iQuercus

How do I make money? - Get lucky in a Casino.

How do I not lose money? - Don’t gamble.

How do I not not make money? - Take more risks.

A true inversion with a negative works better than the not-not structure, and it is easier to wrap your head around.

No. No correlation.

Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History - Good on a cloudy day

Methodically Processing Systems - Good for a quirky evening (I make this one)

Econtalk - Good for commuting.

BBC’s In Our Time - Good during a shower.

At the cellular level it’s a numbers game. The more enemy combatants, the sicker you will be. The more exposure to the virus, the more viruses you’ll have in your body, the more intense the symptoms.

Hospitals don’t have great access to fresh flowing outside air. So as they fill up with infected people the air just becomes a cesspool of virus.

It’s a good recipe for making a lot of estimation errors. Worse, it will leave you feeling more confident than you should be. Then, when you least expect it, it’ll blow up in your face.

This sounds more like diet marketing. People have such varying success with different diets that one set of foods simply cannot fit all.

Exercise is a different story. The most likely to bring about the improvements you describe.

I think it’s better to know it in your bones and then go back and formalize it with theory and terminology.

Put down the books and websites and articles. Write music.

What does his personality have to do with what he is arguing? Is he using “bad statistical” arguments or not?

Shameless plug, I made a short podcast episode about this, from a systems perspective. It looks at what it takes to clean your teeth...and how systems have a tendency to spiral out this way. It’s a feature of problem solving systems: they generate new/different problems that need to be solved, and therefore propagate the system into something like global collaboration.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-0-cleaning-your-...

It's easy to analyze in a frictionless vacuum.

The question is, can you effectively replace a meeting to discuss the nature of life and existence with a meeting to discuss games and movie fandoms?

Or does that deeper topic interplay with meeting and socializing with people?

Shameless plug, since I recently wrote it: https://medium.com/the-craftsman/the-whoa-how-did-you-do-tha...

Basically, don't forget the human in human computer interaction/UI/UX. It's very easy to come out of the academic perspective on UI/UX design designing exclusively to efficiency formulas and words in a glossary. Keep the user, the human, and their context in mind.

I'm curious, why would you recommend Piketty's Capital for 21st Century as the one economics book?

I have a feeling the pencil will be around after this is no more.

Just because someone is proclaimed "expert" doesn't mean they are good at what they do. This is especially true for the softer fields that Gladwell writes in.

At the end of the day it's up to you to determine if what you are reading is accurate. And if you don't have the tools, resources, or time to do so, you trust in experts at your own risk.

Think about it this way: Suppose my theory is that a fair coin is not actually fair but always lands on heads.

If I flip a coin one million times and only publish the ~500,000 results that show coin toss coming up as "heads," I could lead people to believe that a fair coin will always land on heads.

That's how misleading this bias can be.

But anyone can toss a fair coin, so I'd be found out pretty quick. But with more complicated and murky stuff like psychology this can be a huge problem, especially if people begin using this shaky work as foundation for things like: public policy, how to live their lives, how to do work, etc.

After all they can't just toss a coin to check my work on the more complicated stuff.

This area is not exactly renowned for being a hard, mechanically measurable science, so you will get many different answers as to whether this is a problem at all or not.

The wisest suggestion I've gotten with regard to this is to not fall prey to instantaneous picture. It may even be impossible to have equality in a single slice of time. Rather than looking for single point inequality, look for how the population is moving through the income inequality over time.

Basically, are the same people always in the bottom, middle, and top? If so, that's probably a problem. What's the time any given person spends in the top? Bottom? Middle?

As long as you have continuous movement throughout and no one is stuck, you can at least know that there is some semblance of equality in opportunity even if not outcomes.

Why do you save money?

Eli Schiff, whilst pointing out potentially valid concerns about minimalist designs, is also himself with his articles a symptom of a much larger Soviet-style centralist attitude that seems to pervade the modern design community.

Right now, the Soviet Design System (SDS) has decreed that we must all have minimalist everything. Eventually folks like Eli will get us back to something with more flair and embellishment. And then that will be the correct way, and everyone must do that.

But the question is, when will we start designing for context and people rather than some arbitrary, centrally decided (by the fewest people) paradigm of correct design?

Without trying to make any predictions, I wouldn't underestimate the human appeal of a conversational interface on the basis of its quantifiable inefficiencies. The author applies a narrow engineer's lens to something needing a more human perspective. You can't measure things like this strictly by counting taps and dismissing everything else about a conversation.

Disruption as a concept seems to be a bit of an empirical controversy these days.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-05/did-clay-c...

Source?

It's unwise to extrapolate from one domain into another that doesn't follow the same models/rules.

If I walk 20 miles and my ultimate goal is to get to 10,000 miles, then 20 miles of effort translates into 20 miles of distance covered. It's a linear one-to-one no frills relationship. The units don't even change.

But if I'm doing push ups, my goal of 10,000 is actually a proxy goal for things like upper body strength and physical well being. In that context, the biological impact of 20 push ups x 3 days ≠ 60 push ups x 1 day, and no push ups the next two days.

Dr. Steven Novella on brainwave entrainment, from 2008:

http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/brainwave-entra...

"That is generally where the science ends and the pseudoscience begins. A number of companies and individuals have then extrapolated from the phenomenon of entrainment to claim that altering the brain waves changes the actual functioning of the brain. There is no theoretical or empirical basis for this, however. Entrainment is a temporary effect on the synchronization of neuronal firing – it does not improve or increase brain functioning, it does not change the hardwiring, nor does it cure any neurological disorder. There is no compelling evidence for any effect beyond the period of entrainment itself."

I do like the "Cyberpunk" atmosphere of some of the music. But their other claims require some extraordinary evidence.

For example, does this impart any more benefit than me listening to my favorite working music whilst working? It doesn't seem to. But I haven't had a chance to sift through their supposed "180 studies"

Even into the summer of 1914, post-assassination, there were articles like this coming up. The fact is we can't predict the future. Just because less people are dying in battle today doesn't mean 180,000,000 won't die in one year in a possible war in the near future.

To my knowledge, Apple ran a program called "The Apple University Consortium," among others, where they would tap into work of higher education research.

It's my understanding these efforts continue, you just don't hear a whole lot (if anything) about it publicly.

Check it out, you'll see Apple quietly listed on several university websites, CMU for example: http://www.cmu.edu/corporate/partnerships/cic/tenants.html

The problem with broad history is that some things interest some people, some don't. Ideally, you could let students interested in a particular historical topic focus on that.

The research in this area is still too inconclusive to prescribe how to listen to music for productivity. Not to mention the act of "listening to music" can vary dramatically from person to person. For some it involves picking music from thousands of choices and making choices takes time and drains valuable mental resources. They start spending more time picking music than getting work done.

One has to wonder, if your goal is productivity, could it be more effective to just have a cup of coffee/tea? Maybe with some cream and sugar to help get some glucose to your brain as well?

In effect yes they are essentially the same thing. One of the (potentially annoying) things you'll see going through the literature is that the term has very broad meaning. Other times it'll be a very narrow term. The broadest is basically "random noise can be used to improve signal." Under that definition, dithering would be a form of stochastic resonance. This biology article actually touches on the definition issues.(http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jou...)

There's also a case to be made that the definition of SR should be narrowed, and a lot of what's called resonance isn't resonance at all.(http://www.nipslab.org/files/PRE1995-SR-and-dithering-p4691_...)