maus42

The active, open, free discussion on findings and theories has been regarded as one of the big ideas of modern science. That's what journals were for.

However, for some reason I'm doubtful if the "online comments section" is the most conductive for the behaviour we want to encourage, after witnessing how that particular concept did manifest in the newspapers when they went online (compared to the traditional opinion / to the editor page).

>Are they planning to retire young, as a nation?

What an amusing thought. One big problem is that, one part of the idea of retirement is that you eventually die. I hope Norwegians aren't planning doing that, as a nation...

Maybe the term we are looking after is "living on the interest", as old middle class ladies plan to do in the 19th century novels.

On the other hand, Nordics are not exactly clones of each other. I believe the mortgage terms are less crazy in Denmark and Finland.

After a while, overtly sarcastic tone gets a bit boring when you get to read it every day in the every corner of internet over any possible issue.

And in my experience, it's rarely very effective in changing people's opinions, if they are not tending to agree with you already in the first place.

Non-alcoholic restaurants? Maybe that's a nice idea, but I don't think that actually solves anything.

The main problem with alcohol (at least in my culture) is that it's not given that you can go and drink non-alcoholic stuff in a social gathering without others making it a huge problem.

In that situation, who would go into the non-alco restaurant? Especially would you like to ask your friends "let's go to the non-alco place instead of the usual one", if the drinking is the thing you find problematic? Yeah, I've never heard much about non-alco restaurants.

The existence of gimmicky restaurants isn't answer to these kinds of problems, because the inherit reason is ... how I would say this ... in the societal background of "what is normal": the overall framework what is expected of you, what you can reasonably expect of others, and what options you are left with if you think you have a reasonable, principled case against the way things currently stand and disagree with the behaviour that is considered "normal"?

The parallels to over-indulging in predatory social media products are left as an exercise to reader.

>Finns don't really learn swedish

Which is funny, considering how many years (6 I guess?) the Swedish language is a compulsory subject for Finnish-speaking Finns.

> If you want to live as a technology-free hermit, go right ahead.

That's very nice, but if you want to live as a technology-free non-hermit you naturally would try encourage other people to join you.

You don't have to read their 7000+ word essays, either, if you have so aggressive reactions to their claims.

I wouldn't call it very math-y, I'd call it a systematic numbering scheme.

You have lots of metaphors and how analytical thinking is "narrow", but I didn't found your argument why continental philosophy would be better to study than analytical tradition.

I'm suddenly reminded of an acquaintance whole called me "narrow-minded" when I said chakras and horoscopes are maybe fun, but have not much to do with the observable scientific reality, so you should not be serious about them.

I mean, I reviewed the wikipedia dictionary definition [1] of major trends in continental philosophy to see to refresh my mind what it was about, again, and I'm not terribly impressed. If analytical is "narrow" viewpoint, then fine, in my opinion it's very needed right kind of narrow a rigorous and honest study of philosophy needs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_philosophy

>* Interactivity is important in a training setting because you're learning along with others. That initial path you create in your brain is dotted with waypoints that everyone in class travels together.

I'm sorry, I'm totally lost at what this metaphor is even supposed to mean. I have no idea what the deep mental processes of my fellow students are when they are learning, even if we would talk about the material and ask questions and discuss, and I'm not even sure why I should follow the same "pathways" as them to learn to grok some concept.

Most efficient learning method I've found is to study materials on your own (be their written materials, videos, recorded lectures, though I prefer texts), try to apply it (first to some basic exercises if available, then try more independent work), and ask a more knowledgeable person questions about it when I have questions to ask. The last stage is inherently interactive, but at the first stage all and the only action that happens should be you and your brain concentrating on the material.

Interesting read. However, I wonder if for education purposes it would better if every student who is bored with their current schoolwork could just move into more advanced materials until they are not bored, instead of trying to spot the "super geniuses" early on and leaving the rest, the "not talented enough", to continue with the normal course material.

Because if you have some kind of test for identifying the geniuses who can enter your "special gifted genius program", the test is going to have a some cut-off line or threshold, and that's going to be unfair. For example, assume you're using an IQ test, and the kids who score above some arbitrary threshold would be ushered into the special awesome program, but the kid who scores only one point below the threshold does not get in. Even if the difference is just one point ... That would be a quite silly (and deeply unfair) policy, because there's always going to be some random noise in the test taking.

I would argue that it's valuable in itself to actually know what the humanity has found about the universe and how it works and how this method called science is supposed to work.

The only purpose of the continued existence of the mankind is only what we ourselves decide upon and make our purpose. What is the best of ourselves? Towards what end should we aspire to? The greater understanding of nature and ourselves and history and truth and beauty, or being marginally more effective in producing more shiny skinner boxes to enthral our neighbours? The man standing on the Moon, or a new fancy gadget that wibbles and wobbles a bit better than the previous version on wibble-wobbler?

Especially so in the western societies, where the ideal is that citizens vote and participate in the public life and make collectively decisions. Plato claimed that society should be ruled by philosopher-kings. There are many reasons why his utopia would not work out in real life without being utterly horrible, but one thing that we ourselves, who have the right to vote, try our best to be a worthy of the tiny bit of the crown of a philosopher-king that democracy grants us as our right.

Of course, not too many people seem to be interested in being curious about universe. Sometimes it makes me despair.

>If you ever feel the urge say something like "but the internet gave us mass surveillance", just stop and think wether you would really complain about hospital waiting times to someone who had to have surgery before the invention of anesthetics

...I'm sorry, I don't understand how that parable is supposed to make sense.

I read Umberto Eco's guide to writing an academic thesis in early 00's; I'm too young to have first-hand experience how people did academic research before internet, but the book was from late 1970s, and the description of importance of using bibliographies and other such sources and indexes was intriguing.

I thought it was a useful source for Call of Cthulhu campaign set in 1920s, where investigators are supposed how to use libraries effectively.

Link to review of English translation: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/how-write-thesis

And oh, I recently tried starting a habit of keeping an up-to-date directory of greppable markdown notes with links to the papers and books I've read, directly inspired by Eco's index card system and his gigantic private library.

But is it easier to 'drift apart' from people you know if you're the only one they need to remember specifically call or send email to, when they can in general assume that all their friends sort of follow their FB updates? But it's awkward if you're the only one who keeps contacting them.

If you have already hard time building very durable friendships and are sort of hang-around member of your social circles, the social media -- if you refuse to use it -- does not exactly make your life easier.

The animation (esp. flying) was great (as always with Miyazaki / Ghibli), but I thought as a serious film it was ...lacking. Somewhere in the uncomfortable zone of not being a total mess, but not very great either?

The ending was beautiful, in a way, (especially if you've seen Porco Rosso), but on the other hand, Miyazaki had to have a character to spell out loud and clear the whole central ethical dilemma (airplanes are beautiful and the fighter airplanes are the most beautiful things, but they are used as horrible weapons of war). But then what he was doing with the whole preceding two hours if there must be a monologue at the end? It didn't feel like a sign of good storytelling. The other main thing was the romance, which ... eh.

But sure, it's still an interesting film.

But I'd also say Nausicaä (the manga, haven't seen the film) is more interesting take on some of the same questions, if you notice that Miyazaki tells an anti-war story, yet he is clearly in love with the airships whenever he draws them. The gunship battles look awesome, which in a sense, is also a problem.

Video and audio works now.

>But with new programs like Microsoft Word coming into existence, typography (e.g. formatting a document, setting the margins, making sure the lettering is appealing, etc.) became something everyone could do easily without much thinking.

Correction: Most people do it without thinking. This does not mean the majority of the typography on the internet (and eventually printed) is good or well done.

My LaTeX setup produces fairly good typography for math work, without too much thinking on my part, after setting up the packages, fonts, etc and learning LaTeX, which did took some time. (And ironically enough, writing LaTeX feels quite a bit like coding...) But first of all, deciding to use and learn LaTeX (or some other workable solution to produce good typography, it probably isn't the only one but the one I'm familiar with) requires you think about typography and realize that good typography is needed in the first place.

>How do you remember all that.

I ask for receipt for everything (mind, here every cashier is legally mandated to offer you one without asking, so I decided to take advantage of that).

I neither use a fancy app, but old LibreOffice Calc thing I started a couple of years ago. I can now reliably predict my grocery expenses for each year; I also have a fairly good idea exactly how much I can afford to spend on unnecessary things like entertainment (books, Spotify etc) each year, so I now pay the mental effort to actually prioritize how much I want different things. I no longer pay things without planning it beforehand.

Maybe some people can do that kind of mental accounting without help of writing that all down on a paper or using software, but I've found it helpful.

Good point, but not unsolvable. I can imagine the law would require user specifically giving permission to delete the data afterwards, maybe even mandating a certain form of presenting the gist of the deal, instead of lengthy and indecipherable TOS.

I don't know the legal language, but requiring a text box with a tick mark or equivalent that presents a legally mandated predefined statement designed as a short and simple (unlike most TOS and EULAs), in clear and visible text, should not be impossible.

For example, "I agree that $corp may delete my data without notice and opportunity to back it up" if the $corp isn't willing to offer a TOS that grants the user those rights. Possibly another similar one about privacy.

>how much better the world would be

Unfortunately it is not. Issues like this are the reason why government and state occasionally can be useful.

On the other hand, if you don't like the competitions, you probably would not meet like-minded people going there (assuming other participants like them).

Maybe we need alternative avenues for maths nerds to meet each other.

I like the idea of executable cells for developing.

It's been a couple of years since I played around with Jupyter notebooks, but then I got frustrated quite soon:

Stepping outside my preferred editor (vim) was annoying, likewise I had no idea if (how?) I could export the code out of notebook to a regular .py text file (without clumsily copypasting each cell). And the .ipynb files itself seem quite terrible to manage in Git: write something and if you want to 'git diff' the changes, sometimes what you see is okay, sometimes it's not very... easily decipherable. (Text encoded image/png's?!)

My preferred workflow with R is to open the files I'm working with in both RStudio (with vim keybindings) and vim. Maybe if I just strictly restricted the use of notebook cells just for calling scripts and functions written in external files, and use the notebook as a whole just for presentation purposes, but then it wouldn't be that much an improvement over regular IPython. Any thoughts?

Well, it's a newspaper article written by who would be a source, of sorts:

>The FIS - the government agency responsible for toxic oil syndrome - refused to release details of the fieldwork carried out or any background information. However, the families described in the reports were given code numbers and these could be matched against the official list of victims which then became part of the trial documentation. Eventually we identified the families supposedly interviewed for the key epidemiological reports and went to see them.

I'd be interested if they have any full detailed notes about interviews published anywhere, other than the documentary.

recently when the article was written (which was in 2001)

But even for the meatspace courses in our uni, the course materials (lecture notes and exercise pdfs) remain available on the public course web page to the foreseeable future after the course.

Having predetermined time schedule might be reasonable for stuff like course credit and motivating the students to complete the course on time, but killing the forum community and even restricting access to materials (or making the access an unnecessary hassle) seems very unnecessary if the objective really is to foster learning in general.

Well, the early 1900s wasn't exactly an utopian golden age where people were not interested about stuff like sales revenue.

Do especially 'beautiful' items really entice children better compared to, well, maybe bit worn but in good condition and definitely not broken or dirty items, or utilitarian mechanical things that are in prime condition but designed the function, not looks, in mind?

I mean, many children are absolutely enticed by garbage trucks and tractors and stuff like that.

You're not the only one.

>Not long ago, Paul Saffo, of the Institute for the Future, said to me, “Bill Gates is an introvert. He is not the kind of person you want building the social network of the future.”

Looks like Saffo got his wish, Gates didn't build it.

I can see many potential problems arising if arxiv itself implements recommender systems or in some other way tries to be a gigantic journal or the primary social media for scientists or something alike. Tools that are strictly about making accessing the repository easier, like better word search, are fine.

I'd prefer if arxiv stays a repository, and the filtering and discussion and rating is left to other parties, for example, overlay journals such as Discrete Analysis (discreteanalysisjournal.com) [that ranked highly on HN when it launched]. Many separate journals can compete. The future of arxiv being as neutral as possible ground that disseminates papers freely on the internet (in standardized format and with maybe even the API you mentioned) and allows for a beneficial ecosystem of journals and other communities to develop, well, it sounds a more healthier future than arxiv trying to become the science community that encompasses everything from hosting of papers to discussion about them and judging their quality.

Assuming they adopt objective like that, I can easily imagine arxiv becoming a FB-of-science of sorts, and it might be very convenient ("I can just log in to Arxiv and everything will be there!") and maybe people would love it. (Everybody except lunatics and luddites and generally people who like to be inconvenient out of sheer malice to their fellow human beings are in FB, right? At least in my social circles. And that gives FB overwhelming ability to dictate terms for using FB, given that the ordinary user isn't their customer.) It could hand too much power to just one institution to define how the scientific community communicates.

Suppose they introduce comments. Sooner or later that would go the same way as any other internet community that has commenting and isn't 4chan, and they'd need actual comment moderation, maybe even ban people. If they are the major science-on-the-internet platform, that could be bit too much. I understand that currently they only do some basic sanity checks that submitted papers are not utter garbage?

Finland doesn't meet the 2% GDP requirement (neither does Greece, though) and isn't NATO member, but we are the one the very few EU countries that maintain a relatively large conscription based defence forces with relatively modern equipment.