Chathamization

I noticed episodes that seems to be edited lectures in both Mark Goodacre's NT Pod and Philip Harland's Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean. Both are academic studies of the Christian New Testament (though the later also spends a lot of time on the surrounding society), and I enjoyed both a lot (though they can be a bit information dense at times). If you give the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean podcast a listen I'd recommend considering starting at series 2 and coming back to series 1 later, as starting with a deep dive into Paul's letters and their historical context can be a difficult place to start for some people.

Another podcast I've learned a lot from is the Ottoman History Podcast (not to be confused with The History of the Ottoman Empire podcast). It often has episodes where academic historians are interviewing other academic historians about their areas of research. So you'll have a whole episode where a historian talks about their research into mining communities in the late Ottoman Empire, for instance.

For something a bit lighter, the Tides of History podcast is worth a listen. It's an academic historian who takes a look at various historical events.

It depends on the podcast. I tend to listen to podcasts over lectures because the podcasts are often more information rich and deeper than the lectures I've found on the same subject. Some podcasts even seem to include edited university lectures where extraneous parts were removed.

I suppose it depends on the individual. I personally haven't found podcasts to be worse than written sources when it comes to retention.

I've never been a fan of Chekhov's gun. Interactions and details that aren't directly connected to the main plot do a good job at giving the world texture and making it feel alive. Fiction that does away with too many unrelated details (and I'd argue a lot of fiction does this) often feels artificial and empty to me.

Yeah, there's a good chance that what we think of as humanity will be different 500 years from now. As such, trying to find ways to get today's humanity to live on other worlds (a questionable proposition even if things remain relatively static) might be about as useful as the tower of babel would have been to space exploration.

It's even more wasteful if you look at it at a societal level. There's an incredible amount of economic output that's devoted to advertising, so much so that there are large secondary industries (broadcast television, radio, social media, etc.) built around being advertisement delivery vehicles. Yet all of this economic activity is going towards something that's a net negative to society - an enormous amount of distracting material meant to manipulate a persons actions so that they're more beneficial for a company, and often less beneficial for themselves.

Advertising isn't alone in this. It seems like parasitic industries take up a large and growing part of our economic output.

In the 2018 poll the majority of Republicans (52%) actually supported it. There's just been a lot of effort pushing against it by most of the leadership in America (the media, the Republican party, most of the Democratic party leadership). The media plays a big role in this - they often only focus on the cost of one particular implementation of single-payer, and not on the 10's of thousands who die each year due to lack of insurance. There's no mention that the U.S. government is currently spending more on health insurance than the U.K. government spends on its single-payer system (and the total government and private spending in the U.S. is much, much higher).

And even though Democrat voters support this the most, the majority of Democratic Presidential candidates this year were opposed to single-payer and pushed some attacks on it that were mostly false (arguing that it removes choice). And a lot of polls on it will mention things many Americans view as negative (a single government run system) and not mention ones that they would view as positive (no out of network doctors, never being uninsured, never switching insurance, no medical billing issues, no healthcare bankruptcies, lower healthcare expenditures, etc.).

55% in the latest Morning Consult poll[1]. And this is after a heavy push from the healthcare industry against it, as well as strong opposition from all of the Republican leadership and most of the Democratic leadership. Before the recent blitz against it, polling was 70%[2].

[1] https://morningconsult.com/2020/04/01/medicare-for-all-coron... [2] https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/403248-poll-seventy-pe...

In addition, my understanding is that while Shakespeare was well regarded during his life, he wasn't particularly held in much higher regard than many of his contemporaries. The excessive elevation of Shakespeare (Bardolatry) seems to have been a process that occurred over decades and centuries.

It's gotten to the point where it's hard to have a unbiased opinion. People aren't given a copy of King Lear and Tamburlaine and asked which one they prefer. People are usually told ahead of time that Shakespeare plays are wonderful works, that viewing them as wonderful is a sign of intelligence, and people are usually exposed to many plays by Shakespeare and none by his contemporaries.

Our society probably has a much larger impact on how we view these works than the works themselves.

I remember Doom in particular being considered the poster child for what some considered to be lowbrow gaming. Of course people dividing entertainment into highbrow and lowbrow groups is nothing new - it's common for people to think of someone who's entertained by Shakespeare to be more "cerebral" than someone who's entertained by Twilight.

I think this is a key to understanding online discourse. A lot of the stuff you see is generated by a very small percentage of the users (probably much less than 1% if you look at the numbers[1]), and this small percentage likely consists of the more problematic users. Consider that:

- The amount of output someone can put out is inversely proportional to the time and effort someone spends on it. If it takes about 30 seconds to throw out a low quality post full of misinformation and 30 minutes to make an accurate and well thought out post, than the former is going to far outnumber the latter.

- The amount of effort someone puts out is inversely proportional to the amount of time someone spends offline. Someone who is addicted to social media and lives online is going to be producing much more content than someone with a healthier balance that includes lots of offline time.

Almost all online spaces are set up in a way in which this small number of (often problematic) users dominate the output and overwhelm most other users. The voting system used on sites like Reddit further exacerbate the problem. It shouldn't be surprising then that online spaces are the way they are. We should recognize that it's the result of how they're set up, and not a reflection of human behavior as a whole.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...

I've only read her first three Earthsea books and some of her short stories, but The Wizard of Earthsea had a big impact on me.

Also, one short story of hers that I really like is available online:

http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-island-of-the-...

The Boston plan was to start elementary school kids at 7:15, which is why parents were complaining about forcing young kids out of bed at 5:30-6:00 am. Not an unreasonable criticism, I think (there were also complaints from working families that they'd have to pay more for after school childcare).

But you're right that part of the problem was that there was no interest in spending more on transportation (or in generally improving the poor state of transportation). I'd say it's also worth questioning why we insist that all students need to go to school at the same time. The education system seems needlessly rigid (though I suppose imposing a certain amount of conformity is one of its goals).

The Boston plan was to move a lot of younger students to earlier start times. People seem to just shrug this part off for some reason. People talk about the benefit of later start times for teenagers, but the negative impact that earlier start times would have on younger students gets ignored.

Buttigieg's positive coverage started when he was polling below 2% (even when he was polling below 1%). A lot of it had to do with having the right establishment connections[1]. His success in the polls seems to be the result of the media deciding to give him a lot of positive coverage, not vice versa. The same seems to be true of other candidates this cycle (like Klobuchar and Warren).

[1] https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/04/29/lis-smith...

I wouldn't be surprised if we develop brain uploads sometime in the next 400 years, at which point the focus on trying to recreate earth-like environments anywhere will look silly.

There's probably a lot of other advancements over the next few centuries that we can't imagine. Our current view of space colonization is probably going to have as much of a connection to the future as the Tower of Babel had to the Apollo program.

> It should put a limit on how weird or explicitly unfair the law can be.

The defense isn't allowed to tell jurors about jury nullification and there's an effort to keep out any potential jurors who are aware of it. In general there seems to be a big effort to not have jurors think to much on their own. Once during selection I mentioned how unreliable eye witness testimony can be (they were trying to weed out anyone who had problems with convicting based solely on eye witness testimony), and the prosecutor asked me "What if the judge told you to give eye witness testimony the same weight as physical evidence?"

I often see people worry that if we didn't have trial by jury a lot more innocent people would get convicted. Yet if you look at a country like Germany, it doesn't have trial by jury and it has ~1/9 the incarceration rate as the USA.

The non-materialist argument is similar to creationist critiques of evolution. Scientists who study these things see a material explanation, but because these are enormously complex emergent properties they don't know the exact details. Critics then use a god of the gaps argument, saying that if a material explanation can't explain everything right now then a supernatural explanation (which which explains far less and runs counter to available evidence) should be favored. Behind both arguments lie an unease that the scientific approach knocks humans off their pedestal and makes them seem like everything else.

It's not surprising that the only neuroscientist in the article is arguing for a materialist approach.

It's a mistake to think that school is the best way to appreciate "pure knowledge" for all people. I "taught myself" a lot, and later had the opportunity to take CS classes in a highly ranked (for CS) university (I already had a college degree from another university in another subject). I was thoroughly underwhelmed by the classes. I took a number before eventually giving up (got good grades in all of the ones I took).

Further, the idea that not learning in school is "teaching yourself" is flawed. You're using books written by others (sometimes the same books that are being used in university. There are communities - online and in real life - that you have access too, often full of people much more dedicated and experienced in the field than university classmates. If you really want something that's similar to a university class, there are MOOCs, coursework, and lectures available.

Vitamin A supplements are a cheap and effective solution, and one that groups like the WHO have focused on[1]. They almost never come up when golden rice is discussed, because discussions of golden rice seem to be more about pushing on particular kind of tech than about discussing the best way to solve the problem.

[1] https://data.unicef.org/topic/nutrition/vitamin-a-deficiency...

Vitamin A deficiency is also effectively combated by low cost supplements (which is why groups like the WHO focus on this as well as dietary solutions)[1]. Though people who talk about golden rice claim that they're very concerned about vitamin A deficiency, it's telling that they never talk about other much more successful efforts that have had great effect in combating this deficiency (this article is no exception). It seems like a lot of people have put reason aside and become enamored with the idea of a technological silver bullet.

Also worth pointing out that the problems with making golden rice viable have little to do with anti-GMO activists, and more with the problems in creating a viable product[2].

[1] https://data.unicef.org/topic/nutrition/vitamin-a-deficiency... [2] https://source.wustl.edu/2016/06/genetically-modified-golden...

> the Norwegian sandwich definitely has less fat (less cheese, less calories in the butter than mayo or other sauce, less fatty meats)

Butter is much higher in saturated fat and calories than mayo, and you're putting butter on 3 slices whereas you usually only but mayo on one (per the article). One tablespoon of butter is 100 calories and 7 grams of saturated fat, one tablespoon of mayo has 60 calories and 1.5 grams of saturated fat.

If I look at the nutritional information for Kalles Kavier (which someone suggested as a topping), it seems to also be pretty high in calories with a lot coming from extra carbs (sugar).

Read the above post, this is the meal we're discussing:

> last year I have made a matpakke with 3 slices of bread

Which also aligns with what's said in the article. If you eat three of these in a meal, you're getting one more slice of bread than you'd get from a meal consisting of a single sandwich.

Yeah, if you look at the calories in the ingredients (3 slices of buttered bread each with a slice of cheese, liver paste, or peanut butter) you're looking at something that at best has the same amount of calories as a quarter pounder with cheese, and likely significantly more than that.

A lot of people seem to be under the wrong impression that simple foods are low in calories. Compared to other sandwiches the Norwegian sandwich seems to substitute protein (less meat and cheese) for more saturated fat and carbs (an extra slice of bread, butter on the bread).

> In other word, "real" learning is hard, it takes work, it's not fun.

The article compares active learning to passive learning like listening to lectures, and sees evidence that active learning is better. I don't think many people consider academic lectures more "fun" than active learning. The article also suggests that the reason why increased cognitive effort makes people feel like their learning less isn't because it isn't fun, but rather because students associate increased cognitive effort with poor learning:

> Most importantly, these results suggest that when students experience the increased cognitive effort associated with active learning, they initially take that effort to signify poorer learning.

The Harvard Extension School is a good example of this. The school wants to make money by offering classes to more students, but doesn't want people to call them "Harvard students" because it would diminish the exclusivity in their branding (the same exclusivity that attracts people to the extension school).

Like most of the media, it has a strong establishment bias. The center-left types are somewhat liberal in the older sense of the term[1], but establishment conservatives seem to be pretty welcome as well (Diane Rehm used to have people from AEI on all the time). Non-establishment types across the spectrum are frequently laughed at, ignored or dismissed. Osita Nwanevu had a decent column touching on this kind of bias in the media[2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nFvhhCulaw [2] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/03/there-really-are...

> It's unfortunate that internet people have been falsely conditioned to believe the people who create the media we consume shouldn't be paid.

Most of the media we consume is probably detrimental to us, even before advertising is factored in. It's not a bad thing when people have to make a choice in whether or not something is worth the money, and end up deciding it's not. It seems like people are better able to understand monetary costs than time or brain space costs.

As an aside, some of the highest quality content I've found is free and without advertisements (for example, the Ottoman History Podcast or the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean Podcast).

Very much this. I think a large issue with MOOCs is that they're too focused on emulating the structure of a university class - focus on lectures, community built around specific classes, focusing on the metric of course completion rather than on attaining skills, etc. People who successfully teach themselves things (and right now, there are many people using the internet to teach themselves things) often have a very different approach.

It's interesting that so many people have trouble even considering that there might be other ways to approach education.

Decoupling the certification elements from the education elements would probably help. Have a third party, possibly a government entity, allow anyone to be assessed for competency in a particular field and receive a certificate showing their skill level. If they think taking some college classes is a good way to improve their abilities they can do that, if they think self-study is the best way they can do that, if they think hiring a tutor is the best way they can do that. They shouldn't be forced into one particular expensive and time consuming path just to get the opportunity to demonstrate their capabilities.