655 karma · joined March 2, 2012
Having tried it, I think singing is poorly suited to self-learning. In my experience, vocal lessons are designed around identifying and overcoming problems and habits that are unique to each person. Identifying problems is done by ear or by observing subtleties in body posture, which require experience and training.
What I've seen is that journalists often seem to think that if social scientists can measure something, it proves that it is real. A typical headline will be something like "Studies show that 29% of us are addicted to social media." What they miss is that these studies starts with researchers making value judgements, and those judgements aren't more legitimate because a researcher made them.
This kind of research doesn't answer the question "Is social media an addiction?" It tries to answer the question, "If you think social media is an addiction, how serious is the problem?" That's why you can create a satirical measure that answers the question "How serious is the problem of friend addiction?"
The addiction classification is especially difficult. Often we call something an addiction if someone routinely engages in behavior where the negatives outweigh the positives. But when there's no common standard of measurement between the pros and cons, another value judgement has to be made about how to weight the various consequences.
The author seems to believe that there's an essential zero-sum relationship between form and functionality, i.e. by removing "bells and whistles", you've somehow improved the finding of information. That doesn't make sense to me.
Empathy isn’t a primitive spontaneous moral emotion that everyone assumes it is. In real life, our empathetic reactions are determined by abstract moral beliefs about whose suffering is valid or not.
1. Ordinary people reject expertise in ways that are incredibly stupid and harmful 2. Experts have expanded the scope of what they feel entitled to have opinions about well beyond their training and experience
> “Stitch this cut in my leg, but don’t lecture me about my diet.”
> “Help me beat this tax problem, but don’t remind me that I should have a will.”
Whether to change your diet, whether to have a will or not - these are value judgments. They tell me about how I ought to live, that I should prefer one thing over another. Tax attorneys and doctors have no special training in making value judgments. This isn't very different from a financial planner telling you to retire in Arizona because there are a lot of golf courses, and he personally likes to play golf.
Completely agree. It's a bizarre suggestion, to just arbitrarily drop one of the most important tools. What if traffic lights were designed this way?
The other thing that annoys me is his pessimism and nihilism of seeing human beings as fatally irrational. One response that I found interesting was the book The Enigma of Reason by two evolutionary psychologists who argue that reason evolved in humans specifically because we are social animals, and the purpose of reason is to persuade others. It's why we are so much better at catching other people's poor reasoning than our own. The implication is that reason is designed for group settings. Showing that isolated individuals reason badly is like riding a bike on an ice skating rink and saying the bike sucks. We test human reasoning in conditions its not designed for and then come away with an overly pessimistic view of humanity.
He defines intuition as thinking you know without knowing how you know. OK, great. Now the example: guessing someone's GPA based on the fact that they started reading early. Like most people, I guessed it would be on the high side. Kahneman calls this "intuition that is generated automatically with high confidence." And that's… just wrong.
I have very little confidence in my guess, and it certainly isn't generated automatically. It's based on a belief—which turns out to be wrong—that early reading has some relationship with college GPA.
So maybe in this example, he is using the dictionary definition of "intuition", which is basically non-conscious reasoning. He thinks this shows the problem with intuition, but again, that's just wrong.
I didn't get the answer wrong because I failed to reason consciously. It's because my belief about the relationship between early reading and GPA was wrong. If I take his advice and don't trust my intuition, and carefully and logically reason my way to the answer, guess what? I'm still wrong because my information is wrong.
His explanation of when to trust your intuition is similarly flawed. He basically says you can trust your intuition when you have good information. Well yeah. That's a generic statement that goes for almost any method of drawing conclusions about the world, and doesn't help us understand when intuition is useful or not useful.
There's a school of thought that says that portraying moral complexity is a more mature, realistic approach to storytelling than simplistic black-and-white narratives where the villains are pure evil and the heroes are pure good. Part of the reason for doing that is so that we, the audience, realize that although we might think of ourselves as good, we are capable of doing bad things. We learn that moral purity and moral certainty is a form of self-deception. Think about the moral certainty of war, for example.
Let's look at how this plays out in the real world. Someone gets dumped because they were a terrible partner. We hope that the pain of loss motivates them to do better in their next relationship. They briefly feel bad, but start using the technique of "negative reappraisal" (the more common term is "blaming the other person"). This rapidly decreases their distress in the short term, but it also makes them avoid looking at their behavior and making changes, so they make the same mistakes in their next relationship, and the cycle repeats.
It's natural to feel grief when you lose something in your life that was important, valuable and made you happy. You could shortcut that process by convincing yourself it didn't really make you happy, but that is really nothing more than a form of escapism. The pain of loss is one of the most important signals that something impacted your happiness in an enduring way, and that's necessary for making the right decisions in the future.
Another aspect of gig economy companies controlling networking: they typically ban workers from communicating directly with customers. Ostensibly it's for safety reasons, but the real reason is most likely to prevent workers and customers from circumventing the fees. The result is that workers are not able to develop a regular set of clients which could provide referrals, etc.
According to this, Seattle has 50.7 million square feet of Class A office space. Amazon's 8.1 million square feet is 16%. There are 53 million square feet of Class B office space.
It does call into question the feasibility of the book's objective of correcting human biases and cognitive errors. We've been trying to do that for 2500 years.
In my experience, the harder it is to dissolve a relationship, the worse it is. There's no incentive for good behavior because the other person has to stick with you no matter what. Adult relationships with siblings and parents are often quite toxic for this reason.
"minimalis[m/t]" - 2 mentions in 11 interviews, Billy Sweeney (described as having a "minimalist aesthetic"), Sascha Grief (mentions "preserving the previous version's minimalism")
"Japan" - 1 mention in 11 interviews, Sascha Grief (described as "Living in Osaka, Japan.")
"taste" - 1 mention in 11 interviews, Timothy Achumba ("As designers, taste and preference can only take you so far.")
You said "the questions are almost entirely about their taste". It looks like most of the interviews have the same/similar questions, and very few seem are about taste. I've taken some of the more common ones and grouped them into topics below. It seems to me that only the music question (1 of 24) is about taste. Even a much looser categorization does not seem to support your description of these interviews as "entirely" about taste. I would say the majority of the interview focus on tools, process and the job.
BIOGRAPHICAL (3): What do you do? What led you into design? How do you keep improving yourself as a designer?
TOOLS AND PROCESS (9): What does a typical day look like? Describe your working environment and hardware setup? What apps do you have in your dock? What apps do you have on your iPhone? What’s your design process? What do you use to plan initial design concepts? What apps do you use when designing? Do you have a cool design trick/hack/shortcut? How do you go about testing your design or gathering feedback?
WORK (4): What pieces of work are you most proud of? Where do you go to get inspired? What’s a great website for inspiration? What product have you recently seen that made you think this is great design?
TASTE (1): What music do you listen to when designing?
JOB AND COMPANY (6): Why did you join your company? What’s it like working at your company? What design challenge do you face at your company? How do you handle design disagreements at your company? Is your company currently looking for designers? Any tips on designers getting a job at your company?
ADVICE (1): Any advice for ambitious designers?
With 'literal': don't stand by the wall
The Protestant work ethic emerged from the Calvinist doctrine of predestination (who is saved and damned is decided by God in advance) and the belief that accumulating material wealth was a sign of having been chosen by God for salvation.
> when people choose to believe the all-pervasive Western media, movie, and music refrain that success is measured by material wealth
And yet the US is one of the least materialistic countries in the developed world:
https://www.ipsos-na.com/news-polls/pressrelease.aspx?id=635...
Restricting education to what's needed for employment creates a class division between high and low education groups. Social decisions become dominated by expert language that's incomprehensible to the majority, creating conditions for a populist backlash.
To put it differently, what if I point an unloaded gun at someone an pull the trigger? No harm is done, but if I believed the gun was loaded, the moral calculus would change. The reality that no one was harmed or even in danger is not necessarily decisive. What I believe to be true at that moment is the difference between a prank and attempted murder.
Consumers buy tickets to a DJ's show, DJ pays indie label, label pays artist. So three things should be clear: first, DJs aren't on Soundcloud to get signed to a major label, they are trying to drive ticket sales; second, unknown DJs don't use Soundcloud to promote themselves because ticket buyers must be local.
Finally, amateur artists don't care about developing a following like YouTube stars because their music is sold to DJs, not to listeners. Part of the appeal of a DJ is that you hear great tracks at their events that you never heard before, so they aren't going to want to buy viral Soundcloud hits that the audience has already heard.
In short, the mainstream music economy is driven by MP3 sales/streams directly to listeners. The underground music economy is mostly about event ticket sales, and Soundcloud is valuable to artists if it can drive ticket sales. That's why its current monetization strategy is mostly about telling artists which cities their fans are in. Frankly, if I were Soundcloud, my next step would be to build a ticketing platform.
But you know what? Andy Budd knows that. So let's just call it what it is: a lie. My respect for the man has been lowered.
In light of the fact that increasing wealth has diminishing returns in terms of utility, what if the desire for extreme wealth is simply the desire for power? How much power inequality is acceptable in a democratic society? Couldn't you motivate people with fame instead?