I have a new theory for what's going on now. Among other real-world effects, it explains such extremist reactions on YouTube.
Actually it's not really Trump's idea, but must be coming from Stephen Miller and his associates. Trump is just the puppet. Again.
The Department of Homeland Security is under reconstruction.
Coming soon: The Department of WHITE Homeland Security. #DWHS
Don't think of it as the largest piece of the federal government running amok.
It's just color coordination. White House and White Homeland.
Not sure who coined the term "slow-moving coup". Perhaps Bill Maher? But they are shifting out of first gear now. I'm even beginning to think Trumpism has some of the potential of Stalinism. Depends on the depth of the purge. If the Trumpists start purging the "weaklings" among themselves, that would be an exceedingly bad sign. (I had to wrestle with that "If" for a while...)
No, that is NOT what I am saying. NOT EVEN REMOTELY CLOSE. Only a willful desire to prevent dialogue can explain such a lie. Well, I suppose there are other possibilities. For example certain pharmaceuticals.
I am no longer able to believe you have any intention of nor capability for sincere intellectual activity. Therefore I regard this "conversation" as terminated.
Your reply mostly makes me feel that I have failed to make myself clear, but perhaps that was the natural result of transplanting the material out of its original context. Then again, it didn't seem to be particularly clear there, either. I'm inclined to think that means I need to improve my understanding more so that I can present the ideas more clearly.
Due to the confusion, or perhaps related to your writing style, I'm not seeing your reply as particularly illuminating. Your reply might be worth more study, but right now it doesn't feel that way. Your attitude definitely cut into the motivation to spend much time on your comment. Maybe there's something buried in there?
Then when you drop a rude bomb about the audio cortex in relation to reading, it makes me think you might just be highly opinionated without much foundation. The most important thing you need to learn for faster reading is to stop verbalizing, even silently.
Yes, I'm still interested in the topics, but if you don't improve your politeness, attitude, and presentation, then I think I should regard this discussion as terminated.
I'm still offended. I'm NOT going to invest more time in this thread, except to not that I already included a couple of references, if more data is what you wanted.
Okay, just one more item of a slightly complicated sort. The natural approach of ol' Mother Nature. Random mixing of genes, but seeking equilibrium. Half the random combinations are worse than average. Therefore nature's equilibrium is four kids with two dying before reproducing. Just the averages to sustain equilibrium, but people don't like that idea. Therefore I support passive eugenics to reduce the dying. It can be reworded as a right to reproduce while pushing the odds in favor of better combinations of genes for each person. Reversible abortion is one implementation approach on the edge of today's medical technology, though it can also be implemented with old techniques such as amniocentesis.
Must be troll mods. I'm not even seeing an attempted joke to be missed there, so the "funny" mod is without merit, but apparently overrides the equal number of "insightful" mods.
Having said that, there is an implicit solution in your comment, but it won't work. The problem as you've rephrased it is that developers do Windows versions first and Linux versions last, if at all.
The underlying problems underneath that statement of the problem is that the largest profit is on Windows and the developers are seeking the largest profits.
That is why I think the better solution approach would be a cost-recovery financial model with fair payment for the developers. No massive profits, but as long as sufficient numbers of people are willing to help recover the costs, everyone could be happy (except for the profit maximizers like Microsoft and the developers who insist on profit maximization uber alles).
That part of my original submission of the story didn't survive the process... However I think it's too late now, so I'll just bid you ADSAuPR, atAJG.
I like the Subject: even though it still lacks solutions. I even think the moderation is accurate, insofar as the style is interesting.
And yet the layout is annoying. To respond to your 7th point, I feel the only option is to quote it:
Maybe it's the accountability, you know who you're dealing with, there's at least some central number to call for support, instead of a fragmentation of 10 different companies.
Per my original suggestion, I actually see this as part of the project management aspect. I'd offer more details for a solution approach (at the CSB level), but I think it's too late for this discussion. Much too late.
Actually, that made me think of a different solution for the Slashdot problem of amok discussions. I wish the story-Submit webpage included an option for submission confirmation before it is published. The confirmation would confirm that the idea hasn't been mangled too much by the Slashdot editor. Instead of just getting the belated notification that the story idea was accepted, the submitters who activated that option (but not allowed if they also enabled the AC option?) would have some window of time to approve the story or change their minds. If they don't approve it, then it just gets published.
That option would also give the original submitter a special shot at first post, even if they feel the edited story was pointing in the wrong direction. At least that's how I feel now, but maybe the discussion could have avoided the OS-war theme if an early post had focused on SOLVING the underlying problem of the story.
Of course if the timeliness of the story is important, then the submitter should not enable that hypothetical option, but just hope for ASAP publication. That was obviously not the case for this particular story.
Even more of course, the idea is moot. Slashdot has even less project management than that.
Sorry, but I have to ask what the point of the joke is.
Okay, systemd. HTH probably means Hope That Helps. My best guess on HAND is Have A Nice Day.
Still don't get the joke.
Overall I confess that I'm disappointed by two aspects of the long and active discussion. First is the lack of other "funny" comments (at least as of this time, when almost 300 comments have been added) and the second is the lack of solutions. Lots of complaints and problems, but no solution ideas or even approaches to solutions that I've been able to find (yet).
The only joke on this story? I was sort of hoping for at least one funny argument with the Hal-like car, trying to convince it that the driver is not actually drunk. "You're just overreacting to the Purel!"
The complexity of the analysis is what makes it a tough paradox to wrestle with. It's really hard to draw the lines.
However I think there are clearly cases where intolerant people are being intellectually dishonest. They are using the theory of tolerance to claim that they deserve to be tolerated, which is only true until they reveal their real intentions to be intolerant. They would not need to play the jujitsu games if they actually had intellectual integrity.
Extreme examples abound these days. I think the projection is what annoys me the most.
By the way, I am not sure that I can really claim to be tolerant. I'm simply indifferent to most viewpoints, sometimes including my own. It may sort of look like too much tolerance, but in actuality I just don't much care about opinions without evidence and I have rather strict guidelines for what constitutes valid evidence.
Having said that, I do agree with the old saying about opinions as art (and I'm merely trying to ignore the fools with fake facts).
Great attempt to motivate me to provide the citations. NOT.
I actually keep the books in a little database I wrote, but the way the subject indexes work it takes a bit of effort to find stuff at that level. I have concluded you aren't worth that much effort.
I suppose everything comes back to time? I also used to keep track of the magazines I'd read.
Another "discussion" that can safely be regarded as terminated.
Thanks for asking about the parts you couldn't understand. NOT.
Hint. When I wrote "reversible", I meant "reversible".
You'll just have to forgive me for not apologizing for my miserable inability to express myself clearly.
However, there is a funny punchline here. It's actually possible you agree with me. However by the time I scraped that much of your possible meaning out of your comment, I had already wasted more time on you than your attitude justified.
But I probably started it, so that makes it my fault. I was somehow "asking for it" in my original comment, and then I just always tend to give a bit too much tit for tat. Or maybe it's just a "Today's Internet" thing?
Seems to me I can safely regard this "discussion" as terminated. Good day, sir.
I looked again, but I'm focusing on the YouTube side. Nothing there to support your claim. I am unable to find any evidence on the YouTube side that the account is associated with TED. If they do "own" that YouTube account, then the TED people do not appear to want that linkage to be known. Where should I look? But I think I looked carefully at everything on that page.
What I did find on YouTube was a reminder of the "official" excuse that the TED people claimed for NOT publishing it on the TED website. I remain utterly unconvinced that the talk is too boring.
As regards your link to the TED website, the problem is that the TED people blew their credibility. At this point I am not able to trust any of the meta-commentary on the TED website. Any of it might be so-called revisionist history or just salesmanship. At the time I first learned about the first Hanauer talk, I actually felt that the discussion of that talk had been edited and distilled to focus on the "boring" excuse as most plausible--to the people who had never seen the video. I also believe that is logically consistent with trying to avoid a Streisand effect.
Went back at it one more time and realized something obvious. The "WatchExtraVideo" account only has the one video on it. I have certainly seen plenty of videos on the TED website that were much more boring than Hanauer's, but they weren't moved to this YouTube account. If this YouTube account is associated with TED, then this video appears to have received extremely unusual treatment.
I think you need to read some more about how memory works. Or observe your own thinking more carefully? Also I'd suggest some of the books about mnemonic tricks.
For your specific example of phone numbers, researchers have actually done quite a bit of research, starting back when phone numbers were 7 digits. They discovered that short-term memory was generally strained at 7 digits, though many people used natural mnemonic tricks, such as remembering the digits in pairs. For example, if there's a 4 and a 3 in the phone number, then a person may tag it as 43 and temporarily link it to some personal reference to that number, thus using only one memory slot.
I've actually remembered one specific reference for the manipulation problem at the high end. If I remember correctly, the book Nudge included some material about arranging grocery shelves to manipulate the choices made. Insofar as the authors are supposed to be linked to the Libertarians, I found it rather amusing that they argued in favor of manipulating people for their own good. Vaguer memories of controlling the shopping experience in other books.
My personal examples of being daunted into submission involve electronics or smartphone stores. When the of options becomes too numerous, even overwhelming, my first strategy is to find some concrete criteria that I can use to eliminate as many options as possible. Okay, "daunted into submission" is an exaggeration, but I generally don't even try to figure out if any of the eliminated models has other features making them worthy of consideration. At the end I wind up trying to do close comparisons among the 3 to 5 remaining candidates--and I actually find it reassuring if they are similar. It's evidence that there is real competition and some degree of convergence on that balance point for good value. (It's called a satisfier approach, but if applied carefully it should approach the best decision while requiring much less time and effort.)
Trying to understand the range of topics in this discussion gave me the idea for a TED talk on an ontology of TED talks.
Having said that, it seems difficult to imagine what it would be. The only two categories I can think of so far would be self-help ("Do this an be a better person!") talks and tech-breakthrough ("This new idea may solve that problem!") talks.
I was initially thinking of the idea of a TED-talk ontology in terms of a possible poll for Slashdot--and coming up dry on the alternatives. However the Cowboy Neal option seems pretty obvious: "Whatever Cowboy Neal says!"
Now for the complicated new question. It involves memory and epistemology and neuroscience. I haven't read anything like this, but I'm hoping you can point me at the right research to read. It's even possible that it's a new idea, and in that case I hope you are amused, but mostly the question is about what I should read next...
I need to provide context with one of my old theories about language. I believe that our linguistic capacity is highly over-engineered. It is one thing to use language, but we have much greater capabilities than that. One relatively minor example is the ability to learn several languages. We humans not only have the ability to use language, but the much greater capability to generate language. I think this was required simply because there was no one to create our language for us. If we had only evolved the mental capacity to use language, we'd still be waiting for it. (It also helps explain the wide range of capabilities: Only a few creators were strictly required.)
It's also important to realize that we have subverted the capabilities of our mental hardware. Whatever was driving the evolution of the capabilities to use language, it was a conversion of general purpose mental hardware from other purposes. There must have been a major cascade effect at some point, or maybe a series of cascades, but if we want to know more, we can only hope that "the aliens" were recording our progress. (I should apologize to Professor Harari for the appeal to science fiction?)
The extension into memory, especially visual memory, in relation to reading is hard to describe. (This time I'm pointing at Umberto Eco and Jorge Luis Borges.) Our visual memory is dealing with patterns and higher levels of patterns. For example, at a lower level the hardware is picking up various kinds of stripes, while at a higher level we might store notions like "zebra" or "tiger" and associate the ideas with food or danger. Each simple pattern of stripes and loops on the paper links directly and (relatively) unambiguously to an easily remembered node for the appropriate word.
With language and especially with reading we can store the higher level concepts much more effectively. Rather than remembering complicated images, the ideas can be condensed to convenient word-level (and even phrase-level or higher) modules. Though books seem to have lots of information, we can remember and access that information unexpectedly well because we are subverting parts of the memory system that were originally used for storing much more complicated visual data. As we learn to read well we are compressing the information that needs to be stored and eventually bypassing the auditory hardware completely, with the condensed (and simpler) memories of visual words in the visual cortex linking directly to the cognitive and semantic areas of the brain. Or perhaps it is the cognitive areas that expand into the visual storage areas? Those are the kinds of research questions that I'm now interested in and hoping you might be able to point me at...
That YouTube account has no relationship to TED. I'm not sure how the video was distributed, but TED was NOT involved. On the TED website, they initially pretended the talk never existed. Then there was a discussion, but it was quickly aborted.
Your correction of the story summary is accurate, but I really don't think that was the worst headline ever. Too much competition.
There was actually a story on NHK about the device. It involved a precision plate that was designed to deform into a near-sphere when the explosive charge was detonated. Then the 'ball' crashed into the asteroid, and they did observe flying debris, so they are pretty sure it worked. My main concern right now is where. If the crater is in a bad place, they may not be able to get close to it.
Seems like it would have made more sense to skip the plate and just detonate the explosive directly on the surface of the asteroid. I think that would have given them much better control over where the crater was created.
However, the abortion "problem" is actually caused by raging ignorance. It's based on the delusion that a set of genes is somehow equivalent to a unique human being. This actually goes back to the ancient idea of a tiny homunculus contained within the sperm. In the more recent form of this delusion, they think the DNA of a fertilized egg is like a blueprint that completely describes a unique human being.
WRONG. It's a heck of a lot more complicated than that, but a much closer approximation (since everyone wants a relatively simple metaphor) is a book of recipes. Lots of components and instructions, but also contingency plans and conditional mechanisms and substitute ingredients and repair instructions and even various triggers for spontaneous abortion (AKA miscarriage). Many of the results are just random and indeterminate, as when the general parameters are defined but the actual routes of the neurons are basically random. Details and activities TBD later. If everything goes well, the recipes may produce a human being (with all the associated inalienable rights), but not for a long time after fertilization produces the completed book of recipes. (Actually, about half of the recipe books aren't even sufficiently complete and 'good enough' to produce a human being.)
MUCH more could be said, but for now I'll just cite The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee and various books from Richard Dawkins.
The {~5} is the number of choices in play at one time. It's based on the human working memory. For most people that's from 3 to 7, though experts in a particular area may be able to handle more. Handling more options at a time can even be regarded as one of the definitions of expertise.
If the number is too small, say 0 choices or 1 choice, then there is no real freedom, but you get more freedom as the choices increase--for a while. I remember reading at least one book about it. What happens when the choices become too numerous (somewhere above 5?) is that you (1) start losing your freedom, because it's too hard to make the best choices and too easy for your options to be manipulated and (2) you tend to become less and less satisfied with any choice you make because you keep thinking about all the choices you didn't pick.
So do you want me to dig around for the reference? Maybe I can find more than one.
Slashdot Mirror
Z^-1
I have a new theory for what's going on now. Among other real-world effects, it explains such extremist reactions on YouTube.
Actually it's not really Trump's idea, but must be coming from Stephen Miller and his associates. Trump is just the puppet. Again.
The Department of Homeland Security is under reconstruction.
Coming soon: The Department of WHITE Homeland Security. #DWHS
Don't think of it as the largest piece of the federal government running amok.
It's just color coordination. White House and White Homeland.
Not sure who coined the term "slow-moving coup". Perhaps Bill Maher? But they are shifting out of first gear now. I'm even beginning to think Trumpism has some of the potential of Stalinism. Depends on the depth of the purge. If the Trumpists start purging the "weaklings" among themselves, that would be an exceedingly bad sign. (I had to wrestle with that "If" for a while...)
No, that is NOT what I am saying. NOT EVEN REMOTELY CLOSE. Only a willful desire to prevent dialogue can explain such a lie. Well, I suppose there are other possibilities. For example certain pharmaceuticals.
I am no longer able to believe you have any intention of nor capability for sincere intellectual activity. Therefore I regard this "conversation" as terminated.
Your reply mostly makes me feel that I have failed to make myself clear, but perhaps that was the natural result of transplanting the material out of its original context. Then again, it didn't seem to be particularly clear there, either. I'm inclined to think that means I need to improve my understanding more so that I can present the ideas more clearly.
Due to the confusion, or perhaps related to your writing style, I'm not seeing your reply as particularly illuminating. Your reply might be worth more study, but right now it doesn't feel that way. Your attitude definitely cut into the motivation to spend much time on your comment. Maybe there's something buried in there?
Then when you drop a rude bomb about the audio cortex in relation to reading, it makes me think you might just be highly opinionated without much foundation. The most important thing you need to learn for faster reading is to stop verbalizing, even silently.
Yes, I'm still interested in the topics, but if you don't improve your politeness, attitude, and presentation, then I think I should regard this discussion as terminated.
s/except to not/except to note/
Okay, I'm not going to write you off. Yet.
I'm still offended. I'm NOT going to invest more time in this thread, except to not that I already included a couple of references, if more data is what you wanted.
Okay, just one more item of a slightly complicated sort. The natural approach of ol' Mother Nature. Random mixing of genes, but seeking equilibrium. Half the random combinations are worse than average. Therefore nature's equilibrium is four kids with two dying before reproducing. Just the averages to sustain equilibrium, but people don't like that idea. Therefore I support passive eugenics to reduce the dying. It can be reworded as a right to reproduce while pushing the odds in favor of better combinations of genes for each person. Reversible abortion is one implementation approach on the edge of today's medical technology, though it can also be implemented with old techniques such as amniocentesis.
Z^-1
I have to make the obvious reply:
People who "like Outlook" are sick and need help.
Must be troll mods. I'm not even seeing an attempted joke to be missed there, so the "funny" mod is without merit, but apparently overrides the equal number of "insightful" mods.
Having said that, there is an implicit solution in your comment, but it won't work. The problem as you've rephrased it is that developers do Windows versions first and Linux versions last, if at all.
The underlying problems underneath that statement of the problem is that the largest profit is on Windows and the developers are seeking the largest profits.
That is why I think the better solution approach would be a cost-recovery financial model with fair payment for the developers. No massive profits, but as long as sufficient numbers of people are willing to help recover the costs, everyone could be happy (except for the profit maximizers like Microsoft and the developers who insist on profit maximization uber alles).
That part of my original submission of the story didn't survive the process... However I think it's too late now, so I'll just bid you ADSAuPR, atAJG.
I like the Subject: even though it still lacks solutions. I even think the moderation is accurate, insofar as the style is interesting.
And yet the layout is annoying. To respond to your 7th point, I feel the only option is to quote it:
Maybe it's the accountability, you know who you're dealing with, there's at least some central number to call for support, instead of a fragmentation of 10 different companies.
Per my original suggestion, I actually see this as part of the project management aspect. I'd offer more details for a solution approach (at the CSB level), but I think it's too late for this discussion. Much too late.
Actually, that made me think of a different solution for the Slashdot problem of amok discussions. I wish the story-Submit webpage included an option for submission confirmation before it is published. The confirmation would confirm that the idea hasn't been mangled too much by the Slashdot editor. Instead of just getting the belated notification that the story idea was accepted, the submitters who activated that option (but not allowed if they also enabled the AC option?) would have some window of time to approve the story or change their minds. If they don't approve it, then it just gets published.
That option would also give the original submitter a special shot at first post, even if they feel the edited story was pointing in the wrong direction. At least that's how I feel now, but maybe the discussion could have avoided the OS-war theme if an early post had focused on SOLVING the underlying problem of the story.
Of course if the timeliness of the story is important, then the submitter should not enable that hypothetical option, but just hope for ASAP publication. That was obviously not the case for this particular story.
Even more of course, the idea is moot. Slashdot has even less project management than that.
Sorry, but I have to ask what the point of the joke is.
Okay, systemd. HTH probably means Hope That Helps. My best guess on HAND is Have A Nice Day.
Still don't get the joke.
Overall I confess that I'm disappointed by two aspects of the long and active discussion. First is the lack of other "funny" comments (at least as of this time, when almost 300 comments have been added) and the second is the lack of solutions. Lots of complaints and problems, but no solution ideas or even approaches to solutions that I've been able to find (yet).
The only joke on this story? I was sort of hoping for at least one funny argument with the Hal-like car, trying to convince it that the driver is not actually drunk. "You're just overreacting to the Purel!"
The complexity of the analysis is what makes it a tough paradox to wrestle with. It's really hard to draw the lines.
However I think there are clearly cases where intolerant people are being intellectually dishonest. They are using the theory of tolerance to claim that they deserve to be tolerated, which is only true until they reveal their real intentions to be intolerant. They would not need to play the jujitsu games if they actually had intellectual integrity.
Extreme examples abound these days. I think the projection is what annoys me the most.
By the way, I am not sure that I can really claim to be tolerant. I'm simply indifferent to most viewpoints, sometimes including my own. It may sort of look like too much tolerance, but in actuality I just don't much care about opinions without evidence and I have rather strict guidelines for what constitutes valid evidence.
Having said that, I do agree with the old saying about opinions as art (and I'm merely trying to ignore the fools with fake facts).
Great attempt to motivate me to provide the citations. NOT.
I actually keep the books in a little database I wrote, but the way the subject indexes work it takes a bit of effort to find stuff at that level. I have concluded you aren't worth that much effort.
I suppose everything comes back to time? I also used to keep track of the magazines I'd read.
Another "discussion" that can safely be regarded as terminated.
Thanks for asking about the parts you couldn't understand. NOT.
Hint. When I wrote "reversible", I meant "reversible".
You'll just have to forgive me for not apologizing for my miserable inability to express myself clearly.
However, there is a funny punchline here. It's actually possible you agree with me. However by the time I scraped that much of your possible meaning out of your comment, I had already wasted more time on you than your attitude justified.
But I probably started it, so that makes it my fault. I was somehow "asking for it" in my original comment, and then I just always tend to give a bit too much tit for tat. Or maybe it's just a "Today's Internet" thing?
Seems to me I can safely regard this "discussion" as terminated. Good day, sir.
I looked again, but I'm focusing on the YouTube side. Nothing there to support your claim. I am unable to find any evidence on the YouTube side that the account is associated with TED. If they do "own" that YouTube account, then the TED people do not appear to want that linkage to be known. Where should I look? But I think I looked carefully at everything on that page.
What I did find on YouTube was a reminder of the "official" excuse that the TED people claimed for NOT publishing it on the TED website. I remain utterly unconvinced that the talk is too boring.
As regards your link to the TED website, the problem is that the TED people blew their credibility. At this point I am not able to trust any of the meta-commentary on the TED website. Any of it might be so-called revisionist history or just salesmanship. At the time I first learned about the first Hanauer talk, I actually felt that the discussion of that talk had been edited and distilled to focus on the "boring" excuse as most plausible--to the people who had never seen the video. I also believe that is logically consistent with trying to avoid a Streisand effect.
Went back at it one more time and realized something obvious. The "WatchExtraVideo" account only has the one video on it. I have certainly seen plenty of videos on the TED website that were much more boring than Hanauer's, but they weren't moved to this YouTube account. If this YouTube account is associated with TED, then this video appears to have received extremely unusual treatment.
I think you need to read some more about how memory works. Or observe your own thinking more carefully? Also I'd suggest some of the books about mnemonic tricks.
For your specific example of phone numbers, researchers have actually done quite a bit of research, starting back when phone numbers were 7 digits. They discovered that short-term memory was generally strained at 7 digits, though many people used natural mnemonic tricks, such as remembering the digits in pairs. For example, if there's a 4 and a 3 in the phone number, then a person may tag it as 43 and temporarily link it to some personal reference to that number, thus using only one memory slot.
I've actually remembered one specific reference for the manipulation problem at the high end. If I remember correctly, the book Nudge included some material about arranging grocery shelves to manipulate the choices made. Insofar as the authors are supposed to be linked to the Libertarians, I found it rather amusing that they argued in favor of manipulating people for their own good. Vaguer memories of controlling the shopping experience in other books.
My personal examples of being daunted into submission involve electronics or smartphone stores. When the of options becomes too numerous, even overwhelming, my first strategy is to find some concrete criteria that I can use to eliminate as many options as possible. Okay, "daunted into submission" is an exaggeration, but I generally don't even try to figure out if any of the eliminated models has other features making them worthy of consideration. At the end I wind up trying to do close comparisons among the 3 to 5 remaining candidates--and I actually find it reassuring if they are similar. It's evidence that there is real competition and some degree of convergence on that balance point for good value. (It's called a satisfier approach, but if applied carefully it should approach the best decision while requiring much less time and effort.)
Trying to understand the range of topics in this discussion gave me the idea for a TED talk on an ontology of TED talks.
Having said that, it seems difficult to imagine what it would be. The only two categories I can think of so far would be self-help ("Do this an be a better person!") talks and tech-breakthrough ("This new idea may solve that problem!") talks.
I was initially thinking of the idea of a TED-talk ontology in terms of a possible poll for Slashdot--and coming up dry on the alternatives. However the Cowboy Neal option seems pretty obvious: "Whatever Cowboy Neal says!"
Minor problem... Many, probably most, people don't want to be bothered with freedom. Too much effort.
Probably best covered in one of the senses of "free beer" in my sig.
Something beyond Kuhn? Or just a review?
I was actually surprised that The Gene didn't seem to be aware of the notion of paradigm shift.
Now for the complicated new question. It involves memory and epistemology and neuroscience. I haven't read anything like this, but I'm hoping you can point me at the right research to read. It's even possible that it's a new idea, and in that case I hope you are amused, but mostly the question is about what I should read next...
I need to provide context with one of my old theories about language. I believe that our linguistic capacity is highly over-engineered. It is one thing to use language, but we have much greater capabilities than that. One relatively minor example is the ability to learn several languages. We humans not only have the ability to use language, but the much greater capability to generate language. I think this was required simply because there was no one to create our language for us. If we had only evolved the mental capacity to use language, we'd still be waiting for it. (It also helps explain the wide range of capabilities: Only a few creators were strictly required.)
It's also important to realize that we have subverted the capabilities of our mental hardware. Whatever was driving the evolution of the capabilities to use language, it was a conversion of general purpose mental hardware from other purposes. There must have been a major cascade effect at some point, or maybe a series of cascades, but if we want to know more, we can only hope that "the aliens" were recording our progress. (I should apologize to Professor Harari for the appeal to science fiction?)
The extension into memory, especially visual memory, in relation to reading is hard to describe. (This time I'm pointing at Umberto Eco and Jorge Luis Borges.) Our visual memory is dealing with patterns and higher levels of patterns. For example, at a lower level the hardware is picking up various kinds of stripes, while at a higher level we might store notions like "zebra" or "tiger" and associate the ideas with food or danger. Each simple pattern of stripes and loops on the paper links directly and (relatively) unambiguously to an easily remembered node for the appropriate word.
With language and especially with reading we can store the higher level concepts much more effectively. Rather than remembering complicated images, the ideas can be condensed to convenient word-level (and even phrase-level or higher) modules. Though books seem to have lots of information, we can remember and access that information unexpectedly well because we are subverting parts of the memory system that were originally used for storing much more complicated visual data. As we learn to read well we are compressing the information that needs to be stored and eventually bypassing the auditory hardware completely, with the condensed (and simpler) memories of visual words in the visual cortex linking directly to the cognitive and semantic areas of the brain. Or perhaps it is the cognitive areas that expand into the visual storage areas? Those are the kinds of research questions that I'm now interested in and hoping you might be able to point me at...
That YouTube account has no relationship to TED. I'm not sure how the video was distributed, but TED was NOT involved. On the TED website, they initially pretended the talk never existed. Then there was a discussion, but it was quickly aborted.
Your correction of the story summary is accurate, but I really don't think that was the worst headline ever. Too much competition.
There was actually a story on NHK about the device. It involved a precision plate that was designed to deform into a near-sphere when the explosive charge was detonated. Then the 'ball' crashed into the asteroid, and they did observe flying debris, so they are pretty sure it worked. My main concern right now is where. If the crater is in a bad place, they may not be able to get close to it.
Seems like it would have made more sense to skip the plate and just detonate the explosive directly on the surface of the asteroid. I think that would have given them much better control over where the crater was created.
Reversible abortion. Sample problem solved.
However, the abortion "problem" is actually caused by raging ignorance. It's based on the delusion that a set of genes is somehow equivalent to a unique human being. This actually goes back to the ancient idea of a tiny homunculus contained within the sperm. In the more recent form of this delusion, they think the DNA of a fertilized egg is like a blueprint that completely describes a unique human being.
WRONG. It's a heck of a lot more complicated than that, but a much closer approximation (since everyone wants a relatively simple metaphor) is a book of recipes. Lots of components and instructions, but also contingency plans and conditional mechanisms and substitute ingredients and repair instructions and even various triggers for spontaneous abortion (AKA miscarriage). Many of the results are just random and indeterminate, as when the general parameters are defined but the actual routes of the neurons are basically random. Details and activities TBD later. If everything goes well, the recipes may produce a human being (with all the associated inalienable rights), but not for a long time after fertilization produces the completed book of recipes. (Actually, about half of the recipe books aren't even sufficiently complete and 'good enough' to produce a human being.)
MUCH more could be said, but for now I'll just cite The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee and various books from Richard Dawkins.
The {~5} is the number of choices in play at one time. It's based on the human working memory. For most people that's from 3 to 7, though experts in a particular area may be able to handle more. Handling more options at a time can even be regarded as one of the definitions of expertise.
If the number is too small, say 0 choices or 1 choice, then there is no real freedom, but you get more freedom as the choices increase--for a while. I remember reading at least one book about it. What happens when the choices become too numerous (somewhere above 5?) is that you (1) start losing your freedom, because it's too hard to make the best choices and too easy for your options to be manipulated and (2) you tend to become less and less satisfied with any choice you make because you keep thinking about all the choices you didn't pick.
So do you want me to dig around for the reference? Maybe I can find more than one.