bmcleod

We've been looking at the payments infrastructure in New Zealand recently and have discovered that, unless you find whoever wrote something 30 years ago, most of the senior payments people have limited and ofter contradictory understanding of the capabilities of the underlying systems.

In general international agreements don't override national law, they just oblige the countries in question to pass laws that bring them in line with the agreement. Which they commonly fail to do in all sorts of interesting ways. Part of the mechanism in the New Zealand case has been closer to redefining what software is rather than what patents are.

For New Zealand to add software patents back in would require back tracking and quite a loss of political capital.

I suspect what's happening with all the people who this works for is that given there are some people who have a psychological component to their pain and some who have a mostly physical component.

Even if there are far fewer suffering from the psychological version, they are the ones who physical treatment will fail for. So they will be the ones that get as far as trying the pseudosciencey approach to dealing with the pain. So the mind body approach will have a high success rate amongst the people trying it even if it would be a terrible initial remedy to try.

This is really the kind of thing where A/B testing is both necessary and straightforward. Decently intuitive arguments can be made for both sides and there isn't really overwhelming strength on either of them.

This is the point where it's worth pointing out that the portion of the population involved in food production has collapsed massively over the last couple of centuries. People generally seem to find new things to value when their time frees up.

It's a reasonably sensible point being made when I expected the title to mean I was about to be subjected to yet another rant about editors.

Improving the interactivity of wikipedia would be nice. Although I suspect it would make it harder to edit which might be worse than the benefits.

Poor Economics - Changed my views on some areas of how to combat poverty and poor education. As well as relating a huge amount a detail regarding the unexpected ways people with different backgrounds behave.

There is an interesting issue in the philosophy of science regarding the "hard center" of theories. Basically any prediction about a reasonably complicated situation will rely on a large number of premises.

If you happen to be committed to one premise more than the others, you will always blame one of the other premises when an observation doesn't fit your hypothesis.

In the case of sexism there are so many confounding factors that you'll never be able to say with certainty that sexism is the root cause, only that there is a good chance that it is.

If there is a good chance that something bad is happening then it seems like you could reasonably be expected to produce a non-zero amount of effort in avoiding it.

It seems to me that people that don't read self-help books lump a lot more books into the genre and that causes them to miss a number of books they should read.

Earlier this year I recommended Bargaining for Advantage to someone and they responded that they don't really read self-help books. There are a number of books like this that deal with particular topics inside of the broader self-help genre, many of them going to a much more useful level of depth.

In bookstores I regularly find very good books on particular areas of business mixed in with self-help in the more populist style.

Reading a number of these expert titles is very valuable. From the popular group often only one book is enough to cover the common sense side of things, for instance I recommend that all my friends read "how to Win friends and influence people".

Unless the thing I "should" be doing is immediately necessary or massively more important than the secondary thing I end up doing I'm generally pretty happy to follow my motivation around.

I normally seem to get back to the important thing when its deadline or reason for happening actually becomes so important that it really needs to be a focus.

It might be the issue isn't that you're focussing on the wrong thing, it's that you stop after having done the first thing. When the code based work starts closing in on me I start picking targets of what I will do before I'm allowed to sleep. I can do as many other things as I want, but that has to be done. I also seem to focus better on boring tasks when I'm tired. It mostly works.