Former tech entrepreneur (co-creator of the music software Sibelius). Among other things I now play the stock market, write software to predict it, and occasionally advise tech startups. I have degrees in philosophy.
bfinn
Karma: 1,008
Kids physically can’t understand negative numbers until a certain age. The abstract thinking parts of their brain aren’t done cooking yet. Do you know what age that is?
JFC. When I was 12 I was coding in assembly language. I couldn’t understand negative numbers, only two’s complement representation.
Sure, lots of frivolous consumer goods have gotten cheaper but healthcare, housing, childcare, and education, all the important stuff, has exploded in price.
Eh? No, the chart says housing has got cheaper, relative to wages. And childcare hasn’t gone up much
Interesting. Many things can be said about this, on topics such as:
Connoisseurs
Pedantry
Diminishing returns
Satisficing
Signaling
Best left as an exercise for the reader.
When in New York recently, I noticed a vastly higher rate of crazy homeless people (mentally ill/drunk/on drugs) than in London where I live, where I have almost never seen one. There are beggars in London, but they are well-behaved.
My wife (who is American) attributes this to the much better (though still patchy) welfare state in the UK, which seems plausible.
(My own initial explanation, which may have a bit of truth to it, was that British people are just more polite and well-behaved, even mentally ill vagrants! Cf I heard recently of a woman in London who noticed a pick-pocketer had just taken her phone, so she politely asked for it back, and he embarrassedly gave it back to her. A quintessentially British interaction.)
One exception to the welfare state point: some years ago I came across a man in London standing by the road at night, quietly calling out for help; he turned out to be blind (his eyes milky white), disheveled, apparently homeless. I pressed a £20 note into his hand; he asked what it was, and was appreciative. I still don’t understand how there can be blind beggars in the UK, which I had thought were only found in Dickens novels.
Indeed, it’s often said to be good to smile at people (in certain countries*), though I’ve never put the minimal effort into implementing this, not being a natural smiler.
I would not be surprised if adopting the habit of forcing a smile, which might soon come naturally, is an extremely easy win—to the extent of improving the course of the smiler’s life significantly. Both by improving interactions, and because psychology says acting a certain way (eg feigning happiness or extroversion) induces it in oneself.
(*Whereas in some former Soviet countries, smiling is considered a sign of being a fool or weirdo. E.g. before the Sochi Winter Olympics in Russia, hosting staff were trained on how to interact with foreign visitors, including smiling. After this training course, one staff member tried walking down the street smiling at people, but was promptly stopped by police and questioned for suspicious behaviour.)
That’s just way way crazier than anything that 50 year old Americans have seen. And the main technological advances—phones, internet, social media, and recently AI—seem somehow subtler and easier to ignore
You forgot computers more generally. Which only became widely used in the 1980s & 1990s
FWIW I’ve heard the same is true of (modern classical) composers. The piece they wrote that they think is their best work (and wonder why no one performs), everyone else thinks is boring/mediocre/etc. Possibly because it involves the culmination of some novel groundbreaking experimental technique they’ve devised that no one else cares about and doesn’t produce good music anyway. A composition teacher once explained this to me as the difference between a good piece and one which felt good to write (i.e. where it felt like the composing process went well).
(Conversely, back when I used to compose, some of the best stuff I wrote was literally me staying up all night before a deadline, filling bars with crappy notes while cringing and thinking ‘JFC this is utter shite but I’ve absolutely got to get this finished by sunrise come what may or it’ll be a disaster!’)
Indeed it’s ease of first use I’m thinking of here. Noticeable when staying in hotels.
But I doubt aesthetics are relevant in the case of shower UI though—surely a good UI would be aesthetically pleasing enough. And UI design for such a simple device shouldn’t require evolution over time—could jump straight to a (near-)optimal solution
Why do almost all showers have different user interfaces, and bad ones at that? Eg unclear how to turn it on (especially if there is a separate shower head and hand-operated hose), which way is hot, and how hot the current setting is. Each shower requires experimentation to figure it out. How hard can this really be? Even premium manufacturers like Grohe fail.
This incidentally raises the question of what would count as ‘firing too early’. Before it’s become clear whether someone is a bad/mediocre employee rather than starting off on the wrong foot or taking time to get used to their role? (Would be clearer in the case of a bad than a mediocre employee, naturally.)
(A friend of mine was quickly fired from a remote working programming job during COVID, I think because he skipped one of their regular online team meetings without good reason. He’d been half-assing it so much in his previous job in a media company (where no-one did any work) I think he assumed he could get away with and talk his way out of anything, so this came as a shock to him. Sounds like they were right to fire him for the sloppy attitude he had acquired, of which this incident was a single but clear signal.)
Cf almost-obvious business advice I’ve given people: get rid of bad employees ASAP. Don’t wait around to see if they might improve—they won’t, and will only get entrenched (especially if they have psychopathic traits and are in a senior position), making it more disruptive to get rid of them later.
BUT the same applies, less obviously, to merely mediocre employees. Because they can hang around for years, half-assing it and dragging those around them down, occupying a position that could be filled by someone far better, but not quite bad enough to require dismissal.
(This may be less of a problem in the US, where ‘fire at will’ is standard and maybe rapidly acted on, than say the UK where I am.)
(This advice incidentally highlights an apparent difference between the private and public sectors, the latter (in the UK at least, by all accounts) having too many mediocre people who are never fired, due to union pressure, a time-serving work culture, etc.)
a process imposed upon you from above often incentivizes blind adherence, even when it’s hurting the stated goals
Something something Goodhart’s Law—or rather, hurting the unstated real goalsSomething something AGI
Though non-fiction, I noted some years ago that parts of Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom would make great material for a feature film, that would bring the risks of AI to wide attention. Eg the stuff about ingenious ways a superintelligent AI might break out of an oracle situation, or persuade someone to help it manufacture a deadly virus.
Animals and even insects could be prosecuted in Europe up to the 18th century, presumably counting as persons. Their crimes might include killing someone or damaging property.
One notable 16th century lawyer, Barthélemy de Chasseneuz, made his name by his eloquent defence of rats that had eaten the local crop of barley. He also successfully defended some woodworm that had disobeyed a summons to court.
There is an interesting but uncommon adjective ‘bluff’ (crucially different in meaning from the noun & verb) which describes someone who is honest and lacking in grace, but in a pleasant way. Which highlights the small distinction between being graceless and unpleasant. You can imagine some children or uneducated adults being bluff—plain-speaking, but clearly not trying to be, nor particularly seeming, rude. It would need more thought to figure out just how this works.
I’m not saying I advocate being bluff, but I can see some things in its favour. Being honest and clearly understood while also being graceful is indeed a difficult skill, often involving culture-specific subtleties that don’t always work.
Graceful yet honest communication between Britons (such as me) often involves a level of subtlety and indirectness, such as understatement, that is lost on foreigners. Eg ‘It’s not ideal’ can be used to describe anything from a lukewarm cup of tea to the outbreak of World War 3.
Bluffness is more direct than this, and so more likely to be understood.
Grokipedia (and URL), not Grokopedia
But note these drawbacks with Pomodoro (and my alternative solution):
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FDCJ2BfAT9qJGrpFa/what-s-wrong-with-pomodoro
Somewhat related to 5 is the real but much underused word ‘velleity’ (which I use a lot), meaning an extremely slight preference or desire, so slight that you can’t be bothered to do anything to fulfill it.
(Eg watching rubbishy TV late at night, very slightly inclined to change channel but not enough to press the button on the remote.)
Somewhat related to 1 is a word for being stuck thinking how to express a complicated thought (rather than choosing between thoughts). Not quite the same as tongue-tied as this involves intense thinking (rather than eg being nervous).
(Example: some trains from Cambridge, UK to London are fast, some are slow (stopping at many stations). Sometimes there are two trains on adjacent platforms, a slow train leaving first, then a fast train leaving second (but often arriving first). Many a time I have observed passengers (and myself experienced) going up to a staff member and then freezing while trying to form the relevant question, viz: I’m going to London, so in order to arrive sooner, should I get on this slow train that’s about to leave or the fast train leaving later?)
Surprisingly, glass bottles are even worse for microplastics than plastic bottles! Apparently due to plastic coating on the metal cap:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0889157525005344