henriquemaia

Don't take this personally. Your comment just gave me an itch I had to scratch.

There are some words in people's explanations that always bother me. These are 'just', 'mere', merely' and the like. Why? Because they're not explaining, but explaining away. It's like saying: x is trivial, so it's not as important as you think.

But reality is much more complicated than that. For even simple things are hard to fathom for those not knowing how simple it is.

Now, back to the topic: no, medieval painters' lack of knowledge on how use perspective was not just matter of being stuck at conventions. When everyone is expecting to see a certain thing and you're payed to do that thing, it's not 'just' up to the painter see outside her/his perspective. What I'm saying is that takes a huge leap to break away from all that.

Beware of just explaining away phenomena.

That's my go-to audiobook player also. I have been using it for years and it never ceases to amaze me. The level of control you reach with it almost makes the audio part more paper like.

All looks well and dandy until you need to integrate Zotero into the flow of your work. Unfortunately, OnlyOffice doesn't offer a Zotero integration tool. That's a huge deal breaker for any academic.

The system has been broken for long, but never so broken that it actually demands a top to bottom reform.

Besides, those who suffer with it the most either don't vote or have little political relevance or maturity to make a stand. And parents are not good mediators, since they tend to focus on the outcomes, not the day to day life of the student.

That's how you reach the unfortunate situation we have today.

Searx is only as slow as your configuration allows it. You have to check the preferences, under engines, and deselect the offending slower engines. Some will take up to 10s to return any result. If you only choose faster engines, searx will also be faster.

Searx is a metasearch engine [0].

"A metasearch engine (or search aggregator) is an online Information retrieval tool that uses the data of a web search engine to produce its own results."

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasearch_engine

I have been using my own instance for about 2 years now. I couldn't be happier. While researching for my master's, I never felt I was missing out anything substantial.

Setting up your own instance is as simple as mirroring the Git repository. Mine is running in the default 8080 port.

Here's more info on how to do it: https://asciimoo.github.io/searx/admin/installation.html

I follow the What da Math[0] channel on YouTube to keep up with the latest news on cosmology. I highly recommend it. Very thorough and with daily updates.

[0] https://youtube.com/user/whatdamath

I love this idea. What I hate about captchas is not the challenge, but the purpose. However, part of me liked the having to find out what was written on the image. So I would gladly do that on my spare time for a communal project like this.

Besides, as you said, reading the old paper would be enough of a prize in itself.

>Telegram has a great UX

I was making this exact point today to a couple of friends. Telegram's features puts it way ahead of its competitors. While using it, I feel I'm charge and not the other way around (WhatsApp being the worst offender here).

With the recent addition of video calls, and if you judged only by its feature set, it could arguably be called the best messaging app at the moment.

As for countering the network effect, I do my part. I politely ask my acquaintances to message me through telegram for anything important.

As with everything else, the internet serves as a kind of lense, amplifying whatever underlies it to orders of magnitude unimaginable. It doesn't matter if it's a random bit of information on a encyclopedia (wiki) or cybercrime. If it can be scaled up, it will be scaled up.

True. Maybe that's the reason why they chose that new system.

Good point. So whoever wrote that got it wrong, right?

> Somehow, his brain was still processing and identifying a face—a fairly high-level skill—even though his conscious mind was oblivious.

I'm maybe wrong about this, but isn't the ability to recognize faces a fairly low-level skill? Case is point being other social animals having it, like apes, monkeys, or even sheep [1] (who can even recognize human faces [2]).

So maybe they're here referring to the ability of seeing representations of faces (little faces on the letters). Or is this just a blunder of the person who wrote the sciencemag article?

[^1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1641463.stm [^2] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-41905652

Brilliant. Roman numerals are, after all, just letters. The "why haven't they used them?" becomes pretty jarring once you think about it.

I agree that this has tones of adjusting your moves to match those of your adversary.

I just think that the losing side, when adopting similar moves, is not playing dirty per se. It's just leveling the field. You can only play foul if both players share, at least superficially, a similar moral framework.

I usually do this exercise with my students when they tell me they understood what I just explained: I ask them to explain it back to all the class.

Could you do that for us here? Explain to us what problem Weinstein detected, to what it relates to, and its consequences.

That's true. Several people will probably lose their jobs.

But that is the kind of thinking that condemns whistleblowing for the wrong reasons. To put it differently, people rather prefer to keep on pretending if that keeps their jobs than to do the right thing. And that makes everyone a fraudster.

I agree with the subtle point behind the fraud crisis: misaligned incentives.

However, that doesn't excuse the individuals doing it. "Because jobs" is a terrible ethical excuse.

Nevertheless, you have an interesting point there.

I can recommend an interesting podcast series covering that topic. Peter Adamson's History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps [^1].

Some of the series is already in book form, which goes into more depth than the podcast.

[^1] https://historyofphilosophy.net/

Let's be more generous with the opposing position. If, as been argued, we're religious by nature (which the worldwide spread of different, often contradictory, beliefs amply demonstrates), religion is not a mental cancer, and belief in X is not a mental crisis.

Like our innate tribalist tendency of viewing the whole world as an unending conflict between us and them, we, modern humans, must try to find solutions that take those characteristics in consideration, not pretend they do not exist.

It's no one fault to have a religious tendency. There's no bad faith in being a believer.

Yes, historically, Christianity's theological contribution was the idea of a god that cares equally for everyone. But western humanism goes beyond that (building upon) in that human life is valuable in itself, regardless of the social, economical and, the big innovation, religious/ideological stand of that particular individual.

All of that is supported by philosophical arguments, giving western humanism a much older foundation than Christianity.

So, succinctly, I would put like this: was Christianity a necessary condition for the development of western humanism? Yes. Was it sufficient? No. Bigger and better ideas were needed to make it what it is today.

Delusional? On the contrary.

If you're right (and I believe you are) that the whole world is fucked up, filled with all sort of crazy and misguided people, why not treat churches like any other worldly institution, taxing them?

I'm not OP. And yes, at first sight that seems to be the main argument. But...

If we're fair to what it is being said, the point seems to be this: churches are like corporations: their goal is to grow in size and revenue.

That is demonstrated by the anecdata of a friend, someone high enough in a particular church, that confirms they only spent 10% of their income on charity.

So the gist seems to be this: if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like duck, it must be taxed like a duck.

Not a bad argument per se. However, it lacks supporting data, preaching for those who already feel that religious institutions are a scam anyway. So, because of that, it's not very persuasive.

The model is not without its fair share of criticisms. Check out this section on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits#Cr...

Thanks for the link. Actually, I think the downvotes were somewhat deserved. I wasn't careful enough to set the proper tone of my critique.

In any case, I just wanted to point out here on HN we value those who back up their claims with good data.

You did this. So, thanks.

Generalizations like those need solid data to back them up. As it stands, it's just pushing a pseudo-psychological narrative.

And then it would be filed under a "chamber" category on your profile. Just as a friendly reminder of where you were heading...

While I agree that writing has its limitations and that a lot of non-written info is lost, I don't think the written part is the problem.

For if that were the case, YouTube would be a thriving beacon of clarity, when it clearly isn't. And as an effective counter-example of a only-written-yet-successfulish-conveying-meaning you have HN.

So no, communication by writing is not the problem.

I'm on Firefox on a mobile device. That addon has a redirection link [1] specifically for Firefox' mobile version.

As I didn't know about this addon, thanks for sharing it.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/amp2html/