The bit about the pigeon's name was funny, too!

I love myNoise and hope it continues forever. Guess I'll donate again soon!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44098877

Points: 2

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43538338

Points: 198

# Comments: 166

I have a pet theory that volume is required for quality, but would love to be wrong so that I can feel less bad about how much I publish!

If a AAA-tier podcast on the subject you want to listen to a podcast about exists (and you know about it), then that's probably a better (and obvious) choice for your listening time.

However, if you want to listen to someone discuss or explain something and you don't know about a AAA-tier podcast, it's possible that a generated podcast is better than nothing.

On the other hand, it's also possible that the generated podcast will miss or hallucinate a key detail, and herein lies the dilemma. Is it better to listen to something that might get something wrong, or not to listen and perhaps someday to learn about the subject through some other form that is less likely to include mistakes?

Sorry, naive questions: what is a terrifying dilemma to 21st century epistemologist? What is the "modern" recipe?

Layperson coverage: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/09/study-shows-t...

I read a more interesting takeaway, perhaps: that we can — and do — develop new "senses" for any given signal we can perceive. A possibly-shoddy example of this is what social media does to us: the social networks provided everyone with a novel social sense, and indeed everyone who uses social networks perceive and attenuate to that sense in different ways.

This has practical implications: given that we don't have infinite cognitive capacity or even much moment-to-moment bandwidth, we should be careful about which of these digital senses have our attention.

There're obvious links here to "augcog" (augmented cognition; [1]), but also I feel like Ackoff's five assumptions about "management misinformation systems" are relevant somehow[2].

Interesting to think about!

[1]: Especially DARPA's work and similar — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_cognition#DARPA's_Au... [2]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2628680

If that dynamic means that we miss out on the readings that are truly transformative, we've lost. So perhaps the strategic differentiator between readers is to actually have a really powerful theory of prioritization, and useful mechanisms to prioritize (such as the curated references of a good university course or a social network that shares only the most important resources, regardless of how difficult they are to understand).

I'm increasingly of a similar view — that the great filter is something we're already past, due to the incredible combinations of constraints that led to where we are today.

Another infinitesimal probability may be the development of abstract intelligence. The conditions that led to our brand of intelligence being an evolutionary advantage seem particularly unique: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK210002/

A central graph in the 2016 address (found on page 2) has numerous visualization issues (e.g., misalignment of the lines on the graph to exaggerate differences, no uncertainty ranges are provided, averaging data sets in the curves, leaving out data) [2].

[1]: https://skepticalscience.com/skeptic_John_Christy.htm

[2]: https://skepticalscience.com/climate-models-intermediate.htm

[0]: https://www.theverge.com/c/22173998/dna-time-capsule

I made a table comparing different email services on the MacPowerUsers forum a while back. It's in need of updating but might be handy: https://talk.macpowerusers.com/t/icloud-mail-fastmail-gmail-...