I check Facebook at most once every 2 months. HN is my time sink. I should bite the bullet and quit, or maybe just check HN on weekends. This is the wrong place to ask but what the heck, anyone care to share their experience quitting HN?
This reminds me of all those subreddits of people asking how to quit reddit :). There's been periods where I don't check HN much at all for a few months, but I notice that when I "stop checking these specific time-sinks" that really just treats a symptom and I still waste a good amount of time, just on other sites. The only real way to quit is to be intentional about what, specifically, you want to fill the regained time with. I don't have any studies handy, so this may just be conjecture rather than actual science (as if anything else exists online), but it's often easier to make a "positive habit" such as reading 20 more minutes per day than a negative habit like "don't check HN".
I do have phases where I add HN to my /etc/hosts file, but randomly I come across useful insights on hacker news, so I haven't quite taken the step of quitting completely. But if I see an interesting article during a period where I should be working, I've taken to using pinboard's "read later" function and then binging articles all at once when I get to the point where I feel as though I'm not going to produce any more good work for the day. I'm sure pocket, papaly, raindrop.io and other bookmarking services probably have similar functions, though I haven't used them myself.
>This is the wrong place to ask but what the heck, anyone care to share their experience quitting HN?
HN is the vaping to the cigarette smoking that is burning time on Reddit, for me anyway. "It's still got a lot of smart people posting thought-provoking content, and content relevant to my career, it's ok to spend time here", I console myself with.
Unfortunately I'm doing the equivalent of taking a drag from a cigarette followed by a puff of a vape now, having had a severe relapse on Reddit usage, despite internally despising the site and most of everything on it.
So you were able to think of a couple confounding factors off the top of your head, but you dismiss the idea that the researchers had considered those factors and controlled for it? Despite the fact that their full time job it is to think about things like that, and their careers are on the line if they embarrass themselves by disregarding something as obvious and trivial like that? Did you even read the original paper?
This very article is about how the original paper did not control enough for confounding factors:
> Watts and his colleagues were skeptical of that finding. The original results were based on studies that included fewer than 90 children—all enrolled in a preschool on Stanford’s campus. In restaging the experiment, Watts and his colleagues thus adjusted the experimental design in important ways: The researchers used a sample that was much larger—more than 900 children—and also more representative of the general population in terms of race, ethnicity, and parents’ education. The researchers also, when analyzing their test’s results, controlled for certain factors—such as the income of a child’s household—that might explain children’s ability to delay gratification and their long-term success.
You complain to GP for not considering that the people who published the original Marshmallow test paper had controlled for confounding factors. In the opening paragraph, other researchers complain about just that.
In other words: a more sensible reading of GP's comment would be as a reaction to said paragraph.
What you say is essentially an appeal to authority. The questions of wombat92 are legitimate and it is the job of the journalist to answer them in the article. "They are professional, they know their job" is not a valid scientific argument.
LOL, what are you talking about? I asked why OP had such a dismissive attitude towards the original paper, and that's "researcher worship"? Gotta be one of the most toxic responses I've gotten so far on HN.
Ditto. Linux Desktop user since 9x (Red Hat, Conectiva, Mandrake, Debian). I've used IceWM, KDEv1, Gnome2, XFCE, KDEv3, Gnome3, KDEv4, Mate, LXDE, LXQT, usually switched yearly. Started using Cinnamon on Debian since 2017 and -so far- never looked back [1].
You can't really terraform Mars either, not enough gravity. And even if it was possible, the amount of work required to bring the air there is orders of magnitude more than simply building domes over some select craters and filling those with air, a sort of micro terraforming if you will.
Even low gravity will keep your atmosphere close to the surface. What causes atmospheric erosion is solar wind, and the reason Earth isn't affected (much) is that we still have a powerful magnetosphere, powered by our spinning molten iron core.
Mars has a magnetosphere but it's much weaker since its core is cooler and slower and smaller.
If we nuked the polar ice caps (or similar method to warm + evaporate them) it would generate enough of an atmosphere for the external pressure to be livable - maybe even breathable.
Since the magnetosphere is still weak, this atmosphere would be eroded over time, but we're talking tens of thousands of years or more.
I read somewhere that installing a powerful magnet at one of the Lagrangian points between Mars and the Sun would be sufficient to shield Mars from the solar winds that strip away the atmosphere.
That would be a far cheaper and less disruptive way of keeping an atmosphere on Mars.
> If we nuked the polar ice caps (or similar method to warm + evaporate them) it would generate enough of an atmosphere for the external pressure to be livable - maybe even breathable.
Source?
Even granted that would be possible, it would be an enormous waste. Let's say it's possible to use the polar ice caps to create a breathable atmosphere, why do it for the whole planet instead of using it strategically to pressurize domes where people actually live? Added bonus: The domes provide partial shielding for the radiation on Mars. If you believe the ice on Mars can sustain a breathable global atmosphere for ten thousand years, how long will it last when used in closed systems like domes?
ADDED: if you're going to tell me the gravity is necessary to hold onto the atmosphere, great, i'm actually familiar with that mechanism. i assert that mars' proclivity for losing the lighter atmosphere over millions of years isn't relevant, and that it'll hold onto everything important for Long Enough.
When the speed of molecules in the atmosphere (thermal, and thus dependent on molecular weight) approaches escape velocity for the body, the atmosphere starts to leak that component. Gasses like N2 (molecular weight 28) and oxygen (32) will "stick" to Earth where Helium (4) won't. Mars can hold CO2 (44) but not O2.
happened once? because the gravity changed? it'd be an ongoing process.
and only hydrogen and helium are currently prone to jeans escape on mars. the current dominant mechanism for atmospheric loss is the solar wind. which eats away ~1/3 megaton/century. mars has teratons of atmosphere remaining. and it can be added faster than that rate of loss.
(once warmed up, oxygen may begin to escape the atmosphere again. not necessarily faster than it can be replaced, though.)
Gravity got the following to do with it: Lower gravity makes it easier for the atmosphere to escape to space, especially since Mars has a very weak magnetosphere. Second, to have a human-breathable atmosphere you need not only the right composition, but also the right pressure, and to get that pressure on Mars you'd require an atmosphere more than 2,5 times the mass of Earth's. Where are you going to get it from? Even if it was available to you, using it to make Mars globally breathable would be an ENORMOUS waste compared to simply pressurizing domes and bunkers instead.
The problem is the theory implies that people with brain damage should experience psychological effects similar to those induced by psychedelic drugs, and we don't see anything like that.
Yes we do. For quite some effects seen in patients in psychiatry it's not too hard to come up with a drug which induces similar experiences. Take paranoia for instance. And hallucinations of course. Or, to mention an extreme and very rare example: there are people lacking a certain connection between the low-level visual processing and the parts translating that to known objects (sorry, don't remember exact terminology). It's extremely hard to imagine, but such people have normal vision yet they do not recognize based on what they see. E.g. they see a chair, but don't know it is a 'chair'. However when they touch the chair they know 'aha, chair'. Someone I know described that exactly once when on psychdelics; psilocybin IIRC.
If the hypothesis was true, we would expect the effects of brain damage to reliably create a richer and more psychedelic experience for the sufferer. Hallucinations and paranoia are only a tiny subset of the effects experienced by people on psychedelics, so logically the only part of the hypothesis that becomes more probable is that the brain usually filters out hallucinations and paranoia. But I won't accept that either, because neither brain damage or psychedelics reliably produce paranoia, and brain damage does not reliably produce hallucinations.
I don't rule anything out, but the filter hypothesis seems a lot less likely to me given the evidence, than the simpler explanation: That psychedelics just mess up the normal functioning of the brain to create a different experience. This requires less assumptions than the filter hypothesis, which is akin to suggesting that the brain is actually drunk all the time, but alcohol merely removes the filter to allow us to experience the drunk phenomenology.
Note I'm not claiming the filtration theory is true or false - I also have doubts about it - I'm just saying your rejection of it based on 'we don't see such effects because of brain damage ergo the theory doesn't hold' isn't exactly sound. Actually I'm not sure you can use brain damage to prove anything here. It's also too general of a term for me. As far as I'm concerned a serious head trauma where part of the brain is removed as well as a lesion applied locally for the purpose of neurophysiological research are both brain damage.
If the hypothesis was true, we would expect the effects of brain damage to reliably create a richer and more psychedelic experience for the sufferer.
Why 'reliably'? Not all brain damage is the same. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the theory but I don't think it argues that, nor is it what happens in reality.
Also, why at all? Why would certain brain damage not be able to create a less rich experience? The theory doesn't say that is impossible I think?
I'm not saying that filtration theory is false, I'm saying it seems less likely to me than the following alternative: The chemical composition of a sober persons brain causes us to have the usual experience, but taking a substance like psilocybin alters the chemical balance and therefore makes us have unusual experiences. It seems like I have to suppose more assumptions under filtration theory, and that those new assumptions are unfounded and that the consequences of accepting filtration theory leads to predictions that aren't true (vis a vis brain damage).
Which brings us to why I tried to make the point about brain damage. Since we are working with the idea that psychedelic experience is the default but that the brain is filtering out most of it, it seems to follow that strategically damaging the filter should allow psychedelic experiences to flow through. You're right, not all brain damage is the same, but enough people suffer similar brain damage that I believe we ought to have seen by now some subset of patients with certain types of trauma reliably report psychedelic experiences as part of their symptoms. If such a subset exists, then I stand corrected.
Problem is that is quite hard to assess if it is sufficiently similar. That alone warrants an entire range of experiments. Also I don't know the literature enough to figure out if certain types of trauma reliably lead to similar experiences but I do think that is the case. For example electrical stimulation (not 'damage' per se but definitely altering the normal brain operation in subjects) has been repeatedly used to treat a myriad of problems like tinitus, tremors, ... And I know for a fact that during surgery, when attempting to find the right position for the electorde, it is not uncommon for patients to experience hallucinations/strong feelings of disgust/... because stimulating in the 'wrong' area instead of the proper target area. Also look at lobotomy for instance: quite a lot of similar symptoms in the unlucky subjects. Again: doesn't really prove filtration, but does indicate what you think doesn't happen (ie.strategical damage causing similar experiences) does in fact happen so it's imo not a good measure to reject the hypothesis.
The brain damage caused by psychedelics is extremely specific. By your logic, tonsillitis shouldn't be curable by removing the tonsils, because if it were, then shooting someone in the mouth with a shotgun ought to produce similar effects to performing a tonsillectomy.
Sorry but I don't see how that follows from my logic at all. Would you please care to clarify how you reached that conclusion starting from some assumption I made?
I agree that fever and lack of sleep can produce hallucinations, but I'm not convinced that they are non-localized effects in the brain, nor that psychedelic chemicals are non-localized in the brain.
How do you think the temperature increase from Fever could be localized? It's just a temperature increase and you can induce the same effects by preventing the body from cooling down effectively.
I meant the effects of fever, so that perhaps different parts of the brain was affected differently by the temperature increase. I really have no idea, but I was saying that it is not an obvious fact either way.
> Furthermore even though these lasers are very cheap, by army norms, to fire, they're still 600$ or so for a single shot. So shooting down drones will be expensive. Far more expensive than the drones themselves.
What is the approximate cost of allowing the drone in?
Okay, since economics has extensively studied the effect of narcotics on the economy (which is positive, or to put it another way: people will work, even fight, for drugs), we can clearly establish that the cost of missing a shipment is negative. For the economy, it is actually better to miss the shipment than to catch it.
So allowing Mexican cartels to smuggle and sell, for example, heroin has a positive economic effect on society? I have to admit that's a fresh perspective.
Essentially 100%, though probably from a different author. Calling out media bias, real or imagined, is one of the hallmarks of the American right wing, after all, and I see no reason why Wikipedia would be immune. But naturally people are more likely to speak out when their own side is being attacked.
