yanjuk's comments

No, one would get bored eventually, unless the games incorporated hard problems.

I taught my two kids long division in about ten 40-minute sessions spread over 5 days. I sat with each child as we learnt the procedure. To begin with I held the pencil and asked questions, then the child took over the writing and I monitored to fix mistakes until finally the task could be performed/practiced solo.

In this one-on-one practice approach misconceptions are eliminated quickly at the start. It could not easily be replicated in a large group. Instead the approach in the article seems to be about groups of people identifying each other's misconceptions. Either way the effectiveness lies in avoiding bad habit formation.

If you look at YouTube each method of arithmetic has variants and you can pick the one that looks best. e.g. I chose a method of multiplication with consistent placing for the carries which reduced error considerably over what I was taught at school.

I would guess the nausea is a learned response due to people forcing the powder on themselves. Perhaps it needs to be introduced gradually with small amounts?

I conjecture that unhappy people are continually inhibiting certain ideas. This consumes attentional bandwidth which otherwise would go into managing/healing the body.

Indeed, but that doesn't invalidate my argument. (I included automation for context.)

Note also that one cannot merely look after children, because they need to see a greater purpose in what you do.

One cannot simply "grind away" at a tedious task or a task capable of being automated. Unlike a hard problem, it cannot occupy the mind persistently and meaningfully.

Yes, my idea of a safety net is family plus basic income.

However, crucially, there are thousands of important and hard problems out there available to anyone with a roof over his head, food and internet access.

Anyone who doesn't find a hard problem to work on, and this includes those in employment with excellent safety nets, is going to go bad sooner or later (drugs, sociopathy, crime, mental illness, suicide, etc).

I don't think 'doing solid research' is what comments are about or should be about: that's what the articles are for. Comments are more like what goes on with coffee after the research presentation. They're about saying what you think, asking questions, correcting other comments, correcting the article, pointing to other articles. The mere act of writing causes ideas to be clarified.

The increasing majority of us don't expect any but a fraction of comments to be good. (This applies to research articles too. Sturgeon's Law.) They are like unrefined ore. Which is why we need as many as possible. Misconceptions are dangerous but they are less dangerous when brought into the light where they can be identified and corrected.

It's true that misinformation and conspiracy theories spread rapidly but, crucially, so does the correction of error, especially older and more parochial errors, which may even need to spread a bit before this can happen.

Look at places where people don't have access to the internet and you won't find an abundance of true information. Rather you'll find much less information together with cruder and more parochial misinformation such as ideas about witches and evil spirits.

So I don't think we need to worry too much about the quality of information in the comment section or any frontier of knowledge. It's mostly wrong. What is of more concern is how to guard and improve the conditions under which knowledge grows, beyond what we've already learnt (such as expelling trolls, discouraging politics, fluff).

>This is what Stack Overflow does.

Thanks. Didn't know that.

>Sometimes it's just that the question is well written but obscure.

Could be that people regard the question as dishonourable.

Yeah I think it could only be implemented on a new forum, right at the start. No doubt it would bring a different set of problems for moderators.

To those people (not you) "who see downvoting as a legitimate way of showing disagreement" I would say that it's too lazy. Better instead to try to explain why something is wrong. Then we can look carefully and objectively at the explanation rather than at the score or the expert/layman status of the author. Also many disagreers would find themselves unable to explain why they don't like some idea and might even change their minds.

No, I mean downvoting costs both the downvoter and the downvotee one point each. People won't downvote comments they merely disagree with but they will still try to correct injustice and disruption. I'm no game theorist but that's my guess. It also reflects human psychology where righteous anger comes with a personal cost.

My assumption is that commenting has the effect of reducing ignorance, even where ignorant comments are plentiful i.e. silent ignorance is more deadly than mostly-ignorant noise. This is because the very act of writing a comment, be it laden with misconceptions, causes its author to think, at least a little. Also reading different points of view helps people to identify common misconceptions and to make up their minds.

(This doesn't include disruptive comments like fluff, complaining and gratuitous humour.)

>But most diets contain adequate choline

Should be 'inadequate choline', I think.

I remember there was a rat study done showing that unborn pups whose mothers received choline supplements at about two thirds full term had superior memories in later life, possibly referred to here:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/04/980409080807.h...

Great comment, though I'm not sure 'naive political opinion' even exists. If a topic is political then it's controversial and sophisticated expert opinions count just as little as naive layman opinions.

A way to reduce disruptive comments might be to make one downvote cost one karma point.

Down-voting should be for disruption, not ignorance. Ignorant comments are fine. Get them out there so they can be aired and corrected. Laymen get to know what they think. Experts get to know what laymen think. Occasionally there's a good idea.

Talk is cheap and we should do more of it. The alternative is people being far more ignorant than they already are. But silently, in private, with more potential for harm.

What's unsettling is more like the airing in public of things that would normally be kept private.

'Helicopter parenting' is misleading: it's not the degree of parental involvement and oversight that's the problem, it's the degree of unwelcome interference. True, if I'm going to err I'd rather err on the side of benign neglect. Yet blaming 'overprotective' parents is unfair. It only takes phone call or two and children can be temporarily removed by social services. The mere prospect of which is a major heartache.

>do what Socrates did: sitting with his students, asking questions and, through dialogue, teaching them what matters most

Nonsensical comparison. Socrates' pupils came to him. They weren't herded into daycare and expected to act like calm but enthusiastic scholars of random subjects.

Furthermore, nobody knows which knowledge matters most to other people. It's a conceit to pretend otherwise. I suspect Socrates would have been the first to admit this.