yay_cloud2

100% agree with it. As a child, I always felt most creative when the number of lego pieces was limited. Like, what can I make that's cool with just these two handfuls of lego? Where would this weird piece go, and what could it be?

Unlimited possibility bogs me down. I get frozen.

This has been my son's experience as well (Grade 4). We are on week 6 of home-school, and by far the thing that energizes him, lifts his mood, and gets him through his work is any interactions at all with his fellow students.

Most of his classmates are too young to have strong bonds outside of the structure of school, so (I think) school needs to accept the power of these bonds and facilitate social interaction between kids. De-prioritize the output, and prioritize the process of learning things together.

It sometimes fascinates me (and scares the shit out of me) to wonder at all of the little errors/assumptions like this that are baked into the millions of spreadsheets that form the foundation of so much of what we build and do in the world.

Fool me once, shame on me... fool me twice, er... don't fool me agian.

If I remember the study correctly, the scientists actually stated that it is clear that there is not one single "gay gene", but that (like many other traits) instead there are likely a number of genes that work in concert to produce sexuality outcomes.

This title seems like unethical clickbait.

Do you know of any good "office" applications in the VR space?

Jarring to see pics of such an advanced-looking drone being pulled around the tarmac by what looks like a berry picker truck.

For me, this is fantasy hockey. I don't even like to watch hockey anymore, but I enjoy the daily interaction with my friends who are no longer in the same city and busy with their own lives.

By the end of the first paragraph, I felt as though I was reading through Anathem again. I have never read any other writing that gave me flashbacks like that to Neal Stephenson's style.

Looks like I have been pwned; thanks for pointing that out. Guess there was a reason that no good footnote existed in my memory for the origin of the anecdote.

Part of what stuck out to me, though, was that the anecdote aligned with my personal experiences of things that were once difficult until I ended up having to do them everyday for one reason or another.

But you're right, that's still a far way off from there being some actual study or otherwise repeatable exercise to show this in a clinical setting for learning new skills.

Your comment reminds me of the exercise where a class was split into two cohorts, one was tasked with producing just one clay pot (I can't remember the thing now), while the other cohort was tasked with making one per day or something similar.

Put simply, one group put all of its energy into producing just one, and the other group just turned out pot after pot after pot.

At the end, so the story goes, the group that cranked out pots like crazy ended up producing pots of higher quality.

In my own life, I can often find out the thing that I'm afraid of learning because I've set it up like that first cohort: making the one perfect thing, instead of putting it out there and iterating on it or making another based on what I learned. Goes with learning languages (I'd do way better if I simply tried speaking every day, but I wait for perfect opportunities).

Never forgetting or forgiving seems like an ineffective response. My entire being yearns for more.

This is the type of thing that I imagine the "data suckers" (Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon) are able to do regularly with the complex data that they have and the advanced tools that they have at their disposal.

I can't see yet to what end that ability would be trained, but I consider that ability to be akin to the state's ability to see into my backyard from space: I know they can do it and it doesn't harm me immediately that they can, but there's something net negative about the power/ability imbalance that makes me feel uncomfortable. Of course nobody is going to use that awesome power on someone as inconsequential as me, but...

Are there any structures that kids can get involved with (or the family) that will provide some of "complex society" feel?

I'm still taken aback by how quickly government (federal, state) allowed testing of driverless cars on public roads. Feels like a cold calculation made on behalf of citizens to say "some people probably need to die in order to bring this to market quickly, and that's ok with us in these areas."