mortify

If Google made hammers, each use would be accompanied by 5 screens warning about the dangers of hitting things (and 2 ads) until I gave up and used a brick.

There's truth to the ScrumFall design process which is inevitable for most development processes. It's not just that a tool needs to be marketed, but that it needs to be integrated with work from multiple teams and other processes. What ScrumFall does is provide some level of feedback prior to delivery. In the age of Waterfall, devs would develop until they said they were done, we'd get to delivery and UAT only to find that key features work differently than expected and continually extend the release date by months or years until it finally goes out the door more from frustration than actual completion. That stress level would be pegged at 10 for months until it was completed.

Although not truly the point... we do know that people don't seen red and green flipped because color's don't work in isolation. It's also how they work together. If a person with flipped red/green mixed what they saw as red (actually green) with blue, they wouldn't get purple.

We could suppose that someone could see the entire spectrum inverted, but that causes other problems that we could test for. There are more hues between red and blue than there are between green and yellow. Instead of seeing brown (really dark yellow), they'd see dark blue.

The same reason we don't have a race or sex limit on the Presidency. We should only have competency limits regardless of any other factors. My grandfather died at 101. He was extremely sharp until he was 98 and on no medication. I'd vote for that 95 year-old over either of our current choices without hesitation.

Search engines go through cycles of usefulness. I was using qwant for over a year, but their relevance has dropped off. I'm very happy with startpage at the moment as my Google searches continue to drop. Perplexity (AI) is providing better augmentation than Google.

Red 5 standing by.

That can encourage it, but people will need to charge even when it's not windy. Having a smart charger wait for cheap electricity which may never come is a great way to end up with dead battery.

>some people truly are stupid.

This is a difficult fact to accept. We have all been told that people are generally equal, especially in intelligence, if given the same opportunities, but it becomes more clear in time that some problems are intractable to some people and no amount of training or exposure can change that. However, it's a better answer to the problem of why some people like Cleese's example do not absorb information. The alternative is to apply malice and laziness to them when it just isn't so.

We all have these intelligence holes that gives some insight into the mechanism. Eg. I'm bad at remembering names. As in the example, if you tell me someone's name, I'm likely to forget it 5 minutes later. I just spent 3 years reading Douglas Hofstadter's book and had to look up his name to type it here. This seems to happen because I don't see an application to remembering the name. I'm never going to meet Doug and rarely will anyone need to be told about the book, so why remember it? There's definitely a parallel to state capitals in that example.

While thinking is somewhat of a background process, our brains don't just solve the mysteries of the universe while we eat a ham sandwich. We tell our brains which problems are of high importance and it focuses on them. If you've ever laid down to go to sleep and told yourself to wake up at 6:30 and it worked, you've witnessed an obvious application of this.

The problem comes when we fail to point out the importance of a problem, or when we do so reflexively which means that we tell our brain that everything is important and it simply cannot process all of the requests.

Setting your thinking requests before doing a non-thinking activity is a good way to start. Think about the problem consciously and then specifically ask for an answer to a question. Then go do something physical or mechanical: take a walk, sleep, mow the lawn, watch a non-challenging movie, etc. Be prepared to accept whatever result you get. A common response is: non enough information, but it should point you toward what that additional info looks like.

There are parallels. You feed an LLM context data and then tell it what to focus on so it can pull relevant data.

Maybe the entire process isn't like feeding an LLM, but that step is. Relevance identification is an interesting part of the process. The LLM can do a decent job of making connections, but it doesn't know what is relevant. In the longer time frame of the thinking process, we constantly throw out data as irrelevant or identify previously unknown relevant data that needs to be added. It's a part of the process completely outside of the LLM.

Although I've looked at the original report, it isn't clear if this $1M in annual income that they're comparing to the 1950's is inflation adjusted. The only comment I can find on this point appears to say that it isn't which makes it an unfair comparison because that's the equivalent of more than $13M today.

The article avoids a bigger concern which is the size of government spending. In 1960 (I couldn't find older data) federal government spending was $144B. If we adjust for inflation, today's spending would be $1.6T. It's $9.7T.

Perhaps the rich are paying less, but a government that increases spending by 6x is certainly contributing to the problem.

Population has doubled size 1950 explaining some of the spending increases and spreading out some of the costs, but not all. It would be interesting to see if the number of "millionaires" has rise proportionally.

>making it harder for people to fail at adulting

That has been the direction school has gone and, at least from my perspective, it seems worse. It has lead to a loss of agency among now so-called adults who expect to always be in a situation which guides them toward success. They struggle without a guidebook.

Learning to fail, and crucially, how to handle failure and recover are better approaches.

The idea that we're collectively responsible is abjectly untrue. The only people with responsibility are the parents because they are the only ones who are allowed to make decisions. That is unless the government wants to take their children away because they're "uninvolved." Not that a government employee or paid foster family is likely to be better.

The fact is that people with positive influences and role models will do better. It would be great if we could maximize that, but who chooses who is "better," one of the majority who didn't have those role models themselves?