1,350 karma · joined March 29, 2012
Not that I have a solution, but I don't believe blaming the victim is the solution.
Plunging young children into an anarchical learning environment with nothing but YouTube to guide them won't end well. But if you add guidance that encourages their strengths and tolerates their weaknesses, I speculate that net learning will exceed that of today's school system.
Yes, but they don't know which ones. What the commenter meant is that the VC believes each and every one of their investments has the potential to become a rocketship. So they spread the risk into several potential rocketships and hope for one of them to not crash.
For me personally, podcasts are great while grocery shopping, washing clothes or other chores that engage me too little to be interesting, but too much to let my mind wander into critical thinking mode. I'm sure this threshold is different for different people.
But for intentionally passive time, like walking or running, I've stopped listening to podcasts. I may or may not listen to music.
Especially for running, I'll intentionally choose a topic beforehand to think about, and then actively think about that topic. I've found that extremely stimulating.
It's in Faroese, which isn't supported by Google Translate. Good luck. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I was traveling with some friends, doing my usual complaining every day, when one of them finally asked me to please shut up. At first I was offended, but shortly after realized what I had been doing. Committed to stop doing it there and then.
Because I've been there, I'm now conscious about others having this trait. For many people I think it's an attempt at socializing. Commiserating is an easy way to bond, but if you can't temper it, you just come across as an annoying complainer.
I wrote about this on my blog, and even made a flowchart for what to do when I feel the urge to complain. That particular post is not in English, so I won't share it here.
The mistake to me is in implicating art, instead of just aesthetics. But Art Vote is a lot more catchy than Neurobiology Of Visual Aesthetics From Retina To Occipital Cortex Vote.
Accurate or not, it's a fun project.
But if statistically significant, it might tell us something more fundamental about the pure aesthetics assigned by people to patterns. It's more like the bouba/kiki experiment.
No condescension, no threats. Just treating me like an adult with a constructive conversation. It never occurred that anyone might overreact like many in this thread experienced. Makes me feel pretty fortunate now.
Thread archive: https://desuarchive.org/g/thread/48696148
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9788317
For me it's about losing the mindset that children of certain ages are incapable of doing certain things and deliberately holding them back (with nothing but the best intentions I'm sure).
I have a friend who is a published poet and prosaic genius. But she literally cannot solve 2x=4. I'm not being hyperbolic.
Pushing her in math as a child would probably have been catastrophic for her emotional well being. But limiting her in other skill sets (like literature) would be equally catastrophic in terms of wasted potential (and the well being that comes with excelling at something you care about).
So much this. I've managed to make learning fun for my three year old son. All too often we turn some daily scenario into a fun exercise and a well-meaning family member will exclaim "he can't possibly know that!". I assume they intend to shield him from the inevitable failure they believe I'm setting him up for by asking these questions, but he usually figures it out. And when he doesn't, he still gets a kick out of understanding it when we go through it together.
I repeatedly ask them to not make these comments. The more often he hears them say these things, the more liable he is to start believing them himself and say "I can't figure this out because I'm only x years old".
I believe that if kids were allowed to be challenged and excel at the things they show an interest in and predisposition to, the scholastic standard would be much higher. Instead of adults deciding what children of certain ages are "supposed to" be able to do and not to do.
My biggest fear at the moment is for his excitement at learning being crushed when he starts school.
Expensive textbooks are not the easier target, they are the only target. What people find issue with are certain predatory practices by a minority of bad actors.
I think it's great that you make an effort to pick more affordable textbooks, and I hope that your students are paying for them.
If I must take a binary position, then yes. Theft when needed to preserve life is morally justified. In fact, it happens every day on a massive scale. Governments around the world seize up to half of what their citizens earn and redistribute it according to the needs of the whole, for example in order to save lives or support those who cannot support themselves for any of a number of reasons. I support the argument that taxation is theft, but not that it is wrong.
> If you want to argue that IP is not real ownership and should not exist [...]
I don't want to argue that IP is not real ownership. I want to argue that there is no such thing as real ownership, whether the property in question is physical or intellectual. Practical ownership is only what can be enforced through the monopolization of violence. Governments have the power to assert ownership of their citizens' earnings, but for the most part choose to allow citizens the privilege of keeping a portion of those earnings and pretend that they own the goods and services those earnings pay for.
This discussion has strayed quite a bit from the initial question of whether or not piracy = theft = bad. By challenging the reality of ownership, I'm trying to challenge the assertion that piracy is inherently bad because it infringes on ownership and ownership is a fundamental quality of the universe that cannot be rightly infringed upon.
That we choose to adopt certain principles, such as that of ownership, and act as if those principles are "true" in order to make sense of the world, is a perfectly legitimate practice, and I don't believe that you are wrong to do so.
Yes, I agree this is what ownership means in principle. I think the more practical view of ownership is what the current monopolist of violence will let you do with what you possess. The monopolist of violence in most cases being your local government.
There are many real-world examples of being regulated in what you can or can not do with what you ostensibly own. Whether that's real estate, natural resources or intellectual property. Even IP has expiration dates defined by regulators. Do those expiration dates incontrovertibly define what is morally right or wrong to do with said IP? Were the regulators directed by divine mandate when setting those expiration dates?
> It's not to corner people into an easier target so much as to restrict the debate to the issue I take actual exception with.
Just so I'm fully aware of what we're currently debating, is it this?:
> This idea of labeling something as "price gouging" as a moral defense for anything really.
In which case, here's an example in which I personally believe theft is morally justified. Let's say your family is caught in a natural disaster, and you need fresh water to survive. A local opportunist saw the disaster coming and stockpiled all local water sources at low prices, and is now attempting to sell you water for the reasonable sum (when compared to the alternative option of death) of your life savings.
I'm curious about your position on this (intentionally extreme) example. Not as a trick question, but because I'd like to know how rigidly you adhere to the concept of ownership being morally just in all cases. If you still believe theft is morally wrong in this case, that's fine - it just means we believe opposite things.
This is a good argument. I'll try to speak for others when I say that the problem is with professors who actively engage in predatory behavior to gouge students. I appreciate that's not the norm, but it happens enough to at least be perceived as a major problem.
The predatory behavior lies in identifying a group of people who already have considerable sunk cost in their education, and then using a combination of methods (such as decreeing a monopoly by assigning your own books, and creating scarcity by insisting on this year's revised edition) to force them to purchase material or potentially waste the enormous sunk cost already incurred.
You write "we" don't do that, so I'm assuming you're a professor who assigns, and maybe even writes, textbooks. I'm sorry if this whole thread is turning into a personal attack on you. For my part, it absolutely isn't meant to be that. It's an attack on predatory practices that (a minority of) members of all professions occasionally engage in. This time the profession in question happens to be university professors.
I think few people have problems with IP law in and of itself. We have problems with the weaponization of said laws to exploit those in vulnerable positions.
I'm sorry for jacking your analogy, but I think it holds water. Diamonds are not inherently valuable (to the degree they are priced at retail). They are valuable because of an exploitative supply chain and social manipulation efforts spanning decades. Which does not justify robbing stores and potentially causing physical or mental harm to innocent shopkeepers. But very much justifies replicating the product to render those practices worthless and hopefully deter them from happening more.
The same goes for educational textbooks in many (but far from all) cases. Personally I've had professors who assigned their own books at very reasonable prices and apologize profusely for them costing money to begin with. I've had others who peddled their own expensive books while themselves handing out copies (!) of books by other authors. I wouldn't dream of pirating the former, but I'm pirating the shit out of the latter if I can.
I expect that if you forced yourself to slack less and do more hours of "real work", you would get less done in more time, and with degraded quality.
If you can change your perspective and feel less guilty, I recommend you keep doing what you do for both your sake and your employer's. It's a long term win-win.