"The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that make people LAUGH, then THINK. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology." Some of them are rather interesting, actually.

I tend to view all platforms negatively because I am afraid that all are a virtual substitute to actual encounters and debates. They soothe a real need and desire with a sort of hallucinatory satisfaction (human beings are very good at that). Which does tend to create a cycle of addiction or dependency. So by making life more bearable, they also validate and consolidate life as it is. So yeah...

Numerous individuals grapple with contradictory sentiments regarding their engagement with social media, yet persist in using it.

Hacker News isn't an exception in the realm of social media platforms subject to such considerations. It appears that a significant number within this community possess a certain blind spot, often exerting substantial effort to delineate why their favored social media stands apart in some manner from the rest.

> I tend to view all platforms negatively because I am afraid that all are a virtual substitute to actual encounters and debates.

They are not virtual substitute, they are actual debates but through a medium different than voice. Of course, the experience is different, but that doesn’t make it "virtual", just like going to the cinema is not a "virtual substitute" to live theater.

I trust my brain to do the work and if I am not able to produce a relevant summary on demand, so be it. What I read is being processed and I do not know how, when, or why, or to what end it will be useful, but it likely will. In other words, all the books I have read and digested, even partially, are metabolized.

There's a Star Trek episode on that.

You're probably thinking of V'ger, the errant Voyager probe that is central to "Star Trek: The Motion Picture".

There's also a brief scene in which a Klingon ship destroys a different Voyager probe in "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier".

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/V%27ger

https://youtu.be/5kscm2_RCcA

Wasn't it a movie?

Yep the first movie. It's so good and similar to the original series episodes (with much higher budget though) that it's easy to confuse with them.

Well if traditional wisdom is to be believed, the first movie is one of the "bad" ones (being an odd number).

Though I have to admit disagreeing with that rule of thumb on almost every point.

Research now more or less always proceeds bottom-up so that it's never possible to determine causality from results. Everyone looks for causality, researchers look for positive results and the wheel keeps on turning. When top-down thinking disappears, science enters a cognitive decline of its own. This one is contagious.

Nice. Thank you Suno! This is very good and will fit perfectly in my current projects. I feel like hugging your face.

Is this a reference to "Idiocracy"?

Will take one seminal paper to be published on Arxiv for the house of cards to collapse.

The NYT and Bush was earlier.