rohern

Amen.

I see where you are coming from and your response is of the form that expected to receive, but I am not convinced by your objections. Part of the problem, I realized while writing an initial response to you, is the split definitions of "free time". On the one hand, there is free time that we take because we find our performance declining, and so we stop our activity for efficiency reasons. And then there is free time that is really The Time. Free time of this sort is what life is all about, it is why we work.

My query was intended to refer to the second definition.

Neither of your objections have much to do with the first definition, and they do not satisfy me with regards to the second form of free time. If you consider the case of someone like a physicist, for whom their great love is also their form of achieving "success". For people of this type, and for ambitious people who discover fulfillment through worldly success, work is exactly the sort of activity that brings them happiness.

So perhaps that's the split. People of these types concern themselves with free time for efficiency, and the rest concern themselves with the second sort of free time. Perhaps this is also the split between the elite players and the music teachers.

I do not think this is dumb at all. You have stated the problem very clearly.

I would like to ask a question that nags me every time I read an article like this: Why do we assume that we need "free time"? And to answer this, I have to ask another that occurred to me while reading the article: What do these elite players do during their free time?

This is an important questions for programmers and engineers, because we generally enjoy building things. In the context of the article, I take it as implicit that the one thing the elite players are not doing in their "free time" is playing music or that would obviously be a form of practicing.

So, then what is this free time that the elite have and how are they using it? Are they bumming in the front of the TV? Is the formula for success: work intensely for two short blocks and then veg?

Now you are arguing that OP should have pivoted to something new under the assumption that he had an idea of how to so pivot. That's fine, but it is not a defense of the point you originally made and instead agrees with my counterargument.

This doesn't make sense as a critique. There is no other way for a person to make a decision to continue to do something than to base it on their belief in its possible success. The frailty of these beliefs as proven by past failures in judgement is irrelevant. Imagine the absurdity of the situation:

VC: So how do you feel about this company going forward once we give you another round of capital?

Owner: I believe we will fail. I am going to take your money and continue anyway.

If the VC did not interpret the owner as being irrational, he would be suspect himself. You are suggesting that it is selfish to give up things you believe are doomed. What other criteria is there for giving something up?

I do not understand the gamer community. EA has been treating you guys like crap for years and you keep coming back for more. Just stop buying their products. I know it sucks not to have access to a new game, but make a stand for an industry you care about and stop supporting a lousy company that has distain for you.

I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt because this is the internet and it is very difficult to judge one's own written tone, but I hope you'll reread what you have written to see why it makes you come off as a deeply arrogant person. You seem not to have read at all what I have written; you appear to think that I was engaged in criticizing the article. You also continue this nonsense about reading that can only have the effect of being insulting.

I do not think it is a good use of time for either of us to continue this, but to give you some recompense for the time you put into your response, I will write a few things.

1) I have no opinion on Mexico and I have no basis for concurring with what confluence wrote. Nothing I wrote in response to you suggested otherwise.

2) Where you have responded to what I wrote, you have written self-contradictory statements that are not strong rebuttals to the points I made. I was pointing out your use of fallacious reasoning. In your rebuttal you recommitted several of these same fallacies and added some new ones in form the self-contradiction, non sequiturs, and erecting straw men.

3) You spend a great deal of time building up this straw man of Imperialism. I have no response to this as it has nothing to do with what I wrote.

4) You end this with an ad-hominem suggesting that I and confluence read more. I point out that this is both ridiculous on its face as you know nothing about my reading habits and furthermore it is not a useful form of argument.

These are not good forms of reasoning. You have here committed several fallacies that are very common and very worrying, as they tend to lead to the public adoption of poorly reasoned explanations and baseless facts. This is not an attack on you personally.

> As far as the lack of concrete statistics - well, I don't know about you, but until I hear a more-convincing alternate take, I'm going to take his word for it.

It is still a mystery how life originated on Earth. I know you will enjoy my theory about how the unicorns did it.

No. No you won't. I am sure you know that this is a ridiculous argument to make. The fact that you have not heard a better explanation is a terrible reason to accept another explanation. Cogency does not imply correctness.

> I mean, seriously, why don't you just chill the fuck out and enjoy the article on its own merits, rather than imposing completely ridiculous standards on it?

There is no such thing as "its own merits". That is doublespeak for "do not judge it at all". Either it meets the standards of good reasoning, data presentation, and research, or it doesn't You cannot say that it has it own standards for these things that we the reader are forced to accept.

> Do you have more experience of and personal involvement in Mexico than this author?

Again, this is not a sensible argument. It does not matter to me that my doctor has had cancer before he treats me for cancer. Engineers at NASA did not personally need to visit the moon before they were able to engineer the moon lander. You do not need personal experience with phenomena to understand them. In fact, personal experience with a thing can lead to horrible mistakes in understanding and judgment backed up by the fallacy that because they come from personal experience, they are especially valid.

It doesn't seem like you know very much about modern AI work. Watson was on Jeopardy two years ago.

Can you explain what NYC being liberal has to do with it?

I love this comment. This is exactly how parents need to be thinking. Yes, being a doctor is a relatively safe career choice now, but your kid is going to be graduating from college in a decade...

I completely agree about useless degrees, but we're talking about 18-year-olds smart enough to get into college. They are responsible for wisely choosing what to study.

I think OP's comments about being a good Asian parent are pretty silly, but the kind of wishy-washy "everything works out in the end" reasoning that you use here is exactly what has gotten so many young people stuck in the position described in the NYTimes article. One must to consider the economics of things to plan for the future. You cannot get a liberal arts degree on the hope that things will work out. Well, you can, but then you're going to spend a decade in unpaid internships before you finally suck it up and learn to program.

I think you're probably right. Then again, people seem to have a great time at reddit meetups.

Absolutely yes.

This is basically Unix shamanism.

It seems to me that Facebook has always been stuck with a damned lot: to make their product profitable, they have make their product worse. This is exactly the problem with "social" games. These games are lousy exactly because the lousy features make them money. With the direction that Facebook is going, it seems to be a service where users volunteer to receive spam. I do not think any company in this position is setup for long-term success.

On a philosophical note, I have always felt that Facebook is just a slot machine company. They make a fancy box that takes advantage of the weaknesses of the human brain (obsession with novelty, gossip, and visual stimulus) to keep users doing an activity for much longer than required to get the benefit of that activity. I could be radical and say that I think Facebook delivers no value to its customers and that most people end up actively regretting the time they spend on Facebook (I think it is uncontroversial to say that no one goes to bed wishing he had spent more of his day on Facebook), however there is always someone with a story about reuniting with a long-lost elementary school friend due to Facebook. Nonetheless, even if this value does exist, in no way does it justify the amount of time most Facebook users spend on the site nor does it describe the majority of user activity. This is not to say that Facebook is doomed any more than Las Vegas is doomed, but maybe people will wise up and be more careful about how they spend their time...

A bit of anecdote: I have noticed people on reddit commenting that they now use reddit more than Facebook as all the good content on Facebook is just copied from reddit. If reddit had some kind of social interface, it might move aggressively into this market.

I love Firefox, but I am encountering problems like this more and more often. It's a disaster to use with Coursera or Netflix.

It might be that there is a growing population of companies with strong incentive to move away from the model of the public corporation given that short-term growth trumps all other concerns on Wall Street.

We have seen Michael Dell buying back Dell, companies like Facebook and Zynga getting nothing but grief for having publicly traded stock, Elon Musk making it very clear that SpaceX will stay private so that it will be capable of long-term planning, and now this silliness with Apple that does appear to be just market griping over what is clearly a very strong company looking to the future.

Actually, even without the restrictions of the One Child Policy, the ethnic minorities in China are disappearing as distinct cultural groups. Homogenization of culture is a powerful force.

Ironically for your point, this issue seems to be most severely affecting the Uyghurs and the Tibetans, arguably the most religious minorities in China.

The one child policy does not apply to ethnic minorities.

Obviously I am not going to link you to sites where you can watch without these issues, but the third link that comes up on Google is one of them. Visit it with Firefox with Adblock installed and you'll have no problems. This is extremely common practice.

The most populous nation on Earth is by Western standards non-religious -- China. I do not mean that everyone is an atheist as demanded by communism. Rather, the folk "religions" that are most common (there is a large portion of the population, mostly educated urbanites, who are not believers in these either) say very little in the way of the issues you mentioned. They have more to do with granting good luck and curing disease.

Obviously this has not hurt their population.

Apologies for the typo and insane grammar in the fourth paragraph. I can no longer edit it to fix it.

That's fine, but then piracy is going to continue in huge numbers.

This is exactly my point. If you grew up in a time when all you needed to do to watch a TV show online was google "watch Game of Thrones online" and go to the first link, you would feel much more relaxed about it than you obviously do.

I made the age distinction because many older think piracy means that these people are using filesharing and bittorrent to watch these shows. These technologies are obsolete when it comes to television and movies. You can do it all directly through the browser. It is as easy and convenient as YouTube.

I don't see how what I wrote is any way insulting to old people. I am drawing a distinction between how young people use the internet and how older people use it. This distinction exists in reality. It also appears to account for much of the huge difference in tone one hears coming people in different generations when discussing this issue.

Don't forget $300/hour fees for tech support when the system inevitably crashes during dinner hour.

Ha, someone works for Payfirma...