On Instagram, I've seen VSCO links as the "link in bio" (the url in the user's profile) for a few acquaintances I follow. Baader-Meinhoff phenomenon [0] at play; I believed I never heard of VSCO before, but just saw a link in bio, and remembered a couple other appearances.
Paul Graham's assertion that 'parents send their kids to private schools to improve university admission standards' does not guarantee that 'kids from public schools are smarter than kids from private schools.'
Some private schools have high admission standards, and these have better teachers and more motivated students than comparative public schools in the area. The existence of these counter-examples shows that Graham's reasoning doesn't hold. He also assumes that the public school students have studied less material, or easier material, than private school students, and are more motivated to learn. This isn't guaranteed; certain public school programs (like IB, mentioned by another commenter here) meet or exceed the curriculum standards by other private schools. In short, the wording of the Tweets in their current form demonstrate weak reasoning.
However, to take a more charitable interpretation, it's true that other private schools let anyone in who can pay the tuition, while also having less dedicated teachers and unmotivated students compared to public schools (especially public schools with high admission standards). Using more precise language, it can be altered to roughly: "motivated but less-privileged students can outcompete less motivated, more-privileged students in university."
This is a more interesting assertion, but it also depends on the amount of privilege (e.g. some privileged students get an apartment with near-zero commute to the university, lots of cash, the best tutors, etc.). Life isn't truly meritocratic, but you try to do the best you can with the cards you're dealt.
>I feel like this is one of those instances where it feels intuitively correct but probably isn't.
I get this feeling reading a lot of 'insightful' Tweets, especially written by Paul Graham. His essays have been influential and useful, but his Tweets were disappointing (flawed arguments, emotional appeal) to the point where I unfollowed. It's just Twitter, but it does feel like a missed opportunity for a truly insightful feed.
This Tweet is on HN because its founder, Paul Graham, wrote it. I would contend that if anyone else wrote these assertions (even if a celebrity), it wouldn't receive as much engagement.
As a counter-point, I don't see this as worrisome. Your friend who is a public servant sounds professionally and intellectually fulfilled, and far better off and stable than others who've "failed to launch"/have unfulfilled ambitions due to failing to put in the hard work required (not necessarily due to laziness).
I know a couple people (plus myself at one point) who absorbed high-quality entertainment while being professionally unfulfilled. Activities included reading literature, watching artistic films, reading a middle-brow magazines like the New Yorker, and reading lots of New York Times articles. These took a lot of energy and gave a sense of achievement that could've been spent in accumulating career capital/developing career-relevant skills.
This wouldn't imply that entertainment is guaranteed to take away focus and energy from career development (plenty of counter-examples with historical figures), but it is possible for some people. So, I don't see low-quality entertainment as worrisome, so long as people have the main efforts of their life worked on, in tandem. Low-quality entertainment would be a problem, however, if it does distract from time spent on real, helpful work, versus as a stress reliever.
Separately, I would also separate low-quality produced entertainment limited by episodes from social media. They're very different, as social media is better optimized for infinite scrolling and outrage, while shows are more episodic (assuming a weaker, less-optimized pull for binge consumption).
Another anecdote: an undergraduate at a top university I knew, with publications, leadership positions, and strong research experience at the time, was also into reality television, and specifically avoided dramas/prestige television (e.g. Mad Men, Breaking Bad).
In addition to not requiring thinking, I remember he also mentioned that it's harder to get "hooked" and end up binge-watching episodes.
The perspective is plausible to me. I do feel more drained or emotionally spent absorbing intense television series, or even accomplished for understanding them, when I could've spent that on real work. That said, I do think low-quality media affects the way I think and write in a negative way (by contrast, when I spend a lot of time absorbed with high-quality writing, it actually does positively affect my speech and writing for the next few days).
As a counter-point, IG recently made it much easier to upload content directly from a desktop operating system. It finally added a button for users upload posts from a web browser from a desktop OS (before, you had to switch the browser's user agent to identify as a mobile device, then refresh).
But separately, if professional brands really do take over IG over user-generated content between friends, the runner-up is Pinterest. A February 2021 study of social media usage shows that Instagram usage among US adults is 40% [0], with Pinterest at 31% usage. Beyond Pinterest, the runner-ups for (high-quality, artistic) creative content are platforms like Adobe's Behance or Dribbble, but the users for these are primarily creative professionals.
For user-generated content between friends (day-to-day stuff), Snapchat isn't a bad replacement (25% usage, according to the same survey). I would guess that most content remains user-generated (via photos that delete themselves sent to other friends). I would also guess it's less less harmful to mental health for certain groups, as it doesn't feature Likes or Comments.
To be totally honest, though, I wouldn't regret the loss of user-generated social media content. Exchanging messages, having video calls, and seeing people in-person feels a lot more enjoyable and helpful for strengthening relationships.
Probably objects that make you imagine about what day-to-day living was like in the past.
If VR becomes widespread, perhaps the first VR headset. Or perhaps niche, quaint items with great craftsmanship (no longer used at all in the future), like a high-quality metal mechanical pencil, fountain pen, or ballpoint pen.
Early commercial spacecraft (SpaceX) would also be a certainty, as the expansion of humanity across space is near-guaranteed (as long as humanity doesn't destroy itself). Perhaps also today's fashion (thinking of fashion museums).
That observation is incorrect (as of November 30, 8:46 pm ET, about two hours after your comment). It doesn't appear in the top five "most read" stories, which are:
1. Moderna chief predicts existing vaccines will struggle with Omicron
2. The inside story of the Pfizer vaccine: ‘a once-in-an-epoch windfall’
3. Powell signals support for quicker ‘taper’ of Fed’s bond-buying scheme
4. Holmes accuses former business partner of abuse in Theranos trial
5. Inditex shares fall after it appoints founder’s daughter as chair
Even if the observation were true, it doesn't contradict my note that the FT omitted it from the front page stories this morning (US edition, FT, iPad app).
However, in the interest of reporting updated information over being 'right,' a new story about Ghislaine Maxwell (published "an hour ago" at the time of this comment) has since been published after my original comment, and now appears on the front page (website and iPad app).
That said, from my observations, it's clear that the Theranos story today was more popular than the Ghislaine Maxwell story, with my inference that it was more widely-promoted. I'm not arguing that there was an effort to suppress reporting, but I am arguing that it's reasonable to conclude that one story may have been marketed more heavily than the other, from seemingly-minor decisions in web design and the stories selected for the mobile apps.
A lot of journalists are financially poor, or at least don't make much income from their jobs. $1000/yr is a lot of money for journalists, especially at local newspapers.
Quite a few accounts I follow also don't have a Blue Check. If it started to cost money, I'm sure a lot of journalists would just choose not to be verified. The reason is that I'm not convinced that a Blue Check is tied to engagement with your Tweets, but rather the quality of your work outside Twitter.
You're correct, though I have to say as someone who reads the Financial Times and The Economist, I haven't seen any headlines today; this is the first time I've heard of the news.
I don't expect conspiracy, though; it's far more likely that the Omicron variant is far more relevant to markets. The FT also did publish two stories on Ghislaine Maxwell about 23-24 hours ago, but it's fair to say that the paper isn't emphasizing the story (by comparison, the Theranos Elizabeth Holmes trial had a story on the front page this morning).
Thanks for the recs, though Google has caused unexpected design problems in my usage. Sometimes it unpredictably switches to dark mode, then light mode on Firefox and Safari. Google's answer box also sometimes displays wrong information (infamously, "Google turned me into a serial killer" on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27622100).
I'm curious about Amazon Basics and Beats. For the former, they sell so many products that the ones I buy are pretty good (e.g. office supplies), but I have run into other products with middling reviews. For Beats, I would expect them to be good because Apple acquired them, so it's interesting to hear they have problems.
I had it even worse only 5 hours of battery life in my first week of usage. It turned out OneDrive had a bug with syncing; after reinstalling (then keeping it on overnight for the sync to finish), the battery jumped to ~8-10 hours with fairly heavy usage (Parallels + Safari, though with syncing paused), which is near your current level. The Energy tab of the Activity Monitor helped me identify OneDrive as the power suck.
I agree with your side notes, though I would add that depressive realism is a hypothesis in psychology that is challenged by other academics, rather than a settled fact.
From your link, "Depressive realism is the hypothesis [...] that depressed individuals make more realistic inferences than non-depressed individuals [...] [Critics of depressive realism argue that] depressed individuals are thought to have a negative cognitive bias that results in recurrent, negative automatic thoughts, maladaptive behaviors, and dysfunctional world beliefs."
The critics would say that depressed people have unrealistic world views, which causes depressive symptoms. This matches with my own personal experience (e.g. when I felt convinced I could never be happy for a while after I got dismissed at my job, which was convincing at the time but turned out to be totally wrong).
However, I do think you can be pessimistic without the emotional toll as you say; but that doesn't sound like a depressed person, if this person can still excel at motivation and doing hard things.
My bottom line is: I just don't believe in the depressive realism hypothesis just to focus on the first bit, but I agree with the take on pessimistic realism.
You can also stay realistic, while being neither too negative nor too positive.
You can step back and identify the negatives and the positives of a circumstance or plan, weigh them (quite literally in a table for anything complex, it really helps), and set a course of action based on that. Then you price in the risks of negative consequences, while aiming for potential positive outcomes in the future.
Otherwise, being super negative and not trying to change one's situation sounds like distress, and seeing only the positives to a potential course of action sounds like folly and risky planning.
I also think that this can be trained. There were times when I was really negative about everything, but I developed a habit to notice when I was experiencing this negativity, and try to identify positives too, to balance things out. It did give me a lot more agency.
Here are my views to try and answer in good faith, "How can you not be negative?" as someone who feels positively:
>"Plus some people have made loads of money while we watch front line workers basically dying doing their job."
Yes, that is terrible. But to be really honest, I haven't really thought about it much because none of this directly affects me. I don't follow the news as much, and I'm not close to any front line workers. It's abstractly terrible, but I haven't turned negative because of it.
>"Meanwhile the summer heat was just too much and we're watching the planet die."
I vote in favour of parties who support climate measures, but besides that, I'm not in a position where I can do meaningful activism to enact policy changes to materially curb climate change. In the meantime, I don't believe my personal behaviours make too big of an impact on the environment, in comparison to emissions and waste from major companies, countries, and militaries, so I don't feel guilt about my actions. The rest is not up to me.
>"All the while we've been restricted from seeing work colleagues, friends and family."
I don't miss my old work colleagues, and have actually gotten along really well with a couple new people who I've only seen once in-person (rest via text and video chat). I only really have one or two friends. I'm not too close with my family.
So in short, I don't really think about most of these world issues. The biggest issues directly affect me, via working from home and restriction from seeing others. For the former, life is returning to normal at work. For the second, I learned to be happy by myself, and I'm a lot calmer because of it.