166 karma · joined March 22, 2019
To the HN community of course.
> My answer would be that none of the activities you list (with the possible exception of the kind of wannabe entrepreneurship the paper is talking about) are conspicuous consumption.
That’s a valid response, although I don’t agree. Note that I’m not regarding these activities to be entirely about conspicuous consumption, just like the paper doesn’t claim all of entrepreneurship is veblenian. Fwiw the paper does cite another work that claims some internships can be viewed as a form of conspicuous consumption.
Perhaps the simple fact is that most people are motivated by the need for social validation, and only a tiny tiny fraction of the population is driven instead by things like intellectual curiosity, desire to help others / solve societal problems, etc. So any class of activity that becomes open to a sufficient number of entrants will eventually turn into a form of conspicuous consumption.
Now scientific research is conspicuous consumption (MIT Media Lab?), book authorship is conspicuous consumption, and political candidacy is conspicuous consumption. Are there any activities left that doesn’t function as a form of conspicuous consumption?
An EE professor at a well-regarded research university deals with the scientific method all the time. Whatever opinion you may have about the article, as far as I can tell the author is certainly not on "the sidelines" and more than qualified to write about the state of science.
In Japan we often make gratuitous use of English words (yokomoji, lit. "sideways-written characters") to make things sound more interesting than they really are, seems like it works the other way around too.
It’s also not clear if the ML-based classification scheme can handle the vast individual differences among the general public, in real-life scenarios. (Wasn't this why Motion Sense on Pixel 4 wasn’t as precise as initially expected?) Performance may take a further hit with wear and tear, if these are embedded in clothing like hoodie drawstrings.
Is it? Some of my friends went on to start successful companies after getting their PhDs. I'm a bit envious of them actually, I didn't have that option as my research was on an obscure topic with zero commercial potential.
> The Ph.D. is a tremendous opportunity. You get to pick an advisor in any research area you like and then you get to do research in that area, receive mentoring, think deeply on problems, publish papers, become famous, while paying zero tuition for 6 years and receiving a salary.
Yes it is a great opportunity, but considering how universities benefit massively from the work generated by their PhD students they're grossly underpaid (at least in STEM).
Overall this seems like good practical advice, but it's firmly written from the perspective of a true believer in the PhD system (and academia in general). My take is a bit different, I really think academia is broken in some fundamental ways.
I work in what may be called a "soft" science field, I don't complain when people don't view our output as authoritative as that of hard science. I'm proud of my work, but I don't claim to have any monopoly on truth (or even a better grasp of truth, for that matter) just because I have a list of academic publications. It's the nature of the field.
Anyways aibo came out around 2000 I think, if social robots really are viable as a product category we should be way past the Newton stage by now.
Yes interesting idea for a study but only 10 participants, presumably all around the same age.
Too bad this is what passes off as scholarship in Human-Computer Interaction nowadays. I remember seeing a paper from CHI (the top conference in the field, where OP was also published) lamenting the field's far lower standard of scholarship compared to psychology — the poster child of replication crisis!
It's as if the author (with a background in civil engineering not CS) deems everything that she has a good understanding of as "dumb", and everything she's relatively unfamiliar with as "smart", i.e., useless. While I'm no fan of projects like Google Quayside and wary of increasing corporate influence on urban policy, you can't point fingers at fringe ideas like smart garbage cans and use that to outright dismiss the role of IT in urbanism; we don't browse through weputachipinit [1] and conclude that all IoT is worthless do we. If she can look into things like Japan's earthquake notification system [2] and still claim that "smart" solutions don't add value to cities, then we can talk.
[1] https://weputachipinit.tumblr.com
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquake_Early_Warning_(Japa...
Perhaps I'm biased by my own experience here in Tokyo, but I feel that a lot of criticism against smart cities - while not at all without merit - smack of civil engineers, urban planners, architects and the like claiming territorial rights, attempting to keep "outsiders" like IT people stepping onto what has traditionally been their turf. We need less of such feudal mentality, and more interdisciplinary collaboration; more urbanists need to start speaking the language of IT and vice versa.
Also I remember people's attitudes shifting in some inexplicable ways, suddenly cultural capital seemed to carry much more weight than other forms of capital. For a while it felt like everyone in Tokyo was trying to one-up one another, not financially but through cultural connoisseurship. Strange times but I do miss the general atmosphere, Japan feels like a completely different country now...
The value proposition of tangibles took an especially hard blow when smartphones hit the market — multi-touch direct input achieves much of what tangibles promise to offer (e.g., intuitiveness) while retaining all of the benefits of digital computation (e.g., portability of data, negligible marginal cost of production) that are sacrificed in systems like Dynamicland.
This argument reminds me of those pro-gun arguments: we can't prevent guns from falling into the hands of wrongdoers, so let's allow everyone to arm themselves – soon we'll reach an equilibrium where the fear of retaliation acts as deterrence.
I don't agree with this kind of thinking at all, the way to deal with destructive technologies is not further proliferation.
Is there any published criticism against his work? His papers get cited everywhere, I know citations are more metric of popularity than scientific quality but I find it puzzling that his work continues to get attention if the results don't hold up.
https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/3lnpt6/is_jake_adels...
It's not like he acts with any apparent agenda or malice, the guy just has no regard for facts. Everything he writes consists of a small sliver of facts mixed with tons of faux-noir, spiced-up BS that paints some exotic portrait of Japan tailored for Western audiences.
I guess we all want foreign countries to be more exotic than they really are — I remember when I first moved here from LA, my classmates seemed disappointed to learn that I'd never been involved in a gunfight :/
I guess it goes both ways though, the self-proclaimed "America-tsuu (US experts)" here aren't any better.