A regular person says "I want a house and it must have a toilet"
Most people don't specify or know that they want a U bend in their pipes or what kind or joints should be used for their pipes.
The absence of U bends or use or poor joints will be felt immediately.
Thankfully home building is a relatively solved problem whereas software is everything bespoke and every problem slightly different... Not to mention forever changing
As someone who is very cautious about health and nutrition and spent 4 years studying Chemistry at a good university, my takeaway at the time of graduation was more aligned with your caricature as a better prior and heuristic for judging consumable foods.
I remember being told an anecdote that left me feeling humble about just how much of the body we understand: there were cases where the kinetic isotope effect could affect biochemistry, that was how sensitive our systems are and that industrial synthesis will definitely produce different isotopic ratios to natural synthesis.
My conviction on this subject has continued to strengthen with articles like [1] on emulsifiers recently entering public awareness.
Pokemon cards are addictive and fun but they're kind of analogue. Loot boxes are more like slot machines - they have flashing lights, animations and jingles to hook you in deeper. And because the lootboxes are in game they can be tuned in frequency and payout just right to keep you playing in a way boring cards could never be (beyond just boring probabilities)
What are you skeptical about? 40k years ago humans were just as we the humans of today, but they also faced harsher environments to survive in.
Technology has enabled us to compound advanced intergenerationally but I don't really believe we're actually that special when compared to our forebears...
Take a look at Fig 1. A grid of dots. A sequence of X's. Does it mean "Property of Thag?" "Happy Birthday, Mom"? Are the X's there to improve one's grip on the object? Are they just idle doodling around the campfire? Hunter-gatherers have little use for writing.
We'll never know.
When I was young I was fascinated by drawing 5 pointed stars. It meant nothing.
Given that pressure from natural selection has lessened a lot, chances are that we are less special now.
Our intellect evolved for survival, but now it's very much optional - has been for many generations. It and may now even be inversely correlated with having offspring.
I would be unsurprised if we're noticably dumber now than we used to be.
This is a great article that sums up my own (much lower-stakes) life experiences. Athletes live on the frontier so they're excellent subject to study - after all the Olympics are only every 4 years.
Before my first Taekwondo fight and Muay Thai fight I had so much adrenaline and cortisol in the build up to the fights and for some reason it seems to all dump in my legs making them all heavy and unresponsive - not a helpful response when you need to kick to win!
Before my first Chemistry finals I also momentarily forgot the periodic table despite writing it out several times a day in the run up to it.
But as the article states it can be overcome and things like breathing exercises can really drive the needle. The corollary to the mind-body connection is that there is a body-mind connection! Just as the mind can influence the body, the body can influence the mind and performing physical tasks that the body associates with relaxation (breathing exercises, hot spas, forest walks etc) can settle the mind.
The other thing I came across on my journey to overcome performance anxiety for us mere mortal non-Olympians is:
1. Some of the jitteryness is a result of being unaccustomed/intolerant of adrenaline. Doing stressful (but safe) activities can build up your own resilience to stressful situations - this is why I find value in Muay Thai/boxing sparring, there aren't many things more stressful than getting punched in the face
2. Presence of mind can be trained and an easy hack I found that is taught in the military is the 3x3 Grounding Technique [1]
The general theme of sports psychology reminded me of a BBC article [2] that investigated focus in champion tennis players (and other sports) as measured by their eye movement.
If you had a chat with me through lunch on some technical intensive questions, It would be a breeze. I could not only answer them, I could list limitations, how to address them, and I could even come with a working plan on how I could get it done.
> there aren't many things more stressful than getting punched in the face
I can definitely see this happening in dangerous/adrenaline sports like climbing. Normal things and fears just don't bother me anymore, when you are continuously facing your fear of grave injury and/or death when abyss stares at you and you hold just on your finger tips. There is rope but that doesn't do much for the fear, and you can still get injured if fall is nasty. And its not just exposure to fear, but you need to semi-continuously keep overcoming it during entire session, repeat that 1..X times per week, and after few years you become somebody else in this regard (and few others).
Now-famous Alex Honnold said that his fear receptors in brain basically just don't trigger anymore - they did some MRI scans of his brain. But the thing is, there was nothing special apart from that, and he himself attributes this to 2 decades+ of daily exposure to increasingly dangerous situations (not just famous crazy free solos but a lot of wild scrambling which can, and often does turn into serious exposed solo climbing without a chance to retreat).
Brain is a muscle, and fear is one dimension of how to expose and train it. Too much too quickly and it will overwhelm anybody. Bud to it gradually and in dosed manner and things will happen.
So glad you brought up danger/adrenaline addicts - in my head there is a stereotype of the personality type, they exude a very chill energy and I've always wondered if their lifestyle meant they had become numb to normal life.
The anecdote about Alex Honnold not having fear receptors sounds on the mark
Competition can increase cortisol but it's usually a relative thing:
When you are world #200 playing against world #50 might be stressful. When you are world #2 playing world #50 is probably another day in the office. Etc
I imagine once you win your first Grand Slam in tennis the nerves improve a lot - you kind of saw that in Andy Murray who needed a couple of attempts to break through the psychological barrier of winning Wimbledon, including winning the Olympics.
I would posit that the old folk tale is more related to the fact that centuries ago, most people were hyper specialised and standardised widespread education was less of a thing.
You'll find plenty of intelligent people in all walks of life depending on how you choose to define intelligence.
Until very recently, 19 of the last 20 quarterbacks who lost their first Super Bowl never made it back to the title game (Jalen hurts in 2024 is the one).
Historically, out of 38 QBs to lose their debut, only 4 eventually won a ring (Dawson, Griese, Elway, and Manning).
I'm not familiar with the Super Bowl could you help us understand this observation? Is it that people who lose never psychologically recover or that winners go on to become champions?
You don't pay CPF unless you have Permanent Residence/Citizenship so there isn't any mandatory saving for migrant workers (both low income unskilled and high income skilled labour) AFAIK?
Yep. As someone who worked on an EP, the difference was that I paid a low rate of tax that didn't contribute towards Singaporeans' retirement income, whereas a Singaporean living in Europe would pay a higher rate of tax that contributed towards Europeans' retirement income
I quite like Shelter [1]. Shelter apps are installed in a separate work profile, which essentially sandboxes it from the rest of your data. It also has a neat feature to automatically disable (freeze) specific apps and seamlessly re-enable them when you launch them through Shelter.
This is what I do too. If i need to use or test something i don't trust then I use an old phone. All of the phones use crDroid(1) and I have scripts to quickly wipe and reinstall the OS whenever I need a full nuke.
There are 7 year olds[1] who can play better than I can despite 30+ years of playing piano, and even with fairly dedicated practise the progress is so much slower than someone with actual talent.
I had a friend who could play all the Chopin Etudes at age 9. Some of the best art simply requires a virtuoso to bring it to life.
why do we never hear of 7 year old bands then? i think there's more to music than just technique and vast majority appreciate the artistic aspect. but i can imagine musicians appreciating the technique.
Are you looking for facts that will contradict your opinion?
Justin Bieber clearly was that. His youtube videos got him discovered at age 13-14.
Vanessa Paradis made her first public appearance as a singer at age 7.
There are several children prodigies I've seen on YouTube (singers, drummers, guitarists). They clearly have such talent that even at young age they do music better than most people would do with infinite amount of practice.
As to your question, the prodigy is, by definition, extremely rare. They clearly exist (Bieber, Paradis) but, by definition, you can't expect to have a lot of them.
And "why aren't 7 year olds headlining for Taylor Swift" is not a fair bar.
There are reasons 7 year olds don't do world wide tours that have to do with things other than musical talent. Like being in school or not being allowed to take a bus by themselves.
Did you watch the video? Her expressivity and musicianship is far beyond many adults..
She had also just finished a concerto playing with an orchestra
EDIT Also with band music or non-classical music so much of it is to do with platform and distribution, and 7 year old prodigies don't get much interest outside of talent shows or Youtube. Justin Bieber (as mentioned in another reply) though is a good example of someone who did at age 12
Michael Jackson is another. And there were child stars in the movies.
One difference is how popular music is produced today. The members of the band are not just performers, and in fact, they're often mediocre instrumentalists and singers. They're expected to create their own material, which probably requires a certain level of social development and experience. The emphasis is on other skills such as creating songs that resonate with the audience, performing on stage, etc.
I am a believer that in popular music there is an element of the "X factor" which is something intangible but to do with charisma/stage presence/force of character and that is probably exceptionally rare to find in pre-pubescent individuals and then to commercially market them beyond just a novelty factor - the real problem is distribution if anything
In classical music there is a slightly more "objective" character to performance given the high technical requirement and the audience culturally is more willing to earnestly listen to a child prodigy.
Most, if not all, musicians in any professional symphony orchestra was at one point an unusually talented 7yo.
It just takes many years worth of practice to get from being good by 7 years old standards to being good enough that people buy tickets to see your performance, especially in the classical music culture where skill, or "virtuoso", is everything.
Most people don't specify or know that they want a U bend in their pipes or what kind or joints should be used for their pipes.
The absence of U bends or use or poor joints will be felt immediately.
Thankfully home building is a relatively solved problem whereas software is everything bespoke and every problem slightly different... Not to mention forever changing
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