Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Too Clever by Half

epsilontheory.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 261 posts

Re: Too Clever by Half

#81

Post by DFHippie »

Xuper wrote: post #69
sgt101 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feminist here. I have a plan : we will make money by paying a significant percentage of western government officials in the new "poor coin".

Interesting thing is feminism is also winning skirmishes but loosing the metagame. Unless having less children but with more disorders born in fractured families is the goal. Something to ponder.

I think you're mixing disparate phenomena to make a political point. There are places where feminism had a strong impact on culture. There are fractured families. There are families with fewer children (whether this is a good or a bad thing is debatable and a matter of perspective and opinion). But the places where the effect of feminism on the equality of opportunity, power, and so forth are most strongly expressed tend to be the ones with smaller, more stable families. Two of your phenomena anti-correlate. As for the prevalence of disorders, that's a pretty big bag, diagnostic criteria change, and diagnosis itself is iffy. I doubt anyone can make a very strong claim.

Re: Too Clever by Half

#82

Post by brazzy »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #68
raverbashing wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know what's worse? Your dog straying out of the farm and getting eaten by a bear. Or run over by a truck

Oh it's for the dog's own good? Well in that case you can lock it up in a pen so it can't get out, or the bears come in. That will keep it safe. Nothing wrong with that, is there?

What exactly are you arguing for?

Re: Too Clever by Half

#83

Post by rhizome »

mcv wrote: post #49
dibujante wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High-five, fellow "burned by needing to do real work in university" high schooler :(

Same here. Once I figured out that I didn't really have to do any homework in high school, and wasn't even required to do so in university, I was doomed. I'm now trying to teach my son that just learning to do the work, even if it's boring, is the real skill you need. But he's too focused on winning every mini-game.

Look up The Marshmallow Test. If there was one thing I wish my parents had instilled in me, it's good study habits.

Re: Too Clever by Half

#84

Post by crummy »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #67
crummy wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, my folks have an actual physical fence but it is just insufficient. The dog would always figure out a way through or under or over it. The shock collar is also not perfect but far more effective.

One thing that's far more effective is tying the dog up to a pole and never letting it roam free. Is there an objection to handling a dog in this manner?

All day? I guess I'm making an assumption here about the internal desires of a dog but I think she'd prefer to roam several hectares, even with the risk of an electrical shock, rather than be tied to a stick.

Re: Too Clever by Half

#85

Post by gnode »

hangonhn wrote: post #70
nazca wrote: post #4

The only issue with his metaphor is that coyotes have been doing very well at the meta game. At the time of European contact there were no coyotes anywhere near Connecticut. Lewis and Clark didn't encounter them until they hit the great plains. Actually only a few decades ago there were no coyotes near the eastern US. But coyotes are clever and they've learned to adapt and live in close proximity to humans. And as we…

But the biggest winner in the meta-game is the coyote’s domesticated cousin: the dog. They are the darlings of the human world. If earth was imploding and we had to leave for another inhabitable planet, I bet there would be a few dogs and cats aboard those spaceships. Not so sure there would be room for coyotes. Caring for dogs is now a many billion dollars industry and growing. Dogs might be dumber than coyotes but…

This makes me question what is should mean to "win" in a genetic sense. The dog may be high in number, but its genetic selection has been artificial, controlled by humans selecting for favourable traits. Similarly, could we consider the cow to be successful, having been bred to produce enough milk that it can't stand, yet with a population much higher than before humans?

Re: Too Clever by Half

#86

Post by pjmorris »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #16

This is unrelated, but they mention The Great Financial Crisis which made me remember the Recession of my youth. It devastated my family. My father was in construction. That market seriously ebbs. I remember a faint feeling I had back then: resentment towards families who happened to be in industries that weren’t hit. Not because I thought it was unfair that we were hit, I just resented that they didn’t even have to…

Reminds me of what I've heard called a Czech fable:

A poor farmer whose livestock is a single dairy cow goes to the field one morning to milk the cow and discovers that she's dead. He falls to his knees and looks skyward, shaking his fists and cursing God for his misfortune. Suddenly a voice is heard from the heavens: "Your cries have reached me, my son. Tell me what you would like me to do." The farmer gazes upward and says to God, "Please, Lord, kill my neighbor's cow."

Re: Too Clever by Half

#87

Post by raverbashing »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #68
raverbashing wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know what's worse? Your dog straying out of the farm and getting eaten by a bear. Or run over by a truck

Oh it's for the dog's own good? Well in that case you can lock it up in a pen so it can't get out, or the bears come in. That will keep it safe. Nothing wrong with that, is there?

Thanks, that was hilarious.

Re: Too Clever by Half

#88

Post by haZard_OS »

dpark wrote: post #65
arethuza wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm quite proud of the range of results I got in maths at University - I tried the "no study" approach in first year and got burned badly . Fortunately we didn't have the uncivilized GPA system here so my first year indiscretions had no impact on my final degree.

GPA has no impact on your final degree in the US either. You complete the same coursework and get the same degree as the person with a perfect GPA. The only real exception is if you’re screwing up so bad that they kick you out, in which case you don’t get the degree because you don’t complete the coursework.

On a number of occasions I have had prospective employers ask what my final grade was for specific classes. I have never been asked about my GPA specifically, but my grades at the University certainly affected me beyond academia.

Re: Too Clever by Half

#89

Post by gldalmaso »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #22

>> When the dog gets close to the wire, the receiver starts to beep, and when the dog gets all the way to the “fence” boundary, the receiver generates a small electric zap. I know, I know … it’s negative reinforcement and it’s a shock collar and all that. Don’t care. It’s fantastic for us and our dogs. That's disgusting.

As a nitpick, if I recall correctly, "negative reinforcement" is when you remove a desirable stimulus to reinforce behavior. In this case it's actually "positive punishment" as they are introducing an aversive stimulus to extinguish some behavior (go out of bounds).

https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-punishment-2795413

Re: Too Clever by Half

#90

Post by etherael »

r_singh wrote: post #59

The most relevant take away from this article (for me) is how the coyotes (crypto and currency experts) invented Bitcoins, raccoons over leveraged it out of dumb greed (investors) and the state took notice and acted out of sheer desperation to not lose control and once again rendered the invention useless by gaining more control than before (the part that is currently in its early stages right now). Update: I think t…

They don't have control though. At best, they sabotaged just the bitcoin core blockchain, and those who were in it to destroy the state and central banks forked off into bitcoin cash. They also provoked a tidal wave of "financial innovation" in the sector with now dozens of independent blockchains, some utterly anonymous, over which they have zero control.

If their campaign was the bring this under their power, it cannot be viewed reasonably as anything other than a miserable failure.

Also the analogy to the metagame does not acknowledge the reality that actually those in power in the metagame are a predatory parasitic coercive force in themselves, and their brand of coyote cunning is just traditional machiavellian politics rather than financial innovation backed up with cryptographic peer to peer networks.

It's not a war between animal control and coyotes. It's a war between many coyotes executing different strategies. While both the sheep and the raccoons just try to get by as best they can.

Post reply on HN