131–140 of 232 posts
I think it was on HN. It was a quote to the effect that the world changes by just a handful of great people, not by the small contributions of billions.
I recall reading a phenomenal blog(?) post about data science in history in which the author presented some historical data relating to the northern renaissance (iirc, shipping logs) and then presented two completely plausible but divergent analyses of the data. I've spent hours trying to find it again on multiple occasions with no success. :(
Maybe this -- https://sappingattention.blogspot.in/2012/11/reading-digital...
Someone commented: "how things have changed, emacs and vim are partners and the enemy is Eclipse and Visual Studio" A play on words of an episode in star trek the next generation, where someone from the past wakes up to realize that now humans and Klingons are friends and the enemy are the ferengi and the borg.
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You're kind of disproving your own point here, no? Or at least, both the fact that its parents die and that they have no language creates a vicious circle. Though you skipped over it, probably the most important skill you've learnt from your parents is language. The octopus' parents die before they can transfer that skill. Hence, they can (barely) communicate with others of the same species and elevate their collecti…
But you didn't have to learn language from parents specifically, you could've leart it from other members of the society. I was making the distinction between learning from parents and learning from "others". The argument around the mistmatch between the life time of parents compared to the time of the offspring to maturity only makes sense with parents. > The octopus' parents die before they can transfer that skill.…
I think you're working too hard with the semantics here. Parents, as in, who ever the hell takes care of the kid the most. That's either your bio-parents, typically. Maybe grandparents if your bios are crackheads. Maybe a foster care system because everyone in your family is jacked up in general. But parent: those that are responsible for your general well being. Yes "society" plays a roll. But random people don't walk up to a toddler to teach them their ABCs or 123s. Someone has to work with a kid from beginning to end for that developmental knowledge foundation or that kid has a really good chance of having a ton of problems down the line. And yes, schools still do the ABCs and numbers. But that's more to fill gaps, which do happen. Not to straight up teach a kid that can't do shit at all. There are different programs for when a 5 year old can't even say their own name. Research shows things like consistent night time reading and playing with infants and toddlers give them a solid base that proves them well throughout their lives. There was one paper (out of many) that was on hackernews a week or two ago about it as well.
And technically elephants do communicate, both vocally and through body language. As do most mammals. Just no where near the sophistication we can. That has to do with the sophistication of the brain. Those crazy folks that have wolf sanctuaries and are "apart of the pack", would argue with you about animal language too. But to be fair, you have to be a level of crazy of jump into a cage full of wolves. Hell, bees do interpretive dance to communicate. They sure kick my ass in that field. Then take Koko. From the age of 1, they taught a guerrilla to use a modified form of American sign language and was pretty proficient at communicating. I highly doubt starting at a later age would have been as effective. Developmental years of learning are vital for that foundation.
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Maybe this -- https://sappingattention.blogspot.in/2012/11/reading-digital...
It sure sounds like it, thanks! That blog's been posted often, but with little success: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=sappingattention.blog... This thread is quite amusing, I think I'll fav it.
He also created (helped create?) a tool called Bookworm that might be of interest: http://bookworm.culturomics.org
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But you didn't have to learn language from parents specifically, you could've leart it from other members of the society. I was making the distinction between learning from parents and learning from "others". The argument around the mistmatch between the life time of parents compared to the time of the offspring to maturity only makes sense with parents. > The octopus' parents die before they can transfer that skill.…
If you've raised a kid, a lot of these things are really obvious with just a few gaps of understanding here and there where a good book on learning comes in handy. Watching a tiny human go from knowing virtually nothing more than how to breathe, three years later, singing, ABCs, various animal recognition and a plethora of other stuff is educational to understanding "learning". If you haven't raised a kid, then it's…
I didn't mean we don't learn that much from parents versus who the hell takes care of the kids (that would be semantics). I meant that we don't learn that much from parents versus all the other people that you interact with throughout your life.
> And technically elephants do communicate, both vocally and through body language. As do most mammals. Just no where near the sophistication we can.
Right, that's why I said that the crucial point was not communication with parents (or who ever the hell takes care of the kid), but communication. If you happen to belong to a species that has difficulty communicating you will never learn much from anyone, regardless of which age your parents die.
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Not about IQ but I read somewhere about how the properties of octopus bodies (squishiness, bonelessness) form a very different understanding of the world compared to those of primates. Can't find where it was.
This isn't at all what you're looking for, but the book Vampyroteuthis Infernalis (Flusser, V. & Bec, L., 2012) might be a fun read for you. https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/vampyroteuthi...
There was a comment about the theory, that emotions are not represented in the body but actually happen there. And we learn to interpret the bodily state as having an emotion. Can't find it.
http://nautil.us/issue/56/perspective/antonio-damasio-tells-...
Someone created a site that compared flash memory storage prices (USB stick, SD card, SSD) and they posted the link in some comment, but I can't find the HN comment and a Google search doesn't find it either.