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In 2023, I hope we can rediscover wrongness. Mere wrongness. Wrongness untethered from other accusations. Not everything that is wrong is dangerous or evil or bigoted. Sometimes people are just wrong. A big part of human life is arguing over who is wrong and attempting to nudge this whole ungainly human enterprise toward rightness, a few painstaking microns at a time. It's harder to do that when the pitch of everything is so shrill.
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Earlier this year, one study suggested a week-long hiatus was enough to have a positive effect. In a group randomly selected to take a break from platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, researchers found that symptoms of depression and anxiety had reduced, and overall wellbeing increased.
Dang of HN fame :
"Why We Sleep" Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26684519 - April 2021 (151 comments)
Why We Sleep: A Tale of Institutional Failure - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22844723 - April 2020 (52 comments)
"Why We Sleep" Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22419958 - Feb 2020 (34 comments)
"Why We Sleep" Is Riddled with Scientific and Factual Errors - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21546850 - Nov 2019 (58 comments)
Why We Sleep, and Why We Often Can't - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18798366 - Jan 2019 (80 comments)
Productive on six hours of sleep? You're deluding yourself, expert says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15401397 - Oct 2017 (295 comments)
Sleep deprivation is increasing our risk of serious illness - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15324195 - Sept 2017 (77 comments)
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In 1914, Thomas A. Edison's vast plant in New Jersey caught fire which burned down equipment, wiped out ten buildings, and undid a lot of progress.
According to a 1961 Reader's Digest article by Edison's son Charles, Edison calmly walked over to him as he watched the fire destroy his dad's work. In a childlike voice, Edison told his 24-year-old son, "Go get your mother and all her friends. They'll never see a fire like this again." When Charles objected, Edison said, "It's all right. We've just got rid of a lot of rubbish."
How do you develop a cheery and positive outlook on life like Thomas Edison? One key ingredient is the willingness to take bets and fail, live a life of deliberate discomfort.
https://pudding.cool/2022/12/yard-sale/
Why do super rich people exist in a society?
Many of us assume it's because some people make better financial decisions. But what if this isn't true? What if the economy – our economy – is designed to create a few super rich people?
That's what mathematicians argue in something called the Yard-sale model.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect
The Matthew effect of accumulated advantage, Matthew principle, or Matthew effect, is the tendency of individuals to accrue social or economic success in proportion to their initial level of popularity, friends, wealth, etc. It is sometimes summarized by the adage "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer".[1][2] The term was coined by sociologists Robert K. Merton and Harriet Zuckerman[3] in 1968[4] and takes its name from the Parable of the Talents in the biblical Gospel of Matthew.
The Matthew effect may largely be explained by preferential attachment, whereby wealth or credit is distributed among individuals according to how much they already have. This has the net effect of making it increasingly difficult for low ranked individuals to increase their totals because they have fewer resources to risk over time, and increasingly easy for high rank individuals to preserve a large total because they have a large amount to risk.[5]
- Individual kids can be smart, clever, and kind but a group of them often is not. I believe this often applies to adults as well.
- Both good and bad actions are contagious within groups like this, but bad actions are easier to do and their results more difficult to undo. Like, it's much easier to squirt ketchup all over the carpet than it is to clean it up.
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Let's just call everyone "hoss", as in "Hey hoss, can you get this stupid machine to stop pitching a fit out about the bag I'm just trying to load my scanned groceries in to?". It's pretty solid! If they mishear you, they'll think you said "boss", and who is that going to offend?1
However, while "hoss" is an absolutely hilarious way to refer to anyone, its roots are in the word "horse". That seems unfortunate at best for a catch-all term. I also rejected Amy's next idea, "dollface", which was equally hilarious but even more problematic. Next, I spent some time considering "buddy". I wish it could work, but it just sounds far too informal to my ear.
Why don't reviewers catch basic errors and blatant fraud? One reason is that they almost never look at the data behind the papers they review, which is exactly where the errors and fraud are most likely to be. In fact, most journals don't require you to make your data public at all. You're supposed to provide them "on request," but most people don't. That's how we've ended up in sitcom-esque situations like ~20% of genetics papers having totally useless data because Excel autocorrected the names of genes into months and years.(When one editor started asking authors to add their raw data after they submitted a paper to his journal, half of them declined and retracted their submissions. This suggests, in the editor's words, "a possibility that the raw data did not exist from the beginning.")The invention of peer review may have even encouraged bad research.
Sanskrit, although not widely spoken, is the sacred language of Hinduism and has been used in India's science, philosophy, poetry and other secular literature over the centuries.Panini's grammar, known as the Astadhyayi, relied on a system that functioned like an algorithm to turn the base and suffix of a word into grammatically correct words and sentences.However, two or more of Panini's rules often apply simultaneously, resulting in conflicts.Panini taught a "metarule", which is traditionally interpreted by scholars as meaning "in the event of a conflict between two rules of equal strength, the rule that comes later in the grammar's serial order wins".However, this often led to grammatically incorrect results.Mr Rajpopat rejected the traditional interpretation of the metarule. Instead, he argued that Panini meant that between rules applicable to the left and right sides of a word respectively, Panini wanted us to choose the rule applicable to the right side.Employing this interpretation, he found the Panini's "language machine" produced grammatically correct words with almost no exceptions.
Needless to say, a lot of people out there are quite wary of any moves toward a cashless society because they believe that it is part of the "end times" scenario described in the Bible. According to one recent survey, approximately 39 percent of all Americans are convinced that we are living in the "end times" right now…
Nearly two in five Americans, including half of self-identified Christians and a quarter of the religiously unaffiliated, agree "we are living in the End Times," a new study has found.
That's about 39% of Americans who believe we are living in the End Times, according to Pew Research, highlighted by Lifeway Research.
Other surveys have come up with similar results.
This shouldn't come as a surprise to any of us, because global events have definitely started to spin out of control in recent years. At this point, even secular websites are publishing articles about the surging popularity of "apocalyptic scenarios"…
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The balloon frame can trace its origin to Chicago in the 1830s. Accounts vary, but the most common story is that it was first built by George Snow, a lumber magnate, as the framing for a warehouse in 1832. At the time, Chicago was on the cusp of a huge population boom - it would go from 300 residents in the early 1830s to nearly 30,000 in the 1850s, and to nearly a million in the 1890s. Heavy timber, and the labor needed to work and assemble it, was becoming difficult to find.
Timber frames are a labor-intensive building system, especially in the absence of any sort of construction machinery. The timbers themselves are heavy and require a lot of effort to move into position. And the mortise-and-tenon joints that connected them took a great deal of time and skill to create.
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Amidst all the pomp and circumstance was a short, but powerful and sobering speech by Morris Chang, the now-91-years-old founder of TSMC. He shared his dream of building a fab in the US, the hard-earned lessons from TSMC's first time building a fab in America 25 years ago, his perspective that globalization and free trade is almost dead, and why this event is just the "end of the beginning".
It was the only speech that gave a real sense of what America's semiconductor future would reallylook like. Yet no one listened. No American, or any Western media outlet for that matter, bothered to cover this speech. Only Nikkei and a handful of Taiwanese outlets wrote about it. Not even C-Span c
Here are some of my top takeaways from this speech.
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While most of the Beinecke's archival holdings are by their nature dead — their original purpose being fulfilled — the water bond lives on. It still pays annual interest more than 367 years after it was issued.
Timothy Young, the library's curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts, has travelled to Amsterdam this week to visit Stichtse Rijnlanden, a Dutch water authority, and collect 12 years of interest on the bond. Collecting the back interest maintains the bond's status as a functioning artifact from the Golden Age of Dutch finance. The water authority paid Young 136.20 euros in interest, the equivalent of $153.
"This is a teaching moment because the financial industry changes so rapidly but here we have something very old and constant," says Young, who curates the Beinecke's Collection of Financial History in partnership with the International Center for Finance at the Yale School of Management.
According the water authority, Yale's bond is one of five known to exist. The bonds were issued by the Hoogheemraadschap Lekdijk Bovendams, a water board composed of landowners and leading citizens that managed dikes, canals, and a 20-mile stretch of the lower Rhine in Holland called the Lek. (Stichtse Rijnlanden is a successor organization to Lekdijk Bovendams.)
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Contrary to the claims so often made for them, the researchers found consistent evidence that consuming a lot of sweeteners was associated with an increased risk of type 2 diabetes (as well as higher risk of heart disease). Similarly, when it came to weight, they found that people who consumed a lot of sweeteners were more likely to gain weight over the long term (though the report also noted that short-term studies, lasting three months or less, showed that switching from sugary drinks to artificially sweetened ones resulted in modest weight loss of 0.71kg).
Even with dental health, the researchers found that the supposed benefits of sweeteners were not conclusive. A couple of studies suggested that daily use of a sweetener called stevia could reduce a child's risk of getting tooth decay, but in another study, children who consumed more than 250ml of artificially sweetened drinks a day were even more likely to suffer from toothache than those who drank sugary soft drinks or energy drinks, even after adjusting for levels of tooth brushing and economic privilege.
1. The Bat and Ball Problem
Problem:
- A bat and a ball cost $1.10.
- The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball.
- How much does the ball cost?
First Reaction:
Nearly all people have a first reaction of 10 cents which is wrong. The correct answer is 5 cents.
In a study of 3,428 university students, 50% of participants across Harvard, MIT and Princeton gave the incorrect intuitive response and did not actively check their response. A failure to check is instructive because it requires such minimal mental effort.
