joshrule

You make a great point. If morality is a high-level behavior, which is seems to be, then it should be fairly easy to disrupt. Just monkey with any of the several moving parts that combine to create the emergent property of 'morality', and the emergence shouldn't happen, at least not in the same way.

It's not astonishing, it's to be expected.

Unlike a lot of articles reporting on science, this one doesn't make any gigantic claims. They note that morality can be manipulated in the lab, not that scientists have cured evil or that science has found a way to reprogram your mind.

Even better, they quote the scientist's ideas on potential next steps for this line of work and do a decent job of detailing the actual procedures used in the research.

There's a lot of crummy science reporting out there, so when a good job is done, it should be noticed. Good job, BBC.

Newport makes a really interesting argument in this post. He practically reduces motivation to getting started early on projects which you have a good reason for doing.

I certainly understand the 'good reason' part, but the 'getting started early' angle is a great insight. Picking off something small right away has a tendency of knocking even the most imposing projects down to size pretty quickly. Even if all I do is define the first thing I need to do, it leaves me with a sense of traction that often continues through the rest of the project.

Continued progress, however small, is one of the most powerful motivators I know. It may even be addictive.

I really appreciate guides like these, particularly because I'm preparing for graduate school myself.

Another really helpful read was "Getting What You Came For" by Robert Peters. He walks through the entire Ph.D. process and describes a pipeline that can knock a 7 year program to 4 or 5 and a 5 year program to 3 or 4. That time saved would be incredibly valuable.

I'm always on the hunt for good material like this. What other Ph.D./grad school/research guides have people found helpful?

When science isn't driven at least in part by problem solving, there's a tendency to wander off into interesting but arcane fields with little potential for application any time soon.

You can argue that eventually all science will be useful somehow or that as long as someone finds it interesting, it doesn't really matter. But, it seems a waste for brilliant minds to pursue largely irrelevant questions when they could dramatically make the world a better place now just by shifting their interests a bit.

Chrome OS is just another step in the division of labor. Instead of managing our data ourselves, it pushes us even further than most other products so far to let others take care of it for us. It'll be there when we want it, and probably better organized, too.

And, for a lot of people, security is a concern, but in the background. A fly buzzing by the screen door, but not something that would keep them from taking an easy option from a company that 'knows the answer to everything'.

So, for most people, what's not to like?

More likely, an anti-correlation, since we all took time to at least glance over the article...

I wasn't alive during the time most of the achievements you mention really hit their stride. But, I wonder, was the national focus turned on those things, or did they become important only in retrospect?

I'm sure everyone watched coverage of the moon landing, but was the entire nation or world focused on that achievement for any significant period of time leading up to it?

I guess my question is, should we be looking for big things that grab everyone's attention, or should we just be working to solve important problems? They are lots of important problems, but most of them won't hold the public's attention for very long.

I seen What Technology Wants mentioned several times now around the web. Is it really that interesting, or is it just riding some hype?

I'm especially interested in the statistic that great performers rarely spend more than 4.5 hours/day on their craft. I believe it, but I wonder where he pulls that number from.

Any ideas?

It's the sort of thing that seems especially important to my goal of doing great science without neglecting my family and other interests (http://wayofthescholar.com).

The real question, though, is how do you use that 4.5 hours?

I'd guess that there's some irreducible complexity that leaves the number of key traits to excellence at X > 1.

If you figure it out, though, be sure to report back.

It's a great analogy if for no other reason than that it frees your mind to think about more important things than stuff.

If we keep at hand only what we regularly need, and put the rest 'in storage', we'll probably be able to spend a lot more time doing the things we actually want to get done.

Take advantage of the division of labor and let someone else curate your stuff for you. Go do something interesting.

I wonder if this rule translates into other domains as well? That is, does a violinist become noticeable after 1 000 hours, but only a true master after 10 000 hours?

Also, we should never forget that these X hours rules are speaking to X hours of deliberately stretching practice/work. They don't mean, try randomly for X hours and you'll automatically become awesome/successful.

I like this idea that if you don't feel like an imposter, you're probably not challenging yourself enough. It rings true with my experience starting a blog without much design or web experience (http://wayofthescholar.com) and diving into neuroscience research without any neuroscience background. The most I feel like a fraud, the more I'm forced to find smart ways to figure out where I'm at and where I need to head next.

You're right. 'Be passionate' is great advice. But, we need to realize two things:

1. Passion is not something we discover. It's something we cultivate over time.

2. Being effective involves more than being passionate. But, it's nearly impossible to be effective without passion.

http://wayofthescholar.com/passion-misdefined

http://wayofthescholar.com/passion-properly

http://calnewport.com/blog/category/features-rethinking-pass...

While I've spent years reading this message in various places (most recently at http://mnmlist.com and http://farbeyondthestars.com), I'm always refreshed by it.

Perhaps it's not the author's main point, but living lightly means we have more time to invest in the things and experiences that interest us, and that is a good thing.

How exactly does the commonplace book differ from a journal or ubiquitous capture? Are they simply the most interesting journals of past centuries?

As always, a major key, if not the major key, to success is to be useful to other people. If they don't understand what you have to offer, you'll have a very hard time being useful.

This article is, though, a neat illustration of that basic point.

As someone just starting up their first website (http://wayofthescholar.com), there's a lot of helpful material here, and a lot I still need to work through.

Although each item may be obvious and discussed in greater depth a thousand other places, a list is sometimes really helpful.

Part of almost every scientific paper is the 'discussion'. Here, the scientists discuss what the implications of their findings are. This portion of the paper is always up for further debate (hence the title 'discussion').

So, given some operational definition of 'persons', a statement like, "The scientific research ... suggests that dolphins are non-human persons..." may not be entirely out of order in a scientific paper. If dolphins are persons, it's not a big jump to say that they qualify as individuals worthy of moral consideration.

Now, whether their operational definition of person is good or not is a question up for debate. Science has debated the meaning and use of many terms and ideas throughout history. Questions about the relation of the planets and stars used to be primarily theological (harmony of the spheres and so on). Some of our most famous scientists worked to develop good tests and supporting mathematics which slowly created the science of astronomy. That process has been repeated for many, many things over history. Personhood may be another one of those debates, one which we have the opportunity to witness in these sorts of studies.

So, provided the philosophical statements were properly positioned in the paper, I don't think they were entirely misplaced. Sloppy journalism is another issue entirely, though, and a common malady of good science.

I appreciate the good news from Google, but I've often wondered why PDFs are so important in 'academic and scientific circles'. It seems that some sort of HTML solution would ultimately work better. It's certainly a very flexible format, easy to annotate, and easy to search. I'm often frustrated by the the difficulty of searching a large collection of PDFs or providing clean annotations when I'm reading papers. I still looking for tools that are good at both of these things.

Why don't we use HTML or something similar for making papers available?

In any case, thanks Google.

How does this method out perform a plaintext task list including projects? It seems that having so many notes staring me in the face all the time would make it exceedingly difficult to focus on the actual task in front of me. A notebook or text file doesn't have that problem.

The message in this piece isn't new, but needs to be listened to more often. Success is measured in terms of months or years, not minutes or hours.

One quick extension to the post:

Consistency doesn't come by building a cage in which you are forced to get something done. It is far better to consistently build positive motivation. There are dozens of ways to do that, but however you do it, motivation will win out over restraint every time.

Actually, Kasparov is doing somewhere around 200 trillion operations in his head every moment, not merely 100 billion. His brain isn't single-purpose, though, as Deep Blue is. The brain, as Montague points out, does all sorts of things consciously and subconsciously that Deep Blue has no chance of doing with only 100 billion operations/second. It's much more omni-purpose than Deep Blue's processors.

And, while it's interesting that Deep Blue can be produced with relatively low energy cost, it's interesting in the way a fly can be produced with low cost compared to a human. The fly is designed for a very specific type of life, and it does a nice job with it. But a fly is not nearly as adaptable as a human, and neither, ultimately, is Deep Blue. Our long setup period allows us to do some incredible tasks that we are still decades from understanding well.

Free enterprise is a clever system, because it reduces all the value that goes into a product or service to one figure, cost. Instead of understanding a business's environmental policy, its supply chain, its manufacturing technology, and so on, I just have to look at the price. It's an ingenious system which saves me a lot of time.

But, one major barrier holding back a more successful libertarian experiment is the poor definition of profit that we currently use. We don't capture environmental or social costs very well at all, among others. There is a way to do so (after all, we all value potato chips and college educations differently, but we were able to put a price on those), but I haven't spent enough time looking for other attempts to solve the problem or working on my own to know exactly what it is.

We just haven't pushed hard enough to find a better way, yet. It makes sense, given that many libertarian ideas are only a couple hundred years old.

As for (3), the carbon fiber wheels are there, according to the video, to make it easier to build them yourself. The designer wants people to be able to rebuild wheels to fit current trends and/or changing riding conditions. According to the designer, standard wheels are too difficult to maintain and require specialized knowledge.

As an avid cyclist, though, I rarely do much to change out or even maintain my steel-spoked wheels. Once they are well-trued, I usually leave them alone for the season. I certainly never worry about my wheels not looking cool enough.

According to the video, the bike weighs 27kg, which seems a bit heavy for easy pedaling. Add in all your daily luggage and you're pedaling around with something like 35-50kg of extra weight. Except in really flat areas, that seems like a lot to ask of someone.

Right on. People who care enough to act when mistreated are becoming increasingly rare, it seems. Plenty are willing to complain, but complaining is not really acting. It's pointing out a problem, not trying to fix it.

The question is, though, how do we positively reward this type of action? For example, if the professor is fired, my guess is that he will have a hard time finding a job somewhere else, because he has rocked the boat. But, he deserves much better than that. How do we solve that?

Taken with the recent http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1843491, I'm a bit concerned.

As time moves forward, shouldn't we be setting the bar higher, not continually dropping it lower and lower? Why, in so many areas, are standards sliding rather than getting stronger (not just in education, but in government and some industries, too)?

What's happening to personal responsibility and a clear set of rules by which to play the game? Am I wrong in seeing things this way?

In addition to talking about the good and bad of elite educations, Deresiewicz's piece also strongly praises the traditional liberal arts degree. He seems to think it far more valuable than more practical degrees. But, I'm not convinced.

First, shying away from practical studies reminds me of exactly the fallacy that drove me to leave philosophy after I finished in undergrad. My experience was very similar to what pg writes about in http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html. Asking the 'big questions' devolved into quibbling over split hairs and avoiding useful, testable hypotheses that could really make the world a better place (not that 'big questions' are bad, but we should try solving them in useful ways, not randomly)

Also, the author seems to think that a glorified form of vocational training is a bad thing. But, could it be possible to create an educational system where vocational training creates the thinking man Deresiewicz wants? That is, could an interest in say, programming, motivate studying history by examining the development of mathematics and computing machines over time? Could it lead to a study of economics through questions about the Pareto Principle or the right way to offer our programs to the public (free, product, service, and so on)? Could it lead to philosophy and psychology by asking if man is potentially programmable and why certain types of programs can't be written with our current model of computation?

In short, could vocational training take a singular interest and use it to create the sort of individuals Deresiewicz decries elite schools for failing to produce?