I resent the implication that only rich people are allowed to get high.
I enjoy the implication that fantasy football is as disreputable as drug use.
I'm amused by the two high school students getting stoned before school this morning, sitting on the side of their house which has no windows, meaning sitting right by where our kids traipse down the stairs to the driveway. They looked awkward but I seriously don't care if the HPs see someone smoking pot.
(There's a new family of seven that just moved in, next door to us, in a tiny two bedroom house. Maybe 800 square feet? This house is an absolute rathole. It went unoccupied for the first 3-4 years I lived here, and I was stunned when they decided to "renovate" rather than tear the thing down. At least the kids have a big yard to run around in.)
The thing that baffles me about people on the right is that they can get all in a frenzy about the government mythically taking away their rights (by providing health care or services?), and they are perfectly complacent about corporations stomping all over their civil liberties.
But Heebie-Geebie, it's not stomping over your civil liberties if both parties freely negotiate contracts with each other on equal footing and in good faith, which is exactly how private sector employment works.
Based on Facebook, I think most of the people upset that the government is taking away their rights by providing health care are senior citizens who are actually upset that the government is providing health care for somebody else.
Speaking of managing, I'm now supervising three people. It's getting old because I can't think of a good way to say, "Talk to me less often but do what I'd want you to do more often."
Not that I think counting key strokes is the answer. I'm leaning more toward cultivating an air of mystery/mild personality disorder.
7: For what people assume me are sound medical reasons, we have a very large supply of urine and urine collection items in this office. My favorite part of new employee orientation is, "That's the fridge for lunch, the other one is for urine."
upset that the government is providing health care for somebody else
My impression as well. Specifically, black somebody elses.
The linked article is so important and terrifying.
There's a really insightful Cory Robin post on Crooked Timber now too that makes similar points. Basically, libertarians don't care about actual freedom; what they want is the ability of hierarchical, feudalistic private institutions, particularly employers, to do their thing without interference. Your ultimate libertarian right is the right to sell yourself into slavery.
Halford without intense, end-to-end monitoring of everyone's (online) activities we may never know if people are illicitly enjoying Game of Thrones.
I would trade that for a fairer overall workplace, with strong union protections and an end to employment at will, if that's the deal on offer!
Anyhow, I can't figure out how most of the examples in the linked article describe anything at all different from basically standard Taylorization. Because now there are headsets?
Most of the things in that article aren't new. A woman who worked at a call center discovered that the mean length of her phone calls and the number of phone calls she answered were tracked by the company? Those innovations date to like two minutes after the invention of call centers.
14: uh if I could offer that deal I would do so in about negative a billion seconds.
15 -- I don't know if it's "new" so much as just a lesson in the progress of unchecked Taylorism, advancing rapidly as workers' bargaining power decreases, and with no serious hope of improvement.
Seriously though some of these examples are goofy:
Kronos tracks when employees come to work, when they leave and which ones have high rates of absenteeism.
17: well okay, but the examples they give are by and large things that most people have accepted, if sullenly, for years if not decades. Companies block certain websites? Companies monitor employees' work emails accounts? Companies use a radio to tell the forklift driver where to go? Companies that run call centers check if the people who work there are taking calls and how quickly they're managing them? Companies track when and if their employees arrive at work? These things are maybe sort of regular. Should they be? I dunno, I would be happy to not have web blocking and email monitoring software, but I bet most people would find them pretty anodyne out of context.
And some of the examples are seriously good ideas. Cameras in the ICU so that doctors can monitor and improve on patient care? HOW COULD THEY!
I in fact worked at a call center in the late 80s as a teenager, and I was relentlessly monitored. After I gave notice, I got in trouble on my last day for working so little -- they threatened to send me home early without pay. Though they weren't too fascist about bathroom breaks, which might be a consequence of the current high unemployment rate.
Part 1 of that series really does a much better job of making the general-purpose case that conditions are shitty, particularly for low wage or blue collar workers, and that it is due to attempts to boost productivity.
Cameras in the ICUOR so that other doctors can monitor and improve on patient care?
Monitoring employee's social media is particularly odious. I'd delete my facebook and Google+ accounts before letting my employer have access to them. More realistically I'd lie and say I'd deleted them, change identifying information like picture and birthdate so it looks like I'm somebody else, and keep using them.
Though they weren't too fascist about bathroom breaks, which might be a consequence of the current high unemployment rate.
There's a correlation between the unemployment rate and how much people have to pee? I keep something about the workforce micturition rate going down.
9: Moby sells urine and urine accessories!
22: that'd be great, sure, yes. Aren't surgeries often filmed for various reasons in any case?
23: yeah the asking for social media passwords is really shitty and should be stopped forthwith. That and the GPS on the personal car (even though that guy was presumably using his car for work and was, in fact, cheating the company) were the two where I was like "oh, fuck that".
On the other hand, the social media password thing is very new as a public issue (first came to light last year), it's already banned in six states and eight others have bills that have been introduced, and Facebook threatened to sue employers who ask for employee facebook passwords. So we'll see, but I doubt it's going to get enshrined the way (for instance) time clocks have.
16: -31.71 years? I like the internet because even the effort of opening a calculator app is spared me. Of course this answer comes from Yahoo Answers or something and is probably vastly wrong, but fortunately: who cares?
If I had to be productive, I think I would perish.
Just remember the number of seconds in a year is pi times ten to the 7. So yeah, about 30 years.
I have all these weird unit conversions in my head now after the last couple projects I've worked on. I was inordinately pleased to learn that one parsec per megayear is almost exactly one kilometer per second. Damned astronomers and their wacky units.
I wonder if my productivity correlates at all with keystrokes. Probably not.
29 -- Our Senate passed such a provision this time, but the House killed it last month.
But what if companies use machines to GRADE your email, and fire you if your email gets an F? I heard they can do that, you know.
This recent article in The Nation about drug testing was kind of interesting. Apparently the drug testing industry is pushing very hard to have regular drug testing of all kids in school. Because I'm an idiot, I somehow hadn't realized that drug testing basically doesn't catch anything except marijuana use. So yes, let's work very hard to keep kids from using the least harmful drug they could possibly get into! That'll have good results, I'm sure.
Just remember the number of seconds in a year is pi times ten to the 7.
Only for circular years.
32: A millimeter per microsecond is a kilometer per second, which corresponds to a specific impulse of about 100 seconds. I've been pickled in that set of units for the past three months. Not quite as cool as a parsec per megayear, though.
That Nation article is disturbing. The pharmaceutical executive who makes her 49-year-old son take a urine test!
things that most people have accepted, if sullenly, for years if not decades
I remember Ellen Ulman, in Close To The Machine writing about being asked by a small business owner to put a keystroke counter (and recorder) on the computer of his administrative assistant (in the min-90s). She vaguely tried to talk him out of it, but didn't succeed, and left thinking that it was clearly driven by the technology -- he wanted it because it was easy to do, not because he suspected her of anything.
It was a memorable moment in the book. I don't see my copy, or I would transcribe it.
36: Operation Golden Flow is an excellent name for a drug testing scheme.
Because I'm an idiot, I somehow hadn't realized that drug testing basically doesn't catch anything except marijuana use.
Anecdotally, it was a massive problem when drug testing was introduced in Scottish prisons, because it could detect cannabis use in the preceding week, but everything else only for the last 24 hours. So everyone stopped using pot (which made them peaceful and relaxed) and started using cocaine etc (which made them violent).
This excellent article about new-school designer drugs and the people who appreciate them (really, it's great. Explains the same things about bath salts and the decline of acid and so on that I've tried to, but with more and better words) has an amusing sidebar about how some of the most vigorous experimenters are people in the military, who are subject to reasonably stringent random drug testing and are enthusiastic about finding ways around it (it's not hard).
but the examples they give are by and large things that most people have accepted, if sullenly, for years if not decades.
The techniques have been around for a long time. What's new is that it's been ratcheted up during the Great Recession, and more and more companies are seizing on the paradox of increased productivity with fewer workers as a means to grow their profits.
I see this in both Jammies and my job. Jammies has worked for the same company for twelve years. They fired a bunch of people in his group since 2008, without replacement, and he's now doing the job that used to be done by three people, and feeling super stressed out and unable to stay on top of it.
I see it with the secretarial staff at Heebie U - they consolidate positions when someone retires, instead of hiring someone new. Same with faculty - we lost three adjuncts last year for various normal reasons in the math department, and didn't hire any. Literally everyone fulltime in the math department - besides me - has taught an overload this semester. I've absolutely refused to, because I think I'd come apart at the seams.
(The new vice-provost has been amazing about this, actually, and supports me in not teaching overloads, and is documenting and addressing the ways in which everyone is overworked. I love her so much.)
I used to work in call centre management [and previously as a front-line drone]. Some of the tracking stuff could be pretty intrusive. When I worked at a bank, they were dicks about it. I remember having a huge argument with one boss about my time logged off between calls. I didn't have _any_, as I could touch-type and could complete all the relevant logs while I was on the phone to the customer. She was clearly looking at someone else's data, or there was a machine error. But, 'computer says no'. I think I may have even skated close to a formal warning on it. I also got dinged a couple of times for taking longer than X minutes to take a piss.
However, when I was in call centre management, while we occasionally used the numbers to prod someone who was slack or much slower than other people, largely we [junior management] used the numbers to prod senior management into hiring more people. Or at least to lay off the front line people on the targets, as it was clear from the data that there was no way in a million years the targets were legitimately achievable.
They fired a bunch of people in his group since 2008, without replacement, and he's now doing the job that used to be done by three people, and feeling super stressed out and unable to stay on top of it.
Somewhat ditto for me. I've been promoted a couple of times, and whereas previously they'd have hired people to do the old jobs, I've largely ended up continuing to do some of the old things on top of what I do now. There was rumoured to be a policy of deliberately leaving jobs vacant, and delaying the authorisation to appoint within HR, too, in order to save a few £s.
more and more companies are seizing on the paradox of increased productivity with fewer workers as a means to grow their profits.
It's not a paradox, at least in the short to medium term. Say you have two people doing approximately two people's regular amount of work, you fire one and give their responsibilities to the other. Even if the remaining person only manages to do some of that extra workload, their measured productivity (=output per worker/unit of labour cost) has increased dramatically.
Now this approach may harm the overall quality and even quantum of work, but it practically guarantees an in increase in productivity (absent confounding factors such as a decline in other investement).
Wait, I'm still not clear on the math. Leave out the techniquese, please.
There was rumoured to be a policy of deliberately leaving jobs vacant, and delaying the authorisation to appoint within HR, too, in order to save a few £s.
Explicitly admitted at my employer. Doesn't save them money because we just have to use freelancers. But that's a different budget of course....
The pharmaceutical executive who makes her 49-year-old son take a urine test!
Auuuuuuuuuuugh!
If you have no employees at all, but some work happens to spontaneously occur, your productivity is infinite.
I have no monkeys sitting at any type-writers, but I've still got hope.
Apparently the drug testing industry is pushing very hard to have regular drug testing of all kids in school.
We are become a nation of high school assistant principals.
The techniques have been around for a long time. What's new is that it's been ratcheted up during the Great Recession, and more and more companies are seizing on the paradox of increased productivity with fewer workers as a means to grow their profits.
Well, sure. Except, as Ginger Yellow points out, it's neither new nor a paradox. It's just that worker rights have been eroded and the economy is shitty so people are going back to doing things the shitty way they did a hundred years ago, or whatever.
Hooray. Now I can wear my 80s pants.
I really hope five more people can explain to me why the word "paradox" was sloppy, because it's a really fine point that it saves you money to pay fewer people. I'm just not grasping it.
Would it help if I first reminded you that I was a man and then explained it?
Also, there's a point that the paradox has specifically increased as a strategy during the Great Recession. Yes, it's not new and why bother talking about the return of robber barons. I guess we're done rehashing old topics.
Ohio HB59, the new general budget bill, allows the boards of any Ohio state higher ed institution to raise teaching loads by two courses a year. We are desperately trying to convince people that this shouldn't apply to those of us who are already teaching 5/5.
5/5 is only one, no wonder people think professors are too pampered.
At my old firm, we got keyclick counting in the early 90s. Not to worry about productivity, but because some vendor thought we could charge for it. Clients were overjoyed.
Next step: Drug testing used to support expensed drug use.
Well, it's not like the drug dealers are giving receipts.
To the OP, people are willing to put up with employer drug testing etc because they need the money and have no leverage. Just like welfare recipients.
Well, there is some joy to be had in telling your service professionals that there's no way on earth you're ever going to pay a charge like that, and if it ever appears on a bill again, there won't be any further billing.
To the OP, people are willing to put up with employer drug testing etc because they need the money and have no leverage. Just like welfare recipients.
That's different. Of course they put up with it because they have to. But why do they (on the right) not think the practice is a violation of their civil liberties?
70: Because it hasn't occurred to them that anybody wants to test middle-aged white people with college degrees?
I'm missing something and don't understand the keystroke charge. In addition to hourly billing there was a per-keystroke charge?
71. I think Heebie is commenting on the supine pusillanimity of the middle aged white people when they are asked to piss in a bottle.
I won't accuse anyone of mansplaining if they spell out "supine pusillanimity" for me.
The idea of pissing into a bottle from a supine position is disgusting.
I've never had a drug test, though I have had my fingerprints taken at most of my jobs.
I guess it wouldn't be so bad with a stent, but that's not what we're talking about, is it?
Kronos tracks when employees come to work, when they leave and which ones have high rates of absenteeism.
They were pretty punk when they recorded Black Angels, but you never know who's going to get coöpted by The Man.
I've always assumed that any employer with the faintest idea of what it is I do all day would fire me immediately -- I mean, it'd be the only reasonable thing to do. On the other hand, they've all seemed reasonably pleased with my output. Reading stories like this, I've always kind of wondered what happens when a valuable worker gets busted as an egregious time-waster: do people get fired despite doing good work, or does the panopticon develop discreet holes?
I waste most of my time sitting around waiting for data to process. Just took 13 minutes to run an analysis of 6 million data points. If they don't want me to waste time they should buy me a supercomputer.
Have you ever considered more parsimonious models?
73, 75, 77; Rule 34.
There's a book out now on the loss of resilience and robustness when you design a system without slack. Possibly called 'Slack'.
What infuriates me about the rhetoric in the linked articles is that everyone earnestly says `well, in today's economy', but mentions that firm profits are up, so the problem in the economy would seem to be unemployment and under-spending. Which funnel we seem determined to spiral down, now that the public stabilizers are acting like short-term businesses.
I once wrote `Compiling' on an eyemask for office naps. (It was true, too.)
My ignorant mental model of sleep is that we are compiling, or at least defragmenting. Yesno?
78: I might actually prefer that world to the world of the last Kronos performance I saw (although I enjoyed the heavily distorted electric pipa at the end). If I wanted to spend a week or more supine prostrate in despair, I would subject myself to this.
What do you do with data that takes 13 minutes if you don't model it?
Halford, go find an old man and ask him about the wonders of unbundling. And about who was stroking keys in the law firm of the 1980s.
Heebie, they'll tell you it's not a civil liberties violation because the person agreed to it. Just like the myriad 4th Amendment cases you can read where the defendant is unable to suppress the [gun/drugs] found after the defendant consented to a search. Or maybe they'll just say it's not state action.
I'm running it through some data pipelines, joining common fields, filtering & flagging records that pass the filters, and generating new columns from ratios of existing ones. So it actually isn't modeling in the sense of fitting/optimizing/minimizing anything.
79: Do you remember the Bloom County when Bill the Cat failed his drug test?
90: Verdict: Drug addict. But not expendable. Probation recommended.
If you try to order a filter without a model number, we can't be guarantee you get the right part.
My ignorant mental model of sleep is that we are compiling, or at least defragmenting. Yesno?
Not really. Writing to disk and compressing, maybe? If you're really desperate for an analogy.
Also earlier I was just trying to mansplain to heebie than manpart 1 of the dudicle bro-series did a much better job of manillustrating the impact of the broturn of robber bardong style management pracdickces.
82.2: This is a hobbyhorse of mine. Too highly optimized systems are brittle, and that's a very general rule. I will have to read this book, as it seems likely to confirm what I already believe, which is always nice.
I think you can formulate an explanation for the cycle of growth followed by crisis that seems to be a feature of capitalism in terms of the optimization/brittleness model. If so the remedy is to introduce something akin to a viscosity into the system, like regulation and taxation or some other feature that prevents excessive optimization for conditions that inevitably will change.
96.1: I have lately been thinking about how social insurance and monetary policy and taxation and so on can be conceptualized as regularization terms on an economy that is essentially a predictive model of real-world supply and demand; their role is to prevent overfitting of the model to past data to keep from catastrophic failures of generalization at some future point. The only problem with this analogy is that I think the set of people who need to be convinced of the usefulness of the foregoing who would also find this model useful is close to zero.
From the obituary of NYT reporter McCandlish Phillips -- a reminder of the "good old days" --
He did not smoke, drink, curse or gamble, each of which had been refined to a high, exuberant art in the Times newsroom -- the last of these to such a degree that at midcentury the newspaper employed two bookmakers-in-residence, nominally on the payroll as news clerks.
I bought an occasional CD until about a year or two ago, but I've now basically given everything up for Spotify, which is amazing, and although it does suck for artists it's probably the viable and inevitable way forward. Vinyl and download code is nice but my basic consumer attitude these days is eh fuck it listen to it through Spotify.
No, see, heebie, it's a filter.
Not to pick on anarchists, whom I usually like, but the male anarchist/crit theorist sitting next to me during my pre-conference working group last week seriously spent five minutes explaining, to a room with at least four feminist theorists, about "this amazing concept from bell hooks: intersectionality."
Rob: A 5/5 is daunting enough--I can't even imagine a 7/7!
Do you really think someone in your condition ought to be typing in all caps?
With my suddenly swollen fingers, caps are about all I can manage. Didn't Homer have a mashing stick to address this problem?
|| Our state House is currently debating whether to repeal our unconstitutional anti-sodomy laws. The repeal is going to pass, but not before some folks have gotten a chance to show their colors. |>
How sudden, heebie? You know to watch for swelling, headaches, etc.
109: Has someone suggested that they should at least have the decency to put it off for a week or two out of respect for Margaret Thatcher?
109: Our likely GOP gubernatorial candidate, Ken Cuccinelli, has advocated bringing back sodomy laws in VA. He's a precious specimen, our Ken is.
97: You mean the cardinality of that set is close to zero.
Well, you should watch the Schimmel sisters tonight.
105: I mistrust anarchists who sign on for the whole critical theory deal. First of all, you know all their teachers are bourgeois Fabians, so how much anarchism is really going to get discussed/thought about/enpraxised in those seminars? Secondly, most of them don't really do shit as far as activism. Or they'll have like one project that they trumpet loudly and get all worked up about, but they don't actually participate in anarchist communities. Thirdly, it's almost a guarantee that they are going to retire from any anarchist activism when they get their PhD. My late friend j/oel o/lson was one of the few anarchist grad students/professors who resisted all of those things to emerge as a real force for change in both the academy and the streets. Sigh.
Reading stories like this, I've always kind of wondered what happens when a valuable worker gets busted as an egregious time-waster: do people get fired despite doing good work, or does the panopticon develop discreet holes?
Depends. I know a designer who was half an hour late three days out of five for a couple of years. Finally they changed her schedule from 9-5 to 10-6. Now she's usually about 15 minutes late.
|| 64-36. The only no vote from our local delegation (which is 8-2 D) is the R who's planning to run against Max Baucus in '14. |>
110: It just got noticeably hotter here in the past few days, and my fingers and feet have definitely responded. My blood pressure and other indicators are all okay, though.
In libertarian Russia, you watches you.
Writing to disk and compressing, maybe?
I'm not convinced that there's any good evidence of this.
105: Haha, of all the subjects to mansplain. And bell hooks has got to be covered in an intro course, right? I mean, if I know who she is, and I've only read a couple of books on the subject, then jeez.
||
Sigh. NMM to Paolo Soleri. I did get to meet him once several years ago. He was a bit faded, but still funny and brilliant.
||>
Lot's of things sleep, even when they haven't learned anything and don't have very rich internal lives. W, for instance, probably sleeps.
121: that's fine. It's an analogy. What would evidence mean? The actual proces I was trying to analogize has plenty of support.
And if whatever sleeping animal has a hippocampus, it's likely learning something over the course of its life, if only "might be food that way" and "might get eaten this way".
I had a hippocampus, but the hippos just wound up cutting class and hanging out by the gym doors smoking cloves.
Do you know why "hippopotamus" and "hippocampus" both start with "hippo", Natilo? It sure is fascinating!
Is it inane? 'Cause I was mostly going for inanity rather than fascination.
Having read the Wikipedia entry, I am now incensed that the Danish anatomist Jacob Winsløw's suggestion to call the hippocampus the "ram's horn" was not followed. That's so typical, you know. Danish anatomists never get any respect.
The high is 88° today. I'm wilting.
Will nobody post about "Accidental Racist"?
There's a right way and a wrong way to flatter your FPPs into posting things, VW.
I'm well aware there is a large amount of research focussed on finding evidence for this theory and churning out papers, but I think that's more because it was an exciting hypothesis, not because it was well founded.
Sleep is a pretty drastic change to go through every night, and mental performance degrades very rapidly when you don't have enough. Is it really credible that that happens because you haven't had a chance to consolidate the days memories?
Anyway, it's up, because it really is an irresistible topic.
They'd just add two courses a year, not two courses a semester, so my load would be a mere 6/6.
139 and 140 are pretty fucking stupid. You go ahead believing what you feel, chief.
Yeah! Who's the tool that posted 140?
Mighta been my twin, hanki-chief.
Okay, 141 is stupid. Can you explain why it's stupid?
It's not a paradox, at least in the short to medium term. Say you have two people doing approximately two people's regular amount of work, you fire one and give their responsibilities to the other. Even if the remaining person only manages to do some of that extra workload, their measured productivity (=output per worker/unit of labour cost) has increased dramatically.
Now this approach may harm the overall quality and even quantum of work, but it practically guarantees an in increase in productivity (absent confounding factors such as a decline in other investment).
See, this just doesn't match up with my actual experience. I've lived through plenty of cost-cutting in three different fields and this is just not what happens.
Here's an example: A library circulation desk has three staff members, at three computers. Their job is primarily to check people's items in and out, renew things, attend to fines, answer run-of-the-mill questions, etc.
If you take away one of those staff members, the other two don't necessarily serve more patrons (if we're using that extremely crude definition of units of service).
Sure, the two remaining workers can speed up. But that doesn't mean "more patrons served effectively." For one thing, patrons will also self-select away from the now-longer line (choosing to go home without items), will get fewer items than they otherwise would, and will fail to ask questions or make requests that they want.
Library staff, feeling rushed, will skip doing important things like collecting fines and renewing people's expired cards, thus creating more friction and backlogs. Some patrons who normally stand at the desk and wait for their returns to be checked in will abandon that practice, thus increasing the number of improperly scanned items and arguments over fines.
Even if the *only possible metric* you looked at was "items scanned per hour," it is just not my experience that cutting staff leads to any greater productivity from Workers #1 and 2. They can only use one computer at a time in any case. Cutting an extra worker just means fewer hands to go fetch returns, sort items, and empty carts.
This isn't hypothetical. This is my actual experience.
To be clear, I'm not saying it *can't* happen that you fire a worker and save money while increasing the remaining workers' productivity -- I've seen that happen too. I'm disputing that this is necessarily what *will* happen.
141 Is it really credible that that happens because you haven't had a chance to consolidate the days memories?
It kind of seems like by "credible" you mean "plausible", in which case: yes?
The hippocampus comes from a word for "sea horse", right? Except it kind of looks like it should mean "field horse". What's up with that?
150.last: apparently it means something like "sea monster horse" in Greek.
Oh it seems to be from Greek instead of Latin? Different root than the English word "campus", at least based on cursory googling. If only we had a classicist around who could 'splain everything.
It's definitely a greek word, yeah. What I want to know is what kind of demented weirdo looks at a deep interior piece of a brain and says "aw, look, a seahorse!"
Anyhow the mechanism by which memory consolidation happens -- and how the lack of that affects task performance, and the different things the hippocampus is probably for -- is (are) totally fascinating, but I'm going to keep it to myself because PSSH STUPID SCIENTISTS DON'T KNOW NOTHIN WITH THEIR HUNDREDS OF MUTUALLY REINFORCING RESEARCH PAPERS ACROSS MANY FIELDS.
PSSH STUPID SCIENTISTS DON'T KNOW NOTHIN WITH THEIR HUNDREDS OF MUTUALLY REINFORCING RESEARCH PAPERS ACROSS MANY FIELDS.
I swear one of these days I'm going to murder one of my colleagues who always responds to being told the well-known results of an active field of research with a skeptical smirk and "really? eh, I don't know. doesn't sound right."
"Doesn't pass the smell test, mmm?"
YES KUHN WOULD HAVE SEEN THIS YOU DIPSHIT
Today he held up a seminar for about 15 minutes while everyone tried to get him to accept a simple fact that's been in textbooks for 30 years in a field only slightly different from his own.
On the other hand when my advisor talks about how you have to develop an instinct for what science is true and what can be ignored because it's definitely bullshit I believe him, because he is exactly Yoda.
157: hah, that's awesome. We have those. There's one guy who kind of hangs around our lab for providing the only empirical evidence for something famous that is, as it turns out, bullshit, who turns up for talks and gets really involved in trying to debate the merit of points that no, honest, everybody has agreed on for twenty years now.
er the first "for" should be "having gained the privilege by virtue of".
Also there's the lady who is famous for having taught an animal to do amazing, unlikely things but who is not otherwise terribly expert in our field who always chimes in to relate the topic to work with animals, no matter how unlikely the connection might seem to everybody else.
totally fascinating
Huh, that doesn't sound like the answer to a stupid question.
That's right. That's why it's not the answer to the question you asked, which was essentially "why should I believe the existing scientific consensus when I think it sounds all dumb and stuff hurr hurr fart." Which for all I know comes from you knowing way more thn me about memory, REM sleep, and the hippocampus, but sure came like you being an ignorant dumbass and expecting me to do all the fucking work of educating you because why I don't know.
I think you can formulate an explanation for the cycle of growth followed by crisis that seems to be a feature of capitalism in terms of the optimization/brittleness model. If so the remedy is to introduce something akin to a viscosity into the system, like regulation and taxation or some other feature that prevents excessive optimization for conditions that inevitably will change.
You should look into resilience theory. (There's also apparently something called "resilience theory" in child development research that gets a lot more google results than the socio-ecological version I was looking for.)
I think you can formulate an explanation for the cycle of growth followed by crisis that seems to be a feature of capitalism in terms of the optimization/brittleness model. If so the remedy is to introduce something akin to a viscosity into the system, like regulation and taxation or some other feature that prevents excessive optimization for conditions that inevitably will change.
You could formulate it anew, or you could simply copy long passages from Karl Polanyi.
sifu definitely ate his pissed-in wheaties today!
161: And you're surprised that some people are excited find seahorses in brain structures? Maybe she's from a long line of somethings.
Sifu, the standard you're arguing for here is surely not just "experts agree", is it? Experts agree on false things all the time in economics, for example -- economists all agreed that the minimum wage hurt employment until Card and Krueger. Michael Jensen, an economist at Harvard, once said that the efficient market hypothesis is the best-established fact in all of social science, a quote economists liked to repeat approvingly up until about the time of the Nasdaq bubble.
Skepticism towards ideas you don't like (i.e. "that don't smell right") is pretty worthless, but experts are as capable of collective delusion as anyone else.
Skepticism towards ideas you don't like (i.e. "that don't smell right") is pretty worthless, but experts are as capable of collective delusion as anyone else.
Sure! And the memory consolidation hypothesis could easily be wrong (most if not all models of brain function probably are wrong). But pooh-poohing a massive, well-supported research literature because you think people are just trying to crank out papers is stupid, and saying that a theory must not have any validity because you don't find it credible is stupid, and neither makes me inclined to argue back that no, no, all of the people doing work in this area actually aren't clueless charlatans, especially when I've already googled a couple of reasonably well written, publicly available papers with dozens or hundreds of cites. It felt too much like farting in my face and asking me to rebut; why would I engage with that on a question I find interesting?
169: but we're talking about experts here, not economists.
I'm always torn on this issue, I totally hate the Internet "if you can't respond to my objections in five minutes in a blog comment, I will choose to disregard years of research by experts" thing. OTOH Walt is right, and also "I dont explain, respect my authority!" always comes across as a lame rhetorical move even if it's a reasonable one.
N.B. I could care less if Eggplant respects my non-existent authority on this topic.
... and, by the evidence, he could care less about the scholarly work that's been done, which is all I could really speak to anyhow. So, fine! We move on.
I'm not seeing the weirdness, at least not in a literature-based way.
Sifu, nobody can read that research literature. It is impossible to read if you aren't a researcher in the field. I know because it's true of my research as well.
I didn't read the papers because I wasn't at a computer all yesterday (so perhaps not the best time to troll, but), and I don't have time right now, but reading the first paragraph of the first paper I come to this: "the brain uses the same limited neuronal network capacities for the immediate processing and long-term storage of huge amounts of information &em; mutually exclusive functions that cannot take place simultaneously in these networks". Isn't the mutually exclusive part completely false?
Anyway, 139 was mostly trolling and I certainly didn't mean to imply the field is full of charlatans. I do suspect that this hypothesis has driven the research, and the evidence found so far has been weak. You've read much more of the literature than I have (so I am curious about your answer to 141), but what little I have I haven't found convincing. It's very hard to disambiguate the positive effects of sleep from the negative effects of sleeplessness. The effects people find that I've seen are not limited to, and only loosely correlated with sleep.
177: Literature on which I've been a coauthor is very easy to read because I'm a comprehensible kind of guy.
Some responses on a quick read of the first half:
Massive question begging in the introduction, already mentioned.
Then we go to memory tasks, sleep versus wakefulness, post-training and pre-recall. All these experiments are just as consistent with wakefulness being actively harmful, and sleep being neutral, for retention. This may seem like a semantic game, but bear in mind that saying "sleep contributes to hippocampus-dependent memory consolidation" is a ways away from saying sleep is for that purpose. Sleep is pretty clearly beneficial for performance of a wide variety of tasks.
Skipping a bit about stages of sleep and explicit and implicit memories, which I've not come across and will take further thought, they end with the observation that during slow wave sleep patterns of spikes and EEG in the hippocampus and the cortex are correlated, with various leads and lags. One of the problems with this type of measurement is that it is extremely noisy, or at least appears so. If you add in some uninterpretable (by us, not necessarily the brain) background activity a relationship that might still be there disappears. I could be wrong, but couldn't this sort of interplay always be present and only show up when activity quiets and settles into these large scale coherent bursts?
"the brain uses the same limited neuronal network capacities for the immediate processing and long-term storage of huge amounts of information &em; mutually exclusive functions that cannot take place simultaneously in these networks". Isn't the mutually exclusive part completely false?
No, per this work and a lot of follow-up. Basically if you have a neural network you can either be good at learning things quickly or you can be good at avoiding interference; that is, if you want to be able to learn information rapidly (after seeing something once or twice, say) then you are by definition going to run the risk that new things you learn will overwrite old things you learn. This might turn out to not be true but nobody has yet built a neural network model where it is.
saying "sleep contributes to hippocampus-dependent memory consolidation" is a ways away from saying sleep is for that purpose. Sleep is pretty clearly beneficial for performance of a wide variety of tasks
Sure. But where this all started, if you'll recall, was a quest for a useful computer metaphor for what happens cognitively during sleep. Consolidation is both important and also a pretty good candidate for a computer metaphor, which is why I mentioned it, and why I have certainly not made (and wouldn't make) the claim that sleep is only about consolidation.
ut couldn't this sort of interplay always be present and only show up when activity quiets and settles into these large scale coherent bursts?
Maybe. In the absence of converging evidence that would certainly be a concern. But I only picked two highly-cited papers from the first page of google results on a massive literature; if you go here, for instance, you'll see some of the breadth of the work that's been done.
if you want to be able to learn information rapidly (after seeing something once or twice, say) then you are by definition going to run the risk that new things you learn will overwrite old things you learn
Hence the utility of the one-hit professor in the back of every seminar.
I think of that period of each Q&A as `the running of the hobby-horses', and can generally enjoy it for looking at the topic from many angles, however silly they usually are.
There's a lot of things exising neural network models can't do. Approximate a brain, for one.
Also, in that sentence they're not contrasting quick memorization with with slow, more stable inference. They're claiming one can't be conscious ("immediate processing") and consolidate memories ("long-term storage of huge amounts of information").
I wasn't questing for a computer metaphor, I was querying the utility of my naïve one. I've quite enjoyed the result, though.
There's a lot of things exising neural network models can't do. Approximate a brain, for one.
No kidding. And if all they were claiming was that one specific model can't do both of those things, then that would be a fairly devastating counter-argument.
Also, in that sentence they're not contrasting quick memorization with with slow, more stable inference. They're claiming one can't be conscious ("immediate processing") and consolidate memories ("long-term storage of huge amounts of information").
Essentially the same thing in this context.
... well, closely related, anyhow.
184: Okay, if all you're claiming that some learning happens during sleep I can't disagree. That paper is making a stronger claim.
I'm claiming that (the consensus of the research community, which I basically buy, is) consolidation of episodic and explicit memory in the hippocampus is an extremely important role of sleep, and may be the primary role of REM sleep, and likely (in its absence) causes a lot of the cognitive problems that you see in serious sleep deprivation. Also, it is probably the single most important impact that sleep has on cognition.
189: Hang on, you were offering the example of neural network models as evidence that there was a fundamental conflict. I'm responding that a performance deficit in those models is not evidence that such a problem is exhibited by actual brains. Especially when this deficit is not the one under discussion, but is only a closely related one.
193: right. Neural network models as a general-case model for the operation of the brain. That is, the claim is that there is no way to build a neural network model -- even at a scale and complexity that is unavailable to us -- which is a single, homogeneous system that can simultaneously manage one-shot (or limited trial) learning and also avoid catastrophic interference. It's a general claim that applies to the brain insofar as the brain is effectively conceptualized as a neural network, not a claim about one particular model or class of models.
What exactly is Obama trying to fund, when he says "map the brain", by the way? I have been wondering.
In the absence of converging evidence that would certainly be a concern.
My problem is that a lot of the evidence I've seen suffers from this same sort of problem.
consolidation of episodic and explicit memory in the hippocampus is an extremely important role of sleep, ... and likely (in its absence) causes a lot of the cognitive problems that you see in serious sleep deprivation
What about the progression of cognitive problems throughout a day and into the night suggests this? I'm honestly very curious. This consolidation is taking place when we are awake as well. How does this process account for relatively constant performance during the day followed by a steep decline in basically every measure of performance?
195: yeah it's a puzzle. I think people in the brain sciences world are hoping "everything", rather than "this one somewhat hopeless project that's not a very good idea even if it does work".
196.1: if you are concerned about noisy measures of correlation maybe the natural sciences are not going to be congenial for you.
194: Let me reset. As I read it, they are claiming that an existing, single, non-homogeneous system of neurons can't both maintain consciousness and consolidate memories when it clearly does. Countering that crude, homogeneous copies can't is irrelevant.
Let me reset.
Maybe a brief nap would work.
195: yeah it's a puzzle. I think people in the brain sciences world are hoping "everything", rather than "this one somewhat hopeless project that's not a very good idea even if it does work".
Yeah, boy howdy.
