HN user
I do wish folks who’ve never had to navigate the internal landscape of a body would stop offering their opinions on how one should learn it.
I'm not recommending we end the use of cadavers -- and this is a discussion site, not a medical school!
Eww. I suspect that in the computer age the enduring value of dissecting dead bodies is that it's even more repulsive than cutting open live bodies (which trainee medics will have to do later on).
For those of us who don't have to, I recommend:
Of course, we know that today the Luddites are not viewed particularly kindly
On the contrary, it is technology and progress that are viewed with scepticism -- watch almost any recent sci-fi movie.
The sense we have that someone is fit generally comes from their posture.
Exceptions I've noted are joggers with hunched shoulders, splayed feet, leaping too high off the ground, and so on. By no means uncommon.
Does this idea-retraining work as well as the gym?
Not a gym user but I gained a cm in height within a week of encountering the Alexander Technique (AT). My guess is that the best gym users have good posture too, if only for safety's sake.
It's not so much about fitness and muscular bulk but about whether you are receptive to the proprioceptive feedback from those muscles and joints. AT has a unique way of pointing you towards these sensations but it relies on personal contact with a teacher.
It's a reason why some people become social cynics, I think, and this reason is represented in their brains. However they may not be able to articulate it, partly because they need to see themselves (and for others to see them) as good people. Indeed the strategy depends on it.
No doubt, but consider that some people will then become cynical about society in order to become freeloaders.
(Rather as in Upton Sinclair's famous quote: 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!')
Debate and criticism are defence, it seems to me; their value lies in averting heartache and war. For the purpose of changing the world, the ultimate argument is to create something new and substantial and then make progess with it, giving people somewhere to jump to.
Rainbow theme music:
Are mirror neurons really a thing? Why can't the neurons which govern my arm be used to help predict the actions of other people's arms?
My idea of middle-class existence is a thrifty but relatively happy family life with an emphasis on education. The budget could vary enormously depending on how this is implemented.
Thanks! Took me a minute to work out which planet was which (Jupiter being the one just outside the 'belt').
Superb stuff. On a more mundane level I hope we'll soon also have a chart of all the asteroids in our solar system (to the most realistic extent possible).
Yes and it's not just at work: most of us feel we should fill every hour of our non-working lives with activities. Especially our kids' lives (no wonder people are having fewer kids!)
There are two things wrong about this I think. Firstly, it confuses activity with purpose. Secondly, unscheduled time is valuable not only for itself but for extra capacity when something important pops up.
Yep, high speed can definitely ruin a wheel(!):
If the sci-fi I've been reading lately is any guide, one of the greatest threats to humans in stasis will be sabotage by ideological fanatics.
In another sense, 'Goodhart' seems like a splendid cosmic coincidence. Instead of obsessing over targets, try to perceive the whole system. And who can do that? Good-hearted individuals.
Feynman again, on the topic of prizes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEUcmKDaklY
So the real prize is seeing one's work used by others in their work.
The way I see it. Exams can check recall of facts, names, definitions. Also skill at identifying narrow classes of problems (which resemble facts) and extracting them from unrealistic settings. e.g. 'There are 49 dogs signed up to compete in the dog show. There are 36 more small dogs than large dogs signed up to compete. How many small dogs are signed up to compete?' and other such trick questions.
The former can be crammed and quickly forgotten. Not knowledge. The latter skill isn't knowledge of the relevant field.
In the less rigorous, more arty fields (shall we say) the trick is usually to flatter the examiners by firing their own opinions back at them in original ways. This can be highly skillful and requires awareness of the academic milieu. But not knowledge of the relevant field.
What counts is depth, and depth depends on semantic connections, including connections to other fields. These are all differentiated and can't be meaningfully added to yield a number, as if we were counting eggs or measuring a distance.
stupid gimmick like anti-suicide ceiling fan
Yep. It matters less apparently if millions of people wander around feeling suicidal as long as they don't actually commit suicide. For what? So we can pick candidates for the professions more efficiently.
The ridiculous thing is that exams are irrational: they don't measure knowledge and ability, i.e. they don't measure what they purport to measure. It makes the societal scale suffering and death all the more meaningless and disturbing.
we have largely moved away from some of the nastier edges of "traditional" parenting, with good reason
Corporal punishment, you mean. Yes. However we've regressed in at least one way: many toddlers are now in daycare for 30+ hours per week.
given that parenting resources exist, it's better to have and use scientifically tested ones than ones that replicate the prejudices of the loudest voices
Well, my original comment was more about how we use resources. But it seems doubtful whether we can scientifically test for how good such resources are, except in terms of narrow criteria like safety. We can't yet look into children's imaginations and measure how fired up they are; we can only try to find out what our children enjoy and help them to do more of it.
Consider the Harry Potter books. They may have done more for literacy than everything else combined since they arrived. Yet the first manuscript was rejected by many publishers, including some who no doubt had access to purportedly scientific advice.
Far better to look at what other families are doing, reading and playing with. And to read reviews online.
if by “intention” you mean “clumsily projected attitude”.
Nah, just intention. For example, teaching children arithmetic with great moral seriousness, as we do, doesn't produce great arithmeticians. It merely encourages people to become math teachers.
The idea that parenting isn't a field which can be, and is, productively studied
Trouble is that most of the knowledge is inexplicit and that family life is private. So trying to uncover and understand what's really going on is hard. If you try to study families empirically then you're (a) interfering with their normal activities, and (b) avoiding the fact that morality is independent of outcome. However, from the article, 'coach' suggests people are already giving advice. They think they know the answers.
Are you saying you or anyone else is equipped to be a decent parent just because you were a child and maybe had a parent?
Yes. I think that, as things stand, good parenting is largely a matter of being lucky enough to have oneself received good parenting, i.e. it's mainly a matter of tradition. This doesn't imply that one shouldn't attempt improvements here and there, some guided by science. My beef is principally with the idea that there's a scientific method to produce better people. Conceiving of people as products rather than as ends-in-themselves.
Fine, as long as you accept that the main purpose of reading a story aloud is to relax and enjoy the story together rather than to develop skills. Just as the main purpose of lego and similar toys is not to develop 'hand-eye coordination' but rather to build cool stuff. (Whatever claims are advertised on the packaging.)
This isn't a trivial point. If you read stories with the intention of fostering skill development you will neither inculcate skills nor get the most out of those stories.
parenting coach
Ha. The idea that there exist professional parents who explictly know what they are doing (with footnotes and sources) is a major conceit in our present culture.
IIRC this guy or his associates dug up soil from a medieval burial site near Cambridge (England) to try and find a bacterial enzyme capable of breaking down 7-ketocholesterol (and hence potentially to cure artherosclerosis). Maybe not Indiana Jones but certainly ingenius and intrepid!
Indeed, but if control and resources (e.g. immune resources) are allocated via some kind of map in the brain then mightn't that make proximity relevant? (notwithstanding the bone barrier!) I admit it's a stretch...
That may well be but my questions are genuine questions (I'm curious).
What's the typical walking time to the toilet in a large warehouse? Where do the relevant employees keep the bottles (e.g. are they attached to their legs underneath trousers? If not how do they avoid CCTV?) Are break periods mandatory or optional?
Yes, it may be just a coincidence that this is so, with the temples and the temporal lobes being physically close to one another. But intuition makes me wonder.
Roman numerals make all kinds of arithmetic much harder than in Arabic notation
Sure. But of course they made arithmetic easier than it was before ('tallying' I think, i.e. IIIIIII....)
It's interesting how notation and language, which arise to foster communication between different people, become the very things that make it possible for a lone individual to think. This is why I guess that a single artificial person (AI) couldn't be created in isolation.