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John Nash Has Died

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Re: John Nash Has Died

#231
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a culture of not wearing the seat belt as a sign of trust. When I was in Egypt, I'd get in the cab, wear my seat belt and the driver will look at me weird. "So you don't think I can drive?" A few years later, the police started enforcing the law and most cabs didn't even have seat belts. You would get in and find a sort of belt that doesn't even tighten, hacked together only to circumvent the law. Not to say…

>If you wear a seat belt while in the back seat, you are considered weird. Citation? I am sure this is true for some people, but this does not match my own experience or what I can find when searching the web.

Citation? The comment is the citation. OP is giving you personal experience.

Re: John Nash Has Died

#232
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright. Often there's only one person in the car though, and what I said applies to other things too.

We're not talking about other things. We're talking about seatbelts.

I already acknowledged your point. You could do the same for mine.

Re: John Nash Has Died

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds interesting, can you expand on that?

Society is continually expanding it's notion of minimum acceptability. Standardized testing is a great example. The problem with this approach is that extreme excellence is fundamentally divergent. Revolutionarily smart people don't think the same way but faster. They think differently [1]. Also, excellence in one domain precludes it in others. For instance, you can't be a world class distance-runner and body-builder…

Thank you so much for putting this out there, this makes a lot of sense and it's great to hear it put this way.

Re: John Nash Has Died

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you wear a seat belt while in the back seat, you are considered weird. Citation? I am sure this is true for some people, but this does not match my own experience or what I can find when searching the web.

Citation? The comment is the citation. OP is giving you personal experience.

While I view the Egypt portion of the comment as a personal experience, the US portion seems to be making claims that are more general.

Re: John Nash Has Died

#235
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not in academia, are you? There're hundreds of obscure journals and conferences with very low standards. As long as you choose venues that are within your league, you can publish anything that remotely resembles research, and it will show up on Google Scholar. A new academic paper is published every 15 seconds, and most of them are "negative results, meh results, and flawed research".

Very, very few of them are negative results. People just don't write those papers.

Most of them are negative results, though usually not overtly presented as such. In my experience, it's extremely rare for a researcher to throw away months of hard work because the result is null. They almost always find a way to augment it or spin it, write up the paper with the phrase "more research is needed" in the conclusion, and submit to a mediocre venue.

Re: John Nash Has Died

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The culture in the U.S. Is very much pro-seatbelt. Grizzly TV and billboard ads run all the time (in fact I just saw one last night). The slogan here is "click it or ticket" and police will ticket you for not wearing your belt. For some bizzare reason though, it is somehow acceptable to not wear a belt when you are in a taxi, as if you are magically protected by the "professional" driver. I'm not 100% sure but it may…

> as if that made it somehow safer. But it does.

The article seems to prove otherwise.

Re: John Nash Has Died

#238
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very, very few of them are negative results. People just don't write those papers.

Most of them are negative results, though usually not overtly presented as such. In my experience, it's extremely rare for a researcher to throw away months of hard work because the result is null. They almost always find a way to augment it or spin it, write up the paper with the phrase "more research is needed" in the conclusion, and submit to a mediocre venue.

Can you give an example, because I have seen very few papers with negative or 'null' results. I'm not even sure what 'null' results means.

Re: John Nash Has Died

#239
At Princeton, John Nash sat at my lunch table in the campus center a few times. The first time it happened, I didn't know for sure it was John Nash, but there was something about him that just told me that it was. It happened many more times and I always felt a sense of awe to be in his presence. Another example of the fine line between brilliance and insanity and how they are interrelated. Not the way you would have expected John Nash to go. Rest in Peace and thank you for your contributions to the world.

Re: John Nash Has Died

#240
post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also never understood the social norm of not wearing a seatbelt in a taxi, but went along with it for my first few years living in New York. I think the mention of "some dude yelling in some foreign language" is unnecessary. A person's native tongue says nothing of their intellectual capacity, nor of their ability to safely navigate a city.

There is a culture of not wearing the seat belt as a sign of trust. When I was in Egypt, I'd get in the cab, wear my seat belt and the driver will look at me weird. "So you don't think I can drive?" A few years later, the police started enforcing the law and most cabs didn't even have seat belts. You would get in and find a sort of belt that doesn't even tighten, hacked together only to circumvent the law. Not to say…

If you wear a seat belt while in the back seat, you are considered weird.

By definition doing anything outside of "normal" is weird, but in the case of social conventions it's usually because people just haven't thought about it enough. I'd rather be considered weird than be in a crash without a seatbelt on.

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