111–120 of 161 posts
Burning a book (good or bad) is the lowest form of expression humans can stoop to. If people understood the fact that a book is simply a personification of ideas, and ideas good or bad, cannot perish in a fire, the will realize the folly of engaging in a futile act like burning a book. One of the inevitable consequences of the digital revolution will be that, there will come a time, when a controversial book will be…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Considering that the advice genuinely helped you, why do you refer to the book as silly?
I think a lot of self-help books are dismissed by most people. I would love to know why.
Some of them lack science. Worse, some of them are actively anti-science.
I agree that there some great books, with useful helpful life-changing advice.
While not nearly as important, the idea that authors are real makes me immediately relate to my own experience that customers don't seem to understand that software is made by real people too. People with feelings, who are fallible. Several comments on blogs or reviews on the app store show to me that people don't feel they are being insulting or rude if they aren't facing the person they criticize. The more I wrote…
The color of the envelope does not change the message it contains. The only difference between what I write to you online and what I would say to you in person is one of detail and quality, as I have more opportunity online to compose. The problem of rudeness and insults is not due to any inherent flaw of the Internet itself, but rather due to the fact that most children aren't taught that anonymity, although a neces…
I would consider this half-true. As Marshall McLuhan said: "the medium is the message". What is communicated is defined by the complete sum of the experience of the receiver, which includes subtle nuances of how that message is packaged.
That said, I agree with your core point.
This submission could not have come at a better time. Over the past couple of weeks, I've been contemplating making a submission urging HNers to be human , and to recognize that everyone else who comments here is also a human , and that stories about startups and notable figures are essentially about humans - humans who all have families, friends, ambitions, desires, flaws, struggles. All too often I see people here…
I agree with you, and there is a specific type of pedantry I find especially grating. I'm talking about the constant insistence on citations and double-blind studies, even when it isn't appropriate - even when someone obviously means only to share their own experience. There's an aggressive form ("Citation Needed") and a passive-aggressive form ("Say, friend, that's a bold claim! I sure am interested in this. Do you…
You are providing your own chilling effect by demanding others adhere to your personal standards.
I'm curious, how, if "... no copies of this letter have been sent to anybody else. You now hold the only copy in your hands." is true, how is it reproduced on this site?
Shaun here - I run Letters of Note. Presumably Vonnegut kept the draft, or kept the original and sent McCarthy the one copy. The letter's text was later included in Vonnegut's book, Palm Sunday, as mentioned on the site.
This submission could not have come at a better time. Over the past couple of weeks, I've been contemplating making a submission urging HNers to be human , and to recognize that everyone else who comments here is also a human , and that stories about startups and notable figures are essentially about humans - humans who all have families, friends, ambitions, desires, flaws, struggles. All too often I see people here…
I believe it is worthwhile to pursue and encourage this mindset, if I am wrong about something, I want to know about it, not be encouraged to pursue a path of questionable value purely because it might be perceived as mean to educate me.
I want to be treated this way and I want to treat others this way. It is not at all innately vicious or an excess of negative emotion, if anything its precisely the opposite, the complete absence of emotion.
This submission could not have come at a better time. Over the past couple of weeks, I've been contemplating making a submission urging HNers to be human , and to recognize that everyone else who comments here is also a human , and that stories about startups and notable figures are essentially about humans - humans who all have families, friends, ambitions, desires, flaws, struggles. All too often I see people here…
This submission could not have come at a better time. Over the past couple of weeks, I've been contemplating making a submission urging HNers to be human , and to recognize that everyone else who comments here is also a human , and that stories about startups and notable figures are essentially about humans - humans who all have families, friends, ambitions, desires, flaws, struggles. All too often I see people here…
This submission could not have come at a better time. Over the past couple of weeks, I've been contemplating making a submission urging HNers to be human , and to recognize that everyone else who comments here is also a human , and that stories about startups and notable figures are essentially about humans - humans who all have families, friends, ambitions, desires, flaws, struggles. All too often I see people here…
I agree with you, and there is a specific type of pedantry I find especially grating. I'm talking about the constant insistence on citations and double-blind studies, even when it isn't appropriate - even when someone obviously means only to share their own experience. There's an aggressive form ("Citation Needed") and a passive-aggressive form ("Say, friend, that's a bold claim! I sure am interested in this. Do you…
Academic science is an entirely different story. It's a growing body, and it grows by using previous information in its body, so any probability of disruptive/wrong data entering the system has to be reduced as much as it can with strict discipline. To apply the same standard to our daily lives is absurd - you could as well be against spoken conversation because it's too lossy and converse using pen&paper - speech recognition is tricky after all.
This doesn't take much more than common sense to get - you could formalize it for specific cases statistically, maybe using shannon entropy and such - anectodal information is still information and the loss of information by virtue of not being backed up by scientific method is in most cases insignificantly low - just think of it as an efficient compression algorithm.
If you aren't ethically against lossy audio/image/text compression, there is no reason to take such a strict stance against anectodal information. Most times it's very useful, just have your rationality filter/bs detector and the like on at all times like they should be.