PixelProf

@PixelProf@lemmy.ca

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are we all suffering from "future shock" in 2025?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Interesting points, maybe a book I’ll have to give a read to. I’ve long thought that information overload on its own leads to a kind of subjective compression and that we’re seeing the consequences of this, plus late stage capitalism.

  Basically, if we only know about 100 people and 10 events and 20 things, we have much more capacity to form nuanced opinions, like a vector with lots of values. We don’t just have an opinion about the person, our opinion toward them is the sum of opinions about what we know about them and how those relate to us.

  Without enough information, you think in very concrete ways. You don’t build up much nuance, and you have clear, at least self-evident logic for your opinions that you can point at.

  Hit a sweet spot, and you can form nuanced opinions based on varied experiences.

  Hit too much, and now you have to compress the nuances to make room for more coarse comparisons. Now you aren’t looking at the many nuances and merits, you’re abstracting things. Necessary simulacrum.

  I’ve wondered if this is where we’ve seen so much social regression, or at least being public about it. There are so many things to care about, to know, to attend to, that the only way to approach it is to apply a compression, and everyone’s worldview is their compression algorithm. What features does a person classify on?

  I feel like we just aren’t equipped to handle the global information age yet, and we need specific ways of being to handle it. It really is a brand new thing for our species.

  Do we need to see enough of the world to learn the nuances, then transition to tighter community focus? Do we need strong family ties early with lower outside influence, then melting pot? Are there times in our development when social bubbling is more ideal or more harmful than otherwise? I’m really curious.

  Anecdotally, I feel like I benefitted a lot from tight-knit, largely anonymous online communities growing up. Learning from groups of people from all over the world of different ages and beliefs, engaging in shared hobbies and learning about different ways of life, but eventually the neurons aren’t as flexible for breadth and depth becomes the drive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just Terrible⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I love that friend group A is a gradient.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you have what it takes to become a geologist?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Geode colouring matched Ace Flag colouring.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Calculus made easy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I may be wrong but I think it usually comes down to a very specific kind of precision needed. It’s not meant to be hostile, I think, but meant to provide a domain-specific explanation clearly to those who need to interpret it in a specific way. In law, specific jargon infers very specific behaviour, so it’s meant to be precise in its own way (not a law major, can’t say for sure), but it can seem completely meaningless if you aren’t prepped for it.

  Same thing in other fields. I had a professor who was very pedantic about {braces} vs [brackets] vs (parentheses), and it seemed totally unnecessary to be so corrective in discussions, but when explaining where things went wrong with a student’s work it was vital to be able to quickly differentiate them in their work so they could review the right areas or understand things faster during a lecture later down the line.

  But that noise takes longer to teach through, so if it is important, it needs it’s own time to learn, and it will make it inaccessible to anyone who didn’t get that time to learn and digest it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Calculus made easy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Absolutely! One of the difficulties that I have with my intro courses is working out when to introduce the vocabulary correctly, because it is important to be able to engage with the industry and the literature, but it adds a lot of noise to learning the underlying concepts and some assessments end up losing sight of the concept and go straight to recalling the vocab.

  Knowing the terms can help you self-learn, but a textbook glossary could do the same thing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Calculus made easy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  There was a lovely computer science book for kids I can’t remember the name of, and it was all about the evil jargon trying to prevent people from mastering the magical skills of programming and algorithms. I love these approaches. I grew up in an extremely non/anti-academic environment, and I learned to explain things in non-academic ways, and it’s really helped me as an intro lecturer.

  Jargon is the mind killer. Shorthands are for the people who have enough expertise to really feel the depths of that shorthand and use it to tickle the old familiar neurons they represent without needing to do the whole dance. It’s easy to forget that to a newcomer, the symbol is just a symbol.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Calculus made easy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Functional programming is much more math oriented and I think works well here, as it likes to violate a lot of these rules as a rule. I think it’s what makes it so challenging and so obvious for different folks.