HN user
Well surely it's a matter of degree (and also chronological trends) we're talking about here. My writing may not be perfectly clear but other commenters seem to understand my point, nuanced discussions may be difficult but not impossible if we're engaging in good faith.
Then I don't understand who this question is supposed to be directed at:
To the HN community of course.
My answer would be that none of the activities you list (with the possible exception of the kind of wannabe entrepreneurship the paper is talking about) are conspicuous consumption.
That’s a valid response, although I don’t agree. Note that I’m not regarding these activities to be entirely about conspicuous consumption, just like the paper doesn’t claim all of entrepreneurship is veblenian. Fwiw the paper does cite another work that claims some internships can be viewed as a form of conspicuous consumption.
Never said it does, was it confusing? Maybe my English needs more work.
So universities are conspicuous consumption, internships are conspicuous consumption, entrepreneurship is conspicuous consumption.
Perhaps the simple fact is that most people are motivated by the need for social validation, and only a tiny tiny fraction of the population is driven instead by things like intellectual curiosity, desire to help others / solve societal problems, etc. So any class of activity that becomes open to a sufficient number of entrants will eventually turn into a form of conspicuous consumption.
Now scientific research is conspicuous consumption (MIT Media Lab?), book authorship is conspicuous consumption, and political candidacy is conspicuous consumption. Are there any activities left that doesn’t function as a form of conspicuous consumption?
My take is that GP simply doesn’t have any experience with engineering research.
You make it sound as if the author is some middling engineer building smartphones for Apple.
An EE professor at a well-regarded research university deals with the scientific method all the time. Whatever opinion you may have about the article, as far as I can tell the author is certainly not on "the sidelines" and more than qualified to write about the state of science.
Japan has a long history of appreciating quirky (often useless) inventions, I think there’s a certain aesthetic quality to these gadgets that resists easy definition.
Lots of great resources here, but as mentioned in the essay signaling based on external validation is still crucial. (OP seems to have won a Thiel Fellowship, I’d assume that has a stronger signaling value than your typical college degree.) As much as I hate it, the world runs on limited resources and people and organizations have no choice but to rely on some sort of signaling scheme as a filtering mechanism.
This is tangential to the author's argument but it's amusing to see how the word "kawaii" has taken a life of its own in the West.
In Japan we often make gratuitous use of English words (yokomoji, lit. "sideways-written characters") to make things sound more interesting than they really are, seems like it works the other way around too.
The legal drinking age in Japan is 20 (will be lowered to 18 in 2022), but attitudes toward teenagers drinking alcohol has historically been extremely lax here.
This is interesting! Seems we can make everything interactive these days with a simple mix of electronics and ML. Discoverability might be an issue though, I already have trouble remembering all the gesture combinations on the Macbook trackpad.
It’s also not clear if the ML-based classification scheme can handle the vast individual differences among the general public, in real-life scenarios. (Wasn't this why Motion Sense on Pixel 4 wasn’t as precise as initially expected?) Performance may take a further hit with wear and tear, if these are embedded in clothing like hoodie drawstrings.
Granted 16 isn't a lot, but that's actually a higher citation count than the vast majority of academic papers. Anyways, thinking of citations as a reliable proxy for paper quality is like ranking artists by how many followers they have on Twitter.
Some people never do research again after completing a Ph.D. For such people, the Ph.D. was largely a waste of time.
Is it? Some of my friends went on to start successful companies after getting their PhDs. I'm a bit envious of them actually, I didn't have that option as my research was on an obscure topic with zero commercial potential.
The Ph.D. is a tremendous opportunity. You get to pick an advisor in any research area you like and then you get to do research in that area, receive mentoring, think deeply on problems, publish papers, become famous, while paying zero tuition for 6 years and receiving a salary.
Yes it is a great opportunity, but considering how universities benefit massively from the work generated by their PhD students they're grossly underpaid (at least in STEM).
Overall this seems like good practical advice, but it's firmly written from the perspective of a true believer in the PhD system (and academia in general). My take is a bit different, I really think academia is broken in some fundamental ways.
PageRank is a popularity contest, not sure why you’d put so much trust into it as a reliable proxy for content quality. Lots of crap can be popular. Perhaps Google is doing a decent job eliminating crap from their search results (debatable), but that’s not an outcome of a naive application of PageRank.
The public doesn’t owe anything to academics; whether or not they decide to pay attention to literature of a certain field, it is their choice. I was merely stating my observation that while many seem to consider it worthwhile to pay some level of respect to physics or mathematics, fewer appear to do so with regards to sociology or media studies. Are such attitudes justified? Perhaps so, perhaps not - but either way I find nothing perplexing that the public does not respect all fields of inquiry equally.
Why is it perplexing? People put more trust in fields where researchers follow (or are expected to follow, at least) the scientific method.
I work in what may be called a "soft" science field, I don't complain when people don't view our output as authoritative as that of hard science. I'm proud of my work, but I don't claim to have any monopoly on truth (or even a better grasp of truth, for that matter) just because I have a list of academic publications. It's the nature of the field.
If there really is a Newton of social robots the credit should go to Sony’s aibo — the vaguely Japanese-sounding names of Jibo, Kuri, etc. are dead giveaways of who’s the real OG here.
Anyways aibo came out around 2000 I think, if social robots really are viable as a product category we should be way past the Newton stage by now.
They're popular because they're considered Insta-worthy here in Japan, their rise pretty much coincides with that of Instagram.
n=10
Yes interesting idea for a study but only 10 participants, presumably all around the same age.
Too bad this is what passes off as scholarship in Human-Computer Interaction nowadays. I remember seeing a paper from CHI (the top conference in the field, where OP was also published) lamenting the field's far lower standard of scholarship compared to psychology — the poster child of replication crisis!
The author makes a rather arbitrary distinction between "dumb" and "smart" technologies - trains are now considered "dumb" technology? I live in Tokyo and that was never my impression, they're as smart as it gets and the infrastructure is constantly being updated with new tech as we speak. (My brother works for Japan Railways btw.)
It's as if the author (with a background in civil engineering not CS) deems everything that she has a good understanding of as "dumb", and everything she's relatively unfamiliar with as "smart", i.e., useless. While I'm no fan of projects like Google Quayside and wary of increasing corporate influence on urban policy, you can't point fingers at fringe ideas like smart garbage cans and use that to outright dismiss the role of IT in urbanism; we don't browse through weputachipinit [1] and conclude that all IoT is worthless do we. If she can look into things like Japan's earthquake notification system [2] and still claim that "smart" solutions don't add value to cities, then we can talk.
[1] https://weputachipinit.tumblr.com
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_Early_Warning_(Japa...
Perhaps I'm biased by my own experience here in Tokyo, but I feel that a lot of criticism against smart cities - while not at all without merit - smack of civil engineers, urban planners, architects and the like claiming territorial rights, attempting to keep "outsiders" like IT people stepping onto what has traditionally been their turf. We need less of such feudal mentality, and more interdisciplinary collaboration; more urbanists need to start speaking the language of IT and vice versa.
Despite the financial collapse in the early 90s, throughout the decade Japanese youths still had one of the highest levels of disposable income in the world so that probably had an effect. You could be making the most obscure music, film, or fashion and you still had an audience willing to pay for it.
Also I remember people's attitudes shifting in some inexplicable ways, suddenly cultural capital seemed to carry much more weight than other forms of capital. For a while it felt like everyone in Tokyo was trying to one-up one another, not financially but through cultural connoisseurship. Strange times but I do miss the general atmosphere, Japan feels like a completely different country now...
Brings back memories of tangible interface research around the year 2000, these ideas seemed to have so much potential back then. Unfortunately nobody has come up with a convincing argument as to exactly why we need tangibles, aside from some philosophical musings that fetishize the supposed "richness" of real-world interaction.
The value proposition of tangibles took an especially hard blow when smartphones hit the market — multi-touch direct input achieves much of what tangibles promise to offer (e.g., intuitiveness) while retaining all of the benefits of digital computation (e.g., portability of data, negligible marginal cost of production) that are sacrificed in systems like Dynamicland.
The true problem with surveillance is the asymmetry of it all.
This argument reminds me of those pro-gun arguments: we can't prevent guns from falling into the hands of wrongdoers, so let's allow everyone to arm themselves – soon we'll reach an equilibrium where the fear of retaliation acts as deterrence.
I don't agree with this kind of thinking at all, the way to deal with destructive technologies is not further proliferation.
Surprised to hear this about Barabasi, I'm no physicist but enjoyed reading his books on network science as a layperson.
Is there any published criticism against his work? His papers get cited everywhere, I know citations are more metric of popularity than scientific quality but I find it puzzling that his work continues to get attention if the results don't hold up.
Just to remind you all, this is coming from a country whose cybersecurity minister claims to have "never touched a PC in his life".
Sorta reminds me of What's Up Tiger Lily
This thread may be of interest:
https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/3lnpt6/is_jake_adels...
It's not like he acts with any apparent agenda or malice, the guy just has no regard for facts. Everything he writes consists of a small sliver of facts mixed with tons of faux-noir, spiced-up BS that paints some exotic portrait of Japan tailored for Western audiences.
I guess we all want foreign countries to be more exotic than they really are — I remember when I first moved here from LA, my classmates seemed disappointed to learn that I'd never been involved in a gunfight :/
It amuses me how Western media outlets continue to quote Adelstein, his entire shtick consists of spouting made up stuff about Japan to Western reporters with no means of fact-checking.
I guess it goes both ways though, the self-proclaimed "America-tsuu (US experts)" here aren't any better.