Friend, you've misunderstood. @abaymado's point was that tier binning people's lives and careers on one or two numbers is an awful approach, and doing it probably produces more poorly educated people.

(Much irony, given the topic of TFA.)

The problem is that as the education system degrades the products of that system gain power over it and accelerate the decline.

You know what I didn't expect?

That I would so well internalize the "big brother is always watching what you click, what you hover, what you rewatch, what you comment on, what you pause to read longer than average, what you favorite, what you thumbs-down, etc" default experience provided by facebook/amazon/youtube/streaming platform/short form video platform/etc

that when I stick my head back into 4chan from time to time (to see what the motorcycle thread is talking about these days, or get idea for a show to watch) it's a like a physical weight lifts off me as I realize that no one and nothing gives a toss about what threads I open, or what posts I respond to, or what images I save or post. It won't change any feeds in opaque ways. It won't pollute my recommends (jokes aside about how how the choice of website already polluted matters enough). It won't do anything.

Blew my mind when I put my finger on what I was feeling and realized how pervasive this sort of thing has gotten in most every big tech online product.

I'm genuinely interested in how you approached that kind of situation, then. (And I'm not the commenter who presented what you're saying was a false dilemma)

>I don't see how typing it into a computer is significantly different...

I haven't read up on it much myself, but any discussion along the lines of this subthread re: "handwriting > typing" is probably discussing research that's starting to be talked about more and more in the past 5 years or so (maybe the pandemic and online learning accelerated interest?)

here's a 5m clip of a neuroscientist presenting to the US Senate this year on correlation between dropping academic performance and use of tech in classrooms in many countries over many years, and asking for more research into mechanisms and causation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fd-_VDYit3U

and here's a paper from a couple years ago describing differences in observed brain activity between handwriting and typewriting and some discussion of how this could be a mechanism of the kind the video was talking about https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10....

>Is there something stopping you from...

No, but I feel like it's not hard to argue that default are important.

As someone with attention difficulties who eventually decided to leave uni and pursue another path:

I'm saddened that my culture has formed me into a person whose first reaction to your comment was "wow, that's harsh" - because I mentally (and unwarrantedly) translated your comment into something like "if you have attention difficulties perhaps you should just accept that you are a low-value human who is hard class-locked out of many of life's joys and you should (quickly) figure out how to live in the way that least inconveniences your betters."

And my brain does this even though I'm gainfully employed and comfortable and happy (happy modulo general anxiety re climate, politics, war, and future generations)

My second reaction to your comment was more like "bingo, but it sure would be nice to have more clear directions about where one's actual place is." And it sure seems like there might be more such places and they'd be easier to find in a culture whose incentives were slightly (or significantly) different than those of mine (USA).

God, what a great book, imo. My favorite Stephenson novel.

Mine, too. Cryptonomicon was the gateway drug. But I loved 'Anathem'.

Thanks for this.

Completed the collection in 4h 11m here :)

Good job OP!

I think the Sunset Boulevard quote is used twice: for 32 and 40.

Thank you for the pointers to all those resources!

I spent my childhood in the Kasaï-Oriental - my parents were aid workers - and though I lived through some of the key periods of the country (Kabila Sr's rise and assassination) I was young and had no idea of the more general goings-on beyond our town. I've been trying to learn more about the period and I imagine these will be very helpful.

I wonder if my French is still good enough for Les guerres à l'est de la RD Congo...

Ah! Looks like Drumeo (part of Musora) uses Soundslice as their transcription tool? The UI of the demos exactly matches what I'm used to seeing in Drumeo.

Yes, Drumeo embeds the Soundslice player within its product. :)