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I am very real

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Re: I am very real

#151

Post by patrickk »

Spearchucker wrote: post #147
patrickk wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (Da…

You're right about the percentage increase. This is for two reasons - first, because most of the close-range shooting on the ground was done by special forces who're trainined to overcome that resistance. Second, because many of the deaths are from bombs - either shelling from ships at sea, or from aircraft and UAVs. Those last three remove the personal element, and that makes "pushing the button" really easy and gui…

I could be mis-remembering the article in question, but I think the percentage increase referred to soldiers who fired their weapon (e.g. assault rifle or sidearm) directly at an enemy they could see - meaning that we've become more desensitised to violence over time.

I also recall that snipers are trained by shooting watermelons - the impact of a high velocity round on a watermelon is not too dissimilar to an impact on a human head. Snipers see the carnage in all its gory detail because of their magnified scope so it's necessary to desensitise them in training.

Edit: slo-mo watermelon getting shot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO3XsZpOiBA

Re: I am very real

#152

Post by SoftwareMaven »

gaius wrote: post #138
SoftwareMaven wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It doesn't, but think about it from their perspective. Do you base performance on number of A's given? On scoring on standardized tests that only show how well you taught students to take tests? Where do you include "opening a student's eyes to the power of reason and science" or "planting a seed of a deep love for literature" or even just "being a person a student wants to be like"?

It isn't much different than how've question of how to evaluate coders. Any mechanism that can be easily proscribed can be easily gamed or is meaningless. Any mechanism that truly measures worth is extremely complex, doesn't scale, and may have issues with labor laws.

I wouldn't want that crap legislated by state legislatures, either.

Re: I am very real

#153

Post by gaius »

SoftwareMaven wrote: post #152
gaius wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It doesn't, but think about it from their perspective. Do you base performance on number of A's given? On scoring on standardized tests that only show how well you taught students to take tests? Where do you include "opening a student's eyes to the power of reason and science" or "planting a seed of a deep love for literature" or even just "being a person a student wants to be like"? It isn't much different than how'…

We manage it for doctors, lawyers, accountants, airline pilots, architects...

Re: I am very real

#154

Post by pjscott »

reason wrote: post #41
peter_l_downs wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elaborate on this; write a blog post. I'll gladly give you another up vote. > But there's something about the negativity and criticism here that grates on me more than on other sites. Honestly, I have had the opposite experience. Everyone here seems focused on getting work done and making great things, yes, but the little criticism that I do see is always well thought-out and explained. Instead of it 'grating' on me,…

That is of course an assumption I'm making, but one that's come from years of using HN. More recently there was the article about the girl from Pakistan who received technical certification and sadly passed away. There was a good amount of comments that took a fully rational approach to assessing her credentials concluding that what she'd done was not worthy of praise. That seemed terribly inhuman, and I feel people…

I remember that. The nice thing about those comments is that most of them seemed to be focused entirely on correcting journalistic exaggeration, and not on maliciously bashing someone, even if that was the way they were perceived. I know, that doesn't really sound like a nice thing, but I've seen enough actual malicious behavior to much prefer the "inhumanity" of only acting like an asshole as a purely accidental side-effect of being persnickety about technical correctness.

There are a lot of aspects of the Human Condition that I'm not too fond of, so feel free to act inhuman with good intentions around me any time!

Re: I am very real

#155

Post by derleth »

patrickk wrote: post #151
Spearchucker wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right about the percentage increase. This is for two reasons - first, because most of the close-range shooting on the ground was done by special forces who're trainined to overcome that resistance. Second, because many of the deaths are from bombs - either shelling from ships at sea, or from aircraft and UAVs. Those last three remove the personal element, and that makes "pushing the button" really easy and gui…

I could be mis-remembering the article in question, but I think the percentage increase referred to soldiers who fired their weapon (e.g. assault rifle or sidearm) directly at an enemy they could see - meaning that we've become more desensitised to violence over time. I also recall that snipers are trained by shooting watermelons - the impact of a high velocity round on a watermelon is not too dissimilar to an impact…

> meaning that we've become more desensitised to violence over time.

And yet the rate of violent crime continues to go down, bear-baiting and dogfights have gone from national pass-times to illegal aberrations, and dueling is pretty much extinct.

Re: I am very real

#156

Post by route66 »

kalid wrote: post #141
andywood wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for eloquently stating a problem I've noticed for a while. I think there's a fear of not coming off as a hard-nosed, logical thinker, so the constant need for citation is a proxy for "I believed XYZ because some authority said it was true. If I'm wrong, it's not me, it's because I was mislead." The world is full of single data points. If you see an anecdote, see it as a data point, but more importantly, see it…

Erik Naggum had a flamy comment on that topic: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/e5af8ef3f8...

The study you mention brings me to another point: In some cases the discussion here on HN revolves about believe systems, papers an references cited are often selected for an argument by authority. Moreover: would a paper in itself be enough? wouldn't you have to, critically follow through to the reviewing peers? concurring papers? This is indeed death of any discussion and it proves nothing in the end.

Typical thread of citations against citations: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3749114 but the debate is never coming beyond the point of "how do yo know this?" questions, masking "I don't like your point" as "you have no data backing this up".

Re: I am very real

#157

Post by hugs »

thebrokencube wrote: post #103
hugs wrote: post #44

Every time I read a story like this, I'm reminded of Dunbar's number and David Wong's excellent (and very funny) summary: http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html The "Monkeysphere" explains a huge amount of silly human behavior.

Thank you for sharing this link, this actually helps explain a lot of stuff I've been wondering about for a while.

Yeah, my description of the Monkeysphere is: "The Universal Theory of Human Behavior". I wish more people knew about it. Just doing my part. :-)

Re: I am very real

#158

Post by Tyrannosaurs »

vollmond wrote: post #25
orblivion wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like this letter is 1973, the book 1981. His ultimate point is that he wasn't exploiting the letter for attention. 8 years after the incident, I think it's safe to claim the potential for exploitation is gone. EDIT: Oh, you mean you took him literally, that he didn't even have his own copy. Well: "And no copies of this letter have been sent to anybody else. You now hold the only copy in your hands." It sounds l…

I know personally I keep copies of every letter I send, simply to refer back to if and when the recipient responds to me; it's useful to know what questions I asked when the answers come in.

That's a lot easier now than it was back then. Maybe he used carbon paper but there was no photocopying and obviously no word processing, at least nothing that an individual outside of a specialist organisation would have access to.

It's obviously the most likely explanation but still, it perhaps stretches what might be considered usual for the period.

Re: I am very real

#159

Post by kalid »

route66 wrote: post #156
kalid wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for eloquently stating a problem I've noticed for a while. I think there's a fear of not coming off as a hard-nosed, logical thinker, so the constant need for citation is a proxy for "I believed XYZ because some authority said it was true. If I'm wrong, it's not me, it's because I was mislead." The world is full of single data points. If you see an anecdote, see it as a data point, but more importantly, see it…

Erik Naggum had a flamy comment on that topic: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/e5af8ef3f8... The study you mention brings me to another point: In some cases the discussion here on HN revolves about believe systems, papers an references cited are often selected for an argument by authority. Moreover: would a paper in itself be enough? wouldn't you have to, critically follow through to the reviewing p…

Exactly. I saw that back and forth thread on education and it made me cringe.

Re: I am very real

#160

Post by gcr »

philwelch wrote: post #136
tesseractive wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

It's much cheaper to manufacture copies of software than it is to manufacture copies of oreos. It might make more sense comparing the individual who painstakingly crafts each line of code to the individual who painstakingly crafts each line of the recipe, the fabrication process, the machines that cook the oreos, and so on.
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