Refusal after Refusal | Hacker News Reader

Refusal after Refusal

harvarddesignmagazine.org

55 pointspetsormeat47 comments

> I woke up ... and took 450 milligrams of bupropion, 50 milligrams of Lamictal, 5 milligrams of aripiprazole, and 200 milligrams of modafinil ... few hours later, I took 20 milligrams of Adderall. Only then was I able to write this paragraph.

We all have bad days, but if this psychiatric cocktail is a daily routine caused by the job stresses the author should fix him/herself first before advising others, especially prospective students. Sorry, it sounds harsh. But the author should consider taking some of his/her own medicine and switch employers or careers. Even if it makes one a bit poorer, it is better long term. And if that helps it would make for a more informative future post.

Even if that's a true and accurate account of their medication (which sounds like rather a lot to me, but I'm not a pharmacologist), it also serves as a Hunter S Thompson reference. Which seems deliberate when you're writing a 4k word essay with 28 references in. Especially when you're referencing Negri.

This must be hyperbole. The 450 mg of Buproprion alone is hard to believe.

For something pressed in the 5mg to 30mg range, it seems very ludicrous a dose indeed.

It's a bit higher than that. 150 mg for anti-smoking (as Xyban), 300 mg for severe depression or Bipolar 1 (as Wellbutrin) is not uncommon, but with all the others (esp. the Adderall and the mood stabilizer) and coffee to chase, yeah, that would wake up a mummified corpse.

That shrink should have his license pulled.

(That said, Buproprion is a miracle drug. As far as antidepressants go, it's in class all by itself.)

> As far as antidepressants go, [buproprion is] in class all by itself.

I'd like to emphasize that this is literally a true statement. It's what's called an atypical antidepressant [0] because it doesn't act in a way similar to other antidepressants.

---

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atypical_antidepressant

The word "literally" is misused, unnecessary and annoying.

Unnecessary? Only in the sense that my sentence works without the word. It's a rhetorical device.

Annoying? You must be easily annoyed.

But, misused? Not if you agree with definition 3 on dictionary.com: "actually; without exaggeration or inaccuracy." [0]

---

[0]: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/literally

I should have know better than to use THAT word on the internet. How silly of me.

Except in this case, where it is required to distinguish the sentence being true in a literal, as opposed to figurative, sense.

No, they make pills that are 150 mg. I was on 300 mg of daily Welbutrin XL for several years, though more often I was on 150 mg. I also took about 20 mg of Prozac, which seemed to have a smoothing effect. My only side effects on the stronger dosages was an acid stomach, and I could mitigate that by eating half a bagel or muffin in the morning.

I remember asking my psychiatrist about the dosage because it seemed high to me. He told me that up to 450 mg was the recommended maximum, and that he did have a few patients who had been on stronger doses. I believe he said he knew of one patient on 750 mg, though he may have said 600 mg.

Just based on my personal experience, psychiatric drugs are highly variable. I did very well under Welbutrin, while even the smallest dosages of Effexor had me waking up with constant nightmares and a non-euphoric, altogether unpleasant "buzzed" feeling not unlike a hangover without the headache. I also know people who swear by Effexor.

Edit: Today I almost entirely mitigate my depression with natural light therapy.

It sounds like a recipe for anticholinergic, Parkinsonian-like tremors, nausea, vertigo, sweating and other dysfunctions.

That was the most pretentious creative writing homework I have read in a long time.

The verbose and complicated presentation makes me disinterested in the content.

Also, yes, an effort should be made to let college students know the sad reality of working as architect.

I thought the writing was ok but ... do architecture students really believe they're about to transform the world through architecture? If so - why?

It's capital-A Art that gets to dominate the skyline. Some architects get to transform the world; but only about half a dozen. Everyone else gets to do boxy oil company HQs and strip malls. The author is .. not happy about this.

Does anyone into anything out of passion not believe so?

I believed so as I enrolled into mathematics, physics and computer science studies, only to be very much disappointed with academia (more than I expected: I did not expect much, but what I've met was sadder than I could envision).

Yeah, maybe when you're 16~18, then you grow up and understand just how hard it is to make a difference even in your own social circle, let alone the world. I guess people should stop pretending all the great man and woman we hear about today did their thing alone. They all needed someone else, even if just to make their ideas popular or to give them financial means.

I've never claimed I envisioned doing it solo. That's where most of the disappointment actually came from: teaching assistants and professors were so uninterested in the subjects they were giving, they'd hardly motivate anyone, let alone give them a chance to participate in anything world-changing. Even to the point that out-of-the-box creativity was punished. That drove the student body to turn into an exam-passing automata.

Universities are a perfect place for that, and I hoped for such a stimulating environment. I did end up meeting a teacher or two in later years that met my expectations, but they never stuck around long enough.

And no, the fame is not the driver, imho: I believe all humans would gladly contribute to a challenging problem solution, without requiring ego satisfaction (that can come later :)).

One of my favorite lessons in making a difference:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fW8amMCVAJQ

Of course they do. Do you think everyone who plays sport believes that their sport can somehow transform the world? Do you seriously think every bassoon player and salsa dancer believes they're going to change history?

Europe has a lot beautiful architecture that add to the culture of a city. America just doesn't have that.

Ok and the newer buildings that actually pay a good architect are impressive that add to the beauty of a city as well.

If you live in a city in the US that is just strip malls it's depressing

I love European architecture, and I generally detest US urban design, but this is a really unfair generalization.

I used to live in Berkeley. More recently, I lived in South Park, San Diego. Both places have beautiful homes. I would _love_ to be able to build an American Craftsman style home where I live now (Ireland) but it would most likely be deemed "out of character" with the surroundings and refused planning.

http://s3-media3.fl.yelpcdn.com/bphoto/8VGRjHKhUkzpKVPCdeX9X...

Grand Central station in Los Angeles holds its own too http://kmetros.net/wp-content/uploads/galleries/post-95/full...

(Edit - the above was supposed to refer to Union Station in LA, not GCS in NYC.)

Even among modern architecture, there's something to be said for the aspiration, even if not the reality. There's a beauty in the colorful, low-slung storefronts in Ocean Beach, near San Diego. https://goo.gl/maps/tSaHPChSjLo Of course, I could do without the cars and parking lots. Maybe I'm biased by my history but dingy burger joints and head shops near the beach evoke a sense of relaxation I don't get much of in European cities.

Old brick buildings can be really depressing when they're not kept up. And Europe has plenty of unattractive housing projects (https://goo.gl/maps/KLRXsCrck8s )

Here's a ghastly shopping centre near my home in Dublin http://cf.broadsheet.ie/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Phibsboro...

Maybe Europe's advantage was having more time to accumulate buildings, so over time the ugly ones got torn down. Of course, why don't we have more Native American architecture? A nomadic lifestyle combined with materials that generally degrade over centuries? (Notwithstanding that, of course, there may be Native American architects doing interesting work today. I don't know)

But really it's because fewer European cities have been destroyed by car-centric design. Those which have are about as ugly as US suburbia, but I struggle to think of too many examples. Outer neighborhoods of Dublin and Stuttgart come to mind.

>Old brick buildings can be really depressing when they're not kept up.

Brick dominates the UK, but the architecture in the continent in general is much more varied and interesting (see Paris, Rome, Prague, Cracow as examples).

True - and my favourite places in the world are medieval towns on the continent (Obernai, Colmar, Rothenburg ob Der Tauber, Riquewihr, etc. all hold enormous appeal for me). I was just trying to point out that the US isn't _all_ hideous and Europe isn't _all_ charming architecture.

> fewer European cities have been destroyed by car-centric design

Galway is pretty terrible, if you're talking about Ireland, and some of the former industrial heartland of England is pretty bad too (Coventry in particular)

Yup - #GalwayCityOfCars comes up a lot in Twitter for me, and they've fought any improvement for cycling until after getting an enormous motorway built, because clearly a 1 meter wide bike lane is the cause of their congestion issues.

Small note: Grand Central Station is in New York, not LA

Sorry, I meant Union Station, not Grand Central. Too much copy-pasting.

*terminal

Fair, that is the correct name, but you'll hear it called Station, Terminal, or the shortened "Grand Central".

The subway part of it is a station, but for all other trains it’s the last stop.

To a certain degree, it's not unfounded. The spaces we exist in can have a profound impact on how we operate, what we think about, how much energy we have, etc. This is intuitive to anyone: At the extremes, compare coding in a garbage heap, in the office, and at home (even without the associated distractions [eg kids, meetings, the uh.. garbage compactor], the difference you "feel" is immediate)

So then, as you would in any area, you take that intuition, and you become an expert in it, and you realize that with a sufficient number of small improvements you can enact very large ones in total. Theoretically, it should be possible to build an environment thats somehow absolutely perfect from programming in, and creating let's say a 40% boost in productivity with no significant downsides. Replicate the model repeatedly, and 40% programming productivity boost won't simply improve the programmers; the benefits will cascade, likely leading to improvements across the board.

Alternatively, you have the impact of symbols, in things like a grand church.. A city will with a religious superstructure has a distinctly different feel than a city with minor churches here and there. The culture of the populace is very obviously affected, though perhaps why might not be. It might simply be the fear of god being ever-present, or perhaps the general knowledge that most in the area will naturally be tied to that particular religion, or maybe even the simple fact that its a damned impressive feat of human engineering

Architecture clearly has a significant impact on us, so its not that hard to believe that, were you successful and skilled enough, you could make a very significant impact; However, I'm not of the belief that most architecture is (at least by intention), and I don't think we have much hope for it in the near-future. But the potential is always there.

PS: Also note that I'm a strong believer in Christopher Alexander's perspective on living architecture (don't buy that much into pattern theory specifically, though obviously it works well for CS), and ofc Ram's Form follows Function, and those two ideas are what inform most of my opinion on how architecture should be treated

Two friends of mine were architecture students. One is on a fairly successful career trajectory (working at a very good firm in NYC). The other is struggling and not presently working in the industry.

This is just trading anecdata for anecdata, but neither of them were ever possessed of the notion they'd "transform" anything. The more successful of the two always seemed very passionate about the subject, but otherwise he generally came across as pessimistic about what he'd achieve.

Not unique to architecture; in the past ~3 decades, every higher education department has had to justify their existence with grandiloquent overselling of their major's external impact. It's one of the reasons why we're in our current student loan crisis. Milliennials bought all of the "Go to college!" propaganda hook, line, and sinker. We didn't know any better.

In an early counseling session, I told my adviser that I was in the engineering program as a step to a Masters in Architecture. He nodded and said something along the lines of, "From time to time we get students here with that plan. By the time they graduate they realize that they can make more money with their B.S. than they would if they spend the time and money to go on to architecture school."

After graduation, I often interacted with architecture firms on various projects and quickly lost interest in architecture-the-job.

Thank you for sharing this, I enjoyed it very much. I've always been fascinated by the fact that the culture of architecture is (or at least has been) more aligned with that of art and literary criticism than, for example, engineering. I get the feeling that most here at Hacker News would think that's a bad or ridiculous thing, but I think it's wonderful.

"While the typical college student in the United States accrues an average of $29,420 in student debt..."

Ok, this is killing me.

That statement comes from https://archinect.com/features/article/112509888/the-state-o..., which says, "While the average student debt for a US American student is $29,400,..." and links to a search, https://ticas.org/search/google/posd%20OR%20homestate%20OR%2.... On the other hand, they're not the only ones: https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2018/06/13/student....

Here's the deal: all of the numbers I can find in the $30,000-$40,000 range are for people with some educational debt. In other words, it excludes those without debt. (Want to bump up your average? Exclude the zeros.)

"Twenty-seven percent of adults report that they borrowed money to pay for expenses related to their own education, .... Among just those who completed at least some education beyond high school, 41 percent acquired at least some debt to finance that education, and half of those who completed at least a bachelor's degree acquired at least some debt in the process." - https://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/2016-economic-wel...

Second, this defines "the typical college student" as the average college student with debt, as those are the numbers they're using, as opposed to the median college student college student. The median is consistently lower: "Among respondents who report that they currently owe student loan debt for their own education, the mean level of this debt is $30,156 and the median is $12,000. (The median amount of education debt is consistently lower than the mean due to some individuals with large levels of debt)." - https://www.federalreserve.gov/econresdata/2016-economic-wel...

In fact, the reference this essay uses says, "In the United States, around 40 million people currently hold student debt," linking to https://www.huffingtonpost.com/kyle-mccarthy/10-fun-facts-ab..., which links to http://pages.citebite.com/c2y6l3p2t8uga, "More than 40 million Americans have student loan debt, amounting to roughly $1.2 trillion in outstanding debt." [Thus, the roughly $30,000 average value.]

I just wish to note that (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_..., https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/distribution-by-ag...) there are roughly 125 million Americans with a bachelors or greater, leading to an "average" student loan debt of $9,600.

Does the Harvard Design Review fact-check their essays? Is the author taking entirely too many psychoactives?

Thanks. I feel better now.

There is a real problem, but this article does it a disservice.

The problem is that we've got arms races everywhere and they're making it impossible to live up to the standard of living we could have if we didn't have them. Architecture can be beautiful, but it isn't in designing parking garages.

Take property prices, for example. There's only so much land in Toronto. There's only so much lakefront property two hours north of there. Even leaving aside mortgages (which only exacerbate the issue) the intellectual 1% is going to fight it out to get a piece of that no matter what.

This is the double edged sword that is capitalism. It does good when it pushes out the candlemakers for the lightbulb manufacturers, but the very same mechanism has a cost and it's levied at the very shareholders and workers it enriches.

Advertising, education, housing, and (in the US) healthcare are all where we're dumping our money and if we were smarter about it we could tax or regulate sensible limits to them. Or at least come to figure out a better arrangement like we did with our world's security to blunt actual arms races via liberalism.

70 hour weeks for $70000 is $20/hr, not $15/hr as stated in the article.

If you calculate with overtime, it is.

  40+30*1.5 = 85 effective hours
  70000/52/85 = $15.84 hour

Indeed. I hadn't considered that.

Who, with a college degree or without a union, gets overtime?

Also $70k is "low wages". Hilarious.

>> What if we told you that we were beginning to think work itself was the problem?

Who needs people doing useful things anyway. Intellectual Marxists losing touch with the reality of the experience of working class people? Or actual reality in general? Perish the thought!

>Also $70k is "low wages". Hilarious.

Entirely dependent on your location. I'd imagine that most _ideal_ architecture jobs require an urban setting, which usually translates to high rent/housing prices, for which 70k might be a tricky budget.

If you're earning 70k in a strip mall sprawl, you might be better off financially speaking, but what opportunities exist there?

$70k isn't very tricky outside of "the most expensive places to live", and working in an urban setting doesn't mean you need to live next to the buildings you are designing.

Median household income, NYC: $58,000 ($35,000-77,000) http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/nycdata/income-taxes/med_hhold_in...

Chicago: $50,000 https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/chicagocityilli...

If you're talking the SF Bay area, $70k might be quite a bit below median. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/map/sanfranciscocount...

  The machinist, the one they 
  called Chef, was from New 
  Orleans. He was wrapped too 
  tight for Vietnam, probably 
  wrapped too tight for New 
  Orleans.

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