cheatsheet

I think consciously maintaining a collective categorization of entities, or independently maintaining a collective categorization of entities is radical. More people might discover abstract math on their own, simply because it hasn't been purified down to it's symbolic form. The relationships naturally arise out of our own decisions and plans in how we mentally construct relationships between entity forms, and notice the differences and variations between person to person.

I think tradition is important, but so is learning how to think totally differently in a fundamental way - and I think that's what these educators see in this specific case as radical. They see it as a creating a foundation of how to think first, then it is followed by lesson plans. It may affect the way people learn to organize and think about information, or it may not. Maybe people in the future will refine information down to essential subject form, because the chaos in connectivity between information forms has become too complex to reason about, and consequently becomes too complex to do anything with (aside from think). These things happen already. The difference is a magnitude of scale. Will an entire generation be raised with these characteristics?

>>Brag until you Fail

AKA "How to lose friends and annoy everybody"

I do that too, but I still notice patterns. Then the mechanic for constructing of 'anti-patterns' for a choice mechanic is patterned itself.

I just do my stuff for thinking new thoughts. I did a zen thing where I deconstructed every concept and word, and essentially "broke" it in my mind - gave it no power in it's meaning, and thus could not use it in reasoning. I did this over and over and over.

The important part is that I didn't need a reason to destroy the meaning - because I've always lived maintaining my theories until they are proven incorrect, while accumulating information to build on them. But some stuff doesn't prove itself incorrect, because it's a self perpetuating pattern.

That's where I became paranoid about viral ideas, things that are true simply by the virtue of their construction. The construction is considered correct, therefore application of the construction can never be questioned. And I don't know if that really means anything about human existence, but I know it pisses me off when I feel like I've been spoon-fed a way to think.

Mine is useful for sitting alone in my room, staring at a wall of books. I don't really have a lunch problem. I eat lunch at my desk.

> I'm always looking for any dumb excuse to pick one arbitrary option over another

Flip a coin.

I sometimes get paranoid that cultural belief systems, cultural environments and all the knowledge of humanity has indoctrinated me into a specific modality of thinking that is so well formed and 'correct' that I don't even think to question it's influence on me, because that would be ridiculous, right? It's just so hard to argue against, because it's like a wall of reason, logic, observation, and rationality. That, or pretending I have magic powers - which I do.

I find a lot of beauty in the pedantry and borderline neurosis of effective organization, but I suppose that is not what you meant by a curation of bureaucracy.

Fulfilling, imaginative, and measurably impactful work is hard. It is nearly impossible for a single person to produce it consistently. It is not guaranteed to be created. There is no formula or set of guidelines, way to live, or belief system that leads to it. Some of the best work comes from necessity, others seemingly from lethargy.

Some bullshit work is more like distributing the tasks that a single person can no longer manage, because everyone is tired. I recall Graeber making a point about the number of hours worked per week, but even then. The expectation to dazzle reliably is a huge undertaking, and I certainly do not know of any way to do it without risking burn out every few years. And that's me speaking as a perfectionist, overachiever - who at the end of every day will still push myself harder than the day before, even when it hurts. I learned an unfortunate lesson that pain and passion doesn't always bear fruit - and in that I found destruction instead.

It's more about having humility towards every person that contributes to a 'bullshit' job, which the macroscopic view and big data tend to heavily ignore. People are not data points, and their lives have immeasurable value even when they have to drag through every day. We don't have a control society for comparison. That said, part of me agrees with you, but I think speculation is mostly useless aside from guiding your own personal direction.

No, I'm not suggesting that. I'm in a forum talking about things related to my trauma, aren't I? Shouldn't that be triggering me into a horrible downward spiral, if I was suggesting this?

I got better. Some people are still in the process of getting better. I am asking for empathy and compassion for those people, if you have the capacity to recognize that they may need it. Otherwise, just do your best to be a decent human being.

I don't know if people who have not experienced it (or learned how to recognize the pattern of subconscious association) will ever understand it.

It sucks being sucked into your own black hole and I do not believe trauma victims walk into their own black holes willingly. It's a state of mind and it can be learned to be dealt with, but it requires strength.

There are lots of people who live assuming they are in control of every thought and reaction they have. Sometimes this is a rationalization to prove to themselves that they will always have control: it is meant as an affirmation because they fear losing control.

But it denies the experiences, intuitions, and most importantly - the emotional, hormonal, and physically chemical responses of others. We are human. But we are animals too, and as animals we are subject to some 'laws' of our own physicality. People are supposed to learn coping strategies to deal with stress and negative emotions. But trauma victims rarely learn these strategies, and instead learn to pick up on tiny red flags and measure people intuitively on a scale of abuse potential (which is typically heavily biased by correlative relationships).

Do you want to live in a world where everyone is perpetually judged as enemy/non-enemy, but you are constantly told by culture that your intuitions are ridiculous and irrational? Because as a trauma victim, the conditioned response based on experience tells you different even if you are a very smart trauma victim (in which you know that it's based on an outlier from which you can not judge the entire populace). Still, it can be hard to override the physical response to this mechanism - such as hypertension and other indicators of adrenaline release.

I am sort of on the fence on this. On one hand, I do not like pursuing ignorance. On the other, I do not objectively know the difference between a mind that is repeatedly triggered by random noise that can immediately bring my mind back into a state of flipping between catatonia and hyper-stress/hyper-alert, and a mind that is able to control information flow and pursue it's goals (such as a phd and happiness in life).

I've been in recovery from realizing and recognizing the effects of my trauma for almost 4 years now. You talking about rape does not bring me back into the mental state it once did. But I don't know how I got here, besides through time (and sheer determination to be the best I can be, and not let my past haunt me). But that said, if you reminded me of my abuser, I don't think I could control my reaction so much. And hyper anxiety / reactive shutdown is not something that is easy to remove oneself from.

I think your attitude is very intelligent, but I think you need to add a little more empathetic wiggle room for things you may not understand entirely.

I expressed my own personal concern.

This conversation will not be about equivocating one tragedy to another. That is a red herring.

The only thing I am concerned with is how secure / exploitable they are from a computer security perspective. I assume there will be some kind of link between the vehicular peripherals to vehicle control and configuration. Then I worry about who is actually controlling the car. I'm open to AI driven cars with redundant intelligent networks, but people are smart too, and some people are not nice people. How do you know that the entire system is functioning as expected? I'm pretty sure that's NP hard.

I've never gotten my IQ tested, but when I read about studies like these - they usually demoralize me from fear of competitive behavior. I think this leads to low self esteem, and the imagining that I have a low IQ (high marks through schooling and post graduate education, MSc, possible imposter syndrome) as my default attitude. It can be a self defeating attitude, but what it usually does is make me argue with people about IQ tests, and explain why they are not necessarily indicative of intelligence, individually or globally.

I can imagine that merely the act of measuring IQ has significant effect on the population. I can not imagine a population that exists without it, but I imagine it would also have a huge effect on society, as you similarly hypothesize about the 1-3 point increase across the population globally.

I think programming can be very mentally taxing. I prefer empathy over dominance.

> don't code to exhaustion to satisfy some sort of Asperger's or OCD issues.

... why not? What if nothing else works?

> But however you slice it, you cannot get past this one fact: it is an unnatural thing to sit in front of a glowing box for 4, 6, 8 hours a day pecking on little things with your fingers. This type of work has never existed before in the history of our species, and we were not made to do it. I think that's why we have to be very careful not just about the amount of time we code, but all the other things that go with it.

Agriculture and medicine are unnatural too. So are exercise machines, standing desks, and memory foam beds. So are books, ships, planes, trains, and bicycles. So is math - thinking about math is very unnatural.

> I think sometimes people who enjoy programming and also get paid very well to work as a programmer forget just how lucky they are. Most people don't love their jobs.

I forget this all the time, except when I'm programming. I really do love to code, but when I'm away from the computer and I don't feel like coding, I'm actually typically really depressed. At some points in my life, I was lucky to be able to say that I was still alive. Just because someone can get super excited about math and computers doesn't mean that their life is perfect and full of luck either.

This really depends on where you draw the line between knowledge and non knowledge. Our entirety scientific body is the best explanation we have for the phenomenon we as a social species have observed. Much of what we call 'knowledge' - like maths or physics, is actually human produced culture (in that it is taught after it has been discovered). It is subject to being incorrect (although it would take a very powerful set of observations, deductions, definitions, and measurements to prove it incorrect).

I think honestly, the line between nature and nurture really depends on what you believe makes you human, conscious, and existing with awareness. You can technically define the entire existence of the universe as a process of changing states of information (some of which may not be measurable).

A lot of philosophy also deals with this idea, but it's not like anyone takes the humanities seriously in the age of data.

At some points it certainly seems like we need to measure the pain in our foot and fit it to a curve, to know we've shot ourselves in it.

I can not understand or empathize with the intent of 'promising enlightenment'.

Do you think that if 'a given organization' figures out a way to actually offer enlightenment, or the illusion of, and people pay for this, that it is guaranteed successful?

I guess I see social organizations as 'structures that produce things because they are the things that are the easiest or most likely to structure/build'. I do not see this as any different than what the rest of humanity does. It's just a being in that place at that time and doing what humans naturally seem to do to survive, sort of thing.

There's a lot of emotions and hype that conflate the actual mechanics of social production. But most of those labels are ephemeral, some get discarded and others remain. That's just life in general though, I suppose.

I suppose the question I would ask is "why has humanity in general created and supported such cultural machines that prosper from the continual promise of enlightenment?"

Can't you frame every social organization in this kind of light? Stuff that people spend their lives on - they make it sound simple so other people understand it - this forms a 'social group dynamic' through the action of communication or information transfer. If other people understand it, then they participate and contribute to the growth of 'stuff'.

As a person who is only one person, society only changes when one person can reveal or demonstrate to others the concepts that form the ground of the argument.

Otherwise it's just crap stuffed up in your own head.

For him, it is more irritating to live in a world that thinks it is okay to regularly violate people through crossing boundaries of what they consider personal information. For you, it is more irritating to go into a public space and have to deal with other people's opinions.

Everyone is fine with things as long as things are perfect for them. But you can't just wear blinders over your eyes when other people are obviously suffering, and just because you can't empathize with why those people are suffering doesn't make their suffering any less deserving or worthy of understanding, lest you expect the world to treat your suffering in the same cold, disconnected, blinded manner.

I'm sorry he embarrassed you, he would probably embarrass me too in the day to day minutia. But I absolutely stand by him mentally, because I believe and value the world he believes in and values. In theory everything is honky-dory. In practice, society and the individual actually has to deal with problems as they exist. Otherwise they fester and turn into more difficult problems that take a long, long time to understand - some of which are very very difficult to understand after enough time has passed and enough damage has been done.

I can't tell you how much I as a programmer and computer scientist, how much I have benefited from the movement that came from Richard Stallman. I can't tell you how much my mind has benefited from it. I don't care that his actions contradict his core philosophy. They are attempts at connecting a gap between theory and real life.

If the source of code was as privatized and closed as some kinds of knowledge can be, I'd be nothing. I consider it a privilege to share an existence with a person who has helped shaped the world in that way, no matter how annoying or crotchety or irritating he may become. There is always a difference between the ideal a person represents and the person they are. It comes at a high cost to be a public figure, but some people see the value of the world they want to create for everyone to be worth more than that - and maybe that's what the people around him who allow him to use their cellphones see too.

There are the people who grew up watching the privacy invasion happen, and there are the people who grew up with it. I felt often like I was in the middle, but bad experience made me realize that privacy is something worth fighting for.

We've picked the low hanging fruit of clever applications of the data analysis of 'the general population' to recommend us better movies, better things to purchase, search engines adapted to our tastes, and so on.

The absence of privacy is an absence of a safe mind. I grew up enjoying privacy on the internet (or the illusion of) because I was able to learn who I was, and I was able to have my own voice and my own opinions. When my mind became convinced that that was only an illusion, it mentally crippled me. I wasn't able to follow thought paths I deemed unsafe. The definition of unsafe comes from a collection of reasoning (or rationalization) that is mostly irrational - being that it is contextually formed without careful analysis and methodical direction. When one feels like every machine is stalking them, and can eventually be connected back to a person who can make a judgement on that individual's life path without the awareness and consent of the individual, I think we've made a big mistake as an intelligent species.

I used to think like this. But the idea of no consciousness, the complete lack of everything, total emptiness, absolute void - pure nothing, to be nothing, to cease to exist in all forms. That can appeal to a particular kind of someone. It is a sense of eternity, but it is eternity at rest.

I have similar issues, and I've read scientific opinions [1] theorizing that people diagnosed with aspergers may actually have extreme empathy to the point where it paralyzes them.

I've been diagnosed with aspergers by one specialist. I had experience that sort of wreaked havoc on my life, so I've learned to carefully not conflate the term empathy with 'mind reading'. It takes a lot of practice, but you can actually learn to (not turn off, but subdue, I suppose is the best wording) the voice in your head that flags every face, body expression, tone of voice, topic of conversation, etc - to a more appropriate level, a more course granularity (depending on the relationship). If you want. I used to memorize conversations and attempt to predict what people were thinking/wanted/needed, and based my action and decision from this prediction. I was very unhappy. I felt like I had no self, my mind was just consumed with the needs of everyone else.

I am also a domestic abuse survivor, so I think my obsession with people behavior, feelings, and thoughts has been 'on alert', hypervigilant. At some point I had to decide that I wanted to study code and math more than I wanted a false sense of people security. I am less depressed because of it, but I also avoid close relationships. It is easy to fall into a black hole when others are suffering because it is so incredibly sad. But I just try to be strong and supportive now, because the world needs people like that too.

[1] - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2518049/

I think if you spend enough time appreciating the core functionality over the superficial form, your aesthetics change, and the superficial form that denotes quality functionality is what is considered 'better designed'.

It's a bridge between design and engineering. They are often two halves of the same coin.

> the thing Apple fans don't have to worry about is which machine to get because even the worst Apple device is miles ahead of the non Apple alternatives

This is very subjective to define. It's true, if you like apple, and all you are going to choose is stuff from apple, then you don't have to worry about examining choices in depth because there aren't very many. But quality is a subjective thing.

I personally find almost every computer that exists today horrifically boring, compared to when I was growing up. The jump from no computer to computer has been much more exciting than each iteration of slightly better computer. That's really what I call 'miles ahead'.

Smartphones with unlimited data were slightly revolutionary for me, in a "I can listen to music and walk anywhere I want without getting lost" kind of thing, but honestly, I haven't felt anything close to the feelings I used to feel as a kid. Trying to figure out how the entire internet is structured and comparing that to a giant computer is slightly more exciting. Comparing data models to the human brain is slightly exciting. But miles ahead sounds like we're making leaps when we aren't. And you can go ahead and argue that every leap is made up of tiny steps, but when you fade in and out of technology enough, even then, some things really feel like leaps, and other things really feel like steps. And I think that's subjective, so I'm biased, but I find it very hard to have opinions without bias, if not impossible.

I really look forward to when we, as academics, historically document and seriously examine the various phases of the internet, from a variety of alternative perspectives.

It's interesting while it's being built, but it's also interesting to look back and reflect on the bigger picture, outside of the buzzwords and technical terminology used to pull the creation through, and make it actualized.

I look forward when critics and theorists start thinking about the goal of the internet from a social perspective, a collective cultural subconscious directive. I look forward to all the kinds of art history theoretical methodology used to explain the significance of Picasso or Manet in their respective time periods, to use the same kinds of methodology to reason about the relation between the internet and everything that is not the internet.

It's interesting when some information gets washed away and other information is retained through time, and it isn't always the stuff that is indexed that is retained. The idea that art critics can even agree to call the same collection of works "cubism" or "impressionism" fascinates me, and I look forward to the same kinds of invented vocabularies being used to describe various processes, movements, and patterns throughout internet culture (way beyond studying memes and tropes - there are so many layers to the collective psyche of the internet, it is dumbfounding).

I don't know what geocities represents. I'd have to define it's 'kind' and compare and contrast it to other 'kinds' throughout time. I know this was meant to be a humorous comment, but I love to weave theories, and some of them even turn out to be descriptive of the nature of things.

Both exist.

Postmodernism is a lot more relevant to the digital age than anything, imo. It emphasizes pointing out ways of thinking and doing, which I think is especially relevant when we are actually automating most of our ways of thinking and doing.

I know it gets a bad rap because of the ridiculous examples, but the real point of it engages the viewer into a serious kind of contemplation concerning the massive infrastructure that exists and how that shapes our culture, thoughts, understanding, action..

We have the expectation that the generations to come will accept this infrastructure and what it says about how the human mind functions. But much of it is founded on belief systems of how thought and action operate in the real world. Most of these systems are baseless, the idea of a base obfuscated only by the sheer complexity involved in understanding each layer.

Okay, but those ad hominem attacks won't stop some people from training their machines better than implementations of these algorithms can manage the complexities between data kinds and data object noise.

Or something like a public forum or google exists, and lots and lots of people continue to hack and talk about things in order to fuzzily define what they think the author meant by a certain term, in the case that it's meaning was lost, relabeled, mistranslated, or otherwise changed somewhere along the way of technological development.

If you understand mostly what everything else is in a system, then people basically swarm around the behavior of something undefined in order to fuzzily define it. It sticks and it does not stick - it depends on whether programmers rewrite the system or the word is forgotten about on some super secure layer of abstraction, or whether it's the word that everyone is teaching and talking about and naming things after.

I don't think words can really express this process, it's pervasive and paradoxical to it's description. You have to assume you understand everything else, before you can label something truly new. Otherwise it's just the same amorphous blob, and the labels keep swapping, and no concepts are really applicable, because they are only observable from a macroscopic perspective of abstraction, except when they are being used, right there in front of the code. It's always the same balance of 'i know some stuff' and 'i don't know some stuff'.

I only read the end of the article, but it seems the author agrees with you.

> Don't fall in to Tim's trap. Great developers create great software not because they follow the strictures of some methodology but because they are truly great, gifted artisans.

But I think this concept of self knowledge is integral to Buddhism at the least, and I know understanding it can be part of swallowing an iron hot ball in zen.