The paywall prevents me from finding out the economist's theory, but I can put forth my own.
The two movies Sully and Deepwater Horizon, which both came out in 2016, are near mirror images of each other in many ways.
Sully is partly the story about a pilot who has spent his entire career landing failing airplanes, effectively training him to do it again with higher stakes, where its never happened before. But its also the story of all of the regulation that has prevented all commercial aviation disasters since 2001. Sully may stay calm under pressure, but he's standing on the shoulders of giants. The flight attendants stick to their training. The port authority and the captains of the boats that rescue all of the passengers stick to their training. The NTSB even sticks to their training in certain ways. Plans were set forth, and followed. Even at the end of the movie, it is made clear that the NTSB's flaw was to control for all of the time constraints Sullenberger faced, all of the stress, and hid the fact that it was something like the 20th attempt in the simulator that was the first successful landing.
Deepwater horizon is the story about a company that has successfully captured their regulatory framework. There was inadequate training, inadequate safety measures, inadequate equipment to properly measure the specifics of the well. And so when the shit hits the fan, does everyone stay calm and exercise the plan to effect their continued survival? Nope, they all panic, and they nearly all die.
Planes and Trains are far safer than automobiles because of ratio of humans to engines.
As a public service notice, all of your comments for the last week or so are marked as dead. Some people like me view with show-dead on, and see them, but most people don't. I've vouched for a few of them as I come across them, but you might consider discussing the matter with hn@ycombinator.com. For what it's worth, my personal opinion is that some of your comments like this one are great, but it would be nice if you could be less confrontational in some of your others.
I've assumed that. I appreciate the advice. I got a little heated in the Berkeley Study article this week. I guess I get to a point when some things are plain as day to me, such as "Humans learn better when they are more awake than less awake", and then read people pontificate about how this is such a profound insight, and confirms a hunch they've had their whole life. Its like I can see myself getting wound up, but I can't resist correcting my detractors. It only get's worse when people can enumerate the trees, but roll their eyes at others claiming a forest.
I even knew going into my final retort to /u/dang that he'd swing the banhammer. But something in the back of my mind just said "hold my beer".
I fully agree that honey kills more flies than vinegar. But I'm also a Lord of the Rings fan. Pip and Merri only convince the Ents to go to war through forcing them to confront the clear cut forest. It was the Ents position, much like the US before WWI, that this too shall pass, and we shouldn't involve ourselves in the affairs of men/europe.
I'm not saying confrontation is always defensible, but its also not always indefensible.
"Other areas of cortex can support 'declarative' memory formation. For example you can learn things like the definition of a new word (lang), features of a novel object (vis), where you parked your car outside your new apartment (spatial/episodic), within just a few seconds."
Can you provide other examples of this phenomenon? It seems like the ones you put forth here are all examples of relying on previous experience, which seems more on the "habitual" end of the spectrum, which is the articles claim in the general case.
I can learn new word's definitions because I've spent a significant amount of time learning definitions to all sorts of words throughout my life. Thus, the process is very familiar to me, and is a habit.
I have learned over the course of my life that novelties are by definition outliers. Just like all animals with a survival instinct, I've learned that strange things can be dangerous, so it is an effective heuristic to expect danger from strange things. Another heuristic I favor is that the best way to defang danger is to understand it enough to avoid its mechanisms.
I have learned over the course of my driving experience that keeping track of where I parked my car is crucial to locating the car again in the future. Thus, through experience, I know that it is an important piece of information to remember.
These three examples seem to fit perfectly well within the hypothesis of the article. They aren't new tricks. They are by definition the application of old tricks.
I posit that this is largely due to your frame of reference. I will assume from your presence on hacker news that you already have learned programming. You are already familiar with its utility. You have found over your career that tools that sacrifice expressiveness for ease of expression are nearly always crutches, that if depended on too heavily, will foster reliance, and give no incentive to actually learn more advanced tools.
Yet, like all crutches, the provide a superior alternative to certain groups of people. People with broken legs use crutches, but only for the purpose of self sufficiency until their leg heals.
Perhaps this is where the flaw in the business model is revealed. Anvil is largely incentivized to get its users to depend on its crutch. But users are still able to utilize the crutch to ease the learning process, and perhaps explore something that might interest them enough to seek out more traditional development workflows.
Rental of goods exists as a viable service, because there is demand for its supply. When you fly somewhere distant, at least in the US, your first order of business is to pick up your rental car. This is not a bad business practice. You are making the correct judgement that given your limited resources, renting something in the short term is more prudent than purchasing it.
Are you familiar with Node Red? It is an IBM project that is a self hosted website you can run on a raspberry pi, or a traditional PC or server.
The tool allows you to graphically build Node.js applications, through some key abstractions. Node you drag into the canvas has inputs and or outputs which can be connected to other nodes, by simply clicking and dragging between them.
As an embedded developer, I was far more interested in determining the viability of an implementation than learning node.js. To me, Node Red is the superior evolution of node.js. But I can certainly appreciate that people who learned node.js to any degree, before finding out about Node Red, see far less utility in it than I do.
For a mirror image of this phenomenon, Arduino allows novices to circumvent the traditional learning curve required to develop embedded systems, through its key abstractions. Yet, every embedded developer I know immediately attacks the downsides of Arduino. Its not really teaching its users much. At least in its infancy, much of the underlying code was cowboy spaghetti. You would never use Arduino in a production environment.
Yet somehow, Arduino is flourishing. I'll admit that since it's open source, that is a key distinction. But Adafruit.com, and Sparkfun.com are literally printing money with Arduinos and the ecosystem they facilitated. Each is a private company, but each has revealed at least one year of revenue exceeding $30,000,000. Each also provides schematics, datasheets, and tutorials for every single product they sell, if it is within their rights to provide such information.
I can appreciate that they are different tools, but to accept your challenge, I submit three.js, along with the multiple websites that have boatloads of single feature demos. In the particular venue of 3D graphics in the browser, I contend three.js would provide more depth than anvil's breadth.
That being said, I see no reason why you couldn't combine the two, and get the best of both worlds.
> I see no reason why you couldn't combine the two
You bet! Although Anvil mostly shields you from the mudbath of the modern web front end, we do have full HTML and JS interop. So you can call into JS from Anvil's Python code, and into Python from JS.
Even better, once you've built your (eg) three.js interface, you can package it up as a custom component. Then you (or anyone else) can drag-and-drop it onto their page and use it with a pure Python API.
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I haven't finished editing the tutorial video for this, so I'm afraid I'm just going to point you at the reference docs.
It's interesting to think about how apex predators are the keystone that propagates order in their ecosystem. For as long as humans have been aware of wolves, we have sought to eradicate them. After all, they kill livestock. They are immortalized in stories as a symbol of evil. Little Red Riding Hood. The Three Little Pigs. The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
Yet once we were successful in eradicating them, to our complete amazement, we found that the eradication of wolves caused the proliferation of all of these negative effects that would have been otherwise kept in check by wolves.
I think the key takeaway is balance. Everything in moderation, even moderation, and especially moderation of the Internet.
Does it make your nebulous conspiracy theory more believable or less believable when you consider that the age of 18 is generally when people's bodies have reached full maturity?
Personally, if my 22 year old self travelled in time three years backwards to meet 17 year old me, and then travelled 20 years forward to present day to me current me, I have no doubt 18 year old me would the odd man out in this triplet.
18 maybe for physical appearance, but mental maturity and brain development completes in the early-mid 20s. I would definitely be the odd one out at my current age if I were stuck with 17 and 22yo me, unless you were just using physical appearance, in which case yeah, I guess 17 would stand out.
Mental and social maturity continues developing for most of your life. Different life stages have different common problems, and you need to learn different skills to solve them - or sometimes just to cope with them.
In the same way that there isn't much practical (i.e. economic) interest in tailoring schools and college classes to people with different daily cycles, there isn't much interest in teaching people about common problems ahead of time, or running some kind of continuous life challenges training that could potentially do a lot to improve life quality.
In my 50s, one of the common problems my friends have is dealing with parents who are either dying, recently dead, or have a terminal illness like Alzheimer's.
Of course that happens to younger people too, but there are actuarial peaks where it becomes massively more likely that you'll be dealing with a certain set of challenges in a certain decade of life.
There's shockingly little information around about some of these challenges. So it's incorrect to assume that the learning ends after school or college.
You won't learn anything about dealing with these challenges there. You won't even be warned they exist.
I don't think it's particularly a "conspiracy theory", in that there's no cabal of people trying to cover this up. It's more an optimization function; we have N productivity units, and M humans (where M > N), so we hire from the most productive subsets of M. For the less productive subsets (largely youths, criminals, geriatrics), we encourage institutionalization to minimize the portion of M-productive required to maintain the unproductive ones.
If you look at post-industrialization patterns, the age at which humans become productive has been increasing as the productivity of humans has increased. On a subsistence farm, a 6-year old can be doing useful work to increase the productivity of the farm. In a coal mine or factory, an 8-year-old can do productive work. 16-year olds can do construction, food industry, but for jobs with decision-making responsibilities (as more and more jobs are today), we don't trust anyone under 22.
They have? Because last I checked puberty and physical growth tend to peter out around 13-14 for females and 15-16 for males (male growth plates seal at about 15; in females, about a year after menarche, and menses itself stabilizes about two years after menarche).
Does it make his nebulous conspiracy theory more or less believable that you somehow think the age at which we stop warehousing kids actually has nothing at all to do with physical maturation?
Allow me to contextualize all of your controversial deflection:
You specifically selected parts of the body that finish maturing earlier than my statement, because it was the most controversial thing that popped into your head. It didn't pop in to your growth plates, it didn't pop into your elbow. It didn't pop into your left middle toe. It popped into your head.
You should allow these very statements to marinate in that same head, and see if you can come to the correct conclusion as to which part of your body I was referring to in my original comment.
Let me guess, you believe governments should be run like companies, right?
Perhaps, ask yourself why you come down on the side of moneyed interests in every point you make.
When I see this kind of dogmatic badgering, Its almost like my brain is superimposing a Fast Fourier Transform frequency plot on that person, and all of the energy is found to be in a single bin.
Your single bin is money. As this pure tone, it is literally your equation.
I don't have to tell you that this makes you give whores a bad name.
This crosses into personal attack. Please resist the temptation to do that even when you disagree strongly. It's particularly bad when combined with ideological battle, which is off topic on HN to begin with.
This isn't an agreement or disagreement with your underlying views; it's that you can't go offside when expressing them. Same applies to the other team.
What was so traumatizing about the showers available to you in high school? Because I certainly remember first period gym, and I just took a shower afterwards. Then I was right as rain.
It was partly social consequence, and party not wanting to be late for class. Since no one used the showers, the ones who did were usually considered weird or creepy. Even more so when the showers are open designed and you are naked in front of the entire locker room(high school only I think). The bigger half though is not wanting to be late for class. Most schools operate on a 5 minute timer between classes and even being a few seconds late is grounds for punishment. Being that you rarely ever get into the locker room and dressed back into your day clothes before the class is over, you're already pressed for time before you even consider using the shower.
Yep. When I went to high school, literally no one showered. I never saw a single person shower after gym class.
The thing that baffles me about it, is that if you're going to do physical activity like that, a shower after should be mandatory unless you are going home. Otherwise it's pretty gross. The result will be people not trying hard in gym, or people being unsanitary.
I guess this is all because we're ashamed of our bodies or afraid of sexual perverts? What the hell happened to us that we are this way?
I would have been afraid to shower in high school, the way it was. I have since showered in front of many strangers in the military and nothing bad has ever happened to me as a result. If you do have something odd happen, then that should be dealt with. But come on man, high school is not a prison. You are pretty safe to take a shower there.
tl;dr our society would rather be dirty and gross than see the naked bodies of our peers or be seen.
Middle schools already have partitioned showers. At least mine did, I imagine most others that have them do as well. The biggest issue with the showering are the time constraints. The social stigma is present, just in a minor fashion. Being late to class trumps all else.
The time constraints are imposed by a school administration that assumes you will not shower or does not want you to shower. The real problem is people are afraid of nudity.
My school didn't allow us to use the showers after PE. First period PE meant you could either minimize your participation or be sweaty all day. The showers were only available for the sports teams after school.
My middle and high schools both required showering after PE class. You had about 10 minutes to shower and dress after class. It was part of the grade actually, if you skipped the shower you got docked a letter.
As I recall it was because all the other teachers didn't want a bunch of sweaty smelly kids in their classes.
Middle school and high school kids can be viciously cruel and disgusting. Things that if done by adults would land them in jail and on a registry. Your school probably made the right call.
Probably the effort of getting ready once and then having to get ready again. Not traumatizing, just a pain. Some people are particular about their routines.
I really have no idea what this side tangent is about.
I made a comment that getting ready twice in short order is a pain, which is why people wouldn't want to have PE first thing.
I don't see what any of this has to do with the difference in showering schedules between white collar and blue collar labor.
My dad worked in a factory and showered after he got home from work. That was the time of day that made sense because his work was hot and sweaty and dirty.
I suppose the idea could have been that you could have just not showered at all and showered once you were done with PE, but still unsure where this detour is headed.
It’s a class marker, a sign of social status. Sweating is shameful, as is being low social status. You don’t see your father’s job, which he showered afterwards, as something shameful but loads of middle class people would because they’re insecure in their social status, they associated with people of similar income but lower social status. People with much higher status don’t care because they don’t, there’s no chance of them being associated with those with lower status.
Please stop jumping to the conclusion that I am off topic.
My thesis that ties this story together, and showering in PE class, is that some people see boats, guns, and sailors moving through the water, but are somehow incapable of acknowledging that it constitues a navy.
The result in this article, people do better when their awake, can be thought of as a frequency plot. This study effectively performed fourier analysis. They studied a comprehensive data set over a long enough time to deduce the cohesion that is evident when controlling for time.
Here's a thought experiment: can you empathize with a transistor? Imagine your a transistor, and I'm a transistor, and we can somehow still communicate. Im a pnp, and you're an npn:
npn: Its obvious that we're just transistors. You keep spouting nonsense about these logic gates, and how their the future. But please, show me the logic gate. I don't see it. You can't even tell me what it looks like.
pnp: look, when you put enough transistors together, you get an AND gate. In another configuration, you can get an OR gate.
npn: Please stop posting your controversial opinions here. This guy. I bet you're gonna tell me about magical flip flops and arithmetic logic units. Thats because you get all your news from science based sources. You should really try and get your information from a more diverse set.
That's great. I showered and then continued to sweat for 2 hours though (I was massively obese). HS Gym was a nightmare.
Funny enough, I did lose the weight, and am in much better shape now, through activities that are the antithesis of HS gym (turns out riding a bike and swimming for my own pleasure beat the torture of team sports any day)
But ask yourself this. Think back in time to those dreadful experiences and remember the people who didn't _appear_ to dread the experience.
Those people dreaded walking naked amongst their 14 year old peers as well, they just did a better job at convincing you that they dreaded it less than you.
You could even say that those were the victors who wrote your history.
Um, no. Other than some awkward jokes on the first few occasions, it was fine. Possibly this is because the school I went to was pretty new and didn't have any kind of established social hierarchy or bullying culture - it existed, but more as personal animosity.
I just laid out the derivative of your behavior, and then you said
"thats ridiculous, we quickly adapted over a short amount of time".
So, if I hear you correctly, what your saying is that as your understanding over time, lets call this du/dt, has a positive rate of change?
You're probably right though, the biggest trick Copernicus ever pulled was convincing everyone of heliocentricity by employing mathematics. We've been under the illusion ever since.
The two movies Sully and Deepwater Horizon, which both came out in 2016, are near mirror images of each other in many ways.
Sully is partly the story about a pilot who has spent his entire career landing failing airplanes, effectively training him to do it again with higher stakes, where its never happened before. But its also the story of all of the regulation that has prevented all commercial aviation disasters since 2001. Sully may stay calm under pressure, but he's standing on the shoulders of giants. The flight attendants stick to their training. The port authority and the captains of the boats that rescue all of the passengers stick to their training. The NTSB even sticks to their training in certain ways. Plans were set forth, and followed. Even at the end of the movie, it is made clear that the NTSB's flaw was to control for all of the time constraints Sullenberger faced, all of the stress, and hid the fact that it was something like the 20th attempt in the simulator that was the first successful landing.
Deepwater horizon is the story about a company that has successfully captured their regulatory framework. There was inadequate training, inadequate safety measures, inadequate equipment to properly measure the specifics of the well. And so when the shit hits the fan, does everyone stay calm and exercise the plan to effect their continued survival? Nope, they all panic, and they nearly all die.
Planes and Trains are far safer than automobiles because of ratio of humans to engines.