241–250 of 290 posts
Now, I see more people relying on step-by-step guides instead of digging in themselves. It fits the trend of passive consumption. But reading alone isn’t enough. It only matters if you can use it to solve real problems you care about.
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These observations are interpretations of behavior viewed through human eyes. (What’s the concept of a “hat” to an orca?) Perhaps we interpret their behavior this way because it is our behavior.
As someone who's had quite a few dealings with animals (the family business is a horse farm) my interpretation is that human psychology is basically animal psychology with a "language instinct" bolted on as a peripheral. You might very well misinterpret an animal's experience or motives but it is not just mistaken "anthropomorphism" but could just be the same kind of misunderstanding you might have about another pers…
Our pet bird (sun conure) actively tries to lie and mislead when he's doing something naughty. Like he will go into the pantry to steal treats and quickly fly out pretending he wasn't in there when he hears you approaching.
This indicates he has some theory of mind. He has to understand there's a difference between what he knows and what we know, otherwise he wouldn't try to hide or obscure his actions.
And yes there is research showing/arguing that birds have theory of mind --> https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/144146926.pdf
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I think you're generally right about the OP, but I don't see your alternative method as a tonic to the problem the author is discussing. I agree that treating reading as the only way to ingest information is probably wrong, and that the original post tends towards hierarchy in an almost reactionary way, yet at the same time I also see that many people tend to ingest information from other forms of media less critical…
> I agree that treating reading as the only way to ingest information is probably wrong The good news is that not only does the "private researcher" (curious individual person without a research background or job) nowadays have the ability to read online in far-removed libraries, they are even empowered to download the data of many studies, fire up their Jupyter notebooks to replicate some work. The danger is that so…
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> What’s funny is that history is the subject I was least interested in all through school. Indeed, history is largely lost on kids. You need to see some real world events play out before you can care about history. I also think, if you're going to teach history to children, it should be taught in reverse chronology. Basically here's what's happening now, and that's due to what happened last year, which is due to wha…
>it should be taught in reverse chronology. Basically here's what's happening now, and that's due to what happened last year, which is due to what happened last decade, etc Boy, oh boy, you will hate Karl Popper if you ever decide to read him lol
I wonder if LLMs can help bring that kind of exploratory culture back. Because this is not an exploratory culture.
I perused the three posts on this blog, and believe that an LLM was heavily used, because I used one daily, and this is the way its content reads. The leisure the author speaks of may be their own, and the research of which they speak today may be done by a machine. I think the intent is good, and if you as the reader get insight from it, then it is still valid, but I cannot read it, because I don’t feel a thread of…
Well, our minds aren’t but we have legs and arms which is cool. But maybe that will change too.
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This is a personal take. I agree if you are actively participating and grappling with the material in your mind. One reason I like reading is that, if I don't understand I cannot move on to next step. So, it forces me to actively participate, argue and understand the text. In audio and visual medium, it is somewhat easier to trick myself into following the flow without actually understanding. I heard, that is why Fey…
>One reason I like reading is that, if I don't understand I cannot move on to next step Yes, you can. You can even skim—or entirely skip—whole sections.
I think reading is an essential skill, but we also need to get reading out of the pedestal. Because a lot of the time these arguments come across as some sort of literary elitism. Like if you're not ingesting information through reading, it doesn't count. This month I spent many hours listening to lectures on youtube about geopolitics on the Asian continent from the naval war college. Sure I could have read it, but n…
I don't think the accusation of elitism is valid here. Postulating that a particular kind of activity might be better suited to a particular kind of goal isn't elitism. Is it "elitist" to claim that one sorting algorithm is faster than another? People are so individualistic and sensitive these days that they take any proposed alternatives that don't align with their own habits and modes of consumption as a direct aff…
Don't know about you guys, but reading has become more and more of a burden for me. It is as if -- I have greatly narrowed my interest such that most books are not interesting any more. Even the sci-fi and fantasy books, once I loved, lost their magic. Nowadays there are only two types of books that excite me: 1) those about software/hardware engineering, such as iWoz(I even bought a few Tom Swift JR books for my son…
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> I agree that treating reading as the only way to ingest information is probably wrong The good news is that not only does the "private researcher" (curious individual person without a research background or job) nowadays have the ability to read online in far-removed libraries, they are even empowered to download the data of many studies, fire up their Jupyter notebooks to replicate some work. The danger is that so…
It's already hard to sort out the bs that respectable science generates.