Ah, the non-problems of young people! What you say is true, but effective repair tooth pastes might be quite interesting for people that already have thin enamel, worn away enamel, crowns, reduced gums, etc.
I hope the effect size is big enough for one of the substances mentioned here …
> If this were effective, our bodies would probably be doing it already.
Naaah, this is not how evolution works. Tooth decay was not as big of a problem for our ancestors than it is for us (more sugar and acidic soft drinks) and tooth decay becomes more of a problem for older people that already reproduced making good teeth above a certain age uninteresting from an evolutionary standpoint. (And mayebe instead of better teeth we learnded to feed grandparents soft porridge to keep them around longer for babysitting duties ;-) (see the usefulness of aunts in elephants). Just because you like to keep your teeth, doesn‘t mean that nature cares.
Nice video from the well known channel Technology Connections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7Bs98KmnY
=> It's complicated. Yes, there was a cartel, but it was not all bad. There were legitimate reasons to go for 1000h light bulbs.
I like your Chinese culture comparison and the Englisch language has such a word, too. It's "experience". True, you also can have "an experience", but generally it is used in the sense of "having experience" which is having accumulated mastery over time. In German it is "Erfahrung" which maps 1:1 to experience. I like, that Chinese, Englisch and German have common ground, showing that the "human experience" is something quite universal across cultures.
The way "experience" is used in English and in modern American culture has a very different connotation, mindset, value, and frame. In its use in the hiring/HR world, and in the subcuture of wargaming and RPGs, "experience" is understood as a quantity and does not convey the depth of meaning as "gongfu". It's why there are some martial arts teachers who say, "Americans are no good at gongfu" -- not in the sense of not being good at martial arts, but that there's a cultural thing that makes "gongfu" easy to be misunderstood.
The closest term I have seen to "gongfu' in English is the ancient Greek loan word, "arete", which is usually translated as "excellance". What's important to note here is that both "arete" and "gongfu" are understood as quality, not quantity.
For example, you'll hear "Adam has 20 years of experience", or "Barbra has 5 years of experience", but "Adam has 20 years of gongfu", and "Barbra has 5 years of arete" doesn't make sense.
So maybe the German "Erfahrung" does not map 1:1 to the concept of "Experience".
But maybe it is not so much a lack of concept in the language, but something that is related to particularly American hire-and-fire culture, where every employee is an easily replaceable cog in a machine, whereas I think that the full depth of many tasks is not easily conveyed in a documented standard operating procedure, but often needs the actual experience in doing things often. (This is of course an over generalization, because we seldom hear form the established well run smaller companies. You hear much more about dysfunctional companies and dissatisfied employees on the Internet.)
No, this is not really a fantastic comment because the comment initially supports the thesis of the article, which is "change is slow progress, not a burst of activity" and it does this quite well with a biblical comparison, but then it veers off to "daily praying, helps with success in other areas", which is a totally different thesis. That's proselytizing instead of commenting on the article.
And your "+1, fantastic comment" smells, too; because you do not address the content of the comment, but only the original thesis of the posted article. So it should have been "+1, fantastic article". You don't even say what's so good in the comment that you praise.
Is this an attack by missionaries with day jobs in marketing? :-)
(And it is not really a fantastic article either, because it has a nice start with the Rocky comparison and a nice ending (sans post script) that fits the start but the middle is a muddle just like this run-on sentence.)
I think you're trying to follow the analogy/point so maybe I can be more explicit.
Consistency is difficult - everyone knows that you "have to" save money consistently, or cut back on calories, or exercise daily, or whatever. The gap from "knowledge" to "able to do it" is quite big - as evidenced by the fact most people aren't able to be consistent about much in our lives.
And that's not because of some sort of "privilege" - people spend time on social media where they could be exercising, they are spending money on stuff they don't strictly need, etc. There's a large cohort of people who (1) know they can make their lives better through consistency (2) have the underlying opportunity to do it and (3) fail to actually capitalize on those opportunities constantly.
The connection to religion is that religious practice is by its nature consistent (you go to your house of worship weekly, you pray daily, whatever the case may be) - which is a great exercise in the muscle of consistency. I suspect that if someone is trained in ability to do religious things daily, they are much better positioned to apply this skill to other domains of their life (similar to how someone who is a trained weight lifter can apply their strength to other domains like carrying their kids or physical work.)
What takes my comment from "true" to "fantastic" (just kidding) is the connection to the applicability of seemingly arcane religious practice to a very-much-relevant modern day skillset, which I also believe is less available in society than it was previously. You may not resonate with this on a religious level, but perhaps there's some room to recognize ancient wisdom applicable to today, anyways.
So a ritual of saying the day’s name in a cartoon voice
Or burning a blade of grass
If religion is the indicator, the greater the difference from every day life the better
I have actually found that simply making a new choice daily, one that I can’t remember having made before, does wonders for my sense of possibility & curiosity
To paraphrase your comment: "Connecting the ritual of prayer to another task that you want to accomplish, helps in establishing consistency in doing that other task."
Yes, that is a useful tool, to achieve the daily consistency that avoids the "Montage Fallacy". (And it even can elevate your comment to fantastic ;-) )
Less religiously inclined people can easily adapt this concept to other things that they do daily.
Now you are not just promoting prayer but giving a useful analogy. I was a little bit fighty yesterday and perceived a manipulative ploy in your original comment, when it maybe was just a little bit of accidental omission, because coherently and concisely stating something in writing is hard. The latter is something I am also struggling with. And maybe I was going hard on you because you started off with a well stated argument.
> That said, there are indeed a lot more things that are in general better in Germany than in India, and this rant of mine was the result of a year of frustrated dealings with German bureaucracy (not that that makes any of the points I raised invalid though).
And as a German let me say that you are totally right, when it comes to the bureaucracy. While most of the time the bureaucracy doesn't fell too bad for standard German citizens, I can well imagine that it is horrible for you and that it feels really oldfashioned.
All other points are not wrong but debatable, which dhruvrajvanshi already did. The problems that our nations face are both abundant but also quite different.
As an aside:
I also perceived you're post as too blunt and slightly unfair, just as some of the people in the sub-reddits probably felt. On the other hand sub-reddits are full of awful people and I can imagine that you have to deal with a lot of rudeness and prejudices yourself. I could understand where you were coming from and understood why you expressed yourself in this way after beuing frustrated by the German Bureaucracy. The quoted clarification was useful.
Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is a pseudoscientific approach to communication, personal development and psychotherapy, that first appeared in Richard Bandler and John Grinder's 1975 book The Structure of Magic I. NLP asserts that there is a connection between neurological processes (neuro-), language (linguistic) and acquired behavioral patterns (programming), and that these can be changed to achieve specific goals in life. [1]
Fascinating, people speculating about how people think and can be manipulated are applying those unporven highly suspectable "theories" to computers, which probably function totally different, but appear to show similarities.
And even that is fraught with problems, because in my neck of the woods (Germany) we generally do not buy houses/appartments furnished (and renting appartments furnished is also an exception and not the norm. Even kitchens are empty rooms without cabinets and appliances.).
Edit: Even though the AirB'n'B methodology is not perfect, I agree with some of the conclusions. Just like radio/tv has smoothed out local accents and dialects within a country, the internet produces global trends. This is not all bad.
That is bassically the same here (usa), although we typically include major appliances and cabinets.
However, when houses are put up for sale, they are typically "staged", where the seller will rent furnishings to make it look more homely.
Apartments are more hit and miss. The bigger complexes will often have a show apartment they keep furnished for toors, and may often used a furnished one for their pictures.
Obviously the way you furnish a house for show is not the same way you would to live in it. But it seems like a reasonable approximation of the 'average' sensabilities of the market.
Nobody can afford to furnish an apartment the way big complexes stage their model. They rent good-looking but useless furniture from some place like Rent-a-Center. They can afford the rent on it (they pay for it pre-tax, while actual people have to pay for it post-tax) but its such shoddy quality that it will fall apart as soon as you use it. I've never seen anyone decorate their apartment like this. Even AirBnB hosts quickly find out that they can plaster cheap glittery decorative tchotchkes everywhere but the bed and couch need to be something that won't fall apart if you look at it wrong.
How can you say that on the one hand information about self harm should be withheld because GPT is knwon to be wrong and on the other hand advocate that this is not necessary when it comes to information about drug use?
Following wrong information about drug use is just as dangerous as following wrong information about self harm.
Of course you are right, that the question wheter to give information or not is complicated.
I tend to think that erring on the site of giving information that is not always right is better than giving no information. (And inlcuding information about not doing it, seeking help and about being cautious because GPT could be wrong, etc.)
> Following wrong information about drug use is just as dangerous as following wrong information about self harm.
This is an assumption but not one that follows the data. Countries with higher access to safe drug use information report lower OD numbers, and while it doesn't end up with less use it reduces terrible side effects like needle sharing etc.
Policies that reduce lower addiction rates like safety nets etc cannot really be considered from the point of what an AI responds but the information about safe use, quantities, testing for purity etc all could safe lives.
On the other hand, self harm has a very nefarious behaviour. People not currently suffering from self harm tendencies see additional info as drug safety information, becuse objectively it is pretty similar. However people actively self harming have very different reactions to the same information. For example something as innocous as telling people that the trin is late because someone jumped, increases the number of train jumpers, while saying the train is late alone doesn't. That contagious effect of suicide is replicable, for example teenage suicide went up after "13 reasons why" was released. Which is why I think openAI has gotten this case right.
