Viewing profile — hegemonicon

According to google image search, it's Origin: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=On+the+Origin+of+Sp...

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

This is what's known as a "superstimulus" - something that pinpoints our brain's reward and pleasure centers orders of magnitude more than anything that existed in the evolutionary…

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 ke…

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 thi…

A philosophical zombie is not a decision tree incapable of learning. A philosophical zombie is something that is exactly like a human in every way except that it lacks consciousnes…

>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 …

Careful. "The Black Swan" is a pop non-fiction book, and reading it won't give you an intimate understanding of markets. Taleb has taken his share of criticism ( http://www.efalken…

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 i…

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…

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, y…

It's well known that Google collects massive amounts of data, and does massive amounts of UI testing (such as the infamous testing between 85 different shades of blue), so I'm some…

Disclaimer: I haven't read the book OR the article. It's encouraging that Robin Hanson (who's a former physicist) has called the book excellent: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/…

Unfortunately, there's the small matter of them requiring orders of magnitude more energy than exists in the universe. Link to the Alcubierre Drive - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A…

I seem to remember something (possibly posted here) about most company founders actually being in their 30's and 40's. There's something to be said for the value of years of knowle…

There's nothing wrong with trying to be smart. The problem is trying to show others how smart you are (as the guy so astutely wrote in your yearbook). It makes you look like a jerk…

I am not an expert on evolution, but much of this article strikes me as incorrect. The fact that genes are capable of modifying other genes (turning them off/on, splicing in new ge…

I don't know about Japanese, but in Chinese, all the numbers have words that can be said extremely quickly - si, qi, etc. Because our working memory is implemented as a 2 second lo…

I guess 'five behaviors that people sometimes exhibit, some of the time' wasn't a punchy enough title.

This comparison doesn't seem particularly valid. Insurgencies operate by leveraging small-scale, decentralized groups against a large, slow-moving beaurocracy. They succeed by oper…