301–310 of 355 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Online banking in South Africa is excellent - I was shocked when I moved to the US how archaic it is. Transfers are a breeze, fast, and everyone does it. Integration with cell phone infrastructure is also great.
A specific bank in particular?
Competition is pretty strong, so fairly comparable across the board.
Death annoys me. People who can afford $300/year for a cheap cryonics membership and life insurance, and who don't sign up, annoy me. A lot of them are probably being held off by the trivial inconvenience of signing a few papers without a paid salesman to hold their hand. It therefore annoys me that cryonics is poorly marketed and that there are no paid salespeople - that no one gets a commission when you sign up for…
I have no faith that a cryonics company is going to last for more than a few years. If the money doesn't run out (which it will because someone will get greedy), all it takes is one incompetent employee to open the wrong door or push the wrong button for my investment to be entirely wasted. (or it could be an earthquake, or a 100-year flood, or rising sea levels...)
Modern Psychiatry - Parts of it are updated for the modern world. The rest is still pretty much medieval guesses sans experimentation. Accurate unbiased information for someone in distress is hard to obtain, which compounds the problem.
What about it is disappointing? We're all human, so we all work pretty much the same way. Everyone has their problems, and typically those problems are similar to someone else's. This means that the means to treating most of your problems apply to everyone.
It is true that we have a similar brain structure and represent all but a mere point in the endless space of mind design possibilities, but there is a lot of variation within that point. Just think about the variables in operation over here. Billions of neurons with multiple connections in a chemical soup, firing in a patter and changing while sharing information.
It isn't surprising that we don't understand this, but you'll be amazed at the psuedo-science out there did you know that there was something called Oppositional Defiant Disorder (see: http://www.minddisorders.com/Ob-Ps/Oppositional-defiant-diso...)? I cannot name one scientific, unbiased experiment for the root causes behind expression and functioning in gender variant, or intersexed children.
There is some amazing work being done at the national institute of mental health in the underlying neurological basis of mental health disorders like depression and PTSD, but it isn't enough. (see: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=faulty-circ...)
The disappointing thing is not the lack of knowledge but the psuedo-science out there and the self proclaimed experts willing to ruin lives without a flinch. We've come a far way, but we have even farther to go.
it annoys me that staring at a computer screen kills my eyes.
Non-teaching of explicit rationality annoys me. The most fundamental, elementary, and basic concepts of rationality are not systematically explained anywhere that I know of. It is impossible to engage the average PhD in a dialogue with agreed-upon rules of reasoning because they do not know why you can't prove things about the real world by arguing about the definitions of a word, or why it's a bad idea to pick a con…
This sounds like skepticism. Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World" is similar in nature, though hardly systematic. James "The Amazing" Randi has also written a handful of books aimed at debunking some of the more prominent results of irrational thinking (homeopathy, astrology, etc.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about it is disappointing? We're all human, so we all work pretty much the same way. Everyone has their problems, and typically those problems are similar to someone else's. This means that the means to treating most of your problems apply to everyone.
Yes and no. It is true that we have a similar brain structure and represent all but a mere point in the endless space of mind design possibilities, but there is a lot of variation within that point. Just think about the variables in operation over here. Billions of neurons with multiple connections in a chemical soup, firing in a patter and changing while sharing information. It isn't surprising that we don't underst…
For example, being lonely causes depression, bad parents cause a huge variety of problems, and so on. Human nature, our insecurities, our egos, our selfishness & greed, and so on - they're the same for everyone.
If you've got a problem, you can be pretty sure you're not the first one to have it, and that the way to treat you is no different from the way all the others with the same problem were treated.
So, I wouldn't think of it in terms of neurons, but in terms of humans.
ageism. It's so common today that people who would never exclude women or minorities or the handicapped or whoever have no problem excluding people over forty.
When a male turns 18 in the USA, he is allowed to sign up for the Army, get a gun, go kill human beings in the Middle East and perhaps die for his country. BUT if that man dares drink a single beer with his dad before being shipped off to war, he will be treated like a criminal. His dad may be taken to court and punished for letting a minor have alcohol. The 18 year old could face severe punishments, including not be…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When a male turns 18 in the USA, he is allowed to sign up for the Army, get a gun, go kill human beings in the Middle East and perhaps die for his country. BUT if that man dares drink a single beer with his dad before being shipped off to war, he will be treated like a criminal. His dad may be taken to court and punished for letting a minor have alcohol. The 18 year old could face severe punishments, including not be…
It just hit me that there's a rational explanation. Being a good soldier and being a responsible drinker are two very different things. Just because you make a good soldier does not immediately imply you will make a responsible drinker. Quite frankly, 18 is a pretty darn good age to start soldiering, but I know a TON of < 21yo who are not responsible, so my idea doesn't seem completely baseless.
Instead, why don't we look at the problem. The largest problem is that it's forbidden, so the majority of kids growing up have to sneak around and drink with other kids that are irresponsible. Telling a kid he can't do something just makes him want to do it even more.
If we introduce kids to responsible drinking at an earlier age, it wouldn't be so intriguing and they could learn a little bit about responsibility. You'd still have problems but I bet they'd be fewer and we could get back a little more freedom.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am the exact opposite of you. I can put up entire projects myself (design, code etc...) but when it comes to heavy lifting I try and out source it because even though I can do it, it would take as much time as putting up a whole mobile web app. I am currently working on 3 apps (2 will go live in the next few weeks). If you are interested in working on some stuff together send me an email.
What do you mean by "heavy lifting"? Are you saying you tend to work on simpler mobile apps as opposed to more complex apps, since the back-end calculations are too intense? If so, then we definitely need to work together. :) Note: I don't see an email in your profile.
What I really mean is that I work on apps that are simple on the front end and require lots of heavy lifting (example: Sentiment Extraction from Unstructured Text using Tabu Search-Enhanced Markov Blanket.) on the backend.
I am not a programmer or engineer. I am a hacker; but I am also a brilliant problem solver so I can teach myself what i need to know to solve the problem at hand. Even so I am not naive enough to think that I come up w/ anything close to the "optimal" solutions (mathematically). IMO thats where people like you come in.
Finding people to work on short, proof-of-concept projects with. I have a list of more than 25 items that I would love to work on, but have little motivation without someone willing to help out. I don't necessarily want to form a startup on these ideas, just get the ball rolling and see where it leads. I would like a site that enables me to find others and create prototype apps in a matter of days, almost like a flas…