networks earn from selling my data. I wonder what'll happen to their market share when smartphone OS developers start including authentication layers in their kernels.

Lockheed will probably lap ITER within the next few years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_beta_fusion_reactor

Let's not forget that the end-game for fusion is "virtually limitless, safe, clean, carbon-neutral, very high-density power"--a set of characteristics literally none of our other sources of electricity have.

The author also neglects all of the scientific advancements that we've made but haven't yet transmuted into engineering advancements. Graphene, nanotubes, metamaterials, etc.

We could boycott networks & technologies that infringe upon our ability to exist as private individuals and to self-determine: Don't use the wifi toothbrush or the Fitbit, don't use Facebook or Twitter, stay connected with friends using email or (!) the postal service. Use less technology and gain more freedom.

Alternately, market collusion and the unquenchable desire of people to sell their information in exchange for Javascript-enabled friendships will force us into a grim future where the mistakes of the people we love & an assortment of bureaucratically-mandated sensors impede our pursuit of happiness.

Perhaps it's time to draw our lines in the sand.

"Open Link in Incognito Window."

(Though I agree that paywalled content is a nuisance, albeit with some granularity regarding the necessity of paywalls to continued access to quality reporting.)

People barred from flow often experience intense anxiety; I'd imagine that the "addicted" programmer not experiencing code flow would just replace that need with something like a high-complexity videogame.

The author's scope is maybe too narrow by focusing only on programmers. Perhaps this problem can be generalized to a type of individual that requires the flow state to the extent that their other behavior is perturbed or dysfunctional. Compare Richard Feynman's explosive rage when distracted from calculus or drums...

"Our men at the Wernicke and Broca Station Posts suggest that the good Ambassador Moustache is not as trustworthy as he seems..."

My money's on 69.

Rudy Rucker had some interesting conversations with Gödel about a deterministic universe in which (because time is illusory) backward time travel exists: http://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/2012/08/01/memories-of-kurt-g...

If the universe was "made of mathematics," then there would necessarily exist a Grand Unified Theory. But, Hawking asserts that Gödel's Theorems imply that not only does a Grand Unified Theory not exist, but that the formulation of one is impossible (http://www.hawking.org.uk/godel-and-the-end-of-physics.html).

The author stresses that all of reality is mathematical in structure, but this is at odds with the fact that all mathematical systems containing self-reference are necessarily incomplete. Physics is a self-referential system.

If the structure of the universe is mathematical, it is probably a very different math than humans are used to. Insert your favorite flavor of metaphysics here!

A life is certainly not a story, since we are never the sole authors of our circumstances. If you accept the "narrative model," a whirlwind of events and situations authored by others surrounds the tiny moments of our life which we have the ability to author.

...And so, a life is an Exquisite Corpse.

Perhaps when we select books to read them, we only do so in order to describe ourselves as a "Calvino reader" or a "Russophile" as much as the author rejects Bukowski so as to be thought of as "a person who despises Bukowski." In that case, forming an identity through the art you arbitrarily despise and have not experienced seems only slightly more flimsy than doing so through the art you have experienced and have a real opinion about.

But, I think most of us read to learn or to gain new perspectives, etc. So, openly hating things you haven't experienced or examined critically is about as anti-intellectual as claiming to have read things one hasn't. Why not just say, "I am more interested in [some type of fiction with certain themes], and my reading list is quite long." Easier and doesn't freeze out the conversation quite as badly.

I still haven't read Bayard's "How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read"...

Yes, I am a strict logical positivist. Without reproducibility and meta-analyses (or rigorous empirical observation as in climatology, paleontology, etc.), no theory exists, because no meaningful and logically-consistent observations have been made.

I used Foucault's theories as an example, but if you think I am "making stuff up," then I would be pleased to hear your opinions about the other theorists and researchers who admit to the subjectivity and reporting bias intrinsic to the social sciences and instead formulate more "theory" with which to explain and evaluate the behaviour of chaotic systems.

I am not your buddy. I am not making up strawmen, nor do I dismiss the work of researchers without having gained at least a dilettante's familiarity with the field.

I am fascinated by cultures, history, human behaviour, etc. However, I am skeptical of "experimental conclusions" which arrive from surveys and observations of cultures. Incredibly noisy data.

Furthermore, I object to the ambiguation of a term like "science," which exists to connote the certitude of rigorous observations and analyses of systems, and to bestow a certain truth value upon these observations, to describe studies for which our best explanations for observed behaviours are guesswork.

I do believe that human beings, as tribal animals, are (sometimes, and with the possibility of override) governed by evolved ingroup/outgroup behaviours, and that this seems as likely an explanation as any for all the myriad strife in the world. Beyond that? It's anyone's guess.

I wonder if the physiological substrates for important memories would be preserved in a Ship of Theseus scenario. My hunch is no.

I apologize for the disillusionment that will follow:

1) Negligible senescence occurs mostly in organisms radically-different from humans and we have no idea how to edit those pathways into humans or if those pathways actually hold any value to humans. Hydra cells still die but the organism itself doesn't age. If you want to apply a gene-level anti-senescence therapy to an organism, you have to transfect the traits correctly into every cell of the organism--trillions of opportunities for catastrophic failure.

2) Gene editing probably has downstream cascades that we can't foresee.

3) Organ transplants become more risky with age, and the mortality risk from anesthesia does as well. If you were to replace your body, your brain would necessarily be the same age--and since we can't fix the (conjectured) senescence pathways in a living organism, you'd eventually be a senile individual in a young body. There's some neuroregenerative therapies that hold promise, but any "regenerative cell therapy" could also be read as "may create proliferative tumors"

4) Cryopreservation of a living organism is assumed to kill it, or at least alter it radically enough that its original functions will never be restored. Reconstructive nanotechnology is probably impossible due to heat dissipation and brownian motion--you'd have to hope that somehow a human scientist figures out how to engineer a new class of cell that is capable of navigating and repairing all extant human cells, which is more-or-less Clarke's Law.

We are not here forever. Oxygen metabolism literally rusts our bodies over time, disrupting and destroying countless pathways. Aging and death was part of the mitochondrial bargain. Tortoises have been evolving against the bargain's drawbacks for longer than humans have been around, and they still aren't immortal.

Perhaps the authors mean to suggest that the consumption of other perspectives allows one to better empathize with others, and in so doing, become better-equipped to reduce their suffering.

Seems like a just-so story until the methodology of their quantitative analysis is publicly-available.

When a scientist measures the behaviour of particles in a carefully-defined system, they can replicate that behaviour such that they can say, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the particles always behave that way under those conditions.

Such replicability has not been demonstrated in systems as complex, chaotic, and essentially unmeasurable as the human brain, let alone a human society. A field of study is not a science without replicability.

Academic terminology, especially in the social "sciences," creates a scaffold of "theory" without any replicable data, and uses it to pass judgement on the behaviours of individuals without actually examining the individual's own motives for a behaviour. It's a dehumanizing assumption of determinism to believe that individuals are incapable of making decisions for themselves, or that conjectured Foucaultian structures (which could be said to exist only as linguistic sign for the speaker's own level of education) govern all human behaviour.

I'd even go so far as to say that if you believe that Power Structures determine all human behaviour, you're living in the worst sort of Bad Faith.

One either accepts that all study of human society (and all reexamination of values which occurs in its pursuit) is little more than observation, conjectures, and untestable hypotheses--or, one accepts that they do not understand what science is and how it is conducted and how it proceeds.

Calling the social sciences "science" is about as disingenuous and unscientific as calling Art History "Temporal Paint Physics."