hegemonicon

Indeed. Scott Adams is one of the most frustrating bloggers I know - he frequently makes sound points, but far too often you're blinded by a glaring error he makes in the first sentence or two to ever see them.

Skip the first paragraph, and the rest of this post is reasonably well argued.

The world is a big place - annual lead production is approximately 7 million metric tons.

Source: http://www.financialexpress.com/news/lead-uses-that-go-back-...

For those like me who find it difficult to parse things like this without examples, here's an explanation of how the No-Free-Lunch Theorem applies to evolution (specifically, why it doesn't apply):

http://www.talkorigins.org/design/faqs/nfl/#nflt

If I'm reading something, I don't want to be distracted by the fancy text layout and bright shiny colors. I just want clearly presented text with a minimum of complexity.

In rare cases special formatting can enhance the effect or help interpret something written, but in most cases it adds nothing except clutter. I found this article nearly unreadable because of the "interesting" and "exciting" way they presented it.

The millenium bridge was not simply a case of a bridge designed in 2-d instead of 3-d (it would have had to be designed in 3-d to account for wind loading). It was a math error, but it was much more complicated - essentially, the slight sideways motion people imparted to the bridge while walking caused the bridge to sway slightly, which in turn caused the people to walk in step with it, creating a positive feedback loop.

And more recently: http://www.slate.com/id/2235504/

This is a very hard problem to solve, as the very act of marking something signals "Hey, there's something important here!" The natural curiosity of whoever finds it is likely to override any respect they might have for the warnings of a long dead civilization.

Malcolm Gladwell has a rather long history of being corrected by experts. See here: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/122/is-the-tipping-point... and here: http://www.dr5.org/judge-posner-on-blink-the-power-of-thinki...

Full disclosure: I am a Gladwell fan, though I recognize that he is more storyteller than scientist.

Yup.

A list is really a lens for viewing a particular chunk of the world. It's "here are all the things that have this particular characteristic", be it generals in an army or items you want to buy at the store. The characteristic tells you what to items to put on the list, and the items you put on it in turn tell you more about the characteristic itself. Going round and round like that is a good way to learn how the world works.

It's one thing to say "create something challenging and interesting". But just that by itself won't be enough - it's gotta be something you're really passionate about, otherwise "interesting" won't be enough to carry you through that 9th month of staying up till 1 am working on it after you get home from work and the kids have gone to sleep.

Your life is like a house - you can't just pick up the whole thing and move it without destroying it. You have to tear it down and rebuild it carefully, piece by piece. So my vague, generic advice is as follows: figure out what you're passionate about. If you had 10 million dollars and didn't have to work, what would you spend your time on? If you could choose a life out of all possible lives, what would it look like? Once you've figured that out, take small steps everyday to move yourself there.

Figure out what new responsibilities you can take on, and which ones you have that you can drop. Look for a new job. Go back to school. Start a side-business. Write a novel. It sounds like you have all the tools available to do whatever you want with your life, provided you're willing to put in the nights and weekends to make it happen while still taking care of the responsibilities you already have.

We only get one life - there's no excuse for not making it as fantastic as possible. Good luck.

What's he not getting? The current method of news distribution, where papers put their content up for free on the web and continue to take punishing losses isn't sustainable. From what I understand, online advertising alone simply won't cover the cost of running a newsroom - some sort of pay model is inevitable.

Probably the same reason everyone else seems to - it runs completely counter to our intuitions about how the world works. As far as I know (and my knowledge of QM can charitably be described as 'nonexistant') if you ignore intuitions and simply resolve the math, the Everett interpretation is what pops out of the equations.

Needs more explanation on the actual mechanism at work. There is a preponderance of evidence of the instructiveness of failure, and we have a fairly good understanding of the underlying mechanism behind that (the dopamine prediction error signal).

See here: http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2009/10/learning_from_mistake...

And here: http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2009/07/over_at_the_times_ben...

Anyone have a link to the original (ungated) paper?

I didn't read the whole thing, so correct this if it's wrong but...

He hasn't dropped out at all - he's just found a way to live within the system such that he can take from it without giving back. He benefits enormously from the very system he denigrates. If anything that's a statement of how amazing our society is, that it's successful enough that people can live largely off its freebies and its waste products.

I'm sure for some peope society is awful and living away from it really is the very best option. But society wasn't foisted on us without our consent. At one point we were ALL living off the land - and we didn't like it. So we built civilization.

Does anyone know of any estimates of rates of depression say, 75-100-150 years ago? Depression seems to be a disease of civilization, but as far as I know it's not clear if it's rooted in something chemical (as this article suggests) or psychological (we simply have trouble finding meaning in the sorts of lives we live today).

I'm sorry you didn't like my blog (though I feel you're a bit uncharitable in your summary), and that you felt I was making some sort of attempt to foist my ideas on you. My moniker is actually derived from the greek word 'hegemonikon' which translates roughly to 'that which guides' - it was what the greeks believed was the guiding part of the mind or soul. But I digress.

I probably should have elaborated more to avoid the 'snarky' interpretation. As best I can tell from your comments, your intellect more or less prevented you from learning to socialize, and so now you handle most social interaction with gloves and forceps. This is the sort of thing that builds up over years and is probably rooted deep in childhood experiences, and can't be undone by simply reading a forum comment telling you to 'be more empathetic' or 'recognize the values of others'. Subconscious processes are stubborn and resistant to change. If you really want to change your outlook, I'd imagine you need a long period of careful deconstruction of what produced it, followed by building it back up out of the thought processes you already have (along with a few new tools). Since this seems to be more or less what it is that psychologists do, seeking one out could be helpful.

Just my 2 cents of course, so take it with a grain of salt - you weren't wrong when you told me to go see an educator :)

I don't share your particular circumstances, but I know social isolation all too well - I wish you the best.

You have psychological problems. Go see a psychologist.

It's easy to discount that when we have the benefit of 400 years of his work being verifiably true. Without that, the fact that he was an alchemist WOULD put a dent in his credibility, and you would be RIGHT in doubting the quality of his work. That doesn't mean you're excused from checking if it's correct, but having doubts about it's quality is perfectly reasonable.

Having beliefs that are out there doesn't prove that you're a crackpot, but it does slide the probability in that direction.

That said, a quick skim of the article doesn't reveal any glaring errors - it seems to be a good analysis.

Worth pointing out that busy beavers have the potential to be alot more than just 'interesting'. If you knew what the busy beaver numbers were for a given number of states, it could be used to solve various unsolved mathematical problems.

For example, Goldbach's conjecture states that every integer greater than 2 is the sum of 2 primes. So far it has been resistant to being proved. But if you could convert it to a computer program with say, 500 states, and you knew the busy beaver number for 500, you could check it by running the program that number of cycles. If you did and the program didn't halt, then it would NEVER halt, and Goldbach's conjecture would be proven true.

Of course, BB(500) would certainly be an unfathomably huge number, so there would be practical problems running a computer program that number of cycles. But if you had sufficient computing power, knowing the busy beaver numbers would be an amazing mathematical tool.

Just replying to say that anyone who read the original article should go read this - it meticulously lays out why the idea of p-zombies is utterly incoherent.

A meta-analysis of 85 years worth of studies on the subject places IQ as the best predictor (conscientiousness comes in 4th)

See here: http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/10/selecting-tal...

It's inherent in a synchronus communication medium like a phone call. With letters and email, you can respond at your leisure, but with a phone call you have to make an instant decision whether to answer it or not. Seeing as people both A) don't want to be rude to their friends and co-workers and B) don't want to have their lives dictated by a ringing phone, white lies ("sorry, no service", "sorry, didn't see your call") are more or less the most reasonable solution. They keep the benefits of instantaneous access and mitigate most of the drawbacks.

It seems like the big players that give away their content for free (Hulu, youtube, most newspapers, etc) seem to be struggling financially whereas the ones charging for it (netflix, itunes music store, WSJ, economist) seem to be doing well. Perhaps the 'free' business model isn't quite what it's cracked up to be.

This may get voted down as it hasn't gone through anything resembling a review but...

My blog. It's the first thing I've ever done not on the school->college->job path that gets set for us when we're young that I've stuck with and done (I think) a GOOD job on.

The amount of energy put out by Wi-Fi is absolutely dwarfed by the radio, television, and cell phone EM signals that we are swamped in at all times. And none of them put out enough energy to do anything but raise our temperature an immeasurably small amount.

See here: http://scienceblogs.com/builtonfacts/2009/09/wifi_and_radiat...

The most famous study confirming this is the one where they give two groups of kids relatively easy math problems. The first group they tell "wow, you must be really smart to complete all those!", the second group they tell "wow, you must have worked really hard to complete all those!". They then give them another set of problems far above their skill level. The second group of kids, the 'hard-workers', work much longer at the problems before giving up on them. And when both groups are given another set of relatively easy problems, the first group's performance takes a nosedive.

The margins on netbooks are currently so small that they're essentially a commodity, and apple has never been a commodity company.

Netbooks are clearly popular, so it seems unlikely that apple simply isn't interested in the market. The question is "can apple create a netbook that's differeniated enough from the rest of the pack that they can get the margins they want on it." The fact that one doesn't seem to be in development yet suggests the answer is 'no', but they may just be focusing their resources elsewhere.

Add in the word 'tweet' and 'retweet' and you're sitting at around 3% of all tweets (give or take). For reference, this is about 5-10 times higher than any other common term I checked (facebook, google, internet, car, obama, etc.) For futher reference, the words 'work' and 'new' both come in around the same amount (3-4%)

A good post on how this fits in with the War on Drugs can be found here: http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/10/19/is_obama_wind...

Learning through trial and error is so damn useful because that's how our brain is designed to learn.

Whenever we make a prediction, dopamine neurons in our brain start to fire, triggering a feeling of expectation. If we predict right, we get a surge of dopamine and some positive reinforcement. If we get it wrong, the dopamine neurons stop firing which, aside from making us feel like crap, serves as a signal that the prediction needs to be revised. Normal learning operates by consciously acquiring information and hoping it eventually filters down into the subconscious. Trial and error, on the other hand, puts a direct line into our subconscious - it's much more efficient.