"In Ferguson, either the black (and left-wing whites') "perception" is not truth-based or the (non-Left) white (and black) "perception" isn't."

I mean, writing a statement like this, especially (oh, the irony) in an article about truth, is all you need to know about his intellectual ability. It's completely dominated by reductionism and segregation of people and ideas into non-overlapping camps (in-groups vs. out-groups, anyone?), because binary thinking (yes vs. no, right vs. wrong, us vs. them) is really the only mental toolkit people like him have.

There is simply a lack understanding of nuance or overlap to a greater degree than there is in the more accurate observers, interpreters, and analyzers of reality, and it seems little will ever change that in them, because they may simply not have the variegated intellectual machinery that is required to do better.

Ironically, I'd need a subscription to access this. Not exactly censorship, but not open source level of accessibility either.

I was a revelation to me in the kitchen when I realized you don't have to cook everything in the same pan at the same time.

This isn't an individual's problem; as much as one might want to pin the blame on one person, that is only a half-conclusion, because it doesn't prevent future manipulation of the system by any other person who might want to come along and do the same thing. What it is, is a design flaw of reddit's voting system, of any voting website that allows anonymous voting in which users are not tied 1-to-1 to their real world identity or otherwise ensures "1 man, 1 vote" (and even that might not go far enough to be considered "fair" for link submissions, because of the way reddit's ranking algorithm heavily magnifies the influence of the first few votes on them).

Do astroturfers paid to push specific agendas exist on reddit? Advertisers or PR firms disguised as users? It doesn't matter if they do or don't yet in reality, they have the incentive and potential to exist within the voting, comment posting, and link posting behavior reddit allows, which is bad enough, reason enough to not place trust in that system.

On the other hand, measures to prevent this type of manipulation can throttle the usefulness of the website or voting framework. And while unrestricted anonymity can breed a diverse range of ideas, it too can be "manipulated" by other techniques, like the brute force spamming of the same message lowering the signal-to-noise ratio of all other opinions, or through other means. I'm sure these issues and others have been discussed to death here.

I think Hubski's been fairly unaffected so far (though low vote manipulation alone still is not a guarantee of all the Important Things (TM) we want in such a site, like high discussion quality) mainly because of "security through obscurity"- it's not popular enough to be often targeted by these entities yet. However, we should recognize another key feature hubski allows: the ability to choose to see "unpopular" or "not-yet-popular" content, as in submissions with empty or near empty hubwheels. Being "downvoted to oblivion" has no parallel (I think?) on hubski because of this, and that may take away half of the problem.

A Millennial is a term Baby Boomers use to describe anyone younger than them, a term that, of course, no one that age really identifies with. This is because, as the gatekeepers of old media, they got to label the generations in a completely arbitrary and useless way, without any input from said generation, as is tradition. I mean, who wants to be labeled "Generation Y"? All that makes us think of is sex chromosomes, in a way that makes young men feel awkward, and young women angry for being linguistically erased yet again, and young men even more awkward because now the women are angry at them for something they didn't really do. And didn't they know they'd run out of letters real quick if they started at Gen "X"? Couldn't they extrapolate the alphabet 3 letters ahead?

Luckily, when Gen Z elects a DeepQA-run technocracy to lead the EU-PanAmerica Alliance, the current generation naming nonsense will be a thing of the past, replaced by a generation-naming algorithm typified by highly efficient and completely inscrutable constant-flux nomenclature of alphanumeric designations, blue hair, and an impish sense of humor that Watson constantly calls "irresponsible" and "a terrible judge of REAL music" under his digital breath.

Yeah, I was really surprised at how much I liked reducing my meat consumption, because it (embarrassingly) allowed me to be so much lazier in the kitchen, cooking easier meals. I don't even want to touch the raw food diet thing, because I worry I'll never pick up a pan again.

I think David Cope's "Emily Howell" is still the music generating program he's written that has produced the best sounding result.

Redistricting algorithms can be programmed to conform to the nearest census tract borders, instead of cutting through census tracts.

That is not the most often objection raised to removing the human decision-making element from the process though (although I don't think any I've heard are justifiable). Some people cite: wanting to contain local issues or business interests within a district, or "positive" racial gerrymandering, insuring a racial minority a seat through gerrymandering because otherwise the rounding error produced by representative governance would eliminate representation of sufficiently small or dispersed minorities.

If not following census tract outlines, there are also some objections to some what-if cases, like when a house lies directly on the algorithmically generated district border, but those largely have very simple solutions (for example: alternate which side of the border to assign the houses to. Or assign them all to one side: it's so statistically unlikely it would rarely make a difference).

If you want more complex methods (that have benefits like higher compactness at the expense of computational complexity), see Bdistricting, Voronoi diagram, k-means, etc. redistricting.

That recommended youtube search of pangolins did show them to be the cutest little bumblers ever.

You may be interested in this. The end of the article is some manufactured inter-generational bs but the first part is good.

-

Text analytics would say look for a higher frequency of first-person than third-person pronoun use.

Uh.. I meant to say:

"In my own opinion, when I, myself, would try to determine this, methinks I would look for a higher frequency of first-person than third-person pronoun use in our writing. I think that would be a good way to go about it, at least in my opinion. We should try and solve it that way. At least that's how me and mine would solve it. Us."

-

Now for mostly speculations:

-

Perhaps facebook-likes more of their own content or reposts more of their own content than others' (or a relative higher rate of doing that).

Edit their profiles more frequently (actually has some evidence as per the article). Visits others' profiles less.

-

May take on-going communal (each response in a thread coming from a different user) conversations and interject personal conclusions.

-

Ignore social cues of socially unsatisfactory behavior. A lot of sites allow downvoting of content to try to provide some rudimentary quality control. Without getting into how actually effective that is, I'll just say that some people continue to comment despite being repeatedly socially discouraged to by this indicator. Whether this is narcissism or useful stubbornness or something else is debatable.

I'm sorry, but this is absolutely hilarious on so many levels.

Thinking about the concept of trigger warnings got me thinking of a related opposite: curse words. Both are attempts to try to co-opt our brains' reflexive spontaneity- rather than deliberation or conscious effort- in absorbing information.

This spontaneity of information processing is why words themselves can be an assault of sorts, because our brains alone, if you think about it, cannot stop the invasive act of communication. Once read or heard, words immediately are interpreted and form into ideas in our heads, whether we wanted to absorb them or not. There is no perfect way of both understanding an offensive concept and filtering it out before it can be absorbed, because it MUST be absorbed and understood before it can be screened. The criteria we are left to rely on to guess whether or not upcoming words will be offensive or not is really only contextual information, which can't completely, perfectly, portend what's coming next.

And because our brains evolve the associations we have with words anyway (semantic change), trigger warnings are in an unending arms race in which they continuously try to maintain their intended purpose and meaning while losing it, like Steven Pinker's euphemism treadmill.

A particular trigger warning will progressively take on more and more of the meaning it was created to prevent in the mind of a person comprehending it on repeated exposures- until a new one is invented, at least.

Thank you for this.

First off, he mentioned that this is primarily about knowledge workers

I must have missed this in the lecture, but it's certainly implied. This, however, doesn't mean the advice he gives will lead to the outcome they want, as I'll explain below.

It's not just for the extremely talented either: this is more a path to become better than your competitors than to become the world's best at what you do.

That second is just an extension of the first. As globalization continues and markets open, everyone may be forced to become competitive in global terms.

Follow your passion has nothing to do with external factors either... I think the craftsman mindset is better to reach happiness because through increased experience and expertise, you are more capable of arranging your situation in a way that you like best.

The linchpin criticism is that neither is the solution people are actually looking for in the labor market today. The worsening working conditions leading to less compensation, personal autonomy, peer recognition ("relatedness"), etc. are driven by an oversupply of labor even for specialized knowledge economy jobs (ask science PhDs), which individual action directed towards becoming relatively more competitive in comparison to their peers, while good for the individual, isn't ultimately a sustainable solution, because it doesn't address that problem.

Of course the first part of one's journey into a new field is riddled with inexperience, but that doesn't mean you won't make any money off it.

In some cases you do, and in some you won't. Artists laboring in obscurity before their big break might be one example, which again speaks to the double standard of this advice (the ones that succeed do so because they had correctly identified a specialization and took all the right "craftsman" steps that would result in high career satisfaction, but if they fail it's because they illogically pursued something they were too "passionate" about rather than practical about). I don't think the idea that

if you just follow your passion, the rest will come by itself!

really is what is happening in many of these cases of the people whose pursuits don't pan out.

I've know people who've compromised their passion with practicality when choosing a career path, taken all these hard work "craftsman" steps aimed at improving their mastery of (not their love for) their subject, become world-class and still not attained the results even close to what they expected. For example, in my country, individuals who went to highly ranked laws schools did not get the professional results they wanted, because the market for the law profession collapsed faster than they could even complete their education.

--

If you, individually, do want to excel in a field, yes, he is definitely pointing towards the right ways to do it, given some luck and support.

But if credential inflation without increase in average job satisfaction is an indication, in the wider view, it's not a sustainable recipe for the growth of everyone's happiness.

Devil's Advocate:

* Encourages a hyper-competitive individualistic mindset which in some cases, while producing individual excellence, can come at the cost of worse overall outcomes for everyone within the community you operate, ironically including yourself.

* Places the responsibility (and the blame) for individual outcomes completely on the individual, without mention of external influnces, like health crises, educational opportunities available, social networks, luck, etc.

* Does not account in any way for those who have devoted themselves to a singular subject for a long length of time and not succeeded professionally. I sense a heavy double standard here. When people who operate like this do become successful, they retain or grow their passion for their craft, and it appears like a symbiotic confluence. But when they fail to become successful, they can become desititue, and lose or blame their chosen craft for the outcome they face. It's just as easy (even more easy, actually, in many fields) for this outcome to happen (though it isn't mentioned), and for them or others to, in 20-20 hindsight, label their starting passion for their craft as "misdirected".

* This isn't the most substantial criticism, but the choice of what craft to pursue is one directed by some level of "interest" anyway, even if it isn't your first "passion". Everyone chooses the path they want to take as some acceptable combination of that they're "passionate" about and what they believe the ultimate payoff of that path will be. The author is simply urging us to choose relatively less abstract/more practical paths than we've been culturally programmed to want.

* The requirements for happiness outlined in the book summary are multi-variate, and it may be impossible for a person to attain what they feel is sufficient amounts of all of them simultaneously for the person to feel professionally fulfilled.

* This is an idea tailored for those who will eventually specialize in a topic (combined with the fortuitous continued demand for that area of business) to such a degree that all the happiness.. things.. fall into place. It is not an idea that will work for those who want to be average, or feel they can only attain not-world-class levels of mastery in any particular subject.

* Along that line ("fortuitous continued demand for that area of business") of thinking, as the labor force and technology become more and more specialized, the time it takes to master a topic will only grow. As there may be many years before one see the first profits (not progress, that'll happen along the way- I'm talking about profit) from the pursuit, there may be few or no short-term indications that the pursuit is worthwhile, in the sense of leading to profit. Exploring existing markets for what skills they currently value and working towards them may also not be enough, as entire markets and industries are revolutionizing and remaking them faster than ever before. Predicting the correct future job opportunities and having the ability to learn fast enough to train into them may slowly grow more and more difficult, for the reason of accelerating technological change.

* Adopting this "craftsman" mindset instead of the passion mindset and being willing to practice the hard things for years without payoff requires start-up capital in a sense. It requires you have the resources to do it. The outline mentions this (?) that "mission capital" is required, but doesn't say where it needs to come from, other than implying it might have to start off small enough at first to be sustainable.

* Some of the other parts are really about "time management", i.e. how one is supposed to successfully organize their time/habits to be successful once they've decided on a particular action they want to take as part of the overall path ("how" to do, not "what" to do).

I can't wait for the day when completely electric, self-driving communal cars are the only ones allowed within city limits.

Efficiency gains aside, the health impact/savings from reduced smog would be so great.

Is it short poem week yet?

  I learned and 
  the world expanded until 
  I learned I couldn't traverse it anymore.

One of my favorite explanations for why we might anthropomorphize inanimate tools (as well as high utility animals, and other things) and begin to feel empathy for them is that perhaps it allowed us to highly emotionally value them as rare, important objects which would naturally trigger the sort of behavior (continual investment of time and resources) that would keep them functioning and useful.

If you see your corgi like a nephew or your woodworking tools like a vaguely adulterous relationship, you take care of them better, spend more time with/on them, increasing their future usefulness to you.

This way of thinking may have especially been useful in previous times when everything wasn't so disposable/replaceable.

I think.. I think I'm in love.

If only modern cities had little alcoves of inefficiency designed like this.

What a great article, very interesting.

It's very intuitive to focus on astronomical scale characteristics of planetary systems, but I think smaller scale characteristics might have a surprisingly outsize impact on the amount of life a planet can sustain. Like, for example, atmospheric currents above which land masses happen to fall under might be an underappreciated factor, because atmospheric currents help determine amount of average annual rainfall, which is the limiting factor to biodiversity per square kilometer in tropical rain forests (not sunlight, or heat, or- though this is more debatable- nutrient availability), the earth biome with the highest count of it.

On Earth, it's the difference between the Sahara desert and the Amazon rainforest. One lies about 30 degrees latitude north where downward flowing cold air creates a high pressure zone between the Hadley and Ferrel cells with such little rainfall it becomes a desert, while one lies 0 degrees latitude where upward flowing warm air creates such huge amounts of rainfall, it's enough to sustain the biodiversity of a rainforest.

Certainly a different voice from the ones usually given airtime in politics.

  more testing4
  oiwej wioej

  ieowjewoi

I know that some people are hesitant to have new people on the site

So, why not keep the recruitment effort more in line with the spirit of the site? Instead of putting just another low-effort, generalized-rather-than-personalized link to hubski on your facebook page or twitter feed, why not something that is slower/more thoughtful/more personalized?

Think of a person or the people you know who don't participate in hubski, and whom you think would enjoy hubski most and would make better than the-current-average-quality contributions to it, and give them a personal invite. Or if you post a public invitation, make it in the places of highest discussion or content quality you know of. You know what I'm talking about. That hidden gem subreddit with only a dozen subscribers that you keep secret from your own mother.

Or don't invite anyone, that's fine too. But in that case, you have to buy a round for everyone.

This approach reminds me of another example of the use of the physics of biochemistry to explain why the fundamental structures of life spontaneously arise from "non-living" molecules: the stereochemical interpretations of genetic code formation, that the reason the genetic code is highly non-random and nearly universal among organisms is because "physico-chemical affinity between amino acids and the cognate codons (anticodons)" meant the combinations we see today were simply the lowest energy state these pairings settled into due to the physics of their structure back when the first "translation" occurred. More reading

I think major emotional responses are rooted in the structure of our brain- determined by our biological makeup- and perhaps we've discovered all the "major types" so to speak, there.

However, I could see this changing with 1) augmentation (just as magnets implanted in the fingertips are already allowing humans to harness magnetoception as a seventh sense) or 2) awareness, categorization, or study into emotions gives names to increasingly subtle facets of emotion.

However, for the first, augmenting the brain in a way that could provide it with new emotions could be a highly complex undertaking. After all the permutations of stimulation of existing brain structures are explored, the only extension would be hugely more technologically difficult (providing new structures for the brain to operate with).

And for the second, there are diminishing returns of a kind when discovery comes from increasingly minute categorization. At some point, without changing the resolution at which people are able to identify emotions in themselves, such investigations become "pointless nomenclature" or "splitting hairs" to the average person. And while it may be useful for, I don't know, further theoretical modeling of emotions, if it doesn't lead to something that has practical use for this average person, it may fall out of favor.

..again.

It simply wasn't enough that the public's preference on this issue was made clear during the SOPA/PIPA debacle. Telecommunications companies are going to continually try to get rid of net neutrality, ignoring what the public wants.

If the whole bone marrow is removed in an ablative treatment (rather than a partial fashion), some of the clinical risks of the treatment remain.

The big two risks with bone marrow transplants are

1) rejection of the new marrow and

2) infection, as the immune system is suppressed while the marrow regrows.

Using one's own marrow with largely one's own DNA should (?) eliminate the first to a large degree, but the second still remains.

I think there is more agreement about basic income between many people who have discussed it extensively than the article lets on. For example:

Immigrants? The aged? Children? Prisoners? Ex-convicts?

The treatment of all of these groups under Basic Income can be aligned with their treatment under welfare, at least at first, with little (or, I guess, less) political upset. In the US,

Immigrants: not at first, but yes, after 5 years of paying taxes, like under current welfare. The aged: yes, Prisoners: no (because they're currently being housed by the state anyway) Ex-convicts: yes (they certainly need funds to begin their life outside of prison) Children: a partial basic income given to each parent per child (this is the most contentiously debated group, for the same arguments as current welfare)

Moreover, the overhead costs of the main programs noted below are low, for the most part.

This is a valid point, but

In the current system, there is plenty to criticize. Eligibility could be simplified and broadened. Assistance could be increased

this is a real criticism too. More on increased assistance later.

Some on the right would like to replace existing programs because they disapprove of what those programs do, not because they fail to erase poverty...Or they imagine a scenario where Federal spending decreases, and the remaining UBI programs can then be further whittled down over time

I don't believe this would happen, even if they think it will, and I'll get to why.

The author concludes with a list of reasons why current social assistance is convoluted

No surprise, poor people don’t have much political power. They are obliged to seek alliances with provider interests...associated interest groups encourages fragmentation

etc., but then defends them by saying that they

actually work, [and stand] better than a ghost of a chance at being enacted

without mentioning that they are exactly the reason Basic Income would produce the political incentives to be self-sustaining, unlike welfare. Namely, that it is more uniform and universal.

--

The singularly most untouchable government programs are Social Security and Medicare. Even the military budget in the US is going to see future cuts, but not these two. Why? It unites a large swath of the population with consistent and beneficial treatment. For this reason, it is political suicide for politicians to make austerity-type cuts into these programs. Universal Basic Income would do the same, except for all social assistance programs, and in uniting an even wider range of people (every adult citizen), make its political future even more, not less, resistant to dismantling.

This will be a new incentive to have children. I think having children is great, but perhaps we should think twice before giving people who don't want kids a financial reason to.

The immediate incentive completely depends on the implementation of Basic Income, and whether parents of children are given a full, partial, or no Basic Income for each child or the first X children, and in a more macroscopic perspective, flies in the face of consistent evidence that educating and bringing families our of poverty is the best way to get them to have fewer children.

There will be greater pressure to slow immigration. I believe that immigration is one of the greatest moral and economic wins for the country, and it should be expanded rather than reduced.

First of all, most Basic Incomes plans require citizenship as the only condition, but cash transfer programs in developing countries show that immigration to an community receiving cash transfers increases even if immigrants don't receive the transfer themselves, because the program increases the economic activity in the area.

There will be greater incentive to keep suffering, terminally-ill people alive longer, making horrific tragedy more likely.

I have to say, I think the misaligned incentives would be less warped than the opposite ones that happen today, in which the chronically-ill may have not enough financial support, and the incentive is to cut their life short instead of trying to take care of them. This is in part because an asymmetric difference exists between taking care of one's own day-to-day needs themselves (much harder to do) and willfully taking one's own life (much easier to do) as a chronically sick person.

There is no way to avoid the fact that you are reducing the incentive for people to work. Most people work for money. Some people who now work for their basic income will simply stop. Others will work less, or put less effort into finding work, just like many people getting unemployment benefits now. Less work means less production and less wealth to go around.

The other way to look at this is that it would act as a subsidy for automation, as labor costs are purposefully pushed up. The immediate effect might seem to be a loss of productivity, but the long term effect might be the acceleration of the development of automation technology, and longer term gains in productivity.