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On the other hand the human life & culture we've developed might not give us a "realistic" means for dealing with the environment and climate change. Reread what you've written and look at it from the perspective of someone concerned about climate change, whose read the reports that we're likely to see effects of it within our lifetimes, and who lives in a world where the response to a progressively worsening disaster is ranges from "not my problem", "don't be so negative", to "what can we do?".

Young people today are born into a world with a considerable amount of inertia leading it to a not so happy place. The evidence points to this not being just pessimism, but a reality they will have to face and deal with in their lifetimes. Rising sea levels, political instability as once habitable and arable land become inhabitable and barren, increasingly sever weather, etc. Pessimism and optimism in this case refers to how severe these problems will be and whether we can either put them off or mitigate the consequences, not whether or not they are happening.

Yes, and it's the fact that it's the popular narrative that drives this anxiety and ends up being a sell fulfillkng prophecy. Everyone says this is the case and then a kid gets filled with anxiety when they think about doing something else and boom, there you have it, stress addled and burned out at the age of 25.

That's the biggest difference between now and then. Back then if you needed to you could easily get a job doing something that paid decently and work your way up. Taking a risk is a lot easier if you have a reasonable plan for getting back on your feet should your fail. Nowadays it's all about not having gaps on your resume, making sure your involved in clubs, in open source, or that you're blogging and we'll known. Kids, I think, feel as if they need to have a plan for their lives at a young he and that they need to execute on it. It's not enough to just live this days.

The underlying idea seems to be that the economic reality is worsening and this is true for every group. Meanwhile some groups have had more and more artificial barriers removed that make it easier to access that economic reality as say someone who is middle class and white (not necessarily equal, but let's just take white and middle-class as a standard for comparing). So yes, it is better for certain groups, but to continue the analogy of the hill, these groups have had artificial barriers removed that make it easier and easier for them to climb, but that hill itself is getting steeper and steeper.

So on the one hand those barriers are getting torn down slowly, which is progress in one dimension, but the economic reality is worsening for everyone. For example, people of color mighty be competing with other individuals on more level ground when it comes to getting jobs, but the supply of those jobs, the quality of life they support, and the security they afford seem to be decreasing, and the all important question isn't what it's like now, but what it'll be like on 20 or 30 years.

As a side note, worsening economic conditions can result in a flare up in racial tensions which might undo the progress that has been made.

If you feel ownership over some system, you feel as if the whole system reflects on yourself, whereas if you do not feel that sense of ownership, then you feel as if only the work you do on that system reflects on yourself. If you feel ownership then, you're likely to be more proactive in your maintenance and making sure that everything is up to standard rather than being reactive and fixing things that break. You want people to feel a sense of ownership, and rewriting a project is a very good way of doing that. Rewriting may not be the only way, of course, and it may not be the most optimal solution given other goals.

Have you heard of hoogle (Haskell's type signature search)? It almost exactly feels like what you've described.

Curiously the book Why We Sleep says the exact opposite: we all have natural sleep cycles that differ and it's genetic, impossible to change. What I've noticed is that it's possible to keep a consistent schedule and overcome all of that inertia, but if you slip up you'll find yourself back in your natural cycle. Interestingly, the cited reason for this is that evolutionary, it's an advantage to not have everyone asleep at the same time.

The broader concept here is that "people can tolerate a little bit of smell." Code smell is bad, but it also tells you what needs fixing and where your design is lacking. As a principle, I like to operate under the assumption that hacks and nonstandard code is ok IF they can be explained and kept in mind by someone coming into the project. Usually that means a 3 or 4 warts can pop up before I begin to refactor and remove them.

You are thinking of a total order (in fact total orderings or often defined with the '>=' relation). A partial order is like a total order except there may be some elements that are not comparable, so given elements {A, B, C} we can have C < A and C < B but whether A < B or B < A can remain undefined. A lattice is a kind of partially ordered set.

Weather.

The biggest benefit is that you can keep a very clear model of everything that's going on in the language (well, most things), from parsing to evaluation to application. The parenthesize represent very important things about how the language works and the regularity of the language emphasizes that it's a few basic principles replicated again and again. Also, the "beautiful" lisp variants tend to be in the scheme family. Common lisp is wart and pragmatic by comparison.

There is risk for some men, but at least here, you go in regularlynfor checkups to ensure there are no problems. Only a small number have the side effects, and these discontinue treatment.

I believe the rule is to avoid it when you're trying to persuade because by default it makes you sound less convincing.nif you're just discussing, then to hell with the rule.

I didn't downvote you, but I'd like to reply to why this might be a leap in the right direction.

1) Universal insurance increases the fluidity in the labor market because people are no longer forced to stay in a job to have health insurance. This can be the difference between someone starting their own small business and sticking with a large corporation for the benefits.

2) Providing access to health care for the (currently) uninsured means they can manage their conditions and prevent them from deteriorating, instead of going through a costly cycle of ER visit -> stabilization -> ER visit. Because hospitals are obligated to stabilize anyone who goes to the ER, these procedures increase hospital operating expenses which is passed on either to (1) the tax payer or (2) insured patients. The best care both health and fiscal-wise is preventative care.

3) Obamacare was a leap in the right direction, but definitely did not go all the way. A portion of that may be that it simply takes time to adjust to a new system, but as parts of the old system are rolled back, it becomes increasingly less effective. For example, universal coverage without the individual mandate is costly for insurance companies, resulting in higher premiums.

4) People make poor decisions and forgo medical insurance only to have a medical disaster happen and land them in considerable debt. The affects of this debt continue to plague them for years after. Carrying crippling debt affects not only these people but any of their dependents, so the effects compound. The usual response is that the responsible shouldn't have to pay for the irresponsibles' poor choices, but you'll pay for them either way, just in one case it's easy to quantify the effect and in the other case the effect is nebulous are hard to pin down exactly. For example, studies have shown that acute poverty has an effect on intelligence. The more people that run around stressed by their debt, the less likely they're going to make smart choices going forward with respect to their finances, politics, etc.

Assuming you believe that Obamacare was a leap in the right direction, you have to recognize that it did not go far enough or reach a stable enough point to where the benefits may have been fully realized. Even if you agree that a single payer system or a European style system is better, you are still forced to tackle the transition period during which responsibilities and policies have to reshuffle between hospitals, the government, and insurance companies. That is going to be messy any which way you cut it, but the current system is clearly broken, so it might be better to rip the bandaid off. Aside from that, the benefits wouldn't primarily be in the amount your premiums are, but in the indirect benefits of having accessible health care for all.

I've always thought that our contemporary world pushes these two sometimes contradictory ideas on us: that we are unique individuals and that we are supposed to have a "tribe" of people like ourselves. The more "unique" you become (or the more intimately you know yourself) the more you're able to draw differences between you and others which impedes finding your "tribe." It's a trope in media to have a "friend group" of people that share certain core, common, traits but these are entirely artificial constructs that don't accuractely reflect the messy business of human relationships. The sleight of hand comes about when we begin to feel as if WE are missing out, as if WE have failed, and not that this artificial notion that's been distilled in us is in actuality unreasonable and unrealistic.

I don't think it's the ad, per say, but the agreement for delivery. It's be like you sending housing ads and asking USPS to only deliver them to men. USPS would probably be on the hook then as well.

Back to your point though, it is a new domain because with your paper examples there is no one who can "undo" the illegal ad. You copy it at Kinko's and it's not like Kinko's is out there delivering it with you. With online platforms, they both Target and deliver these ads and are responsible for continually delivering them.

His philosophy was a prediction that groups in the 19th/20th century coopted because the rhetoric was useful. The first communist nation's were supposed to be Western Europe and the US: capitalist to industrialize and then revolution. Eastern Europe and china were not industrialized when they had revolutions. It's not surprising it didn't work out too well.

That is the academic style! The academic style is effective communication, the problem is there's a lot of bad essays.

That's a good idea: encourage researchers to focus on a mix of replication and new research. When writing grants, a part of that grant might be towards replicating interesting/unexpected results and the rest for new research. Moreover, given that the experiment has already been designed, replication could end up demanding much less effort from a PI and allow his students to gain some deliberate practice in experiment administration and publication. On the other hand, scholarly publication might have to be changed in order to allow for summary reporting of replication results to stave off a lot of repition.

I don't think science will be able to say as much on the subject as one would like. "Navigating your own dream state" is a person making decisions about a world they themselves have created. There isn't much room for an objective observer there. In general, I don't think science is ever going to get a grip on consciousness. The whole "self observing the self" business makes it way too slippery a concept to get a grasp on in any satisfactory manor.

I don't think the rigorous definition of the field is the important bit, rather the kind of area one has expertise in. These days people will develop expertise with a set of "tools" and then apply them to whatever area they'd likem. We get feminist critiques, Focauldian critiques, deconstructive arguments, LGBT critiques, etc., that take on political and social issues in a very slanted manner because they analyze the issue in terms of a this framework. Instead of being experts on feminism, for example, we get experts on everything from a feminist perspective. It's good to have this perspective, the problem is that the perspective is overwhelming. The point is to analyze the issue from this perspective, but we've lost a focus on the relative importance of this perspective and the issues it raises. Moreover, sometimes the issue itself is obscured because it is contorted to be analyzable by this framework.

I will say, the problem he delineates doesn't seem to plague all of the humanities, only certain areas. Analytic philosophy departments and history departments seem to not suffer from the same problems.

The website is called The Chronicle of Higher Education, so I'm going to go with other professors.

The fundamental thesis is

> Three generations ago, literature professors exchanged a rigorously defined sphere of expertise, to which they could speak with authority, for a much wider field to which they could speak with virtually no power at all.

Hence all the references to various scholars and their works.

Nowhere does the author bash Trump or say his voters are uneducated imbeciles. The quote most related to this is

> For going on 50 years, professors in the humanities have striven to play a political role in the American project. Almost without exception, this has involved attacking the establishment. As harmful as institutionalized power can be, as imperfect as even the most just foundations inevitably appear, they are, as it turns out, all we’ve got. Never has a citizen been so grateful for institutions — for functioning courts, for a professionalized FBI, for a factually painstaking CBO or GAO — as since November 2016.

Which boils down to "The humanities anti-establishment position needs to be toned down. This election when many of us did not get an outcome we wanted, we realized the value in having strong and trustworthy public institutions."

The main theme of the essay is self-awareness:

> Yet the editorial logic of right-wing media resembles closely the default position of many recent books and dissertations in literary studies: The true story is always the oppositional story, the cry from outside. The righteous are those who sift the shadows of the monolith to undermine it in defense of some notion of freedom.

Considering the essay starts out with

> Can the average humanities professor be blamed if she rises in the morning, checks the headlines, shivers, looks in the mirror, and beholds a countenance of righteous and powerless innocence?

The takeaway is that humanities professors have become ineffective because they've traded expertise for politically motivated analysis. There's a feel good, all inclusive, woo woo diversity culture about the humanities, but its come at the price of critical analysis and discerning judgment. Instead of providing a a critical, reasoned opposing view, they've become increasingly radical and reactionary. Instead of seeing their view as a small, but important contribution to the greater project of society building, they've tried to monopolize the project. The end of the essay reaffirms that the humanities have something to offer, but that that offering has to be a balanced towards improving the establishment instead of encouraging critiques with no means of improving or fixing it.

This is a very good way of describing the problem. Journalists are humans that search out salient news and stories and work on bringing it before the public. There (should be) professional ethics in their work that inform these choices. Google, meanwhile, just throws up whatever it finds. It's doubtful a journalist would ever take interest in the odd smattering of risqué/questionable moments of your neighbor, but Google's more than happy to serve them all up at your request.

On the other hand, have we really gotten to the point where we have to try to provoke others into a debate? Why can't we state what we mean, what we think, what we're uncertain about, what questions we'd like to discuss in order to foster discussion instead of provoking it. Playing devil's advocate is fine when it's understood what's going on and why you're playing devil's advocate, but when there's ambiguity you play this game of "yes I said that I didn't mean it though" which ends up sounding weak as it does in those case. Devil's advocate is a great cognitive strategy for exploring an issue together, but it's a very poor conversational strategy.

What I got out of Hackers and Painters is that the two activities are similar in procedure: most basically you begin with an idea, you, you make an initial sketching, then you iterate with periods of refactoring until it's done. That's a procedure that seems true of ANY creative process, and the essay argues hacking is more of a creative process than whatever else a person might think it is. This is especially true when working with certain languages where you're encouraged to constantly rework designs. Dabblers and Blowhards kind of missed this point, but the overall criticism stands: an individuals subjective experience of an activity isn't necessarily shared by everyone.

Oddly enough I don't think people who have 'found' themselves necessarily have found some genuine self. Rather they've found something permanent and stable to latch onto. Given OPs thoughts about media/advertising these days, it could be said that we don't get enough permanent stuff to fashion an identity out of in mainstream culture. Part of the MO of advertising is always changing and building a need up for products. That implies a heightened impermanence to our mainstream culture.

Communism hasn't every really happened. What we've had are bizarre dictatorships veiled in communist language that tap the masses discontent as a source of support, but these haven't resulted in communist states. Communism, in theory, comes after capitalism gets bad, but you need capitalism to come before it, otherwise you get the Soviet Union and China which try to be communist states without being industrialized states first.

Probably never given how broad the field of psychology is. The demarcation line probably runs somewhere through the field, but to separate the two sides between science and not science is an open problem. Hell, it cosmology and evolution also suffer from similar problems, but those fields are far less controversial.

A part of it is definitely perception. If this country is so great, why does it have so many problems?

As to what distinguishes the US from European countries is probably the lack of continuity and history. One doesn't really feel like an "American" as one might feel "Spanish" or "French." An unfortunate consequence of this lack of unity is that democracy becomes very, very messy, and what might have unified the US--a common set of values, hopes, ideals, etc.--is being chipped away at. On the flip side US culture promotes individualism which sometimes leads people away from unity.

With respect to the issue at hand, there's a great quote by David Foster Wallace: “This is so American, man: either make something your god and cosmos and then worship it, or else kill it.” There's a bizarre zeal that's valued in US life and culture (think startup culture) that's great if you find that something to "worship," but if not you're left with this overzealous impulse to do something, something great, something worthy of your time, but you don't have anywhere to direct that energy. It becomes destructive. Europeans have a steadier pace of life that recognizes that 90% of the people aren't going to becomes famous, have amazing carers, be important figures, and that instead of that they can have good, stable, happy lives. In the US, that just doesn't cut it.