Medium really botched the paywall approach and I couldn't possibly agree with you more. It is so inconsistently applied and quite honestly I can't justify spending 5 dollars a month on a "publisher" whose content is so variable. Some Medium articles are really good, others are baseless clickbait, it's hard to tell until you read the article and already sunk the time and the money.
I'm thinking of writing an extension that would go grab the first page of each link and tell me if they want me to pay. The extension would turn the link red if so. How consistently can I get this right though? I can't just go by domain name because sometimes I have free articles left, on New Yorker for example. I agree with you on Medium. I was more angry until I found out it is up to the individual authors to turn on the paywall for their article so they can get paid. 60 dollars a year for hit or miss medium content is a bit rich. They must think they are in the same league as NYT or WAPO
I am a little unclear on what the editorial bent of this is. Are they trying to use this as another way to say that Amazon unfairly compensates workers?
If so, it seems like a cheap target. I've always known mechanical turk as a way to get dead stupid tasks done by people, but not as a way to earn a living.
How much should someone be compensated to do something so simple? At will? I don't understand. MT has been around for a while, this isn't some new sinister plot to undermine the workers of the world.
I also have seen some people who employ workers through MT support a 15 dollar an hour minimum wage. It's up to the person deploying the task, not Amazon.
I don't know if best is the right word, but he is definitely one of the best. Some of the things I think really make him stand out are his storytelling, his flow, and his charisma (that he looks unconventional also probably plays into this). Also Puff Daddy was instrumental as a hype man in getting him to platforms like MTV etc. And his untimely death definitely plays into the modern mythology. But I think if there is anything that truly encompasses his talent it's this video right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hbwdAOogBw and this demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rEaPDNgUPLE&feature=kp
And this new reputation economy will only be as good as the cultural biases of the engineers of the technology. Which could net us a worse situation than there is currently.
Also not terribly excited about this. But i should also probably just move on from posting here. Not a big contributor and have found that overall there's a huge echo chamber dynamic to this community that's generally hard to break through. Really hard to have a dissenting opinion unless you're just doing it for academic reasons or devil's advocacy. I imagine with this, myself and many other new or not high participating members that don't go full heartedly with the general belief system here will find themselves wedged out of the conversation. Oh well.
Its true, but there are even fields of science based almost entirely on assumptions.
Even then, there is a neuroscience branch called neural coding that apparently acknowledges the existence of a neural code; but judging from the wikipedia entry their approach seems still too "low level".
I've never found these "brain plasticity" arguments very compelling. I had no motivation or context for learning when I was young (0-20) and while I might have done well in school tests and read a lot of books, I don't think I really absorbed anything in any depth, or thought in any particularly interesting or challenging ways - I certainly never achieved anything which would have required so much willpower and focus as learning to program modern computers.
And now that I am older (mid-20s) and my brain is supposedly less plastic, but I have motivation, context and determination in abundance, I feel like I am really learning and developing for the first time in my life.
The fact that it is possible for a motivated 25-year-old to be better at learning something than the same person as an unmotivated 10-year-old does not refute the fact that human brain development is such that certain forms of learning are much easier at 10 than at 25.
Neuroplasticity primarily relates to the evolved ability of young children to rapidly, effortlessly acquire basic, evolutionarily critical behaviours - language systems and other core social behaviour necessary for tight social integration (and later various more complex but still critical secondary social behaviours) in a small hunter gatherer pack essentially - all picked up subconsciously from the social environment.
The important difference is that all of this acquisition is a result of tens of thousands of years of consistent natural selection. It's hard-wired because humans have needed these things, and children have needed them as fast as possible, for a long long time.
The things humans attempt to learn in modern times however (non-native languages, formal systems of logic, the ability to argue and reason in complex fashions, the ability to program complex systems) are completely evolutionarily unprecedented, and the result is clear: children are not able to acquire these behaviours effortlessly. They don't just rub off. Instead they (generally) require focussed, extensive supervision and tuition from humans that have already put in the hard work of mastering them.
So the relevance of neuroplasticity still seems small to me.
> The things humans attempt to learn in modern times however (non-native languages, formal systems of logic, the ability to argue and reason in complex fashions, the ability to program complex systems) are completely evolutionarily unprecedented, and the result is clear: children are not able to acquire these behaviours effortlessly.
At least in the case of non-native languages, while it may not be "effortless", every study I've seen has indicated that it is much easier for children to learn them.
If some folks were just trying to pay the bills, working in government or biotech would be fine. What kind of bills are we talking about? I think it's more that sex and photo sharing, at the moment, net an excess of wealth quickly and efficiently.
