In the overwhelming majority of male/female relationships I've observed, the man is actually much more tidy than the woman. So I get really tired of this stereotype that I can't keep my house clean.
Back when I was an undergrad, I lived in a single that shared a small kitchen and bathroom with four or five other (single) rooms, collectively known as a "suite."
My first year, it was all male. While there was generally some mess around in the kitchen area, it was generally easy to localize. And guys in college don't tend to have a lot of dishes for themselves, so I guess they couldn't eat another bowl of cereal or whatever unless they cleaned them up at some point. The mess never sat around for more than a day or two and never grew out of control.
In year two, they decided to turn it into a mixed gender suite -- about half and half. The kitchen now was continuously unusable due to the amount of stuff that was left by the women. When my parents were visiting once, they were so horrified by the appearance of things that they took it upon themselves to clean up the area. It was back to its former condition within a week.
For whatever reason, by my third year, I think I was the only male living in that particular "suite." Maybe there was one other guy, but he was never around. I completely gave up using that kitchen (just bought a fridge and microwave for my room). The kitchen was a complete disaster, and even the bathroom was overrun with crap. We started receiving emails from the RA that the cleaning staff were disgusted with how things were being kept and were concerned that it could attract vermin.
I would occasionally run into a cleaning woman and apologize, but she knew that I wasn't the cause of any of this. She herself then started telling me about how the all-female suites in the dorm were often the worst.
I've seen slobs of both sexes, but I have to say my undergrad experience made me seriously doubt the myth that all women are genetically predisposed to keeping nice houses or something....
I take your point, and I would not encourage people to engage in distracting behavior unnecessarily.
That said, there actually are solutions to your problems, which weren't always around decades ago:
Are we asking Starbucks for "hot drink while driving" solutions?
Convenient cup-holders in cars. Cups designed to fit in them. (Not so much from Starbucks, but for other restaurants -- why do you think those supersize cups have smaller bottoms?) Drivers don't even need to take their eyes off the road.
Are we asking McDonald's for "eating food while driving" solutions?
Well, I believe McDonald's made some sort of "fry cup" that fits in a cup-holder too. I don't really eat there, but I've seen this advertised somewhere, I think. It doesn't solve all the problems, but they are clearly considering the issue.
Are we asking business owners for "looking for a store" solutions?
This is why you have big signs on the highway before an exit, on the exit to tell you where to go, and giant lit up signs outside a parking lot. Businesses pay for some of these signs. It's not only good business, but it has the added benefit of allowing drivers to see where to go while barely taking their eyes off the road.
Are we asking advertisers for "distracted by billboards" solution?
No, but in most municipalities there are limitations on where billboards can be placed. If they are deemed too much of a distraction to drivers, they may not be allowed.
The problem isn't tech, the problem is stupid drivers.
Yes. But the task of texting actually requires you to not only take your eyes off the road for a significant amount of time, but also to pay detailed attention to it -- because verbal reasoning and finger coordination are more complicated than taking a sip from a giant cup or grabbing the next french fry from some bin.
Under some circumstances, the items you list can be significantly distracting. But under most circumstances, texting is much more distracting than any of these. Since people actually have been working on solutions for the kinds of things you mention, maybe we should also consider solutions (of whatever kind) for the much more distracting behavior that is the subject of this thread.
Advertising, in its purest form, is simply making people aware of what you're offering. That's the concept.
You have no clue what "advertising" is, at least for the past 100 years, which is really when modern "advertising" came into being.
What you describe is a con. Which is how the vast majority of ads is presented to us today. Mostly because it works.
Yeah, there have been con men around since the dawn of time. Before 1900 or so, businesses mostly depended on brand recognition. Those that didn't were generally snake-oil salesmen who promised all sorts of crap in print advertisements. The idea that products needed to be "marketed" to people who didn't yet know they "needed" them was not really established.
Modern advertising got going in the early decades of the 1900s when people like followers of Freud and similar folk tried to deconstruct the desires of people and their self-concepts -- in order to convince them to buy something THEY DIDN'T NEED.
No longer were you content to establish a brand and provide a service people actually wanted. The whole point of advertising was to "market" products -- in other words, to CREATE a market for something, even if the population was perfectly content with what they had. You had to convince them that they weren't happy -- that their lives would be incomplete without your product.
Whether you want to call that a "con" or not, it was similar to the tactics that the snake oil salesmen used to use. But now it was backed up by psychologists and "marketing experts."
That's what advertising is, "in its purest form," as you put it.
However, there's huge subset of people who dislike and don't fall for that crap and would be more inclined to buy things when they are objectively presented. For me, say, a good cell phone ad would be simply a spec sheet. So for people like me that's what they should serve, and in that sense targeted advertising would make it actually work as a service, not a burden.
You really have no clue about marketing departments. They will never give you a spec sheet as an "advertisement." NEVER. That's not worth their money to "advertise" in such a way, even with a superior product. They know people like you will probably seek out spec sheets anyway -- if anything, they will market their product to some tech reviewer you might be likely to read, rather than giving you raw data. It's just not worth any money to "advertise" like that with no context.
And even if they could be convinced to give you a bunch of specs in an advertisement, they will be selected particularly to highlight some features which might appeal to you, or point out some way their product stands out compared to some competitors in some (carefully chosen) specs... which is just a really boring version of the woman using three different kinds of vacuum cleaners on a TV advert and showing you the cleanest rug.
So I can't stand outside my car when I fill up with gas because those asshats want to put in 30 display screens playing advertisements WITH sound blaring. Fine, fuck-em. I get back in my car and turn on the music a little louder and relax till the indicator says it has stopped filling up.
Speaking of freedom: unfortunately, you can't do that in many states, since quite a few have outlawed the nice catches that would hold the gas pump trigger until the tank was full (at least at self-service pumps -- the full-service guys still get to use these "advanced technologies").
Those of you in southern states may not mind this as much, but when you're trying to fill up with a subzero wind chill in a northern climate and forgot your gloves that day (because otherwise you spend so little time outdoors in your commute that your pockets work fine for the rest of the day), this is NOT a fun experience. I don't even need to get back in my car: I'd just like to put my hands in my pockets, for gosh sake. (I'll happily discharge any static wherever you want me to after participating in that dangerous behavior, which the full-service guys get the privilege to do.)
On a particularly cold day, I even saw a guy take a sort of short bungie cord thing he had rigged up and wrap it around the gas pump trigger -- just so he could get back in his car. Yeah... that's the kind of behavior we want to encourage.
All this because in the few refueling fires that have occurred, in something like 1/3 of cases, people returned to their cars while pumping, and the going theory (just a theory, mind you, not strong empirical testing) is that these people built up static electricity which caused the fuel to ignite.
Anyhow -- if it's so freaking dangerous, why not put a huge sign on the gas pump: "THE SURGEON GENERAL SAYS: DO NOT RETURN TO YOUR CAR WHILE FUELING OR YOU WILL DIE!" or whatever. I know there are small signs with this information buried on gas pumps, but if it's so darn dangerous, why not make the warning stronger? After all, I've definitely seen many scenarios where family members are "tag-teaming" during the gassing up, and even without the convenient trigger lock apparatus, it's very easy for someone to exit the car to come assist or talk to the person pumping the gas and theoretically discharge static electricity...
... if that indeed is even the cause in a significant number of these fires -- in which case, we need to put up huge signs and actually teach people to discharge themselves properly before being in contact with the fueling apparatus, not inconvenience millions of people every day for no apparent reason.
Look at some of the guys history remembers. Thomas Edison? Henry Ford? We don't remember Henry Ford because of the Ford Foundation either. Gladwell seems to think the historical fame of entrepreneurs is based mainly on their charity. Why?
I don't know if I agree with Gladwell. But he isn't entirely crazy with this idea. People who give lots of money tend to have buildings, colleges, major landmarks, even entire cities named after them. While sometimes the meaning of these names is almost forgotten, in other cases the charity associated with those names has continued to be well-known (Carnegie, etc.), while fewer people may remember the details of that person's achievements.
Anyhow, the reasons people are written into history books are various. Usually, it has to do with the kind of story the historian is trying to tell, which will often depend more on the subsequent legacy of the person's name in the decades or centuries following his death than on his lifetime achievements.
Example: there were hundreds of composers active in Germany around the time of J.S. Bach, dozens of whom were more "famous" (in modern standards) than Bach was. With a few exceptions (e.g., Telemann), only specialist historians could name those people today. But Bach taught a lot of students, who preserved his music well and argued for his teaching methods. Then, in the mid-1800s, many musicians became fascinated with history and the "old ways" of doing things, and Bach's reputation just happened to emerge at the right time to be established as the quintessential "old style" composer. By about 75-100 years after his death, Bach was on his way to becoming one of the most famous composers in history.
I'm not saying Bach doesn't deserve to be remembered. But, centuries later, we don't ever talk about the people that the newspapers talked about all the time... yet almost everyone has heard of old J.S. Bach.
I have no idea how the internet and the preservation of searchable digital data will change the way history is done decades or centuries from now. But I think Gladwell is right to urge us to think about how a person's "legacy" may be more important than what he does in his lifetime. Whether Jobs or Gates will be judged greater by future historians is probably not a question we can answer for at least a few decades.
If none of this is multitasking to you, you'll have to clarify your use of the term.
I'm not sure you understand the difference between "multitasking" and just doing a more complicated task. Running in place while clapping your hands is not multitasking. It may take some practice to coordinate various parts of your body (like the "walking and chewing gum" thing that some people seem to worry about), but pattern-based activities can be learned and "replayed" (generally with significant variation).
I usually multitask when playing the piano. I...
* Get fingers positioned right (both hands of course)
* Decide on little touches like dynamics, stoccato, pedaling, rubato, what emotional content I want to convey, if any; I often make these up anew each time
* Decide on changes to the piece, like different rhythms, extra grace notes, changed chords, etc.
* Evaluate my playing--"missed note", "incorrect dynamics", "this emotional arc sucks", "I really like that passage at that speed", etc.
As someone who has been a professional freelance keyboardist and, more importantly, a professional accompanist, I call all of these tasks simply "playing the piano." This is not multitasking. They are all constituent tasks which require coordination, but they do not split your attention -- if they do, you can't really play the piano.
* Perhaps read music
Yeah, as someone who used to sight-read as an accompanist for vocalist auditions and such, again, this is an essential task of being a good pianist.
According to your criteria, anyone who could read a newspaper aloud would be a tremendous "multitasker" -- after all, he is not only moving his eyes along the page, parsing words, punctuation, grammar, etc., silently, but he is also causing his mouth to articulate complex patterns of open and closed sounds, varying speed, inflection, articulation, dynamics, etc. to make the meaning of the text and its emotional content clear to a listener... etc, etc.
I'm not saying it's easy for everyone to read aloud in a fluent and effective manner. It takes practice. But I'd hardly call that "multitasking." Would you? If not, why is playing an instrument any different?
* Let my mind wander, thinking about the day or interactions I had with someone or sometimes a math problem (to calibrate difficulty, I was fiddling with pointwise approximations of complex measurable functions by polynomials almost everywhere a while ago, and the non-null-homotopicness of a particular curve yesterday)
Doing a repetitive physical skill along with more active "thinking" is again not multitasking. People run on the treadmill while watching TV. Are they multitasking? Playing piano is slightly more complicated, but I would bet lots of money that your ability to actively engage with your musical interpretation goes way down when you are deeply involved in some unrelated thoughts. You essentially let your hands go on "autopilot" while you think about something else, just like the runner watching TV. Yes, you might still vary your musical performance somewhat, just as you might slow down or speed up your running, but anything more generally requires "taking turns" with your attention.
* Listen to people if they're talking around me or listen to TV if it's on; I can tune these out if I wish
Yep, just like running on the treadmill while doing these things. I dare you to come up with an innovative performance including complex changes to all the musical aspects you discussed while actively paying attention to these other things.
Interestingly I can't respond verbally to someone while playing the piano. I can understand someone perfectly and think of a response (nodding if yes/no, for instance), but the verbal part of my brain seems to be engaged with the music.
I say the following as someone who is a huge fan of Linux and who has used it as my primary OS for at least five years, and as a secondary OS for well over a decade.
People do have problems with Linux you know.
Those who do, don't bitch about it on Slashdot
Well, actually sometimes they try, until a hundred screaming open-source fans shout them down. Followed by a bunch of downmodding, so you can't even see those with complaints, only the Linux cheering.
Slashdot is a great place. Most people here are pretty devoted to open-source, which I think is a great thing. However, a significant percentage also feel the need to denigrate any person who comes along and says anything bad about their experience with open-source.
Every OS has its problems. I have no idea what caused the OP's problem, but I have had enough experience with random Linux crap (and bad hardware, for that matter) not to discount this experience immediately as apocryphal or as some sort of Microsoft shill making crap up.
If you actually believe in open-source, listen to the problems and take them seriously. If you don't want to help solve them, just shut the hell up. Denying that anyone ever has any problem in Linux is just hopelessly naive.
The etymology of -teen : combining form meaning "ten more than," from O.E. -tene, -tiene, from P.Gmc. *tekhuniz (cf. O.S. -tein, Du. -tien, O.H.G. -zehan, Ger. -zehn, Goth. -taihun), an inflected form of the root of ten
So thirteen is a stylized form of three and ten, which makes Gladwell's claim even weirder.
Ah, yes, the Proto-Germanic root *tekhuniz, which every two-year-old obviously recognizes as the word that was ultimately inflected to create the "teen" on 13 through 19 (nevermind the more problematic cases like "twelve" and "eleven," which have an even less clear relationship to base 10). Oh, and those two-year-olds also manage to figure out the inversion where the added number is put on the front of the ten root for the teens (e.g., NINE-teen), but on the back for every other number up to infinity past number 20 (e.g., twenty-NINE).
/sarcasm
Gladwell's claim about calculus education is probably bogus. But anyone who has spent time with young children realizes that they think of the numbers from 1 through 20 as mostly separate entities, and only after 20 do they begin to note the similarities that recur after every 10-count. Some smart kids do pick up a sort of pattern starting with 16 (where you actually get uninflected prefix numbers added to "-teen"), which only leads to confusion about where things like "twelve" come from. And there is research to back up the decreased speed that kids process numbers in languages like that, compared to simpler methods like "ten-one," "ten-two," etc. (Again, this mainly has relevance to early math teaching... Gladwell is really speculating about connections to higher math learning.)
But nevermind... next time a kid asks me about counting, I'll just direct him to the etymologies in the Oxford English Dictionary.
In short, he said that the way chinese count gives them an edge in learning calculus, because the chinese say the number 13 as "three and ten", building the number out of simpler, more fundamental numbers, whereas in the US children must learn an entirely new word: "thirteen".
While this may not be the primary reason for calculus skills, there has been child development research that claimed to demonstrate that the linguistic structure of numbers has a major effect on how fast younger children can do basic manipulation of numbers (counting, arithmetic, etc.).
A system where you have words like "eleven, twelve, thirteen..." etc. instead of "ten-one, ten-two, ten-three" actually does introduce potential cognitive processing delays. I've even read about a study where the fact that the number "seven" has two syllables (as opposed to languages where all the single digit numbers are one syllable) can be an issue. Even worse are systems like the French language, where you have embedded 20-base arithmetic from some archaic counting methods (e.g., 80 = "quatre-vingts" = "four twenties" in French) in your basic numbers.
Now, from what I've read, the magnitude of the effect from number names isn't clear, but I think most developmental psychologists agree that it exists. The more syllables, the more unique number words needed to count, and the more complex the counting (e.g., whether there are embedded old non-base-10 systems) all could potentially slow kids down.
Now, whether and how much that might affect calculus learning is a much more controversial claim, since as far as I know, this is mostly discussed when talking about learning basic numbers and arithmetic.
Nevertheless, Gladwell isn't completely making this stuff up, at least regarding basic learning of math.
Yes, it was from the "Tablet PC" era, and devices lack that were a terrible failure. People already complain that the iPad is too heavy at a pound and a half, nobody wants a six pound tablet.
Umm, I have a convertible tablet/notebook made by Fujitsu which I bought in 2006 that weighs just about 2 pounds. It still works great and was a great option both for taking notes, doing touchscreen stuff, as well as doing real tasks requiring typing, a full OS like Windows XP or desktop Linux, etc. (Admittedly, the touchscreen functions were not as slick as what we've seen with iOS and derivatives, but I also had real full operating systems on this thing, which was pretty useful, since you could put the thing into a doc, use it with a full keyboard, and have a real computer.)
It's not quite as comfortable to hold as an iPad because it's thicker (since it has the turnaround screen, full keyboard, etc.), but it was hardly a "terrible failure" as a number of doctors and other people who needed such functionality I knew had similar devices back then.
The issue with such ultralight, small devices back then wasn't their functionality -- it was that you paid a huge cost premium for the small size and light weight.
and the diagnostic part of medicine will become much more automated, with diagnostic equipment having its results interpreted by the computer rather than just an image being spat out and read by a technician and then a doctor.
Ah, yes. Let's just hope it doesn't end up like this (from the movie Idiocracy):
Joe is in line leading up to a uniformed TECHNICIAN running what looks like one of those auto-diagnostic machines from Jiffy Lube, or an automated car wash. A sad-looking man pulls up his pants as the technician hits a button on the machine.
COMPUTER VOICE: You've got hepatitis! Hey! Take it easy! Your illness is important to us!
TECHNICIAN: Next.
Joe steps up. The Technician holds up three probes connected to the diagnostic machine.
TECHNICIAN: Okay. This one goes in your mouth. This one's for your ear. And... This one goes in your butt.
The technician hands Joe a third probe. Joe looks at it
reluctantly, hesitates a beat, then looks at the line of 20
people staring at him.
GUY IN LINE: Hurry UP ASSHOLE!!!
Joe unhappily puts the plug up his butt.
TECHNICIAN: Shit, wait a second.
The Technician pulls all three plugs out and stupidly fumbles with the identical cables.
TECHNICIAN: Okay, one goes in your... No, wait a second...
Joe tries to follow the one that was in his butt like three card monte, but it's a lost cause. The technician stops shuffling the probes.
TECHNICIAN: Okay. This one goes in your mouth.
Joe stares in horror as the Technician brings the probe closer to his mouth. Joe hesitates.
GUY IN LINE: COME ON!!!
(LATER IN THE DOCTOR'S OFFICE)
The DOCTOR enters, a big, affable lunk holding several charts and computer printouts.
DOCTOR: Hey, how's it going, man?
JOE: Not so good... I'm hallucinating like crazy. I think it's the drugs these Army guys put me on. It's kind of Top Secret, but if you could just get me well enough to get back to Base...
DOCTOR: (nodding) Uh-huh, uh-huh. Kick ass. (looking at Joe's chart) Anyway, I don't wanna sound like a dick or nothing, but I looked at your charts and it seems like you're fucked up, you talk like a fag, and your shit may be retarded. What I'd do, man, is get plenty of rest-
JOE: Wha? I... I want a second opinion.
DOCTOR: (holds up Joe's charts) OmniPal doesn't lie, man. But listen - there's plenty of 'tards out there living really kickass lives. My first wife was retarded and she's a pilot.
JOE: Okay, I'm going to another hospital.
DOCTOR: So, that'll be six billion dollars. (hands Joe an invoice)
Also, another thing to think of is all of the sunk costs in an individual (education, primarily). If they die at 18, pretty much all of those sunk costs are completely wasted. If someone lives to 80, those costs are amortized over a much longer period.
I forgot this -- yes, that is a valid point. I agree that if we're looking at total cost to society, we should factor it in, and again, I don't think it's a good thing that people are dying young... for them or for society as a whole. So I completely agree that this might be a rationale for trying to prevent more fatalities (although, again, if we're talking about seat belts, I didn't see a strong correlation between states with strong seat belt laws and decreased fatality rate, even when I tried to adjust for total miles driven, urban vs. rural roads, etc. which are all available in the government statistics).
I just don't think that the health care costs alone are a reason for regulation here, because I think the arguments are a lot murkier once you start considering all effects.
And without seat belts, many of those minor accidents would produce the very expensive disabled people that need assistance for the rest of their lives.
I agree that you are shifting costs around, and some minor accidents are more likely to result in disabled cases.
But I'm not talking out of my ass here. I haven't looked at these studies recently, but a couple of years ago I read a number of studies about seat belts and health-care costs. I remember running some numbers myself and deciding that it was very likely, based on the projections in the studies that assumed what costs would be with belts for everyone who was beltless, that if you incorporated saved future costs from fatalities, the numbers would no longer seem like a savings for seat belts.
But I'm happy to yield to someone who has better numbers. What I do think is that the supposed "savings" from seat belts is a lot less than is usually advertised.
Anyhow, a lot of this is neither here nor there, because the relationship of seat belt laws to methods of enforcement and to actual seat belt usage is quite complicated and not as straightforward as you might expect. And the number of serious injuries and fatalities does not seem as highly correlated with these laws as people like to think.
I ran some numbers based on data I could find from all 50 states and tried to see if correlations came up based on the strength of seat belt laws, and there was very little correlation between the strength of laws and the number of fatalities and injuries.
Seat belt laws do increase seat belt usage, but that doesn't necessarily translate into fewer fatalities and injuries. This may be due to a number of factors, like the fact that studies have shown people tend to drive more recklessly when they feel "safer" (and thus some people drive faster, etc. when belted, which appears to have resulted in a statistically significant number of additional injuries, particularly to bicyclists and pedestrians after seat belt laws have been adopted in some countries, etc.).
I would strongly argue that every intelligent person wear a seat belt. But after spending a lot of time trying to look at good data, I'm not convinced that seat belt laws are actually "saving lives" or healthcare costs.
If someone else has better studies that I may have overlooked, I'm really interested in seeing them.
So how much did your students learn? And what standards did they meet? Do you have the data?
You seem to be fundamentally confused. "Standards" are important as some sort of minimal baseline. "Learning" in good classrooms hopefully goes far above the "standards."
There's a good reason why interviews for jobs generally consist of face-to-face conversations. There's a good reason why you generally can't get a Ph.D. anywhere in the world without defending your work at an oral examination. Such things are rarely "standardized," but that's how real people actually judge other real people. I can learn more from a 5-minute conversation with a student about his abilities than I could with a standardized test that was hours long. Why?
Well, I can choose to be interactive. If I see the student already seems to know a lot about fundamentals, I don't have to spend 20 minutes making him answer questions about them. I can adapt my questions to the things the student says in responses and very quickly make some judgments.
I've seen all the studies about how classroom size supposedly makes no difference in learning outcomes. I can tell you it does make a huge difference in how much I knew about my students. When I'm teaching 1/3 of the number of students per year at an elite private school as I was at a public school, I have time to have lots of conversations like this with my students.
So, yes, I think I had a hell of a lot more data about my students than any standardized battery could ever give me.
If you do, congratulations. You have done testing. If not, then perhaps you aren't as good a teacher as you think you were.
Well, I talked about conceptual physics in my previous post, but I also taught AP. Most of my students got a 5 on the AP Physics exam, so I suppose they must have learned something. Does that satisfy your dumbass metric?
But given how oversimplified and crappy many of the AP Physics test questions are (mostly because of low expectations about calculus knowledge), I sincerely hope they learned more than that if they hope to go on and do anything else in the sciences.
And if you think unions are opposed to that, then perhaps you need to catch up with current events.
I think unions are opposed to anything that is likely to get people fired. I absolutely think they would be in favor of more subjective assessment methods, like I was talking about here, because they are less likely to be clear enough to get people fired.
But that's not what I was talking about at all when I said unions wouldn't be in favor of things -- that was at the end of my post, when I was talking about assessment of TEACHERS. In the system I was discussing, a teacher who didn't meet the standards set up would be fired within 2 years at most. Meanwhile, unions nationwide have been incredibly resistant to anything that would allow teachers to be fired under almost any circumstances, particularly if they've been at a school for any length of time. If you don't realize that, you need to keep up with current events.
Finally, good districts advertise to new teachers a system fairly close to what you propose. These are public systems.
I never said my school had a monopoly on such systems, nor did I say that only private schools could do it. I do think that many public schools with enough resources would be happy to try something like it, though it would have to have teeth -- i.e., you could actually fire teachers. While standardized tests may have some use here too, I think placing too much emphasis on them is incredibly detrimental to the teaching and learning environment.
Having taught at public schools in a state where standardized testing was around for long before NCLB, I saw the effects of this nonsense in the way teachers designed curriculums, in the way they taught their classes, and i
While this may be true for tobacco users (which I'm skeptical of without reading the studies you refer to), it doesn't necessarily mean that in the general case dying younger equates to lower health care costs. A simple example from my family:
I'm sorry for your brother, but anecdotal evidence isn't generally useful in a statistical argument.
My point is that while age is certainly a factor in lifetime health care costs, I suspect the primary factor is one of severity of an illness during ones life, regardless of how long it is.
And you would be correct. The simplest way of thinking about it is that people with longer lifespans are more likely to have more severe illnesses and therefore will be more costly, on average. Younger people who live more risky lives may have an increased cost while they are young, but that generally isn't enough to make up for the cost savings after they die prematurely.
The fact of the matter is that those who choose unhealthy lifestyles generally end up having a lower total lifetime medical costs because they do not live as long.
Yes, mod parent up, please! Everyone keeps asserting that obese people and smokers cost the health care system more, but that's only true on an annual basis. When you consider the lifetime costs, smokers and obese people cost the system a lot less... because they die earlier: Study: Fat people cheaper to treat.
If you are overwight and smoke than such insurance should cost you more.
Well, life insurance should cost you more because you're at greater risk of dying sooner. But, since you would tend to die earlier as an overweight smoker, your total lifetime insurance cost is likely to be less (http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-02-05-obese-cost_N.htm).
Given that insurance providers can't easily drop people involuntarily, they will have to pay health care costs for non-smoking non-obese people that are likely in excess of what they have to pay for obese smokers in the long-term.
By your logic, we should actually charge "healthier" people more for health insurance, since they are likely to live longer and cost the system more in the long run.
Soda here and there is fine, chugging 8 MountainDews a day is not healthy.
Soda has no nutritional benefits. Having it "here and there" is probably not going to be as bad for most people, but for most people it never a particularly good thing.
On the other hand, there are some people who can drink 8 Mountain Dews per day and be fine. There is at least one documented person who has only eaten Big Macs for his entire adult life, and he actually seems to be incredibly healthy. The oldest woman who ever lived was a smoker for close to a hundred years of her life.
All sorts of people engage in all sorts of behaviors that might be risky for some or most people. If they aren't hurting you, why do you care?
To have a requirement to "NOT ACTIVELY KILL YOURSELF" is quite different than "this is what you have to eat".
Exactly what is the government's business in regulating whether you decide to kill yourself? It's your life. Shouldn't you be free to end it however you want?
For some people, the only thing that makes their life worth living is being a deep-sea fisherman. I've definitely met some who love their jobs, and they can't imagine doing anything else, even if it's hard for them to make a living. But their profession has one of the highest mortality rates of any profession. You want to tell them they can't do their job that they enjoy because they might end up dying?
How many great artists died of drug overdoses, diseases contracted from sexual behaviors, etc.? Would they have given the same creative work to posterity had they not been free to live their lives in these ways?
I'm not trying to ennoble the drinking of huge amounts of Mountain Dew. But I'm not sure why that person should have a "requirement" not to do so. (And before you start off on the healthcare cost argument, look at my previous post on this thread and the study here http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-02-05-obese-cost_N.htm)
Ah yes, the argument that smokers are actually good for a country because they die young.
Did I say it was "good for a country"? Did I say it was good for anyone? The GP said people who smoke, get fat, etc. should pay for health care costs because (presumably) they are so much more. That is a false assertion. I don't think it's "good" that people die young. I just said the GP's assertion that we'd all be better off in the finances of the healthcare system without the fatties and the smokers is probably not true.
That doesn't mean there aren't many great reasons to try to get people to stop smoking or lose weight or whatever.
Wow. Can I just shoot you right now, so that I pay less for healthcare? I mean, I should be allowed to do it. After all, it lowers my health care bill.
How do you know that? That's only true if my health care expenses are above average. If my expenses are below average (which I can tell you that so far, for people my age, they are), then I'm benefitting you by paying in more to the system, thereby lowering your costs.
What you - and all your conservative/libertarian friends as well - don't get is that a stable society is a prosperous one, and that a society where people can get old safely is one in which experience can be accumulated and put to good use.
I'm not sure how we miss out on so much old people's experience when, as the link I gave pointed out, you're looking at reducing the average age of smokers or obese people by 4-7 years from the average lifespan. Given that in our society these days we suffer from rampant age discrimination where most people tend to ignore what senior citizens think, let alone anyone over age 50 or even 40 for many "young companies," I sincerely doubt that our current society would benefit from the wisdom of the old. In years past, I might have agreed with you.
And besides, satisfied and content people tend to be more likely to be creative, wise, etc., because they live life the way they want to. How many great artists have died at young ages because of illnesses due to their risky behaviors, not just smoking, but drugs or sexual behaviors, etc.? Would these people have been the same way if they were legally probihited from participating in whatever behaviors they enjoyed the most?
I live a pretty mundane existence compared to most of these people, but I don't live under the illusion that if we just regulate everyone to death and overprotect them until they are 75 that they are suddenly going to start spouting great wisdom.
And, by the way, I'm not at all conservative, nor am I particularly libertarian, since I don't believe such classifications are adequate to describe the multitude of possible views on political philosophy. I do hold some opinions that would be considered by some to be reactionary or libertarian or right-wing, but I also hold probably more views that would be considered far, far more left than the craziest mainstream "liberals."
But so what? I was arguing about the accuracy of a financial point. Your assumptions or conclusions about my beliefs and greater agenda (beyond the fact that we should have reasonable and logical facts in support of a policy agenda) are your own...
They also surely contribute (via taxes/insurance premiums depending on your system) quite a lot more too?
Yes, you are correct. And this is part of the reason why I hedged a bit and said that the costs may end up being about equal in the end. The study I linked to only considered total costs, but it did not factor in potential contributions.
Nevertheless, if you just take the numbers in the link (as an example), I don't really think the contributions for the remaining years of healthy people (which are generally the most illness-prone and therefore expense) are going to completely negate the issue I was talking about.
From the link:
On average, healthy people lived 84 years. Smokers lived about 77 years, and obese people lived about 80 years.
Ultimately, the thin and healthy group cost the most, about $417,000, from age 20 on. The cost of care for obese people was $371,000, and for smokers, about $326,000.
So, on average, obese people had their lifespan reduced by 4 years compared to healthy people. The study estimated costs from age 20, so that's reduction of 64 years to 60 years, or about 6%. Costs were reduced by $46,000, or about 11%.
Now, I'm sure we can pick apart the various assumptions of the model, so these percentages might be closer (or further apart) than this estimate. But the extra years of paying into the system as a (generally more sickly and more costly) old person are not going to net as much return for the system as a whole as young, healthy people. So the extra few years paying as an elderly person is unlikely to make the math work out in favor of non-obese, non-smokers (who will still have increased health problems at age 70 or 80+).
The 18 year old dumbass not wearing a seatbelt might, if wearing a seatbelt, escape with minor injuries. And then contribute to the healthcare system for another 50 years and more. Killing them at 18 isn't necessarily the best fiscal option.
You're somewhat right, and I think the analysis is more complicated when you're talking about someone dying at 18 versus 84 vs. dying at 80 vs. 84 (or even 60 vs. 84).
The problem is that there is a major complicating factor, which already tends to make supposed health care "gains" for selt belts almost negligible. This is -- in major car wrecks that would otherwise tend to create a fatality, you tend to have a much higher incidence with seat belts of people who survive by are permanently disabled (i.e., they cost the health care system huge amounts of money compared to the average person).
When you're looking at minor accidents, there is a cost advantage to seat belts, but for major accidents, you tend to end up with people whose lives were saved but who are very expensive (rather than if they were dead, in which case they cost nothing).
Again, I'm not saying it's a huge savings or that people shouldn't wear seat belts so we can all save money when they die. I'm just saying that when you take all factors into account, the cost differential is almost always insignificant (and often slightly favors non-interventionist policies).
If you choose to be fat, if you choose to smoke, if you choose to live an unhealthy lifestyle, you should be the one to pay for your healthcare expenses.
I keep hearing this crap and seeing it modded up as "+5 Informative."
This is a problem with the majority of health care expense studies that call for "nanny state" approaches to just about anything. Such studies usually compare annual costs to treat people who have various conditions or behaviors. Rarely do they consider total expenses for the entire lifespans of patients.
Think about it this way: an obese or a smoker or whatever may get sick a little more and thus cost a little more on average for the early part of his/her life. But a lot of these people then have heart attacks or strokes or whatever and die at age 45 or 55 or whatever. Meanwhile, other healthy people continue living to age 85 or 90, and they need health care (including various illnesses, operations, whatever) for an extra 30 or 40 years more. In the end, even many "healthy lifestyle" people will die of cancer or some other costly illness, so they end up costing the system a lot of money in the last couple years of care, just like the obese smoker who ends up with lung cancer 30 years earlier.
But those extra 30 years of healthcare, even for healthy people, will often end up costing more than the obese person who was "nice enough" to die and remove himself from the insurance pool early.
The cost-benefit analysis is a bit controversial, and there are some conflicting studies, but basically when you consider the total cost of healthcare over an entire lifespan, that obese smoker probably costs everyone a little less -- or at least about the same amount.
You can apply this logic to just about any "nanny state" law. Seat belt laws supposedly save us money because people wearing seatbelts end up with fewer major injuries, thereby costing the healthcare system less. But those studies never take into account the fact that people who don't wear seat belts tend to have a much greater fatality rate, and every 18-year-old dumbass who gets himself killed without a seatbelt is someone the healthcare system won't have to treat for another 60 or 70 years.
In the end, most of these things tend to balance out... because people who do stupid things just don't live as long and therefore generally shave decades off of their healthcare costs.
You want to be angry about someone -- be angry with the 100+ year old healthy people who have had minor operations and other problems over the years. They're the ones who collectively are costing you huge amounts of money over their lifespans. Maybe you're in favor of cutting off health insurance for anyone who lives past the average lifespan??
I chose the example I did because it's kindergarten level stuff. If we all rely on the word of experts for even the most fundamental on concepts, how can anyone claim that trusting experts is a logical fallacy?
One further point -- I actually don't agree with this. I don't rely on the "word of experts" to believe that the commutative property exists in objects in the real world. Nor do I rely on the "word of experts" to believe that it exists among natural numbers. I can easily see that myself from the way the world works.
The flaw in your example is that you think that some sort of axiomatic proof is adding to a child's understanding or acceptance of the commutative property. I think the commutative property is self-evident because it exists in the world for many operations in an intuitive way. "Experts" are not adding to my understanding of the everyday world by giving me thousands of pages of symbols claiming to "prove" something that is plain to a two year old.
I'm not saying there is no value in such proofs or that they might not add to advanced mathematical understanding or that such advances in math might not lead to applications in science somewhere at some point.
But kids in science classrooms don't need "proof" for things they can see intuitively, like the commutative property. They need it for assertions that go against their everyday experience of the world or their beliefs or whatever, and the evidence needed to show those things is usually not found in formal logic.
I agree completely, and I do apologize if I was overly argumentative. And you will note that I did agree with your general point about the necessity of accepting information from authorities.
I guess I thought the PM stuff was a bit over the top, given that the requirements of formal logic you mentioned are rather different from what we expect in empirical science.
A better analogy (in my view) might be some actual non-trivial and non-intuitive, but well-accepted, scientific theory. Like, for example, the fact that there are atoms and elements that make up all of matter. We can't go through every single rigorous experiment to prove that they exist and how they work in chemistry 101. We can't go visit volcanoes and glaciers before talking about basic geology. Etc.
The real appeal to authority that is usually necessary in introductory science is caused because of the necessity of glossing over methodology, datasets and analysis (and data collection on a more basic level), etc.
My real issue with your previous post was the bit about rigorous "proof" and "truth," which are things that cannot be achieved by introducing further details in a science class. If that is anyone's goal, you're never going to get there in a science class in the same way you might be "proving" mathematical axioms. You can merely provide more evidence in favor of an empirical theory...
Take a course in reading comprehension. Come back when you notice that I actually agreed with the GP's main point, merely taking issue with his primary analogy. Then we'll talk more.
So when we have to rely on experts to just progress in something as trivial as Commutation,
It depends on whether you think some sort of formal reductionist exercise on a completely made-up system of mathematical logic is "progress," I suppose. I personally think it's interesting. I think people who do things like it are cool.
But what you're really doing when you supposedly "prove" such a fundamental property is merely defining your made-up system a little more rigorously. You push a few more "axioms" into "theorem" status, but it's really just shifting around nomenclature and defining and circumscribing different aspects of your formal system.
Again, I'm not saying people shouldn't do it. But it's hardly discovering something new about commutative relationships as actually reflected in most of the real world by doing a formal proof for the natural numbers or something. The reality is that the commutative property as used by (and derived from) empirical experience is already self-evident. We do not make scientific progress by going through these sorts of exercises in formal logic.
what makes you think that we can just test everything out ourselves in natural sciences?
I didn't say that at all. I explicitly said that I agreed with the parent's point that we need to rely on scientific authority. But his example of logical proof is simply not a good analogy to the way we offer "proof" for models in experimental, empirical science.
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In the overwhelming majority of male/female relationships I've observed, the man is actually much more tidy than the woman. So I get really tired of this stereotype that I can't keep my house clean.
Back when I was an undergrad, I lived in a single that shared a small kitchen and bathroom with four or five other (single) rooms, collectively known as a "suite."
My first year, it was all male. While there was generally some mess around in the kitchen area, it was generally easy to localize. And guys in college don't tend to have a lot of dishes for themselves, so I guess they couldn't eat another bowl of cereal or whatever unless they cleaned them up at some point. The mess never sat around for more than a day or two and never grew out of control.
In year two, they decided to turn it into a mixed gender suite -- about half and half. The kitchen now was continuously unusable due to the amount of stuff that was left by the women. When my parents were visiting once, they were so horrified by the appearance of things that they took it upon themselves to clean up the area. It was back to its former condition within a week.
For whatever reason, by my third year, I think I was the only male living in that particular "suite." Maybe there was one other guy, but he was never around. I completely gave up using that kitchen (just bought a fridge and microwave for my room). The kitchen was a complete disaster, and even the bathroom was overrun with crap. We started receiving emails from the RA that the cleaning staff were disgusted with how things were being kept and were concerned that it could attract vermin.
I would occasionally run into a cleaning woman and apologize, but she knew that I wasn't the cause of any of this. She herself then started telling me about how the all-female suites in the dorm were often the worst.
I've seen slobs of both sexes, but I have to say my undergrad experience made me seriously doubt the myth that all women are genetically predisposed to keeping nice houses or something....
I take your point, and I would not encourage people to engage in distracting behavior unnecessarily.
That said, there actually are solutions to your problems, which weren't always around decades ago:
Are we asking Starbucks for "hot drink while driving" solutions?
Convenient cup-holders in cars. Cups designed to fit in them. (Not so much from Starbucks, but for other restaurants -- why do you think those supersize cups have smaller bottoms?) Drivers don't even need to take their eyes off the road.
Are we asking McDonald's for "eating food while driving" solutions?
Well, I believe McDonald's made some sort of "fry cup" that fits in a cup-holder too. I don't really eat there, but I've seen this advertised somewhere, I think. It doesn't solve all the problems, but they are clearly considering the issue.
Are we asking business owners for "looking for a store" solutions?
This is why you have big signs on the highway before an exit, on the exit to tell you where to go, and giant lit up signs outside a parking lot. Businesses pay for some of these signs. It's not only good business, but it has the added benefit of allowing drivers to see where to go while barely taking their eyes off the road.
Are we asking advertisers for "distracted by billboards" solution?
No, but in most municipalities there are limitations on where billboards can be placed. If they are deemed too much of a distraction to drivers, they may not be allowed.
The problem isn't tech, the problem is stupid drivers.
Yes. But the task of texting actually requires you to not only take your eyes off the road for a significant amount of time, but also to pay detailed attention to it -- because verbal reasoning and finger coordination are more complicated than taking a sip from a giant cup or grabbing the next french fry from some bin.
Under some circumstances, the items you list can be significantly distracting. But under most circumstances, texting is much more distracting than any of these. Since people actually have been working on solutions for the kinds of things you mention, maybe we should also consider solutions (of whatever kind) for the much more distracting behavior that is the subject of this thread.
Advertising, in its purest form, is simply making people aware of what you're offering. That's the concept.
You have no clue what "advertising" is, at least for the past 100 years, which is really when modern "advertising" came into being.
What you describe is a con. Which is how the vast majority of ads is presented to us today. Mostly because it works.
Yeah, there have been con men around since the dawn of time. Before 1900 or so, businesses mostly depended on brand recognition. Those that didn't were generally snake-oil salesmen who promised all sorts of crap in print advertisements. The idea that products needed to be "marketed" to people who didn't yet know they "needed" them was not really established.
Modern advertising got going in the early decades of the 1900s when people like followers of Freud and similar folk tried to deconstruct the desires of people and their self-concepts -- in order to convince them to buy something THEY DIDN'T NEED.
No longer were you content to establish a brand and provide a service people actually wanted. The whole point of advertising was to "market" products -- in other words, to CREATE a market for something, even if the population was perfectly content with what they had. You had to convince them that they weren't happy -- that their lives would be incomplete without your product.
Whether you want to call that a "con" or not, it was similar to the tactics that the snake oil salesmen used to use. But now it was backed up by psychologists and "marketing experts."
That's what advertising is, "in its purest form," as you put it.
However, there's huge subset of people who dislike and don't fall for that crap and would be more inclined to buy things when they are objectively presented. For me, say, a good cell phone ad would be simply a spec sheet. So for people like me that's what they should serve, and in that sense targeted advertising would make it actually work as a service, not a burden.
You really have no clue about marketing departments. They will never give you a spec sheet as an "advertisement." NEVER. That's not worth their money to "advertise" in such a way, even with a superior product. They know people like you will probably seek out spec sheets anyway -- if anything, they will market their product to some tech reviewer you might be likely to read, rather than giving you raw data. It's just not worth any money to "advertise" like that with no context.
And even if they could be convinced to give you a bunch of specs in an advertisement, they will be selected particularly to highlight some features which might appeal to you, or point out some way their product stands out compared to some competitors in some (carefully chosen) specs... which is just a really boring version of the woman using three different kinds of vacuum cleaners on a TV advert and showing you the cleanest rug.
So I can't stand outside my car when I fill up with gas because those asshats want to put in 30 display screens playing advertisements WITH sound blaring. Fine, fuck-em. I get back in my car and turn on the music a little louder and relax till the indicator says it has stopped filling up.
Speaking of freedom: unfortunately, you can't do that in many states, since quite a few have outlawed the nice catches that would hold the gas pump trigger until the tank was full (at least at self-service pumps -- the full-service guys still get to use these "advanced technologies").
Those of you in southern states may not mind this as much, but when you're trying to fill up with a subzero wind chill in a northern climate and forgot your gloves that day (because otherwise you spend so little time outdoors in your commute that your pockets work fine for the rest of the day), this is NOT a fun experience. I don't even need to get back in my car: I'd just like to put my hands in my pockets, for gosh sake. (I'll happily discharge any static wherever you want me to after participating in that dangerous behavior, which the full-service guys get the privilege to do.)
On a particularly cold day, I even saw a guy take a sort of short bungie cord thing he had rigged up and wrap it around the gas pump trigger -- just so he could get back in his car. Yeah... that's the kind of behavior we want to encourage.
All this because in the few refueling fires that have occurred, in something like 1/3 of cases, people returned to their cars while pumping, and the going theory (just a theory, mind you, not strong empirical testing) is that these people built up static electricity which caused the fuel to ignite.
Anyhow -- if it's so freaking dangerous, why not put a huge sign on the gas pump: "THE SURGEON GENERAL SAYS: DO NOT RETURN TO YOUR CAR WHILE FUELING OR YOU WILL DIE!" or whatever. I know there are small signs with this information buried on gas pumps, but if it's so darn dangerous, why not make the warning stronger? After all, I've definitely seen many scenarios where family members are "tag-teaming" during the gassing up, and even without the convenient trigger lock apparatus, it's very easy for someone to exit the car to come assist or talk to the person pumping the gas and theoretically discharge static electricity...
Look at some of the guys history remembers. Thomas Edison? Henry Ford? We don't remember Henry Ford because of the Ford Foundation either. Gladwell seems to think the historical fame of entrepreneurs is based mainly on their charity. Why?
I don't know if I agree with Gladwell. But he isn't entirely crazy with this idea. People who give lots of money tend to have buildings, colleges, major landmarks, even entire cities named after them. While sometimes the meaning of these names is almost forgotten, in other cases the charity associated with those names has continued to be well-known (Carnegie, etc.), while fewer people may remember the details of that person's achievements.
Anyhow, the reasons people are written into history books are various. Usually, it has to do with the kind of story the historian is trying to tell, which will often depend more on the subsequent legacy of the person's name in the decades or centuries following his death than on his lifetime achievements.
Example: there were hundreds of composers active in Germany around the time of J.S. Bach, dozens of whom were more "famous" (in modern standards) than Bach was. With a few exceptions (e.g., Telemann), only specialist historians could name those people today. But Bach taught a lot of students, who preserved his music well and argued for his teaching methods. Then, in the mid-1800s, many musicians became fascinated with history and the "old ways" of doing things, and Bach's reputation just happened to emerge at the right time to be established as the quintessential "old style" composer. By about 75-100 years after his death, Bach was on his way to becoming one of the most famous composers in history.
I'm not saying Bach doesn't deserve to be remembered. But, centuries later, we don't ever talk about the people that the newspapers talked about all the time... yet almost everyone has heard of old J.S. Bach.
I have no idea how the internet and the preservation of searchable digital data will change the way history is done decades or centuries from now. But I think Gladwell is right to urge us to think about how a person's "legacy" may be more important than what he does in his lifetime. Whether Jobs or Gates will be judged greater by future historians is probably not a question we can answer for at least a few decades.
If none of this is multitasking to you, you'll have to clarify your use of the term.
I'm not sure you understand the difference between "multitasking" and just doing a more complicated task. Running in place while clapping your hands is not multitasking. It may take some practice to coordinate various parts of your body (like the "walking and chewing gum" thing that some people seem to worry about), but pattern-based activities can be learned and "replayed" (generally with significant variation).
I usually multitask when playing the piano. I...
* Get fingers positioned right (both hands of course)
* Decide on little touches like dynamics, stoccato, pedaling, rubato, what emotional content I want to convey, if any; I often make these up anew each time
* Decide on changes to the piece, like different rhythms, extra grace notes, changed chords, etc.
* Evaluate my playing--"missed note", "incorrect dynamics", "this emotional arc sucks", "I really like that passage at that speed", etc.
As someone who has been a professional freelance keyboardist and, more importantly, a professional accompanist, I call all of these tasks simply "playing the piano." This is not multitasking. They are all constituent tasks which require coordination, but they do not split your attention -- if they do, you can't really play the piano.
* Perhaps read music
Yeah, as someone who used to sight-read as an accompanist for vocalist auditions and such, again, this is an essential task of being a good pianist.
According to your criteria, anyone who could read a newspaper aloud would be a tremendous "multitasker" -- after all, he is not only moving his eyes along the page, parsing words, punctuation, grammar, etc., silently, but he is also causing his mouth to articulate complex patterns of open and closed sounds, varying speed, inflection, articulation, dynamics, etc. to make the meaning of the text and its emotional content clear to a listener... etc, etc.
I'm not saying it's easy for everyone to read aloud in a fluent and effective manner. It takes practice. But I'd hardly call that "multitasking." Would you? If not, why is playing an instrument any different?
* Let my mind wander, thinking about the day or interactions I had with someone or sometimes a math problem (to calibrate difficulty, I was fiddling with pointwise approximations of complex measurable functions by polynomials almost everywhere a while ago, and the non-null-homotopicness of a particular curve yesterday)
Doing a repetitive physical skill along with more active "thinking" is again not multitasking. People run on the treadmill while watching TV. Are they multitasking? Playing piano is slightly more complicated, but I would bet lots of money that your ability to actively engage with your musical interpretation goes way down when you are deeply involved in some unrelated thoughts. You essentially let your hands go on "autopilot" while you think about something else, just like the runner watching TV. Yes, you might still vary your musical performance somewhat, just as you might slow down or speed up your running, but anything more generally requires "taking turns" with your attention.
* Listen to people if they're talking around me or listen to TV if it's on; I can tune these out if I wish
Yep, just like running on the treadmill while doing these things. I dare you to come up with an innovative performance including complex changes to all the musical aspects you discussed while actively paying attention to these other things.
Interestingly I can't respond verbally to someone while playing the piano. I can understand someone perfectly and think of a response (nodding if yes/no, for instance), but the verbal part of my brain seems to be engaged with the music.
This takes practice. As someo
I say the following as someone who is a huge fan of Linux and who has used it as my primary OS for at least five years, and as a secondary OS for well over a decade.
People do have problems with Linux you know.
Those who do, don't bitch about it on Slashdot
Well, actually sometimes they try, until a hundred screaming open-source fans shout them down. Followed by a bunch of downmodding, so you can't even see those with complaints, only the Linux cheering.
Slashdot is a great place. Most people here are pretty devoted to open-source, which I think is a great thing. However, a significant percentage also feel the need to denigrate any person who comes along and says anything bad about their experience with open-source.
Every OS has its problems. I have no idea what caused the OP's problem, but I have had enough experience with random Linux crap (and bad hardware, for that matter) not to discount this experience immediately as apocryphal or as some sort of Microsoft shill making crap up.
If you actually believe in open-source, listen to the problems and take them seriously. If you don't want to help solve them, just shut the hell up. Denying that anyone ever has any problem in Linux is just hopelessly naive.
The etymology of -teen : combining form meaning "ten more than," from O.E. -tene, -tiene, from P.Gmc. *tekhuniz (cf. O.S. -tein, Du. -tien, O.H.G. -zehan, Ger. -zehn, Goth. -taihun), an inflected form of the root of ten
So thirteen is a stylized form of three and ten, which makes Gladwell's claim even weirder.
Ah, yes, the Proto-Germanic root *tekhuniz, which every two-year-old obviously recognizes as the word that was ultimately inflected to create the "teen" on 13 through 19 (nevermind the more problematic cases like "twelve" and "eleven," which have an even less clear relationship to base 10). Oh, and those two-year-olds also manage to figure out the inversion where the added number is put on the front of the ten root for the teens (e.g., NINE-teen), but on the back for every other number up to infinity past number 20 (e.g., twenty-NINE).
Gladwell's claim about calculus education is probably bogus. But anyone who has spent time with young children realizes that they think of the numbers from 1 through 20 as mostly separate entities, and only after 20 do they begin to note the similarities that recur after every 10-count. Some smart kids do pick up a sort of pattern starting with 16 (where you actually get uninflected prefix numbers added to "-teen"), which only leads to confusion about where things like "twelve" come from. And there is research to back up the decreased speed that kids process numbers in languages like that, compared to simpler methods like "ten-one," "ten-two," etc. (Again, this mainly has relevance to early math teaching... Gladwell is really speculating about connections to higher math learning.)
But nevermind... next time a kid asks me about counting, I'll just direct him to the etymologies in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Gladwell is really overrated. That said,
In short, he said that the way chinese count gives them an edge in learning calculus, because the chinese say the number 13 as "three and ten", building the number out of simpler, more fundamental numbers, whereas in the US children must learn an entirely new word: "thirteen".
While this may not be the primary reason for calculus skills, there has been child development research that claimed to demonstrate that the linguistic structure of numbers has a major effect on how fast younger children can do basic manipulation of numbers (counting, arithmetic, etc.).
A system where you have words like "eleven, twelve, thirteen..." etc. instead of "ten-one, ten-two, ten-three" actually does introduce potential cognitive processing delays. I've even read about a study where the fact that the number "seven" has two syllables (as opposed to languages where all the single digit numbers are one syllable) can be an issue. Even worse are systems like the French language, where you have embedded 20-base arithmetic from some archaic counting methods (e.g., 80 = "quatre-vingts" = "four twenties" in French) in your basic numbers.
Now, from what I've read, the magnitude of the effect from number names isn't clear, but I think most developmental psychologists agree that it exists. The more syllables, the more unique number words needed to count, and the more complex the counting (e.g., whether there are embedded old non-base-10 systems) all could potentially slow kids down.
Now, whether and how much that might affect calculus learning is a much more controversial claim, since as far as I know, this is mostly discussed when talking about learning basic numbers and arithmetic.
Nevertheless, Gladwell isn't completely making this stuff up, at least regarding basic learning of math.
Yes, it was from the "Tablet PC" era, and devices lack that were a terrible failure. People already complain that the iPad is too heavy at a pound and a half, nobody wants a six pound tablet.
Umm, I have a convertible tablet/notebook made by Fujitsu which I bought in 2006 that weighs just about 2 pounds. It still works great and was a great option both for taking notes, doing touchscreen stuff, as well as doing real tasks requiring typing, a full OS like Windows XP or desktop Linux, etc. (Admittedly, the touchscreen functions were not as slick as what we've seen with iOS and derivatives, but I also had real full operating systems on this thing, which was pretty useful, since you could put the thing into a doc, use it with a full keyboard, and have a real computer.)
It's not quite as comfortable to hold as an iPad because it's thicker (since it has the turnaround screen, full keyboard, etc.), but it was hardly a "terrible failure" as a number of doctors and other people who needed such functionality I knew had similar devices back then.
The issue with such ultralight, small devices back then wasn't their functionality -- it was that you paid a huge cost premium for the small size and light weight.
and the diagnostic part of medicine will become much more automated, with diagnostic equipment having its results interpreted by the computer rather than just an image being spat out and read by a technician and then a doctor.
Ah, yes. Let's just hope it doesn't end up like this (from the movie Idiocracy):
Joe is in line leading up to a uniformed TECHNICIAN running what looks like one of those auto-diagnostic machines from Jiffy Lube, or an automated car wash. A sad-looking man pulls up his pants as the technician hits a button on the machine.
COMPUTER VOICE: You've got hepatitis! Hey! Take it easy! Your illness is important to us!
TECHNICIAN: Next.
Joe steps up. The Technician holds up three probes connected to the diagnostic machine.
TECHNICIAN: Okay. This one goes in your mouth. This one's for your ear. And... This one goes in your butt.
The technician hands Joe a third probe. Joe looks at it reluctantly, hesitates a beat, then looks at the line of 20 people staring at him.
GUY IN LINE: Hurry UP ASSHOLE!!!
Joe unhappily puts the plug up his butt.
TECHNICIAN: Shit, wait a second.
The Technician pulls all three plugs out and stupidly fumbles with the identical cables.
TECHNICIAN: Okay, one goes in your... No, wait a second...
Joe tries to follow the one that was in his butt like three card monte, but it's a lost cause. The technician stops shuffling the probes.
TECHNICIAN: Okay. This one goes in your mouth.
Joe stares in horror as the Technician brings the probe closer to his mouth. Joe hesitates.
GUY IN LINE: COME ON!!!
(LATER IN THE DOCTOR'S OFFICE)
The DOCTOR enters, a big, affable lunk holding several charts and computer printouts.
DOCTOR: Hey, how's it going, man?
JOE: Not so good... I'm hallucinating like crazy. I think it's the drugs these Army guys put me on. It's kind of Top Secret, but if you could just get me well enough to get back to Base...
DOCTOR: (nodding) Uh-huh, uh-huh. Kick ass. (looking at Joe's chart) Anyway, I don't wanna sound like a dick or nothing, but I looked at your charts and it seems like you're fucked up, you talk like a fag, and your shit may be retarded. What I'd do, man, is get plenty of rest-
JOE: Wha? I... I want a second opinion.
DOCTOR: (holds up Joe's charts) OmniPal doesn't lie, man. But listen - there's plenty of 'tards out there living really kickass lives. My first wife was retarded and she's a pilot.
JOE: Okay, I'm going to another hospital.
DOCTOR: So, that'll be six billion dollars. (hands Joe an invoice)
Also, another thing to think of is all of the sunk costs in an individual (education, primarily). If they die at 18, pretty much all of those sunk costs are completely wasted. If someone lives to 80, those costs are amortized over a much longer period.
I forgot this -- yes, that is a valid point. I agree that if we're looking at total cost to society, we should factor it in, and again, I don't think it's a good thing that people are dying young... for them or for society as a whole. So I completely agree that this might be a rationale for trying to prevent more fatalities (although, again, if we're talking about seat belts, I didn't see a strong correlation between states with strong seat belt laws and decreased fatality rate, even when I tried to adjust for total miles driven, urban vs. rural roads, etc. which are all available in the government statistics).
I just don't think that the health care costs alone are a reason for regulation here, because I think the arguments are a lot murkier once you start considering all effects.
And without seat belts, many of those minor accidents would produce the very expensive disabled people that need assistance for the rest of their lives.
I agree that you are shifting costs around, and some minor accidents are more likely to result in disabled cases. But I'm not talking out of my ass here. I haven't looked at these studies recently, but a couple of years ago I read a number of studies about seat belts and health-care costs. I remember running some numbers myself and deciding that it was very likely, based on the projections in the studies that assumed what costs would be with belts for everyone who was beltless, that if you incorporated saved future costs from fatalities, the numbers would no longer seem like a savings for seat belts.
But I'm happy to yield to someone who has better numbers. What I do think is that the supposed "savings" from seat belts is a lot less than is usually advertised.
Anyhow, a lot of this is neither here nor there, because the relationship of seat belt laws to methods of enforcement and to actual seat belt usage is quite complicated and not as straightforward as you might expect. And the number of serious injuries and fatalities does not seem as highly correlated with these laws as people like to think.
I ran some numbers based on data I could find from all 50 states and tried to see if correlations came up based on the strength of seat belt laws, and there was very little correlation between the strength of laws and the number of fatalities and injuries.
Seat belt laws do increase seat belt usage, but that doesn't necessarily translate into fewer fatalities and injuries. This may be due to a number of factors, like the fact that studies have shown people tend to drive more recklessly when they feel "safer" (and thus some people drive faster, etc. when belted, which appears to have resulted in a statistically significant number of additional injuries, particularly to bicyclists and pedestrians after seat belt laws have been adopted in some countries, etc.).
I would strongly argue that every intelligent person wear a seat belt. But after spending a lot of time trying to look at good data, I'm not convinced that seat belt laws are actually "saving lives" or healthcare costs.
If someone else has better studies that I may have overlooked, I'm really interested in seeing them.
A belated reply...
So how much did your students learn? And what standards did they meet? Do you have the data?
You seem to be fundamentally confused. "Standards" are important as some sort of minimal baseline. "Learning" in good classrooms hopefully goes far above the "standards."
There's a good reason why interviews for jobs generally consist of face-to-face conversations. There's a good reason why you generally can't get a Ph.D. anywhere in the world without defending your work at an oral examination. Such things are rarely "standardized," but that's how real people actually judge other real people. I can learn more from a 5-minute conversation with a student about his abilities than I could with a standardized test that was hours long. Why?
Well, I can choose to be interactive. If I see the student already seems to know a lot about fundamentals, I don't have to spend 20 minutes making him answer questions about them. I can adapt my questions to the things the student says in responses and very quickly make some judgments.
I've seen all the studies about how classroom size supposedly makes no difference in learning outcomes. I can tell you it does make a huge difference in how much I knew about my students. When I'm teaching 1/3 of the number of students per year at an elite private school as I was at a public school, I have time to have lots of conversations like this with my students.
So, yes, I think I had a hell of a lot more data about my students than any standardized battery could ever give me.
If you do, congratulations. You have done testing. If not, then perhaps you aren't as good a teacher as you think you were.
Well, I talked about conceptual physics in my previous post, but I also taught AP. Most of my students got a 5 on the AP Physics exam, so I suppose they must have learned something. Does that satisfy your dumbass metric?
But given how oversimplified and crappy many of the AP Physics test questions are (mostly because of low expectations about calculus knowledge), I sincerely hope they learned more than that if they hope to go on and do anything else in the sciences.
And if you think unions are opposed to that, then perhaps you need to catch up with current events.
I think unions are opposed to anything that is likely to get people fired. I absolutely think they would be in favor of more subjective assessment methods, like I was talking about here, because they are less likely to be clear enough to get people fired.
But that's not what I was talking about at all when I said unions wouldn't be in favor of things -- that was at the end of my post, when I was talking about assessment of TEACHERS. In the system I was discussing, a teacher who didn't meet the standards set up would be fired within 2 years at most. Meanwhile, unions nationwide have been incredibly resistant to anything that would allow teachers to be fired under almost any circumstances, particularly if they've been at a school for any length of time. If you don't realize that, you need to keep up with current events.
Finally, good districts advertise to new teachers a system fairly close to what you propose. These are public systems.
I never said my school had a monopoly on such systems, nor did I say that only private schools could do it. I do think that many public schools with enough resources would be happy to try something like it, though it would have to have teeth -- i.e., you could actually fire teachers. While standardized tests may have some use here too, I think placing too much emphasis on them is incredibly detrimental to the teaching and learning environment.
Having taught at public schools in a state where standardized testing was around for long before NCLB, I saw the effects of this nonsense in the way teachers designed curriculums, in the way they taught their classes, and i
While this may be true for tobacco users (which I'm skeptical of without reading the studies you refer to), it doesn't necessarily mean that in the general case dying younger equates to lower health care costs. A simple example from my family:
I'm sorry for your brother, but anecdotal evidence isn't generally useful in a statistical argument.
My point is that while age is certainly a factor in lifetime health care costs, I suspect the primary factor is one of severity of an illness during ones life, regardless of how long it is.
And you would be correct. The simplest way of thinking about it is that people with longer lifespans are more likely to have more severe illnesses and therefore will be more costly, on average. Younger people who live more risky lives may have an increased cost while they are young, but that generally isn't enough to make up for the cost savings after they die prematurely.
The fact of the matter is that those who choose unhealthy lifestyles generally end up having a lower total lifetime medical costs because they do not live as long.
Yes, mod parent up, please! Everyone keeps asserting that obese people and smokers cost the health care system more, but that's only true on an annual basis. When you consider the lifetime costs, smokers and obese people cost the system a lot less... because they die earlier: Study: Fat people cheaper to treat.
If you are overwight and smoke than such insurance should cost you more.
Well, life insurance should cost you more because you're at greater risk of dying sooner. But, since you would tend to die earlier as an overweight smoker, your total lifetime insurance cost is likely to be less (http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-02-05-obese-cost_N.htm).
Given that insurance providers can't easily drop people involuntarily, they will have to pay health care costs for non-smoking non-obese people that are likely in excess of what they have to pay for obese smokers in the long-term.
By your logic, we should actually charge "healthier" people more for health insurance, since they are likely to live longer and cost the system more in the long run.
Soda here and there is fine, chugging 8 MountainDews a day is not healthy.
Soda has no nutritional benefits. Having it "here and there" is probably not going to be as bad for most people, but for most people it never a particularly good thing.
On the other hand, there are some people who can drink 8 Mountain Dews per day and be fine. There is at least one documented person who has only eaten Big Macs for his entire adult life, and he actually seems to be incredibly healthy. The oldest woman who ever lived was a smoker for close to a hundred years of her life.
All sorts of people engage in all sorts of behaviors that might be risky for some or most people. If they aren't hurting you, why do you care?
To have a requirement to "NOT ACTIVELY KILL YOURSELF" is quite different than "this is what you have to eat".
Exactly what is the government's business in regulating whether you decide to kill yourself? It's your life. Shouldn't you be free to end it however you want?
For some people, the only thing that makes their life worth living is being a deep-sea fisherman. I've definitely met some who love their jobs, and they can't imagine doing anything else, even if it's hard for them to make a living. But their profession has one of the highest mortality rates of any profession. You want to tell them they can't do their job that they enjoy because they might end up dying?
How many great artists died of drug overdoses, diseases contracted from sexual behaviors, etc.? Would they have given the same creative work to posterity had they not been free to live their lives in these ways?
I'm not trying to ennoble the drinking of huge amounts of Mountain Dew. But I'm not sure why that person should have a "requirement" not to do so. (And before you start off on the healthcare cost argument, look at my previous post on this thread and the study here http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-02-05-obese-cost_N.htm)
Ah yes, the argument that smokers are actually good for a country because they die young.
Did I say it was "good for a country"? Did I say it was good for anyone? The GP said people who smoke, get fat, etc. should pay for health care costs because (presumably) they are so much more. That is a false assertion. I don't think it's "good" that people die young. I just said the GP's assertion that we'd all be better off in the finances of the healthcare system without the fatties and the smokers is probably not true.
That doesn't mean there aren't many great reasons to try to get people to stop smoking or lose weight or whatever.
Wow. Can I just shoot you right now, so that I pay less for healthcare? I mean, I should be allowed to do it. After all, it lowers my health care bill.
How do you know that? That's only true if my health care expenses are above average. If my expenses are below average (which I can tell you that so far, for people my age, they are), then I'm benefitting you by paying in more to the system, thereby lowering your costs.
What you - and all your conservative/libertarian friends as well - don't get is that a stable society is a prosperous one, and that a society where people can get old safely is one in which experience can be accumulated and put to good use.
I'm not sure how we miss out on so much old people's experience when, as the link I gave pointed out, you're looking at reducing the average age of smokers or obese people by 4-7 years from the average lifespan. Given that in our society these days we suffer from rampant age discrimination where most people tend to ignore what senior citizens think, let alone anyone over age 50 or even 40 for many "young companies," I sincerely doubt that our current society would benefit from the wisdom of the old. In years past, I might have agreed with you.
And besides, satisfied and content people tend to be more likely to be creative, wise, etc., because they live life the way they want to. How many great artists have died at young ages because of illnesses due to their risky behaviors, not just smoking, but drugs or sexual behaviors, etc.? Would these people have been the same way if they were legally probihited from participating in whatever behaviors they enjoyed the most?
I live a pretty mundane existence compared to most of these people, but I don't live under the illusion that if we just regulate everyone to death and overprotect them until they are 75 that they are suddenly going to start spouting great wisdom.
And, by the way, I'm not at all conservative, nor am I particularly libertarian, since I don't believe such classifications are adequate to describe the multitude of possible views on political philosophy. I do hold some opinions that would be considered by some to be reactionary or libertarian or right-wing, but I also hold probably more views that would be considered far, far more left than the craziest mainstream "liberals."
But so what? I was arguing about the accuracy of a financial point. Your assumptions or conclusions about my beliefs and greater agenda (beyond the fact that we should have reasonable and logical facts in support of a policy agenda) are your own...
They also surely contribute (via taxes/insurance premiums depending on your system) quite a lot more too?
Yes, you are correct. And this is part of the reason why I hedged a bit and said that the costs may end up being about equal in the end. The study I linked to only considered total costs, but it did not factor in potential contributions.
Nevertheless, if you just take the numbers in the link (as an example), I don't really think the contributions for the remaining years of healthy people (which are generally the most illness-prone and therefore expense) are going to completely negate the issue I was talking about.
From the link:
On average, healthy people lived 84 years. Smokers lived about 77 years, and obese people lived about 80 years.
Ultimately, the thin and healthy group cost the most, about $417,000, from age 20 on. The cost of care for obese people was $371,000, and for smokers, about $326,000.
So, on average, obese people had their lifespan reduced by 4 years compared to healthy people. The study estimated costs from age 20, so that's reduction of 64 years to 60 years, or about 6%. Costs were reduced by $46,000, or about 11%.
Now, I'm sure we can pick apart the various assumptions of the model, so these percentages might be closer (or further apart) than this estimate. But the extra years of paying into the system as a (generally more sickly and more costly) old person are not going to net as much return for the system as a whole as young, healthy people. So the extra few years paying as an elderly person is unlikely to make the math work out in favor of non-obese, non-smokers (who will still have increased health problems at age 70 or 80+).
The 18 year old dumbass not wearing a seatbelt might, if wearing a seatbelt, escape with minor injuries. And then contribute to the healthcare system for another 50 years and more. Killing them at 18 isn't necessarily the best fiscal option.
You're somewhat right, and I think the analysis is more complicated when you're talking about someone dying at 18 versus 84 vs. dying at 80 vs. 84 (or even 60 vs. 84).
The problem is that there is a major complicating factor, which already tends to make supposed health care "gains" for selt belts almost negligible. This is -- in major car wrecks that would otherwise tend to create a fatality, you tend to have a much higher incidence with seat belts of people who survive by are permanently disabled (i.e., they cost the health care system huge amounts of money compared to the average person).
When you're looking at minor accidents, there is a cost advantage to seat belts, but for major accidents, you tend to end up with people whose lives were saved but who are very expensive (rather than if they were dead, in which case they cost nothing).
Again, I'm not saying it's a huge savings or that people shouldn't wear seat belts so we can all save money when they die. I'm just saying that when you take all factors into account, the cost differential is almost always insignificant (and often slightly favors non-interventionist policies).
If you choose to be fat, if you choose to smoke, if you choose to live an unhealthy lifestyle, you should be the one to pay for your healthcare expenses.
I keep hearing this crap and seeing it modded up as "+5 Informative."
Here's the problem with these arguments: Study: Fat people cheaper to treat.
This is a problem with the majority of health care expense studies that call for "nanny state" approaches to just about anything. Such studies usually compare annual costs to treat people who have various conditions or behaviors. Rarely do they consider total expenses for the entire lifespans of patients.
Think about it this way: an obese or a smoker or whatever may get sick a little more and thus cost a little more on average for the early part of his/her life. But a lot of these people then have heart attacks or strokes or whatever and die at age 45 or 55 or whatever. Meanwhile, other healthy people continue living to age 85 or 90, and they need health care (including various illnesses, operations, whatever) for an extra 30 or 40 years more. In the end, even many "healthy lifestyle" people will die of cancer or some other costly illness, so they end up costing the system a lot of money in the last couple years of care, just like the obese smoker who ends up with lung cancer 30 years earlier.
But those extra 30 years of healthcare, even for healthy people, will often end up costing more than the obese person who was "nice enough" to die and remove himself from the insurance pool early.
The cost-benefit analysis is a bit controversial, and there are some conflicting studies, but basically when you consider the total cost of healthcare over an entire lifespan, that obese smoker probably costs everyone a little less -- or at least about the same amount.
You can apply this logic to just about any "nanny state" law. Seat belt laws supposedly save us money because people wearing seatbelts end up with fewer major injuries, thereby costing the healthcare system less. But those studies never take into account the fact that people who don't wear seat belts tend to have a much greater fatality rate, and every 18-year-old dumbass who gets himself killed without a seatbelt is someone the healthcare system won't have to treat for another 60 or 70 years.
In the end, most of these things tend to balance out... because people who do stupid things just don't live as long and therefore generally shave decades off of their healthcare costs.
You want to be angry about someone -- be angry with the 100+ year old healthy people who have had minor operations and other problems over the years. They're the ones who collectively are costing you huge amounts of money over their lifespans. Maybe you're in favor of cutting off health insurance for anyone who lives past the average lifespan??
I chose the example I did because it's kindergarten level stuff. If we all rely on the word of experts for even the most fundamental on concepts, how can anyone claim that trusting experts is a logical fallacy?
One further point -- I actually don't agree with this. I don't rely on the "word of experts" to believe that the commutative property exists in objects in the real world. Nor do I rely on the "word of experts" to believe that it exists among natural numbers. I can easily see that myself from the way the world works.
The flaw in your example is that you think that some sort of axiomatic proof is adding to a child's understanding or acceptance of the commutative property. I think the commutative property is self-evident because it exists in the world for many operations in an intuitive way. "Experts" are not adding to my understanding of the everyday world by giving me thousands of pages of symbols claiming to "prove" something that is plain to a two year old.
I'm not saying there is no value in such proofs or that they might not add to advanced mathematical understanding or that such advances in math might not lead to applications in science somewhere at some point.
But kids in science classrooms don't need "proof" for things they can see intuitively, like the commutative property. They need it for assertions that go against their everyday experience of the world or their beliefs or whatever, and the evidence needed to show those things is usually not found in formal logic.
I agree completely, and I do apologize if I was overly argumentative. And you will note that I did agree with your general point about the necessity of accepting information from authorities.
I guess I thought the PM stuff was a bit over the top, given that the requirements of formal logic you mentioned are rather different from what we expect in empirical science.
A better analogy (in my view) might be some actual non-trivial and non-intuitive, but well-accepted, scientific theory. Like, for example, the fact that there are atoms and elements that make up all of matter. We can't go through every single rigorous experiment to prove that they exist and how they work in chemistry 101. We can't go visit volcanoes and glaciers before talking about basic geology. Etc.
The real appeal to authority that is usually necessary in introductory science is caused because of the necessity of glossing over methodology, datasets and analysis (and data collection on a more basic level), etc.
My real issue with your previous post was the bit about rigorous "proof" and "truth," which are things that cannot be achieved by introducing further details in a science class. If that is anyone's goal, you're never going to get there in a science class in the same way you might be "proving" mathematical axioms. You can merely provide more evidence in favor of an empirical theory...
Take a course in reading comprehension. Come back when you notice that I actually agreed with the GP's main point, merely taking issue with his primary analogy. Then we'll talk more.
So when we have to rely on experts to just progress in something as trivial as Commutation,
It depends on whether you think some sort of formal reductionist exercise on a completely made-up system of mathematical logic is "progress," I suppose. I personally think it's interesting. I think people who do things like it are cool.
But what you're really doing when you supposedly "prove" such a fundamental property is merely defining your made-up system a little more rigorously. You push a few more "axioms" into "theorem" status, but it's really just shifting around nomenclature and defining and circumscribing different aspects of your formal system.
Again, I'm not saying people shouldn't do it. But it's hardly discovering something new about commutative relationships as actually reflected in most of the real world by doing a formal proof for the natural numbers or something. The reality is that the commutative property as used by (and derived from) empirical experience is already self-evident. We do not make scientific progress by going through these sorts of exercises in formal logic.
what makes you think that we can just test everything out ourselves in natural sciences?
I didn't say that at all. I explicitly said that I agreed with the parent's point that we need to rely on scientific authority. But his example of logical proof is simply not a good analogy to the way we offer "proof" for models in experimental, empirical science.
You're completely making the parent's point.
Only when you ignore most of what I said.