I have a theory that whatever popularity my blog has comes from writing to the level of the reader. My favorite example of the opposite behavior is how every blog post on a topic involving Bayesian inference seemingly must start with Bayes’ formula.
I really like Katex. I used to use MathJax for my blog, but the page reflow was annoying. Now I use Katex with server-side rendering, and even pages with a lot of math load quickly and without reflow.
The other obvious reason to avoid inverses is that they're only defined for square matrices, whereas LU decomposition works on general rectangular matrices (or rather PLU decomposition,same basic idea).
Invert can also destroy structure you might want to keep around, for example the LU factorization of a banded matrix will still be banded (lapack will do partial pivoting which will increase the bandwidth, but with it'll only double the number of super-diagonals in L), while the inverse is a full matrix.
I didn't implement a CNN from scratch, but a few years ago, I wrote a blog post on CNNs [1] because, like the other commenters, I could find almost no decent blog content on what exactly a CNN was. Maybe it will help in your efforts.
this seems really good. I always like to read code cause it gives a better idea how things works under the hood. when I first wrote a toy neural network I read everything I could on the topic, plus I was taking a ML class where the teacher was a big fan of implementing things from scratch.
Ever since reading Bertrand Russell's "The Conquest of Happiness", I've thought a lot about the importance of being able to sit inside my own head. One quote that I wrote down:
> A life too full of excitement is an exhausting life, in which continually stronger stimuli are needed to give the thrill that has come to be thought an essential part of pleasure. A person accustomed to too much excitement is like a person with a morbid craving for pepper, who comes at last to be unable even to taste a quantity of pepper which would cause anyone else to choke. There is an element of boredom which is inseparable from the avoidance of too much excitement, and too much excitement not only undermines the health, but dulls the palate for every kind of pleasure, substituting titillations for profound organic satisfactions, cleverness for wisdom, and jagged surprises for beauty... A certain power of enduring boredom is therefore essential to a happy life, and is one of the things that ought to be taught to the young.
This is a profound realisation that is usually preceded by experiencing the sickness and suffering that comes with unrestrained desire. How it takes over one's discriminating faculties until one becomes blind to everyday beauty.
I cannot recommend meditation enough to train the mind to stay calm when desires want to run rampant. No mantras or music, just sit in silence and boredom. Thoughts will come and go and eventually you will learn to cope with yourself.
Mindfulness came to mind for me specifically. I used to jump from work to coffee meetings to fancy restaurant dinners out with both clients and friends to meet-ups at NY's Meatpacking District...to deeply enjoying the feeling of just sitting in a nature preserve, smelling sap, listening to birds, and breathing in the entire environment. (a benefit of taking a job in the burbs.)
Before the lockdown, I did an experiment where I either walked (through a forest path) to work everyday or biked leisurely to work (also thru a forest path.) [I realize having the ability to do that is itself a blessing.] In winters, the walk was difficult (ice, elements, frozen mud) but it came to a point where the morning and evening "commutes" were the best part of my day. I would even take detours to more remote benches to clear my mind.
I was incredibly productive at work throughout this 18month experiment, until lockdown.
Not to be facetious but the juxtaposition of the romantic description of the value of personal time you made against the last line link to some kind of walk-sharing social media app did give me a laugh.
Completely agreed on every word though.
I do get your comment :-) But I'm also an Engineer, Data Scientist, and thus I feel obliged to measure efficacy.
The app is part of the efficacy measurement. I try to evaluate everything I do. I've been measuring everything I can from number of code commits to lines of code committed to sprint points, to weight/bodycomp, to time wearables' meta scores.
> I cannot recommend meditation enough to train the mind to stay calm...
Actually came here to just say that. After reading the piece and just trying to sit tight, I was pleasantly surprised how meditation changed me over the years, in a good way.
My path also has no mantras or music. Just inner reflection. Sometimes things got tough, but it transformed me dearly.
>substituting titillations for profound organic satisfactions, cleverness for wisdom, and jagged surprises for beauty...
...And porn for relationships and intimacy. If there's any modern ill that has exacerbated our inability to be comfortable with boredom (which is essentially inner loneliness) it's porn. It's an escape for loneliness and a terrible salve that leaves the intrinsic desires for intimacy and connection unfulfilled, akin to drinking salt water to cure thirst.
A psychological pandemic in its own right, and you can't escape its ubiquity and influence.
Meh. I've been watching porn since forever. My taste in porn has informed my real-life taste, and vice versa (in particular, I detest make-up / fakeness, both in porn and in real life).
Still, I find real people infinitely more fulfilling and have always put effort into seeking real relationships, sexual and romantic.
(I estimate porn is similar to gambling - some people's psychology makes them more susceptible to addiction of any kind.)
Meh. I've been going to bars since forever. I'm not like that guy over there who pounds a 12 pack every night and has no standards for what he funnels down his gullet. Despite my habitual usage and inability to refrain from the activity for any extended period of time, I estimate his psychology must make him the addict. For me it's a matter of refinement and my consciously-engaged frontal-lobe awareness of the fine hops and spirits that elevates me to a connoisseur of the boozy arts.
If you hadn't inserted "inability to refrain" out of nowhere, you could have been describing a perfectly ordinary (though pretentious) non-alcoholic. And you inserted that based on absolutely nothing, so good work.
While many functioning porn users will dismiss your comment as nonsense, I believe it really is a massive problem in society.
Porn in its current iteration, is similar to social media in that it literally programs your brain. We program computers but are ignorant to the fact that computers can program our behaviour if we are not careful. Yes, it is a poor substitute for intimacy but it also creates dangerous thought patterns and belief systems. These so called kinks have little to do with healthy sexual biological functioning. The perversions can become so ingrained that one will see it in real life instead of what is actually there.
Remember, that a human being is programmed through our beliefs and habits, which are formed through repetitions. So be extremely careful of what you consume in this age of the Internet.
While I think that the porn industry has inherent problems and some people get addicted to it. For me its preachers like GP that are doing our society a great disservice by moralizing and putting perfectly normal humam behaviors down as "perversion".
Exactly. People shouldn't be free to do things rusty cans don't approve because our society is at stake here!
There's only one solution to each problem and it's what this wise, moral person is selling because if it works for them, then it's the only possible truth.
It’s acceptable to have a position or opinion, civilly stated.
Any of the common “vices” like gambling, porn, Skinner box games, some drugs are difficult for people to manage. That dopamine hit burns behavioral pathways into the brain and is tough to undo.
Why are you (and others in this thread) grouping porn with drugs and gambling? To me, this does not make any sense.
Watching porn is not a bad thing. Obviously, if you're talking about addiction then perhaps, but do you think people are addicted to porn (on average) to the extent others are to those other vices?
Likewise, gambling and drugs impact you both physically and mentally, whereas the evidence for porn's impact on either is questionable at best.
Watching porn in of itself is no more a bad thing than playing poker or a video game. I’m not making a moral judgment.
Like gambling, it’s easy to fall into a behavior pattern that is similar to gambling. ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4600144/ ) I’m not sure of the pervasiveness of gambling or porn addiction, it isn’t my field.
There’s a reason why online porn pivoted to a model similar to YouTube — it’s a model that drives engagement, and you very commonly hear evidence that YouTube has a very significant addiction, even for toddlers.
I see, good point about falling into similar patterns regarding gambling.
Although I disagree. I'm not sure if porn has a model that drives engagement?
Let's be honest, are most people really watching porn, having a wank, then watching the rest of the porn? Probably not, so I am not sure how the engagement model of porn is similar to YouTube.
Having said that, with OnlyFans and other such sites, the porn landscape is certainly evolving, and perhaps it is that landscape (than porn hub) that is more engaging because there's the human element, e.g., you can ask an only fans person to say your name whereas you cannot when watching videos.
Anything artificial that directly affects the brain's reward pathways is bound to cause addiction. We can't, in good faith, argue that artificial food is addictive, or that artificial opium is more addictive than regular opium, and then, in the same breath, consider preposterous the idea that artificial sex is. (And let's not argue over semantics here, to pre-empt any argument about what constitutes artificial sex: a restaurant doesn't necessarily serve artificial food any more than a prostitute serves artificial sex)
>Let's be honest, are most people really watching porn, having a wank, then watching the rest of the porn? I'm not sure if porn has a model that drives engagement?
It's very easy, incentivized even, to open 10 tabs and switch through each to "optimize" the orgasm, finding the exact clip to reach orgasm. And much like social media influencers take many different photos and pick the ones that are the best, the same is done with the creation of porn. People don't finish the porn videos, you're right, but a lot of people also don't finish Youtube videos either. I think it's irrelevant whether they're finishing them - what drives engagement here is discovery of novel pornographic content. There are almost infinite possibilities for what one can watch. The problem with porn today is it's artificial and plentiful. So the model is to abuse our psychology to seek novelty as well as our desire to have many sexual partners. The engagement is in the desire to see many new and novel scenes at each session and the user's anticipation of another "porn session".
Apparently everyone is exactly the same and the only people whose lives haven't been ruined buy these vices, as you call them, are the ones who haven't tried them. I am done here
I enjoy drinking alcohol and have no issues with it, but that doesn’t mean acknowledging that alcoholism is a thing is a problem or some judgemental act.
The potential downsides associated alcohol consumption are well understood, and this understanding has permeated most societies.
The same cannot be said for porn consumption. While studies exist, this is not a well understood topic, and big claims are going to be met with skepticism and demands for evidence.
What insight, specifically? You make big claims with no citation, and when asked for more info, you dismiss those questions. If you’re interested in helping others understand the insights you claim to have, bring some details to the table!
I’m pretty curious about the topic, and this is an inquisitive community in general. Unfortunately, the way you’ve presented your position is not helpful, especially for a group that tends to demand scientific proof or at least a well formed hypothesis.
Forget about the porn for a moment. Read it first as online habits programming the mind. When you visit certain websites, the content and algorithms tend to program the user's mind. You can see it with Facebook influencing politics and such. TikTok, etc.
Now bring in the porn websites and you will realise how it programs the user's mind in a similar way. Eg. After some time, some people will exhibit cuckold, submission/domination, incest behaviour in real life. Some will look at an older woman and not see a mother but a milf. Hope you get the point. I don't have any scientific proof but I used to be a porn user myself. You are welcome to research the subject further if you are interested.
Referring back to the parent comment, as the stimulation of vanilla porn becomes boring, the user will need to watch more and more hyper stimulating material. Not dissimilar from a drug user. Some lose the interest in regular real life sex altogether or need to incorporate their porn habits into it.
I don't mean to generalize so if you don't think it applies to you then move on, but if you are interested in self improvement then tread these waters carefully.
>I’d wager that truly unhealthy kinks are uncommon.
The algorithm on PornHub promotes incest videos so heavily that creators of regular porn have started putting words like "stepmom", "step-sister" and "step-daughter" in the title of their videos even when the actual content has nothing to do with that.
It's one of the reasons I stopped using the site and went over to Reddit.
Not just the Algorithm. Each major company has a family-xxx studio for their content. They have significant production value & popular performers, which feeds the optimization cycle. God only know's what societal effect it has when you fetish step children like that at scale.
Beyond that there are categories that I believe normalize behaviors such as transgenders, where the reasons for their increased visibility in wider society cannot be uncoupled. So it muddies the waters whether the porn, is playing any role, and prevents critical questioning of root causes. which in this case “sissy hypno genre” within trans porn directly tells viewers they want to be a girl and get fucked over and over. This is a large portion of transgender porn genre that viewers will eventually rabbithole to w the algorithm.
Personally I’d be very skeptical of supporting my child transitioning if it was rooted in blatant porn brainwashing such as this.
Virtually all sex acts can be done in a healthy way provided both parties are truly into it. Porn has created expectations in men as to what women normally want and as a result a lot of women do sex acts that they don't truly like. Porn has distorted the view of what is 'normal' and the expectations of what a woman should consent to.
expectations is perhaps a personality problem and lack of honest communication. normal is subjective even if it is inherited from societal norms. communication and being able to talk freely is key.
The parent comment asks for specifics, but you go back to generalizing porn in response.
> Porn has distorted the view of what is ‘normal’
Surely you mean some porn, but you have not clarified which types. What do you say to plain, “vanilla” porn that pushes no boundaries? As with so many things, this is not a black or white issue, and statements like your final sentence do nothing to advance a nuanced conversation about the subject.
It's kind of like how social media warps our perception of what people (should) look like. Or how many vacations we should be going on [0,1]. Porn can affect how long we think sex should last and the positions we think we should be in [2]. Yes, even vanilla porn. While I think the anti-porn movement started with a religious-purity undertone, the secular explanations for why porn isn't such a great idea are convincing [3].
I would also ask anyone engaging in this discussion to replace the word "porn" with "alcohol" and see if it makes sense. Examine if it is useful to respond "well not everyone gets addicted to alcohol" when discussing the problems with alcohol. At least with me, there is an implied understanding that it's possible to use porn without getting addicted (even if I am becoming more skeptical of this assumption).
As the person making claims without evidence, the onus is on you at this point. You’re not going to change minds if you’re not willing to share where you’re coming from.
A person sufficiently interested in exploring whether or not I'm right can easily use a search engine and find the research. If a person can't be bothered to do that on their own then I think nothing I post will change their mind. An intellectually curious person will delve into the issue once they see dissenting opinions being expressed.
Someone else in the thread was kind enough to share what they felt are good sources, so I’ll take a look at those.
I can only conclude that you have nothing to back your position, and you are postulating based on 2nd hand information. Of course I can go google something, but the value of a community like HN is that the sources shared by members here tend to be good ones (or at least better than average). Your refusal to contribute followed by a No True Scotsman argument are pretty disappointing.
There is another possible conclusion. Namely, that what I wrote is indeed true as to why I didn't post links. This topic is sort of like an anti-vax topic. I can post lots of links that vaccines are safe and worth taking but if someone is too obtuse to even bother to look up the relevant information themself then nothing I post/say will sway them. Hence, posting links to scientific research to an anti-vaxxer is meaningless. It's not a "no true Scotsman" argument because I'm not making an argument. I'm simply stating why I didn't post links. That isn't an argument it's just a rationalization for why I didn't post links to the research.
It's really quite easy to find stuff written about the destructive aspects to porn.
I'm sorry if that's been your experience but this generalisation is a bit much.
I probably watch about as much porn as I do Netflix - around 30 minutes per day on average. I enjoy it, it's very relaxing and pleasureful. I'm in a committed long-term relationship of 3 years and have had the same habits through other 3 relationships of about the same length. They've all had a full sex life and I enjoy both separately. I'm sure many people have the same experience.
I think there are a lot of people like you, just as there are a lot of alcohol drinkers who are not alcoholics, and a lot of people who can smoke one cigarette a day and not become chain smokers.
There are also a lot of people with a vastly different experience with internet porn. Since we’re sharing personal anecdotes, allow me to describe my experience. I’ve first encountered internet porn in my teenage years. A harmless habit eventually escalated to daily 1-2 hour sessions, with maybe a hundred tabs open searching for that “perfect” video or picture. I would download terabytes of torrented porn to find that one specific video. Looking at porn on my phone would be the first thing I did in the morning and the last thing I did before falling asleep at night. It has poisoned my intimate relationships and my views of women in general (when 90% of ones experience of the opposite sex is from online porn, it warps ones real world perceptions). The sessions would eventually start leaving me drained and depressed for a few days after, to the point where I had to time them around important events (like work presentations, etc.) so that I would feel up to the task. I strongly suspect it caused some dysfunction with the real thing, ranging from never quite being satisfied (I would be back looking at porn an hour after sex) to some psychological and physical issues like premature ejaculation and not being able to get aroused for days at a time.
Like many addicts, I tried quitting a few times. The first time was after a week long vacation where I didn’t have easy access to internet. I felt better and got interested in the topic (despite the above I never considered my porn usage “a problem” until then). Turns out there’s an evolving community of people sharing these issues. I abstained for maybe half a year after relapsing. Similarly how smokers who quit talk about being able to experience smell and taste in a new way, this was a revelation. What attracted me in women started to change. Things became more subtle and interesting. I also felt like I no longer needed to have sex all the time and it greatly improved the quality of my relationships.
Most recently, I quit using https://easypeasymethod.org/ (a rewrite of the classic “Easy Way to Stop Smoking” but for porn) and I hope this time for good! If anyone recognizes themselves in this story please do yourself a favor and read through that website - if there’s a 1% chance of it working for you it’s worth it.
I think you can agree that my experience is not “normal” or “healthy”. I also believe a lot of people are in the same boat, as the availability of online porn is only becoming easier with time.
Knowing what I know now I wish I’ve never came across it back then and I’m dreading figuring out how to educate my children about this. The easily available, effectively infinite internet porn is the problem, not just porn in general. I don’t see getting hooked in the same way on magazines or dvds, as repetitiveness gets boring pretty quickly.
There's been a bit of research into the destructive aspects of porn watching. Porn has normalized a number of sexual behaviors that were not common in the past. This is especially so for behaviors that are degrading to the woman.
What's interesting about your comment though is that you accuse OP of over generalization whilst using your singular anecdotal experience in what I think can best be described as a example of under generalization.
To be fair, some people of all genders get their kicks from being sexually dominated. The issue is knowing where the other person’s limits are and having good communication. This becomes a problem when people find discussing their sexual preferences embarrassing, even with their partners. My sex life improved greatly when I started asking my partners if they have any fantasies and exploring them together. Sometimes porn can help people discover things that they otherwise would have been too shy to bring up. However, If you’re watching porn five times per day and find yourself less and less stimulated by IRL sex, you need a detox.
It’s possible though as a society we’ve lost the idea of a disordered desire. If you’ve got an authentic desire to be sexually dominated or to humiliate and dominate others, we now say “That’s ok, that’s your authentic self. It’s cool as long as everything is consensual.”
But maybe it’s not OK. Maybe it’s behavior that if indulged keeps us from living and thriving and keeps us from being our best selves.
I’m not making a moral argument here — at least I don’t think I am. Just that it might not be healthy to indulge every desire we may have. And when desires are far outside the norm, it’s worth it to be circumspect about them.
You definitely are making a moral argument, even if that isn't your intention. There is no meaningful way to define "outside the norm", so it becomes a synonym for "unnatural" and a proxy for individual prejudices. Homosexuality is statistically "outside the norm", and conservative heterosexuals use this logic to support gay conversion therapy and other bigotry. You can overindulge in any dopamine-producing activity, so the same can be said for sex, eating, drinking, smoking, etc. The particular type of sex you enjoy is as irrelevant as the brand of whiskey you prefer.
Of course there are such people. I submit though that the number of women who consent to anal and like it is much less than the number who consent and don't like it. The same for various other sex acts. I believe the research supports my position.
I didn't downvote you, but "I believe the research supports my position" is functionally equivalent to "that's my gut feeling". I'd be interested in seeing any research you've encountered that caused you to arrive at this conclusion.
Using porn to fix loneliness is like using a screwdriver as a hammer. It's not the intent of the tool, nor can you be upset with the screwdriver for being a poor hammer. The issue lies with the maker, not the tool.
Many things are clearly harmful because they exploit weaknesses in the human psyche and the average person. There is a reason why obesity is high and rising, for example.
One is that they are to be managed - their food choices kept narrow to safe ones, dangerous things removed from their environment, and only safe and allowable futures enabled. Give them little locked down tablets that don't view porn, keep their food limited to acceptable options, don't let them read dangerous books.
The other view is that humans are free agents, and to treat them as less than an agent is to fundamentally deny their identity as such. That means giving them information but letting them make "bad choices" or "the wrong choice".
There’s a road between those views: people are sometimes free agents, but often do not actively choose their own path. So while we should allow people to make their own choices when they’re actively choosing them, we can do a lot to make the default choice one that is relatively beneficial over the long term.
So things like requiring sugary drinks to carry a label that makes it obvious when a juice is as sugary as a soda. Or modifying sidewalks and parking to make walking or biking short distances more pleasurable than driving. Some of how you do this is by removing dangers from their environment, for instance by separating bike lanes from roads. And by allowing people to break from a habit cycle, for instance by establishing rules for gambling like enforcing periodic breaks in play to give people opportunities to reassess their actions.
Nothing in life is black or white. Life has many shades of gray (more than 50).
> Freedom means being able to make bad choices.
Yet here we are, where you're fined for drunk driving or for not wearing a seat belt.
* * *
There are no penalties for making bad choices that only affect <<you>>. But almost every choice you make, good or bad, affects someone else.
For an example of a very personal and selfish choice that actually impacts <<others>>, if you don't wear a seat belt and die, your family will greatly mourn your loss, but they might also not be able to make it without your financial support and have to get help from social services or from others, which others have to pay for. You'll probably turn a small accident into a big accident, and if you're not the only person in the car, you'll traumatize those with you for life (again, maybe needing help which others will pay for!) plus you're probably going to total the car (which the owner will have to pay for).
Humans aren't trees falling in a forest, trees that no one can hear falling.
* * *
Simple rule of thumb: if a restriction has been agreed to by diverse societies across the world, across tens and hundreds of countries, maybe it's there for a good reason and you're statistically not smarter than billions of people. I hope you are, but I'm willing to bet you aren't.
> There are no penalties for making bad choices that only affect <<you>>. But almost every choice you make, good or bad, affects someone else.
Sure there are, easiest one to reach for is the consumption (or even ownership) of various drugs.
Beyond that there's prostitution in many jurisdictions, and no doubt there are other "victimless" crimes still on the books (basically those formed around morality - and therefore moral harm - rather than an otherwise identifiable harm or loss).
The problem with reaching for the "almost every choice you make affects someone" trope is that it's very easy to use it to justify any moral panic you choose. Sodomy (and by that I mean non-procreative sexual activity) is an excellent example whose laws were still active in some states up to 2014* (and maybe still).
> Sure there are, easiest one to reach for is the consumption (or even ownership) of various drugs.
Drug consumption is far from victimless. Even light drugs such as marijuana have negative effects on your cognitive abilities. That has an impact on others (the archetypal example being parents distraught by their children becoming drug users).
Stuff such as heroin, cocaine, meth, definitely have serious side effects for others.
If anything, your argument backfires spectacularly, since in a world where this would be possible alcohol, tobacco and possibly coffee would also be banned, for their disastrous consequences (coffee isn't really disastrous, but it's not that good, either).
I remember reading somewhere that the mortality rate on others (i.e. someone drinks alcohol and someone else dies due to that) of alcohol, for example, is second only to heroin (maybe meth, too?). It beats out stuff like cocaine or marijuana, for example.
> Beyond that there's prostitution in many jurisdictions, and no doubt there are other "victimless" crimes still on the books (basically those formed around morality - and therefore moral harm - rather than an otherwise identifiable harm or loss).
Prostitution is not victimless. It's mostly a female occupation (male prostitutes are a very small minority) and a good chunk of female prostitutes are abused and practically forced into it. I mean, it could be victimless, but in practice coercion is so present that it's almost impossible to separate the two.
> The problem with reaching for the "almost every choice you make affects someone" trope is that it's very easy to use it to justify any moral panic you choose.
That's why I said that only stuff where there's general agreement, including both liberal and conservative countries should be considered. For example murder would fit, since there really isn't any jurisdiction where murder is not a serious crime.
> Sodomy (and by that I mean non-procreative sexual activity) is an excellent example whose laws were still active in some states up to 2014* (and maybe still).
I agree. For your example, I'm having a really hard time to come up with real life, scientific, documented, negative side effects of sodomy on others. So it's much easier to distinguish between moral panic/aesthetic (let's be honest here, it's mostly an aesthetic thing, many people are just disgusted by it).
Both of the issues you cited with drugs (harm caused by action performed whilst on drug) and prostitution (coercion) are the crimes rather than the drug or prostitution itself.
Driving while intoxicated should certainly be a crime, as should rape, or forms of coercion like intimidation. These are one step removed from the acts themselves though.
With prostitution we should be acting to separate the violence etc from the act, and one way to do that is to not punish the victim. Provide support, reduce moral judgement.
Regarding sodomy (not just buggery, but onanism, buggery, oral sex, anything non procreative), I suspect the reason provided initially would be that it's preventing conception. This limits the expansion of a culture. The aspect of disgust came later (see ancient Greek consideration of the topic vs Abrahamic faith).
There's a professor somewhere trying to prove that you can extend how long your pure water lasts by also drinking sea water; or something like that. Having trouble finding it right now.
If you think pornography is somehow uniquely modern...well, you're ignoring a millennia-long history of erotic depictions there, on top of presenting absolutely no evidence to support your rather Puritanical claims.
I think it’s a mistake to blame porn, rather than realizing porn is a self-medication for people targeted by institutional and pervasive misandry.
I understand even after several generations of men being abused, people aren’t ready to admit man-hating is a real problem in modern US society. I would encourage people to view education statistics where men have trailed women for forty years — yet receive no institutional support, while female-focused programs are lauded by the press. Or sentencing statistics, where the gap between men and women for the same crime is three times the sentencing gap between whites and blacks — something most of us recognize as a problem.
It’s the same thought process that blames video games for men staying home rather than assessing why they might rationally choose to isolate in a fictional world instead of embrace broader society.
here is a secret: we are hardwired to reproduce. you may think you have a choice but you are wired to fsck everything that has even a remote chance of resulting into you passing your genes forward.
porn is a way to release some of the tension that comes with this wiring. nothing more, nothing less.
This is basically why I prefer living in a location with seasons. Yes, CaliFlorida weather is nice. But I appreciate what all of the seasons have to offer so much more for the variation. I could do with a 25% shorter winter and summer, though ;)
> I could do with a 25% shorter winter and summer, though ;)
I also love spring and fall, spring the most. On the other hand, after reading a piece about how euphoric is spring for nature and it's actually very tiresome for living things, I learned to appreciate other seasons.
I'm a cool weather guy and more resistant to cold than hot weather, I don't dislike winter too.
Exactly this. My #1 advice for new parents is that the most important thing for a parent in the long run is to make sure their children are bored out of their gourds regularly.
Kids need to have times when screen time has run out, there's nothing on TV and they have no hobbies on engagements to run to. Just time alone without any external inputs.
This is the point where creativity usually pops up. Kids should be able to play with anything around them.
Yeah, boredom is a key, one I remember unlocking creativity when I was younger, and one I rarely can find anymore without effort (like John Cleese of Monty Python sitting in a barren room for four hours, 3.5 hours of boredom followed by a half-hour of inspired writingj[0][1].
I wish someone made the opposite lecture to John Cleese on creativity; I'm stuck in open mode, an endless supply of ideas, struggling to turn off the faucet and actually make something.
Your reading of this is rather extreme, and I feel you've missed the point by thinking that Russell is advocating to avoid fun intentionally at times so as to preserve a happy life. I read it as more an observation that the boring times, those in which there's a lack of stimulation, are an important part of a balanced, healthy life.
A more modern take on his advice would be to avoid mindlessly surfing the internet every dull moment in which we are waiting a few minutes for some time to pass. If you haven't taken an extended, conscious break from the internet outside of your work needs (no social media, no news, etc), I recommend it. It was very enlightening for me to feel this lack of stimulation. I certainly enjoy my time on the internet when I'm there because I want to be there, not because I'm just looking for something to kill the time.
Similarly, I've stopped listening to music while coding because I realized that the listening without mindfulness was killing my passion. After doing so, the passion has been restored.
His words, too, remind me of the drug user's plight. My sister works in drug rehabilitation and has told me about the struggles many go through known as Post Acute Withdrawal Syndrome. From my naive understanding, these people have adapted to the constant, unnatural amount of dopamine flowing through the brains during addiction by producing more dopamine receptors. When the drug is gone, those receptors are still there. But, the body is not capable of naturally releasing the dopamine required to fill these receptors even during the highest of natural moments, leading these people to experience serious anhedonia -- an intense lack of pleasure from everyday life. It takes a long time for these receptors to downregulate, which is the reason for such a high rate of relapse for certain drug types.
I think of Emerson's words a bit: "If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!"
I agree, and yet I think it's important not to focus too much on pleasure. Not just for the sake of productivity, but for the sake of one's own happiness. Caring about more than pleasure makes it easier to be happy. The Buddha had a lot to say about that.
Then again maybe that boils down to a mere alternate definition of pleasure. Newcomers to exercise find it painful, and that feeling never really goes away, but some learn to enjoy it.
Perhaps as you age this advice is great, and I find myself naturally trending towards it, but I wouldn't give up my past life full of titillations and jagged surprises for anything. It's been amazing so far.
Sometimes I think everyone has a set average level of happiness and as we get better at avoiding being unhappy we lose the highs as well. The only adults I know who scream in joy at Christmas presents also all have chronic depression.
I read that book also. I believe in both modalities.
I can go for days without human contact, code, "ideate" (sensory deprivation that leads to daydreaming, new product designs, and new writing ideas)... but I can't go indefinitely.
I also have ADHD and need lots of stimuli to get a rush. I don't "party hard," but I engage in copious adult activities, decadent cooking, have people over to listen to blast vinyl at annoy-the-neighbors volume and let loose like it's the last day on Earth, and extreme sports.
Your body may age, but never give up the joy of life. YOLADO (you only live and die once).
In graduate school, I worked for 2+ years before my first paper was published. In that time, I passed my PhD qualifying exam, took classes, wrote code, read papers, learned math, and so forth. Yet when I applied for internships, I received no interest from employers. I suspect this was because I had no concrete signal that I knew anything in my field.
While working on my second paper, I started blogging. In the language of this article, I started generating public intellectual capital for myself. I have definitely experienced the effects of this capital on subsequent job hunts. Now I can point people to my blog to demonstrate knowledge, technical skills, and communication skills beyond the scope of my peer-reviewed work. Furthermore, there is no question about who contributed to my blog, and when I learn something new, I can externalize that quickly.
This happened to me when I left academia. No “real credentials”. Math expert with strong computer background (phd, published papers, years of experience in research/teaching) didn’t said more than “one year data science ‘masters’ abroad”. It took me quite some time to translate my expertise into marketable skills. Before that, I got passed on even for entry level positions.
While a PhD can do the work, you really want the PhD to direct the work and explore new related things. A lot of this will depend on where you apply. That being said the market for data scientists has exploded in the past 2 years. 3-5 years ago things were different. Part of this is due to maturation of the tooling and the development of data platforms with organizations building out their data pipelines etc...
Thing is, while PhDs are usually by far the biggest domain experts you'll get, the absolute majority of them comes absolutely ill-equipped to lead anything, as university rarely teaches any skills in project, people or resource management skills, business sense, opportunity cost and presentation.
I've had disastrous outcomes going by credentials for leadership positions and these days only hire for demonstrated results on a real-world project.
Just my personal anecdotal evidence points me towards stellar academic success having a slight negative correlation with on-the-job performance. People who prefer building things with impact over citation rubber points usually don't survive in academia long enough for enduring a PhD.
Well I had a “math expert” join my team recently and the problems were: they couldn’t work in a team, verbally expressed their intellectual superiority to everyone else, didn’t have the technical ability to get anything into production, could not follow instructions from superiors, thought most of the work they were given was “boring” and invented their own projects to work on, etc. I don’t know if that type of attitude is acceptable in academia, but it won’t work in industry. So now I’m extremely cautious about on boarding anyone without a proven track record at working outside academia. I simply don’t have the time to “manage” someone like that, shit had to get done.
It’s my biggest problem, both with people who want trendy frameworks, and myself who was bored with work in my younger years (til I started drinking and made changes and created my company). “From a million dollars, anything is your passion” is quite true (was it Joel on Software?), but IT is quite boring when evolving at the lower levels.
I’ve loved the book “Tribal leadership” which defines levels of career,
1-Almost dropout;
2-Bored worker (apathetic victim, but delivers work - This was me);
3-Working like an as but executing on your own skills (“lone warrior” - This is me now);
4-Executes well with a mentor above and mentoring below, which pushes the organization forward by “belonging” to the social fabric;
5-Executes for others - Creates relationship between people so they can execute together - that’s the “startup ecosystem” or corporate leader style, those people often look like gurus amazed by the smartness of people in their ecosystem, which, if they are contagious and humble, becomes true leadership.
I believe these attitudes are somehow commonplace along academia, but I think it extrapolates to several disciplines, including software development or engineering.
There is a misunderstanding between where on the abstraction layer you are standing and how smart you are. The commonplace along mathematicians is that, as we are standing pretty low, we are the smartest of them all, and since there is basically no interaction with people in other layers, this belief gets comfortably reinforced.
Smarts comes in different flavors, and realizing that yours is just one of many and does not work at all in other contexts is hard. Treating others like morons and acting bored is a lousy way to deal with it.
your blog is very high quality and i've enjoyed it in the past (Metropolis-Hastings post especially).
however there's a problem if everybody is going to do this, if it becomes standard that you want to have a blog in order to promote yourself during a job hunt.
i think this is why search results are cluttered with a proliferation of largely useless "awesome X" GitHub repositories, repetitive bad Medium articles on basic ML topics, and so on.
I hope we don't end up in the world where everyone has to do this... there's certainly a diminishing social utility.
> "i think this is why search results are cluttered with a proliferation of largely useless "awesome X" GitHub repositories, repetitive bad Medium articles on basic ML topics, and so on."
This is such a sad way to view blogging and Github contributions...
There's nothing wrong with people writing bad articles. In fact everyone writes badly to begin with.
The same goes for Github contributions, everyone starts off with demo repos and broken projects.
The beauty of the internet is that it is infinite and you can build up your skills in blogging and coding over time.
It's the job of search engines to reveal quality results, not for people to only contribute quality results...
> There's nothing wrong with people writing bad articles. In fact everyone writes badly to begin with.
It's ok to write badly in the beginning. It's less ok (to say the least) to publish the bad writing in the Internet and decrease it's mean quality level in result. Of course, by now the cat's way out of the bad and Internet is mostly low-effort, low-value crap. Arguably, it's been this way since the very beginning. In terms of quality and curation it's basically the digital equivalent of a wall in a public restroom. But still, I find scribbling on such walls to be in poor taste...
> "It's less ok (to say the least) to publish the bad writing in the Internet and decrease it's mean quality level in result"
This presumes that the "mean quality level" of the internet is actually important. With the scale of the internet now, it literally doesn't matter how many bad articles are uploaded, as search engines filter what is good/bad for you (whether or not search engines are good is another story). 1,000 results or 10 billion results you'll only look at the top 15 anyway...
> "In terms of quality and curation it's basically the digital equivalent of a wall in a public restroom"
This analogy assumes that there is limited physical space and people will be subjected to reading it, the internet is much different and a lot of content will never get advertised or even read.
So my question for anyone with this line of thinking is, how would you know when your writing has improved and ready to be published? I think the best way is to write and publish often and look for feedback.
Civil engineers don't have to build bridges in their back yards or write blog posts about I beams; their education is presumed sufficient for an entry level job. Why can't tech work like this? Do students need to form some kind of union and agree not to talk about extracurricular programming to interviewers for their first job?
We understand and can certify how bridges are constructed. Someone from the government can come in and check your work reasonably quickly and make sure it’s up to code. There’s a “trust” step and a “verify” step. And it often takes a lot of time to do iteration.
Software engineering isn’t like that. Not only are the tools changing every year, but 95% of the work in a project isn’t actually design or construction, it’s figuring out what the client wants or the product should be! Requirements are discovered as construction happens because most of the time software is solving a business problem not a physics problem.
There’s no certification because there isn’t something to standardize. Every company has different problems, technical solutions are always changing. Interview processes are trying to look at generic problem solving + communication + ability to translate some easy algorithmic idea into code. They don’t do a great job of assessing that, but the point is that two CS degrees can look identical on paper but there’s so much fuzzy interpersonal/business/requirement-assessment work that basically isnt captured at all by a degree, and is really hard to demonstrate on a resume.
You can surely become a very poor civil engineer that way. Perhaps nobody wants one, because the average quality is so much higher, but nothing stops you from calling yourself that.
As someone who has interviewed hundreds of entry-level developers, the range of skills/talent/ability is enormous.
I expect you would have a hard time getting top students to join your union.
(On the other hand, I don't care at all about side projects or seeing code on GitHub. I want to see how you solve a realistic problem that I have seen dozens of other people take a crack at for comparison.)
Not necessarily. OP wrote a blog about their research paper. That is by definition a nov or rare topic.
If people use any kind of horse sense when choosing blogging topics they will either choose something:
1. Unique, or
2. Where what they have to contribute beats what already exists
To be sure, anything poorly done is clutter. But this applies to the work product itself too. If someone writes garbage, superfluous blog posts, why would you expect good research from them?
Despite the massive amount of information that exists the world certainly does not have enough good, specific information yet.
I don't think this is entirely true. Getting in the habit of writing, even if a lot of it is things other people have said better, means that when you do have something novel to say you will be much more practiced.
My experience is that when people try to only write the good posts they don't end up publishing things, but if they write hundreds of posts dozens will be good.
I agree, and you’re actually supporting my argument with additional reasons against OP haha.
But in the case of a research blog about a new research paper I think my point above trends closer to true, as the novelty of the subject guarantees novelty of the blog.
I totally agree and had a very similar experience in graduate school. Writing about my experiences and things I had learned (technical and project management) had a huge impact on my ability to demonstrate my knowledge and is without a doubt why I quickly received two job offers before defending my phd (biology/neuroscience). I think papers are a really poor way to demonstrate the huge amounts of work you've done unless you stay in academia (and probably not even then).
This is one thing I messed up during my grad school studies. Now that I have a "real job", getting the ball rolling on blogging about what I'm looking into / learning about is harder (although that is still a convenient excuse).
Thank goodness I have been meticulously keeping track of what I've learned in Org mode for years. I've just gotta dredge that old database for some blog posts (starting with why folks who are similar to me should really consider not going to grad school...).
I work on a well established, closed source, trade secrets style e-commerce site. I can never seem to think about anything I could write up that would not involve me reworking everything to be more general. I also think it would largely boil down to a Stack Overflow link. I am doing more management now, so that might make this problem a little easier to solve for me.
I had one of these blogs years ago and I found the questions I had to look up were great subjects for blog posts. Many of them wound up being pretty basic: thread safe singleton in java, sort a list, etc. This isn't a PhD thesis, it doesn't have to be profound, you're just trying to demonstrate you can write some code and communicate.
I don't think I did a good job of articulating my point. By the time I wash out all the domain specific stuff, I believe I am left with a post that is even less valuable than a link to a Stack Overflow discussion about the same issue. Does that make sense? What value am I adding to the world if I spend an hour typing up my thoughts on this and I could have just linked to SO? Also, my blog traffic is effectively 0 people. I don't think it is wrong for others to do so, it just isn't the right thing for me.
EDIT - sorry, I missed the fact that we are talking about producing a blog as a proof that I understand and think about programming in a certain way (e.g. as useful to people evaluating me)... You are absolutely right, then, and I withdraw my objection.
I am not currently looking for work but if I were, I think a blog focused on dev would be more valuable than my collection of half-baked github repos. Food for thought.
The pithy way I tell people is that they should only do a PhD if they can't NOT do a PhD, i.e. they feel so compelled to work on a specific thing and have found an advisor who will advise them but ultimately let them do their own thing to a great degree. The only other viable option is to find a tenure-track junior professor who really has their stuff together (including their work ethic and emotional intelligence; often the latter can be lacking).
One also has to consider the time cost of doing a PhD, and whether spending the equivalent time working would have gotten them further not only in career, but also salary. Between a) people who go from undergrad to a job and don't really keep pushing themselves, b) people who go to grad school to hopefully skip to a more interesting job post-PhD, and c) people who go from undergrad to a job but really push hard to learn new skills (e.g. presenting at conferences, blogging about it, etc), option C is generally leaps and bounds ahead of the other two.
A PhD is worth considering if the thing you're interested in most is not really used widely in industry (perhaps some PL stuff?).
Also, prospective PhD students need to consider that there is a very asymmetric relationship between advisor / advisee compared to a normal job. If my job starts treating me like dirt, I can tell them to shove it and quit ASAP because I know that my skills can get me another job in short order. With a PhD, it is almost impossible to quit a PhD and then pick it up again if you and your advisor have some sort of falling out; every future PhD position will look at the prior "failure" with suspicion, losing the nuance of issues besides the actual work that triggered the separation.
Basically you need to really understand why you want a PhD (and whether you could do better towards your ultimate career goal without it), and if that's a "yes" you need to really make sure you can get along with your advisor for years. A strong advisor can "compensate" for a weak student (i.e. get them through the program), and a strong student can compensate for a weak advisor (e.g. students who basically do their own thing from the get go, and have high-ranking perpetually absentee advisors who do more research bureaucracy than research and advise by way of ominous single-word emails), but if both are weak it's a recipe for disaster, and only the student gets hurt.
Getting a visa into a country via graduate studies is definitely a good reason (especially in the US it seems), but often an MS is sufficient (except if one tries to get in on the green-card fast-track via the O1 visa, which requires an exceptional PhD track record).
How did you "[generate] public intellectual capital" though? Posting your blog places, or just by virtue of being able to refer to the blog in your resume it helped your job hunts?
