What's the problem with a good book, age? Baby Rudin's first edition is 70 and the latest one is from 1976. It's still widely used and will be for a while.
Honestly your problem was that you didn't know any Classical Mechanics yet and you were assuming that the volume of recent developments made old books obsolete. Maybe in Biology, in Physics getting to recent developments would mean that you're familiar with Goldstein, Landau's Vol. I... Abraham-Marsden? Arnold? Those are old.
Often newer editions actually worsen textbooks and then only a few contemporary books become references in the long run. It's always been like this, there's tons of great books from the 70s that aren't used today and could definitely do. At least they're not ~1,000 pp. of waffle, which is what you usually get for your first textbook on anything nowadays.
You're conflating things. This issue isn't that Classical Mechanics has somehow evolved or changed. It's that people continue to find new and better ways to explain and illustrate concepts. At lest personally I don't know of any field or book where I've felt "Hmm, this is basically perfect and I can't imagine a better way to explain these concepts".
Have you looked at for instance Khan Academy's Grant Sanderson (aka 3Blue1Brown) Math videos? it's really apparent there is a LOT of room for improvement in pedagogy.
As the linked PDF illustrates, most people are teaching along a set formula and sequence of concepts. Good teachers will try to tweak and iterate on these formulas and evolve a better curriculum that sinks in better for students.
Naturally as time goes on, if each author has to start from scratch, then it becomes harder and harder to beat "the best book on BLAH" from the last 100 years. (Though I refuse to believe it's a monumental task to write a better textbook than Rudin)
If you have open copy-left books, then in theory people could start with a Rudin, fork it, tweak it and improve it. 70 years of improvement could yield some amazing forks!
"Often newer editions actually worsen textbooks"
That's typically because they select a random new author to in-effect update their copyright date.. and the new author is rarely of the same caliber as the first
> Have you looked at for instance Khan Academy's Grant Sanderson (aka 3Blue1Brown) Math videos?
I have. I went through Khan Academy, Brilliant and 3Blue1Brown. After spending more than 100s of hours I started getting the feeling that these are all good for elementary level math.
But for any serious math (think real analysis, complex analysis, group theory and beyond), all these platforms did was leave me with a warm fuzzy feeling of having learned something cool but in reality that warm fuzzy feeling was not good enough for solving actual exercises that come in textbooks or really deeply understand the material.
I've given up on these online learning media. Back to textbooks. The difference is like night and day.
Note that 3B1B often warns you that his videos bring perspective for a book/class that you're doing or are already done with. And Khan Academy's focus is for K-12.
If you want anything past Analysis 1 I think you'll find that universities guard their content.
> If you want anything past Analysis 1 I think you'll find that universities guard their content.
Not so; there's an absolutely vast amount of freely available undergraduate mathematics resources available at all levels. Honestly, so much that it makes it confusing to choose and not get distracted by the options -- perhaps AI-mediated distillation could be helpful in the future.
Really? Can you link some for Analysis and beyond?
I wanted to find good analysis video lectures from a real university complete with problem sets, homeworks and their solutions. I couldn’t. I think MIT OCW now has one analysis course like that, but it’s relatively “recent”.
> I think you'll find that universities guard their content.
Hmm. All the way back to when I was in college there was advanced content available from the Open University. You had to be awake at 2am and it was in black and white, but it was there.
I didn't mean to say videos are better - just as far as I can tell that's where the most creative new teaching techniques are on display. I'd definitely prefer they were in the written word. Especially if they were an open collaborative effort. Books are great for flipping back and forth with. You have an "ah-ha" moment and skip back several pages and reread something you misunderstood on a first read-through. It's somehow clunky and takes you out of the flow when you do it in a video.
Critically, you can read/listen to something and come away with the false impression you understand it. Sitting down and doing problem is .. not always fun.. but can be critical for the concepts to sink in. I think this is the main point of what you're saying
I could see in the future it being something like watching a video and then doing a programming exercise
I've given up on these online learning media. Back to textbooks. The difference is like night and day.
Are there people who think this is an "either/or" choice, as opposed to a "use both" thing?? I ask, because it's pretty well established that learning is enhanced by use of multiple media types and it seems self-evident to me that books and videos are complementary.
> it seems self-evident to me that books and videos are complementary
Can't speak for others but for me it is more about efficient utilization of time rather than complementing multiple learning methods.
I've found that time spent in learning math from videos have poor return of investment. That time is better spent re-reading a chapter or that thing that I couldn't fully understand the first time and doing more exercises.
Fair enough. For me personally, I find great value in jumping back and forth between different modalities, where the different presentations reinforce each other. But what works for me may not work for everyone, and vice-versa.
I think you're just parroting things you've heard other people say. 3b1b's videos are universally agreed to be excellent, and it's baffling that you think it is a choice between watching them and using textbook and doing the exercises. Anyone with the intellectual capacity to study that sort of material is not going to have a hard time comprehending that they are intended to be complementary, as Grant Sanderson makes very clear at numerous points.
Hmm - I do wonder if for very particular things in physics their heyday has come and gone? Were there more ridiculously talented inviduals deeply steeped in classical mechanics and discussing amongst themselves in the past? I feel modern physicists move onto high-energy phyics or low-energy physics research pretty early in their careers...
Then you are objectively wrong. Look at Grant Sanderson's explanation of introductory Linear Algebra. Very obviously it adds something good to complement the best paper textbooks on the subject.
There are excellent textbooks on Classical Mechanics, probably because it's a crystal clear subject and you can give a detailed account of the essentials in a single volume without handwaving. Of course everything can be improved, but it also can be muddled. If it works think twice before fixing it. Kind of what happens with Rudin and introductory Real Analysis.
On the other hand, there's for instance Optics where you basically have to condense an encyclopaedia and there's always prettier pictures. Or Thermodynamics, Fluid Mechanics etc that can be taught in different ways depending on the curriculum.
There definitely should be pedagogical considerations in higher education, that's lacking because it's usually an afterthought. And it also should be very clear to people getting into higher education that at some later point pedagogy must end and you have to be capable of working your way through the material.
I think you have the perspective of somehow who's succeeded in Physics. In your typical introductory physics class less than half the students will walk away with a very solid understanding of classical mechanics.
To my mind, if the textbook was actually excellent then that would be 80%+. We're nowhere near there. I think there is LOT of room for improvement
But sure.. Thermodynamics.. things could be worse :)
Sometimes things are just hard because they're complicated and you need to buckle down and learn your multiplication tables. But at least in my own life experience, the vast majority of the time things are a problem because their poorly explained - often by people that poorly understand it themselves.
Once you truly understand something inside and out - and look back on it - it all generally looks relatively simple. But it takes a special talent to be able to go back and reexplain it from the naiive perspective
> In your typical introductory physics class less than half the students will walk away with a very solid understanding of classical mechanics.
That's probably true.
> To my mind, if the textbook was actually excellent then that would be 80%+. We're nowhere near there. I think there is LOT of room for improvement
In my view, that's probably false. I don't think the problem is masochism, gatekeeping, and people holding on to old textbooks. I think the problem is that classical mechanics is actually hard, at least for most people. If you come in to beginning classical mechanics wanting to have learned it, rather than wanting to learn it, no textbook can save you. And I think that many people come in that way. They want it out of the way as a prerequisite for something else, rather than really wanting to know it for itself.
> To my mind, if the textbook was actually excellent then that would be 80%+. We're nowhere near there. I think there is LOT of room for improvement
I think you overestimate the capabilities of students entering university (even 20 years ago), and underestimate how poor high schools can be in preparing said students.
I went to a mediocre university. A 50-80% drop out rate was there for both physics and EE - I don't know how it compares to the other engineering. And I did not even consider it challenging. Almost all the classes were a breeze for someone like me who was well prepared going in. At least in that EE department, the teachers were very dedicated to teaching. They would allocate 3-9 hours a week for office hours, and the pace they taught as was slow (probably only covered 70-80% of the material that is covered in a top university).
Students were given lots of chances.
The reasons they drop out are:
- Poor preparation at the high school level
- Poor discipline. A lot of students didn't transition well to independence, and didn't have an authority figure (e.g. parent) controlling their schedule.
- Realizing too late what it means when courses are built on top of other courses. Thus you'd have people getting an A in Calculus I, but almost failing Calculus III because they didn't realize they needed Calculus I beyond the course.
- In high school you can get far with a cursory understanding of the material. At university, you could get a B, or even an A, with that approach for introductory courses, but that approach will start trending towards an F in junior/senior level courses.
Sure, I agree with you that pedagogy can be improved, but I expect that 80% would at best become 60% if all you focus on is pedagogy.
I almost wrote above that, to my knowledge and IMVHO, no one has succeeded at writing a book on Thermodynamics yet. I self-censored because that would be too flippant, wouldn't it? Lmao
I took thermodynamics over 30 years ago. I remember having the feeling of learning a different language using a text book whose explanations also needed translation. I remember the book explained Entropy using chaos theory or randomness and talked about popular philosophy during the 19th century. After a bit of mental torture, I realized by Entropy they really mean Thermodynamic Stability. It is just that heat usually dissipates when materials touch, they were using words like chaos or randomness to describe the process. But their description was vague and poorly conceived.
I think Thermo can only be taught if you have a solid foundation in statistics. And stats... is not really taught in the US? I tried to selfstudy a bit, but the textbook situation with stats make math look amazing. For very intro practical things, there are stuff like John Taylor's book... but past that anything rigorous - I actually have no idea how people learn anything
Why should pedagogy ever end? That's like saying at some point in health care medicine must end and you're responsible for your own treatment. What are the professors for, doing research and abusing their grad students?
The idea is becoming intellectually independent, arriving in the stage of self-pedagogy if you like. Peer learning when there's the chance.
You can't realistically expect that there will always be someone up the ladder to explain things to you. I mean, who explains stuff to the professors if it worked like that?
When you get to university, the lesson is very much that you have to learn things yourself. I found that the more decorated the professor, the worse he was at explaining anything, due to some mixture of being unable to go back to a state of ignorance and being in a seat where his main responsibilities are elsewhere (grant applications!). I'm talking about 1or2-to-one tuition here, done several times a week to kids who did very well in high school.
Yes, you have to shed the expectation that others will teach you, I agree with that. In the end, people slogged through by doing a bunch of reading from various sources. It is maybe the main lesson of university for everyone: you're not in high school anymore, you won't just learn whatever the guy says while talking to you. It's quite the shock if you had actually good teachers at school.
The thing is though, you can still demand good teaching materials. Textbooks have to explain things in the clearest way possible. They shouldn't be confusing, especially considering they end up being the main source for just about everything. In this modern world where there are online lectures and textbooks, there's no reason we can't all have the very best explanations of every relevant concept. Yes, of course as a student you still have to put in the time, but the materials ought to be the very best.
You seem to have a very individualistic notion of education.
Even at the research level we are not independent islands of learning and discovery. People collaborate, some pickup certain concepts better than others and vice versa. So we teach and aid each other.
It seems you're firmly against this notion? Or if not please clarify your position?
I think everyone should be capable of working alone as well, and that has been the general assumption around as far as I've noticed. Of course collaboration is usually way more productive and also unavoidable.
But we were talking about education. Theses are individual for a reason.
> Have you looked at for instance Khan Academy's Grant Sanderson (aka 3Blue1Brown) Math videos? it's really apparent there is a LOT of room for improvement in pedagogy.
There is a study showing that you actually understand material better, if you use the most primitive methods: chalkboard and a lecture. Because you are forced to visualize the material yourself, instead of being presented with a ready-made animation.
It probably makes sense to use visual aids for students that just can't grasp the concept, but I believe this will only help in elementary math.
1. I think the research shows that increasing the cognitive load increases the retention. So in general, when it is harder to learn something, you retain it better.
2. When I struggle with books it is because they do not present the motivation behind what they are doing. Videos and "more popular" articles can both provide the big-picture motivation and overview. Sometimes, you have to construct a motivation for yourself, based on what you read. That's hard. Maybe you even invent something new in order to understand a concept better. This approach is slow, though. It's easier if someone explains to you why a certain concept is "hard" or a point of view from which the concept is "easy".
3. I think students who build on a partial understanding are not going to have a better time with videos. They are in greater need of learning how to learn something than they are of facts, but school does not teach that skill (afaik).
I've suggested to college students that they leave their laptops behind and attend lecture with pen and notebook, and take notes. It makes things a lot more sticky in the mind.
And do the homework problems. You'll never understand the material without doing the problem sets.
I had a 1930s edition of a "radio physics" textbook as a child, and because there could be no prior assumptions about exposure or familiarity, it was filled with very complex ideas explained so cohesively and coherently that, well, I could understand.
The author knew that this book was for people who might be as involved in the business of radio as its science or engineering, so they wrote as much about the application across every industry, breaking down the systems to the component level and manufacturers, deployment, and ordering, as they did the design and theory.
I learned how to evaluate a textbook from its structure and style. It certainly wasn't designed for discrete lessons, and the professor would have needed a diverse and practical understanding to teach it effectively.
I wonder if the same thing isn't happening with computer science. When I started studying the topic in the late 80's, I was part of the earliest generation that actually did, and everything seemed to be explicitly written with the goal of making sense. Some things (like recursion and pointers) were fundamentally complicated, but they were made as simple as they reasonably could be.
My son is studying computer science in college right now and I look at the way they present the material and it often seems designed to confuse - I'll read it over and then explain it to him the way _I_ was taught it and he'll say, "oh my gosh, why don't they explain it that way?"
I feel like teaching is mostly a one size fits all endeavor, but people learn and think in different ways, just like a processor is optimized for some operations but not others.
Take simple arithmetic like 12x17. Some people do the long form multiplication (carry the one..), some people say it's 12x10+12x7. Some remember 12x12 from times tables and go 12x12+12x5. Some people make it 24x8+12 => 48x4+12 => 50x4-8+12 etc. Some do it on the abacus in their heads.
All valid, though some are slightly more optimal than others. Good teachers empower alternative solutions and try to help people connect what they already know to what they already understand.
As someone who only learned multivariable calculus successfully via independent study of exterior differential forms as a result of off-handed comments from the differential geometry professor who taught my first-year calc course, I wholeheartedly agree.
I took Lebesgue integration and some pretty high powered group theory classes in the 1989s and am retaking them now, and I have to say the presentation now is much better. I think having Terrence Tao blog about how stuff really works makes a difference, at least for lower level grad classes. :) and trying to present groups as the widely useful abstractions they are instead of just a cute self contained theory makes a difference.
Interesting to note we haven’t got a text book for these classes just lecture notes and a number of text books recommended if we want additional presentations.
The problem is that there is no good textbook for Classical Mechanics out there. At least not on an introductory level.
It's funny that for the 19th century and the first few decades of the 20th one physicists were so eager to simplify and generalize their knowledge. With the side-effect of learning quite a few surprising things from the work. And yet for almost a century the goal is explicitly the opposite. (It's almost like if Academia is in crisis...)
I learnt a lot of physics from Marion's 2nd edition (not SR there though). An older and completely forgotten fine textbook is W. Hauser's Introduction to the Principles of Mechanics. Then you jump into Goldstein (the 1980 one, again not SR there). It's a good idea to buy any Schaum book from Spiegel about this too, also for vector analysis if you can't take a course on that.
While not exactly "introductory" in terms of mathematical prerequisites, Spivak's Mechanics I[1] is an interesting take on the subject, with extensive historical references if you're in to that sort of thing.
The problem is that the pedagogy, as in, the best most effective way to teach people things, should improve massively in 70 years. Whether it actually does, that is another question.
Pedagogy, like any other field is constantly developing. We are continually learning new and better ways to teach materials and thus I think the continued evolution of teaching materials has the potential to be a good thing (and I've created curriculum for professional learning, for grad school and for bootcamps).
It is true that just because a book in newer it is not necessarily pedagogically better
It is also true that a poor selection of content or understanding by the author could doom a book even with better pedagogy.
All that said, I love the idea of OSS books/exercises for teaching - I don't know if a sufficiently engaged and competent (domain + pedagogy) would evolve around and/all of them, but it'd be a fine experiment to try!
It would also be great training material for LLMs to help them to tutor using more thoughtful metaphors and examples.
I think that researching pedagogy is very difficult, and, like many scientific fields, it is hard to reproduce results found in papers. (I am not an expert in this area -- I am just a former teacher with around 10 years teaching experience.) One of the main things I notice is that standardized test scores are not really improving. I think that high school students today would score about the same as high school students in the 1980's if they were given the same multiple choice tests. This implies to me that the field has not advanced a lot. I do think that LLMs and other computer based teaching could help.
Your response does a pretty good job demonstrating the internal challenges universities face. The interest in making a change was motivated by unmet needs, and it's not going away until those needs are met. The only way to deal with people who won't meaningfully engage in the problem solving process is to go around them.
A textbook should be provided for reference. Copying its contents on a blackboard isn't teaching. You still have to design your course. There's goals to meet, you have to evaluate where your students come from and your job is getting them there.
Besides pedagogy, in college you have to respect your students as studying adults and give them a proper bibliography, emphasizing references for independent study if they don't like your lecture notes, nor your approach, nor whatever.
I understand what a university is, I also understand and am qualified in secondary education and it would be incredibly depressing turning colleges into extended high schools because of business models. That would be exploiting students, I never agree with that.
I actually completely agree with everything you wrote. I'm also very familiar with the ongoing battle between education and training.
What I'm talking about is expanding options to meet additional education needs. Since universities are a shared resource, any solution must be carefully designed to preserve the ability to continue providing existing services. That's difficult to achieve, so I understand the obstructionist response.
All I'm saying is that if you position yourself as an obstructionist, don't be surprised when you're treated like one.
I'm very adaptable nowadays. It's just that I think I know which things should work, but I'm not fighting society, particularly not on this.
The thing with giving the public what they want and being too much of a pragmatist is that we've seen it before.
Consider Western universities in the 17th century, they were still there churning out degrees, but modern science, mathematics and technology developed elsewhere.
The old one-size-fits-some approach is as pragmatic as it gets. Society's education needs have grown beyond what the old model can adequately service. We need new solutions that don't cause regressions on the old solutions.
You're right to protect your existing solution against regressions, and there's value in revisiting old topics in the new discussions, but you're not going to constructively contribute much if you're unwilling to engage with why so many people feel the need for something different in the first place.
You can absolutely delude yourself with the wrong design and materials that have going for them that they're what you can afford and call it innovation and whatnot. It still is wrong design and materials.
I didn't pay attention to this until the day they were supposedly running out of oxygen. I searched for pictures to find a hollow long cylinder made of carbon fibre with end plates. That and reading their Wikipedia entry made me angry. It was obvious that the reason for losing contact days before was that it had imploded killing them instantly. My background is physics.
So is mine, and they made several successful trips which (among other things) makes me think that carbon fiber could be an appropriate material for a submarine. Metallic hulls would also implode catastrophically if not well designed.
The reasonable and ethical engineering approach is to do one's best with models, simulations, first principles analysis and design something that works on paper. And then built prototypes, test the hell out of them. Without people inside. Standardize everything they can about manufacturing. If all looks good, they can operate. Never stop measuring and testing.
The operators decided this was too much work. They gambled and they lost.
The problem with carbon fiber is that it's fiber. Think of a rope. It's very strong in tension; you can hang from it, climb it, hoist things with it, etc. Carbon fiber is useful in an aircraft fuselage because the inside pressure is a tension load on the fuselage.
Rope is useless under compression. You can't push a rope, or climb a rope that's only attached to the floor. So under compressive loads, you're relying on the glue mainly. The carbon fiber gives the glue something to stick to. A submarine is the opposite of an aircraft: the high pressure is on the outside, so the hull is under compression not tension.
Some good points from first principles. But there are ways. If you manage to make the composite with a very good process so the fibers are straight and closely packed, then it can have good compression strength as well.
This can be achieved for example in pultruded carbon rods, where the carbon fiber is under tension when it passes through an epoxy bath. They have been used in aircraft wing top spars which receive compression loads (when taking positive gees).
How to make a cylindrical vessel that can take compressive loads? The creation process certainly needs some thinking and attention.
Thinking about this more from first principles, if I got it right, the cylinder hoop stress is twice the longitudinal stress. So you could pultrude a unidirectional layer of hoops, or very shallow angle spiral to handle half of the the hoop stress only on the outside. Have normal cross wrapping layer on the inside probably.
This is misleading. Only raw CF is like a rope, once made into a composite with resin it becomes a stiff member with entirely different properties. It's more analogous to a wood beam - very stiff and resistant to bending but once you get past it's limit it cracks.
I suspect the failure mode in a submersible like this isn't so much the carbon fibers themselves but either the carbon > metal interface at the ends or gradual delamination between layers of fibers due to the cyclical pressure loads.
Under outside pressure, the fibers in the matrix take close to no load, while under tension they take a lot. That alone is the reason why carbon fibre composites are the least suited materials for submarines and submersibles.
You should watch the initial interviews with James Cameron. He explains 1) composite hulls have a finite number of compression cycles before they fail, typically less than 10 (this was dive #7 give or take, I forget the exact numbers) and 2) no composite material is perfect, the water pressure will find imperfections and work it's way into the material, causing weak points
Steel is a significantly better material for this task. I'm stunned they even considered carbon fiber.
Composite failure is very hard to predict and hard to evaluate. By comparison metal fatigue is very well understood.
Compression loads on submarines are extreme and cyclical. This causes the fibers to delaminate loosing strength. Furthermore, De-lamination is difficult to measure non-destructively (I think only xrays work?)
Manned conposite subs should always have their chief designer or financier aboard
The paper is from 2020. My understanding is that composite testing is still in its infancy.
Also note that the hull was 5 inches thick (safety factor > 2.5). Depending on the dispersion properties of the medium ultrasound might not penetrate and get a good result. In Ti (some alloys at least), for example, you cant get much signal past a couple of inches due to the scattering (from the grains?)
No, it is well understood because the failures of metals are much more reproducible than of other materials.
Both for ceramics and for composites the failures are caused by microscopic defects that are never the same for different samples, so the conditions for failure are very variable from sample to sample. Therefore the results of experiments with such materials have lower predictive ability for the behavior in a real application.
To some extent. "Mistakes were made" as they say. But its a lot more nuanced than that.
Metal fatigue is understood because we have a mechanistic understanding of what it is, how fatigue accumulates, and how different metal crystal strictures respond to fatigue.
We know, for example, that metals like aluminum will always fail from fatigue given enough loading cycles, no matter how small the applied stress.
We also know that other metals, like iron and titanium, have a "fatigue limit" below which fatigue doesn't accumulate and these metals can endure infinite loading cycles.
We have, to some extent, the ability to repair metal fatigue.
We build airplanes from aluminum knowing their aluminum hulls and wings will fail (whereas if it were built with Ti fatigue failure could be eliminated) because metal fatigue is very predictable and we can withdraw a hull from service after a regulatory determined number of landings.
So yes, until we developed our current understanding of fatigue, people died. But, often, this was from a callous disregard to traditionally accepted safety factors by cowboy "innovators".
(Im a materials eng. PhD in polymers w/ background in Eng. Phys. Im not a metallurgist for what its worth)
Metal hulls do not degrade on every dive. If you start off with a safety factor of 2.5 (according to the design specs as they are known today) then after a number of dives you'll be below '1' and failure is a given. Without the ability to test the degradation it's a roulette.
I'm just an armchair observer here, but from what I can tell from the discussions, carbon fiber certainly can be an appropriate material for a submarine, as long as it's only used for one dive.
The reason it's a useless terrible material for a sub is that until it survives the first dive, you don't know if it has a hidden flaw.
And after the first dive, even if it survives, you know that 100% that it does.
Weight is not nearly the problem it is for a sub as it is for spacecraft or aircraft.
The problem wasn't safety protocols or XBox controllers or any of that.
It was conflation of "big idea people"[1] with real engineers.
As I said, I'm an armchair observer here, not a materials scientist.
However, there are a lot of things that are absolutely designed and built to be single-use, especially in fields like space, where rocket engines have been single-use until very recently.
As for weight, I think the reason that was important was because they didn't have a big enough ship that could operate a crane and haul the submersible out of the water. Really, the whole operation was a bad idea: this kind of exploration is expensive as hell, and the only way to cut costs (with current tech) is to do really dangerous stuff.
Yes, but the thing is we have increased productivity tremendously because that's what our species does. So first we didn't need everyone working in the fields, after that we didn't need everyone working in the factories, and we're at this point in which we have to make up more and more absurd necessities and regulations so people have jobs, but we aren't going to need everyone doing that either. The clear socioethical paradigm that made sense after we realized that growing food was easier than hunting and foraging is heading a wall.
> So first we didn't need everyone working in the fields, after that we didn't need everyone working in the factories,
Do you own any fields? Do you own any factories? If you owned those, then you might be able to work in them and produce what you need to live, or at least something to trade for the things you need.
You seem to think there's a "we" here. There isn't. No one else is much in the mood to support you.
Yes, I own fields. No, the ROI isn't there so parishioners keep them for sentimental value mostly. It isn't worth it, it was but it's been decades that it's not.
Of course there's a "we". We depend on supply chains and working societies to even be writing anything here now. No one is willing to support anyone but we're a social species with division of roles, that's the "we".
No, there isn't. You use the word, and deep in your lizard brain you hear yourself say "myself and all these other people who care about me and love me and are on my team".
There's no "we". No one wants to be part of that "we" with you, and those who lie and say they do want to be part of it with you are hoping they get more out of the deal than they give to be part of it. I'm probably the closest thing to being your friend that you have when I'm at least honest and tell you that's horseshit.
If people like yourself spent more time trying to solve the much smaller problem of "how do I make my way in this world" instead of "how do we make it so everyone gets what they want", then quite simply more of you would get what you want.
> but we're a social species with division of roles,
Your role's about to be eliminated. Might take 20 years, the timeline's hard to pin down. But the guys who get to keep their roles are perfecting autonomous war drones. Your odds don't look good.
You're right that we're not going to get fully automated luxury space post-work, communist or not, because the "entrepreneurs" ushering it in will not be able to shake the motive of "profit" out of their lizard brains and would rather kill everyone not in their social/economic class than see the death of the world order that puts them at the top. But it is amusing that you comment gleefully that someone else's job is about to be eliminated, but upthread are bitching about childishness and people not wanting to work. We're supposed to want to work in a world that is actively obsoleting jobs (and leaving nothing "better" in its wake, to boot)? A bunch of people going "fuck you, got mine" makes more people better off than cooperation? If post-scarcity somehow happened your lizard brain would implode.
It was an automatic process and colours were consistent. I find that reading theories about what might have happened 20 years ago is becoming pretty annoying. I shot some kind of Fujifilm mostly and if it was under/overexposed that was like your problem.
This is obvious, but for some reason some people want to believe that magically a conceptual framework emerges because animal intelligence has to be something like that anyway.
I don't know how animal intelligence works, I just notice when it understands, and these programs don't. Why should they? They're paraphrasing machines, they have no problem contradicting themselves, they can't define adjectives really, they'll give you synonyms. Again, it's all they have, why should they produce anything else?
It's very impressive, but when I read claims of it being akin to human intelligence that's kind of sad to be honest.
> They're paraphrasing machines, they have no problem contradicting themselves, they can't define adjectives really, they'll give you synonyms. Again, it's all they have, why should they produce anything else?
It can certainly do more than paraphrasing. And re: the contradicting nature, humans do that quite often.
Not sure what you mean by "can't define adjectives"
There's excellent rubber domes and people have been typing properly on them for 30 years. You don't need mechanical switches, you just like them.
I keep a few nice 90s' ones from HP and IBM. Sun's sucked yet people typed a lot on those. There's been decent ones from Dell and you can still get older IBM/Lenovo Preferred Pros. They're fine. I don't think switching to rubber domes back then was a cost cutting measure, that's peanuts for the prices of those systems. Noise was considered distracting, maybe stressful, actually sustained noise is. If you shared a lab with 30 people banging on Model Ms you'd agree. Mechanicals are great for gaming, I give you that.
> If you shared a lab with 30 people banging on Model Ms you'd agree.
What if you shared a lab with 30 Selectric typewriters or couple line printers? I did. People complaining about the "noise" from Cherry clears and similar are over-reacting.
> you just like them
I do! And you don't! and guess who's keyboard it is? This is why I'm testy. People like different things. When that happens: mind your own business and cope.
It's no more inconvenient for you to hear my (not that loud) "silent" cherry clears than for you to impose on me to have to type on a keyboard that doesn't work for me.
And we can all agree that the guy that cooks fish in the microwave is our shared enemy.
So that's the best appraisal you can give of David Deutsch: "Just an old man seeking attention"?
Well, leaving aside the usual embarrassment I feel when it comes to the impromptu nonsense a fair share of HN commentators think it's worthwhile to contribute here when there's a piece of news involving physics or physicists, that's an ageist take without any content whatsoever.
There's more old people who know what they're talking about than young people. That's just the obvious consequence of having been around reading and thinking about stuff more time. You'll notice it eventually because as the song goes, time waits for no one.
Yep, we're getting too impatient and that's not helpful when it comes to think deeply about what we've been taught. Yet that's the most important part of any job IMO. I'll check it out, maybe you're right and he's rambling. That would be surprising to me, which is the reason I replied to your post.
I don't think he's rambling. He isn't sure what familiarity his audience will have with the intellectual underpinnings of his argument, so he recaps those before embarking on the argument proper, in order to make sure the audience can follow.
Granted, he does tell a couple
of anecdotes in the process, but maybe that's his style. I think it's fair to consider impatience implicated here - for what it's worth, when I find myself feeling that way about coverage of stuff I already know but not everyone is guaranteed to, I usually just skip ahead or scroll ahead, checking in here and there, until I hit something on point or that I don't already know. (Usually the second one!)
Impatience is an emotion, and while we can't help much what we feel or how we feel it, we can most of the time treat what we feel as input. Think of it, if you want, like a Datadog alert. How do we handle those? By investigating to understand the root cause and taking whatever action that requires in the context, if any. If we let them drive our behavior directly without taking the time for considered action, we easily risk causing more problems than we're likely to solve.
Granted, I don't entirely love this metaphor, which is no less flawed than any. Maybe too some dork on Twitter will use this as an example of the mechanistic techbro attitude endemic to the diseased discourse of Hacker News comments, or something; it does lend itself somewhat to such misrepresentation.
But despite that lossiness I think it's not wholly without use, because it does point at least vaguely toward a way in which we can manage and make valuable use of even the most unpleasant among our emotions, and one that's served me well over the years since I stumbled upon the concept in some writing or other, I've long since forgotten where.
(I don't think Deutsch was rambling, but I certainly am, in an effort to distract myself from a quite unpleasant facial pain I can't do anything meaningful about until Thursday. Please excuse me.)
I think you have opinions, on the other hand judgements need argumentation. You've simply stated that you object "to people who freely talk about negative experiences" because some other people you like a lot don't do that. That's not a judgement, it's just you expressing your personal preferences. It's not very interesting per se to be completely honest with you.
Multiple friends and family members are currently successfully managing their depression. Prior to that multiple weren't able to manage their depression and killed themselves. I had a close friend thank me on her birthday for suggesting ketamine - she said she probably wouldn't be alive without me making her aware of it.
Honestly your problem was that you didn't know any Classical Mechanics yet and you were assuming that the volume of recent developments made old books obsolete. Maybe in Biology, in Physics getting to recent developments would mean that you're familiar with Goldstein, Landau's Vol. I... Abraham-Marsden? Arnold? Those are old.
Often newer editions actually worsen textbooks and then only a few contemporary books become references in the long run. It's always been like this, there's tons of great books from the 70s that aren't used today and could definitely do. At least they're not ~1,000 pp. of waffle, which is what you usually get for your first textbook on anything nowadays.