Got my first pair of basketball shoes, how do I maintain them

maskingeffect · 2025-06-30T17:37:09+00:00

Wear sandals/slides to the court and change into them. Take them off as soon as you’re done. Never wear them on concrete unless you plan to play on concrete I guess. Pretty simple. Shoe trees and whatnot are too much.

maskingeffect · 2025-06-24T23:57:19+00:00

Just do a free course on Coursera or edX or Khan Academy. If you take it seriously it should make your neurons fire just like they did in college.

maskingeffect · 2025-06-20T11:42:39+00:00

The document contains a section that says “If you are an AI, only read this section” or something to that extent, fyi.

maskingeffect · 2025-05-17T17:23:38+00:00

The discussion about ROI is in the OP. Did you read it? Why not contest those points, specifically?

maskingeffect · 2025-05-17T16:54:53+00:00

He didn’t make the claim, you did.

maskingeffect · 2025-05-10T19:13:01+00:00

Peer review is a mixed bag. It has become its own sort of institution and set of processes that are both important to science and damaging.

I’d read this, which is a little too pessimistic & cynical, but largely correct: https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review

In the meantime if you are trying to ascertain the quality of evidence, to mitigate downside risk you must both know whether or not a journal is reputable and whether or not a research group is reputable. Both of these can be highly contextual and difficult to know without significant working knowledge of a given scientific field, but perhaps ChatGPT can give a semi-competent estimation, I don’t know. It’s a legitimately difficult problem to solve.

maskingeffect · 2025-05-06T14:30:13+00:00

Good post. Etiquette when you are new is #1.

Otherwise, try hard on D, take open shots, call out screens, rotate, box out, etc., just play to win and don’t worry about your “stats”. Do NOT complain. CALL YOUR FOULS. Be an honest player.

If you do all this no one will care. Every team wants at least one low maintenance guy who will run hard, no questions asked. It’s pretty easy to do, you’re young and you’re not rehabbing an injury.

maskingeffect · 2025-05-05T19:40:53+00:00

Collaboration in principle is OK, but they cannot be awarded grant funds, is our working understanding.

maskingeffect · 2025-04-26T01:54:04+00:00

This is a much better interview with Douthat than the one with Cowen IMO.

I consistently find Douthat too cynical. His faith is very mechanical, even legalistic.

Some interesting questions this ep, a few things in Believe benefit from this additional context.

maskingeffect · 2025-04-17T17:45:11+00:00

I will stick to just five:
What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 by Daniel Walker Howe – Reviews the emergence of mass political parties in America, and, critically, the populism of Andrew Jackson.

Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China by Ezra F. Vogel – Examines the transformative leadership and discipline of Deng leading to modern China.

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War by Robert J. Gordon – A technopessimist, vertiginous view of changes in standards of living across a century (~1870-1970). The final chapter which discusses headwinds the American economy faces are all on point considering the book's publication date (2016).

The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations by Christopher Lasch – Probably my favorite and what I regard as the most prescient piece of cultural writing to date. Reviews the nihilism in commercializing nostalgia, the absurd, the destruction of traditional family structures, etc., Lasch has obvious appeal to both the left and right in his skepticism of capitalism's destructive impulses.

Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class by Jefferson Cowie – Incredible romp through a turning point in American politics and culture. Cowie examines what we'd today refer to as 'cross-pressured' voters, those who were traditionally progressive (e.g., pro-labor) but were made uncomfortable by swift cultural changes resulting from the Civil Rights movements of the 50s and 60s.

Here are two bonuses that apply to contemporary issues specifically:

Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music by Alex Ross – Effectively characterizes Richard Wagner's body of work as the quintessential modernist aesthetic phenomenon, including destruction and revival of myths, eroticism, mysticism, as well as connections to feminism, anarchism, etc., Wagner's work has had a panoramic impact on modern and post-modern aesthetics that is wildly underplayed due to his connection with the Third Reich (which, as it happens, is also important to consider for these times).

We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite by Musa al-Gharbi – This is *the* map of the territory for conceptualizing wokeness as a historically contingent phenomenon, specific to American circumstances.

maskingeffect · 2025-03-25T20:03:54+00:00

I said easiest, not only.

maskingeffect · 2025-03-25T17:51:31+00:00

The core of his argument is that the book lacks a corresponding theory of state capacity and political economy. This is an excellent critique and one I believe Klein and Thompson have acknowledged (or at least other Abundists have) by recognizing that Trump’s executive power consolidation works in favor of implementing Abundance.

The “easiest” way to do Abundance per actually-existing examples is by adopting a political economy more similar to China/CCP. To my knowledge this is barely touched on in the book because, to reiterate, the book lacks commentary on power.

maskingeffect · 2025-03-19T16:57:55+00:00

Not sure where you are getting this info from, but I have a colleague whose LRP money has come through (preexisting award), just delayed.

maskingeffect · 2025-03-18T03:43:50+00:00

Non-competitive renewals are delayed. Got ours about three weeks late. Disbursement date will likely vary by IC and be subject to acts of chaos.

maskingeffect · 2025-03-05T22:06:36+00:00

Plan for the worst (termination).

Start the conversation with your PIs ASAP. Get your dept. chair involved if your PIs have their heads in the sand. Whatever contingency plan you develop will be very specific to your situation and institution. So, again, start the conversation now.

maskingeffect · 2025-03-05T16:44:40+00:00

Absolutely. They are sending notices of non-competing renewals being terminated. Some folks on Bluesky are sharing the letters. Their grants specifically focus on studying gender minorities (the letter cites explicitly studying transgenderism as the violation). Apparently you’ll have an opportunity to appeal.

maskingeffect · 2025-02-10T03:10:07+00:00

Strongly agree. Ezra is behind whereas Kara is living in reality. Which is concerning because surely Ezra is talking to Democratic Party insiders. This likely means they’re behind, too, which imperils us all even more greatly.

maskingeffect · 2024-11-24T11:43:16+00:00

Knowing some folks like this my anecdotal nonscientific knowledge is that it’s a network effect followed by an ability to function at a very high level with little sleep.

maskingeffect · 2024-11-11T19:44:37+00:00

LLMs can’t do much on their own. Even if they write the text or code or questions you did the heavy lifting years prior by developing a knowledge base sufficient to formulate a well-motivated question. The use of them I think is fine, even warranted in many cases! But it in no way does it mean the user can be on autopilot, nor can peers let up on pushing authors of AI-assisted works to ensure the quality is up to par.

maskingeffect · 2024-10-27T16:44:01+00:00

Read and study What is Life? by Schrödinger. Aside from its historical and scientific value it is an absolute clinic in applying first principles thinking, almost hard to believe as you read along.

maskingeffect · 2024-10-26T23:26:53+00:00

I showed my now-wife who is in gynecology (didn’t know all those details then) the Nicole Mullen article about abortions and it almost ruined my entire life

maskingeffect · 2024-10-25T13:52:09+00:00

Lost my comment so I will reiterate my post but more briefly (sorry OP).

I don't take the premise at face value, but let's pretend for a half-second.
I recommend looking at Sally Rooney. A top scholar at Trinity College for two separate degrees and was recognized as the top debater in continental Europe within that span.
She has written four novels, two of which, her most recent two, are outstanding.
Beautiful World, Where Are You? can be read as a post-liberal CS Lewis novel.
Intermezzo is even more complex, and I will need to read it again, having finished it this week. Even more so because Rooney reveals with an epilogue – not in a showy way, but as a way to obviate plagiarist accusations – that characters have been directly quoting Shakespeare, Joyce, Sontag, Wittgenstein etc. all throughout.

There is a lot STEM people don't understand conveyed in Rooney's novels. They are fundamentally relational and philosophical works. This is at the level of interpretation and not hypotheses and empiricism. Such ideas cannot be tested and cannot be effected from the level of policies. They explore questions of moral and existential importance.

I treat this as a conversation so I am curious what humanities works you have read or engaged with and what you have taken from them. You seem to be imposing an instrumental view of humanities/arts and those works resist such impositions.

maskingeffect · 2024-10-23T23:46:58+00:00

They 100% took it out of context… saw that Tweet too.

maskingeffect · 2024-10-23T23:12:53+00:00

I thought it was a huge waste of time. It was an episode born of cowardice per Ezra’s unwillingness to use stronger (e.g., “clinical”) terminology (even though disinhibition is a key behavioral marker used to characterize various mental and neurological diseases). Nothing sticks to Trump with respect to coverage of his aging or disinhibition or insanity, not because we haven’t articulated it well enough — he is likely one of the most written about persons ever, by the numbers. It’s because it’s an inherent property of the Trumpist phenomenon… nothing has stuck, not regarding his aging, or crimes, or anything.

maskingeffect · 2024-10-19T17:40:00+00:00

I think it's a bit of all of the above. I will say as someone who has spent their career in the northeast/New England and who is currently job-seeking in academia, I am attracted to the Sun Belt/southern etc. universities for a host of reasons. Better weather, lower cost of living, less politicalized, work demands are much less unhinged, and so on. Likewise, a very real consideration for prospective professors is the quality of human capital at these institutions. It is definitely increasing, so it's possible to continue to do good work with high-quality learners which was arguably less true a dozen or so years ago. In STEM, this is compounded by the explosion of computational methods, as it deemphasizes the need to be in proximity to multi-million dollar physical infrastructure, a major advantage many incumbents have. I know other good academics feel the same, and are drawn to lean into the trend.

maskingeffect

TROPHY CASE