wpietri

15 ms·

241.
by wpietri 2y ago
Does it bother you that there's no actual value creation at the bottom of it? I used to work for financial traders, and while I was there I'd justify it to myself in the usual terms: the traditional commodities markets increase l
242.
by wpietri 2y ago
Yeah, I don't think you can choose what obsesses you. If you want to make use of obsession, you have to notice things you can be obsessed by and pick among them. For me at least, feedback from other people really helps there. So I look
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by wpietri 2y ago
Oops! s/reduced/reproduced/
244.
by wpietri 2y ago
ROI is very much a business term of art. And that's how it's mostly used here in this little venture-capital supported niche. I agree one can broaden it to mean something much vaguer, using it metaphorically. But A) I think we at
245.
by wpietri 2y ago
I don't think there's a "unified 'they'" in the sense of, say, there being a Stamp Out Critical Thinking Council with meetings Tuesdays and Thursdays. But I do think that people who rise through power systems w
246.
by wpietri 2y ago
The forcing doesn't have to be particularly dramatic. One of the things I like having about a tutor is it "forces" me to make some progress on a regular basis. As a friend of mine put it, "Sometimes I need somebody to no
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by wpietri 2y ago
A few scattered thoughts here: There were periods in my early career when I was hyperproductive. Every time I burned out, unable to work for months afterwards. It had a cost in terms of physical and mental health that in retrospect was not
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by wpietri 2y ago
Sorry, I should have specified that I was talking about psychology and sociology. Happy to believe it was part of crit lit then.
249.
by wpietri 2y ago
We aren't particularly in a period of scarcity. New Zealand's a rich country with a stable GDP. Also, ROI is the wrong frame to use for government activity. If something has significant short-term ROI, then normal commercial capit
250.
by wpietri 2y ago
Did you look at the article I linked? Even many chemists and physicists think significant portions of their fields have results that can't be reduced. Biology and medicine even more so. Even if the problem were related to robust quanti
251.
by wpietri 2y ago
Yeah, I suspect few of them directly want that. But I also think few of them are inclined to appreciate the benefits of it. But it does happen intentionally that way some times for sure. E.g., the way the US's Dickey Amendment defunded
252.
by wpietri 2y ago
Yeah, there's a lot of education you can't get just by reading books. Which is exactly why I ended up hiring a tutor. Philosophy in specific is one long argument, 2500 years of new people showing up and saying, "Well that guy
253.
by wpietri 2y ago
I hate to break it to you, but spouting a little pop science jargon plus some anecdotes is not "figuring it out" for the purposes of actually fixing anything. If it were, then they "do your own research" people would hav
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by wpietri 2y ago
Funny that you should say that. It's not just the social sciences that are having a replication crisis. [1] So this appears to be some sort of broad social problem that we don't totally understand. Seems like we need people who st
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by wpietri 2y ago
As far as I know, Freudian psychoanalysis has been dead academically as long as I've been alive. Complaining about it is pretty close to complaining about how physics is stuffed with all these people who believe in the lumineferous aet
256.
by wpietri 2y ago
Just off the top of my head: 1) what specific mechanisms are used to hook people initially? 2) What specific mechanisms sustain or deepen the addiction? 3) What actual value do the provide to users? 4) Who specifically do they harm, and by
257.
by wpietri 2y ago
Yeah, 18 months ago I was struggling with a philosophy book and on the street saw an ad for a professor who does tutoring. I thought, "What the heck!" and signed up to see what happened. We meet every couple of weeks and it has be
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by wpietri 2y ago
I disagree. Frank language is not disrespectful. And here I think the warm opening and closing, the specificity of the critique, and the useful suggestions are not just respectful, but helpful. Also, I think anybody whose contribution is, &
259.
by wpietri 2y ago
There's more than one kind of poor design. These days there's quite a lot of bad design that looks slicker than something in the geocities era, but is worse in terms of how well it meets its purpose. I agree with idk1; however pre
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by wpietri 2y ago
I think one shouldn't say that on its own, as it's not helpful. But given that it's in the middle of a lot of clear and specific detail that includes an offer of help, I think it's fine as emotion-conveying hyperbole.
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by wpietri 2y ago
Yeah, they were actually both left temporal lobe glioblastomas. Every time that comes up with a doctor they get a funny look and ask where they lived, obviously suspecting some environmental cause. The short answer is people almost never kn
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by wpietri 2y ago
My mom ran an adult foster care home. Half the population was elderly, half developmentally disabled. I liked helping out with the developmentally disabled folks. They were a handful, but they were basically enjoying life. But the elderly w
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by wpietri 2y ago
Yeah, I get that. Once you've accepted death is inevitable, you start to think carefully about what kind of death you want. My parents both died of glioblastomas, a particularly aggressive form of brain cancer. As the surgeon explained
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by wpietri 2y ago
For sure, and I think a key change here is asymmetry. Previously in public I'd have a reasonable chance of knowing that somebody was watching or following me. Between cameras, networks, and high-capacity recording, that's all out
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by wpietri 2y ago
You might appreciate this repurposing of some Chuck E Cheese robots: https://chicagoreader.com/blogs/how-logan-arcade-got-its-mis...
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by wpietri 2y ago
Right? To me it's eerily similar to how cryptocurrency was sold as a general replacement for all money uses, but turned out to be mainly useful for societally negative things like scams and money laundering.
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by wpietri 2y ago
Excellent point: > just output from an LLM-based workflow that is not fit for purpose And I think this is just one aspect of what I think of as the stone soup [1] problem. Outside of rigorous test conditions, humans just have a hard time
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by wpietri 2y ago
No, you can't judge it the same way you judge a human, any more than you could judge a bus engine the same way you'd judge human. It's not an individual, and not remotely like one. I get this might seem like tedious nitpickin
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by wpietri 2y ago
It's absolutely not like any human source, and there's little reason to think its competencies and biases are anything like humans.
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by wpietri 2y ago
Not sure if that's better or worse than a developer doing basically the same thing because they could make a little money. <at_least_its_an_ethos.gif>

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