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I am very real

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Re: I am very real

#131

Post by Luyt »

itmag wrote: post #85
reason wrote: post #31

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…

The most common personality types on HN are INTJ and INTP. Might have something to do with it Source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=943722

I got curious what you meant by 'INTJ and INTP'. I founds this in the WikiPedia:

"INTJ (introversion, intuition, thinking, judgment) is an abbreviation used in the publications of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) to refer to one of the sixteen personality types."

Ah, Myers-Briggs, a pyschometric system. I've read some criticism about it: (two excerpts)

An American woman, Katherine Briggs, bought Jung's book and was fascinated by it. She recommended it to her married daughter, Isabel Briggs Myers, who had a degree in political science. The two of them got hooked on the idea of psychological metrics. Together they sat down and codified their own interpretation of Carl Jung, making a few important changes of their own. Jung had everyone fitting into one of four basic buckets. Myers and Briggs decided that each person probably combined elements, so they modified Jung's system and made it a little more complex, ending up with four dichotomies, like binary switches. Any combination of the four switches is allowed, and Myers and Briggs reasoned that just about every personality type could be well described by one of the sixteen possible ways for those switches to be set. Basically, according to Myers and Briggs, we're all represented by a four-digit binary number.

[...] the MBTI's practical use is overwhelmingly unscientific, and it's often criticized for this. Criticism ranges from the pragmatic fact that neither Jung nor Myers and Briggs ever employed scientific studies to develop or test these concepts, relying instead on their own observations, anecdotes, and intuitions; all the way to charges that your MBTI score is hardly more meaningful than your zodiac sign.

Source: http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4221

Re: I am very real

#132

Post by tnash »

alanfalcon wrote: post #129

I've been obsessing a little bit over Ready Player One over the past couple weeks. Not that it is an amazing piece of literature, it surely is not that. But it is highly entertaining and an incredible work of meta fiction. It is a fiction about a fictional world in which essentially all other fictional worlds co-exist, and they all celebrate each other. I would recommend it to anybody at all without reservation (if y…

I also found Ready Player One very entertaining. My favorite Vonnegut book is Cat's Cradle so I say start there.

Re: I am very real

#133

Post by bambax »

This is very weak. We should not burn books because it might hurt the feelings of authors? Surely that means it's ok to burn the books of dead authors?

The reason why we should not burn books is because

- it deprives potential readers of the benefit of reading them

- the free circulation of ideas is the cornerstone of a free society, and trying to restrict it is the beginning of tyranny

- arguments should be fought with arguments, not fire

But the feelings of authors really don't have anything to do with it. KV shouldn't have felt insulted that someone burnt his books. He should have been ashamed for the human race that anyone would burn any book (and not just his own). He should have punched the guy in the face.

Re: I am very real

#135

Post by kaeluka »

bambax wrote: post #133

This is very weak. We should not burn books because it might hurt the feelings of authors? Surely that means it's ok to burn the books of dead authors? The reason why we should not burn books is because - it deprives potential readers of the benefit of reading them - the free circulation of ideas is the cornerstone of a free society, and trying to restrict it is the beginning of tyranny - arguments should be fought w…

this letter is a very good example of tailoring an argument to the audience.

Re: I am very real

#136

Post by philwelch »

tesseractive wrote: post #52
peacemaker wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't understand this logic. Did he think the internet was some magical place that created all his games and apps and so on? How did he think about manufacturing then? Or artwork? Or movies? How does someone get so far in such a technology based society without knowing that there are people behind all these things?

There are people involved in the manufacturing of Oreos and iPods and office cubicles, but if you compare it with shopping at a farmer's market or a craft fair and meeting the person who made the thing you are buying, it can all seem so abstract and distant. Someone might rail against "all the preprocessed crap" that you can buy in a grocery store (and people do, all the time), with only the barest awareness that the…

There is, or used to be, some show on I think the History Channel about how a lot of these processed foods are made. It was fascinating and disgusting in equal measures.

I think the real difference is that in one case you have someone watching a puree of HFCS, artificial thickeners, and almost-real-food slide down an assembly line following directions with little room for personal initiative, and in the other case you have people painstakingly writing code line by line, having to think carefully about each of them. There are a lot of people involved in manufacturing, but there isn't much thought and care compared to individual craftsmanship.

Re: I am very real

#137

Post by gaius »

johngunderman wrote: post #49
peacemaker wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't understand this logic. Did he think the internet was some magical place that created all his games and apps and so on? How did he think about manufacturing then? Or artwork? Or movies? How does someone get so far in such a technology based society without knowing that there are people behind all these things?

In my experience there is a large class of people who lack basic curiosity about how things work. They are content to believe that things just "exist". I haven't done much research into this, but I would be interested in seeing if this is considered more an education problem, or if some people simply don't have the capacity for curiosity.

I have a friend who is a teacher, she had to explain to her class that no, they did not have mobile phones during the Great Fire of London, no, not even "bricks". Some of the class didn't believe her.

Re: I am very real

#138

Post by gaius »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #54
danso wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an interesting take that I had not expected to read when going to this comments section, but you're absolutely right. But this applies to almost everything. Every time I read a report of a sanctioned (non-criminal) or poorly evaluated public school teacher, I think of my friends who are teachers: how they've had to juggle everything in their personal lives in addition to the emotional and physical drain that…

It is unfortunate that, given how important teaching is, we still don't have good ways to evaluate which teachers are good and which are not.

It doesn't help that teacher's unions vociferously oppose the development or introduction of such methods.

Re: I am very real

#139

Post by patrickk »

stan_rogers wrote: post #75
DanBC wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unless the shooter is psychotic. Nitpick: You mean "psychopathic", not "psychotic". People with a psychotic illness are more likely to be victims of violence than the perpetrators of violence, and are much more likely to harm themselves than to harm another person.

"Psychotic" also works here, but for a different reason. While a psychopath may be able to perceive, but unable to empathize with, a person, someone in the depths of psychotic delusion may be unable to perceive a fellow human being. It is perhaps not nearly as common "in the wild", but it does occur (the killing of Tim McLean by Vince Weiguang Li being the example that comes most easily to mind). In fact, generating…

An article about the reasons infantry fire or not:

http://www.historynet.com/men-against-fire-how-many-soldiers...

I read somewhere (citation needed!) that the percentage of soldiers who deliberately fire their weapon at the enemy has increased from WWI to the Iraq conflict, which some put down to violence in movies and video games. After watching excellent Iraqi conflict documentaries like Restrepo and Armadillo (Danish movie) and seeing how soldiers react to conflict, there could be merit to that argument.

Re: I am very real

#140

Post by philwelch »

DanBC wrote: post #113
mitjak wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of self-help books are dismissed by most people. I would love to know why.

Because a lot of them are pure nonsense that can do more harm than good. There's a weird mish-mash of useful and garbage, and it's hard to tell which is which unless you already know about the field. 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.

And even the good books have maybe an essay or three blog posts worth of actual information stretched out over a few hundred pages for salability.
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