skunkworks

I share your distaste of when evolution is personified or otherwise represented to be anything other than a powerful but passive process.

That being said, I have no problem with the statement that bacteria want to survive. They most certainly have mechanisms that are engaged actively in order to increase chances of survival. Horizontal gene transfer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer) allows bacteria to evolve in means other than traditional reproduction.

To add to my pedantic argument, it's not a conscious desire of theirs, but I'd argue that the basic things that humans do to survive (eat, drink, sleep, and have sex) are not conscious desires either. I'd argue that sexual reproduction is a mechanism that directly represents the biological success of greater genetic diversity and sharing of genes between organisms. We desire sex, and we desire sex with the best genetic candidates, and it's all a biological process encoded into our DNA that represents our desire for survival, so in that sense, bacteria desire survival as well.

And what does desire even mean? Does desire require consciousness and the ability to choose? It's a horribly imprecise term if you stare too long at it, so what I'm saying is that I don't think it's useful to pick on the doctor for his choice of words in this case.

Anyway, you have great points otherwise, but that first paragraph is not a point worth tripping over.

When I first head of wabi-sabi, it was to describe the aesthetic appeal of raw denim made on heirloom equipment -- the uneven weave caused by loom chatter, how dye gets everywhere, the uneven fade patterns, the leg twist caused by the skewed direction of the twill weave.

You're taking a cute fictional story and running wild with it to somehow fit your weird anti-PC agenda. No one here, including the original article's author, is claiming that this is evidence of cultural equality. Way to waste your energy.

By an intern, nonetheless.

You're welcome to dismiss my argument as a series of platitudes, but you should also agree to allow me to dismiss your story as a platitude, about how you were so determined not to be poor that it drove you to succeed.

I'm not actually dismissing your story -- I am in no position to judge fairly -- but I'm trying to point out that the fundamental attribution bias and the closely related actor-observer bias (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor%E2%80%93observer_bias) are both powerful. What if your personality type made it such that you had a high likelihood of success whether you were rich or poor?

Finally, with all this talk about "choice", let me go ahead and throw out a controversial statement: we have a lot less free will than we want to believe we do.

It's not just a choice in a vacuum, there are other things that contribute significantly to you making right and wrong choices, and specifically when it comes to making good life choices, a lot of those decisions are influenced negatively by poverty.

> You, like a real rich person, start to attribute success to your own individual skills and talents, and you become less attuned to all of the other things that contributed to you being in the position that you're in.

Rather than hammer an obvious point about the general bias against social services by the wealthy, I think it's more useful to point out the other side of the coin, which is that many poor people are poor not because of a direct lack of talent or skill but because of all the other things that contributed to them being in the position that they're in. There was another post recently on HN that compared poverty to a rogue background process that drains willpower, and yet another one about how entrepreneurs are disproportionally from well-to-do backgrounds. You can't take risks when you're poor, you don't have mobility, you can't pay for childcare, you spend time clipping coupons instead of reading... the list goes on.

What a hilariously irrelevant, tangential, presumptuous response. You must be fun at cocktail parties. Do you also tell people about how they shouldn't enjoy their shoes because they were stitched up by some poor sap in a sweatshop? I hear that goes over like gangbusters too.

Agreed. There's an emotional reward I get from not only writing with my Namiki Vanishing Point fountain pen on a nice piece of Rhodia paper, but also from seeing a clean and well-organized task list or set of notes written with good penmanship. That emotional reward really helps reinforce and perpetuate good habits, and it's something that's sorely lacking from working with electronic solutions.

That being said, my phone is much better at automating my repeating reminders.

A salient point re: the existence of different types of depression. Some cause a physical slowness (can't get out of bed), some cause anhedonia, some are the dementor type, etc.

Mmm, if it's not acceptable to scream at an adult, it's not any better to scream at a child.

Yet another good point re: disinterest in an argument being a potential third poison. I can see how detached engagement at least gives you an opportunity to have your voice be heard without the angst of fully-attached engagement. I think I have a tendency to walk away from arguments with unreasonable people, which seems like a good thing at first but is probably suboptimal from a professional standpoint. Thanks again, friend.

I agree wholeheartedly that unconscious desires find ways to express themselves, but it's novel for me to correlate those who are disconnected from their emotions (i.e. push them into their unconscious) with those who are more likely to fall victim to cognitive biases, dissonance, etc. It makes a ton of sense; for example, it takes all of my mindfulness to stop myself during a discussion/argument and ask myself honestly whether I'm open to hearing someone's argument or if I'm just feigning openness while trying to get a point across that I've tied my ego to. Oh, the inertia of preconceived thoughts and biases.

This is very useful to know, so thanks for the light-bulb moment. It'll be easier to step away from discussions when I can recognize that someone will live and die with their agenda because A) they lack the mindfulness to divorce their emotions from their stance, B) their identity and ego is built upon this stance, and C) no one will let you come by and sweep away their identity/ego without a fight, especially when their emotions, repressed or not, are swarming.

I guess it's easier to trust the judgment someone who's aware of their emotions than someone who's got a glaring blind spot.

> I find that someone who doesn't work well with emotions is typically bad at reasoning too, because the arguments they make end up expressing their feelings in obtuse ways.

This is an interesting explanation. Do you think that people bad at understanding their emotions are less aware or mindful of their unconscious biases?

Agreed on all points. Really when I say "black magic" therapy, I'm being sloppy because what I really mean is that if you're not that good of a therapist, you shouldn't be offering anything but basic, rigorous types of therapy. I wouldn't go so far as to say that a good therapist offers a "human element", but skilled therapists are more observant, have stronger communication skills, have a more intuitive sense on when to challenge their patients, etc., and that allows them to go deeper into murkier waters than others. But to boil all of that down to "the relationship" and the "human element" feels overly reductive. There's still something quantifiable about the qualitative aspects.

CBT gets props because its empirical results have shown to be more effective than the traditional talk therapy approach. It's been around for a long time, has been studied enough for us to be confident that it makes a real difference, and I consider it as medicine for thoughts. Of course there's no way for us to quantify its precise method of action, so it's not that different than making the observation that the bark of a certain tree seems to reduce pain and inflammation, but if the burden of proof is to show direct causation from our thoughts and CBT to a better outlook on life, we might as well be asking about the nature of human consciousness.

CBT is a framework more than it is a manual, and not nearly as robotic as you've described. All therapy requires a human relationship to be successful. You have to trust your therapist to believe in the things they say, and that belief is a prerequisite for putting in the effort to reshape your thoughts and attitudes, but what's so robotic about a therapist asking you to explore the origin of a preconceived notion? About them asking you to be mindful of those type of thoughts? On coaching you to intercept those negative thought patterns and replace them with improved ones?

I think chalking up the efficacy of therapy to hope and placebo is a bit disingenuous. Yes, belief in change is a precursor to real change -- no therapist can help someone who isn't willing to believe or even want to change -- and in a way, the therapist's role is to guide you in your own endogenous healing process. However, there needs to be some rigor in the way they guide you to break bad patterns and replace them with better ones.

In a way, the therapist's challenge is like inception: how can I plant something in someone else's head but make them feel like they came up with it themselves? I think most of us could look at someone with low self esteem and negative thoughts and tell them what's wrong and what they should say or do or believe instead. However, that process needs rigor, and one of the best tools in the toolbox is to increase someone's mindfulness, and one of the best ways to do that is CBT.

I think overall you're a bit dismissive of it as a shallow, robotic approach when really it's a simple, repeatable, controllable frontline intervention. It's not going to work for deep-seated issues, but I think of it as almost being a prerequisite before those deeper issues can be tackled. I am of course speaking from personal experience, in both myself and what I've observed with others.

A welcome article to read after this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6346567

I hope one day we'll have a complete model for understanding depression, but for now, it's encouraging enough to know that there are different kinds that are more/less responsive to different treatments.

Also, nice to see CBT get some props. It's really effective. And as someone who often proselytizes about the wonders of therapy, I'd like to get rid of the quacks who practice "black magic" therapy i.e. a non-evidence-based mish-mash approach. They are not helping the bias against mental health services in the US.

No, psychiatry is not a very, very loose and abstract field as much as it's an attempt to wrangle and understand a very, very loose and abstract subject, which is the essential nature of our thoughts and how we actionize them into behavior.

Criticism of its lack of rigor may be fair in many cases, but for you to call it a "sham field" is reactionary and completely inflammatory. Don't backpedal with "I don't want to discredit the entire field" when you're going to lead your comment with, "Good riddance."

Agreed on all points. I have a feeling I'll be coming back to read this again in the future.

This is not a helpful or even relevant comment

> That's all well and good as long as you give the full story, but you've forsaken the anti-grain diet fads while parroting their mantra almost verbatim. Namely, the idea that grains are a primary food source only because they're an easy source of calories. What about the fact that they're also rich in essential nutrients and have numerous documented health benefits?

They aren't rich in essential nutrients. They don't have numerous documented health benefits. And most certainly the reason why we bake bread and eat rice is because of their caloric density and ease of storage of rice and wheat.

A diet void of vegetables (and to a much lesser extent, fruit) is horribly unhealthy. You can't say that about grains. Is it really so unreasonable to postulate that the solution to our obesity pandemic is to remove the dense and less-satiating sources of calories and replace them with fibrous fruits and vegetables that contain many more micronutrients?

That was my first thought too. My guess would be a shortened URL that redirected to a private server, which then redirected to some Facebook contact form. Facebook message times could then be roughly correlated with IPs harvested from logs from the private server.

It is a common coping mechanism to find arbitrary things to blame in tragedies where there isn't one. It's part of our rational mind to find meaning and patterns in the natural world. We do this to understand. It's often wrong -- our eyes turn clouds into animals and mere static into design. This is not endemic to America.

It depends on where you live, how much you want to spend, and what sort of fit you're looking for. Barneys will have a selection of mid-range denim -- brands like APC and Naked & Famous. If you're in SF, NYC, or LA, there's Self Edge, which specializes in higher end, more obscure stuff but still carries great value brands like 3Sixteen. Also in NYC is Blue In Green, which carries a ton of stuff. You can always look at Revolve Clothing or Context Clothing online as well. There are tons of options, there are many local boutique places that will carry good brands, and it gets deep really quick. Let me know if you have any questions.

A bit incredulous but bemused, I imagine. The world of so-called denimheads can be strange and fetishistic -- at its most extreme, it has a Zoolander Derelicte quality to it, where beat-up raw denim is left unwashed well-past its due date and the goal is to look like a merchant marine from 1920 or a railroad conductor -- but as someone who really loves his jeans, I can tell you that I derive a lot of joy from the fit, detail, style, and comfort of a good pair of raw denim that I've broken in myself.

This is fantastic. I did the same with a very similar botnet way back when, except my "hello" in IRC wasn't as friendly. Left to eat for an hour, then came back to my hard drive erased. Live and learn...

That seems like needless hyperbole, if not a poor attempt at snark. There's plenty of content in there.

The entire time I read this article, I was well-aware of the fact that this one-on-one presentation was only an Apple PR move, and I felt that he as a journalist knew it too. What he wrote reflects this as well. It seems condescending to both him and his readers to surmise that they wouldn't understand this.

BTW, if you decide you want the Kindle version, there's a $10 promo code. I'm not sure if you need to be signed up to Amazon Student for this, so YMMV:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000...

Link to the 2nd Edition version of this book:

http://www.amazon.com/TCP-Illustrated-Protocols-Addison-Wesl...

(Didn't even realize it had been updated until I checked!)