tmuir

I've assumed that. I appreciate the advice. I got a little heated in the Berkeley Study article this week. I guess I get to a point when some things are plain as day to me, such as "Humans learn better when they are more awake than less awake", and then read people pontificate about how this is such a profound insight, and confirms a hunch they've had their whole life. Its like I can see myself getting wound up, but I can't resist correcting my detractors. It only get's worse when people can enumerate the trees, but roll their eyes at others claiming a forest.

I even knew going into my final retort to /u/dang that he'd swing the banhammer. But something in the back of my mind just said "hold my beer".

I fully agree that honey kills more flies than vinegar. But I'm also a Lord of the Rings fan. Pip and Merri only convince the Ents to go to war through forcing them to confront the clear cut forest. It was the Ents position, much like the US before WWI, that this too shall pass, and we shouldn't involve ourselves in the affairs of men/europe.

I'm not saying confrontation is always defensible, but its also not always indefensible.

I guess I struggle at picking my battles.

The paywall prevents me from finding out the economist's theory, but I can put forth my own.

The two movies Sully and Deepwater Horizon, which both came out in 2016, are near mirror images of each other in many ways.

Sully is partly the story about a pilot who has spent his entire career landing failing airplanes, effectively training him to do it again with higher stakes, where its never happened before. But its also the story of all of the regulation that has prevented all commercial aviation disasters since 2001. Sully may stay calm under pressure, but he's standing on the shoulders of giants. The flight attendants stick to their training. The port authority and the captains of the boats that rescue all of the passengers stick to their training. The NTSB even sticks to their training in certain ways. Plans were set forth, and followed. Even at the end of the movie, it is made clear that the NTSB's flaw was to control for all of the time constraints Sullenberger faced, all of the stress, and hid the fact that it was something like the 20th attempt in the simulator that was the first successful landing.

Deepwater horizon is the story about a company that has successfully captured their regulatory framework. There was inadequate training, inadequate safety measures, inadequate equipment to properly measure the specifics of the well. And so when the shit hits the fan, does everyone stay calm and exercise the plan to effect their continued survival? Nope, they all panic, and they nearly all die.

Planes and Trains are far safer than automobiles because of ratio of humans to engines.

"Other areas of cortex can support 'declarative' memory formation. For example you can learn things like the definition of a new word (lang), features of a novel object (vis), where you parked your car outside your new apartment (spatial/episodic), within just a few seconds."

Can you provide other examples of this phenomenon? It seems like the ones you put forth here are all examples of relying on previous experience, which seems more on the "habitual" end of the spectrum, which is the articles claim in the general case.

I can learn new word's definitions because I've spent a significant amount of time learning definitions to all sorts of words throughout my life. Thus, the process is very familiar to me, and is a habit.

I have learned over the course of my life that novelties are by definition outliers. Just like all animals with a survival instinct, I've learned that strange things can be dangerous, so it is an effective heuristic to expect danger from strange things. Another heuristic I favor is that the best way to defang danger is to understand it enough to avoid its mechanisms.

I have learned over the course of my driving experience that keeping track of where I parked my car is crucial to locating the car again in the future. Thus, through experience, I know that it is an important piece of information to remember.

These three examples seem to fit perfectly well within the hypothesis of the article. They aren't new tricks. They are by definition the application of old tricks.

I posit that this is largely due to your frame of reference. I will assume from your presence on hacker news that you already have learned programming. You are already familiar with its utility. You have found over your career that tools that sacrifice expressiveness for ease of expression are nearly always crutches, that if depended on too heavily, will foster reliance, and give no incentive to actually learn more advanced tools.

Yet, like all crutches, the provide a superior alternative to certain groups of people. People with broken legs use crutches, but only for the purpose of self sufficiency until their leg heals.

Perhaps this is where the flaw in the business model is revealed. Anvil is largely incentivized to get its users to depend on its crutch. But users are still able to utilize the crutch to ease the learning process, and perhaps explore something that might interest them enough to seek out more traditional development workflows.

Rental of goods exists as a viable service, because there is demand for its supply. When you fly somewhere distant, at least in the US, your first order of business is to pick up your rental car. This is not a bad business practice. You are making the correct judgement that given your limited resources, renting something in the short term is more prudent than purchasing it.

Are you familiar with Node Red? It is an IBM project that is a self hosted website you can run on a raspberry pi, or a traditional PC or server.

The tool allows you to graphically build Node.js applications, through some key abstractions. Node you drag into the canvas has inputs and or outputs which can be connected to other nodes, by simply clicking and dragging between them.

As an embedded developer, I was far more interested in determining the viability of an implementation than learning node.js. To me, Node Red is the superior evolution of node.js. But I can certainly appreciate that people who learned node.js to any degree, before finding out about Node Red, see far less utility in it than I do.

For a mirror image of this phenomenon, Arduino allows novices to circumvent the traditional learning curve required to develop embedded systems, through its key abstractions. Yet, every embedded developer I know immediately attacks the downsides of Arduino. Its not really teaching its users much. At least in its infancy, much of the underlying code was cowboy spaghetti. You would never use Arduino in a production environment.

Yet somehow, Arduino is flourishing. I'll admit that since it's open source, that is a key distinction. But Adafruit.com, and Sparkfun.com are literally printing money with Arduinos and the ecosystem they facilitated. Each is a private company, but each has revealed at least one year of revenue exceeding $30,000,000. Each also provides schematics, datasheets, and tutorials for every single product they sell, if it is within their rights to provide such information.

I can appreciate that they are different tools, but to accept your challenge, I submit three.js, along with the multiple websites that have boatloads of single feature demos. In the particular venue of 3D graphics in the browser, I contend three.js would provide more depth than anvil's breadth.

That being said, I see no reason why you couldn't combine the two, and get the best of both worlds.

It's interesting to think about how apex predators are the keystone that propagates order in their ecosystem. For as long as humans have been aware of wolves, we have sought to eradicate them. After all, they kill livestock. They are immortalized in stories as a symbol of evil. Little Red Riding Hood. The Three Little Pigs. The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

Yet once we were successful in eradicating them, to our complete amazement, we found that the eradication of wolves caused the proliferation of all of these negative effects that would have been otherwise kept in check by wolves.

I think the key takeaway is balance. Everything in moderation, even moderation, and especially moderation of the Internet.

Please stop jumping to the conclusion that I am off topic.

My thesis that ties this story together, and showering in PE class, is that some people see boats, guns, and sailors moving through the water, but are somehow incapable of acknowledging that it constitues a navy.

The result in this article, people do better when their awake, can be thought of as a frequency plot. This study effectively performed fourier analysis. They studied a comprehensive data set over a long enough time to deduce the cohesion that is evident when controlling for time.

Here's a thought experiment: can you empathize with a transistor? Imagine your a transistor, and I'm a transistor, and we can somehow still communicate. Im a pnp, and you're an npn:

npn: Its obvious that we're just transistors. You keep spouting nonsense about these logic gates, and how their the future. But please, show me the logic gate. I don't see it. You can't even tell me what it looks like.

pnp: look, when you put enough transistors together, you get an AND gate. In another configuration, you can get an OR gate.

npn: Please stop posting your controversial opinions here. This guy. I bet you're gonna tell me about magical flip flops and arithmetic logic units. Thats because you get all your news from science based sources. You should really try and get your information from a more diverse set.

I just laid out the derivative of your behavior, and then you said

"thats ridiculous, we quickly adapted over a short amount of time".

So, if I hear you correctly, what your saying is that as your understanding over time, lets call this du/dt, has a positive rate of change?

You're probably right though, the biggest trick Copernicus ever pulled was convincing everyone of heliocentricity by employing mathematics. We've been under the illusion ever since.