aridiculous

My napkin explanation is that governments and organizations (and so on) 'bite off more than they can chew' by implementing theories into policies before really understanding them. They see "this will optimize X (prosperity, civil rights, public health)" without fully understanding the larger system.

However, that's just about the implementation details. In the end, it all comes down to what a society wants and its values. The hard part isn't the intellectualism and engineering of how to 'fix' a society, it's deciding what a 'fixed' society looks like, short term and long term. I think we as technical people need to be reminded often that the social world isn't a machine with an easily identifiable telos.

Aren't cats notoriously good at surviving in the wild? Both feral and domestic cats (if they have to).

It's true that yes, biochemically, the brain's abnormal activity often correlates with subjective experience. But a) the subjective nature of the condition is what makes it so damn tricky and b) we don't know what's causing what. It could easily be the case that an individual (organism) in a bad (social) environment leads to a biochemically abnormal brain state. Treating the brain state is like playing whack-a-mole. There could also be complex feedback loops. We don't know. We're throwing shit at the wall right now.

Though there is good evidence for the basic nervous system strengthening properties of SSRI's, there's also very compelling evidence that SSRI's have absolutely zero impact in credible, controlled studies. From my personal experience and observations, I believe SSRI's can be good at 'stopping the bleeding', which sits well with why they are often known for having a dampening effect. But that will only get you so far, because there's no set way of determining what 'cured' is. There's no such thing as normal in the same way that it's normal to be free of strep throat. Functioning and succeeding in society has positive qualities, but can sometimes be at the expense of individualized growth and healthiness.

The point is, mental life is really complicated, and possibly wrapped up in broader, deeper things like spirituality, love, and economic and social conditions. Your bio-reductionist view (which isn't an insult, it's simply the view of much of the middle to upper middle class) doesn't match reality in my experience. I've found that most people suffer deeply with modern conditions (the less neurotic they are, the less they're aware of the causes of their malcontent) because there are fewer sources of authority, purpose, or truth. A la carte medicine and treatments won't solve that.

Besides all that, the drug industry just stinks of hypocrisy and deserves its popular skepticism. If a sufferer is to experiment with drug treatments, ayahuasca (and similar) should be legal and just as available as XYZ SSRI's.

Can you elaborate on this?

I was surprised at how similar they were. I was expecting Vancouver to be a lot different than it was. Vancouver was even more high-rise, glass-everything, gated-community than Seattle. I spoke with the locals who informed me that was Vancouver's MO, and if I wanted a culturally interesting Canadian city, I should head over to Toronto.

Good luck with the new system! Although you're doing it for practical reasons, I still applaud you moving away from this practice.

I agree with most of your points except this:

>>Moving divs around, adjusting CSS or erasing pencil off a piece of paper is never going to be as efficient as clicking on a layer and moving, resizing it, etc.

As a visual designer and front-end developer (that knows Photoshop very well), code is actually far more efficient for modern UI's. It's much better organized than the PS layer model, CSS gives you tremendous reach with your changes (especially with SASS/LESS), and Developer Tools (or Firebug) give you amazing reactivity.

However, that being said, the designer must have both design skills and coding skills, which aren't, and shouldn't both be a requirement for the position. The most creative and best graphic designers tend to not know code well enough to become more efficient with it than their traditional layout tools.

The best middle ground for "thinking for UI" and quality graphic design is Sketch. Sketch eliminates 80% of the stuff you never use in PS for web design and adds the features you didn't know you wanted. Its styling options reflect the styling options of CSS. I can't recommend it highly enough.

Honestly, unless you have some very complex personnel issues, every web designer should be using Sketch over Photoshop (and maybe use Photoshop for image manipulation).

Maybe because it's the quintessential example of the tension between abstract systems and conscious life.

If this kind of thing isn't enough to get people to take technology and business ethics seriously, I don't think there's much preventing the rise of a sociopathic society.

Computers, engines and rats != people.

Or at least what a minority (I, included) believes academics to be about. The cynic in me is OK with YBB+ and its food menu ethos: most of the academic system has been turned into an exchange already, so might as well be publicly honest about it. That way, real scholarly students can avoid places like Yale at the undergraduate level, and go to places that actually still know what real education means.

As you get wealthier, your ability to affect society expands. I'd argue that, in the same way one can feel responsible for members of your family, society is your larger family. Humanity, an even larger one. Perhaps a wealthier individual should feel as though more of society is their 'family' as he/she gets wealthier — and treat them as kin.

Instead, what you often find is self-involved individuals becoming more and more distant from their society as they get wealthier (large households with gigantic yards, vacation homes, remote travel).

I should have pointed out that I didn't do anything of this stuff while in college. I didn't really know what positivism was. I didn't read Das Kapital (I didn't even spell it right!). I didn't know what an intellectual framework was.

But I've played catch-up since graduating. I hope to save someone else that dysfunction by just going to a proper institution that cares about disciplined learning.

The problem to me is larger than which degree someone graduated in. It's that college isn't rigorous enough in general, and the only people who see the real benefits of education are people that study the sciences AND are curious and motivated. See, with science, business, and technology, the worst case scenario is that the teacher is terrible and the textbook takes over the responsibility of pedagogy. This, along with a motivated student, is enough to salvage an education.

In the humanities and the social 'sciences' (which, in my opinion aren't really science in how we tend to define it these days — and I say that as a great admirer of sociology, political science, psychology, and economics), motivation from the student isn't enough to save them from the worst case scenario: the student graduates underdeveloped, unfocused, and scattered with only the seeds of critical mind if the curriculum and teaching is poor. And that worst case scenario happens A LOT since, as previously mentioned, lack of rigor and inconsistent teaching quality is poor across all departments at the university level. With very few exceptions, my social science peers didn't have even a high level understanding of the alternatives to a intellectual framework like positivism. I doubt they would even know what I would mean by an intellectual framework or positivism. Technical students don't need to know this (though they should), but as a social science student, you can't do your most basic work without an understanding of such topics.

College has become a replacement for high school, because high school has become a daycare. University teaching is inconsistent because universities are confused on their role in society. This teaching problem is cross-discipline. However, with the sciences, the textbooks can more or less set an expectation of learning. Other subjects require a very disciplined teaching method to be valuable — the professor must direct the path. Humanities and social sciences require boldness and direction from its teachers, which they can't do because the university is a hostile environment for professors.

The only solution I see to this problem (on a personal level) is to encourage aspiring college students to choose the HARDEST college (the reading difficulty and writing quantity should terrify the applicant), which explicitly and forcefully values teaching, and has the highest level of prestige (for when it comes time to showing that resume around).

If you're a humanities or social science major, you should be reading at least a book every week (I'll give you 2 weeks for Das Capital ;) and always MULTIPLE books on any topic. Otherwise, you're wasting your time and money. I wish someone told me this, so I hope a high school or current college student comes across this comment and thinks about transferring to a serious institution.

But then you also have the people who just scroll through Instagram or something similarly non-linguistic while you're in a conversation. They say they're listening but they "just do this naturally" or "I can do two things at once".

Whether their phone use is blocking or non-blocking of our conversation, it's simply a gesture of disrespect if done more than once or twice. If you don't like my company enough to give full attention, or your other friend is in an emergency, just excuse yourself and leave.

I think I'm going to start excusing myself when I find my friends are doing it.

Is it a fear of non-compliance?

If you're going to hit homeruns like Musk, I think you must "reinvent the wheel" like he does. But he has resources to fight those battles, and you -- probably -- don't. When he didn't have those significant resources, like when he started Paypal from first principles, he had an entire cultural shift as his economic lever: he was only able to compete in the online banking and credit card industry because it was an Internet wild west.

I'm not sure that reasoning from first principles is the right first step for someone with no assets now that the internet has legal and corporate oversight swimming through it. But what do I know :P

1) Establish and grow credit rating 2) An extra layer of defense against bad merchants (the CC companies will be your goon squad) 3) Bonus miles/points/etc

Exactly. It can't be measured.

The situation is political, and the academics are right not to engage in a dialog that uses the language of market economics and 'value'. The private sector market experts are going to want to use their models and supply-demand curves to justify resource allocation to obvious industry-relevant subjects. The academics are going to use history, ethics, etc to defend breadth, freedom, and security of non-obvious inquiry.

The faculties need to take back control of the university. They're being bent over a barrel by their administrations.

It's plausible, I admit. But much more likely, to me, is just artistic exploitation 101 (if it turns out he did borrow a lot from her story). She has a specific problem with Eggers getting away with it. She would too if her article was published in the NY Times. She seems to be playing identity politics in a situation that doesn't warrant it: Perhaps she was unlucky in her career? Perhaps Eggers has better agents? Perhaps Eggers is a better writer, or has more experience? Perhaps Eggers' brother works at the NY Times? I would posit that, in this case, it's unlikely that Eggers had his piece published and got away with ripping off her article because he is a white male.

I recognize that sexism and racism definitely exist in Silicon Valley, but the problem she's trying to point out is broader — it's the overzealous linguistic bullshit promoted throughout culture (and that includes other industries, mind you). It's the 'engineering perspective' applied to all situations without discretion. Solve every problem in all domains like its a physics problem. Silicon Valley has a penchant for hyperbole and thus is always "killing," "disrupting," and "breaking" things.

In a linked essay, she declares it to be myopic to promote Facebook's mantra of "move fast and break things" because it leads to unjustly enforced criminal activities like trespassing — and might be "rapey" ("rapey" is her language). Facebook's mantra started in the context of writing internet software. Minorities and women have little disadvantage in that specific context. The problem rose when the life advice language got so widespread (applied to every possible situation in Medium blog posts) as to become meaningless. Now she's pissed off because minorities and women can't get away with breaking things and asking for forgiveness in all areas of life, but young, white men can...and that's exemplified through the popular philosophy of Silicon Valley. First, that again is so broad as to be meaningless (e.g. I can think of plenty of examples where being a young woman let's you get away with things others' can't). Second, "act first and then ask for forgiveness" and related Ferrissisms are all tropes carried over from other industries and books (ever heard of 'sales'?). Third, it targets Silicon Valley as the epicenter of discrimination, which kind of makes it look like she's never worked or lived in any other industry or area of the world.

== lollipop cam

But this "modern colorful web design" style isn't necessarily the best design system to present your business idea. It's a trend, so it looks familiar to viewers of your presentation, which is good. However, it also communicates young and inexperienced in my opinion.