This is a reasonable thing for MIT to do. Many comparisons to book burning have been made in various comments, which is not a good analogy. In this situation, the analogue to book burning would be burning his books[1]. MIT is just declining to have their name on the cover of his books (read: lectures) any more.
MIT is not trying to decree that the guy has some egregious objective moral failing. They're saying that they ran an internal investigation, with the help of other physics faculty, and found Lewin to be in violation of their institutional sexual harassment policies, and as a result, they're removing his content from their platform. This is a perfectly good reason to distance themselves from him, as well as making it clear that they take sexual harassment very seriously by impacting his legacy so negatively.
MIT OCW continues to host courses for 8.01 and 8.02, the courses his lectures covered, with lectures given by other faculty[2]. The loss of material to learn from is marginal at best - these videos are for the same courses at the same school with much of the same infrastructure (notes/recitation videos/etc).
This is pretty cool. I like her learning style. I do the same thing, and I love the process of going from looking up every other word to being able to actually understand independently, even in small chunks.
> She scratched around in Google until she found uploaded PDFs of the articles she wanted. She would read an abstract and Google every word she didn’t understand. When those searches snowballed into even more jargon, she’d Google that, too. The expanding tree of gibberish seemed infinite—apoptosis, phenotypic, desmosome—until, one day, it wasn’t. “You get a feeling for what’s being said,” Kim says. “Pretty soon you start to learn the language.”
Agree, but I like having everything in one place. I don't get a lot of email, so that may change, but I have a filter and separate inbox[1] set up for stuff I read, including RSS.
No, because people have too damn many email addresses.
I typically have multiple email addresses at all times, with one constant (my gmail) and the others revolving around my employer, my school, and other affiliations. And which email I give you depends on how I know you (I'll give classmates and potential employers the university one, etc). So even though I might have someone's corporate address, if they change companies, I'm SOL. With this service, I can click your "request email" button, and you tell me the most convenient address to reach you at.
This is totally off the cuff, but here's my first thought:
To sign up for the site, you need only a username, password, and verification method (email/sms/facebook/something to authenticate you as a person, but this wouldn't necessarily be tied to the account). The usernames are unique, and your personal url is domain.com/username or something along those lines (like reddit).
Then you can give your business card to everyone and their spammy recruiter, and if they follow up and visit your domain.com/username, they can hit the "request email" button, at which point you can choose which email to give them or ignore it all together. Potential problem is that unique usernames will mean that professional ones run out quickly. Not sure at what scale that becomes an issue....
In other news, if anyone here is going to be at hackMIT and would be interested in working on something like this, email me (its in my profile).
Wholeheartedly agree with the article. I have absolute control of my inbox with filters, labels, and signing up for newsletters and/or updates on various subjects. There is no way a centralized end-to-end service is going to eclipse email for me, unless they radically change their business models.
The value proposition is just really bad in all the services I've seen so far.
"Oh, you want me to sign up for your service so that I can look at the content you think I should see alongside the ads you're making money off of? And what exactly is in it for me?"
Something I would pay for: a rolodex social network. No centralized feed. No useless info. Your profile is 2-3 sentences and your current city (with some sort of maps integration for when you travel, to see who's near you). Two buttons, one to request to view resume, and another to request to view email. That's it. With the idea being, you use the site to enable you to keep up with people. You add people you know or have worked with to your network, and you can easily get their current email and catch up when you're in the same city. Simple, no obnoxious ads, no slimy tactics to increase time on the site.
Probably will never come to pass, but I can dream...
Out of curiosity, what are some of the things you're trying to combat the 2nd type of procrastination? I've been experimenting with habits and other organizational systems to use my time more effectively, and it's been going pretty well so far.
The main thing I do when I realize I'm frittering away time when there's something pressing that I really should be doing, I think "OK. On xxx Date in the future, you are going to be held accountable for The Thing. That date is approaching, and when it gets here, you are either going to fail or succeed, and the difference will likely be what you spend your time on right now."
This is moderately successful for important tasks with important consequences, but not so helpful when I really should, say, do my laundry. But I figure that if I can get the hard things sorted out, I'll slot the laundry in somewhere later (textbook procrastination rationalizations, yes, I recognize the irony).
I'm also playing with todo lists to help me plan better - keeping everything in my head is certainly not optimal. I sampled a bunch of methods: so far Wunderlist has been the best for just straight todos. I would like to change my habits so that when I'm too tired (physically or mentally) to do intellectual work, I default to a less demanding task - exercise, errands, whatever - instead of HN. But that's still a work in progress.
One other thing is that I've been keeping more notebooks. If something happens, and after the fact I think "Hmm, that could have gone better..." I'll jot some notes down about what I could have done instead. When the semester starts (I'm an undergrad student) I also want to start keeping a rough weekly plan in the notebook, like this: http://calnewport.com/blog/2014/08/08/deep-habits-plan-your-...
There's a big difference between an "internet connection" and "facebook". My opinion (as someone who cancelled my Facebook and netflix accounts this month, never had a TV, but do have a smartphone (mostly for GPS)) is that anything meaningful that happens on facebook can happen just as easily via text or email. If your close friends are planning an event or talking in a group chat, great, they can shoot you a text or email.
The things that facebook (and twitter) has the market cornered on are the things that no one cares about. For example, with these sites, you can see random updates from old acquaintances that really do not impact your life. That would never have happened before social media, and personally, I did not feel that 140 character quips, infini-scrolling feeds of irrelevant info, or gossiping were benefiting my life at all, so I've been on a deactivation spree.
I don't know the answer here, but it's something I've considered often, so:
Is it possible that those top 1-2 people just knew so much more than you, going into the class, and had such a strong foundation in closely related material, that they picked it up more quickly? I mean, if the scenario was "my twin brother and I went into a math class with the same level of math knowledge, and he didn't study and got an A, while I studied 15-20 hr/wk and got a B" then I would find that much stronger evidence to conclude that these differences may be innate. But to me it seems likely that the 1-2 people who vastly outperformed everyone else may have just been setting themselves up to do that for the previous 10 years. By which I mean, they were intensively studying math throughout high school (and likely before), so that although they may not have known the course material going in, after seeing it once they think, "oh, yes, that's an obvious result based on x, y, z things that I already know. And it's a very nice way of thinking about w." Whereas you, not knowing x, y, z, or w, don't have any of that intuition. So they can make connections and learn by analogy "effortlessly" while you have to study much more to understand these concepts.
>Most kids want the thousand bucks, Lee said, but the pennies doubled daily over 30 days eventually adds up to more than $10.7 million.
30 years perhaps?
Anyway, it's cool to hear about Microsoft Research. This quote is especially exciting, since scalability is the main question I've had about quantum computing (and really quantum mechanics as a whole) being viable outside of a lab.
>“The problem of coherence is a major focus of our research here,” Lee said. “Every researcher connected to this field dreams of building a quantum computer. We are not trying to build a quantum computer. Our belief is that trying to build a quantum machine by controlling electron spin and using surface codes is like trying to build a computer using vacuum tubes. Labs all over the world can do that, but you’ll never be able to scale up. We’re taking an outrageously hard, unreasonably difficult approach, and if we succeed – and it’s a big if – then we will have a building block for a scalable quantum machine. We have a chance, a tiny chance but a real chance, to completely upend technology and society in a fundamental way just like the transistor did.”
Edit: oh, wow, I was thinking about the 30 day thing really wrong. Thanks!
It seems like some baseline talent is necessary to make the strategy work. I don't claim to have any ability to judge musical ability, plus it seems many artists aren't writing their own songs anyway, so I'm not trying to comment on her merits. Just noting that she's chosen to shift attention from her actual music to these antics, which is a strange choice from my perspective.
She definitely knows what she's doing. You can't go from that "Jolene" video you linked to sitting naked on a wrecking ball[0] in one year, by accident. The interesting thing is that she would choose deliberately to do that.
I don't think so - unless I'm missing information about them (they're now rebranded as just "Genius" FYI). Their two main controversies that I'm aware of were the SEO violation thing and the founder's inappropriate comments about the serial killer's sister.
The first they apologized (and were penalized) for, the second they fired the founder. They aren't embracing negative attention, as far as I can tell.
My interest in the Miley Cyrus model might need a little more explanation. Back a few months ago, when she was releasing over-the-top videos (wrecking ball?), everyone was saying some variant of "wow why is Miley famous she obviously has no talent and this is just lewd." But this is the crux of her brilliance.[0] She has tricked a very large number of people into advertising for her, regardless of whether she does anything requiring talent. But then there's the obvious tradeoff: she has to deliver all of these ridiculous things, likely to the detriment of her ability to contribute anything actually meaningful to the industry. Maybe other people have made that deal but none seem to have been as successful, at least based on the data from my facebook feed. And this is a rare case in which facebook feed data is a useful measure of the success of the business, because it fuels the clicks and the conversations and the weird interest.
Anyway. Every time I see something about her, even overwhelmingly negative, I shake my head and think "another person tricked into feeding her success". Her willingness to decouple her success from anything "worthwhile"[1] about her (talent/skill/beauty/benefit to fans), at the cost of irrecoverably changing her career in what most would view as a very negative way, is sort of fascinating.
[0] I say "her brilliance" but in reality I am sure she is just the face for a manager type orchestrating the money-and-fame-for-girl's-reputation-and-soul deal.
[1] "Worthwhile" in quotes because is anything in the pop music industry really worthwhile?
Now that you point it out I can see how it could be interpreted that way. I had trouble recognizing that because I don't think being wealthy (owning a Tesla) is an indicator that one "built something substantial".
That was my thought too, math is obviously tied very closely to language. And programming did come from CS which came from math. Web/App dev is just so far downstream from all of the math, that people in those roles can get away with ignoring it.
In fact, if you accept the premise of math as a language, most of the piece can be boiled down to: "language skills help programming skills, whether that language is mathematics or not".
Another nitpick:
> A common variation on this: without a CS degree, you can’t build anything substantial. Which, ha ha! Don’t tell the venture capitalists! They’re down there on Sand Hill Road giving actual money to hundreds of people building software projects without any formal qualifications whatsoever. In fact, they do it so often that the college-dropout-turned-genius-programmer is our primary Silicon Valley archetype of success. And monetarily, their strategy seems be to working out for them, if the fleets of Teslas on 280 are any indication.
1. Tesla is not a "software project" and I can't imagine that building a car is light on math.
2. Elon Musk has a degree in physics and dropped out of a Stanford EE PhD. He's not a "college dropout" or a "genius programmer." The CTO, Straubel, also has (non CS) engineering degrees from Stanford.
3. To my knowledge Tesla was initially 100% funded out of Musk's PayPal money, not venture capital.
"Math is irrelevant, look at Tesla!" is simply a ridiculous thing to say.
"It hinges on a gut-level judgment about what sort of universe we inhabit."
The thing is, I don't think a gut-level judgment is the best course of action here. Similarly, I don't make gut-level judgments about whether I believe in gravity, or whether I believe in evolution. In my mind, the nature of the universe falls squarely under "science."
By "washing" I think you mean driving dirty clothes a small distance so that immigrants can wash them for you while you take a cut. Much cushier gig than actual washing.
I have dabbled in a little bit of video production, and on the (rare) occasion that I catch a few minutes of televised football, that yellow line always blows me away. Mentioning how difficult it must be to whoever is actually watching the game results in weird stares as if it's the most natural thing in the world, but I'm glad to read that I'm not going crazy. And I had no idea how extensive the setup actually was.
MIT is not trying to decree that the guy has some egregious objective moral failing. They're saying that they ran an internal investigation, with the help of other physics faculty, and found Lewin to be in violation of their institutional sexual harassment policies, and as a result, they're removing his content from their platform. This is a perfectly good reason to distance themselves from him, as well as making it clear that they take sexual harassment very seriously by impacting his legacy so negatively.
MIT OCW continues to host courses for 8.01 and 8.02, the courses his lectures covered, with lectures given by other faculty[2]. The loss of material to learn from is marginal at best - these videos are for the same courses at the same school with much of the same infrastructure (notes/recitation videos/etc).
[1] http://www.amazon.com/For-Love-Physics-Rainbow-Journey/dp/14...
[2] http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/physics/8-01-physics-i-fall-2003/