manifestsilence

Absolutely! The same way we say you have to hash and salt passwords so they're not useful for cross-site breaches, it's even more important for any other piece of information that is used to verify identity. Especially since these other pieces of info aren't easily changed and can't be different on different sites. Or, facts about a person shouldn't be considered secret for the purpose of authentication, but that's hard when people have trouble with being asked to keep track of any new secret pieces of information they are given.

That the market is manipulable should be evident from the quantity of money that is spent on lobbying legislators about it, and how much opposition there is to unions.

Belief in a totally free and natural self-regulating market is just as bad an appeal to Naturalism as to say we should eschew health care because people were meant to die if they get sick.

Absolutely! I still tend to stop and edit and overthink way too much to finish longer things, so tomorrow I'm starting https://nanowrimo.org/ to attempt to actually finish a novel draft without any second guessing. It's in the same spirit as the freewriting exercise, just extended to a month. :)

Yeah, fair enough. I have found sonnets and sestinas to be really interesting ways to explore ideas, too, because of their structure.

I suppose the level and kinds of restrictions you self-impose affect the kind of space you explore. Both are useful.

Within free writing, even, there are different levels of "free", all the way from don't stop to remember spelling of a word or ever hit backspace, to allowing minor corrections and subtly directing your train of thought towards a goal but not allowing significant pauses to think, which gets into more like draft writing.

Usually I've only written poems when the seed of an idea happens to already be there I want to write as a poem. I'll try that as a way to get unstuck as suggested. Seems interesting. :)

Wow, that's an epic freewrite! Some really great phrases in there, too

Heeeeeeeeere's Johnny!!!!!

I agree, totally. But I think that 20 minutes of journaling per day is really valuable even if it's not for work optimization.

A lot of people say handwriting is fundamentally better, but I much prefer typing because I can keep up with the flow of my thoughts more, and find I catch a higher percentage of the thoughts that are occurring. YMMV

Haha, yes! It only becomes problematic when I click post before doing the editing step...

Black Perl is a thing of beauty and genius.

Agreed. For more modern ones, Dessa and Kate Tempest are also really great.

Robert Bly did a collection of haiku with essays accompanying them that's good.

I love poetry, but think this advice is slightly off. A better way to get un-stuck is free-writing. Just write whatever comes to mind without stopping. If you hesitate, just write "I don't know what to write" - anything to keep writing.

If you can sustain this for twenty minutes, you are now immune to writer's block. You know you can always write. This shifts the question to what to write. You find you can sculpt these chains of drivel. Eventually you start to generate real ideas again.

Even if you never use the things you write in this way, it can be hugely freeing to the mind as you set aside the other things that were distracting you by putting them onto the page and are then clear to focus again on the problem at hand.

This comes from the Artist's Way, which advocates doing this daily as the primary activity of the book / workshop.

Here's a short essay on it I wrote a long time ago.

I would rewrite a lot of this now for general quality, but I think my thesis is sound:

https://albertstimson.wordpress.com/2015/01/23/why-poetry/

Of note: this takes a fairly strict definition of what poetry even is, and I would argue that a lot of things that superficially look like poems don't accomplish any of what makes a poem be worthwhile as something different from prose.

Very cool! I'd like to add that: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ also has an email list for poem of the day. I may do both. :)

It's tempting to think one can come up with objective measures of musical complexity, but the problem is the number of dimensions musical complexity exists in:

Many people who listen to classical (in the more general sense of the word that encompasses baroque and romantic eras as well) dislike folk music as being too simple. They are listening to harmonic complexity - the changing of chords over time. Irish music usually has two or three chords repeated in a predictable pattern. But it has micro complexity - subtleties of emphasis, timing, melodic variation, grace notes, etc. - that make it, to my mind, far more complex than it is given credit for. These intricacies are particularly difficult to measure objectively.

Other kinds of music, like EDM, rap, etc. have rhythmic complexity. Fans of this music often think classical music is boring because classical tends to be rhythmically predictable.

Within classical music, there is Classical (Mozart era), which values balanced form, strictly following structures like AABA, with the complexity hiding within the endings and transitions between repeated sections.

This is very different from baroque (Bach, etc.), which often has rambling forms, and lots of micro complexity - dazzling changes of chords and keys, very intricate harmonies.

I won't even go into modern "serious" music, which stretches the definition of music to its breaking point.

The point being, there are as many forms of complexity possible as there are variables you can control in creating a piece of music.

I suspect this actually brushes up on fundamental limits of measuring complexity such as the Halting Problem in a currently only vaguely defined sense.

Edit:

To give a more direct listing of variables an algorithm might want to attempt to measure complexity in, off the top of my head, we have:

Chords, melody, polyphany, timbre, phrase structure, rhythm, rubato, dynamics, movement/song structure, whole piece/album structure, rhyme scheme, assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia, vocabulary size, word repetition, references to other musical or verbal phrases in other works...

I mean, people get PHDs in analyzing this stuff.

Edit again:

Here's one really specific example that highlights both the fun and difficulty of doing this stuff algorithmically: there's a piece Bach wrote where one person reads the page right side up, and the other reads it upside down (starting from the other end, all notes inverted), and it works out. Noticing patterns like that would take a highly sophisticated algorithm akin to what is used to analyze genetic sequences.

This one is kind of contrived, but a work of mad genius. Mandelbrot code that resembles Mandelbrot, in Python 2:

    _                                      =   (
                                            255,
                                          lambda
                                   V       ,B,c
                                 :c   and Y(V*V+B,B,  c
                                   -1)if(abs(V)<6)else
                   (              2+c-4*abs(V)**-0.4)/i
                     )  ;v,      x=1500,1000;C=range(v*x
                      );import  struct;P=struct.pack;M,\
                j  ='<QIIHHHH',open('M.bmp','wb').write
    for X in j('BM'+P(M,v*x*3+26,26,12,v,x,1,24))or C:
                i  ,Y=_;j(P('BBB',*(lambda T:(T*80+T**9
                      *i-950*T  **99,T*70-880*T**18+701*
                     T  **9     ,T*i**(1-T**45*2)))(sum(
                   [              Y(0,(A%3/3.+X%v+(X/v+
                                   A/3/3.-x/2)/1j)*2.5
                                 /x   -2.7,i)**2 for  \
                                   A       in C
                                          [:9]])
                                            /9)
                                           )   )

https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/23423/mandelbro...

This is why Python uses Timsort: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timsort

Except humans aren't rational actors, driven by statistics, and obviously the women who were murdered can't be interviewed. But if there are more stories out there about women being murdered by a partner, and the stories are amplified by the news, it's easy to imagine this could have an effect on perception of the danger of a non-murderous but angry former partner. As to whether this is measurable in a sociological study, I have no idea.

It can become wrong to use words the old way. Try throwing a "fag" on the fire...

Well here's the thing: if you're talking about socially presented traits of a person, you're talking about gender.

If you're needing to use the word sex, it means you're talking about the difference in shape of a person's private parts. The word is exactly as socially acceptable as it seems to be.

If you're trying to compare a bunch of people in a room, like to say you should divide up teams by ___, you probably want gender, not sex. It's medical professionals who usually have cause to care about the sex of a person they know. Unless you're dating someone, and then it is sex sex you're talking about...

It's not a trend, it's an increase in scientific understanding.

Language is fluid, or we would all be speaking some variant of old German on this forum (try reading Beowulf in the original).

It's not grammar, it's semantics.

Words are social. When one person tries to rewrite the meaning of a word, unless they have significant social clout they are just going to be misunderstood. When many people rewrite the meaning of a word, they change the meaning of that word.

I think the chat in this example still basically counts as synchronous, and the issue is more to do with people being poor at organizing their ideas in text vs. spoken conversation.

Truly asynchronous communication would force them to put their whole thought down on paper at once and perhaps organize it better, or at least allow you to skim. But then of course, async is poor for time sensitive issues anyway.

Ok, fair enough. I have enough other reasons to be against roundup without needing to cling to believing it's carcinogenic. Thanks!

For the record, the other reasons are to do with the larger ecological impact of roundup-based practices, such as harm to soil fungi and bacteria, and collateral damage from runoff or wind. Plus, there were some studies finding it may cause harm to intestinal lining and such, even if it's not actually a carcinogen.

As a contrary data-point, I'm an increasingly luddite programmer who doesn't care at all about 5G, but I live in a town that is kind of a hotbed for conspiracy stuff and I tire of the latest scare always going round without a plausible causal mechanism.

You can find PHDs who believe just about anything (I saw one recently with a sign saying "sunspots cause global warming"), and PHDs publish papers. So you have to look at whether they were peer reviewed, in what journal, and what the findings and methods really were.

It's a lot of work to properly evaluate studies, but I think that meta-analysis is easily abused in this arena. The other big problem is the null publication bias. Have one hundred people roll dice, and if you're only interested in snake-eyes and only publish papers on where that happens, you'll get like 9 studies where they rolled snake-eyes and one responsible scientist who publishes a null result, and conclude that there's a 90% chance of snake-eyes on dice rolls...

Agreed, but there are plenty of factors with a better-explained causal mechanism than non-ionizing radiation. Like the three you listed.

My money is on diet and pesticides/preservatives/etc. being another big one. With this, too, there is little official evidence that, say, Roundup, causes cancer, but there is, imo, a stronger lobby against a positive outcome in those studies, and they don't necessarily control for interactions such as Roundup combined with the surfactant that it is typically mixed with that increases cell penetration.

This comment explains precisely why the dismissal from so many here. Correlational studies without a plausible causal mechanism are highly suspect.

As an illustration, people have used obviously bogus examples like, in the past 100 years, piracy has risen. So has global warming. Therefore, pirates cause global warming.

Unless a 5G study specifically addresses the mechanism, and how non-ionizing radiation can cause damage to DNA, or has a very large correlation established that does a very good job of controlling for other factors, these studies will be dismissed out of hand.

Having just read the other thread, this gave me a great moment of confusion and deja vu as the two trains of thought entangled in my mind. Kudos. :)

Neverhood and Samorost are also fun. The latter is by the Machinarium creators.

Definitely by later (early Windows) games, this is true. Neverhood was a very fun one where it was advertised that there was only one way to die. And that was marked, "don't do this, you will die".