Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther also caused a spike in the suicides.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So... lets ban all books? Or lets ban at least this book?

Well, their health care (covered by tax money) costs about 1/3 of what it costs in the USA (covered by insurance money), but still provides better results. It is much more cost efficient to let government handle things like health and education.

Gates is funding several different projects. I think it is based on the idea that it is best to fund multiple small projects than one big project. The total funding last year was about 8 billion dollars.

https://www.gatesfoundation.or...

The person to whom you replied is clearly a scientist, even if that is not his profession. He presents a very valid question.

You might wonder why the question "Why start with a group "diagnosed" with ADHD at all?" is a valid question, so let me clarify.
If you would run this test with sleeping pills instead of ADHD drugs, what kind of results would you see? Most likely exactly the same results. And you would see the same results with general population also, simply because sleeping pills render you unable to do anything, so you can't do anything bad either.

Your rule does not work because of the sleeper effect. Persuasive message initially associated with a low-credibility source becomes more persuasive over time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

> Unfortunately the number of people that can write a good teaching book is very small.

I disagree. I claim that almost anyone can write a good teaching book, as long as they follow the instructions. How long it will take is up to the skill, but with enough repetition, I think anyone can do it.
1) Write the material
2) Test how well it works
3) Fix found problems
4) Go to step 2

I think the major issue with bad books is that they were never tested by anyone. I claim this, because I have found errors from math books that would have been obvious to anyone who had tried to do the exercise. This requires more work, but it is work that literally even a kid could do. It just costs either money or volunteer time.

> Suggesting that an author goes through all that work for free is unrealistic

You can have free text books and pay huge amount of money to the authors at the same time. You can get the money from government or private donators. You pay for the work once and after that the work is published for free use.

I think AI is overhyped and underhyped. People are way too focused on chatbots and think companies like AI will make AGI. That won't happen.

On the otherhand, people are missing the important things, like Alphafold2 solving protein folding. Alphafold3 making first steps for AI generated drugs, which could mean that we are few years away from immortality. Or AlphaEvolve improving several algorithms, as in automating scientific progressing.

I like this image for explaining the difference between natural change and human made change:
https://xkcd.com/1732/

The taste of the grapes will change because there is less light. For better or worse, I don't know.

If that is your thing, I hope you have seen what AlphaEvolve has done "in 20% of cases, AlphaEvolve improved the previously best known solutions":
https://deepmind.google/discov...

I think we will be seeing a lot more of new discoveries made by AI in the near future.

I count 8 rows from the right side, if you count 2 for the enter as it takes 2 rows of space.

My wish is a standard key to enter into bios. Currently even same laptop manufacturers use different keys in different models so it can be really difficult to find out which key takes you to the bios if it is not visible on the screen. I don't think that it would be much more expensive to use the same key.

Both right wing and left wing media are biased. Even if they are not telling lies, they are at least deciding which stories to tell. And this is not something new, it has been going on for decades. Generally news are more likely to tell bad news than good news, because people are more willing to read bad news. Good example is gun violence in the USA. If violence is decreasing, there are no news about it, but if it is increasing, there are news about it. If you look at the actual statistics, you will see that the violence is actually going down in the long term.

Or do you remember covid? Did you see any news about it? Perhaps even more than one? When ever something bad happens, media will take everything they can from it. First they report infections, when infections go down, they start reporting deaths. When deaths go down, they start reporting cumulative deaths. Then cumulative deaths on people who were infected. Well one can argue that it is important information, but while we are reading those, what are we missing?

It looks like in the USA, ebook and audiobook usage is still increasing:
https://pufferprint.com/wp-con...

I also checked the statistics from my country and it looks like money is going from physical books to e books so fast that in 20 years there will no longer be printed books to sell (obviously the speed will slow down at some point). So I could say that this is still in progress and physical books will eventually die out, because the less physical books are sold, the less they will be printed and the less they will printed, the less variation you have to buy from, which will force people to buy at least one book as a ebook, which makes it so much easier to continue using it. This is pretty much what happened with my kid who wanted to read the next book in the series, which was not yet published in my country.

I think that part of the problem is that value of entertainment has dropped.

Value has dropped, because everyone can nowadays make entertainment and some even use AI to make it. All these people compete against each others in the same markets, even if the products are different type (music, game, video, book, ...). Even if you are an amateur, you can get lucky and create something worth watching, for example just by getting hit by a lightning.

I don't think that piracy is their problem. I think it is all the free stuff you can find from the Internet.