IF a consciousness was housed in a black box (a brain, but we're ignoring it's internals) AND that black box had inputs connected to a computer that can send signals to the black box that it WOULD interpret as signals of sight, sound, touch, hunger, intoxication, etc.
THEN how is one suppose to conclude that they are not just a consciousness in a box because they 'feel' drunk after they 'feel' they've ingested alcohol.
There's no need to monitor alcohol levels because the alcohol hasn't been proven to exist!
I think your confusion arises from the fact that this discussion is about two different thought experiments: the brain in a vat [1] (a la The Matrix) and proper solipsism (which implies no real world at all, not even a vat). [2]
Only if you subscribe to some pretty tortured interpretations of quantum mechanics. QM still describes an objective state of the external world, and exactly how it changes over time.
Knowing "why" is exteremely helpful in many cases. But let's not forget that, on the other hand, memorization plays a huge part in learning, and not only in mathematics. Learning "why" multiplication works will not help you to retain the multiplication table in your head. (Also, in many cases the answer to a question "why" you might get will be plain wrong - sometimes because the correct answer is too complicated, sometimes for other reasons.)
I don't think that it's "memorization" that's the key: I think it's repetition. Learning anything, but especially mathematics, requires you to just sit down and solve problems over and over again. That is what builds the right connections in your mind, gives you a feel for the shape of the solution, and gives you good intuitions about problems.
Like: it's a pretty useless skill to have memorized what the anti-derivative of the cosecant function is. But if you solve enough integrals, and are familiar with the techniques, you can see the path to the solution of the problem, even without having memorized every single function and anti-derivative.
Memorizing multiplication tables is over rated. Seeing connections between those early multiples up to 12 is more interesting. Can be helpful I suppose in factorization.
Maybe I just don't trust my memory (as in how am I sure that 7*8 is 56) and why I despise rote memorization and rather retain memory from use and practice.
Regardless a good example of something to remember in math is the quadratic formula
Still enjoyable to derive and 'see' why it works but also just used so much. That said, I wouldn't encourage memorizing it without first understanding it.
No. If you can’t multiply in your head, you are crippled in any quantitative reasoning. You have interjected too many steps in estimating, calculating, judging, etc.
This is not to say there aren’t useful, non-quantitative pursuits.
I'm sorry but this seems patently wrong to me. There's only so much working stack space in your brain. If you're constantly having to think through multiple steps to multiply single digits then you're going to be at a serious disadvantage when you need to solve a bigger problem that involves more work than just single-digit multiplication.
The best is the 9's table, how all the digits add up to 9. My mom's an elementary teacher and there's always a few third graders who figure that out on their own and love it.
Additionally 9 * n = [n-1, 10-n] for n = 2-11; where n-1 is the digit in the 10's place and 10-n in the single place. This just an aesthetic curiosity. I know the pattern continues for larger n I've just never bothered to generalize it. Also never compared it to other bases.
It's not an aesthetic curiosity at all! 10 is equal to 1 mod 9... So suppose X is written in base 10 (a0 * 10^0 + a1 * 10^1 + a2 * 10^3 +...) and you want to find X mod 9. Then all of the 10^k's are just 1 (mod 9), so you just get the sum of the digits.
So if X is divisible by 9, then the sum of the digits (mod 9) is zero.
Same works for 3 (x is div by 3 iff the sum of the digits id divisible by 3). And 11 gets an /alternating/ sum of the digits, since 10 is -1 mod 11...
This. Although said tongue-in-cheek, is a basic principle. Once you understand the concept and the mechanics behind something, what rote learning buys you is to free cycles in the future so that you can take up the next-level task. Skipping this step is like expecting someone to play the piano just by learning how to read a music sheet and where each note is in the keyboard. You build up your muscle memory so that you're able to take on more complex pieces as you progress.
Spending time memorizing the multiplication table, then, is more efficient on both accounts: you will not need to do "a lot of multiplications" to begin with, and it takes less time for your brain to "cache the results".
Maybe that works best for some people, but as a kid I didn't do it. I used a printed multiplication table while tackling some more-interesting problems[0], and let the table soak in as a byproduct. It went quickly and did not turn me off on math for life. Paul Lockhart in Arithmetic also recommended this.
[0]: Multiplying two-digit numbers by one-digit, and that sort of thing. Lockhart had more artistic pursuits in mind.
(An obvious reason this might not apply: I was more talented than my grade-school peers. But most kids would learn arithmetic better if not forced to before they're ready, and then the talent difference would matter less.)
May I add my support to your opinion? Or, to put it more bluntly, the "why" is overrated. The "modern" math education (in the US) comes courtesy of people like Jean Piaget or Seymour Papert. These guys were true geniuses, but made a grave error. They generalized from their own experience ("to understand is to invent") to everyone else. Unfortunately, for 99% of the people, the style of learning by discovery is extremely inefficient. So we ended up with a system that sounds great in theory, but in practice you have kids in the fourth of fifth grade still going over addition and multiplication.
I agree as a generalization, but that does presume that the syllabus itself doesn't need rote interpretation.
“No, we haven’t learned about some of the vectors yet, so for the sake of the problem, we just take this one out,”
Many many students self-combust when faced with garbage worded questions because they never learnt how to deconstruct them in class. When questions come with spelling errors and ambiguous variables it's tough.
Honestly I think you make a good point and implicitly they could have used those resources instead to improve the user experience (for example, improve the sites efficiency and load times)
Some of the issues I have had with the new design is pretty amazing. For example, when you open a specific submission it's opened in a "lightbox" which basically contains all the comment. If you click outside of the lightbox it's automatically closed which I guess is OK. So some time ago they made a new release and broke it so that if you clicked on the scrollbar to scroll down in the lightbox to see what people had commented then the lightbox with all the comments closed.
I submitted some complaint in their redesign subreddit but immediately random people replied to say that this was as designed and I should use keyboard to scroll, and not the scrollbar. But then the issue was that when the lightbox was shown it wasn't focused so I first had to use mouse to click in the lightbox to focus it and then use keyboard arrows to scroll.
It really is a good example of everything that is wrong with the SPA approach today. Browser history abuse, skeleton/placeholder text rendering instead of actual content, never-ending loading spinner on the browser tab, problems with authentication between sessions. Just open up your network panel and try clicking around and watch your console light up like a christmas tree. Then switch to the old layout and compare the two.
To put a cherry on top of it, the new layout now intersperses ads into the post lists and styles them to look like posts.
Additionally, ever since reddit decided to host it's own media, it no longer possible to directly link to a video or image. I don't want to send a link to my friend of comments about a gif. I want to just send him the damn gif. For this reason alone I'll continue to use imgur.
I'll be really bummed out the day I can't click "switch to the old layout", but I'm sure the time when they're removing that is coming.
It looks like we're finally seeing a series of decisions being made that caters stockholders instead of users of the site. They managed to hold out for this long, but I guess the day has come where it has finally happened. The big difference between reddit and all the other sites that have done this, is reddit used to be the hip place people went to get away from these kinds of user hostile moves.
The only question left now: is reddit so entrenched in it's position that it won't lose ground to a newcomer from the fallout of these decisions? Probably, but I know I'll definitely be keeping my eye out for competition that is gaining steam.
>I suspect that's the real purpose of the redesign
I mean at this point I don't think there's any doubt whatsoever. Is there even a plausible other explanation?
I only lurk on reddit but it's rather comical how bad it's become. And not just the interface, the content too, /r/all is basically Facebook with a slightly younger audience and you have to get deeper and deeper into niche subreddits to find worthwhile discussions.
Reddit has just gotten too big. So much of the bigger subs are fluffed with surreptitious sponsored content, reputation management, etc. I would have thought that that was where Reddit made the real money, by providing a back-end to make ads look like organic content, by helping moneyed backers influence discussion toward their monetised and brand-building ends.
If Reddit isn't charging and managing those using their platform for that purpose -- not an insignificant number, surely -- they are fools.
This seems to be the key/blocker for a decentralized internet, well social apps at least. If someone can solve discoverability, it'll make a lot of things possible.
I remember when Digg was bigger than Reddit and then after a certain Digg site redesign they lost a significant number of their users to Reddit and never really recovered.
Where are people going to go this time? I feel like people usually copy their competitors which is why they consider redesigns worthwhile... but which Reddit competitor is Reddit copying here? I don't think there is one.
Obviously Facebook/Instagram/Twitter/Snapchat kind of worry them, but then again, I feel like people are "done" with "social media" so I wouldn't be _really_ worried if I were Reddit. They have the advantage that they can give the user very interest-focused information; when you follow a friend on Facebook, you get their programming advice, baby pictures, and political rants. With Reddit, you get to skip the baby pictures and political rants.
Just because you think people are "done" with "social media" doesn't mean Reddit execs do. They are definitely changing look and feel to be more like instagram and facebook hoping to poach users or at least widen their userbase by lowering the barrier of entry. One of the primary goals of the redesign was changing look and feel to make the site more approachable to a wider audience. They claimed after extensive testing that the old site scared off many potential users because it was "hard to use" (IMO it just looked old, and therefor bad/lame).
I think the underlying problem is that people want a platform for self-promotion (hence buying followers on Instagram), but most subreddits and maybe the site itself prohibit self-promotion. As a result, many people will never be interested (including me; I use it for pictures of cats, but nothing important).
I mostly went to HN. My own migration was Slashdot → reddit → HN. I'm on lobste.rs too, which feels like it's in the growth stage. Fewer comments, but fewer bad comments still. HN is nowhere near reddit levels of decay, which is nice.
If memory serves, the primary driver of reduced traffic to Digg 4.0 was the fundamental shift in how their submission mechanism worked, not in a change to their layout. I recall some kind of promotion mechanism where superusers gained some amount of control over their "front page" equivalent.
Also, unlike Digg, Reddit hasn't been bleeding members to another site for some time now, so there's nowhere for Reddit users to go if they become dissatisfied. Does anyone have any ideas about why that is? Reddit is not, fundamentally, a hard product to emulate, and yet I know of no site even remotely as popular nowadays (HN aside, of course). Slashdot, Fark, and sites like those all seem to have mostly been consumed by Reddit. Is it the strong network effects that Reddit has, or does Reddit's moderation system provide a unique way of hosting a community that no one has reproduced?
There was post on here awhile ago from an engineer working at digg during the v4 launch that was pretty interesting. https://lethain.com/digg-v4/
I think Discord has been siphoning off some of the users on the gaming related subreddits, but it fundamentally serves a different purpose so its not a wholesale replacement.
Network effect is one for sure. I'm not a fan of the redesign (and submitted my thoughts several times), but the content is there, and it's a reasonable platform overall.
I feel like that would have happened this time if there were a viable alternative. I know if they kill the ability to opt out of the new redesign I will be looking a lot harder for one.
Hasn’t reddit front page become really bad? When I joined there were a lot more textual posts, now it’s all images and memes. More 9gag-y. Maybe taking askscience and atheism and all these subreddits out of the FP was a really bad idea? I wish there was another category next to hot, all, new: an interesting one with a pre-selection of mostly textual subreddits
I still don't understand how come the CEO of reddit is okay with the redesign? It's worse enough that I had to install plugin to redirect to old.reddit.
It's all but guaranteed that if Reddit removes old Reddit and forces new Reddit on everyone third party web clients with ads that generate money for someone else will pop up and fill the gap.
It looks like that option is only available on old reddit. If I opt out of both beta tests and the redesign in the "Account settings" section of my user settings, I go back to old reddit by default.
This is one of the most frustrating things for me. Two weeks ago they'd set a cookie to redirect www. to old., then they removed that and now all of my old links take me to the redesign.
"Maybe they are planning for the audience they want rather than the one they have?"
That's definitely a reasonable possibility since it appears to me to be formatted for the Instagram crowd.
"Or maybe they just feel safe since there aren't any alternatives?"
Possible as well but ironic since its creating a space for an alternative.
I like this sites design. Clean, simple, and nothing superfluous. Seems to understand people are here for the user shared content and not the site itself so it stays out of the users way.
This was my opinion until I spent a week using it. Now I don't even notice the redesign. I'd even go as far to say that I like the "infinite scroll" and the way topics are displayed on the same page as the feed.
However, the reddit mobile experience leaves much to be desired, and I will never install their app.
There have been multiple threads on Reddit where people pick apart the new design and I've never seen somebody from Reddit show up to defend their changes. Not just opinions on design, but low quality javascript code. It makes me believe they know it's shit too, but it's all they have.
What are the actual complaints with the new design? I've been using it on and off and I can't say I've noticed any major issues. Though I'll admit most of my browsing is one on the mobile app these days.
First and foremost it's unnecessary and is not fixing anything.
Second, it forces learning a new layout and system. I don't understand instead of gradual changes in UI to improve experience they went with whole new thing.
Third, it's slow, bloated, and really hard to navigate through. Old version can display more pertinent information per screen resolution.
In a nutshell, hinders user experience without any noticeable improvement.
Finish product is bad design because initial idea was bad design to begin with (i.e. the idea to fix nothing and break everything).
I like the aesthetic changes to the UI, it definitely looks more modern and less cluttered. But it's the severe cut in features that annoys me.
* No way to easily access personal multi-reddits
* Saved/Hidden/Blocked have disappeared
* A lot of information in the subs sidebar doesn't show up anymore (things like related subs, wiki and so on). Now it's limited to rules and welcome message.
The multi-reddits thing is especially problematic to me. If you've subscribed to many subs, it becomes unmanageable without them.
I get obnoxious multi-second lag when entering text into a comment box on my phone, even on a thread that only has a couple comments. It's... befuddling how this made it to production and remains. And no, I don't want to use your stupid app. I'm not a fan of loading 1000's of shitty apps on my phone when a simple web page is sufficient.
Somehow the scrolling is also broken on their mobile site, and that can't be by accident. Is it some sort of javascript middle finger to urge users to move to their app? I've never experienced scrolling issues like that on any other site, ever.
That they make their mobile site intentionally unfriendly and frustrating is infuriating.
I get scroll lag on the redesign with my desktop computer. But that seems to have been resolved as I just checked.
Still, the interface is much clearer on old Reddit, new Reddit really shows the optimization of watching pictures and videos instead of articles and comments.
I've never noticed because I never opted-in to the new site design. That was a pretty sane default, thankfully.
There was some wonkiness where my profile preference to have thumbnails not shown kept getting overridden for some reason, but that seems to have stopped.
IF a consciousness was housed in a black box (a brain, but we're ignoring it's internals) AND that black box had inputs connected to a computer that can send signals to the black box that it WOULD interpret as signals of sight, sound, touch, hunger, intoxication, etc.
THEN how is one suppose to conclude that they are not just a consciousness in a box because they 'feel' drunk after they 'feel' they've ingested alcohol.
There's no need to monitor alcohol levels because the alcohol hasn't been proven to exist!