Anybody who keeps informed has known for a long time that âoeIQâ was meaningless, and that IQ tests only evaluated the ability to succeed at IQ tests, nothing related to any kind of intelligence whatsoever.
I have kept one eye on IQ research over several decades, and this is not what anyone seriously involved actually thinks.
Research in the field of behavioral genetics has established that the construct of g is highly heritable. It has a number of other biological correlates, including brain size.
It is also a significant predictor of individual differences in many social outcomes, particularly in education and employment.
The most widely accepted contemporary theories of intelligence incorporate the g factor.
However, critics of g have contended that an emphasis on g is misplaced and entails a devaluation of other important abilities, as well as supporting an unrealistic reified view of human intelligence.
Hmmm. The g is not strong in this editor: either that last sentence should read "unrealistically reified view" or it should read "unrealistic, reified view". Furthermore, that last bit is not actually a criticism of g, it's a criticism of the entire field of applied psychometrics, up to and including Duckworth and Kahneman. People are extraordinarily complex. You put something extraordinarily complex into an extraordinarily complex environment, and unpredictable things happen, regardless of whether your metric is perfectly sound when isolated in simpler, more controlled environments.
The actual argument here is whether any justifiable isolate of human potential (meaning: some kind of number on a solid research footing) solves more problems than it creates when deployed in a messy, real world by messy, real people.
OCEAN probably provides a good starting point from which to explore where a person can best pursue their future potential and deliver present value, modulo some specific organizational context. It doesn't provide a good basis for lumping people into buckets.
Nothing we've ever discovered provides a good basis for lumping people into buckets, not even the man/woman buckets that were already old and tired by the time of Christ's first, brief reconnaissance.
Memo from Sally Ride to Genghis Kahn: Suck. My. Dick.
Ride remains the youngest American astronaut to have traveled to space, having done so at the age of 32. After flying twice on the Orbiter Challenger, she left NASA in 1987.
She worked for two years at Stanford's Center for International Security and Arms Control, then at UCSD as a professor of physics, primarily researching nonlinear optics and Thomson scattering.
She served on the committees that investigated the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters, the only person to participate in both.
We've learned subsequently that it was information originating from Sally Ride that was "leaked" to a perceptive Feynman (while talking small-engine shop, in somebody's actual garage) that lead to Feynman getting enough of a jump on the technical investigation to thence succeed in decoding the political smoke screen, just in the nick of time to drum up huge waves.
You had better believe that a valid IQ test has never been invented that Feynman wouldn't have aced. So you purport to believe his ability to ace any manner of test whatsoever concerning fluid intelligence had no real connection to his ability to ace life? (As physicist, teacher, author, and reluctant politician.)
Marge von Fargo: I'm not so sure I agree 100% with your police work there, Lou.
I place about 16 holds a month at the local library, for myself and my wife, of which about four are usually DVDs (representing the entirely of our household TV consumption). Perhaps half of the books are common interest, and the other half divides evenly between my interests and my wife's interests.
How much of a book I actually read depends on the book. The least substantial items get a quick, thirty minute once-over. Sometime I just want to assess the strength of the author, which does not require reading every damn page. For many of the book I'll read half the chapters in full, and glance over the other half. A couple of books a months I devour sequentially.
Perhaps one book a month I'd read out loud to my wife at bedtime. Perhaps such a book gets ten hours of oratorial attention. It's surprising what books work for reading out loud and what books don't. It's also surprising how much differently you end up understanding the author by the end of the process.
We're working through Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery (2014) by Henry Marsh as our bedtime material right now. At one point last night, I needed to read a phrase which involved several words in quick succession in the mold of "haemangioblastoma", with the middle word hyphenated at the end of a line. I just kill myself trying to read at an even pace no matter what confronts me. I could feel my panic rising a full line in advance. But for that confounded hyphen, combined with the distracting blue blood "ae", I might have made it. Blue blood is my personal kryptonite.
Marsh garden-pathed me a few times with awkward placement of small words like "is", but otherwise his style is a dream for reading aloud. There's almost always something intense going on, he frequently comments on it from an extremely personal place (not always flattering), but never dawdles over his confessions.
Pinker is regarded as a great stylist, and his words do flow more smoothly than most science authors, but I always find I need to suck in air by the barrel to get through his initial strawman construction. Then he'll finally get around to thoroughly deflating his strawman, often with fine insight. Unfortunately, the giant air suck finally disqualified him for reading out loud. Pinker doesn't seem to understand that the unwashed includes some mighty shrewd cookies, whose native instincts would put many academics to shame, if there was/were any possibility of a fair fight between man at large and organized highbrow.
Reading a book out loud is roughly equivalent to blitzing through a book entirely by eye three times over in terms of the intensity of impression you're left with, though you'll be left with quite different things.
Beyond books, I average about two hours a day of general reading online. All the content at edge.org, about half the items at aldaily.com, a quarter of the transcripts at TED (few of the actual videos are worth one's time, any more), the majority of American political coverage from The Guardian, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Politico, and Vox, sometimes with excursions into The Daily Beast or Doubleclickbait (er, Business Insider). If once in a while something leaks over the WSJ's paywall, I read that, too.
I also deliberately seek out viewpoints from people like David Frum, George Will, Michael Gerson, and Michael Lind. I frequently listen to an EconTalk episode while cooking dinner, so I'm also up to my eyeballs in Classical Liberalism (with a mild, yet increasingly irritating neoliberal slant—if only because Russ is becoming progressively worse at preventing his slant from walking him back from the hard-nosed questions). To his credit, Russ is a voracious reader. He really does bend himself over every guest's book (he might employ a never-mentioned staffer who pre-winnows, but I wouldn't put money on this proposition). Has Coulter ever endorsed a book that wasn't edited by Winston Wilhelm Wordsmith II? Just asking. Th
Speaking as the person responsible for much of that "retraining" it never ceases to amaze me just how much effort people are capable of putting in to the avoidance of knowledge.
If it's anything like AI, every time you learn something, the bar is instantly raised. Bar inflation is underappreciated by the pocket protector set. Thus perhaps the proper diagnosis is that the end user is investing enormous amounts of effort into stopping the bar from moving. Because there's no end in sight to how much IT support would prefer to offload onto a better-educated user base.
Supposing they did choose to learn—surprise!—all this end user sunk cost is thrown overboard in the next software generation, because ribbon GUIs are a thing now, or touch desktops, or some other dubious, branding brainfuck.
Allow me to play devil's advocate for a second more.
When users will willingly work harder: what they are being asked to learn is a reasonable work process (as perceived by someone who doesn't love IT for its own sake), the learning process is finite (and knowable in advance), and what you've learned stays valid across branding fashion cycles.
My wife works in a (large) government Windows shop. They've been having five person meetings week after week over file naming conventions concerning a large database of decision documents. This only started because some IT support guy told them their file names are too long (what he means is that their pathnames are too long; they have some fraction of 260 characters because of how their volumes are mounted deep under the hood, which has never been explained to anyone in her shop, even though it sometimes seems to change, which immediately causes all kinds of heartache).
I'm a ZFS user. While the filename itself is limited to 255 characters, the path names can be a lot longer. In my wife's IT environment, maybe I'd quickly give up on learning, too. The brokenness file would quickly overwhelm everything else.
Proposal currently circulating in my wife's office: everyone gets a handy cheat sheet for how to encode shorter filenames from short, cryptic designators. And, also, the idea that you no longer need to designate the other party, because after all, you can tell that from the folder name (until you email the document to someone and it's now outside of the filing system context).
I suggested, you know, maybe flatten your folder hierarchy and keep your filenames long and human readable and fully declarative and traceable?
But no, probably that handy cheat-sheet wins out, and there goes all the brainspace for internalizing anything else IT-related for the rest of the year. It's a shop that files all day long. Many of these are regulatory documents with permanent legal standing. Dusty documents get dredged up decades later, when the same stress point inevitably flares up again. There is nothing new under the sun in their universe.
Brilliant IT guy: give them a filename limit that doesn't turn their work process upside down, they might all find more time to learn that other shit you so wish they'd lap up.
Have you ever heard the phrase "to seek new opportunities"? What do you think it actually means?
It means the relationship soured, and that both parties are better off heading in their own separate directions. It means that the wife wanted to be a cop, but the husband couldn't handle chewing his white knuckles every time his wife came home from work half an hour late.
Is the wife wrong? Is the husband wrong? How about we all consult the Magic Eight Ball of foregone conclusions?
God gave us a jumbo helping of scarlet letter for a good reason. Shame to let it go to waste.
I think, therefore I am.
I slander, therefore my own fuck ups are not such a big deal after all.
So what you're saying is that the main premise of Wikipedia is false.
It is not a crowd-sourced documentation of knowledge. It is the exact same encyclopaedia, written by a few experts, that Wikipedia was supposed to supplant.
The cognitive style of your remarks demonstrates that you have none of the attributes of the superforecaster as described by Tetlock's book. To begin with—to a good first approximation—Wikipedia resembles no other project in the history of human endeavour.
So let's ponder a moment the long human history with green field idealism.
For example, the Greek invention of democracy (which really didn't last that long), or the French revolution which rapidly devolved into the Reign of Terror, or the American re-invention of democracy, about which the best one can say lately is that it continues to limp along, and it may possibly yet live to see a better day.
Turns out that reforming governance models is hard. Who knew reforming governance could be so complicated (and difficult)?
Any superforecaster worth his or her salt would have constructed a suitable idealism filter concerning Wikipedia right from day one. Big ideals? Fine. Are people involved? Yikes. Low barrier to the unwashed. Double yikes.
Yet somehow you seem to have absorbed the Propaganda of Brave Beginnings (largely invented by journalists to soothe the huddled and surprised masses concerning this Frightening New Thing) exactly in so far as it inflated a convenient strawman toward which your bile could be directed without rubbing two working brain cells together.
Here's a thing. Do you suppose that the top 1300 contributors to the Linux kernel are responsible for less than 75% of the total work volume (by whatever reasonable proxy one chooses to wield)? Linux also features a very long tail of public participation, yet I suspect the top 100 Linux contributors have all been mega prolific.
Furthermore, Linux has the advantage of being 70% objective. If your virtual memory subsystem is shit, there's no feasible way to hide this. The other 30% brought us systemd. How did that go? How has that worked out to champion Linux as a flagship of sober fraternity?
My own suspicion is that about 1% of the Wikipedia content generates 99% of the carping about Wikipedia having become destructively cliquish and exclusionary.
I make 90% of my edits in the 90% of Wikipedia that most people don't give a shit about. Very little of my work generates any notice or opposition whatsoever. I deploy my superpowers of reading and absorbing the editorial guidelines, decoding community standards, and persisting in my efforts despite a few episodes of annoying/frustrating blowback. It's a hard lesson to learn, but in this sphere, it's not right to expect the best argument to prevail in every battle. The right response is to spread out, rub shoulders less aggressively, and let the larger sweep of time take its due course.
What many neophyte contributors fail to recognize is their interlocking-gradient blindness. Newbies tend to rush into one contentious paragraph insisting upon operating within a truth monoculture. That's not how it works. Worst of all, they don't understand the topology of bias. Bias is like zero degrees Kelvin. Matter does not cease to move. There is no intuitive zero. Mainly you're just trying to stamp out electrons that jump three orbitals all at once (bias way up in the x-ray spectrum is not good, and really can be eliminated).
Wikipedia has little to do with truth. It's a condensate of received opinion, where the majority of its value lies in its topic graph (which is why the expertise argument is, and always has been, largely bogus). Larry Page's Page Rank algorithm is/was also a condensate of received opinion (does any recognizable trace remain?) To a large degree, Wikipedia is a condensate of a condensate of a condensate, because Google'
Much the same way my dog catches a ball, and yet we're aren't terrified of our prospective canine overlords.
Please explain how you managed to survive long enough to have the ability to post that remark without being able to think your way out of a wet paper bag.
No, on second thought, don't bother. We all know the answer already. You've become trapped in a shallow, knee-jerk dopamine loop of petty social one-upsmanship, where the key to obtaining your small, regular dopamine hit is to never write any remark beyond Twitter scale (the scale of Twitter as presented to its user base, as opposed to its engineers).
With your head bowed toward your phone, you just wandered out onto an eight-lane autobahn where sharp-tongued assholes such as myself are gathering to debate whether mathematical wunderkind Stephen Hawking is full of shit. And there you are, in the middle of a hostile expressway you barely noticed, armed with a short little dagger made of entirelymissingthepointium.
At present, the intelligence that terrifies humans is uniquely our own, especially once amplified to the next level.
Vonnegut spent the last half of his writing career explicitly advancing the hypothesis that the human brain was already far too big for our own good (his sentiment about this is probably brewing in his earlier works, as well).
Correlation is not causation, but the human cognitive fixation on narrative (aka story), which is largely congruent to explanation, seems to function as some kind of potent social steroid, making the human species qualitatively different than any species that's come before. Turns out, explanation has a shocking range of scale, from milliseconds of flighty dopamine, all the way to a decade of steady serotonin.
It's starts at "face your palm toward the ball at a position where the ball will soon arrive, with your fingers outstretched, and then contract your fingers when the ball arrives", but doesn't end here:
Catching a baseball. American Journal of Physics, 36, 868-870] showed that a catcher may be guided to the landing spot of a fly ball by zeroing out its optical acceleration. Subsequently, various studies have provided evidence for what is now known as the Chapman strategy. However, in those studies the catcher's own acceleration and the visuo-motor delay were ignored.
This raises the question whether the Chapman strategy still provides an accurate description if those factors are taken into account.
To address this question, we implemented the Chapman strategy in a forward dynamical model of the catcher's locomotion in relation to the ball's actual trajectory.
Numerical simulations of the model revealed that catching performance was still successful under a broad range of ball trajectories. Furthermore, the model simulations largely reproduced the real running paths reported by McLeod and Dienes [McLeod, P., & Dienes, Z. (1996).
Do fielders know where to go to catch the ball or only how to get there?
Concern over where we're headed in the near term is far from fear mongering.
Twitter and Facebook have already managed to accelerate our political discourse, until it's a full time job just to keep up.
I didn't completely get this until just this weekend, and I had the Asia trip (pretty please, don't nuke the planet!), stacked on top of the Texas shooting (and the "good man with a gun" fairy spin, who was nevertheless—by my count—about twenty deaths late to the party), stacked on top of the Paradise Papers (a mere 13.4 million documents), stacked on top of the V
The ME (and AMD's analogous PSP) have nothing to do with government, and nothing to do with cryptography (though they make heavy use of it). Clipper was about enforcing a standardized encryption mechanism with a built-in backdoor specifically for law enforcement. Completely different thing.
What makes you so sure this isn't a government-friendly end-run around the failure of the Clipper chip program?
All we're presently missing is a handful of Snowden codenames for the many ways this advantages the NSA in their fight against all the things they fight against (some portion of which involves suppressing evil doers of evil, other portions of which involve being evil doers of evil, probably in the service of maintaining a well-ordered society, by which I mean grease-stripping the social mobility rails occupied by the already established fat cats).
The intelligence community runs on capabilities. Intel's IME is a capability like no other I've seen before. It routes around the power switch. Hot damn.
News of my present complicity in the consumer surveillance industry is greatly exaggerated.
I don't shop at malls until it's my last option.
But that's already second level.
I don't shop until it's my last option.
First, make better use of what I already have, second improvise, third patronise local, independent retail, fourth source the item from one of a handful of primary mail order relationships, fifth head to the appropriate box store, sixth go back to step 1 unless already repeated, seventh grit teeth and head to the shopping mall.
Chances of me being blaise about the Crossover business model because privacy already raped: not terribly high.
The DNC colluded with the Hillary campaign to fix the primary election process so Hillary would win [cnbc.com]. But no Slashdot story on that, because...? Guess it's not news for nerds.
Gee, that was hard.
You do realize that Slashdot is not a general news site, and that when Trump gets covered as president he actually wields a great deal of power over science and technology?
If Trump has been covered with no connection to science or technology, those articles weren't news for nerds, either.
That said, it's hard not to cover one of the most powerful men in the world when he's addicted to 0400 rage tweets. File under: geek, what hast thou wrought (with this new and appalling social media bullshit).
Just last night I read an entire chapter of Rust: The Longest War (2016) devoted to Harry Brearley, one among many to discover stainless steel, but the first who completely refused to shut up about it.
It was obvious to many involved that stainless steel cutlery (and certain engine parts) was the way of the future, but it took decades for most innovations in steel to find widespread commercial adoption, because every new steel at first mainly served to ruin available tooling.
I'm sure there was a slow back and forth between improved tooling, and adjusting the stainless steel to best get along with the improved tooling, but it was always slow work, and usually outside of the five-year investment cycle that made your boss loud and proud of your accomplishments.
That's why it finally took a nutter to not shut up.
Jonathan Waldman has done quite a bit of research and his writing style has an engaging tone, but there's also some kind of weird semantic deficit in his narrative structure that's difficult to diagnose in a single pass.
Be prepared for loosely grouped splotches of colour. This book has high geek appeal, but will irritate actual historians and engineers.
Management has a finite supply of nuance. Telecommuting impacts the nuance budget. Often the end result is blanket policy. Case closed.
But I think there's a second problem here.
Employment contracts rarely stipulate a change in net compensation depending on whether one is permitted to work at home or not. Thus the time investing in unproductive commuting becomes weirdly non-monetary.
I'd be totally happy to share the economic surplus of the commutes I've foregone with my employer 50-50. One hour less in the car, another 30 minutes working at desk. Fair trade.
Until this gets written down in the employment contract, it can't be entered into management spreadsheets, and it remains forever a NAN.
Japan at this time was not just an Asian tiger, but an Asian tiger of terrifying, almost mythical dimension. Yes children, America was once so terrified of Japan, we practically threw our lunch money at their cozy, indoor slippers.
The term "fifth generation" was intended to convey the system as being a leap beyond existing machines.
Computers using vacuum tubes were the first generation; transistors and diodes, the second; integrated circuits, the third; and those using microprocessors, the fourth.
Whereas previous computer generations had focused on increasing the number of logic elements in a single CPU, the fifth generation, it was widely believed, would instead turn to massive numbers of CPUs for added performance.
This was 1982. In my view, the world started to get serious about SMP around 2005 (as SMP rounded the bend from luxury to necessity due to bumping up against the GHz wall). Does anyone else now recall what Japan brought to this party? I certainly don't.
The Lost Decade is a period of economic stagnation in Japan following the Japanese asset price bubble's collapse in late 1991 and early 1992.
Has Japan been heard from since? Oh, right, the Cell chip.
There's just a bit of a difference between a) launching a napkin plan to launch a Sputnik, b) launching a Sputnik, or c) launching a Sputnik and then following through with decades of incremental refinement that no other country can match.
How about we wait for B before beginning to worry about C?
How I miss the good old days, where no one ever interpreted 1% as "crushing it"—unless it was a 1% uptick occurring in under 24 hours. Even by this standard, in any given issue of PC Magazine twenty different Taiwanese upstarts would be outed as crushing it since the last breathless thud.
These days, The 1% is reliably crushing it, but that's a different matter.
It sure did and the Obama administration had hard evidence of Russia targeting the election and did absolutely nothing about it.
You know in those video games where your avatar's life is bleeding out in a rising cloud of numeric bubbles? Credibility works this way, too. Only you have to visualize this yourself. It's a little harder, but may I suggest it's a worthwhile life skill to develop.
Obama also approved a previously undisclosed covert measure that authorized planting cyber weapons in Russia's infrastructure, the digital equivalent of bombs that could be detonated if the United States found itself in an escalating exchange with Moscow. The project, which Obama approved in a covert-action finding, was still in its planning stages when Obama left office. It would be up to President Trump to decide whether to use the capability.
That last sentence certainly does manage to call in question whether Obama did nearly enough, soon enough. (Spoiler alert: he almost certainly didn't, and would now admit this himself.)
The court documents so far show crimes from people affiliated with Trump that mostly pre-date their association with the Trump campaign. That's an absolutely enormous difference from what you are describing, though it still calls into question what caliber of leader would have hired (under a monetary agreement or otherwise) all these conspicuous fuck-ups in the first place.
Whenever I see an "shocking" article about Russia, my first thought is, "Why the shock that countries work for their own interest and against their enemies?"
Just asking: did you snort the same blase powder over the Snowden "revelations".
The shock—and it's usually just a mild one—is to finally see credible evidence marshalled in a public forum that the majority of the population won't immediately discount as a giant nothing burger.
I always startle a bit when a giant nothing burger suddenly undematerializes behind me.
You are of course correct. I think they are using the wrong words "mathematical proof" when the accurate term is "extensive modelling."
If by "extensive" you mean building the simplest possible model that some significant subset of the chattering class is willing to regard as credible for all of the five minutes it takes to seagull post and flit onto the next topic.
Excellent work. Now the reader is equipped with a yellow flag that activates (one hopes) on next encounter with a similarly thumping article (subtype: da da da DAH!) beating the vapid drum that "it's the telomere, stupid!"
Now well-equipped reader thinks, I once read a MOASH (mother of all stupid headlines) to the effect that merely fixing the telomeres lurks below the snake oil horizon.
This is what hapless mayfly dredges out of his or her damp, woven basket promulgated as "proof".
Appalling.
Even the huddled yeast on this proof basket fail to thrive.
Slashdot Mirror
I have kept one eye on IQ research over several decades, and this is not what anyone seriously involved actually thinks.
g factor (psychometrics)
Hmmm. The g is not strong in this editor: either that last sentence should read "unrealistically reified view" or it should read "unrealistic, reified view". Furthermore, that last bit is not actually a criticism of g, it's a criticism of the entire field of applied psychometrics, up to and including Duckworth and Kahneman. People are extraordinarily complex. You put something extraordinarily complex into an extraordinarily complex environment, and unpredictable things happen, regardless of whether your metric is perfectly sound when isolated in simpler, more controlled environments.
The actual argument here is whether any justifiable isolate of human potential (meaning: some kind of number on a solid research footing) solves more problems than it creates when deployed in a messy, real world by messy, real people.
This problem is not any different with the big five personality traits.
OCEAN probably provides a good starting point from which to explore where a person can best pursue their future potential and deliver present value, modulo some specific organizational context. It doesn't provide a good basis for lumping people into buckets.
Nothing we've ever discovered provides a good basis for lumping people into buckets, not even the man/woman buckets that were already old and tired by the time of Christ's first, brief reconnaissance.
Memo from Sally Ride to Genghis Kahn: Suck. My. Dick.
We've learned subsequently that it was information originating from Sally Ride that was "leaked" to a perceptive Feynman (while talking small-engine shop, in somebody's actual garage) that lead to Feynman getting enough of a jump on the technical investigation to thence succeed in decoding the political smoke screen, just in the nick of time to drum up huge waves.
You had better believe that a valid IQ test has never been invented that Feynman wouldn't have aced. So you purport to believe his ability to ace any manner of test whatsoever concerning fluid intelligence had no real connection to his ability to ace life? (As physicist, teacher, author, and reluctant politician.)
Marge von Fargo: I'm not so sure I agree 100% with your police work there, Lou.
I place about 16 holds a month at the local library, for myself and my wife, of which about four are usually DVDs (representing the entirely of our household TV consumption). Perhaps half of the books are common interest, and the other half divides evenly between my interests and my wife's interests.
How much of a book I actually read depends on the book. The least substantial items get a quick, thirty minute once-over. Sometime I just want to assess the strength of the author, which does not require reading every damn page. For many of the book I'll read half the chapters in full, and glance over the other half. A couple of books a months I devour sequentially.
Perhaps one book a month I'd read out loud to my wife at bedtime. Perhaps such a book gets ten hours of oratorial attention. It's surprising what books work for reading out loud and what books don't. It's also surprising how much differently you end up understanding the author by the end of the process.
We're working through Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery (2014) by Henry Marsh as our bedtime material right now. At one point last night, I needed to read a phrase which involved several words in quick succession in the mold of "haemangioblastoma", with the middle word hyphenated at the end of a line. I just kill myself trying to read at an even pace no matter what confronts me. I could feel my panic rising a full line in advance. But for that confounded hyphen, combined with the distracting blue blood "ae", I might have made it. Blue blood is my personal kryptonite.
Marsh garden-pathed me a few times with awkward placement of small words like "is", but otherwise his style is a dream for reading aloud. There's almost always something intense going on, he frequently comments on it from an extremely personal place (not always flattering), but never dawdles over his confessions.
Pinker is regarded as a great stylist, and his words do flow more smoothly than most science authors, but I always find I need to suck in air by the barrel to get through his initial strawman construction. Then he'll finally get around to thoroughly deflating his strawman, often with fine insight. Unfortunately, the giant air suck finally disqualified him for reading out loud. Pinker doesn't seem to understand that the unwashed includes some mighty shrewd cookies, whose native instincts would put many academics to shame, if there was/were any possibility of a fair fight between man at large and organized highbrow.
Reading a book out loud is roughly equivalent to blitzing through a book entirely by eye three times over in terms of the intensity of impression you're left with, though you'll be left with quite different things.
Beyond books, I average about two hours a day of general reading online. All the content at edge.org, about half the items at aldaily.com, a quarter of the transcripts at TED (few of the actual videos are worth one's time, any more), the majority of American political coverage from The Guardian, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Politico, and Vox, sometimes with excursions into The Daily Beast or Doubleclickbait (er, Business Insider). If once in a while something leaks over the WSJ's paywall, I read that, too.
I also deliberately seek out viewpoints from people like David Frum, George Will, Michael Gerson, and Michael Lind. I frequently listen to an EconTalk episode while cooking dinner, so I'm also up to my eyeballs in Classical Liberalism (with a mild, yet increasingly irritating neoliberal slant—if only because Russ is becoming progressively worse at preventing his slant from walking him back from the hard-nosed questions). To his credit, Russ is a voracious reader. He really does bend himself over every guest's book (he might employ a never-mentioned staffer who pre-winnows, but I wouldn't put money on this proposition). Has Coulter ever endorsed a book that wasn't edited by Winston Wilhelm Wordsmith II? Just asking. Th
Do Chromebooks use the off switch, like most people do to turn their PC "off", or do Chromebooks actually unplug ME from the wall socket?
I have more confidence in the second method.
If it's anything like AI, every time you learn something, the bar is instantly raised. Bar inflation is underappreciated by the pocket protector set. Thus perhaps the proper diagnosis is that the end user is investing enormous amounts of effort into stopping the bar from moving. Because there's no end in sight to how much IT support would prefer to offload onto a better-educated user base.
Supposing they did choose to learn—surprise!—all this end user sunk cost is thrown overboard in the next software generation, because ribbon GUIs are a thing now, or touch desktops, or some other dubious, branding brainfuck.
Allow me to play devil's advocate for a second more.
When users will willingly work harder: what they are being asked to learn is a reasonable work process (as perceived by someone who doesn't love IT for its own sake), the learning process is finite (and knowable in advance), and what you've learned stays valid across branding fashion cycles.
My wife works in a (large) government Windows shop. They've been having five person meetings week after week over file naming conventions concerning a large database of decision documents. This only started because some IT support guy told them their file names are too long (what he means is that their pathnames are too long; they have some fraction of 260 characters because of how their volumes are mounted deep under the hood, which has never been explained to anyone in her shop, even though it sometimes seems to change, which immediately causes all kinds of heartache).
I'm a ZFS user. While the filename itself is limited to 255 characters, the path names can be a lot longer. In my wife's IT environment, maybe I'd quickly give up on learning, too. The brokenness file would quickly overwhelm everything else.
Proposal currently circulating in my wife's office: everyone gets a handy cheat sheet for how to encode shorter filenames from short, cryptic designators. And, also, the idea that you no longer need to designate the other party, because after all, you can tell that from the folder name (until you email the document to someone and it's now outside of the filing system context).
I suggested, you know, maybe flatten your folder hierarchy and keep your filenames long and human readable and fully declarative and traceable?
But no, probably that handy cheat-sheet wins out, and there goes all the brainspace for internalizing anything else IT-related for the rest of the year. It's a shop that files all day long. Many of these are regulatory documents with permanent legal standing. Dusty documents get dredged up decades later, when the same stress point inevitably flares up again. There is nothing new under the sun in their universe.
Brilliant IT guy: give them a filename limit that doesn't turn their work process upside down, they might all find more time to learn that other shit you so wish they'd lap up.
It means the relationship soured, and that both parties are better off heading in their own separate directions. It means that the wife wanted to be a cop, but the husband couldn't handle chewing his white knuckles every time his wife came home from work half an hour late.
Is the wife wrong? Is the husband wrong? How about we all consult the Magic Eight Ball of foregone conclusions?
God gave us a jumbo helping of scarlet letter for a good reason. Shame to let it go to waste.
I think, therefore I am.
I slander, therefore my own fuck ups are not such a big deal after all.
And the winner is, brain network #2.
The cognitive style of your remarks demonstrates that you have none of the attributes of the superforecaster as described by Tetlock's book. To begin with—to a good first approximation—Wikipedia resembles no other project in the history of human endeavour.
So let's ponder a moment the long human history with green field idealism.
For example, the Greek invention of democracy (which really didn't last that long), or the French revolution which rapidly devolved into the Reign of Terror, or the American re-invention of democracy, about which the best one can say lately is that it continues to limp along, and it may possibly yet live to see a better day.
Turns out that reforming governance models is hard. Who knew reforming governance could be so complicated (and difficult)?
Any superforecaster worth his or her salt would have constructed a suitable idealism filter concerning Wikipedia right from day one. Big ideals? Fine. Are people involved? Yikes. Low barrier to the unwashed. Double yikes.
Yet somehow you seem to have absorbed the Propaganda of Brave Beginnings (largely invented by journalists to soothe the huddled and surprised masses concerning this Frightening New Thing) exactly in so far as it inflated a convenient strawman toward which your bile could be directed without rubbing two working brain cells together.
Here's a thing. Do you suppose that the top 1300 contributors to the Linux kernel are responsible for less than 75% of the total work volume (by whatever reasonable proxy one chooses to wield)? Linux also features a very long tail of public participation, yet I suspect the top 100 Linux contributors have all been mega prolific.
Furthermore, Linux has the advantage of being 70% objective. If your virtual memory subsystem is shit, there's no feasible way to hide this. The other 30% brought us systemd. How did that go? How has that worked out to champion Linux as a flagship of sober fraternity?
My own suspicion is that about 1% of the Wikipedia content generates 99% of the carping about Wikipedia having become destructively cliquish and exclusionary.
I make 90% of my edits in the 90% of Wikipedia that most people don't give a shit about. Very little of my work generates any notice or opposition whatsoever. I deploy my superpowers of reading and absorbing the editorial guidelines, decoding community standards, and persisting in my efforts despite a few episodes of annoying/frustrating blowback. It's a hard lesson to learn, but in this sphere, it's not right to expect the best argument to prevail in every battle. The right response is to spread out, rub shoulders less aggressively, and let the larger sweep of time take its due course.
What many neophyte contributors fail to recognize is their interlocking-gradient blindness. Newbies tend to rush into one contentious paragraph insisting upon operating within a truth monoculture. That's not how it works. Worst of all, they don't understand the topology of bias. Bias is like zero degrees Kelvin. Matter does not cease to move. There is no intuitive zero. Mainly you're just trying to stamp out electrons that jump three orbitals all at once (bias way up in the x-ray spectrum is not good, and really can be eliminated).
Wikipedia has little to do with truth. It's a condensate of received opinion, where the majority of its value lies in its topic graph (which is why the expertise argument is, and always has been, largely bogus). Larry Page's Page Rank algorithm is/was also a condensate of received opinion (does any recognizable trace remain?) To a large degree, Wikipedia is a condensate of a condensate of a condensate, because Google'
Main?
What a moron.
Try "loud".
Sheesh.
Slash drop: when you slit your wrists from the incessant Chinese water-drop torture.
Apparently, I don't even give enough of a shit about this subject to stick around long enough to figure what 'locked away' actually means.
Much the same way my dog catches a ball, and yet we're aren't terrified of our prospective canine overlords.
Please explain how you managed to survive long enough to have the ability to post that remark without being able to think your way out of a wet paper bag.
No, on second thought, don't bother. We all know the answer already. You've become trapped in a shallow, knee-jerk dopamine loop of petty social one-upsmanship, where the key to obtaining your small, regular dopamine hit is to never write any remark beyond Twitter scale (the scale of Twitter as presented to its user base, as opposed to its engineers).
With your head bowed toward your phone, you just wandered out onto an eight-lane autobahn where sharp-tongued assholes such as myself are gathering to debate whether mathematical wunderkind Stephen Hawking is full of shit. And there you are, in the middle of a hostile expressway you barely noticed, armed with a short little dagger made of entirelymissingthepointium.
At present, the intelligence that terrifies humans is uniquely our own, especially once amplified to the next level.
Vonnegut spent the last half of his writing career explicitly advancing the hypothesis that the human brain was already far too big for our own good (his sentiment about this is probably brewing in his earlier works, as well).
Correlation is not causation, but the human cognitive fixation on narrative (aka story), which is largely congruent to explanation, seems to function as some kind of potent social steroid, making the human species qualitatively different than any species that's come before. Turns out, explanation has a shocking range of scale, from milliseconds of flighty dopamine, all the way to a decade of steady serotonin.
It's starts at "face your palm toward the ball at a position where the ball will soon arrive, with your fingers outstretched, and then contract your fingers when the ball arrives", but doesn't end here:
Catching fly balls: a simulation study of the Chapman strategy
Paradoxical pop-ups: Why are they difficult to catch?
For extra credit, explain explanation.
Concern over where we're headed in the near term is far from fear mongering.
Twitter and Facebook have already managed to accelerate our political discourse, until it's a full time job just to keep up.
I didn't completely get this until just this weekend, and I had the Asia trip (pretty please, don't nuke the planet!), stacked on top of the Texas shooting (and the "good man with a gun" fairy spin, who was nevertheless—by my count—about twenty deaths late to the party), stacked on top of the Paradise Papers (a mere 13.4 million documents), stacked on top of the V
What makes you so sure this isn't a government-friendly end-run around the failure of the Clipper chip program?
All we're presently missing is a handful of Snowden codenames for the many ways this advantages the NSA in their fight against all the things they fight against (some portion of which involves suppressing evil doers of evil, other portions of which involve being evil doers of evil, probably in the service of maintaining a well-ordered society, by which I mean grease-stripping the social mobility rails occupied by the already established fat cats).
The intelligence community runs on capabilities. Intel's IME is a capability like no other I've seen before. It routes around the power switch. Hot damn.
News of my present complicity in the consumer surveillance industry is greatly exaggerated.
I don't shop at malls until it's my last option.
But that's already second level.
I don't shop until it's my last option.
First, make better use of what I already have, second improvise, third patronise local, independent retail, fourth source the item from one of a handful of primary mail order relationships, fifth head to the appropriate box store, sixth go back to step 1 unless already repeated, seventh grit teeth and head to the shopping mall.
Chances of me being blaise about the Crossover business model because privacy already raped: not terribly high.
Gee, that was hard.
You do realize that Slashdot is not a general news site, and that when Trump gets covered as president he actually wields a great deal of power over science and technology?
If Trump has been covered with no connection to science or technology, those articles weren't news for nerds, either.
That said, it's hard not to cover one of the most powerful men in the world when he's addicted to 0400 rage tweets. File under: geek, what hast thou wrought (with this new and appalling social media bullshit).
Why does the word "save" so often translate into delivering less with less?
Which lies more in the "skimp" territory, if we're being semantic.
This is only tangentially related, but it needs to be reposted at least once a year.
BlackHat USA 2011: SSL And The Future Of Authenticity — Moxie Marlinspike
Hilarious Comodo story begins around 5 m mark.
Slide at 10:48 has only become funnier in the meantime.
I'm not ready yet to permanently divide the world into billionaires and hobbyists, though I can almost see this day coming in my lifetime.
Just last night I read an entire chapter of Rust: The Longest War (2016) devoted to Harry Brearley, one among many to discover stainless steel, but the first who completely refused to shut up about it.
It was obvious to many involved that stainless steel cutlery (and certain engine parts) was the way of the future, but it took decades for most innovations in steel to find widespread commercial adoption, because every new steel at first mainly served to ruin available tooling.
I'm sure there was a slow back and forth between improved tooling, and adjusting the stainless steel to best get along with the improved tooling, but it was always slow work, and usually outside of the five-year investment cycle that made your boss loud and proud of your accomplishments.
That's why it finally took a nutter to not shut up.
Jonathan Waldman has done quite a bit of research and his writing style has an engaging tone, but there's also some kind of weird semantic deficit in his narrative structure that's difficult to diagnose in a single pass.
Be prepared for loosely grouped splotches of colour. This book has high geek appeal, but will irritate actual historians and engineers.
That was a constructive post. +1.
Management has a finite supply of nuance. Telecommuting impacts the nuance budget. Often the end result is blanket policy. Case closed.
But I think there's a second problem here.
Employment contracts rarely stipulate a change in net compensation depending on whether one is permitted to work at home or not. Thus the time investing in unproductive commuting becomes weirdly non-monetary.
I'd be totally happy to share the economic surplus of the commutes I've foregone with my employer 50-50. One hour less in the car, another 30 minutes working at desk. Fair trade.
Until this gets written down in the employment contract, it can't be entered into management spreadsheets, and it remains forever a NAN.
Schmidt is old enough, as I am, to remember the Japanese fifth generation computer initiative.
Japan at this time was not just an Asian tiger, but an Asian tiger of terrifying, almost mythical dimension. Yes children, America was once so terrified of Japan, we practically threw our lunch money at their cozy, indoor slippers.
This was 1982. In my view, the world started to get serious about SMP around 2005 (as SMP rounded the bend from luxury to necessity due to bumping up against the GHz wall). Does anyone else now recall what Japan brought to this party? I certainly don't.
Lost Decade (Japan)
Has Japan been heard from since? Oh, right, the Cell chip.
There's just a bit of a difference between a) launching a napkin plan to launch a Sputnik, b) launching a Sputnik, or c) launching a Sputnik and then following through with decades of incremental refinement that no other country can match.
How about we wait for B before beginning to worry about C?
How I miss the good old days, where no one ever interpreted 1% as "crushing it"—unless it was a 1% uptick occurring in under 24 hours. Even by this standard, in any given issue of PC Magazine twenty different Taiwanese upstarts would be outed as crushing it since the last breathless thud.
These days, The 1% is reliably crushing it, but that's a different matter.
I'm a little slow sometimes.
If you had written your post that way, instead of "absolutely nothing", much of your credibility would still be intact.
I know, I know, "absolutely nothing" and "sweet fuck all" are practically cohabiting in the same pouch on your potion belt.
Yet the difference is crucial.
You know in those video games where your avatar's life is bleeding out in a rising cloud of numeric bubbles? Credibility works this way, too. Only you have to visualize this yourself. It's a little harder, but may I suggest it's a worthwhile life skill to develop.
Obama's secret struggle to punish Russia for Putin's election assault — The Washington Post, 23 June 2017
That last sentence certainly does manage to call in question whether Obama did nearly enough, soon enough. (Spoiler alert: he almost certainly didn't, and would now admit this himself.)
The Disturbing Timeline of George Papadopoulos' Russian Contacts On Behalf of Trump Campaign
Just asking: did you snort the same blase powder over the Snowden "revelations".
The shock—and it's usually just a mild one—is to finally see credible evidence marshalled in a public forum that the majority of the population won't immediately discount as a giant nothing burger.
I always startle a bit when a giant nothing burger suddenly undematerializes behind me.
You expect it, but you also don't.
Rapture #1: All the mobile users of the internet are snatched up by God.
Does anyone other than click-steam entrepreneurs even notice their absence?
Rapture #2: All the desktop and workstation users of the internet are snatched up by an advanced alien civilization.
The internet ceases to function in 3, 2, 1 ... 404.
Help desks everywhere begin to return 410 Gone.
#ShitShitShit commences trending on Twitter.
If by "extensive" you mean building the simplest possible model that some significant subset of the chattering class is willing to regard as credible for all of the five minutes it takes to seagull post and flit onto the next topic.
Excellent work. Now the reader is equipped with a yellow flag that activates (one hopes) on next encounter with a similarly thumping article (subtype: da da da DAH!) beating the vapid drum that "it's the telomere, stupid!"
Now well-equipped reader thinks, I once read a MOASH (mother of all stupid headlines) to the effect that merely fixing the telomeres lurks below the snake oil horizon.
This is what hapless mayfly dredges out of his or her damp, woven basket promulgated as "proof".
Appalling.
Even the huddled yeast on this proof basket fail to thrive.