“You want to know something about how bullshit insane our brains are?” (2018)
twitter.com
twitter.com
Why this is presented as bullshit insane I have no idea. It seems like an amazingly brilliant solution to me, much better than the 'engineering' solution suggested where your vision flashes black every time you move your eyes. Also worth mentioning this weirdness is repeated in human consciousness all the time. Like the theory (tested as far as we can) that tall people perceiving the world further in the past so they can reconsile nerve impulses from their feet as happening at the same time as visual stimulus. We've known about phenomenon like this for a long time as well as other deeper revelations like, what is sometimes called, the illusion of free will. And yet we constantly act surprised that our conscious experience of the world doesn't correlate to what we find out is 'actually' happening.
So we are flawed meat bags with insane, non sensical brain mechanics, if only our biological solutions were as well thought out as VR eh?
How glad am I that the incredible complexity and subtly of evolution created my visual system and not Valve or Sony.
You could very easily write a whole piece about how elegant and awe inspiringly complex and effective they are on the exact same subject.
Except it wouldn’t get as many likes and retweets, of course.
Sort of made me sad just thinking about that. Twitter really does encourage the worst forms of conversation - outrage, sarcasm, cheapness, drunk humor dominates.
But eh, I'm not the one who took their time to write this all out in a presentable way so whatever the author wants
The 2010s “lol look at this dumb shit” attitude reminds me of the 90s “edgy ironic” attitude. It’s lazy, just following the trend that further reduces our ability to continue and have a cool discussion. You can be funny without needing to hit every dopamine receptor. But hey, maybe that’s just what Twitter is for - letting off some steam.
I only felt sad because I saw discussions here the other day about humans being sphagetti code and this sort of absolutist/negative/ironic postmodern attitude just kind of sucks - it actually shuts down conversation (note you are literally just defending it instead of expanding into, say, some philosophy). You can be totally tongue in cheek, funny, and even self-deprecating without being just wrong and super absolutist at once, it’s just not as easy and probably wins a few less internet points.
If anything I’m advocating for a humor that complements truth.
If one watches a lot of brain documentaries on pop sci TV channels, the thing they present looks like this magnificent beautiful 3D model with bluish and pinkish stuff and light pulses go around as in a hyperfuturistic awesome thing while the camera is circling around with beautiful intriguing music in the background. The reality is a squishy gobblegook of kludges that gets its job done remarkably well but through some remarkably strange ways. It is a lot of spaghetti, no clear modularity, lots of stuff performing multiple functions and doing things in a roundabout way.
I first read about this contrast in David Linden's really enjoyable "The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God".
But if you already think that everything is rotten and humans are crap and biased beyond imagination, nothing has any value etc. etc. then perhaps you'd benefit from the opposite direction idea, about how really well it works and how much extra stuff the mind does that is not strictly mundane and everyday tasks.
> how bullshit insane our brains are
> but OH NO
> this shit works
> your freaking visual system just lied to you about HOW LONG TIME IS
> we're apparently computers programmed by batshit insane drunkards in Visual Basic 5
> your brain has EVEN MORE UGLY HACKS
Interminable shtick that just makes subject matter pointlessly longer and more of a chore to read.
TLDR; that’s authors choice both for stylistic reasons and personal. When the choice is between “don’t blog at all” and “post on twitter” because that’s what fits his mind process, I would rather read about it on twitter than not at all.
Judging by the amount of discussion here, it seems like this was thought provoking for a number of people despite the format.
I find twitter threads frustrating to follow also, but you could always... skip clicking the link if you feel so strongly about it.
As an aside, criticizing the form of content rather than the substance is not of particular interest in general, to be honest. It comes off as “I didn’t really have anything to say about the subject, but at least I can comment on perceived flaws in the style of presentation”.
If you like that style, then fine, why don’t you just not reply to this valid sub-thread? I don’t see you adding any to the discussion. But the discussion of the degradation of our ability to communicate due to social media incentivizing stupid clickbait is super important.
I don’t think the discussion on this post here is reddit-level - for example, I found the top level comment on the role of dreams, and the link to the commenter’s paper on psyarxiv super interesting. As I said in my comment, I too find the twitter thread format a bit frustrating to read.
What I was trying to say is that the author (Foone) has previously posted about this - for them, the choice really is between “blog this way or not at all” due to the way their mind works.
Of course the fact that this topic comes up every time is indicative, but I think what it indicates is that Twitter UX is terrible, not that the author is a bad person for choosing to share in this format.
I definitely should aim my criticism at the incentives more than the people, that’s a good point. I specifically like HN because it seems to have figured out pretty nice incentives (of course the lack of scale is the key).
If this happens any time this author is posted there's obviously something to the criticism of the style.
As for your aside, "if you don't like it, don't read" is also not a particularly interesting contribution, to be honest.
I am not saying Twitter is a great platform for this type of thing - clearly it’s not.
I now know what to expect if I do read more in future, but regardless of my opinion of the style, I definitely rather people post/publish in any form rather than not post at all. Anything that can inform people about something they weren't previously aware of is a good thing.
Nassim Haramein - British leftist newager who claims to have invented a new theory of physics implying all particles are actually black holes and who’s quite popular in North London hippie circles has 350K followers on Facebook.
I think these are good baselines of what it takes to get 62k followers.
Science establishment knows all, and is never wrong, especially once it excommunicates a heretic. Science heretics are always bad and wrong. Science establishment people are always right. Trust science establishment. Give science establishment money. Science good. Quack bad. Give money. No money to quack. All to science. Science good.
Did we mention science right and quack wrong?
I've never understood why, in the Eternal September, anyone would expect the average late-night conversation on the internet to be any different from the average late-night conversations at the local pub. Sure, you might find that rare table of PhD students/young engineers/residents/academics and teachers/etc. having a genuinely interesting conversation as they transition from work to relaxation after a long night at the lab/hospital/grading. But mostly it's drunk idiots relishing in base pleasures. And after the second drink or so those engaging conversations will devolve.
I don't think Twitter is encouraging anything in particular here. The same thing happened with IRC channels, forums, etc. No point in getting angry or sad about the Eternal September; it was always inevitable.
The platform not only discourages long form dialogue, which is especially useful for communicating complex topics, it explicitly prohibits it.
Sure, but I don't think that type of communication/interaction causes bad conversations. The conversation was going to be a shit show regardless. Go join any Mome's or Political group on Facebook. The conversation isn't exactly elevated.
> The platform not only discourages long form dialogue, which is especially useful for communicating complex topics, it explicitly prohibits it.
Not really. "1/N"
Tweeting involves getting your short thoughts evaluated and rated by strangers at scale! You're also regularly aware of the properties required to (potentially) go viral.
It is far more difficult, by design, to encourage better conversations there.
While I'm not a big fan of Twitter, "the character limit encourages a weird conversational style" is not on my list of grievances at all.
I see Twitter as mostly a broadcast medium where you go to get the latest info on some event.
Conversations the kind that feel natural and human dont have a weird distracting real time ticker above my head scoring every dumb thing that flits through my mind.
Without going into the backstory, there was a period of time where I had to follow about 100 very specific people. I also happen to know how successful these people were financially.
Those who were the most successful financially tweeted the least and those who were the least successful financially tweeted the most. Then there was those who didn't tweet at all because they had no financial incentive to and their egos weren't contingent upon it.
Can you offer a source? Asking for a tall friend.
I don't see a real problem with this. Imagine a video camera that inserts a black frame every other frame (in the sensor data), and a transcriber that just doesn't bother including the black frames in the recorded data. Why would the black flashes from the sensors be a problem?
But that's completely unrelated....
How about a visual system that did not need to take liberties with the perception of time?
As you say, blinking rarely makes its way into conscious thought, despite that the visual input was briefly suspended. (I suppose a similar thing happens with smell. How often do you notice that you don't smell much when you breathe out?) Neither do we notice that our various senses have different latencies, reporting the same event at different times.
As I understand it, the blind spot in our vision was only discovered relatively recently. For countless millennia, mankind wasn't even aware of it, and not for lack of curiosity. I suspect the same goes for our colour perception.
Senses can even blur together - the input from, say, your sight, can affect how you perceive taste, or texture.
As you say, this kind of 'smearing' is a brilliant feature of our minds, it's not an ugly hack at all. That we aren't able to intuit the precise nature of how we perceive things, is a small price to pay, both in evolutionary terms and in terms of the elegance of the system, to my mind.
On a less substantive note: reading lengthy writeups on Twitter is singularly painful. I do wish people would make the leap to the blog-post format for this kind of thing.
For example, would a color blind philosopher understand the world differently? How about a synaesthete? What about a philosopher diagnosed with sociopathy? Would their experience change their rational understanding of the world?
Interesting anecdote: I've been through a fair amount of training in perception and conscious proprioception in the military. The end result of all of this training is that I am very often actively paying attention to my body, especially my vision, hearing, and touch. I've noticed that when I blink, I'm consciously aware of what has changed when I finish blinking. I'm aware of how my body moves during this time, if my sense of touch is telling me something is different than before my eyes closed. I can pick things up that I can't see without fumbling for them. It's really interesting how effectively we can mentally model the world around us, incorporate different types of senses to update this global model.
I imagine that professional athletes, race car drivers, Martial artists, etc... develop similar levels of proprioception and modeling.
Say a novice practices to catch a ball on a windless day. He gets better. What exactly is he getting better at? He is getting better at guessing the trajectory of the ball based on past 3D positions of the ball.
This guesswork has its limits. He learns the limits on a windy day. He gets better with more practice on a windy day.
This new knowledge too has its limits. He learns that on a windy day at the beach.
The brain tries to guess the future based on a sequence of events. This is why detaching from senses is an experience like no other. Meditation, irrespective of the modality, is a way to detach from senses. We do not live in the past.
If our brains were not capable of holding memories and only of detecting one event at a time, two cars moving at vastly different speeds would look separated in space, but nothing more than that. I think, our senses, our ability to hold on to memories (past sensor data) of events and our ability to compare two past events combined makes the world animated. This also seems to give birth to the sense of passage of time. Which also could mean that time does not exist?
This is at the heart of mental health - the issue being that imagined feeling patterns are formed during infancy. During that period you need to maintain relationships with your caregivers in order to survive (so your feelings organise around achieving good caregiver conditions). However when you are in the wider world as an adolescent/adult things are very different (1. don't need your caregivers to survive and 2. the rest of the world doesn't act the same way that your caregivers do) and that's when things get bad-mental-healthy. Your brain is imagining feelings to satisfy a different environment to the one you are in.
Even more amazingly the brain knows it does this and has a built in correction mechanism - dreams. They don't auto correct, but provide instructions (if we listened). This isn't the Freudian-everything-is-a-penis/vagina vibe, but a much more practical route to using dreams to diagnose false feelings. I wrote a paper on this here: https://psyarxiv.com/k6trz
When you have spotted a false feeling it's very easy to get rid of it. You have to catch yourself repeating the pattern and break it. Do that a few times and your brain reconsolidates and no longer feels the inaccurate feeling as it understands that the survival function of it is no longer required.
My oversimplification of the paper: give yourself real-life exposure to situations you fear in dreams. (You'll probably respond well IRL, and start to break down your anxiety.)
Some key quotes
“… dreaming results in the mental generation of situations where we should behave unanxiously, or without avoidance … the function of dreams is to highlight erroneous fear responses … anxieties are the over generalisation of the fear response, stemming from a real fear memory, resulting in unnecessarily avoidant behaviour. These are what dreams bring attention to.”
“in my own therapy, where I started to use [dreams] to identify which fear I needed to expose myself to next, I found that, as one dampens the highlighted fear in real life, in-dream behaviour becomes increasingly un-avoidant (i.e., in line with what the situation demands). … This process continues until the fear is no longer present, at which point dreams highlighting this anxiety no longer occur.”
“… typically diagnosed symptoms of social anxiety (e.g., avoidance of social situations, low self - esteem) are all sensible anxieties to hold in order to avoid potential conflict situations; avoiding interactions eliminates the risk of upsetting others and having low self-esteem results in a default conflict-avoiding position of appeasing others. … These dreams propose a route out of social anxiety which focuses on becoming comfortable upsetting others for the benefit of the self, rather than disproving seemingly relevant maladaptive beliefs (e.g., people don’t like me).”
How do you recommend doing that?
The paper I link to on dreams should help too. Dreams are sort of an internal mini-therapist, but again, it is easier with an outside perspective.
That's a big part of what cognitive behavioral therapy does. Also, mindfulness meditation is one way for doing this that helps some people with the "catch yourself doing that pattern" part.
Now, MDMA was bullshit in its own way, of course, but I’ll forever be grateful for the realization it gave me. It changed my life.
I really don't get why you said that (I use the stuff myself). Do you really think that, or is that partly an externally-acquired anti-drugs message, perhaps picked up from school in drug 'education' lessons, or am I being uncharitable?
My emotions are as real as my bones. If you think emotions are an illusion, you should spend a few months with severe clinical depression (I had much more than that). You'll soon change your mind.
I would sometimes "catch" our bathroom clock (analog, with second hand) going backwards for a second. But no matter how long I stared at it, it wouldn't happen again. Only when I turned my attention to it would it sometimes seem to go backwards for the first second.
With the "your brain extrapolates the movement backwards" this makes perfect sense if the second hand will vibrate a bit on each tick. Apparently, if I focused on the clock while the second hand was vibrating for a fraction of a second after moving, it might be moving ever so slightly backwards at that moment, which is extrapolated to a full second of backward movement. In the end it's just another optical illusion.
Woah, I remember this too. It's a memory I had long forgotten. Every once in a while if you glance at an analogue clock that doesn't have a smooth second hand, it looks like the first time the second hand moves is backwards.
It's a combined effect of saccades and your brain drifting in and out of focus.
I seem to recall a similar confusion a couple of times. It's more likely just a bad coverup and/or a timestamp confusion in asynchronous processing.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_fusion_threshold
My aunt had a very small stroke in her visual cortex. Incredibly it only impacted the visual processing in the upper right quadrant of the right eye. Everything else was fine.
She was telling me that the affected part of her field of vision wasn't black (as you'd expect). She described it as "empty". It just wasn't there. There were no good words to describe how that looked visually.
Interestingly as her brain recovered somewhat, the "empty" area got a bit smaller, then her brain started to do "error correction" and to her, the "empty" part is gone, but it doesn't provide any visual information. Similar to the tweets, it's just filled with "background".
1st step) Imagine you have eyes in the back of your head.
2nd step) Concentrate on trying to see what's behind you.
The loss manifested itself at first as trippy vibrating colors, which soon changed to non-black nothing.
After that I would look straight at things not only to not see them, but to not even realize I am not seeing something.
It's been years since I had an occurrence, but the timing was pretty reliable.
~30 minutes: slowly growing blind spot at the center of my field of vision.
~15 minutes: rainbow zig-zags in a slowly expanding circle from the blind spot until it encircled my whole field of view, after which it faded out and I could focus pretty normally again. No headache during or after.
After multiple rounds, I figured out the, or a, trigger: absinthe. Drinking absinthe reliably brought one on ~18 hours later. Only ever had one that I couldn't tie to absinthe. Stopped drinking absinthe years ago, and the scintillating scotoma stopped as well.
If someone sitting next to him spoke, and he wasn't facing them with his remaining working eye, he would be taken by surprise, and would not always understand who was talking to him. Instead of turning his head, he would frequently ask, "Who's that? Where are you?" It wasn't just that he couldn't see the person, it was almost as if the person wasn't there. He frequently described how the blind side of his vision wasn't black, just "not there".
Another oddity was that he didn't notice the loss of vision until maybe a couple of days after it happened.
There wasn't a black spot in her field of vision, it was a kind of indefinite background that didn't stand out, but didn't have any information. Her best explanation is that it was like your peripheral vision, you can "see" things to the side, but you're not getting 100% of the detail you'd get if it was in front.
But yes, she said the same thing - it freaked her out when she would move her eye slightly and something that was hidden by the blind spot popped up.
Is there a citation for this? I can't find any paper on it, the Wikipedia articles on "sacaddic masking" and "transsaccadic memory" don't mention the phenomenon at all, and I've been trying it with my own clock (where the second hand moves in second increments, not continuously) and it simply doesn't happen for me at all.
I can't figure out why your brain would "rewrite past memory" instead of simply persisting the old image either.
If anyone could point me to an actual name for this phenomenon, or a paper proving it, I'd super appreciate it, because it seems so implausible that I'd love to understand it more.
EDIT: found the actual term for it -- "chronostasis" -- and the memory phenomenon is "neural antedating" or "neural backdating". [1] And while it appears to be a reported phenomenon, it appears to be understandably difficult to verify experimentally, since it is an inherently subjective phenomenon and experiments involve potential sources of bias that could alternately explain it.
FWIW, I have noticed the effect many times, in particular with the second hand of analogue clocks.
It's interesting that I casually came up with a complex explanation and didn't even try to critically examine whether it was plausible or not.
There isn't an image to persist. The "image" you see is an active construction of your brain working on incomplete and inaccurate sensory data. As a hypothesis, your visual system doesn't have the memory to "persist" the sensory data, the data during the saccade is not meaningful, and your brain, while constructing your own personal chronological sequence after the fact simply uses what it has on hand.
I believe you're misreading that Wikipedia section. The phenomena exists, and the mentioned aspects all play a role in causing it.
It is difficult to explain which part of the process causes the time distortion, and the measurements of how distorted things can be are influenced by the testing.
Namely how flexible/fluid adaptive the brain is. The eye is pretty "dumb" but the processing pathway of the optic nerve through the visual cortex (which is hilariously on the complete other side of the brain) is a marvel of processing.
> This can easily be duplicated by looking into a mirror, and looking from one eye to another.
But you can't see your eyes move in the mirror. They seem strangely very inert. If you play the video afterward, you'll see your eyes moving!
From a high level @foone is right, our eyes and visual system are nothing like a camera. Our visual system constructs an internal 3D model of the world, our “perception”, given observations in the form of the electrical activity in our photoreceptor (rod and cone) cells. It tries to do this in a way that balances energy use and accuracy of the model. This simple concept can actually be used to explain a lot things that may seem like ‘hacks’ as @foone put it. One example: Saying Saccades are a problem is misleading, they likely evolved to give us higher acuity (resolution) vision without having to pay the energy cost of a larger fovea [1, 2, 3]. They also likely allow us to see color more accurately outside of our fovea.
I also really don’t buy this time-shifting idea, although other neuroscientists would probably disagree. As @foone said our eyes are not cameras, our perception is our brain hallucinating an internal 3D model of the world. It knows what data to incorporate into the model and what not to, i.e. a blurry saccade is not a good representation of the world. If you want to read about how this can be framed with bayesian statistics you can read one of my favorite papers from my advisor [4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccade#Function
[2] Ratnam, Kavitha, et al. "Benefits of retinal image motion at the limits of spatial vision." Journal of vision 17.1 (2017): 30-30.
[3] Anderson, Alexander G., et al. "A neural model of high-acuity vision in the presence of fixational eye movements." 2016 50th Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems and Computers. IEEE, 2016.
[4] Olshausen, Bruno A. "27. Perception as an Inference Problem." The cognitive neurosciences (2014): 295-304. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/bb00/42b5e48feff89a95182c63...
It doesn't affect my day-to-day, which I think is surprising. In fact I have very good hand-eye coordination and visual perception, which may be a side-effect of constantly having to track moving objects.
It's also a symptom of being drunk, or a brain injury. Medical students are always very concerned and ask whether I've hit my head, and I often get breathalysed when I'm pulled over.
[1] https://www.aoa.org/patients-and-public/eye-and-vision-probl....
But the phrasing of "your visual system shows you X" is still off. The visual system is you, the eyes and the retina's neurons are you, etc. There is no "you" hidden somewhere deep in the brain that watches what the brain shows it, like a homunculus.
But psychologically it depends on what you identify with. Most people identify (wrongly) with their consciousness.
Our experience is like a dream vaguely guided by reality.
Overall though, those were some cool new examples of eye limitations I hadn't heard of before, like the accumulation of laser light damage.
And yeah similar to other commenters, some of these could just as easily be explained as amazing adaptations required to work with the limited resources available in addition to a description as ugly hacks. I guess the important part is just to hopefully become more aware of our limitations with the goal that that helps us maybe get a little better understanding of potential difficulties we all face.
I've reverse hacked this: When I'm tired and need to walk up a hill, I look straight down at the ground such that it appears horizontal, this makes it easier to walk.
We do not see images. Our brain does not have a frame buffer. Our minds construct the visual experiences we have of the world around us. They construct them from reality and we have developed technology that can make recognizable facsimiles of how we see the world, but they have very little to do with each other.
I don't know if it has a name but I've noticed this many times.
https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/56798/what-is-th...
Blindsight is one of the best, 10/10 on Mohs Scale of sci-fi hardness. I love the description of scientific concepts behind sci-fi story at the end. Such a shame, there is so little books with that kind of deep research.
One of the best written, first contact novels out there. I have the luck of hearing Watts lecture on one of the Cons. He is even better in person.
If you are from Canada, it is good idea to check, where he is speaking.
Authors blog, filled with pop-scientific concepts and ideas [1], is well worth it.
shit I knew it was real! adolescent me noticed this and had a hard time to explain or figure out information about it (this was about the excite era)
This is so cool. It's one of those mundane things that you think only occur to you, when in reality it's way more common and intriguing. Like those eye floaters.
Granted, as a kid I had this egotistical sense of self, to which I attributed a number of misconceptions about lots of things.
and personally I kinda had a general feeling that could be at best described as 'the first second of a timer always look longer than the others' which roughly matches what magnio said, and that was it, it's not something I'd widely share unprompted, people already think I'm enough of a nerd as it stands.
Vsauce did a good video on it, "Is Your Red The Same as My Red?" [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_processing_disorder
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030698771...
However, parts of our visual system other than forming images are handled in other parts of the brain. For example, managing the tracking of objects by the eye - it's a completely separate group of control neurons (vs the visual cortex) that drives where the eye looks (and it's actually different for vertical vs horizontal tracking).
So, it turns out that if you present images with, say, vertical or horizontal stripes and ask a person with cortical blindness (developed after they could see) person which it is, they'll tell you of course that they can't see & don't know. However, make it a forced-choice question where they must guess one or the other, and they'll get a high percentage right, far greater than chance. The information is exfiltrating from the centers controlling the eye motion even though there is no cortex to form an image.
" Smooth pursuit eye movements allow the eyes to closely follow a moving object. It is one of two ways that visual animals can voluntarily shift gaze, the other being saccadic eye movements. "
Schience youtuber Kurtis Baute did this as well: his video "I Spent 7 Days Upside-Down" documents it... a very fun watch!
Scanning my own face, for each of these 3, i tried to see my own saccade, and (1) I am blind to it in the mirror; (2) barely see it on the iphone, and (3) very visibly see it on the macbook.
What does your brain see in the period between the blinks? Because it perceives the light as a smooth motion, and not as discrete jumps, it must "see" a virtual non-existent light in between two real lights. But if everything in your brain happens chronologically, how would it know if the light to the right would light up or not? It must have "backfilled" that information into your memory/perception after seeing the right light blink.
When you shift your focus to look at an analog clock, the time to the next tick of the seconds hand should follow a uniform distribution between 0 and 1 seconds if there are no visual bugs. It seems likely that people experience some confirmation bias, where the delays above 0.9s stand out more in their memory.
I really don't buy the claim that there's a 500ms delay in perception here. At the very least, this should be bounded by the time it takes to move your eyes (~100ms).
I'm having a hard time visualizing this. If it still happens, would you sense a longer time between clicks? Or does the effect go away?
Woah, woah, woah. I'd noticed this before when sitting around waiting for something (reception rooms, etc.) but never thought much of it. Thought it was just my mind playing tricks. I am so happy to know this is a consistent phenomenon for everybody, and there is a concrete reason for it. The human brain is facinating.
The visual system is a lot more like videos than people think.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-10-23-ca-6941-s...
If it were not in such an awful format, I might have read further. I was interested enough to see what the post was about, but the format was enough to make me think "I'm not that interested".
Could go either way. I'm not saying he should change the way he does things just to please me, and I might not be a reader he cares about, and that's fine.
I also understand that it could be the act of publishing a piece at a time, and having it immediately be publicly available, that pushes him to actually complete the post (adding just enough pressure on himself, or whatever).
I just wonder if the format choice might have a larger impact than he thinks.
My suggestion was intended to be constructive. I was thinking perhaps he could still get the effect of the twitter-like way of doing things, while ending up with a final format that would appeal to a broader audience.
Of course this is all just speculation on my part. Likely he will not even see what I suggested, not that I really expected him to.
I for one often feel that if I have something long to write, I need to open a proper word processor rather than paste it into a nondescript box, less I somehow lose what I was writing. I also feel that in some of those tiny boxes, I can't adaquately arrange my thoughts, as I can't see the structure of what I wrote before adequately.
Perhaps the twitter format alleviates the writer's tension by forcing them to "chunkify" (packetize?) their writing into small portions, with the satisfaction of being able to hit "enter" and calling it done after every little one.
Of course, I think paragraphs can accomplish this as well.
But coming back to my original statement, I wonder how the common tools of today makes us look differently at how we compose and structure our thoughts. If I think of the way I'd communicate to colleagues over chat, or email, a collaboration tool, or heck, on HN or Reddit, and compare that to how I'd go about writing a blog post or paper, they're quite two different things.
gorkish 1 hour ago | parent |on "I don't really get the beef with this..."
you and I have very markedly
gorkish 1 hour ago | parent |on "I don't really get the beef with this..."
very different ideas about what
gorkish 1 hour ago | parent |on "I don't really get the beef with this..."
"pretty decent" means
gorkish 1 hour ago | parent |on "I don't really get the beef with this..."
because I actually think this kind of
gorkish 1 hour ago | parent |on "I don't really get the beef with this..."
nonsense is really quite bullshit.
I'm mostly glad it's not Medium or some other paywalled shit.
Even if you add comments on your blog you will never get the same thing you get on twitter.
That said, I don't think Twitter threads works for all sorts of written content either.
Also, those 48 frames need to be converted to 60 frames and as a result, some frames will be shown for a disproportionate amount of time and/or created by mixing two adjacent frames. The article is about interlaced modes, but I think it also applies to progressive scan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-two_pull_down
I have to wonder: what is gained by mixing up so much noise with an interesting message? Isn't there enough useful information in the subject of saccades, without the tone (which I suppose appeals to some)?
It's like when you're trying to hold a conversation with someone that disagrees with you on the internets and they constantly try to troll you, starting their comments with sentences like "no, this is wrong, you're an idiot and you don't know what you're talking about" before telling you why they disagree, or what they mean etc.
I agree that it can be overdone, but it's pretty lightly sprinkled here. But it's the same as any other useful literary device, to answer your question. To make things more interesting or different.
A lot of my friends will bother me for help with compsci or math stuff for some reason, and I usually try to help. Math and programming are hard, especially to someone who doesn’t already know it, and people can quickly get frustrated as a result of it being confusing. Throwing in a swear can be useful to signal to the person to relax, and to tell them that it’s ok to think of this stuff in goofy terms, and in my experience it can help lower the tension.
It’s not the best tool for every scenario, I don’t use that tactic when teaching kids, but I do think there’s utility in it.
Another commenter mentioned shock value, which doesn't seem far off. A little taste of shock is what jolts the reader's attention.
With that said, it should be used sparingly (if at all), otherwise the message loses eloquence and the intended expression is diminished by vulgarity. Someone also once said that using curse words makes people dumber and lazier because they end up using curse words in place of more descriptive words, which I tend to agree with.
Only computer programmers tend to describe biological systems in deprecating terms like this, calling them ugly hacks, klugy, etc. As if we know best what's elegant and what's klugy. I wonder if perhaps we do this because we would never have the practical intelligence come up with a solution like that. It's not a great look for us.
Modern competition like Go PRO require too much baby sitting, and can hardly work for 2 hours without maintenance.
Hmm, well the visual cortex makes up almost a third of our entire brain, and the brain uses ~20% of our daily energy. I’d hardly call that “low power”! Though granted I don’t imagine you can break a sweat just from thinking.
I heard that people who were asked to do sorting tasks, i.e. just separate big oranges from small ones, got tired as heck, comparably to physical workers. Then again, dunno about sweat.