The Advantage of Offline Source
Sharif smiled hesitantly. “In all honesty, I was as surprised as you about that. Professor Gu and I were talking freely when he arrived on campus. He got rather quiet as we came down the slope from your Warschawski Hall. And then for no apparent reason, he turned left and we went around the north side of the library. The next thing I knew he was walking into the freight entrance—and I lost contact. I don’t know what more I can say. My own wearable security is of the highest order, of co...
notesAn interesting critique on the bias of the Internet in how it brings you exactly what you are looking for, while the paper-books only brought you approximations, challenging you.
Automation Comes to China
The key question isn’t “How much will be automated?” It’s how we’ll conceive of whatever can’t be automated at a given time. Even if there are new demands for people to perform new tasks in support of what we perceive as automation, we might apply antihuman values that define the new roles as not being “genuine work.” Maybe people will be expected to “share” instead. So the right question is “How many jobs might be lost to automation if we think about automation the wron... notesWould China, a centrally-planned society, replace its factory workers with robots and put a huge portion of the population out of work? Tagging this with a "todo" so I can follow up on it in the future and see if China does go down the automation route.
Pollyanna VS Sod's Law
It's easy to see that predators (animals that kill and then eat other animals) are working for the downfall of their prey. But it's also true that prey are working for the downfall of their .fedators. They work hard to escape bei and it they all succeeded the predators would starve to death. The same thing holds between parasites and their hosts. It also holds between members of the same species, all of whom are actually or potentially competing with on another. If the living is easy, natural... notesEvolution favors the paranoid mind.
Lack of Evidence-Based Child-Rearing in Society
s any new mother or father knows, nothing so invites advice as a new baby in the house. Other parents. Grandma, the lady next door, a stranger on the street, the family physician, and stacks and stacks of child-care books are happy to give directions about the "correct" way to care for an infant. What most parents do not know is that these various tidbits of advice, and even the consensus "rules" of parenting that have such an aura of credibility, are, for the most part, based on a mix of tra... notesThere are many cultural norms, folk wisdom, and "common sense" ideas about how children should be raised, but there is very little research to prove what actually works.
Accidental Inventions
To begin with, often you just don’t know change is coming. Even
if you’re personally involved, you may be looking the wrong way
at the time, like young William Perkin of London in 1856. Around
then, everybody wits looking for benzene rings and chemistry was
the flavor of the month, and Perkin, a chemist, was trying to be
the young science hero who would save the great British empire by
discovering the way to make artificial quinine chemically. You see, our administration and army chaps we... notesIt is the search that produces revolutionary inventions, not the intention, discovering something useful is like winning the lottery in this passage, but you have to be knowledgeable enough to know that you have won it.
Means of Penetration for Memes
We looked at three methods of penetration: repetition, cognitive dissonance, and the Trojan horse. When a virus of the mind infects you, it may resemble one of these scenarios:
- Repetition. Repeating a meme until it becomes familiar and part of your programming is one method of mind-virus penetration:
• Hearing a similar message repeatedly on television news, commercials, talk radio, and so on
• Being in a group or organization where, for instance, a charter is read or an oath is taken a... notesWays memes infect.
