301–310 of 931 posts
-- I was surprised that the HN list page didn't automatically refresh in my browser (seems as though it should be live and not have to be prompted ...)
Most things around here are not how they should seem.
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Semi-offtopic: I've always been fascinated by the origins of religions, their evolution, potential re-definitions and conflicts with other ideas. Specifically, I like thinking about how the founding members of a set of ideas, might retrospectively analyze the entire history of their ideas, and the "idea set"'s metamorphosis into a religion whose followers now treat it as dogma. I have this, entirely unprovable, theor…
Bob Barton once called systems programmers "High priests of a low cult" and pointed out that "computing should be in the School of Religion" (ca 1966). Thinking is difficult in many ways, and we humans are not really well set up to do it -- genetically we "learn by remembering" (rather than by understanding) and we "think by recalling" rather than actual pondering. The larger issues here have to do with various kinds…
What to do about System 1, though? Truly interactive research/communication documents, as described by Bret Victor, should be a great help, to my mind, but what do you think could be beyond that?
Tabs or spaces?
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> I'm not a big Unix fan What is your preferred technology stack?
What's a good non-UNIX open-source operating system that's useful for day-to-day work, or at least academically significant enough that it's worth diving in to?
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I personally vouch that this isn't fake. (But anyone familiar with Alan's work could tell that just from reading his comments here—who could possibly fake these?) We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11940227 and marked it off-topic.
"who could possibly fake these?" Copying from other sources. I'm not saying it's fake, just curious about verification as someone claimed so. For instance, your "vouch", are you an official HN account. How can I tell?
Hi Alan, As a high school teacher, I often find that discussions of technology in education diminish 'education' to curricular and assessment documentation and planning; however, these artifacts are only a small element of what is, fundamentally, a social process of discussion and progressive knowledge building. If the real work and progress with my students comes from our intellectual both-and-forth (rather than sta…
Let me just say that it's worth trying to understand what might be a "really good" balance between traditional oral culture learning and thinking, what literacy brings to the party, especially via mass media, and what the computer and pervasive networking should bring as real positive additions.
One way to assess what is going on now is partly a retreat from real literacy back to oral modes of communication and oral modes of thought (i.e. "texting" is really a transliteration of an oral utterance, not a literary form).
This is a disaster.
However, even autodidacts really need some oral discussions, and this is one reason to have a "school experience".
The question is balance. Fluent readers can read many times faster than oral transmissions, and there are many more resources at hand. This means in the 21st century that most people should be doing a lot of reading -- especially students (much much more reading than talking). Responsible adults, especially teachers and parents, should be making all out efforts to help this to happen.
For the last point, I'd recommend perusing Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking: Fast and Slow", and this will be a good basis for thinking about tradeoffs between actual interactions (whether with people or computers) and "pondering".
I think most people grow up missing their actual potential as thinkers because the environment they grow up in does not understand these issues and their tradeoffs....
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"who could possibly fake these?" Copying from other sources. I'm not saying it's fake, just curious about verification as someone claimed so. For instance, your "vouch", are you an official HN account. How can I tell?
If an answer could be confused with a "real" one then it's as good.
Hi Alan, do you still do coding (any kind of, for any purpose) these days? If you do, what's your comfortable setup (say, language, editor, tools and etc)?
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Bob Barton once called systems programmers "High priests of a low cult" and pointed out that "computing should be in the School of Religion" (ca 1966). Thinking is difficult in many ways, and we humans are not really well set up to do it -- genetically we "learn by remembering" (rather than by understanding) and we "think by recalling" rather than actual pondering. The larger issues here have to do with various kinds…
1. Spaced repetition can make the recalling - and thus the thinking and pondering - easier. It can certainly make one more consilient, given the right choice of "other things to study" e.g. biology or social psychology, as you've mentioned in an earlier comment. 2. It takes quite a bit of training for a reader to detect bias in their own cognition, particularly the "cognition" that happens when they're reading someon…