this essay's style seems endemic in tech writing: logorrheic and trafficking in technical details/protocols in place of the underlying principles (cogency, brevity, a single unifying argument that can be simply stated).
i appreciate any tips to aid my writing, but i think very few match the tried and true approach of reading masters of the craft and revising one's writing, again and again, for brevity. i suspect that the blog format discourages the latter.
looking up the paper on pubmed reveals a flurry of letters to the editor published in the subsequent issue that call out the 'tai method' for what it is. i would actually bet a good number of the 70 citations that so worry 'flip tomato' are actually criticisms or commentary papers like this, as opposed to earnest citations.
it's ironic that a blog post like this would use an image that appears to be poking fun at the fervor with which people record and analyze paul graham's teachings
yet, his personal blog is largely attacks on people who publish essays questioning his conclusions. for instance, he appears to be still steaming over the whole pinker review/ eigenvalue debacle. i guess i can't really argue with the quotation you provide but he seems to me like someone who takes his conclusions (too) seriously.
i don't grasp the 'problem' with the rating system. a 4.5 star deli offers 4.5 star deli cuisine, and a 4 star restaurant offers 4 star haute cuisine. are they that much more comparable than a 4 star restaurant and a 5 star laundromat?
the people here seem so self-motivated that i would be surprised if many of them would want to pay yearly fees to be told they are smart, as opposed to simply telling themselves they're smart or, better yet, not really worrying about it at all.
those looking for a new, ultra-stimulating social circle may think mensa offers more than their local universities or alumni associations, but i'm not so sure. i would also worry that mensa might select for a unique type of person who is highly invested in his perceived intelligence (which is often to the detriment of friendship and productive conversation). i wonder if anyone can tell us more about the organization...
I think we agree completely that the use of GPA as a measure of ability is limited. To be fair, though, I never asserted that GPA would predict who would 'have a better social life' or who would be 'in better shape.' In fact, I might predict that these would be negatively correlated with GPA. Also, I'm not sure I understand your story: did your friend actually have low grades, or are you just saying he was highly successful after attending a less famous school?
In any case, I hesitate to offer my own examples: I don't have a sufficiently large sample size, as I don't hang out with people who had low GPAs.
the 'relevance of grades' argument never seems to die here. like any other measure of ability, the use of GPA has its limitations. the reason the debate continues, i suspect, is that a lot of people here got bad grades.
It is exactly because the "top x" title is a gimmick that I want it faithfully included in HN titles. This way, I know to not click on the link in the first place, as I typically avoid these types of list articles.
i think a lot of the discussion regarding this topic has focused too closely on famous scientists/innovators and whether they were insufferably arrogant or not. certainly we can all agree that many famous scientists were arrogant, and i believe your claim that many of the people you admire are arrogant. but these are the very rare people who are exceptionally talented and--i admit this with a sigh--deserve to be arrogant. it might be a little harder for me or others to get along with them, but that's who they are and if it helps them do good work, then so be it.
we seem to forget that the vast majority of arrogant people overestimate their abilities, are no better than their peers, and are mocked behind their backs or on the internet. One might term these the "fuck yeah" arrogants. Perhaps their arrogance is helping their work slightly, but I think instead its primary effect is to limit their capacity to learn.
this is an amusing article that points out some of the more classic examples of wolfram's risible self-promotion. it's odd, however, that this critique comes from someone whose own webpage offers 3 headshots of himself, including one at the astronomic resolution of 1650x2135. (http://chrishecker.com/Image:Checker-headshot-closed.png)
maybe wolfram wants alpha to do many of the things that we now consider 'googling;' maybe he doesn't. regardless, the author's point stands that alpha doesn't seem to do too many things that are useful to me on a day-to-day or even week-to-week basis. as a biologist, i consider the results of gene searches on alpha to be, if not useless, then at least far inferior to what i get in more specialized databases. do people in other fields also find this to be true of their own searches?
this will be ideal for high school research papers (especially the edward tufte-inspired graphics) and get some new people into mathematica, but beyond that i'm not too excited about it.
i guess my issue is (and perhaps this is because i haven't read up enough on the biohacking movement) that transforming e. coli shouldn't be sold as 'hacking,' which to me implies that you'll be free to kind of build and design whatever you can imagine. in reality, you are 'splicing' nothing (as transformation does not require recombination, and the bacteria will rapidly lose whatever plasmid was introduced if they are taken out of the appropriate media), and you are limited by whatever plasmids you have the good fortune of borrowing from someone--maybe GFP to make your bugs glow or something. i suppose there might be an analogy to be made here to the early days of computer science, when one could do very little with computers, but i still think that this technology, which will be great for getting people excited about science, should not yet be advertised quite so breathlessly.
it's worth pointing out that all of the protocols i've found on this site after a brief search are essentially late middle school/early high school science fair projects. i'm not a computer person but i assume that this is not what you would call 'hacking.'
i think people are going a little overboard about this. it was a humorous essay, reflecting real events probably but told in an exaggerated style. (i do admit that the part about the dad and girlfriend pushed the humor into something a bit awkward.)
i thought his observations about paul's essays were pretty spot-on, and i'm surprised few people have mentioned this.
i appreciate any tips to aid my writing, but i think very few match the tried and true approach of reading masters of the craft and revising one's writing, again and again, for brevity. i suspect that the blog format discourages the latter.