msamwald

It might be consoling to some, but it is hardly accurate.

Hypothesis: The psychology behind the turmoil caused by the red guards might be very related to contemporary phenomena in academic settings and on social media, where the rhetoric of social justice is perverted and turned into a weapon to antagonize anyone in the perceived out-group. (Of course, the magnitudes of the resulting problems are vastly different.)

The odd thing is that articles on the topic and seemingly all medical doctors assume that there is only a single way in which Q-tips can be used for ear cleaning purposes.

I think that there are several possible ways besides simply inserting the Q-tip in a straight motion and thereby pushing earwax towards the tympanum. Personally, the way I use Q-tips is to insert them from below the ear at a 45 degree angle, constantly rotating the Q-tip and then performing a swipe around the ear canal while keeping up the rotating motion (resembling the precession movement of a gyroscope). Using this technique, I never had any issues with pushing earwax towards the tympanum or irritating the ear canal. The advantages are less itching in the ear canal caused by ear wax, and having no visible crumbles of ear wax falling out of my ears. I seem to have the "wet" ear wax type.

It seems like this is a common and weird instance of problems that re-occur when medical professionals give advice to patients and the general public:

* Lack of insight into why people are exhibiting the behaviour. For me at least, the natural buildup of ear wax produces itching, and using Q-tips is a significant relief. In the re-occuring advice to the public by medical professionals this seems to be ignored.

* Lack of understanding of the importance of aesthetics. Yes, it might be natural to have large crumbs of ear wax visibly protruding from your ear canal, but that does not make it irrational to dislike how it looks. Ignorance of such social factors leads to 'unexplained' lack of compliance with medical advice, which in turn leads to a decrease in the quality of doctor-patient relationship and ineffective public health interventions.

* Lack of interest in harm reduction approaches. For several decades articles like the OP have been published, seemingly with minor or no effect on actual practices. It might be more reasonable to accept that people are very keen on cleaning their ears, and to find strategies to reduce the potential harm while still letting people do what they want. Simple advice on HOW to use a Q-tip without harming yourself (don't push in too much, don't push in straight if you really can't do without it) might have more overall positive impact.

As several people pointed out, the arguments made in this article are severely weakened by the fact that we do not know what fraction of this complexity is essential for brain function and what fraction is unnecessary complexity caused by evolutionary history and biological constraints.

In addition, we should also keep in mind that a digital AI can have many 'unfair advantages' compared to human brains. Besides lacking the obvious biological constraints, digital AIs are not necessarily limited to pure neural networks. AIs can be made up of hybrid systems in which neural networks have access to web-scale knowledge bases, extremely fast and prcecise databases for writing and reading arbitrary data and storing them indefinitly, APIs for running computations that would be difficult to implement in neural networks, and so on. The neural network part of the AI could evolve and learn with having zero-latency, high-bandwith access to several such resources and learn how to make optimal use of them.

As a Viennese who took that tour together with some international guests, I highly recommend _not_ doing it, because you're not allowed to see very much. I found it quite disappointing.

It would be interesting to know how novel those sequences are (obviously, the outcome would be far less impressive if what we hear is basically a looped, noisy sample of a song that already exists).

For me, the hardest thing about learning Git is the lurking feeling that I have to learn it because it has become an unavoidable fad, not because it is the best approach to version management for most common use-cases.

I think that the article describes a sentiment that far more people dealing with computer science / programming share than usually perceived. I think it is mostly because for the (seemingly warranted) fear of being called out as unprofessional by other people in the field.

I'll come out of the closet: I also wonder why Bash is still so important in 2014. I think it simply is unintuitive and cumbersome for all tasks that you don't routinely do, and only a small minority of people that are using Bash are doing it in such a fluid way that the potential benefits of the command line can be reaped. For the rest of us it mainly feels like http://xkcd.com/1168/

In summary, I think that: 1) Bash is overripe for being replaced by something else, perhaps a more user-friendly and interactive shell that is built from the ground up and not a fruitsalad of ad-hoc solutions created a few decades ago. 2) Using Bash and praising its benefits is not only so popular because it has positive practical aspects. It also seems to have become culturally ingrained in the geek community in an irrational way, like an initiation rite that separates insiders from outsiders.