What do you think about a recent Veritassium video that discusses the idea that ‘there is no such thing as a visual learner’ (https://youtu.be/rhgwIhB58PA)
I'm completely open to being wrong or corrected, I will watch the video now. It's likely poor understanding on my part. However, I would reinforce my claim by adding that there is good psychological evidence for verbal vs spacial interest and competency, which is no doubt related.
I think it's basically just arguing semantics. Been a math teacher my whole career, and it's quite plain to me that some kids simply learn better as soon as you draw a picture, and others simply don't. Not sure why it has to be a whole debate.
I would say it's worth debating because it is an inexact and unsound principle on which recent education is built on.
More than that, in the Romanian Master's cycle, if you want to continue your pedagogical studies such that you become a high school teacher, there is an entire course dedicated to learning styles and there is one more dedicated on the other infamous inexact-semantics concept, the multiple intelligences theory.
So I would argue that it has a similarly bad effect on the education domain to any other arbitrary first-principles that lead to sub-optimal research and lack of clarity of what is really going on in some domain, which lead again to sub-optimal methods.
Regarding your observation about how some kids simply learn better after seeing some visual representation of the concepts, there could be many reasons for this (they start paying attention when you draw, they fall somewhere on the Bell curve such that they need that extra representation to get it, as the Veritasium video also presents with the memory experiment), but I would doubt that persistent learning styles of your students would be the differentiator, which is what the video discredits (https://youtu.be/rhgwIhB58PA?t=438).
One of my favorite games of all time is Railroad Tycoon 2: Platinum Edition. While Sid Meier didn’t directly make it, but he spawned the franchise with RRT-1. I found a pirated version selling on the street-side in the capital city of India. (Later on, when I had a job, I did buy a proper copy - which was much harder to get than the pirated copy).
Many sid Meier games have a remarkable sense of “time and place” - and Railroad Tycoon (imho) takes it to the next level. You really feel you are in early 1818, on the east coast of USA, getting your “little startup” off the ground. Even the blues and bluegrass music is designed to transport you there. The game captures a sense of adventure - that almost isn’t supposed to be the case in a rail road sim - but all the gameplay mechanics aside, this game captures an amazing sense of adventure ... and education. You learn a lot after exploring the continents, tackling terrains of continents, learning about cities, gaining a sense of scale and the thrill of making ideas come to life... it’s really cool how a game (a piece of software) can capture all this!
Upon repeat playing, I have come to admire the graphic design, sound design and interaction design (“the UI”) so much more. There are small but significant - even beautiful, decisions made that make the game fun to play and good to look at eg Train cars will change appearance through different eras..
A part of HN is entrepreneurship driven - I think those folks will also get an immense kick out of beating JP Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt.
The campaign is the thing to play — travel the globe and connect places! Make economy happen.
Game also allows simple surprises like being able to buy businesses outright - that you have merely connected (and made to prosper) - shows you clearly how far monopoly can go :). I guess today it will be called a “full stack” railroad company.
I have dismissed my own love of the game to - “I am just nostalgic” — but I played it again recently, and I have happy to report that it remains as engaging as ever!
The game is classified as a business sim - its not. It’s a railroad sim - the amount of details (eg every engine has a real world counter part) about railroads makes it a railroad game and not a business game...
“ As a result I’ve improved a number of biomarkers (e.g. resting heart rate, resting blood glucose, strength, endurance, nutritional deficiencies, etc)”
— how does one measure / track these things? ESP resting heart rate, blood glucose and nutritional deficiencies.
Resting heart rate is commonly tracked by wearables e.g. Apple Watch. Blood glucose can be self-monitored with the same tools diabetics use. Nutritional deficiencies can be measured with blood tests; WellnessFX was one of the early channels to get these but I believe Quest will let you self-order them now.
Solution to the Byzantine General’s Problem using proof of work is possibly an example. The basic problem is: how do you make sure that multiple entities, which are separated by distance, are in absolute full agreement before an action is taken?
If one is not trying to solve it in the fastest time, then an agreed ‘truth’ can be reached after ‘some time’ without a central entity. By deciding to go ‘slow’, a solution can be found eventually.
Previous work on this was done for the movie Interstellar. The resolution of the rendering software was so high that team members were able to examine the black hole very closely - Because Gargantua was spinning at almost the speed of light, the rendering showed that spacetime warped into shapes never seen before. This led to the publication of —> https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03808
Kip Thorne describes his work not this in a book called the science of interstellar.
Kip’s description of black holes here is also fascinating: https://youtu.be/oj1AfkPQa6M — first time I learnt what “warped” space-time means :)
Sean Caroll has a great podcast, mindscape [0]. One of the recent episode featured Kip Thorne as a guest and had some great discussions about Gravitational Waves, Time Travel, and Interstellar [1]. It's a very informative and entertaining podcast, I recommend it.
Kip has studied black holes all his life — this podcast goes into the work on LIGO that finally got Kip (and collaborators) the Nobel Prize. I found it amusing that there is some “Nobel guilt” for scientists that comes with the prize, because the size of them teams that usually collaborate and make a large project like LIGO happen (over 20 years) is incredibly large.
I also find it inspiring that Kip speaks with so much... love ... about warped space time :)
There is a video that I cannot find where Christopher Nolan describes the process of rendering the black hole for his movie - they used Kip’s equations to render Gargantua and when the first images were seen, he realized that Kip has never actually seen a black hole before - even though he has spent his entire life studying it.
> Kip’s description of black holes here is also fascinating: https://youtu.be/oj1AfkPQa6M — first time I learnt what “warped” space-time means :)
In this video he makes a comment which I struggle to fully understand:
He says that ALL of the matter which belonged to the cooled-off star is DESTROYED in the process of creating a black hole.
That concept of complete destruction eludes me. I assume what he means is, the matter was converted entirely to energy. Right?
But if that's true - where is all of that energy? Is it stored (somehow?) in the Black Hole? Is it dispersed throughout the galaxy? What HAPPENED to the mass (energy)?
It's all squished into the black hole and from the perspective of everyone outside, converted into... more mass of the black hole. The mass of the black hole comes from the mass that created it. As you feed it more stuff, it gets more massive.
As to what physically happens to the stuff once it's inside, I don't know if we know for certain. It gets dragged towards the center. From the point of view of the rest of the universe, it might never actually reach the singularity: GR would make it look like it's going slower and slower and slower.
Speculation about what is actually inside the event horizon is at most mathematical extrapolation, since we can't actually crack one open and look.
This is exactly right - infact, because some people might consider housing in Bay Area to be a good investment, we can try to make it affordable for others.
This is the project we’ve been working on for the last month or so: https://zerodown.com/
The first version of some astonishingly successful businesses were quite simple. Including and certainly not limited to: AirBnB, Groupon, Facebook, Zenefits, ZenPayroll (now Gusto), YouTube, Twitter etc were quite simple.
Ironically, their success over the last 10-15 years, has made starting a software businesses relatively simple. My bet is that in the next 10-15 years the value is increasingly going to come from harder to start businesses.
What you say may be true for almost all the products, unless when the product is 'money' itself. Something worth considering.
Easy access to low-cost loans creates the illusion of affordability and exacerbates over-consumption (over-consumption: a general malady afflicting most humans)
The answer in the article is: “Products that aren’t daily, but still hugely valuable” — like a Payroll system, LinkedIn etc. (there are many!). And...yes, these businesses should not have DAU/MAU as their goal.
Andrew is quite brilliant, and recently joined A16Z as a partner — but this specific essay is quite ordinary, and lacks insight. His prior piece, which is a compendium of essays written by others on “Marketplaces” is quite good.
Just curious.