> Only afterwards were they told which wine they had tasted.
Well that spoils the next tastings. You can remember what the expensive wines taste like and score them higher in the future.
391 karma · joined July 2, 2016
Well that spoils the next tastings. You can remember what the expensive wines taste like and score them higher in the future.
You don't need degrees to make it into the tech world. Yes some companies might ignore you in the very beginning of your career if you don't have a degree but there is so much demand out there for tech workers that you will find a job for sure and after one or two years nobody will care that you don't have a degree. By the time your peers graduate you will have multiple years of experience in the field and that's what everyone cares about.
Oh, and doing a CS degree you hardly learn anything about programming and most professors teaching you have never coded anything longer than 50 lines.
I remember being happy --- I was a kid. I remember when it stopped --- gradually when I became a teenager and completely when I became an adult. I had a career, I had money, more than I could spend. I had a loving wife, better wife than I ever expected to have. I lived in a free country. I was passionately interested in a myriad of subjects: Films, books, sports, programming, science, I had a lot of hobbies, never stopped being busy. All those hobbies I had since I was a kid. But I realized that I don't see them the same way I saw them when I was a kid.
Sports, I hated long-distance running as a kid, found it tedious and grueling. As an adult, I would run and run and run, run through pain, through exhaustion, became sick with over-training, developed anemia, had multiple injuries, had pain almost every day, ran through injuries because I didn't want to lose fitness, reached almost 20 BMI, was frail and weak. What for? Nobody cared, not even me. It was just an obsession, looking for something that wasn't there.
Science, it was no longer the wonderful curiosity-satisfying endeavor that it was when I was a kid. It had become stressful research, anxiety to learn as much as possible, guilt and feeling of worthlessness when I couldn't really understand something after studying it for a period of time.
Films, I would watch 100-150 per year. Had a film-club subscription and watched pretty much everything they put on. Went to film festivals and watched 30+ films in a week. Watched something at home regularly. When you watch so many films they become tedious and you hate 90% of what you watch but I had to keep doing it because, what else would I do with all the free time I had?
I realized that there's nothing wrong with all those activities, what's wrong is what I expected from them. I wanted too much from them. I wanted them to give meaning to my life which was at a point when no meaning could be extracted by such activities.
And then I had kids. It was stressful, yes, it was tiring, yes, but oh boy --- no doubt about it, I was happy. I wanted to run out on the streets screaming from my happiness. I could not get angry any more. Everything that happened to me I just smiled and went on. And 6 years later I miss every time I awoke at night, every time I held them screaming. I am absolutely and positively sure that there can be no greater happiness in this world than the one I felt back then. I realize that I can have another kid now but it won't be the same.
And it all feels like it was one second ago. It all passed me by in an instant. Now my kids are old enough to do almost everything by themselves. Soon they will know how to read. I now do all the activities I mentioned above. But no obsession. I run enough to stay fit. I started weight-training which made me feel and look better than ever. I study science with a smile and with an understanding that I will never understand everything.
Everything has meaning now.
I don't see this "bias" as inefficient or counter-productive. It is just an artifact of the way you designed your flawed experiment.
To find any real bias you would have to assure the subjects that the researchers were equally accomplished.
Chess is touted as an ingenious game when it is little more than a brute-force search with simple prune and huge amounts of memorization.
I would argue that most GMs would easily play up to 200-300 elo points below their current level with little to no practice. But they spend decades of their lives memorizing and memorizing just to get the highest rating they can. And it is diminishing returns --- if you spent 1000 hours memorizing to get 100 points, the next 1000 hours will only get you 50 points. And when you reach your peak --- be prepared to keep memorizing forever just to stay there and inevitably drop when you reach a certain age.
What a waste of intelligence.
It is telling that nobody is pushing for chess960. This would greatly devalue memorization and make chess a brute-force-search-with-simple-prune game once again, as it was meant to be. But that's exactly the problem; if you are at the top after doing all this memorization you don't want to throw it away! In fact, your memorization might be better than your calculation in which case you will be surpassed by other players.
There is an ancient Greek saying: Not working is the root of all evil.
But there is one problem with longevity: Boredom is a thing. When you are a toddler even a small piece of paper or a string can excite you. But then you get bored and you need to find something else. I am almost 40 years old now and pretty much all my drive in life is my two kids. If I didn't have them I doubt I would find reason to get up from bed every morning. If I had to live forever or for a very great number of years I believe life would become a burden. It's always been possible to be old and sick and thus unable to do things you crave. But I fear one day it will be possible to be young (in body) and healthy and unwilling to do things because you've done them all before too many times.
It was still uncomfortable to sleep because at night the outside temperature goes below the set point of the AC so the compressor switches off and the room gets humid. You can lower the set point to keep the compressor running all through the night to pump out the humidity but that would increase my power bill significantly. I was already paying a fortune just leaving it on like that.
It's too dangerous for the police to stop them while they are racing, and they don't even have license plates on. They should just get them when they are parked.