I'd argue the opposite -- it's the "Physics Envy" i.e. basing psychology on the classic scientific model of objective measurement that makes it worse, and now it gets 39/100 score. And we don't even know how important those 39% that passed are -- it may be some stupid stuff few people care about while the big ones failed.

The reason is in psychology you simply can't measure reliably -- often times your measurement is asking people what they think or feel, or you observe some behaviors that depend on a thousand other factors. And we do have a first hand access to our minds, why pretend that the mind is the black box? But most importantly, the utility of psychology is supposedly to make people feel better and more meaningful, and that escapes any objectification.

I have read some Jungian literature and while it's in no way what we'd call proper science it seems very useful. (It was for me, that's the only thing I can claim.)

Btw not saying that all of the objective psychological approach is not useful, IMO it's useful for small/mechanical we do stuff (that can still be important).

There is. Not to *accept* the study but to be on the lookout whether the pattern that the study claims to exist really exists, if it useful for you, so you can validate it first hand.

Example (not a great one but will do) -- suppose a new study that seems reasonably well done claims that drivers of black cars are significantly more prone to road rage. You drive a car, so if this pattern holds, it's relevant to you. Then from time to time when you see a black car on the road you give it a little extra attention to see if there's something that indicates the rage thing might be true. After a few "experiments" you decide for yourself.

IMO the patterns they discover would almost certainly be less than they generalize it -- perhaps the black car drivers thing is true only in the U.S. Or, it's only true in in bad economic times. Or, it's only true during the 2008 recession. And, only in suburban areas. And so on. Compared to hard sciences, the individual and group behaviors are much much less constant -- the systems are more complex, there are far more interactions, so the patterns are much less stable, a behavior hold for a while and then people move on and it never comes back. (Life sciences are somewhere in between.)

Come to think of it -- given the fickleness of those patterns, you should pay attention to a new psychological/sociological study only if it could be *very* useful to you if true.

by designing it after the fact, so it may be a good idea to establish some principles and put them in practice. Not to prevent "evil" AI but to thinking what kind of damage can be caused by an algorithm that makes complex decisions if it goes haywire. Not that different from defensive programming really.

The Wordpress theme I purchased for my site (and that was considered very good) had a mobile theme that I turned off -- because it was ugly and I hated it. Yes it probably would have made the site easier to navigate than the desktop version on cheap phones, but my site has a lot of demo screenshots and videos and if someone was looking at it on a crappy client I would have preferred that they don't and they use the desktop if they care.

IMO the policy should be to change the results if searched with low-end clients, not with phones that have higher display resolution than most budget laptops. No need to force everyone into the mobile ghetto just to cover bottom half or third of devices.

That's what happens when you are a man of the world.

Think of Google's search as your type as 1-dimensional suggestion list. I'd like as I type to see around the search bar a matrix of categories: news, videos, documentation, blogs etc. Then as I hover over a category with a mouse I zoom into a matrix of subcategories for that category using the mouse wheel. I zoom out back one level if that's not the branch I'm thinking of.

In addition, I don't want to click until the very end, and maybe not even then. Hovering over a set of results shows me what's at the deeper level, and when I'm looking at a one or a handful of pages that match the criteria as I refine further, it is also shown as a cell. Hovering over it will give me a preview -- from the search engine, not my browser fetching an actual page. Only when I'm certain I want to go there, I'll click.

That would be a search engine of the future. Or, idea #2: make it like google, but when I control-clik on the link for the page it opens a sanitized copy of the page, provided by your server, so I know there are no scripts or malware and crap. And if possible give me that sanitized preview when I hover over the page so if I'm lucky I don't have to click on anything at all.

I know sites wouldn't like it but just saying what I'd like to see that I think is technically possible. Thanks for listening!

I see. I meant he looks more down-to-earth than Romney, i.e. gives an impression that he is less disconnected from the reality of an everyday person's life. Obama has that quality too in my view, possibly even more, but is short on some other "somethings" needed for good leadership.

I actually got that positive impression of Gingrich watching his interview with Ali G heh.

Care to say why you think Gingrich having won would have been awful? I don't know much background but he seemed to me more connected to reality -- more "normal" -- than Romney and so possibly more trustable i.e. a better potential leader, which may be the most important trait in a president. Maybe I'm naive/uninformed or Gingrich was faking it well.

I just realized it doesn't matter if weed "causes" lower grades or if students with lower abilities are attracted to smoking and so on. What matters is the pattern: if you find yourself being at a university and happen to be smoking weed regularly, you are a bit likelier to have lower grades. That is all.

That is, assuming the study is done properly, this one kind of looks so.

This case, the woman who got 20 years for (possibly inducing) miscarriage, the guy who built a fort from cardboard boxes in his yard for his kids and was told by the city to remove it, all in the last few days -- I think they call for this quote from Jack Tramiel (of Commodore) when he asked how he could not hate Germans after having been in Auschwitz:

"You know," he once told me, "it's hard to believe it really happened. But it can happen again. In America. Americans like to make rules, and that scares me. If you have too many rules you get locked in a system. It's the system that says this one dies and that one doesn't, not the people. That's why I don't hate the German people. Individuals, yes. Rules, yes. But not all Germans." He shrugged. "They just obeyed the rules. But that's why we need more Commodores. We need more mavericks, just so the rules don't take over."

It may well be a health risk, but I can't imagine it's #1 or even a distant #2 or in the top 5 either. (My guess is nutrition, amount of physical activity and mental/emotional stress level are top 3, far above all others.) Since it's not a top factor and certainly not an easily fixable one, why mention it? It's wasting everyone's time, including ours as we are posting here as a consequence instead of doing something useful. :-)

Good analogy, and I'd propose another one: social media is like alcohol. If you never go to a bar you may miss some situations where interesting people are met and friendships are made, and if you use it too much... well we know what happens. Also some people are naturally very attracted to it, and some not at all, while some have to force themselves to stay away.

I think it's best to drink the FB booze in very small amounts. Have an account, but don't put anything of value in there, just a couple of pics and a few irrelevant article shares. That gives you access to people without being much giving much information away, or requiring you to engage.

I stopped posting almost anything after I noticed in my daily life I was doing or seeing things and I thought about posting them -- it was taking mental energy away. I still check FB at least 4-5 times a day, and sometimes I see valuable stuff, probably still worth the small exposure to the overall FB toxicity.

I'm just curious, is your project or income somehow tied to people watching sponsored content and giving something in return for it (their time or clicks or bandwidth/CPU etc.)? Not saying any of that right or wrong, just wondering if that's related.

Would it help if the VR headset allowed for some Actual Reality to seep through in some controlled way? Couple of ideas come to mind --

1. Have a faint overlay of "AR" with the VR image. Could be that the physical screen is partly transparent somehow so you can see the outside, with a controllable (manual or automatic) transparency.

2. Have a small square patch of AR in your field of view, say in the upper right corner, that your eyes can dart back to when your brain needs some grounding. Kind of like a little plug in the headset that when you remove physically with your hands, you see a hole through which the real world shines through. When it's plugged back, you see a black square in its place. Actually it would be more like a camera shutter -- touch the headset on the side and it opens/closes.

3. Time-shared -- at certain times, auto-deduced or manual, the entire VR quickly fades in into your entire field of view. That would be best if optical and not rendered, so it may be a form of (1) -- unless rendered is fast enough (maybe with direct circuitry from the headset camera to the screen, without going through the PC).

The idea is the very moment you feel uncomfortable you touch the headset (perhaps even command it via EEG) and you see the real world immediately -- without worrying about taking off the headset.