5 posts were merged into an existing topic: Creating & Editing Video, Audio & Animation
Tip: it’s “try to” not “try and”.
To some significant extent, a company is a group of people who are expected and assumed to be extremely biased in favor of the company. It’s a sort of in-group system.
In terms of public presentation, a company is not a loose association of people who retain their own conflicting views. There’s strong pressure not to say anything negative about your company.
Huge companies do have a lot of low level, low skill employees who aren’t controlled or incentivized well (they can easily get a similar job elsewhere). Some of them say negative things on social media. They occasional get fired for it.
More important, professional and highly paid employees don’t do this as much. You don’t see many Amazon tech workers flaming Amazon in public, but you do see complaints from warehouse workers and delivery drivers.
Having your low level employees hate you enough to say so in public (or sometimes directly to customers while they are on the job) is actually really bad, and is something companies seem to inadequately care about. But it’s hard to tell how much they don’t care vs. how much they’re incompetent. I think they ought to look at some of the companies who get along with their employees better – like (without research) I think Costco, Apple (retail store workers) and Trader Joe’s – and copy more of what those companies are doing (including hiring away some managers from those companies).
I think treating low level workers poorly is related to having poor customer service (treating low paying customers poorly). I don’t just mean because the low level workers do the customer service and they do a worse job if they’re disgruntled. I’m thinking of the attitude of the people in high positions at the company to not care about how they treat large numbers of people who are each individually not very important. That attitude applies both to low skill workers and to customers.
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7 posts were merged into an existing topic: Crypto Currency Fraud
I tried to search for YouTube videos where people use MindNode to do something else, so MindNode isn’t the focus. I actually made one of those Yesterday. MindNode was just a tool I used to for doing trees.
I found none. I found plenty of reviews, tutorials and similar – videos about MindNode. But I found no videos with MindNode but about something else.
In general, I find there’s a shortage of videos of people doing real work. Like there are tons of videos teaching you how to use Final Cut but few showing someone sitting down for an hour to do real work (rather than an example meant for teaching) with Final Cut. I was happy to find this one yesterday Editing a Trailer LIVE! - YouTube
I make this kind of video that I think is missing. I have hours of me writing essays, replying to forum posts, and other real activities (not demonstrations; stuff I’d actually do anyway, basically the same way, even if I wasn’t filming). But I haven’t seen much interest or positive response.
This type of video does exist a ton for gaming. It’s easy to find people filming their gameplay and sharing it. That’s primarily available as livestreams. On YouTube, you get more game reviews, play session highlights, Let’s Plays (which usually involve doing a performance for an audience), tips, etc.
But apart from video games it seems pretty rare. I don’t know where to get it. I want to see people doing real stuff and ignoring the camera, but reality TV is fake. And if you search e.g. “cooking” on YouTube you’ll find tons of stuff trying to teach you or show off – stuff meant for an audience – rather than just someone turning on a camera while doing regular cooking like they would with no camera. It’s the same for tons of subjects. Anyone know where to find more real activities footage?
I think when trying to learn to do something, it’s best to look at a mix of stuff meant to teach you and real examples of skilled people doing it (for real, not a staged demonstration).
Sports is another thing where you can get videos of people doing the activity for real. But only for the actual games. Getting video of a baseball team practicing is harder.
I tried searching for building a house with some keywords like “raw footage” or “livestream”. I found people building virtual houses in computers and some time lapses. Time lapses are OK and I’m glad they exist, and some show a meaningful amount of detail (of the actual work activities) instead of just being from a distance. But they’re so sped up it’s hard to learn details of doing the activity from watching. Plus the ones I saw were actually highlights in addition to time lapse, rather than just putting a camera in one place and showing everything recorded. Example. And I have no idea how many hours of work or days of time it took (and even if I knew those summary statistics, I wouldn’t be able to tell them from the timelapse and wouldn’t get an intuitive sense of how slow the real process is). I think the belief is that hours of footage instead of 10 minutes would be boring – unless it’s video games which people livestream for hours and hours no problem (they also will stream some other things like D&D sessions or board games so you can see it real time unedited).
People do stuff differently when in teacher mode (or showoff mode or otherwise putting on a show for an audience) than when they do the work normally. So the teaching material tends to be incomplete and leave some stuff out.
I think one reason people dislike raw footage is it’s harder to understand when you don’t have a teacher explaining what’s going on. And yeah if you only have raw footage, with no teaching stuff, that sucks. So I guess it makes bad introductory material and is more suitable for people who already know some stuff, so that’d lower the popularity a lot.
One of the big picture results is it’s harder for underprivileged people to learn about and break into new industries (or for anyone to change industries, or for children to figure out what industry they’d enjoy). It advantages people with family and friends in an industry so they can get exposure to it that isn’t available on YouTube.
Somewhat related, it’s hard to find good reviews (text or video) for most stuff. A ton of reviews are just like “here’s one; here are some features it has that make it sound good; here’s our affiliate link. ok here’s the next one, and some reasons to buy it, and an affiliate link”. and google doesn’t care and just fills up its search results with that crap. Finding thoughtful reviews that use conceptual reasoning is harder. Partly it’s because those reviews are harder to do than just naming facts or features for each product. But why aren’t the good reviews floating the the top more and being popular and therefore easier to find?
Anyway, does anyone know how to find more real, raw footage for stuff besides games? Anyone have ideas on why there is low demand for it? Like why you haven’t watched much raw footage of me doing philosophy work?
Stephen Wolfram does something like this:
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Cool, thanks, I’ll watch some of this.
I went to one of the first videos and saw it only had ~500 views. So then I checked a recent one and … also ~500 views. And that’s for a tech CEO who’s name is fairly well known and on a 60k sub channel. So apparently this stuff is very unpopular.
I started watching one and immediately saw something worthwhile:
You can apparently, very easily, get a random tree diagram with 40 nodes (or another number). That seems like something I might be able to use somehow. I should check what other tree diagram features they have.
3 posts were split to a new topic: Caffeine, Drugs, Food Additives
Some of the resources our society has for blind people to read books are horrible.
I called NLS to enquire about the process of reading a protected book from archive.org. They had absolutely no clue, and sent me back to the Internet Archive for information, who originally referred me to NLS. So, as this circle was closed, I tried to call the manufacturers of the Victor Reader, which is one of the most popular book reader devices. Though the original FAQ says that protected books can be read using the Victor Reader Stream, it has two versions, the first one from the years when protected books were not available from Archive.org. I wasn’t going to drop a few hundred Dollars to find out that it didn’t work. When I called Humanware, the manufacturer of the Victor Reader, likewise, they didn’t have a clue about Archive.org, and they asked me to call the National Library Service. See above.
Disabled people have to get a special decryption key from the government and then the protected books can’t be accessed on iOS, Android, Mac, PC or Linux – only on expensive specialized hardware from companies like Victor Reader who apparently don’t know how anything works and don’t have any customer service to help disabled people successfully read books.
The reason it’s so much trouble to read these books is DRM.
Here’s an example of a book:
It has “encrypted daisy” download for print-disabled users. That’s the thing which is so much trouble to use even if you sign up with the U.S. government, prove your disability to them, and get a decryption key. (I don’t know if access is possible at all if you aren’t American.)
By contrast, sighted users can make a free account and get a 1 hour or 14 day free library loan and then read the book in a visual viewer on the website (or, for 14 day loans, they can also download encrypted copies that load in Adobe Digital Editions on mainstream computers or devices with any encryption stuff automatically handled by Adobe so the process is user friendly).
Some non-intellectual things that make it harder to think well and learn effectively:
- drugs (including alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, pot, all drugs claimed/intended to be brain-affecting, mood affecting, psychiatrically helpful, etc.)
- undersleeping, disrupted sleep, insomnia
- burnout, routinely trying to fit too much into your schedule
- dating or living with someone abusive
- having a lot of stress, drama and disasters routinely instead of a calmer life where it’s easier to make plans and have some predictability
- ongoing trouble affording rent/food/utilities, financial instability
- diets with a significant calorie deficit
E.g. if you’re trying to lose a pound a week with a diet, that’s around a 500 calorie per day deficit. That will fuck you up. If you don’t cheat on that diet (most people cheat), you’re starving yourself, it will be super painful, and you shouldn’t be surprised to become moody, anxious, depressed, etc. ( Minnesota Starvation Experiment - Wikipedia )
What’s a reasonable maximum limit on the amount of calories to cut if you want to cut calories? I don’t know exactly. Maybe 10% of what you need to eat to break even.
Note that I don’t think the “calories in, calories out” model is very accurate (also people can’t count the calories they eat as accurately as they believe).
On a related note, my understanding is that the diet industry lobbied to change what BMIs are labelled “healthy”, “overweight”, “obese”, etc. So now some research shows better health outcomes for “overweight” than “healthy”. So if you think you’re overweight, you might just be being lied to and also have seen too many airbrushed instagram pics and skinny TV stars. ( https://www.reddit.com/r/Instagramreality/ )
I think most people would be better off if they avoided the following for the first half of their day:
- videos, tv, movies, podcasts, entertainment
- social media
- news, politics
- video games
- EDIT: maybe music too
This is meant for when you have significant control over your schedule. If you have a regular school or work schedule, then it applies to weekends. On days where you spend 8 hours on work/school, you could take the part of the day that is your own (the other 8 hours) and use these guidelines for the first half of those 8 hours (e.g. 1 hour in the morning plus 3 hours after work).
Tip: For health reasons, I suspect over 50% of what you drink should be plain water.
I think that this you say this because you think people are smartest right after they wake up, so if they do the stuff you mention in the first half of their day, then they are wasting their brain power. I recall you’ve written elsewhere that you do your hardest work immediately after waking up.
I think that you think this will be true for almost everyone who is not on caffeine. Am I right?
I was more thinking that doing the most productive stuff first is the best default to fight autopilots taking over your day/life. Once people start watching videos they sometimes don’t stop and are not thoughtful or very aware of how they’re spending their time for the rest of the day.
Doing the important stuff first is a common principle, makes sense in terms of prioritizing, and gives you a reward (watch videos or whatever you want) after you get your stuff done. It gives you something to look forward to and earn in a guilt-free way. (It’s much better to watch some videos and feel good about it than to do it while procrastinating and feeling guilty.) And yeah also people have more energy in the morning. Think/work first, rest after!
And it’s just a simple way to organize some time in your day where you avoid the activities that most often lead to the worst autopilot problems. It has to be really simple to have much chance of working for most people. The kind of person who can implement complex solutions into their life is less in need of this kind of advice.
You can do a similar system with getting stuff done before watching videos, rather than splitting the day into halves by time. That’s more complicated though and takes more skill to set appropriate goals for how much to get done. And it can result in people not finishing their goals all day, so they spend the entire day in work/serious mode and never get to relax/fun mode, which is bad. You’d need some ability to change your goals in the middle of the day when they take shorter or longer than expected. But that’s risky because then you can make excuses for not doing much.
Also, if you do it just by number of hours, it means you will have some time where you gotta figure out what to do and figure out what’d be good to do instead of just taking all the time you can (free time) and putting it straight into entertainment/autopilot. It’s good to sometimes be reflective and think about your goals, schedule, etc. A fixed amount of time to avoid time killers can help you find more goals or activities.
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Makes sense. Thanks.
Are microwaves and cellphones actually safe? On the theme of not trusting the experts, I did 5 minutes of research with google scholar.
Initial conclusions:
Microwaves are safe. The research was done in the 70s or earlier. Looks competent. The radiation is dangerous but the shielding works.
Cellphone research is shoddy and a bunch is industry-funded and biased. We could add cheap shielding to reduce radiation by multiple orders of magnitude, but I think we weren’t doing that as of 2009, presumably to keep phones slightly thinner and lighter (or maybe to keep a better external shape?). So cellphones might be a brain cancer risk. ugh.
This fits with a general theme I’ve noticed: science got worse. Random papers from the 70’s are better than now. Publish or perish is evil and some things have gotten more corruption. Science is having an Eternal September problem and being flooded with mediocre people who are then pressured to publish tons of stuff. Also maybe it’s been bought more by big corporate interests. It was a gradual transition but a very rough guideline is science after 1995 is worse. Also stuff that’s too old is problematic because we knew less in the past (this varies a lot by field). For a lot of topics you have to read stuff from after WWII or later to find work that’s still good today not obsolete.
BTW a lot of meta studies are really low quality – pretty brainless efforts to search some keywords in some databases of papers then categorize the papers with simple metrics. Instead of thinking about explanations, concepts, arguments, what is refuted or not, etc. And this crap is much more common today b/c computers enable it and publish or perish incentivizes it. This is ironic because the “hierarchy of evidence” stuff advocated by some rationality type people says meta studies are the best evidence. What is the Hierarchy of Evidence? | Research Square Reviews are useful when they summarize ideas and talk in terms of concepts and explanations, but I often find just looking at some of the actual research, not meta stuff, is most useful.
A couple thoughts about my initial impressions of science papers/issues:
- My initial impressions are positive, negative or neutral. I do all three. I’m not just always pro-science or always pretty near neutral at first until I know more.
- I’m good at skimming and have a lot of experience with it.
- Sometimes I look at stuff in more depth and I often reach the same conclusion (and if I didn’t, then I’d think about what mislead me, how to do better next time, etc.)
- I searched academic papers instead of popular media articles. I think that works better for a lot of topics.
Video (from mainstream perspective, not someone challenging the status quo) says the scientific research says depression is not caused by serotonin imbalance, and we’ve known that for a while. Tons of scientists don’t believe the serotonin-depression hypothesis but the public does (and the drug companies want the public to believe it). This implies that prescribing SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) for anti-depressants is problematic…
Related, do you know what’s a less extreme, dangerous, risky thing to try than brain-affecting drugs like SSRIs? The lion diet. As a diet, it sounds very extreme. And it is. But it’s mild compared to SSRIs, so people should seriously consider trying it before trying SSRIs.
The lion diet is basically just red meat, water and salt. It’s an extreme elimination diet which tries vary hard to eliminate any food that might be contributing to your health problems. It’s not meant to be permanent. The idea is that, after things improve, you can reintroduce foods one by one and see which are OK for you.
I think that “industry-funded” should be irrelevant to your judgement about a study, because it’s non-decisive.
Good people in industry would be interested in knowing whether or not their product is safe, and would therefore be interested in funding (good, unbiased) studies to investigate that.
E.g. You could say that Hank Rearden researched Rearden metal in an “industry-funded” study.
Industry-funded is not decisive alone, but is relevant context which can be used in arguments and explanations. For example, one might find it implausible how many mistakes they made, on the basis that science isn’t that bad (in general), and then search for an explanation.
Part of the current context is widespread badness in large companies and zero companies resembling Rearden’s. That makes references to industry (or mega corporations or other familiar terms) understandable without specifying a qualifier.