I second this last paragraph.
I want to add my pet theory that it is not a purely psychological phenomenon. It's like that thing where we only remember the good movies (the "classics"), and the others are forgotten. When you first get started on the field, you're reading just the "classics". When you get to the current state of the art, the classics have not been sorted out yet, and so you get a lot of trash.
Do tell more... does it have to do with hyperspecialization, not being able to get fluent in a large enough proportion of the field as was the case in Euler's time, say?
No, while it may have been fun to be a generalist in Euler's era, that wasn't bothersome to me. To be clear, the issues I found in academia had little to do with math specifically, and affected academia broadly. The usual issues you've likely heard about dwindling ability to make a comfortable career of it without a great deal of luck.
- i really liked this design, in a functional/readability sense. for example, how the images appeared in parallel to the text, so you could look at them without really having to look away from the text. another example is the footnote pop-ups (Wikipedia does that too).
honestly, i'm a bit disappointed in people in general that this isn't the rule. we've had HTML for very long now. it's not a lot of effort to learn enough of it to be able to produce webpages with functionality like that -- yeah, it's an upfront cost, but then, well, less so than learning your mother language!
- i really don't like, though, the reliance on extrapolation from examples from nature and history.
IMO, our understanding of these subjects has been shown many times to be limited and flawed... we can't rely on it that much.
also, come on, if you pick and choose from the examples you can pretty much advance any thesis you want. like yeah i bet the chimps and the ancient greeks have a beautiful society if you look at it from this specific point of view, but they also practice infanticide or something like that -- i just made this one up, but i bet it's not hard to make it real.
and i felt that the text was especially quick (did not really present justifications) to dismiss what it didn't like and advance what it did...
- finally, i really liked this take on "how many humans does it take to screw on a lightbulb?" -- i'm definitely stealing it. i don't think this is the main focus of the text but it's something that really speaks to me. the comfort of today's society is only enabled by an amount of technology so huge it takes a large amount of people cooperating to keep it running. if we don't want to go back to the wild and die of dumb diseases, we need to be able to cooperate.
Seriously, how realistic is it to get a job like this guy's? Open ended, no rules, just solving problems... Most days I'm fine with a boring specialized engineering career, but this one got to me...
So, be one of the best in the field, and perhaps folks will trust you to do wild open-ended research forever. I think that sounds like a pretty reasonable deal.
Any career in fundamental research is more or less like that. From what I've seen personally, academics and government labs are the two biggest places you can find the most open ended roles. Each comes with their own caveats, of course.
interesting to know.
in my limited experience though, in practice, in academia the politics is so heavy (more than in your average workplace) that political matters often overshadow research matters. maybe that is one of the caveats you had in mind.
i am curious about government labs though. though it seems country-dependent. how is it different from academia?
> It was always odd to me that é was out of sequence
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that it is the only one of those that is found in French, which may have been supported earlier than Spanish. I'd look at ç, è, à for further evidence.
I want the FDA to get meta and be empowerd to say if you add sesame to everything just to work around our rules, we'll fine you, because we're not idiots.
> Mechanism design is a branch of economics, social choice theory, and game theory that deals with designing games (or mechanisms) to implement a given social choice function. Because it starts at the end of the game (the optimal result) and then works backwards to find a game that implements it, it is sometimes called reverse game theory.
Have you found any good books on mechanism design for laypeople? I picked one up (can’t remember the name) but it was quite textbooky and mathy, and I’d prefer to start with a more conceptual overview.
Yeah, to me the whole discussion of "UPF = unhealthy" is based on a romanticization of "natural" that breaks down if you try to make sense of it.
If you use the right words, you can make even cheese and butter sound ultra processed. So the concept of UPF itself is shaky.
Additionally, there is nothing inherent in the "food processing" process that makes the material "unhealthy" -- whatever those words mean. So even if we could define UPFs, there wouldn't be an inherent correlation with unhealthiness, as pointed out in the example of fruit juice -- a personal favorite of mine, because the natural crowd loves fruit juice (don't get me wrong, I love it too, but I'm aware it's just candy)
The vendor who sells many different things seems to be at least a bit less culpable than the provider who sells just their thing while lying about certain effects of it. Yes, we can examine how we got into this situation where doctors take drug advice from the people who make the drugs but the people who lied for profit deserve the lion's share of the criticism.
In practice, even many of the general public knew that what the vendor was selling was addictive and dangerous -- there are some reports even in this thread. So it's hard for the vendor to claim ignorance, even more so when often they also stood to profit from the lie (repeat customers).
What share of the guild do the medical providers that prescribed the opioids to their patients have? There would be no opioid crisis if none were willing to do it.
The US is the only place in the world AFAIK where you will get prescribed opioids for something as trivial as a wisdom tooth extraction (kind of like one of the cases cited). It is also the only place in the world AFAIK going through the opioid epidemic.
Every other country in the world has got the problem of painkillers figured out. So it can't be that complicated.
The point is that people are overall too cavalier about opioids in the US.
I don't think it's necessary to get into the details of how much pain is enough pain, how acute is acute enough, etc... because this is not a problem essentially anywhere else in the world -- and not because they thought really hard about it.
Objectively, opioids are prescribed much less often outside the US.
Subjectively, I got four wisdom teeth extracted in two sessions of two extractions each. Both times I only needed generic acetaminophen to manage the pain.
Perhaps an US surgeon have insisted on doing it all in one session, in which case I would have found the pain and discomfort intolerable and opioids would have made more sense.
In any case, they should probably figure out why their patients are in more pain than the patients of foreign surgeons and fix that. It could be something silly like them being less gentle during surgery because they are used to their patients being on opioids.
