hegemonicon

$1000 would barely cover 25% of the price of a current seat of AutoCAD.

Having tried to implement a certain form of this, I can say that forcing yourself into a certain mode of thinking, top down, is EXTREMELY mentally taxing. It's very difficult to keep up the mental focus necessary for an appreciable amount of time, and I would not be surprised if this actually impeded mental performance on an individual level because of the effort involved, though it's possible overall group performance could still increase.

What I find irritating is that a neuroscientist would be so easily drawn into mysterious, magical thinking about what was going on in her head.

Of course, I suppose I might see things differently if a blood clot turned half of my brain off for a while.

>Complexity research doesn't need its own institute, because complexity research is a pseudoscience that means whatever you want it to mean

This. As far as I can tell, "complexity science" is really just a dumping ground for things we haven't figured out yet. Some pattern seemingly ‘emerges’ out of nowhere? Complexity! Feedback loops causing unpredictable behavior? Complexity! Non-linear or ‘chaotic’ behavior that's difficult to interpret? Complexity! Don’t know where something starts or stops? Complexity! Self-reference or deep, recursive hierarchies doing something weird? Complexity! You can’t talk about any of them without using the phrase “don’t know”. It’s a field defined by our ignorance.

Hrm, this submission is over 300 karma points as of this comment, which means that hacker monthly #2 will have to include an entire copy of hacker monthly #1...

Of course, at some point letting problems work themselves out just becomes laziness.

"Mr Coolidge's genius for inactivity is developed to a very high point. It is not an indolent inactivity. It is a grim, determined, alert inactivity, which keeps Mr Coolidge occupied constantly" - Columnist Walter Lippmann, 1926

When you're talking about a profession though, engineer means something very specific. It means that you're trained and licensed and can be held legally responsible if whatever you're building should malfunction. Referring to your profession as an engineer when you don't meet those criteria is a bit disingenuous. It's akin to the difference between calling yourself a doctor because you went to medical school, and calling yourself a doctor because you got a PhD in english lit.

You need a layout change - this looks more like a news aggregation site than a blog. News sites are designed to lure you in with a grabbing headline. With articles such as yours, you really need to put the text in front of me immediately - the title alone isn't going to get me interested. Unless you have a compelling reason to eschew the standard blog look, I'd stick with that.

I'd also suggest moving the google ads to the far right of the page. They were the first thing I saw and I was immediately annoyed by them.

As far as the content goes, you need a lot more explanation as to what sort of analysis you're actually doing, and what the graphs mean. Many of your graphs and charts are extremely cryptic, and they're frequently put at the end of the post with nothing following them.

Furthermore, you've got the unfortunate combination of writing in a stilted, scientific style (which really, you should never do) with posts that really don't have much scientific content to them.

Overall I'd say you need to focus more on your actual writing and less on everything else.