See, what's interesting to me is that the grandparent comment describes "50 Shades" as ~8 hours of reading. The zero-sum argument assumes that reading time is some fixed value for all people. I don't remember how long it took me to read "50 Shades," but it was significantly less than 8 hours, and couldn't have been more than an hour. (I'm not saying that to brag. It takes me a lot longer to do many other things than many other people. My only point is that the author of the article completely ignores throughput variability in his calculus.)
Depth and breadth, in this case, are not opposite directions on a straight line. They are vectors that only appear oppositional when viewed under specific time constraints. The more prolific a reader you are, the more efficiently you read, and thus your higher throughput dramatically compresses time.
If we're to speak about very specific increments of time and units of reading material -- say, you get to read N books over 1 week -- then sure, the zero-sum argument holds. But a lifetime is so much time, offering so much opportunity to the experienced reader, that time is almost effectively lifted as a constraint.
The only zero-sum quantities in this case are time and number of books. Depth and breadth of subject matter are better described as characterizing subcategories of #_books.
No, I'm not literally suggesting people have infinite time on their hands. Rather, what I'm suggesting is that time compresses when you're reading for pleasure. When you reach a certain "level," shall we say, you read so naturally and so widely and so frequently that it is truly astonishing how much you can read in a day.
Then again, I'll continue to caveat all of this by saying that my subjective experience seems increasingly abnormal every time I read someone's advice on how to read (or write). The idea of deliberately practicing a style or a voice is weird to me. I've always written by ear, and I've never thought about it. I've thought about structure, and character, and perspective, and logic, and all of the other elements that go into writing well. But when it comes to voice and style, well, shit, man. You pick it up as you go along, and you learn to trust it. It strengthens, not weakens, with exposure to breadth.
One last time: I'm going to go out on a limb and say that my experience is probably weird.
While I don't disagree with the author on his points, I find them premised on faulty logic. His thesis assumes that depth and breadth are zero-sum pursuits. I suppose they are if time and energy are limiting factors, but to those who read and write for the love of the game, those limits are lifted.
When it comes time to settle down on a voice and hone your craft, sure, I would never recommend you switch up your style for the hell of it. But if you want to read widely, and if doing so refines your style, great. Go for it. It probably will.
Again, the way the author characterizes this 'problem' is jarringly foreign and antithetical to my own experience. Perhaps I lack the objectivity to see it the way the author does.
This article is horseshit. I'm a professional writer, and I'll trust Oates and King over whoever this guy is.
"Read widely" isn't some religious dictum. It's more of a religious calling. (Of sorts.) If you love to read, and you love to write, you naturally read all fucking day. Your thirst is unquenchable. Your tastes are varied. So you drink from many different fountains.
You also realize there is no trade off between depth and breadth. It's a false dichotomy. It seems to be manufactured by people who find the act of reading some sort of chore. I do not. I find it the highest pleasure I have ever experienced.
Perhaps there's a difference between being naturally curious and being forced to read broadly. I dunno. I've never had to be forced. I like reading and writing the way many of us like programming. I'm truly sorry if the author does not. Writing's a hell of a shitty way to make a living; I can't imagine what it'd be like if you didn't at least enjoy the sport of it.
My god, this brings back some formative memories. Memories of AOHell. Memories of HappyHardcore, the self-styled hacker who claimed authorship of it. Memories of hanging out in Warez chat rooms, where everyone showed up in phished accounts to trade 'warez' and conspire to troll various AOL communities. Memories of taking apart System 7 shareware games with ResEdit and, in so doing, learning how they worked.
I think you're right, but I do like pishpash's solution of converting to currency value at the time of theft and then applying some sort of interest calculation. This divorces the damages of the theft from the hypothetical asset value of milkshakes over time.
So essentially we set damages at t0 currency value of the milkshake, plus interest over N years. Seems reasonable.
If milkshakes were illiquid, and could only be bought and sold every N years, that would seem to peg damages to asset value instead of currency value. Or am I wrong?
In the scenario I've presented, I think you're correct. This is because milkshakes are liquid (both literally and figuratively), and because they are replaceable.
If we add the condition that milkshakes are not replaceable, does that change the outcome? I'll stfu now if this is derailing things.
Hypothetical problem... Let's imagine a universe in which milk is a rare commodity, and milkshakes are worth their weight in gold. In this world, right now in 2017, 1 milkshake trades for $100 USD. You have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake. So we each hold the equivalent of $100. I drink your milkshake, effectively stealing $100 from you.
Fast forward to the year 2020. Milkshakes are now worth $1,000,000 USD. Have I deprived you of $100, or have I deprived you of $1,000,000? (Note that we can't seem to use retroactive NPV analysis in 2017, since in 2017 we had no way of accurately predicting how milkshakes would be priced in 2020.)
On the one hand, I appear to have imposed a severe opportunity cost on you. On the other hand, I haven't taken the world's only milkshake from you. So what I've literally stolen from you in 2017 is the present value of the milkshake, $100.
IANAL, and I will confess that I have no idea how a court of law would evaluate this case. But in economic terms, it certainly feels as though I've deprived you of more than $100. So what have I actually taken from you?
[EDIT: This post was meant to pose a question. It was not meant as a frank disagreement with the parent post per se. I've cleaned up the wording a bit to try to make it clearer.]
Atlantic salmon aren't "different" enough from the various Pacific salmon species to occupy their own niche in the Pacific Northwest. If the big ones are too big for you, there are also medium-sized species and smaller species.
The Atlantic salmon is a big, predatory fish that needs to eat a lot of smaller species to stay alive. In the Pacific Northwest region, pretty much every species that could sustain the Atlantic salmon is also preyed upon by an extant, native salmon variety of some stripe. If the Atlantic salmon possessed some sort of advantage in obtaining one prey species or another, then there you go, there's a niche it can adapt to. Thus far, we haven't seen that advantage materialize, or the niche appear.
I apologize if some of the nuance of this point was lost in my "bigger, faster" figure of speech. My tl;dr here is that exotic species don't just magically, automatically win in a new environment simply because they're exotic. To thrive, their exoticism needs to confer some specific competitive advantage within the local ecosystem. I'm struggling to see what that advantage is for the Atlantic salmon in the Pacific Northwest, simply because the oceans and waterways in that region are teeming with very, very similar competitors.
I would be highly suspicious of anything calling itself "wild" and "Atlantic" in the same breath. There is almost no wild Atlantic salmon fishery left in the United States and Canada. It's all farm raised. Occasionally you can find legitimately wild Atlantic catch in Scotland or Norway. But wild catch makes up less than 1% of all Atlantic salmon on the market.
So if you want wild salmon, start by looking for a Pacific label, a listed species, or a regional designation of some kind. That's still not a guarantee, but it narrows things down quite a bit.
For what it's worth, 90% of all salmon on the US market is farmed. So if you're at a restaurant or a BBQ and aren't sure what you're getting, you're probably getting farm-raised Atlantic salmon.
Right, but genetic diversity of the breeding population would be very low, making the population itself very fragile. And that's assuming the spawn survive their first season. (Most young salmon spawn do not survive, and those not native to the local waters face unique challenges.)
This doesn't seem to be a case where the invading species gains an immediate upper hand in its new environment. (Cf., the rampant python population in the Florida Everglades.) In this case, the invading Atlantic species faces stiff and probably superior competition from the various Pacific salmon species, which are every bit as big and fast, and which fill the same ecological niche. Hell, a Pacific Chinook will get twice as big as an Atlantic salmon. It also knows the territory, including where and what to hunt, and its wild instincts haven't been dulled in a fish farm.
If I were a betting man, I'd wager on the native Pacific populations over the scattered pockets of farm-raised exotics nearly 99 times out of 100. Barring human involvement, of course. If we hunt the Pacific species out of existence, or damage the environment beyond recognition, all bets are off.
The conflict of interest (companies are also advertisers) is powerful, and it appears to be exerting a significant effect on the directional reliability of aggregate reviews for any company large enough to be a major advertiser. Companies can badger Glassdoor into removing negative reviews, and Glassdoor will ask few to no questions before taking summary and unappealable action in the company's favor.
The negative reviews are pretty much the only interesting data points on the site. Take them with a grain of salt, sure. But you have to take the positives (especially large cohorts of positives over short time intervals) with the whole freaking salt shaker. The aggregate scores offer some directional guidance, but bear in mind that you are not looking at the total sample size of reviews; you are looking at the sample size after the company has culled and gamed what it can, which is often quite a lot of the original pool.
This is sort of like the directional reliability of eBay scores, now that there is a short decay on past reviews, and pretty much anyone with 10 minutes on their hands can get negative reviews expunged.
Coyotes never really went anywhere; in fact, they seem to thrive in the same marginal suburban and semi-wild niches that deer do. Coyotes don't generally prey on deer, however, and hence they're not a perfect substitute for the lost wolves and bears. (Coyotes are too small and slow to take adult deer, except in snowy conditions.)
We have reintroduced wolves to national parks like Yellowstone, evidently with great success. I hope we do the same in other national parks if/where needed. Wolves do not prey on humans, contrary to popular belief, and generally keep a lot of distance from wandering hikers or campers.
Nature may not be "fair," but all things considered, I'd rather we let the wolves do the job of deer population control than humans. We are not as good at it, and we also pump the ecosystem full of heavy metals while we're shooting at the critters.
They're not good markets, and even if they were, they fall far short of the Segway's original goals as a mass consumer product. There is a reason Segway is often used as a cautionary tale in product circles, and as as "What not to do" case study in academia.
Yes, hence why I use the term "ancestral wolves" and not simply "wolves," in the hopes of avoiding confusion. Many people assume dogs are simply some sort of captured/degenerated/infantilized versions of the modern-day grey wolf. This is not at all the case. The likely ancestor of the domestic dog was an ancient lineage of Middle Eastern/Eurasian wolf that is presently extinct and did not survive the last glacial maximum -- because humans hunted its megafaunal prey to extinction. Dogs used to be classified by most textbooks as subspecies of Canis lupus, the grey wolf. Increasingly, genetic analysis shows that Canis familiaris might properly be its own species.
The dog was, in all likelihood, domesticated multiple times over multiple thousands of years in various parts of the globe. The lineage that survived to present is likely to have come from the Fertile Crescent area, even though its domestication predates the agricultural revolution. (Dogs joined us when we were hunter-gatherers, and cats joined us when we settled down to store grain and thereby attracted rodents).
I am not convinced that non-human apes "domesticated" the dog the same way we did, even if modern apes seem capable of taking actions superficially analogous to domestication. Ancestral wolves specifically followed human camps around and lived among us for (presumably) thousands of years before it even occurred to us to domesticate them as such. By that time, nature had 'pre-selected' them for us -- the friendly and cooperative ones, who could survive at the margins of our hunting parties, outcompeted their more feral cousins, who kept their distance from humans and then starved when the mammoths ran out. The first ancient wolves we came into frequent, nonviolent contact with were, in all likelihood, the result of many generations of natural selection before we set about artificially selecting them.
Ironically, and counterntuitively, dogs were more naturally fit than wolves to survive in the early days of the Homo sapiens.
I'd highly recommend reading a book like "The Domestic Dog," which was recently updated with a new edition in 2017. It contains all of the latest science and anthropology around the origins of the human/dog relationship.
The tl;dr is that dogs really do identify us as family, and in all likelihood, the first ancestral wolves to become domesticated dogs took as many co-evolutionary steps towards us as we did them.
Humans and dogs have been evolving alongside each other for at least 15,000 years. The sorts of dog breeds that can't survive in the wild (bulldogs, etc.) are a fairly recent innovation in all of that time, dating back to the mid 1800s and the emergence of the modern breeding program.
Dogs like being with us as much as we like having them around. They were the first domesticated species, and they are literally the only mammals we know of who can read human facial expressions and emotions as well as the great apes can. Our relationship with them is a partnership, not an enslavement.
If you want to take issue with the way humans treat animals, there are so many better targets for outrage than our treatment of the dog. Take the cow or the chicken, for instance, most of whom lead a tortured and awful existence and would want nothing to do with us in a state of nature.
Taleb is a gifted statistician who often wanders out of his element to make broad, bold, but perfunctory claims about various subjects. You kind of have to take his work for what it is: the work of a really smart, but arrogant guy who likes to shoot first and aim later.
Personally, I prefer his academic papers to his pop-sci blogging and books. But I still can't help reading him. He isn't always right, but he's usually interesting.
I agree with you that he would benefit tremendously from a strong editor.