Some people here seem to be upset. I don't get it.
More than 40% of US adults are obese. The rates of chronic diseases are through the roof. There's obviously a systemic problem in these institutions who are tasked with the well-being of the country. We know of many fraud in social sciences (ever heard of priming research?), medical science (eg. alzheimer researchs) and nutritional science (eg. saturated fats). In fact I'd argue it has become systemically untrustworthy.
Robert Kennedy Jr vowed for: (a) dedicating 20% of science funding to replication studies, (b) systemic publication of peer reviews alongside papers, (c) publication of null results.
Which seems like a very good improvement over what we have now. The field is in dire need of a reform.
RFK believes in things that are provably false and you seemingly believe things without evidence either. Our institutions cause obesity? Who keeps refusing protect the environment? Who refused to directly address the COVID crisis when it was starting and pedalled fake cures. Effective policy is hard to get right but the Trump admin are immeasurably worse than the alternatives.
Yes, let's blame scientists for obesity. Not the fact that most of our society has been built around fatty foods and cars to get everywhere.
Where are these scientists arguing for that?!
Hell, science has been wrong on a number of health issues. But diet and exercise has been a staple of good health science for as long as I can remember.
The last paragraph of the Discussion section makes it clear that fat on its own isn't to blame:
> This pilot study examined correlations between diet composition, mental health, mood and happiness, and the gut microbiome to find that fat and protein reduce anxiety and depression while carbohydrates have the opposite effect.
As I'm understanding it, this is funded by a public health institution in the USA. Health institutions all around the world have been especially sensible to the idea that cholesterol and saturated fat are absolutely bad, even if we know now that it's probably not the case. I guess they kept it politically correct in the Abstract to save face, even though their study says the opposite.
Now it should be noted, as others' have, that it's just a n=22 study.
And that was just the install process. Soon you'll start using it and you'll quickly come to despise anything Windows-related.
A good tangent is this absolutely marvelous video put out by the Microsoft Teams people, where they compare the performance of the "classic" version to the brand-new version. A sight to behold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CT7nnXej2K4
I'm so glad we have modern computers with gigabytes of RAM so that we can do real-time chat. This app would have been impossible fifteen years ago when computers had only 1GB of RAM or less. Without modern hardware development we would still all be sending eachother long emails like it's 2006. /s
Where was the chat app of fifteen years ago which could open Microsoft Word documents inside it, such that multiple people could have them open and be shared-editing the same file at the same time? Where was the chat app which could record the video call, add automated transcriptions, and upload it to a SharePoint-alike document store with permissions for the people on the call to watch it? Where was the chat app of fifteen years ago which was cross platform Windows/macOS/iOS/Android/Web browser including video calling?
I would imagine that fifteen years ago, nobody needed a document editor embedded in a chat app. In fact, today we don't need a document editor embedded in a chat app. As far as "automated transcriptions", they weren't necessarily practical fifteen years ago. And cross platform? Hello? There have been IRC clients for every platform since forever. And Matrix clients. And many other clients.
In short: Teams is not all that revolutionary or even great.
> "And cross platform? Hello? There have been IRC clients for every platform since forever."
Where's the fifteen year old IRC client which does hardware accelerated video chat from a web browser?
> "In fact, today we don't need a document editor embedded in a chat app."
What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. Except we have evidence: given a choice of Teams or IRC, businesses choose Teams.
Businesses chose Teams not because of anything listed in this thread of comments. Businesses also didn't choose IE because it's fast and had a lot of features.
People chose Skype because it was fast and it just worked. It stopped being fast and people moved over.
You say all this like it's some technical marvel, but my family & friends do all of these things (chat, realtime docs, video, etc) with no problem on a wide variety of hardware with free google accounts.
Meanwhile, at work, I can't reliably see my teammates in video calls because MS Teams still hasn't figured out how WebRTC works.
For context running Slack with a medium sized company workspace:
* Slack takes 6.5s to load on my 2021 Macbook.
* Slack consumes 366MB of RAM - if I browse around that rises to 744MB of RAM.
For the longest time Slack would kill my machine if colleagues posted gifs in messages. I'm no fan of Teams but I think there's plenty of shame to go around living in a world of eight core CPUs running large Electron apps.
> Congratulations to the Microsoft Teams team on all their hard work! Maybe in a few years we won't have to watch Teams draw itself like a Windows 1.x application on contemporary hardware!
Maybe they made the original Teams version terribly slow so that they can remove some sleep statements to get it down to 9 seconds for 2x faster startup, collect fat bonuses, do nothing for three years and then remove another sleep 5 and release Teams 3 to start in 4 seconds for another 2x start time improvement and another round of bonuses.
The good things about books is they compel you to truly engage in an argument, an idea, a conception of the world. You can't opt out easily, and that means you ought to be focused. And that's incredibly important, because quality almost always mean quantity. Not only the amount of knowledge in the average book far surpasses 90% of what's on the web, but more importantly information does not come easy, and never has. If it's easy to digest, you most likely won't remember it, which essentially makes the whole thing a loss of time. Learning takes time and reflection. If you don't do either of these you're just consuming things on a surface level: you're losing the attention war waged against your brain.
Yes, there's in fact an incentive mismatch here between the creator and the media. But it doesn't mean it wasn't there before to some extent. There are still great resources out there. So how do you spot them?
Information does not come easy, and never has. If it's easy, you most likely won't remember it, which essentially makes the whole thing a loss of time. What I would aim for is focus. This is the big difference I think. If the content is selected for its quality, I'm in. And quality almost always mean quantity. Learning takes time and reflection. If you don't do either of these you're just consuming things on a surface level.
Replace Twitter with internet forums, replace articles with books, instructional videos with real documentaries, etc. All these things call for your full attention, and that is, I believe, the most important. Paradoxically, I've found that the best "content producers" instinctively know this and don't spend much time on YT/social media.
True but there is less signal available. It was much more effort and time consuming to learn. Now the effort is spent in filtering out the noise but it still seems like a net gain. Things like learning to cook or fix a bicycle, or find books and music are so much easier, despite the overwhelming amount of garbage/noise. At least that's my take as an adult who has lived in both worlds.
Yeah but turn your signal producer into one that has less noise and find out that the world is noisy and entropy wins in the end and that people are just other systems inside the system and all of it has it's own goals.
And so why bother? Embrace correlation, seed the world with noise, burn yourself up as you and all of it burns down and we wait for the telomeres to do the inevitable.
Look at the buildings in this painting: https://fineartamerica.com/featured/view-of-washington-dc-ed... . Do they look exceptionally ugly?
To be fair they look almost exactly like the ones in the "old town" part of the city where I live (just more red and less orange), which is by far the most-visited part of my city (because it's pretty and also walkable).
People take pictures right outside of the places were I live. There are photography events in my neighborhood all the time.
The buildings in the painting sure look more appealing than the brand-new district in my town: https://www.lyon-entreprises.com/wp-content/uploads/confluen...
And yes, the past was much more ornate because architecture was a vector of communication -- administrative/state buildings and religious edifices in particular obviously. Which, as a side effect, produced beauty still revered millennia after its creation.
So maybe we should ask: what's modern ideology saying? And what does it says aesthetically? The answer is for all to see, and for all to debate.
On the subjectivity of "beauty" in modern architecture:
- if you average the "subjectivity" of most people (in the USA at least), you get "we prefer traditional architecture": https://www.civicart.org/americans-preferred-architecture-fo...
- when you study "composition" in painting or photography, it's obvious that there are some "rules" to make some pictures better than others. Of course there is intent, but there's also this aspect of making things pleasant to look at. Maybe it's the intent of harmony, I don't know. What these rules would be is subject to debate, but it's not unusual to think there aren't natural aesthetics rules in architecture. It ultimately stems from our interaction with the world and the patterns we see in nature. To me this untold magic is best shown in one of the most famous greek sculpture "Laocoon and His Sons". An upside down Chrysler Building would look incredibly off.
On survivorship bias: look at the buildings in this painting: https://fineartamerica.com/featured/view-of-washington-dc-ed... . Do they look exceptionally ugly? To be fair they look almost exactly like the ones in the "old town" part of the city where I live (just more red and less orange), which is the most-visited part of my city (because it's pretty and also walkable).
"It was WWI/WWII" -- Modern art debuted before WWI even happened. Marcel Duchamp's first oeuvre was in 1912, his famous Fountain is from 1917. The fracture didn't happen with WWI/WII even though people keep hammering these points. What started however at the start of the century was the rise of global ideologies: Communism mainly. This is not to say it's communism's fault, it's simply to say that the idea of a bright egalitarian future seem to have coincided with a general renounciation to beauty. And as the brilliant (communist) essayist Lukacz puts it, artistic expressions are reflections of the consciousness of a people at any given time. Modern aesthetics is modern ideology.
"Modern architecture is cheaper" -- It's really not. There's plenty of projects everywhere that were built "classically" and are still comparatively cheaper to their modern counterparts.
Some of you have mentioned Scott Alexander's piece (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria and the very important follow-up https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-co...). The only comment who did argue at length for an opposite case was from... an architect. (Yes I've read all of the comments on both articles, yes this topic is my pet-peeve). Of course, he argues that beauty is subjective ("that's your opinion man") and when challenged on the fact that most people seem to find the buildings he champions as frankly repulsive, he defers to the usual "well you have to understand the point of view of the architect"... And no, no I really don't, and in fact nobody ever needed to do that for any building, ever. Except a certain class of architects when it comes to modern buildings.
I could write an essay on this topic, but I've got to stop here.
Is this ironic ?
You give the example Yglesias, one of the most famous independent journalists in the US, and litterally the first paragraph of your article is about how he turned down SBF's money:
> Several months ago, I found myself having a few mocktails and splitting vegan snacks with Sam Bankman-Fried at a restaurant near my house.1 We touched on, among other things, his proposal to create a new publication featuring writers he liked, including me.
> I declined, which obviously in retrospect was the right choice. I told him that I like my Substack just fine and make plenty of money, though he was happy to offer more. But I also told him that given the extent to which we agree on a lot of important issues, I thought it was a lot more valuable to these causes for me to maintain credibility by not accepting any of his money.
This always sounded incredibly scary to me, especially when I was in my early 20s. I guess when you're that age you don't like the idea of things having an end, you are sort of overwhelmed by a feeling of infinity, of never-ending youth.
Now I'm not even 30 but this kind of memento mori doesn't strike me as scary but as liberating. "Here's your precious, finite time in this world, and it's up to you to make it worth it." This is one of those things when knowing you're in charge makes you better, kind of how taking responsibility empowers you inside.
> The most important thing I discovered a few days after turning 65 is that I can't waste any more time doing things I don't want to do.
--- Jep Gambardella, La Grande Bellezza
As someone pointed out to me recently when I argued the same thing, crypto and blockchain does have a use case: funding organizations and people through anonymous means as to circumvent the scope of the law/avoid the eyes of state or corporate authorities. This includes funding politically persecuted groups or terrorist groups as well as buying drugs or other more or less recommendable things. After all it's mostly what it's been used for so far (if we ignore speculation and various scams).
Another point is that crypto allows for easy transfer of money across borders. Say I want to hire a dev in Germany/Chile/Nigeria, I could go through the cumbersome and expensive process of wiring money, which incurs taxes on money being exchanged, broker fees in the form of a spread and so on, or I could use a cryptocurrency to just send the money and avoid all of that.
Crypto is also a very powerful tool for people in countries with spiraling inflation, such as Venezuela, Turkey and Argentina. Instead of being 100% exposed to local currency or USD, now you have options on how to perform transactions even inside your own country.
> Say I want to hire a dev in Germany/Chile/Nigeria, I could go through the cumbersome and expensive process of wiring money, which incurs taxes on money being exchanged, broker fees in the form of a spread and so on, or I could use a cryptocurrency to just send the money and avoid all of that.
As much as I'd like this to be the case, that's not a valid argument. If you're a random person who wants to fund a certain organization, you're going to have to buy the cryptocurrency somehow. For anything except tiny amounts this is going to require you to do KYC at some point. Every transaction on a blockchain is recorded forever and traceable back to you and the legal ID that you used during KYC. No one's going to mine Monero for five months just to fund a grassroots organization.
The way covert funding of illegal or unpopular operations or bribes _actually_ works in the real world is different. It often involves stuff like gambling, getting a thousand pre-paid cards, having a bank that issues credit cards (eg Russian-owned MyWireCard which now dissolved issued huge, prepaid, free cards to EU politicians), or "ant work" such as hacking or grinding up game accounts and selling them for profit. That's the covert and difficult part - not having a blockchain. Before you could get paid for your OF leaks with Ethereum, you'd get paid with Amazon prepaid card codes. The tender being on a blockchain doesn't improve anything at all for those performing the payment or those receiving it.
> mine Monero for five months just to fund a grassroots organization.
Am I missing something here? This is the main use case for Monero. You can just buy it with your credit card or after buying bitcoins thru a KYC'd service. That's the point - once you got Monero, it is practically untraceable by the authorities or anyone else interested. No one can see who sent or received money without a view key. The same cannot be said for most other cryptocurrencies like BTC or ETH, since once you buy these from a KYC service, it's tied to your identity forever.
No it's not. Our monetary systems depends on very few companies that restrict things that go way further than the law.
You cant use credit cards for thousands of things you never thought about, PayPal is banning even more, wire transfer isn't international and banks may still complicate things, not even talking about how long these can take internationally and how that doesn't work for realtime services.
There are dozens of things like perfect money, Payeer, Payoneer that could also be blamed because it is used for bad things. But reality is we need those to pay for things that visa doesn't want us to pay for.
Crypto is one solution to this obvious problem. It's easy to say it's all drug money and money laundering but only if you never happen to be in a position where you have to trust untrustworthy russian credit card gateways because it's nearly impossible to charge for a skin colored dildo.
Monero is close to anonymous by default. You generate wallet, and send money there. While this first step can be tracked, you can just transfer the XMR from the first wallet to a new one. This time, no one can see your transactions or associate this address with you (unless you, for example, publish it next to your name).
More than 40% of US adults are obese. The rates of chronic diseases are through the roof. There's obviously a systemic problem in these institutions who are tasked with the well-being of the country. We know of many fraud in social sciences (ever heard of priming research?), medical science (eg. alzheimer researchs) and nutritional science (eg. saturated fats). In fact I'd argue it has become systemically untrustworthy. Robert Kennedy Jr vowed for: (a) dedicating 20% of science funding to replication studies, (b) systemic publication of peer reviews alongside papers, (c) publication of null results. Which seems like a very good improvement over what we have now. The field is in dire need of a reform.
Am I missing something?
PS: I am not from the USA.