ex3xu · HackerTrans

3 yıl öncediscuss

UPS drivers, like it or not, produce that much value. Bankers don't, and are instead holding the economy hostage through abuse of insider information [0], regulatory arbitrage [1], and capturing short-term value via liquidity mismanagement [2] or creating long-term systemic risk via post-Glass-Steagall gambling on derivatives that eventually leaves shareholders and taxpayers holding the bag [3], which ultimately comes at the expense of everybody else in the economy.

[0] https://www.goldmansachs.com/investor-relations/corporate-go...

[1] https://www.atlantafed.org/-/media/Documents/news/conference...

[2] https://apnews.com/article/silicon-valley-bank-bailout-yelle...

[3] https://money.usnews.com/investing/stock-market-news/article...

ex3xu

3 yıl öncediscuss

> The core idea is trying my best to not kid myself: when my engagement with a piece of content is active and effortful then it’s learning, when it’s passive it’s entertainment. When I create I learn. When I consume I just relax.

This core idea is getting at something important, something that other commenters are covering and is covered in this previous HN thread [0] about information addiction for example, but I disagree the author's assertion that all passive consumption ought to be categorized as entertainment and all active creation ought to be categorized as effortful work. (I've seen too many video game damage calculation spreadsheets for that to be the case.)

I'll highlight the author's conjecture that "edutainment is not learning but preparation for learning". Relevant, digestible, and yes sometimes entertaining collections of information are preparation for understanding (which typically requires application), which is preparation for mastery (which typically requires ten more years of application). I would argue this entire process is what encompasses learning, of which well-sourced information is a critical component for. I suspect there is some conflation here of entertainment with the risk for distraction, which is a real mind killer that ought to be addressed, but instead gets tossed away by the author during his Cal Newport reference in favor of his love for Twitter and vested interest in newsletter subscriptions.

The concept I feel the author is getting at via his edutainment strawman is that information acquisition is not sufficient for the fluency of understanding required for conceptual mastery. This is a concept that I think most HN readers and textbook exercise writers would agree with.

The possibility that the author may be missing a working understanding of this concept feels to me like it would explain a certain awkwardness about the entire article, which seems to rely on shoehorning a plethora of loosely-connected, name-dropped quotes and ideas into italicized slots of questionable logical integrity to support the presumption that everything entertaining must be useless, and everything educational must be hard. I've met way too many lazy smart people to believe that to be the case.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34710830

ex3xu

3 yıl öncediscuss

If a doctor told you to stop smoking and lower your blood pressure, would you berate him for pushing to make your life miserable?

Our collective addiction to the conveniences of modern life is leading to the proliferation of carcinogenic materials and destroying the environment. Generations upon generations lived without these spoils uphill both ways without complaint. If the slightest suggestion of lifting some weight and going for a walk is enough to induce abject misery, it might be a good time to re-evaluate the way we do things.

ex3xu

3 yıl öncediscuss

These are fair and valid points and I wish I had used more consideration in my attempt to convey the rhetorical usage. The proselytization component is probably a more significant reason behind the word choice than any other aspect of catechesis. I meant no offense to anyone of any faith.

ex3xu

3 yıl öncediscuss

I think your understanding will improve if you view the content of this link as nothing but a scathing review of the book in question. I get the sense that your confusion comes from thinking that the linked article is trying to make points about the subject of the book, when really the point of nearly every paragraph is to trash the book as a waste of time especially compared to her previous book (while concomitantly recommending better options by other authors, referenced and linked throughout the review).

For instance, when the reviewer references Wikipedia, they are not making a criticism of Wikipedia's usefulness -- they are criticizing Odell's summary of other writers' ideas as being as shallowly researched as summarizing their ideas off of Wikipedia. When the reviewer states "Problems with style and pacing are problems of thinking", the primary intent is not to make some sort of generalized insight applicable to you, but instead to criticize Odell in particular as putting poorly styled, poorly paced, and poorly thought-out lines on the page. If you read the review from the perspective of this adversarial framing, you could imagine the reviewer's answer to "Why We Never Have Enough Time" to be "Because we have to waste our lives on our jobs -- mine right now being to write a review of a book I think is a waste of everyone's time."

Catechesis is a term often associated with the the Catholic Church as a form of systematic instruction of a set of dogmatic ideological beliefs. This insruction is backed by a huge and famously boring book, the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Denouncing Odell's book as "catechistic indexing" uses the connotation of a group of religious followers shallowly regurgitating the same dogmatically accepted facts (with or without adequate exposition or even any understanding in the first place), in the style that a religious leader might conduct a catechistic question and answer session. The abstract forces being referenced are essentially the attention economy's post-structuralist rehash of the same Marxist criticisms of capitalism that goes back centuries at this point, which the reviewer assumes that New Yorker readers (who generally self-select for a certain demographic of left-leaning and educated) would be overly familiar with. If you're looking for a basic introduction to those arguments, there's Richard Wolff's appearance on Lex Fridman's podcast last year [0] or you could try a more erudite overview like Vivek Chibber's talk, titled Consent, Coercion, and Resignation on the structural forces of capitalism [1].

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0Bi-q89j5Y&t=4316s

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dcVoQbhFtQ

ex3xu

3 yıl öncediscuss

I think it's a portmanteau of susurrus and torrential, which serves to invoke the force and volume of a torrential downpour to the description.

ex3xu

3 yıl öncediscuss

Long ago, on Svalbard, when you were a young witch of forty-three, your mother took your unscarred wrists in her hands, and spoke:

    Vidrun, born of the sea-wind through the spruce
    Vidrun, green-tinged offshoot of my bough, joy and burden of my life
    Vidrun, fierce and clever, may our clan’s wisdom be yours:

    Never read Hacker News

But Hacker News has read of you, in their snicker-slithing susurrential warrens, and word has spread...

https://aphyr.com/posts/341-hexing-the-technical-interview

ex3xu

3 yıl öncediscuss

Matlab files on Github: https://github.com/Layton-Lab/Kregulation

ex3xu

3 yıl öncediscuss

I found KC Davis's 2022 book How to Keep House While Drowning to be a nice complementary update to Kondo's techniques.

On a practical level Davis focuses on accumulated mess as 5 things: (1) trash, (2) dishes, (3) laundry, (4) things that have a place and are not in their place, and (5) things that do not have a place.

The book adds some interesting psychological framing which I found helpful -- treating care tasks as morally neutral, for example. Her techniques target ADHD-types as well as people undergoing life changes (like Marie Kondo starting a family) or otherwise have strict time/energy constraints. Her Struggle Care website [0] has a pretty detailed primer on her philosophy.

[0]: https://www.strugglecare.com/struggle-care

ex3xu

3 yıl öncediscuss

Sure, I can understand your skepticism. The church was skeptical of Galileo when he made new claims about the nature of the earth as well, since it contradicted their own previous anecdotal perceptions and private ideology. If only we had developed tools like the scientific method to evaluate claims on the basis of evidence instead of personal skepticism -- then it could be possible to make some productive headway on the evaluation of whether or not an approach could be effective. Fortunately, these tools exist, so that someone who wanted to evaluate the claims behind the microbiota-inflammasome hypothesis of depression could click on a link to an overview of the scientific literature in support of the hypothesis, helpfully provided at the bottom of the comment [0], before posting a cursory dismissal on the basis of their personal skepticism.

The subject of the Quanta magazine article is a critical literature review which the article author describes as the "death knell for the serotonin hypothesis". The basis for your skepticism, "The fact that healthy people still get depression" could be addressed in the section of article where they explain how depression could be a catch-all umbrella term for the presentation of symptoms with a wide variety of causes, potentially including stress, genetic predisposition, tryptophan depletion, or chronic inflammation, among other possible causes like adverse childhood experiences or learned helplessness for example. Inflammation from periodontitis or gut dysbiosis can exist within the threshold of otherwise healthy people, as evidenced by the attenuation of symptoms in some sufferers of major depression by these interventions in the studies examined by the review I linked.

Maybe the reason a lot more people haven't beaten major depression through these interventions, as you suggest should have happened by now, is because when they go to the doctor, they get a script for an iatrogenic SSRI and a cognitive behavioral therapist and a kick out the door, instead of testing to see if they just need a root canal and some yogurt. And I protest your inclusion of magnesium orotate in the category of "x y supplements" as it is the target of specific studies which have examined its effectiveness in conjunction with probiotics in attenuating depression [1].

[0] https://sci-hub.st/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30004130/

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10787-017-0311-x

ex3xu

3 yıl öncediscuss

Two weeks from the anniversary of Aaron Swartz's death, I'm wishing he could have lived long enough to see Sci-Hub. Rest in peace.

ex3xu

3 yıl öncediscuss

Google in 1998: Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives from the original paper The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine [0]

"Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users... we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers... we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm."

Google in 2003: Eric "You can trust us with your data" Schmidt convinces Sergey and Larry of the bonkers amount of money they can make by adding a monopoly on digital search advertising to leverage their monopoly on digital search. They proceed to switch to the same advertising business model that hindered their early competitors.

Google in 2008: Buys out Doubleclick to maintain Adsense's monopoly on digital search advertising and doubles down on surveillance capitalism.

Google in 2011: Buys out AdMeld, changes AdX contracts to be even more anticompetitive to maintain monopoly on digital search advertising.

Google in 2017: Loses $2.7 billion antitrust lawsuit in the EU. Response? No changes to business model, but oust a vocal supporter of the decision from Google-funded think tank New America. [1]

Google in 2023: Sued again.

[0] http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15131370

ex3xu

3 yıl öncediscuss

I am a subscriber to the microbiome inflammasome hypothesis for major depression [0], so I wouldn't be surprised if a treatment course for depression in many people could be as simple as better dental hygiene + magnesium orotate + probiotic supplements. I've had my eye on studies linking schizophrenia with inflammatory cytokine markers, and it follows that other psychological conditions could have similar etiology and pathogenesis. Research on the influence of gut bacteria and intestinal dysbiosis on anxiety and depression has been coming out since at least 2013 [1].

After reading Robert Whitaker's 2010 Anatomy of an Epidemic [2], I'm convinced that future generations will look back on this era of psychiatric treatment with the same critical eye that our generation points at Moliere's 17th-century leeches or George Washington's personal doctor treating his strep throat with several blood-letting phlebotomies -- an absolute iatrogenic travesty. The overprescription of potentially mania-inducing antidepressants in children and teenagers is especially egregious to me. Add in the perverse incentives of profit-driven pharmaceutical companies, and you get issues like Zyprexa's 2009 class action lawsuit, for example [3].

For those looking for a readable introduction to the potential link between chronic inflammation and depression, there is The Inflamed Mind by Edward Bullmore from 2018 which did some rounds on talk shows and the like.

[0] https://sci-hub.st/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30004130/

[1] https://sci-hub.st/https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/art...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomy_of_an_Epidemic

[3] https://www.justice.gov/archive/opa/pr/2009/January/09-civ-0...

ex3xu

4 yıl öncediscuss

Goethe and Hegel both get some character-driven exposition in this book, but Hegel is about twenty years younger than Goethe, so the interactions focus more on the contemporaneous groupings of Goethe-Schiller-Fichte and later Schelling-Hegel than direct interaction between the two. Goethe as a poet is generally viewed more through the lens of literary criticism as opposed to the philosopher Hegel who is generally studied with the analytical rigor of philosophy, considering his position as one of the premier post-Kantian German idealists.

The two share much ideological agreement, like when both offered great praise for Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic of Education of Man, but while Hegel generally quotes Goethe with veneration, Goethe seems generally suspicious of Hegel's philosophy -- in one meeting offering open criticism to Hegel about his dialectic, for example.

One work that goes into detail on both thinkers would be the late Walter Kaufmann's first volume of his trilogy Discovering the Mind, in which he offers an opinionated criticism of Kant and Hegel's obscurity and obfuscation by contrasting it with Goethe's thematic clarity.

ex3xu

4 yıl öncediscuss

Wulf is an unconventional historian with an unconventional background, and her work reads much more like a narrative-driven piece of New Journalism than a theoretical entry from the Cambridge Studies series on philosophy. As revealed by the tagline of this book, The Invention of the Self, Wulf's new work is an exploration into the roots of modern conceptions of self-determination done through character studies of the Weimar classicists -- Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, and Kant in particular. I could see fans of narrative-driven nonfiction writers like Laura Hillenbrand or Roger Lowenstein enjoying Andrea Wulf in the same way.

While I am always happy to see new work focusing on the Weimar classicists, whose ideas serve as a stark contrast to dystopic forces from the brutality of the French revolution to the banality of corporate life today, I think I agree with this article writer about the weakness of Wulf's synopses. As compelling as Wulf's exposition is, it feels to me somewhat overpractical to constrain these powerful thinkers through the lens of a Socratic Know Thyself commandment in her emphasis on self-determination. Certainly there is a place for a feel-good, narrative-driven book like this, but I personally would point people towards the essays curated by Carroll, Giles, and Oergle in Aesthetics and Modernity or Leslie Sharpe's Cambridge Studies entry on Schiller for a drier but more thought provoking exploration of German Idealism and the valuable concepts it would spawn through the Frankfurt School in the twentieth century.

ex3xu

4 yıl öncediscuss

I took some tips from a book titled How to talk so kids will listen and listen so kids will talk - they suggest to try to help kids label their emotions, and then reaffirm those emotions are valid (even if they can't get what they want). They have various kid-friendly techniques for this in the book, one that worked for a couple of the worst tantrums I had to defuse is getting them to draw a picture of how mad they are.

ex3xu

4 yıl öncediscuss

My internal picture of Schillerian Spieltrieb is basically a bunch of 1960s pie-in-the-sky Woodstock hippies making art, music, and free love all day in a post-work, self-governing society. The OP is juxtaposing this utopic vision of games and play against the reality of the dystopic, positivist, Skinner's box-style internet spawned by Zuckerberg/Schmidt/Bezos that is currently in the process of devouring us all.

Schiller's concept of Spieltrieb is from his 1794 On the Aesthetic Education of Man, which describes a sort of idealistic, post-work state of man when given the liberty to merge his innate "Sinestrieb", the urge towards sensual and material gratification, and his "Formtrieb", the urge to establish moral order upon the world.

Schiller, alongside of Goethe and other Weimar Classicists, built on Kant's transcendental idealism to perform a sort of epistemological revalorization of the Greek concept of aesthetics, in contrast to previous enlightenment thinking which primarily focused on reason without regard for sentiment. Writing against the backdrop of the French Revolution, which Schiller felt had been co-opted by violent radicals and ultimately failed to achieve its lofty ideological goals, Schiller (being a playwright and novelist himself) believed that an appreciation for the arts could help develop the moral character necessary for a society to act as unified harmonious beings.

This concept has persisted as the pursuit of the aesthetic condition, a sort of post-revolution endgame to aspire towards where everyone, upon reaching some threshhold of education and appreciation for art, becomes happy and aspires to play and create works of art all day long. This aspirational outcome is referenced by political theorists like Marcuse, Adorno and the rest of the Frankfurt school whose work criticized what they saw as the inevitable unpleasant consequences of modernity and capitalism, e.g. commodification, the alienation of labor, and the devaluation of man.

Stanford encyclopedia on Schiller: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schiller/

comments