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This is quality writing for a blog post. Bet it would be accepted for publication as a review article in a suitable scientific journal.

It also follows his own "fibonacci web design" style [1]

[1]: https://people.idsia.ch/~juergen/fibonacciwebdesign.html

> If you don't mind me asking, do you suffer from any of the things he discusses in the book?

Yes, the book was recommended by my therapist. There were interesting and helpful parts to the book, in my case specifically the idea that it's hard to be anxious in a relaxed body, the yoga part, and the chapter about psyche being composed of different parts that protect one another and you can ask them to "step aside" were the most influential.

So I took useful things out of it, but I cannot say it is well written. In particular a lot of "meta" conversation would have been better left out. Like coming back to the DSM classification and ranting how it doesn't include childhood traumas even thou the author feels he demonstrated they should be a separate entity. And on research - I don't know much, but I know something about epigenetics. There was a chapter that touched upon epigenetics (about how stressors change the expression of our genes), and the papers were cherry-picked to agree with what the author was saying. I didn't like that and this made me doubt some of the cited literature in other chapters that I cannot judge on my own.

There are different NAs for different types of objects. And that's why you get:

    1^NA_complex_   # NA

But:

    1^NA_real_      # 1

Agree about 1^NaN being strange.

Also R's cleverness with NA's is not so consistent. For example:

    median(c(1,1,1,NA))

Should return 1, since no matter what value is behind NA the median is still 1. But it returns NA.

But this "aren't clearly delineated" gets pedantic sometimes. The same issue is true for assigning hours into morning/day/evening/night, yet no-one talks about issues there. Stratifying something continuous into categories suddenly becomes bad when talking about ethnicity.

I second the Freedman, Pisani, Purves "statistics" recommendation.

This book explains the concepts without using mathematics, but even people with phDs in mathematics praise it as one of the best textbooks on statistics [1]

[1] https://stats.stackexchange.com/a/1666/18417

> I do not understand this argument.

The unfortunate thing is that, I think, I understand your side. But something happened, I read some book or heard some talk that placed a seed of doubt in my mind. At first it was just a seed and I oscillated back and forth between being 100% materialist and between entertaining the proposition that there is something beyond matter in this world. But as time went on I began to shift towards the "non material" interpretation for consciousness more and more.

It's not an explanation, I agree. But there is nothing to explain. Me claiming that consciousness might not arise from matter is not an attempt to explain it. I just see no way how it can be investigated in material terms. If you see a person on the street there is no way you can tell if he or she is conscious. And I don't see a possibility of there ever being a way.

Sadly, I don't know what started this doubt in me, so I cannot share it with you. You brought physicists for some reason, and I know a few, like Schrodinger, who thought about consciousness and came to the same conclusion. Here is his quote: "Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else." I haven't read about Max Plank, but heard he had similar views.

If I had to guess my starting point was a book called "the problems of philosophy" by Bertnard Russell [1]. He tries to answer the question "are there any statements to which all reasonable men would agree". And one of the conclusions the book comes to is that you cannot claim anything as objective without assumptions, and that the most objective thing is your subjective experience.

For example if you saw a cat, turned your head, and then looked back at the cat - was the cat there when you were not looking or was it gone? In the book Russell convincingly demonstrates that if someone maintains the cat was gone when you were not looking - you cannot prove logically to that person that he is wrong. In other words - you would not be able to start with his worldview and lead him to contradictions. Hence his "theory" about cat disappearing cannot be disproven without assumptions about how material objects behave.

Not sure if this is helpful, but I wanted to reply.

[1]: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5827/5827-h/5827-h.htm

Google, when used with double quotes and exact title, finds aggregator sites, but I was simulating looking for the original: https://joshmitteldorf.scienceblog.com/2020/07/08/politics-i...

Here is one more, search: Ten Elements of the False COVID Narrative

Google: nowhere

Brave: first result

And it's not like Google just didn't index the site, it works for topics that are "less controversial", search: Universal Clock implies Universal Clockwork

Google: first result

Brave: first result

Whatever the explanation - either Google censors some topics, or its search engine works differently - the result is the same, for this example Brave outperformed Google.

Here is one example in Brave's favour, seach: politics influences the science of covid-19

Brave - first result.

Google - no first page, no second page, no third page, stopped checking.

Let's try that in quotes - it's the exact title of the article: "politics influences the science of covid-19"

Brave: first result

Google: no results found, searching without quotes.

This action was performed in a specific country - Iran. I am sure it was illegal there. Isn't that enough?

So this is a public bragging about illegally putting a gun in a foreign country and assassinating a person, all the while being comfortably sure that no national or international pushback will come.

Quite disturbing to read.

To play the devil's devil's advocate :)

Brave allows you to do whatever you want. You can see publisher ads without Brave ads. You can see Brave ads without publishers ads. You can see both. Or you can disable both.

Since individual users can achieve any configuration of ads they like, to me it seems that some people are only unhappy with this because they want to push their moral stances on everyone else. Like, for example, stating that the ability to block publisher ads while enabling Brave ads is immoral and shouldn't be allowed.

There are more lies in that article. This one for example is so often repeated but untrue:

> Rewards is their shitty program that will replace ads displayed on websites with their own.

Brave doesn't replace ads with their own. Brave ads are displayed as desktop pop-ups. They can also be easily disabled (which, surprise, the author doesn't mention because of his bias). And the idea behind Brave ads is to give you tokens which are then distributed to the content creators you engaged with. This is the default setting. Their idea is not to shovel you with ads or offer you "get rich with crypto" schemes. Idea is to block ads but still provide revenue to the content, based on how many users engage with that content.

When I see people saying "Brave replaces ads with their own" I have to wonder if they have tried using Brave themselves before writing these critique articles.

> 30. Do no wrong to anyone, and bear patiently wrongs done to yourself.

This one is similar to "be conservative in what you say and liberal in what you accept from others"[1], but worded better.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robustness_principle

I don't have anything like this and I think it's a bad idea to be keeping a wiki like that. The premise here is to accumulate knowledge for the sake of knowledge itself. In my experience this isn't productive, takes time, and is not going anywhere. There is a reason you forget things you read about - you don't really need them and your brain does you a favour by forgetting.

For me - a better alternative is to only seek and store knowledge about things you are currently working on, and organise it by project. And if you read something that is actionable - do it and forget about it. Ideas are also fine, but if you have more than 3 then it can be a sign of procrastination.

I really like the concept of "compression oriented programming" that Casey outlines here. You write an imperative program and make functions and objects as "compressions" of your original code, where suitable. That way you don't end up with a jungle of objects, and, on the other hand, don't start constructing monads or producing hundreds of tiny functions just for the ideology of it all.

> If you cease forward movement with your eyes so you can, for example, underline a few lines, or draw a bracket next to paragraph, or, dare I say it, highlight a sentence, it will require a large energy burst to get started once again. Too many such stops and starts and your brain will be fried.

For me that's not true. The biggest "energy drain" is when I rush reading something and get fuzzy about what is being said. Understanding the text becomes harder and harder and a lot of will power is required to keep reading the text that no longer makes sense. Re-reading a paragraph 2-3 times or stopping to think more about what was written helps. So the fewer times I stop the more my brain will get "fried".

You don't really need to experience it to see how this one day might happen to you. Here is a recent example with RuboCop: https://github.com/rubocop-hq/rubocop/issues/8091

"Cop" suddenly became a problematic word and you can read the comments in that issue thread. Imagine you have some repo like "PinkKitty", and then someone blows himself up dressed in pink and pink becomes a symbol of Jihad or White Supremacy or what have you. The same kind of people will then come to your repo and harass you and your unpaid work.