Simfish/InquilineKea's Thoughts

someday i will grab my more insightful posts from HG/INTL/PF/CC/etc and actually make copies of them somewhere here.

What’s the value of a forum, anyways? Especially if it’s one of many forums on a certain subject?

I was lucky in choosing age of kings heaven as one age of empires 2 forum out of many. It wasn’t necessarily the obvious choice back when I was active there, but now I realize that I was lucky. Now it’s influence is higher than any other age of empires 2 website (simply since all the other ones have died and their archives have permanently vanished). But also because the community, for whatever reason, happens to be more intelligent than the communities of many others. As TheShadowDawn once remarked, it was a community of mostly amateur players. But this community of mostly amateur players resulted in a community of fun (the forum parties at Agincourt) rather than of competition.

And why do I go to physics forums, among all other science forums? This is harder to justify. Physics Forums is obviously the first that came, and the most active among them. But I certainly wonder if there is a more non-arbitrary criteria for me to go there.

Of course, also, there’s forums vs IRC.

There’s no reason not to go to several different forums. But when one is not heavily engaged in the forum, one pretty much "defaults" to the default forum that one has always gone to.

so, a cliche quote. Of course it has its merits. People often overestimate the costs of failure – the cost of failure is often unpleasant, but can result in intense self-development.

But, there are *some* times that the quote doesn’t apply. because the people who succeeded while taking *real* risks – are the only people who end up giving such advice. so they’re an unrepresentative sample. But we must also realize, that, of course, the people who failed might end up in another field and give the same advice, too => in a sense, almost everyone could succeed and still give that advice.

obviously developing interests/cultural references is the best way to bond with people (even childhood ones can be particularly powerful). hell, i’m not even sure if google reader is a waste of time. a lot of the things i read are very cultural. internet culture. and this helps you win friends with nerds. it’s like the elegant literature/poetry/whatever of the early 1900s.

in fact, internet culture is a lot better for winning *useful* friends than most other forms of culture. if you define *useful* as those who are technically savvy and into CS and what nerds do.

even SIM games helped me bond with chantal (since she asked me if i played those games since i mentioned them on my profile). of course the best ones to develop are those that are known to people who are particularly compatible with you (hence why I need to be very acquainted with nerdy cultural references like some computer games, xkcd, and some forums). even some 4chan and urbandictionary help.

Most psychological research focuses on the correlations between two variables. so they show things like "more sleep = better grades" or "friends = happiness"

but of course, such correlations DO NOT WORK for everyone. in fact, the *exceptions* are often the most interesting. Look at the data points, and look at the groups of people with less sleep and good grades (see what they have – their examples are often interesting too – see what’s so special about them). Look at the group of people without friends and high happiness (see what’s so special about them too). Also, see if they’re in a different environment, too.

Look at the people with "high achievement" but low IQ. See what’s so special about them.

but i don’t think the psychology research journals will care about this

I’ve created a lot of things now

• what drives me to do the things i do?

• My perception of which fields are “hot”

• Animal Intelligence

how does performance correlate with effort?

technically it’s just a function of efficiency. But we can definitely analyze efficiency. (a) Sometimes efficiency is 0. (b)Sometimes efficiency is 0 *and* the person learns something that might be useful (but still ends up not performing any better). (c) And then efficiency can be > 0.

(b) is often common in math assignments and programming assignments. and essays too.

math assignments: it’s easy to see why. you chose the wrong approach. or you dont know how to really solve the problem. in either case you might learn some skills that might be useful later.

in essays, you can spend hours and hours researching the topic and still get absolutely nothing done because you chose the wrong main point at first. if your main point sucks, you might want to change your main point. but that is often difficult when you’ve already spent so much effort in researching your main point. but you might learn a few things about defending your arguments well (in fact, it takes better arguments to defend poorly chosen main points, although sometimes this results in considerable loss of intellectual honesty (aka creating BS).

programming assignments: sort of a mix between essays and math assignments