kwekly

I work in the control room for an electrical generation system an this isn't the case at all for us.

Each desk has 12 ~30 inch monitors, and each monitor has a similar degree of information density, from monitors of system frequency, voltages, power flows etc. around the network, also financial / market information. There's a mix of diagrams, tabular data, maps, plots.

Two of the monitors are devoted to a geographic view with weather data, locations of field staff etc. Check out the similar setup from this California control room: https://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/news/2016/06/17/calif...

Most displays show live data, but are not setup to be interacted with normally.

I think the truth is probably due to: 1) the same with all enterprise software, the folks who end up using the displays have token-to-no input into the purchasing or design decisions. Actually now I think of it, check out the interfaces marketed to electronic music composers (generally individuals or small studios): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOq8R55xMyo

2) While I bet operators would select Tronish UI given the choice, they don't _need_ it because ultimately (with enough experience) the model of the system sits in your head, and the interface simply gives cues.

"I live in rural France with narrow roads and it's incredibly stressful to be driving with nearly no margin of error preventing a head on collision."

This is the crux -- I think the author is in fact saying that roads are safer while you are in this stressed state.

"This is like reducing the size of your front door to make it harder for thieves to steal your couch."

The problem is fundamentally different in that the agent on the road at not trying to cause accidents.

What you're describing sounds a lot like a statistically trained system.

"until we understand how that information is encoded in our own minds, getting a machine to truly understand it the same way will be elusive."

Here's a (fairly convincing imo) discussion as applied to language:

http://norvig.com/chomsky.html

Further, I think human emotions are pretty transparent -- e.g. why might people lust after high calorie foods?

The timeline is probably far shorter than you are describing here.

Pure speculation, but I think heat dissipation is probably the more important bottleneck of spaceship design -- no convective cooling, so you potentially want more surface area to increase radiation.

I think aerodynamics (both lift to weight and streamlining) are the reason for the compact design of aircraft and submarines (also perhaps reducing the profile for military vehicles).

Weight maybe an issue for maneuvering in combat, but there's tons of structural material literally floating around in space, so I'd wager that base material cost would not a limiting constraint.

Very cool -- what about sliders to feed parameters for new ship generation :)

You're probably at a good point to appreciate the following:

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...

You're reinforcing this point by with even "stronger opinions" but you're avoiding the fundamental issue:

"There's a difference between a person having an unconventional idea, e.g. for a business, and an unconventional theory, which they claim has a sound scientific basis."

Unlike a business proposal, no degree of bizarre circumstance or incredible luck can transform the underlying operation of the brain.

Ironically, you're using a human bias (pushing an analogy outside it's original domain) to argue about human bias. I'm pretty sure 99% of folks involved in this debate are well aware behavioural psychology and the like, so you can spare the "fuck you up" histrionics.

I can't tell if you're kidding or not...

Is your question, do writers and mathematicians also speak of elegance and aesthetic in their work? Do writers engage and practice free writing and side-projects to hone their skills, beside whatever they have to do to pay the bills?

Expand your world man, there's so much more out there.

There's one more aspect at play here too:

If you're brash and "break things" and overall the situation turn out for the worst, if you're a kid, people will tutt and mutter and aww shucks who should have been supervising those rough edges on the young whipper snapper.

If you make the exactly the same mistake in a more senior positions / with grey hair, people will bring your qualifications into question - and I suspect those with political interests will try and leverage the failure against you.

The intuitive cynic in me sees a combination of 1b and 2 explaining this:

1b: Many people barely know the name of, let alone trust their neighbours these days. They are turning to the neighbour out of necessity, rather than old-fashioned good will.

2: Perception of hi-tech security, or rather perception of making an effort at security. Just like the gahzillion dollars spent of on body scanners that don't do very much for air plane safety, certainly not in proportion to their cost.

It's hardly the first first-world product that satisfies a want rather than a need.

If you read to the end of the article, you come across an an interesting comment that might be of relevance here:

"If you think Phillip Roth, one of the greatest living writers, wrote this 2,648 word piece to get a remark on Wikipedia changed, I think you've missed his point.

- GREGPOMEROY

And at this risk of stating the obvious: the Michelin guide then went on to evolve a culture and impact well beyond it's intended use...

I deal a bit with arty types, and they tend to pride themselves on being able to identify products, along with designers and quoting how many hundred $'s something "costs"

I think it's a bit like nerds and bragging rights in being able to produce good explanations for difficult technical questions. Along that line of thinking, perhaps a stackoverflow karma / community recognition style system might be enough.

The analogous concept here is the product of sampling rate and bit-depth, the number of bits per sample i.e the precision of the recording

Neil Stephenson addresses this in his book, Anathem.

He states it's a fact "well known" within the military etc. that a certain percentage of folks respond very well to training for high risk, high intensity, high pressure situations (i.e facing live fire in combat) while a certain percentage simply flub and perform no better than someone who hadn't had the years of prior training.

Thing is, you don't know who's who until the event happens.

Anyway read the book it's really good in you're into this sort of idea, and into hackerish ideas in general

Quoth the author:

"I've been an advisor to the company for years, and you'd be hard pressed to find a more hard-working, dedicated founding team that has endured every roadblock and frustration a startup can experience. They recently decided to pivot to selling modern design-oriented furniture, art, electronics and housewares aimed at young professional men -- a segment they understood well since it was one to which they also belonged. Things have been going great for them, and I couldn't be happier."

He's a party with a vested interest, and is doing his bit to spin sympathetic narrative. With humans, a good story is much more persuasive than facts or content or substance.

Files are sorted into filing cabinets or boxes, which are stored on shelves, in different rooms etc.

There's more at stake than that -- malice or not, a simple, tidy diagram can bypass a human's critical faculties and increase the feeling that the false data (and whatever it's conclusion) are more true. For a statistical research organisation, this is straight up neglect!

Part of my job involves electrical drafting, and though I'm positively anal about my drawings, if I manipulate the design to make the drawing more clear and presentable, it's a snowball's chance I'd ever be excused.

In my case, the risk is starting a fire in a power supply; in theirs, manipulating the market death of a product, however many dollars that might entail. Professionals have higher standards in their field, precisely because we trust them with expert information and give more weight to their decisions. Stupidity is no excuse in this case.

That is incredible -- I'm pretty sure a professional statistical research organisation appreciates power of manipulation of humans through visual effect.

If they pull the line that it was a mistake on the artistic front to get the text to fit into the boxes, I'll file that under criminal neglect.

Because Science, man.

You don't do things in science because they are practical (you just write that on the grant applications), in fact you do many things largely because they are impractical.

It's about wonder and lust for knowledge and all that. It just so happens that the theoretical ground work for all technology piggy backed on this motivation.

Yet you're just feeding the same beast you claim to dislike.

Yes, the post has a bait title, but it's not entirely irrelevant and -- more importantly -- the article has real substance. It's structured lazily as a list but the overall point it's making is coherent, the arguments are fairly convincing and the writing appears to be mostly original.

You've managed to distract away from all the content and draw attention instead to the meta-trash -- all the while complaining about the existence of said "meta-trash" ! (At least you've generated a nice bit of irony for me to feel clever about spotting)

I can appreciate why it took a while for the thought to die off that "brandy drinking women" were prone to spontaneous combustion.

That's a bit dishonest -- the scepticism is direct at the results, not the process itself.

I routinely distrust the gushing claims by paid TV advertising actors about how the Magic Bullet changed their entire life. That hardly implies I think the product is trash, but the alleged results are obviously designed sucker less discerning consumers.

And the general answer your question is yes, as far as I'm aware, employers routinely seek references to back up the claims made by potential hires.

This article has been cobbled together from a few threads here and there taken from Kahneman's own recent book popularising his research (Fast and Slow Thinking, 2011).

The book explores several interesting ideas, but I think I can safely say that "why smart people are stupid" is almost certainly NOT one of the more important themes in the book. Which I think is why, as you've noted, the results from the CRT testing don't line up with the conclusions in the article.

Actually I'll go a bit further and say that in simplifying a fairly nuanced and complex concept down to an attention grabbing headline, this article is ironically appeals to the intuitive bias trap that Kahneman describes in his book. "Why smart people are stupid" gives us an easy bypass to answer a complex question and saves us the mental effort of actually coming to grips with the problem. The explanation is satisfying, but it's also flat out WRONG.

No, the deeper theme is something of an inconvenient truth for both smart and not so smart alike. Best for you to read the book yourself if you're really interested, but I think it's not too big a stretch to say that PG was approaching the same idea in his wisdom (intuition, fast thinking) vs. intelligence (slow, deliberate thinking) essay:

"And while wisdom yields calmness, intelligence much of the time leads to discontentment.

That's particularly worth remembering. A physicist friend recently told me half his department was on Prozac. Perhaps if we acknowledge that some amount of frustration is inevitable in certain kinds of work, we can mitigate its effects."

This is already built into the requirement: 3 to 7 years.

After three years he/she is open to apply for what might take others 7.

"Back to Econ 101. What happens when you double the price of something? Demand for it decreases."

Pretty sure what he's describing is sliding the supply curve straight up, which has exactly the opposite effect.