I don't think it's unreasonable to ask for "hard science" on this. Just as you've provided an anecdote of "street kittens," I have personal anecdotes of children who grew up in abusive families who turned out to be very nice people. Of course, there may have been less visible setbacks in other parts of their development, but at the end of the day it's not a clear-and-cut A causes B to me.
So yea, you've caught me. I've been ruminating over an idea to make really short (1~2 mins) technical educational videos. They would explain technical concepts from my university courses that I found more challenging than they needed to be. So the majority audience would probably just be university students, but I imagine that the simpler/easier it is to understand, the more effective the material would be, especially since the videos would be so short.
> In your example, the burden of being a teenager in high school is far more cognitive overhead to the learner than if the educator is using singular or plural when describing a new concept.
I hadn't actually thought of this, but that makes a lot of sense to me. For a university student, the cognitive overhead might come predominantly from tight schedules, deadline stress, etc more than they do from any single set of subpar lectures slides.
That said, even if it's not that consequential, I'm still curious how much effect it has. I actually did end up asking ChatGPT for links to studies regarding this, and came back with 3 publications, but the titles and DOI links it provided didn't seem to match up. I couldn't find the first study by keyword either.
It gave me (DISCLAIMER: INACCURATE CITATIONS):
- Jackson, L. A., & Stanovich, K. E. (1986). Conceptual information processing and the use of singular and plural forms by children. Journal of Educational Psychology, 78(3), 205–213. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.78.3.205
Oh I was just borrowing your words for "longevity framework" aha. I've taken a look at your website, and it seems like you have a much more well-defined "framework" than I do, given your commitment to a healthy diet, regular physical exercise, etc. In fact, I wouldn't say I have a longevity framework at all. It's an interesting concept though, and I feel like I certainly could learn from you by establishing a more formal set of health-guidelines for myself, so thanks for the idea!
I was first exposed to the idea of cold showers for better health in Veritasium's "How to Slow Aging (and even reverse it)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRt7LjqJ45k. The video isn't focused on cold showers exclusively, but he briefly touches upon it as a method of improving longevity. I figured that implementing cold showers into my daily routine should be a pretty easy task, because it doesn't add any extra work into my schedule--it's just replacing a small portion of my hot showers, which I should be minimizing anyway.
And yeah, you're probably right about cold showers being less of a good idea in the evening. How often do you shower then? I can't bring myself to go to bed at night without feeling clean, but showering twice in a day also feels a bit time-consuming and excessive.
汉字 reader here! (although I'm probably only at grade 3 level)
I've never seen any web-based word games like this for Chinese, so this is really cool to see!
In my opinion, the core game-part itself feels more like a matching game than a language-learning game. Once any hints are revealed, there's usually only two remaining characters that match the current stroke pattern/positioning. This makes it pretty easy to guess the correct characters starting off with a single random click. One way you could make this more challenging is to only reveal the matching stroke elements, but not necessarily their physical position in the answer word.
While playing, I was confused by how strokes, radicals, and components got differentiated. One specific instance of confusion was that the ren2 radical (亻) doesn't get revealed when guessing any character that contains a shu4 (丨).
I've noticed that in games that include characters with shu4 and heng2 strokes, guessing any character with those two strokes often reveals a large chunk of the answer. Maybe that's a strategy that when realized, actually helps people learn? I don't know. In any case, here is a recent game I played: https://git.sr.ht/~yfxu/images/blob/master/hanzi.webp
That said, being able to see the full word at the end with the pinyin and definition would be pretty useful for a learner (I learned a new word!), but I don't know if it would be nearly as useful as flash cards would be.
At the end of the day though, I still think this is a cool game, and I bet figuring out how to hide and reveal specific components of the characters wasn't the easiest task aha, thanks for making and sharing this!
How long are your cold showers, and in what ways are you feeling great? You mentioned that you're trying to recover faster. What are you recovering from? I hope you get better soon ;'o
I recently started trying to take more cold showers, but they're never exclusively cold. I start cold for a minute, then take a regular hot shower for another 5-10, and then finish it off with another cold rinse for one last minute. This has been my drill for pretty much every evening in the past six months, also inspired by the "longevity framework" as you put it!
It doesn't feel as if my life has changed drastically by any means, apart from the mild ego stroke of "wow I sustained two whole minutes of cold!" That said, it might be because I'm not doing cold showers right.
If it adds any context I'm in my early 20s right now.
I mostly agree with the author's point, but I feel it's worth pointing out that apologizing for being inexperienced with a language can actually help _build_ confidence in communicating more. It can give people a sense of qualification that they're able to continue without being judged too harshly for their language skills.
I think the original point is to say that people felt moved enough by the poem to "permanently" integrate some feature of it into their lives. Critiquing the "whole poem" thing feels incredibly pedantic.
Ok that's fair, I don't think anyone is going to die. But calling Twitter a "frivolous discretionary product" feels very dismissive of the real impact that it has on society. For instance: the Capitol Insurrection
To be entirely honest, I have no idea what Elon Musk's management will bring to Twitter--whether it'll get better or worse, and what might happen as a result. I don't personally think anything will crash and burn, but that's not to say that the transition won't be rocky and influence _some_ people at least.
Elon Musk wants to make verified statuses purchasable. Would fake news outlets abuse this to further spread misinformation? I don't know, but I do hope that there is someone in the company who will consider these issues more deeply than I have the time for.
So no, I don't think anyone is a sucker for acting in the best interest of their customers and colleagues. Yes, the new executives might not value their employees the same way anymore, but I don't believe it's right to abandon those you care about in the face of a new enemy. OP sounds to me more like they're loyal to the users, rather than to the organization.
> To be blunt: you're making yourself sound like a sucker who will let people exploit you.
That's not really what it sounds like at all to me. A more apt analogy might be OP wanting to help all the passengers off the sinking ship before jumping off themselves. While you could just abandon the ship and assume everyone else knows how to get off without assistance, reality shows that many people still need that helping hand.
I don't think OP is letting anyone exploit them. OP just wants to help people, which I think is quite admirable.
