Ever hear the very early Talking Heads song, "Artists Only" - David Byrne remarks,

"pretty soon now, I will be bitter, pretty soon now, I will be a quitter. You... can't... see... it... til it's finished"

My father knew this too, intuitively. He did some really nice, not-for-profit, practical projects on a very low budget. He'd like to comment during those fruitful years, "now, that's a pregnant idea" - the point being, perhaps, that you want to allow the idea to develop way past the fertilization stage, before releasing it into the world. The British have a term, "half-baked idea" that may run along the same lines.

What a nice essay. Thank you, author! It's hard to imagine these insights being hatched by interactions on social media, where everyone is a critic, and always so cock-sure that their biases are so correct.

Of course, our educational system is loaded the the dialectic-style interaction style, where there is a dogma that the truth can be arrived at by negation of opinions through a Socratic question-and-answer dialogue, but that often often goes nowhere. In my most productive R&D experiences, where I was often the only guy in the lab who had various consultants milking the billable hours, the best bosses would give plenty of space for diving into trying this or that, because they respected that intuition needs to run free. Then, the numbers and other results would validate the assumptions or instincts. But just point-blank instinctively shooting down every new idea... often goes nowhere - and happens so often. Too often.

Thanks again.

I stopped posting to my website. Why should it be so much work to stop this theft?

Would it be helpful to have geofencing and regulation?

I worked for a very small company getting funding by the Medici Fund a while back. First I ever heard of the name.

So much intrigue in the past. Guys like Montaigne were said to have "food tasters" to sample the goods before they ate themselves.

As a career trace analytical chemist, I can tell you for sure, that weird poisonings are so much less likely to occur now, because of the probability of detection. That's a little comforting. The same goes for the food supply. Mechanisms are in place to rapidly detect deliberately placed poisons.

Ever been to a third world country and seen happy people who make just a couple hundred bucks a month, yet are very healthy and happy? I have. It's very life changing.

Who are the historical figures that you revere the most? Did their positive influences upon your life originate from making and having money?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48987060

Points: 3

# Comments: 0

Actually, it's a great question. Even if we have single photon sensitivity detectors, just what kind of power would a laser need? Or would it be some other area of the emf spectrum? Or some other kind of communication? Sci fi ventures into gravitational waves sometimes

And work out safe systems for hibernation, maybe rotate the crew in shifts

Oh yeah this is the stuff of science fiction coming to life

Nothing to see here, move along move along.

I reconcile it by realizing that advertisers wield enormous power. Also, it's not called "good information" it's called "news" - nothing is promised in terms of guaranteed good factual content. And I remember that Palestinians are semites. So are Arabs. Immigrants from Eastern European flocking to the mideast are not semites at all.

100% agree about the personalization of news topics and stories. When I look at my spouse's newsfeed in the evening (she uses yahoo) I remark to her "that's clickbait" and get a relatively violent reaction. "Relatively" because normally she is very pleasant. But tailoring the media to past viewing history is potentially very dangerous. In the wrong hands, the news feed could be tweaked just a little bit, day by day, week by week, to enable or worsen certain biases. And surely, we see some of this daily already. Why else would billionaires purchase large US media companies?

The best guidance I've seen to have a well balanced view of world news, is to use several independent sources globally. Do not rely upon "newsfeeds" (doesn't it suggest that we are cattle in a way?), don't spend too much time in any one place, use a variety of search engines to confirm or disprove questionable conclusions, and try to read print books by reputable authors on topics that really fascinate us.

Nassim Talib offered some good advice in his books on the so-called "news" - if you really want to see the value in the news, try to go to the library for a print newspaper, and look at the news from a week ago. Is it really as important to you as the "news" today? Very often, it will seem completely meaningless, ancient history. If that is the case, we are getting something from the information other than the information itself. It's something that has to be tried to learn the lesson.

Advertising? I see very little, using linux with brave browser and various plug ins. When I use google chrome, the results are horrifying. I've used google for 30 years now, but have been de-googling for over a year now. It's been a healthy experience. I don't know what is happening with them. Maybe they abandoned the "don't be evil" prematurely?

A large part of that was that early adopters tended to be more educated, played nicely, and were not involved in attention-seeking, sychophancy, and often, escapism.

Another factor is the bright colors, moving videos and other eye candy, and psychological hacks like the emojis for "liking" and gaining "followers" which produce addictive feedback loops.

Of course, this interview touches on valid points, but is not the whole picture. "Bad news travels fast" and gets more clicks. That helps explain the rot of the news media.

Maybe I am oversimplifying too, however. Factors like sophisticated persuasion campaigns by various organizations, for example, cannot be discarded. Likewise with the advertisers.

OH JUST SAW that link.. thank you. So these forces are as strong as AIPAC. Good to know. FWIW, I try to be grassroots, just enlightening people one by one. Most don't want the truth. They want convenience, likes, thumbs up and worthless confirmation bias. But I'll try.

Why all this data center mania. Okay, I get it. Each and every one of us has data that is worth a few thousand bucks, that we give away for free, so that data brokers in the gleaming towers of SF, Chitown, NYC, or in swampy areas of Florida can sell it all to the highest bidder.

But please think about what you are doing to the US and the world. From what I am seeing, we could all go up in flames.

Thank for your attention to this matter

- Someone who is in the bottom 2% of energy consumption.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48725972

Points: 9

# Comments: 5

Brush and floss bruddahs.