UPS drivers, like it or not, produce that much value. Bankers don't, and are instead holding the economy hostage through abuse of insider information [0], regulatory arbitrage [1], and capturing short-term value via liquidity mismanagement [2] or creating long-term systemic risk via post-Glass-Steagall gambling on derivatives that eventually leaves shareholders and taxpayers holding the bag [3], which ultimately comes at the expense of everybody else in the economy.
> The core idea is trying my best to not kid myself: when my engagement with a piece of content is active and effortful then it’s learning, when it’s passive it’s entertainment. When I create I learn. When I consume I just relax.
This core idea is getting at something important, something that other commenters are covering and is covered in this previous HN thread [0] about information addiction for example, but I disagree the author's assertion that all passive consumption ought to be categorized as entertainment and all active creation ought to be categorized as effortful work. (I've seen too many video game damage calculation spreadsheets for that to be the case.)
I'll highlight the author's conjecture that "edutainment is not learning but preparation for learning". Relevant, digestible, and yes sometimes entertaining collections of information are preparation for understanding (which typically requires application), which is preparation for mastery (which typically requires ten more years of application). I would argue this entire process is what encompasses learning, of which well-sourced information is a critical component for. I suspect there is some conflation here of entertainment with the risk for distraction, which is a real mind killer that ought to be addressed, but instead gets tossed away by the author during his Cal Newport reference in favor of his love for Twitter and vested interest in newsletter subscriptions.
The concept I feel the author is getting at via his edutainment strawman is that information acquisition is not sufficient for the fluency of understanding required for conceptual mastery. This is a concept that I think most HN readers and textbook exercise writers would agree with.
The possibility that the author may be missing a working understanding of this concept feels to me like it would explain a certain awkwardness about the entire article, which seems to rely on shoehorning a plethora of loosely-connected, name-dropped quotes and ideas into italicized slots of questionable logical integrity to support the presumption that everything entertaining must be useless, and everything educational must be hard. I've met way too many lazy smart people to believe that to be the case.
If a doctor told you to stop smoking and lower your blood pressure, would you berate him for pushing to make your life miserable?
Our collective addiction to the conveniences of modern life is leading to the proliferation of carcinogenic materials and destroying the environment. Generations upon generations lived without these spoils uphill both ways without complaint. If the slightest suggestion of lifting some weight and going for a walk is enough to induce abject misery, it might be a good time to re-evaluate the way we do things.
Microplastics are everywhere, and you can't use those plastic dishes without some of them coming off -- into water, into the air, and into your food (and therefore your body).
Microplastics are absolutely hurting the environment, and are contributing to things like endocrine disruption.
I think your understanding will improve if you view the content of this link as nothing but a scathing review of the book in question. I get the sense that your confusion comes from thinking that the linked article is trying to make points about the subject of the book, when really the point of nearly every paragraph is to trash the book as a waste of time especially compared to her previous book (while concomitantly recommending better options by other authors, referenced and linked throughout the review).
For instance, when the reviewer references Wikipedia, they are not making a criticism of Wikipedia's usefulness -- they are criticizing Odell's summary of other writers' ideas as being as shallowly researched as summarizing their ideas off of Wikipedia. When the reviewer states "Problems with style and pacing are problems of thinking", the primary intent is not to make some sort of generalized insight applicable to you, but instead to criticize Odell in particular as putting poorly styled, poorly paced, and poorly thought-out lines on the page. If you read the review from the perspective of this adversarial framing, you could imagine the reviewer's answer to "Why We Never Have Enough Time" to be "Because we have to waste our lives on our jobs -- mine right now being to write a review of a book I think is a waste of everyone's time."
Catechesis is a term often associated with the the Catholic Church as a form of systematic instruction of a set of dogmatic ideological beliefs. This insruction is backed by a huge and famously boring book, the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Denouncing Odell's book as "catechistic indexing" uses the connotation of a group of religious followers shallowly regurgitating the same dogmatically accepted facts (with or without adequate exposition or even any understanding in the first place), in the style that a religious leader might conduct a catechistic question and answer session. The abstract forces being referenced are essentially the attention economy's post-structuralist rehash of the same Marxist criticisms of capitalism that goes back centuries at this point, which the reviewer assumes that New Yorker readers (who generally self-select for a certain demographic of left-leaning and educated) would be overly familiar with. If you're looking for a basic introduction to those arguments, there's Richard Wolff's appearance on Lex Fridman's podcast last year [0] or you could try a more erudite overview like Vivek Chibber's talk, titled Consent, Coercion, and Resignation on the structural forces of capitalism [1].
Not to detract from your main point, or from the intended rhetoric of the featured article, but "huge and famously boring" is not really a fair description of the Catholic Catechism from the point of view of its intended audience. I have many textbooks on computer related topics, which most non-computer people would describe as both huge and boring, yet I (and no doubt many more folks here) would find them a source of endless fascination.
The Catechism is perhaps "famously" boring because of the number of people who identify as (culturally) "catholic", probably only go to Mass on Sundays because their grandmothers told them they have to and their mothers will refuse to talk to them at Sunday lunch if they don't; people who in some ways want some of the purported "privileges" of belonging to the faith (access to schools in the UK, for example) without actually being actively engaged or interested in the faith itself. To such people, occasionally being forced to plod through parts of the Catechism while jumping through various hoops in order to maintain membership, is what creates the reputation referenced here.
But to someone actually interested in the faith, what the Church teaches and why, this book is of course a fascinating (and very accessible) read. Dogmas (and doctrines) are not blindly asserted, but justified by reference to both scripture and a tradition of philosophy stretching back thousands of years. It's a nerdy read, and theology nerds will certainly get a kick out of it, but you don't need a degree in the subject to make sense of the contents.
These are fair and valid points and I wish I had used more consideration in my attempt to convey the rhetorical usage. The proselytization component is probably a more significant reason behind the word choice than any other aspect of catechesis. I meant no offense to anyone of any faith.
Honestly, no offence felt from my end. You did a great job of explaining what that phrase implied in the author's usage. I just wanted to jump on the opportunity to correct a common misconception and share my enthusiasm for another avenue of geeking-out that I happen to enjoy. At the same time hoping I didn't offend any atheists, people of other faiths or different flavours of non-catholic christians...
Long ago, on Svalbard, when you were a young witch of forty-three, your mother took your unscarred wrists in her hands, and spoke:
Vidrun, born of the sea-wind through the spruce
Vidrun, green-tinged offshoot of my bough, joy and burden of my life
Vidrun, fierce and clever, may our clan’s wisdom be yours:
Never read Hacker News
But Hacker News has read of you, in their snicker-slithing susurrential warrens, and word has spread...
susurrus or susurration is a very literary word for a whisper/whispering. The usual adjective would be susurrous or susurrant, rather than susurrential, but in any case it would mean “full of whispering sounds”.
I found KC Davis's 2022 book How to Keep House While Drowning to be a nice complementary update to Kondo's techniques.
On a practical level Davis focuses on accumulated mess as 5 things: (1) trash, (2) dishes, (3) laundry, (4) things that have a place and are not in their place, and (5) things that do not have a place.
The book adds some interesting psychological framing which I found helpful -- treating care tasks as morally neutral, for example. Her techniques target ADHD-types as well as people undergoing life changes (like Marie Kondo starting a family) or otherwise have strict time/energy constraints. Her Struggle Care website [0] has a pretty detailed primer on her philosophy.
Google in 1998: Appendix A: Advertising and Mixed Motives from the original paper The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine [0]
"Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users... we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers... we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm."
Google in 2003: Eric "You can trust us with your data" Schmidt convinces Sergey and Larry of the bonkers amount of money they can make by adding a monopoly on digital search advertising to leverage their monopoly on digital search. They proceed to switch to the same advertising business model that hindered their early competitors.
Google in 2008: Buys out Doubleclick to maintain Adsense's monopoly on digital search advertising and doubles down on surveillance capitalism.
Google in 2011: Buys out AdMeld, changes AdX contracts to be even more anticompetitive to maintain monopoly on digital search advertising.
Google in 2017: Loses $2.7 billion antitrust lawsuit in the EU. Response? No changes to business model, but oust a vocal supporter of the decision from Google-funded think tank New America. [1]
I am a subscriber to the microbiome inflammasome hypothesis for major depression [0], so I wouldn't be surprised if a treatment course for depression in many people could be as simple as better dental hygiene + magnesium orotate + probiotic supplements. I've had my eye on studies linking schizophrenia with inflammatory cytokine markers, and it follows that other psychological conditions could have similar etiology and pathogenesis. Research on the influence of gut bacteria and intestinal dysbiosis on anxiety and depression has been coming out since at least 2013 [1].
After reading Robert Whitaker's 2010 Anatomy of an Epidemic [2], I'm convinced that future generations will look back on this era of psychiatric treatment with the same critical eye that our generation points at Moliere's 17th-century leeches or George Washington's personal doctor treating his strep throat with several blood-letting phlebotomies -- an absolute iatrogenic travesty. The overprescription of potentially mania-inducing antidepressants in children and teenagers is especially egregious to me. Add in the perverse incentives of profit-driven pharmaceutical companies, and you get issues like Zyprexa's 2009 class action lawsuit, for example [3].
For those looking for a readable introduction to the potential link between chronic inflammation and depression, there is The Inflamed Mind by Edward Bullmore from 2018 which did some rounds on talk shows and the like.
The fact that healthy people still get depression makes me skeptical of hypotheses like this. If it were as simple as taking probiotics, x and y supplements, and eating healthier, (and brushing teeth more), I think a lot more people would have beaten major depression by now.
Someone else in the thread suggested it's just exercise, sleep, and diet. Yet there are plenty of folks who do these things perfectly and still get depression.
Sure, I can understand your skepticism. The church was skeptical of Galileo when he made new claims about the nature of the earth as well, since it contradicted their own previous anecdotal perceptions and private ideology. If only we had developed tools like the scientific method to evaluate claims on the basis of evidence instead of personal skepticism -- then it could be possible to make some productive headway on the evaluation of whether or not an approach could be effective. Fortunately, these tools exist, so that someone who wanted to evaluate the claims behind the microbiota-inflammasome hypothesis of depression could click on a link to an overview of the scientific literature in support of the hypothesis, helpfully provided at the bottom of the comment [0], before posting a cursory dismissal on the basis of their personal skepticism.
The subject of the Quanta magazine article is a critical literature review which the article author describes as the "death knell for the serotonin hypothesis". The basis for your skepticism, "The fact that healthy people still get depression" could be addressed in the section of article where they explain how depression could be a catch-all umbrella term for the presentation of symptoms with a wide variety of causes, potentially including stress, genetic predisposition, tryptophan depletion, or chronic inflammation, among other possible causes like adverse childhood experiences or learned helplessness for example. Inflammation from periodontitis or gut dysbiosis can exist within the threshold of otherwise healthy people, as evidenced by the attenuation of symptoms in some sufferers of major depression by these interventions in the studies examined by the review I linked.
Maybe the reason a lot more people haven't beaten major depression through these interventions, as you suggest should have happened by now, is because when they go to the doctor, they get a script for an iatrogenic SSRI and a cognitive behavioral therapist and a kick out the door, instead of testing to see if they just need a root canal and some yogurt. And I protest your inclusion of magnesium orotate in the category of "x y supplements" as it is the target of specific studies which have examined its effectiveness in conjunction with probiotics in attenuating depression [1].
Lol Galileo over here. My comment was indeed a personal anecdote, nothing more. And I only wanted to establish that physiological factors like diet, exercise, and sleep, are not the ONLY contributors to major clinical depression. I'm pretty sure you agree? And you're saying there are MORE physiological factors (gut biome, gum health, etc), and... I don't disagree. The only purpose of my comment was to put to bed the assumption that some people have, which is that depression is purely, surface-level physiological (like just exercise/sleep/diet, not taking into account genetics, environment, stress, and all the other factors)
I have not specifically dug into depression, but I think I can overall agree with the line of thought. As far as modern medicine goes, it is almost undoubtedly primitive but puts forth a facade of sophistication.
[0] https://www.goldmansachs.com/investor-relations/corporate-go...
[1] https://www.atlantafed.org/-/media/Documents/news/conference...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/silicon-valley-bank-bailout-yelle...
[3] https://money.usnews.com/investing/stock-market-news/article...