ravitation

This is an important idea in game design, even for games that aren't explicitly competitive.

What players enjoy doing (i.e. playing to play) should (mostly) converge with what players do to optimize for some goal (i.e. playing to win).

I think Sirlin's definition of a "scrub" is interesting, and certainly useful (in that it describes a type of player that exists), but I wouldn't read too much culturally into that definition.

It might have something resembling that meaning in the Street Fighter community (though, as far as I know, it's still way more general than described in this article), but, for video games in general, it is mostly used to mean "just a bad player."

> I want to learn things, but code reviewing bad code doesn't teach me anything - I want to work with people who can teach me things when they review my code just as often as the reverse.

I mean maybe you're working on extremely repetitive code, but the idea that you don't learn anything from reviewing bad code, and hopefully writing comments designed to help not humiliate, seems pretty bad to me also...

You want to learn from others who review your code, but become angry when you have to teach those whose code you review? That seems bad...

My comment answered that "countries with public health systems" actually do "pay" for the "latest generation insulin" (i.e. the price for the "latest generation insulin" is still a tiny fraction the cost in the United States).

Just repeating the question, when I gave you the answer, isn't very productive.

Not actually the question since countries with modern healthcare systems provide all types of insulin at an average cost per unit that is roughly 1/10th to 1/20th the cost in the United States (cheap vs. expensive is an over simplification).

And you very conveniently don't address anything I actually said, because after "yourself" you also wrote "and the world."

This isn't some "gotcha." I addressed the parts of your comment that I disagreed with, and didn't address the other parts...

What I think is somewhat interesting, is that there are numerous pieces of his/her comment, like the piece you quoted, that essentially imply the need for articles like the one posted here.

The idea that you can "learn just as much about [...] the world" from things other than what, until very recently, has been the primary mode of inter-generational human communication is pure absurdity. An idea whose absurdity is illustrated by all of human history. The fact that this requires explanation or demonstration is the reason that the current "trend" of elevating reading to a "rare alchemy" exists, because it essentially is if you're coming from a place of treating all activities as equal methods of learning.

I mean... No, it won't... Being 75+ doesn't kill someone in weeks like COVID-19 does...

It certainly seems very likely that what you're doing with said screen matters quite a bit, but this is also an extremely complex thing to try to study. Not only can the net result (i.e. a hypothetical positive or negative result) of a given activity change based on the individual instance of that activity, but it can also change based on the person doing that activity (whose mindset could also change depending on the instance, which could effect the net result of a given instance of a given activity).

The point is, while it might be "pretty obvious that not all screen time is the same," it would also not be that surprising if screen time was still negatively related to the average number of common screen activities over a certain amount of time (which is what you would expect from a study like this).

I'll of course hedge my statement, by saying that the Hacker News community is likely not a representative sample when it comes to common screen activities relative to the general population.

> Many people have chosen to promote the lie that the vast majority of COVID deaths can be dismissed using this reasoning, rather than a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction.

This is comically illustrated by the examples being used... Hit by a bus? Hospice patients with weeks to live?

The truth is that the typical comorbidities, that have a noticeable effect on the actual total number of deaths, are things like obesity, hyptertension, and diabetes... Things that literally will not kill an otherwise healthy adult in the same time period as COVID-19.

This study is only interesting as a prerequisite for reading this...

https://respectfulinsolence.com/2020/05/29/hooker-and-miller...

And, as mentioned here (among other places), https://twitter.com/gorskon/status/1266391373592309761...

"Brian Hooker and Neil Z. Miller, [are] two antivaccine propagandists disguising themselves as scientists."

To be honest, this reads as quite the Luddite article.

Not to mention the focus on Simulmatics is akin to using the 19th century use of bleeding as the basis for a criticism of modern medicine.

Also, the modern example of Cambridge Analytica obviously has essentially nothing to do with what 538 actually does...

Towards the end, the criticism of if a predictive model is falsifiable is an accurate one given that its output is probabilistic, and given the small number, and relative infrequency of, American elections (especially presidential ones) - which impacts the model's calibration. But, Nate actually brings this up quite often (which I assume the author would attribute to him "covering his bases").

I wonder how different these comments would be if the author had used the term "antisocial personality disorder" instead of "sociopath."

I'd also argue that a failure to teach (i.e. "telling people the knowledge they supposedly lack") is also not in and of itself a failure of intelligence.

The failure of intelligence is not necessarily thinking that the earth is flat, it's why one thinks that; and, in the modern context, and some historical contexts, this specific conclusion is explicitly an illogical one (i.e. an unintelligent one).

I'd argue, at least in part, that the discussion about "lack of knowledge" in these comments is at least partially a result of the author's own failure to define, or even maintain a consistent implied definition throughout his own hypotheses of, intelligence/stupidity (even going so far as to use "wisdom" in place of intelligence in some of the hypotheses).

I think this is undoubtedly a relatively large contributor to the perception of modern stupidity.

Additionally, I read it as part of some of the written hypotheses, but, upon rereading, I don't know that the exact conditions are captured particularly well in any of them.

I doubt this considerably. Aside from the fact that it is almost assuredly a combination of multiple of the hypotheses, from my in-person experience (i.e. not on the internet), age does not directly correspond to intelligence (specifically referring to the term as I believe the author would define it). When considering the entire population (i.e. not just the highly educated and the intellectually interested), I'd argue they are essentially entirely unrelated (though I know some would probably argue they are actually inversely related).

This is essentially the theory of multiple discovery (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery), as opposed to the heroic theory of discovery (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroic_theory_of_invention_and...).

Additionally, I think the "inevitability of discovery" is more true now than it has ever been. In the early 1830s there were relatively few young naturalists and geologists looking at the islands and species of the south Pacific that were well positioned to develop a theory of evolution by natural selection. Today, looking at comparable questions, there are a great deal more young scientists competing to answer those questions.

One thing that I think the original comment and this response both point out is that we as a society could still do a much better job of encouraging young thinkers towards challenging and meaningful problems, despite the fact that we do a much better job of it relative to the early 1830s. This encouragement influences not whether the problems get solved, but how quickly.

Honestly, I find the argument that some specifically destructive event (or even a collection of events) would be pervasive enough among all intelligent species to serve as a "Great Filter" to be completely absurd. The chances that any of the examples he listed actually resulting in full extinction (or even an endless spacefaring handicap) are only moderate at best, not assured, even if they did occur. In fact, I think it's quite reasonable to expect that a species, having undergone such a destructive event and been left not extinct, would actually be pushed into space far more efficiently. With that in mind, it's certainly completely absurd to actively hope that monumental (possibly species altering) discoveries are not made.

This blog post (and most of the blog itself) is completely absurd (and largely enormously uninteresting).

I found the ending of this specific post particularly meritless. The Norton Sound Regional Hospital and Quyanna Care Center was built with funding from the Indian Health Service, not Medicare or Medicaid. It's also only an 18-bed hospital, and is located in what is largely a medical desert and serves a diverse population of nearly 10,000. None of that sounds worthy of ridicule to me, in fact this seems quite remarkable (despite the fact that the hospital seems understaffed).

This is a bit of a weird take, the weird part is primarily...

> My point is this: if we expect everybody who is a little bit different to think of themselves as an impostor, we’ve totally lost the plot on this whole inclusion thing.

I'm wondering why when "especially [...] younger women" refer to "[their] Imposter Syndrome" it's assumed to be related to them being "women" and not to them being "younger?" Many young men and women feel some level of self-doubt early in their careers (and this is often labeled as "Imposter Syndrome"), which is why I'd imagine it'd be expected. I certainly did - self-doubt being simply a difference in internal vs. external "value" or "ability."

I certainly wouldn't expect a woman (or man) who has been in largely the same software space for ~20 years to feel Imposter Syndrome.

Other than that, which is a large portion of the article, I agree with the other general premise - that some level of humility in what you know is good (I probably would not call it "self-doubt" though, because nothing she described sounds like "self-doubt" healthy or otherwise).

Once again your ability to absurdly oversimplify things is truly astounding.

The reason why one's economic situation is relevant (and it's relevant to essentially everything), is because it becomes a source of many other biological and social pressures that might prevent someone from spending time, for example, "[developing] a personality" (whatever that means).

You comically underestimate how hard those things are for many men, especially those that are economically disadvantaged. I don't agree with many of the takes in these comments, but your simplification to "just work harder" isn't any better.

Historically police department reorganizations have actually often involved increases in "policing," in addition to structural changes in what "policing" looks like...

Could not agree more with this. I'd sooner buy an "ancient" secondhand MacBook Air than use Windows or attempt to use Linux on a laptop.

I find the the touch bar obviously annoying, but that annoyance is so minor compared with the annoyances of Windows or running Linux on a laptop. Honestly it seems like a lot of people have quite the double standard when it comes to Apple products.

This is also coming from someone who was forced to use Windows professionally for several years (worked on CAD software).

My point wasn't that I necessarily have a different view on what scientific discourse is; my point was that someone who is less discerning might see a discussion of one of the views you listed and see valid scientific discourse.

The issue is not that scientists, or discerning non-scientists, will take those views seriously, it's that others might (or will, or do). Hence the issue is not with defining scientific discourse, it's with educating a population to be able to apply that definition (or formulate their own functional individual ones).

The WHO's stance on a subject is not equivalent to scientific consensus... This is actually a very common criticism of it.

Well, some may find posting said preprint particularly questionable simply because it had Ioannidis' name on it, and he's primarily known for his emphasis on standards of evidence.

I want to add one other piece of information to this discussion, because Ioannidis is somewhat central to the point the original article is trying to make, and it is ignored by the article (because it significantly weakens some of their arguments).

Had the study simply been released and criticized, then much of this current controversy would've been avoided, but that didn't happen. Instead, Ioannidis did the rounds at several conservative news outlets in the wake of the study's release, and promoted the study's findings as the new "best evidence." This aided in pushing certain social and political agendas. Many scientists (especially on Twitter) found this specific behavior to be unacceptable, especially from a scientist that they also felt should "know better."

Others are not so discerning in what they think is scientific discourse.