Never in my life have I found these totally generic advice collations useful.
They're always vague, unfalsifiable, borderline platitudes. They "work" for the same reasons horoscopes work, and I think a sizable minority, if not majority, of people publishing such work are just sociopathic profiteers.
This post is an advertisement, but sadly that seems to be the origin of most content on the internet now - at least the SEO optimized results that fill the first (1-10?) pages.
As a counterpoint, I’ve found these books to be extremely useful and it has had profound positive impacts on my decisions.
It’s not telling you to wake up at 4am because that’s what [unicorn startup ceo] does. The advice given here is how to step back and find solutions, which is great for people who have difficulty arriving at those points.
Likening it to horoscopes because it doesn’t work for you is like me dismissing books on dieting because I’m already slim.
Lots of people don’t have positive role models, good teachers, mentors, or even stable parents. So even things as simple as “don’t be quick to anger, step back and think about the long term consequences” are lessons that many people have never been taught.
> Never in my life have I found these totally generic advice collations useful.
I only check the HN comments for posts like this. That's where the real meaty content is where actual programmers/engineers talk about what may or may not have worked for them.
Here is the first study[0] which correctly looked at the combination of HCQ with zinc sulfate ionophore, as per the original theory, which originated from a Dutch researcher who predicted the mechanism by which HCQ was shown to be in vitro effective against SARS and/or MERS. Further, this is the first study I've seen which gave the trial drugs early as recommended based on the mechanism of action.
HCQ cocktail was floating around the internet long before Trump tweeted about it and the media politicized the treatment by bending over backwards to prove Trump wrong, even at the possible expense of passing up a promising treatment.
Every single study before this linked NYU study either administered HCQ alone, and/or waited until patients were critical - but none of that stopped the smugness and eagerness with which the trials were reported on as proof that HCQ doesn't work.
If literally anyone other than Trump mentioned the drug in the public eye it would have been correctly treated as a promising avenue - but because it's even vaguely associated with Trump suddenly everyone wants to see it fail.
This HCQ fiasco is a manifestation of further anti-right bias and the fact that this behavior is not just implicitly condoned, but eagerly supported and simultaneously denied by the majority media and majority of commenters online makes it very difficult to have a presence as an independent on the internet. The bottom line is that we have a cheap, safe drug, in common use for decades, with a direct known and proven (in vitro and not in vivo) mechanism, and people are content to ignore all of this or worse, embellish the dangers and downplay the efficacy, just to stick it to Trump. The collective pettiness is unbelievable.
>that all matter has some associated mind or consciousness, and vice versa. Where there is mind there is matter and where there is matter there is mind.
That doesn't make sense. We know that humans (and probably most if not all conscious animals, in fact sleep may be a prerequisite for consciousness) spend about a third of their lives unconscious. This assertion doesn't hold, unless you want to tell me that all these rocks are just asleep.
This is a fantastic resource. I've long lamented the difficulty of finding textbooks. Since colleges buy them back every semester to control demand, it's actually hard to find something that should be cheap and common. It's tragic.
Good to see they're at least here online, though it's also shameful that I didn't find this on Google when I searched for it a year or so ago. Tried to buy a calculus textbook to teach a friend - only overpriced latest editions by and large were available.
I'll buck the apologist trend here and mention that artists by and large are not technical people and are only concerned with the superficial pleasant appearance of pixel art, and not a faithful reproduction even assuming they were capable of understanding all of the optimization tricks that made pixel art technically beautiful.
Another example of laymen latching onto and ruining a "nice thing".
How anyone can continue to place so much faith into dogmatic science, after the global and nearly universal failure of these same institutions to properly prepare for and handle covid, is beyond me.
This post is pure fear porn. Environmentalists have been making these same doomsday predictions since literally the 60s and deadlines continue to come and go without incident.
Look, the papers that predict what's more likely to happen aren't sexy, so they don't get read much if they're published at all. The truth is that based on all of our evidence regarding the speed of climate change in the past, if there's any change from human emissions it will be slow and take on the order of 100+ years, during which time the only measurable indicator will be an increased rate of turnover and spending for infrastructure projects, maybe a slight uptick in immigration, as we have a bigger storm or a bigger flood here and there.
That doesn't even mention the potential benefits to climate change - there's nothing that says that the earth won't potentially have more fertile land area if the permafrost thaws, for example. But such an attitude is clearly not popular among alarmists.
The scientists did not fail to prepare for the pandemic, and the countries that had scientists in the driving seat handled the pandemic very well. For example, Vietnam currently has no deaths from covid-19 precisely because scientists were in charge. Meanwhile, countries like US, who dismissed the scientists have the highest death toll in the world.
Climate change denialists don't seem to grasp the concept of basic risk assessment. We don't know exactly what will happen, however we definitely know what could potentially happen. Claiming that just because the scientists might be wrong there's nothing to worry about is the height of insanity. You're essentially advocating for playing Russian roulette with our biosphere.
People who actually study the climate are the ones who have the best idea of what will happen. Period. These people are unanimously telling the rest of us that all the best available evidence suggests that horrific things will happen.
And now we're seeing these things starting to happen, and we're seeing them happen at a faster rate than was expected. Yet, idiots who have absolutely zero understanding of this domain continue to insist that there's nothing to worry about because they read something on Facebook that one time.
>Vietnam currently has no deaths from covid-19 precisely because scientists were in charge
Vietnam was prepared because they, like Taiwan, knew from the start that China was lying and took proactive steps that western countries failed to take.
>Yet, idiots who have absolutely zero understanding of this domain continue to insist that there's nothing to worry about because they read something on Facebook that one time
I'm a geoscientist. The fact that climate dogma is righteous dogma doesn't mean it isn't dogma. You claim that none of us have the qualifications to question climate change, but somehow we are equipped to call "deniers" idiots?
>People who actually study the climate are the ones who have the best idea of what will happen. Period. These people are unanimously telling the rest of us that all the best available evidence suggests that horrific things will happen.
Except if you actually read an IPCC report (not the made for headlines summaries, dig in a page or two) you'll see that in reality scientists are far less certain, and all this world ending talk is literally worst case. And historic data tells us that even the most rapid historic climate changes happened over scales comparable to human lifespans.
>You're essentially advocating for playing Russian roulette with our biosphere
There's a grand irony here - once again, like the reopen controversy, the people have chosen the side of the majority of "scientists" and hunkered down, shaming others with worst case threats while ignoring that mitigation is also enormously expensive and pretending that anyone questioning the lockdown is a denier. Your dogma leaves no room for shades of gray.
I'm out of room to explain for the billionth time so I'll keep it short - climate change is one of the softest of sciences because it is purely model and backtest driven. That leaves a massive gap in capabilities to be nicely filled with unquestionable dogma. The fact that those ignorant Republicans don't understand climate change doesn't mean that the learned and capable among us shouldn't be free to question the narrative.
Look at how poorly we understand nutrition - that's arguably at least as rigorous of a science as climate change yet the difference here is at least the conclusions are falsifiable. Meanwhile the food pyramid has been dangerously incorrect for decades.
>Vietnam was prepared because they, like Taiwan, knew from the start that China was lying and took proactive steps that western countries failed to take.
The only difference was that Vietnam and Taiwan took it seriously and prioritized people's lives over the economy. Meanwhile, Western governments largely chose to do the opposite. This is the exact same pattern we're seeing with climate change denial as well. The institutions are prioritizing short term profits while ignoring the science.
>I'm a geoscientist. The fact that climate dogma is righteous dogma doesn't mean it isn't dogma. You claim that none of us have the qualifications to question climate change, but somehow we are equipped to call "deniers" idiots?
Being a geoscintist does not make you a climatologist. It's amazing to me that people who are experts in one domain think that gives them the authority to talk about other domains.
I'm deferring to the domain experts PRECISELY because I know this knowledge is outside my area of expertise. I'm calling the deniers idiots because you seem to think that you know better than people actually studying the field. I'm sure you'd be pretty appalled if I started telling you my notions about how I think geoscience works based on my extensive computer science knowledge.
>And historic data tells us that even the most rapid historic climate changes happened over scales comparable to human lifespans.
That's because historically things like mass scale industrial production did not exist. Humans are not operating on geological time, and it's surreal that this has to be explained to somebody calling themselves a scientist.
>There's a grand irony here - once again, like the reopen controversy, the people have chosen the side of the majority of "scientists" and hunkered down, shaming others with worst case threats while ignoring that mitigation is also enormously expensive and pretending that anyone questioning the lockdown is a denier. Your dogma leaves no room for shades of gray.
All I can tel you is that US accounts for roughly a third of the deaths worldwide while the number of deaths and reported cases continues to grow exponentially. So, yeah this is a perfect analogy for climate change denial. In both cases business interests are prioritized over science with similar results.
>I'm out of room to explain for the billionth time so I'll keep it short - climate change is one of the softest of sciences because it is purely model and backtest driven.
Your capacity to deny facts is absolutely stunning. We're no longer talking about predictions here. We're talking about actual events that are happening around us. Sounds like people like you will continue denying there's a problem as you're boiled alive in your own juices.
>You put too much faith in modern institutions.
I'm doing the opposite of that. I believe scientists and experts in the domain over the idiots who think that we should risk the fate of humanity to keep the growth economy going.
>Being a geoscintist does not make you a climatologist. It's amazing to me that people who are experts in one domain think that gives them the authority to talk about other domains.
I literally consume the same data. It's a sister field. We have the same problems with the exact same uncertainty because we use the same instruments for collection. My opinion is valid but that doesn't matter because anyone who take a position remotely critical of climate science can expect an immediate, vicious, purely dogmatic response.
>The only difference was that Vietnam and Taiwan took it seriously and prioritized people's lives over the economy
It's easy to dismiss other peoples' arguments as "nonsense" when you misrepresent them. The question isn't whether China reported cases or not. It's the fact that China deliberately underreported cases and contributed to an underestimation of the pandemic by laymen and professionals alike who are too naive to understand the dishonesty typical of authoritarian regimes like the CCP. The peoples who have been dealing with China for millennia hold no such delusions.
>The ability to deny facts is absolutely surreal. We're no longer talking about predictions here. We're talking about actual events that are happening around us
This is only true if you cherry pick your literature. I'll remind you our discussion is about future predictions of which only catastrophic outcomes are suitable for (one sided) discussion. The fact that some minority of models agree with current measurements does not resolve the uncertainty regarding the predictions that spawned this entire discussion.
You underestimate the complexity and chaotic nature of science. Certainty in doomsday climate predictions is hubris.
>I literally consume the same data. It's a sister field. We have the same problems with the exact same uncertainty because we use the same instruments for collection. My opinion is valid but that doesn't matter because anyone who take a position remotely critical of climate science can expect an immediate, vicious, purely dogmatic response.
Again, as somebody who works in a complex field I know perfectly well that it's rare that somebody has broad expertise outside a fairly narrow domain. People who think they do are typically suffering from Dunning-Kruger effect. You also keep using the word dogmatic in a weird way that makes question whether you even know what it means.
>It's easy to dismiss other peoples' arguments as "nonsense" when you misrepresent them. The question isn't whether China reported cases or not. It's the fact that China deliberately underreported cases and contributed to an underestimation of the pandemic by laymen and professionals alike who are too naive to understand the dishonesty typical of authoritarian regimes like the CCP.
It's easy to dismiss nonsense when it is demonstrably nonsense. China was dealing with a novel virus and had no idea what to expect from it. There was no evidence that this was some novel influenza based on a handful of cases, or that it could easily spread between humans. However, China did report it on the 2nd of January, and the world had all the same information we had now at the start of January. It's really not surprising that you're a conspiracy theorist in general though.
The fact that China had absolutely no warning and has less deaths than US now really shows the difference between countries that trust science and those that do not.
>This is only true if you cherry pick your literature.
There's a unanimous consensus in the field, but I'm sure oneiftwo knows better because he's a "geoscientist".
>The fact that some minority of models agree with current measurements does not resolve the uncertainty regarding the predictions that spawned this entire discussion.
Show me a single model that's predicting things happening faster than what's observed. If there's anything the models can be faulted on is being too conservative with their predictions.
>You underestimate the complexity and chaotic nature of science. Certainty in doomsday climate predictions is hubris.
I do no such thing. I just understand the basic concept of risk assessment. Gambling our entire civilization on "I hope all the models are wrong and everybody in the field is overreacting" is complete and utter idiocy.
Continued existence of the human race is what's at stake here, and anybody who thinks we shouldn't err on the side of caution when it comes to that is a dangerous idiot.
I had to post this link exactly 7 days ago. Is there some misinformation currently being pushed in the climate change denialist bubble recently that accounts for the sudden questioning of the validity of historical modelling?
Do critics of government hold other prediction "markets" to the same standards?
People predict sportsball outcomes. A much smaller problem domain, with far more historical data, insane audience engagement (interest), and ample expertise.
Are sportsball predictions qualitatively better than pandemic predictions?
>Do critics of government hold other prediction "markets" to the same standards?
You realize that modern economics is basically divination for the same reason that climate science is uncertain? Structurally the two sciences are actually similar in critical points, namely that the domains are non experimental and purely model driven. Yes, you should be extremely sceptical of any economist who tells you that he's certain about anything.
>People predict sportsball outcomes. A much smaller problem domain, with far more historical data, insane audience engagement (interest), and ample expertise
You can't seriously compare the complexity of climate science with sports betting.
The big difference here is that the risk of climate scientists being right is that billions of people die. Meanwhile, all the observed evidence either fits the models or is rapidly outpacing the predictions made by the models. We're not longer talking about hypotheticals here, we're observing these events happening right now. If you look through the links in my above comment you'll see that a lot of them are talking about observed events.
>The big difference here is that the risk of climate scientists being right is that billions of people die.
That's literally an absolute worst case prediction. You cannot guide policy exclusively with worst case predictions.
>We're not longer talking about hypotheticals here, we're observing these events happening right now
No, we're seeing warming and minor sea level rise right now - and even this is less certain than people would have you believe, we only recently realized for example that the mismatch between expected and current warming could be explained by the ocean acting as a heat sink. Imagine how many other similar phenomena we have yet to discover.
Physical systems tend to be nonlinear. Even a high rate of warming now does not preclude a comfortable maximum due to nonlinear restorative forces.
That's why nothing, literally nothing that we've observed to date, can significantly reduce the uncertainty regarding doomsday predictions.
When the worst case scenario is the end of human civilization we absolutely should drive policy to avoid that. It's absolutely surreal that anybody would argue otherwise.
>No, we're seeing warming and minor sea level rise right now
Read the links I provided earlier. These are not minor events. You're just parroting dangerous nonsense here.
>That's why nothing, literally nothing that we've observed to date, can significantly reduce the uncertainty regarding doomsday predictions.
And idiots will continue parroting this exact line as billions of people are dying. Exactly the same way idiots are protesting social distancing, lockdowns, and mask wearing in US right now. It's the same pattern with the same dangerous fools putting the rest of humanity at risk.
>And idiots will continue parroting this exact line as billions of people are dying. Exactly the same way idiots are protesting social distancing, lockdowns, and mask wearing in US right now
There is no purpose to have a discussion when your thinking is so narrowly black and white. Your worldview doesn't seem to allow for the shades of grey necessitated by uncertainty.
If all skepticism was met with the same belittling as climate science, we'd still be stuck in the dark ages. Don't think it's possible for an institution of sciences to be very wrong for a very long time about a very important topic? Look at the forces that caused us to fruitlessly pursue the amyloid plaque hypothesis for decades.
Consensus has a strong normalizing effect, but that does not necessarily mean that a given consensus is correct.
Anyway I'm being rate limited by sanctimonious downvoters so this conversation is effectively over.
Edit: by the way, with respect to the lockdown controversy, did you hear about the atrocious academic modeling code that informed the lockdown policy? A single 15k line C file which, among other things, does not seed random number generation and cannot be reproduced. So bad that I just found there's an entire website dedicated to a teardown[0]! But I'm an "idiot" for showing skepticism. Do you think climate modeling code is any better? Have you worked with academic code? I have. It's universally bad. But, again, I'm an "idiot" for expressing any degree of skepticism.
>There is no purpose to have a discussion when your thinking is so narrowly black and white. Your worldview doesn't seem to allow for the shades of grey necessitated by uncertainty.
There are no shades of gray here. We're weighing human extinction against an economic system here. These things are not comparable. The whole point of an economy is to facilitate human existence.
>If all skepticism was met with the same belittling as climate science, we'd still be stuck in the dark ages.
Your skepticism is not rooted in facts and evidence, but rather has an ideological basis. When all the experts in the field unanimously say we should be dealing with global warming, that's what we should be doing. Anybody who is not an actual climatologist needs to get the fuck out of the way.
>Don't think it's possible for an institution of sciences to be very wrong for a very long time about a very important topic?
Sure, it's possible, but only a fool would gamble the fate of humanity on that. The stakes are simply too high here. There are also no actual downsides to addressing climate change. Imagine the horror of having a cleaner environment and sustainable industry creating millions of new jobs and advancing our technology and science.
>Anyway I'm being rate limited by sanctimonious downvoters so this conversation is effectively over.
It's good to see that majority of people see the dangerous absurdity you promote for what it is.
>by the way, with respect to the lockdown controversy, did you hear about the atrocious academic modeling code that informed the lockdown policy?
And just like with climate change you ignore the actual facts all around you. 80,000 people died in US while 0 people died in Vietnam. Chew on that for a while next time you claim that following scientific consensus is the wrong thing to do.
>There are no shades of gray here. We're weighing human extinction against an economic system here. These things are not comparable. The whole point of an economy is to facilitate human existence.
Again, you don't seem to have any actual experience with risk assessment, because all risk assessment is grey. You weigh probability of outcomes and cost of outcomes and come up with a value. That's literally my point, that the you are at one end of a high dimensional extreme. That's what this entire argument boils down to.
Science is a high-d gradient descent search. You can easily get stuck chasing a local optimum, and bias and dogma like the kind that blinds your judgement can send groups of scientists in the wrong direction and, more importantly, keep them there for decades. Your exploration constant is far too low if you respond with such blind hostility to anyone with criticism. You're hindering progress and when your policy is guided by such one sidedness, that's dangerous. This doesn't just apply to climate science. We couldn't even get the nutritional pyramid right, and climate science is hard for the same reasons - non-expert mental, data and model driven and only verifiable in hindsight.
Not all scientific fields are equally rigorous. An appeal to a climatologist on the subject of climate is far weaker than an appeal to a physicist on the subject of physics because of the nature of the fields. Climate science by nature is extremely uncertain, i.e. you search the high-d space with less gradient information, and personal/institutional biases can converge to fill in those gaps nicely enough to have you trapped in a local minimum.
>again, you don't seem to have any actual experience with risk assessment, because all risk assessment is grey.
There is no meaningful comparison between the risk of human extinction with having to transition off fossil fuel economy. This is what this entire argument boils down to. On one hand, you have the end of civilization and possibly end of human existence, and on the other you have some temporary inconvenience. These are fundamentally not comparable.
>Science is a high-d gradient descent search. You can easily get stuck chasing a local optimum, and bias and dogma like the kind that blinds your judgement can send groups of scientists in the wrong direction and, more importantly, keep them there for decades.
You're creating a false equivalence between the two possibilities. All the best available science tells us this is happening. There is absolutely no scientific basis to doubt that this is happening.
So, yes there may be a chance that all our accumulated decades of observation and models are wrong, but it's far more likely that is not the case. Our observations are either matching or outpacing what the models predict. You just keep parroting the same nonsense over and over like a broken record. It's dangerous nonsense, and you don't seem to understand what's at stake here.
> which is the general level of mediocrity, even at the top levels of academia
This is not unique to academia. Our entire society has gradually degenerated over the last few decades for a number of constructively interfering reasons:
1. We told two+ generations of children that everyone was capable of anything, gave them all awards after every "competition", and that kind of upbringing makes it difficult to recognize merit.
2. We've lowered the bar for standards across education, in an attempt to bring our lowest up, failing to realize that the primary result was bringing our best down. That hurts merit at professional levels especially, where the pipeline effectively shrinks.
3. Our media has regressed to the lowest common denominator. The most popular sources of influence in our society are uncredentialed hacks who spread misinformation ("Dr." Phil, "Dr." Oz, Oprah, etc). Even our official "news" sources are primarily entertainment venues and are fully editorialized. This makes it extremely difficult for the average person to recognize merit.
It's like our entire culture has been consumed by charisma, such that incompetence permeates every sector of our economy and society. Things were too easy for too long, and now we face a reckoning - either we fix things or our nation collapses. There's no room for popularity contests, crony capitalism, or diversity initiatives during times of crisis.
Edit: what about this comment is deserving of being flagged?
What is with this ridiculous fixation people have on participation trophies? I'm serious, where is this idea coming from? Was it an object of moral concern in the media before I was old enough to remember or something?
Getting a stupid ribbon in third grade is not going to radically inform your approach to life.
So I agree that people have a fixation on "participation trophies" but the problem it attempts to address, essentially the featherbedding of education is a serious one.
In response to your question, about the stupid ribbon, it probably won't but that's the point. Everyone got a freaking ribbon, everyone got a ribbon in third grade, and fourth grade, and so when someone is actually exceptional how do you then distinguish them, you can't. It's not that the ribbon changed anything because you got it, it's because everyone got it that made it worthless.
Suddenly everyone can prove to everyone how smart they are, meanwhile those that are actually exceptional in an area without an easily defined winners and loser bracket can never be recognized. This leads quickly to a situation where my ignorance is as good as your facts because we are all can be "right in our own way."
The result leads to a distortion of facts a society that can agree on basic reality and everything being run by conmen and manipulators because they realized early on that was the only way to get ahead. Starting to sound familiar?
>Getting a stupid ribbon in third grade is not going to radically inform your approach to life.
It's not a single stupid ribbon. It's growing up in a society where literally every competition results in everyone winning. Predicting performance (i.e. evaluating merit) is a skill that requires development, yet when you reward everyone equally regardless of success or failure you train that skill on noise. How do you expect children to learn to recognize when people are or are not skilled when you imply that skills don't matter because everyone wins anyway? Instead you raise them to believe that skills don't matter.
What happens when these children become adults after a lifetime of being taught that everyone is a winner, regardless of performance? Cognitive dissonance and a sense of entitlement, because there will always be true winners and losers in a world of scarce resources.
Children need to experience failure. Just like they need to experience pain and a multitude of other negative emotions that our modern society increasingly attempts to shield them from. Otherwise you raise a generation of childminded adults who fail to differentiate between charisma and merit, and all of society suffers.
Maybe what the other commenter is getting at is that there's no criticism of society you couldn't find some way to project onto some act of parenting or other.
But drawing a line from your pet peeve about the world to one occasional event out of thousands in a kid's life is disproportionate and reductive.
Children fail and children fail to get their way all the time, in hundreds of daily struggles. A few school contests they don't even necessarily find important shouldn't be assumed to move the needle. If a kid grows up rich, that's something that colors their every experience and is more likely to shape a lifelong attitude about what they're entitled to. But that still doesn't mean you have to stereotype them.
Maybe the failure that is being taught to children is the failure of external sources of validation. The sooner a child learns which external sources of validation have merit or value, and which are gamed or captured, the sooner that child learns to trust in their own process over an external authority. I think that is a positive outcome in education.
Everything remotely related to adware is just gross. It's hard to believe that after 10 years of this nothing has changed and the tricks are as dirty as ever. Totally unethical industry and I can't wait for the bubble to collapse.
How long have you been waiting? I think it is here to stay given how quickly it has become prevalent in real life as well as the web. We just can’t do anything as long as we are dependent on them for anything. It sickens me as well, but it can’t be avoided.
>it’s essential that mainstream journalistic institutions reaffirm their bona fides as disinterested purveyors of fact and honest brokers of controversy
This hasn't been true for decades. Almost all modern mainstream journalism is activist journalism. I think it's been normalized to the point that even journalists are unaware of their institutional bias.
