Jay
Bork! Bork! Bork!
+2,006|5328|London, England
I still buy a mix of ebooks and hardcovers. Because I've long since run out of space on my bookshelves, I've been saving my actual hard copy purchases for books from small presses that have nice bindings. I have no idea what the trade name is for any of it, but I view these as pieces of art in themselves.
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0306/3197/products/HL-cover-mockup.jpg?v=1584555666
"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat
uziq
Member
+492|3422
cloth-bound editions.
uziq
Member
+492|3422

Larssen wrote:

Considering the idea started through a presentation at a think tank and it's often referenced in actual academic papers I'd say calling the assumption stupid is a bit of a stretch.

I still don't see how I'm wrong in not reading the 300 page book to glean knowledge of a subject. Wouldn't you agree it may also be more directly productive to dive into the academic discussion on the topic rather than the in depth proofs and arguments of a single author? In the time it takes you to consume the book you could read another 5 or 6 extensive reactions to it including the preceding or deduced paper.
i didn't disagree it can be more productive. it really depends on the point, doesn't it? for undergraduates trying to get up to scratch on a subject very quickly, or playing catch-up for a seminar, sure, read some journal papers or a few topical reviews. isn't that basically what all undergraduates cramming for a term paper assignment do?

i said that journal articles clearly have a place in the academic ecosystem. just they have a place next to books, and many other things. academics do write, read, and produce an awful number of journal articles, after all. i proofread and edit journal articles for a large portion of my work ffs. they clearly have a very big use!

you were the one making unsupportable proclamations about anything over >50 pages, academic book-length research gradually starting to disappear because of lowered print book sales, yada yada. i said it was a ludicrous thing to say, and it has been self-evidently thus for the last two pages of your bloviating. the thrust of your argument was essentially this:

'i have thought and pondered why i don't read many books. and i have concluded that books, in fact, are bad'.
and it is a stupid assumption. almost all ideas that take wind and become 'pop' cultural phenomena or 'surprise bestsellers' started out in an academic petri dish somewhere. so fucking what? the book market for polemics and non-fiction has always had a symbiotic relationship with academia and research. academics are just as capable of writing tendentious, controversial, opinion-inflated things as anyone else. but it isn't their academic output. it wouldn't get passed by peer-review or accepted at an academic press. if you're going to attack something, stop muddling and confounding your arguments. citing 'the clash of the civilizations' to bulwark your argument about academic monographs is very stupid.

and, o n c e  a g a i n, nobody harassed you for not reading 300pp+ academic monographs. the number of people who do so, outside of academia, for enjoyment, is fractionally small. i found it incredible that you read ~3 books a year, period. again, when did you last go to a fucking book store? they don't even sell monographs! there is a whole world of reading you are declining.

larssen, you're the kind of guy who will talk seriously about a bottle of wine or a pasta dish or a visit to a restaurant 'broadening your experience', but then want to drag all of academia through a bush in some torturous exercise of self-expiation over your habits of not-reading, or claim that people who buy physical books are 'just pretending' and posing for 'decoration'. just face yourself already, pleb.

Last edited by uziq (2020-07-03 06:10:21)

Dilbert_X
The X stands for
+1,810|6076|eXtreme to the maX
^ TLDR

Anyway

Apparently its back in print and I've ordered a copy of 'And the Band Played On' by Shilts. If you want to read about a pandemic I recommend it. I think there was a fair bit about Fauci.
https://www.bookdepository.com/Band-Pla … 0312374631

Also I'll get the Harper Collins LOTR set which a local shop has on the shelf, and they can order the Edgar Froese bio, which has been out for three years, no idea why it took the local paper that long to review it, his death triggered it I guess.
Русский военный корабль, иди на хуй!
uziq
Member
+492|3422
the tl;dr is that larssen seriously claimed that reading monographs is a waste of time, every academic idea could be put in a journal article, and that soon one day, to confirm his own reading preferences, academia will wind-down the production of books and academics will stop writing books because they're so pointless (never mind the fact that a PhD is quite literally a book sans a publishing contract).

larssen reads 3 books a year and goes to a restaurant four times a month, and he'll be damned if there's any cultural or intellectual activity beyond that sphere. pretentious twaddle!

Last edited by uziq (2020-07-06 05:15:23)

Larssen
Member
+99|1857


maybe we'll reach a point where a phd in the future is just one giant powerpoint presentation. 50 slides max, I got places to be

Last edited by Larssen (2020-07-06 13:40:56)

uziq
Member
+492|3422
i'm sure business school could conceivably get to that.
Larssen
Member
+99|1857
business itself is already there. I didn't touch a single word document in my 2 years as consultant. Only excel and powerpoint. Sounds horrendous but you learn a lot if your means of conveying information are mostly limited to visualisations and the quantifiable. I wish bureaucracy and business could meet in the middle somewhere.
RTHKI
mmmf mmmf mmmf
+1,736|6707|Oxferd Ohire
We use word for training docs that's about it. Yea all I do is use excel for data, powerpoint for displays on tvs, and powerbi for charts.



I'm almost done with Atlas Shrugged. It's at 91% and I skipped a lot but seems like I missed nothing.

Last edited by RTHKI (2020-07-06 14:52:12)

https://i.imgur.com/tMvdWFG.png
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689
Schools use Google Docs and their software. It works well with Google Classroom and district email system. Probably more reliable than MS Office too.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
KEN-JENNINGS
I am all that is MOD!
+2,973|6602|949

Larssen wrote:

business itself is already there. I didn't touch a single word document in my 2 years as consultant. Only excel and powerpoint. Sounds horrendous but you learn a lot if your means of conveying information are mostly limited to visualisations and the quantifiable. I wish bureaucracy and business could meet in the middle somewhere.
Counter that with the amount of time and effort you put in to a slide deck though. Writing text on a ppt is the same as writing text on a word doc. The presentation is cleaner on a ppt but you're recording the same information.

Won't knock visualizations though. I use them for virtually any learning tool or presentation I create.
Larssen
Member
+99|1857
Yeah but once you've racked up a collection of slide decks you can make any fancy ppt in record time. It's the first few nice ones that take a lot of effort/time.

The biggest difference in govt is that not only are policy documents rather long, there's much more scrutiny from different parties in the creation process than in business. There you may have a small team making a ppt for management, a few iterations and done. In govt I'm having to juggle dozens of stakeholders from different ministries all delivering input, down to the punctuation. Worst there's no google docs like sharing and sinultaneous editing.

Only due to corona have they even begun working from home and don't get me started on fucking Webex...

Last edited by Larssen (2020-07-06 15:02:03)

KEN-JENNINGS
I am all that is MOD!
+2,973|6602|949

Have you ever used bluejeans? The devil you know...

My computer has crashed 3 times in the last two days doing presos on bluejeans. Oops sorry, dropped the call, give me 5 mins to reboot and join the conference again.

O365 online (onedrive) allows collaborative input. They even have version controls if you want to use them. Obviously some access control/confidentiality tradeoffs though
Jay
Bork! Bork! Bork!
+2,006|5328|London, England
I'm good with the software but I despise PowerPoint presentations. Nearly everything ends up looking the same.
"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat
KEN-JENNINGS
I am all that is MOD!
+2,973|6602|949

you definitely figure out a certain look and feel of the presentations you put together. What i've learned is that virtually everyone has a different way of presenting data. It took a long time before i got to a style that i liked, and it took equally as long to realize that making the preso look 100% perfect (gotta have every slide formatted the same, everything has to be in line with other shapes/columns, etc) was fucking pointless and a huge stumbling block to actually completing the slide.

Nowadays, I don't even bother with formatting unless I completely own the preso. No point in spending time formatting when someone is just going to repurpose the information anyway. I'm the master of the blank white slide with no background image, no fancy formatting, just key points and pics/charts. I'm also not in sales, so the people I interact with are much more interested in the substance than the style.
Dauntless
Admin
+2,249|6712|London

Even NASA struggles with powerpoint

https://medium.com/@JoachimLasoen/the-p … 20c907d0ae
https://imgur.com/kXTNQ8D.png
Jay
Bork! Bork! Bork!
+2,006|5328|London, England
Has anyone read Nassim Talib? I hate this first person narrative shit. Does he get better or is it just nonstop crappy anecdotes and humblebrags?
"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat
uziq
Member
+492|3422
i don't like his stuff. it's very malcolm gladwell / freakonomics ish. you have to read it all with one eyebrow raised. mostly he really really likes how smart he is.

he is pretty much the ur-template of the 'reason, bro' or 'i own rationality' type that proliferates on forums/reddit. a good successor to objectivism in attitude.
Superior Mind
(not macbeth)
+1,755|6662
I’ve been reading Moby Dick. Pretty fun read. Love all the random tidbits of zoological, geographical, and historical info.
Jay
Bork! Bork! Bork!
+2,006|5328|London, England
Gladwell is better. At least he's less disjointed and can complete a story. I'm not sure this is worth finishing...
"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689

Superior Mind wrote:

I’ve been reading Moby Dick. Pretty fun read. Love all the random tidbits of zoological, geographical, and historical info.
“Call me Ishmael"

I haven't read it and don't plan to. I know a few things about the book that I can pick up references to it though.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
SuperJail Warden
Gone Forever
+634|3689

uziq wrote:

i don't like his stuff. it's very malcolm gladwell / freakonomics ish. you have to read it all with one eyebrow raised. mostly he really really likes how smart he is.

he is pretty much the ur-template of the 'reason, bro' or 'i own rationality' type that proliferates on forums/reddit. a good successor to objectivism in attitude.
It's off putting he tried to make "black swan event" a commonly used term. Never trust a man trying to coin a phrase.
https://i.imgur.com/xsoGn9X.jpg
Jay
Bork! Bork! Bork!
+2,006|5328|London, England
I'm 12% into Antifragile
"Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough."
-Frederick Bastiat
Superior Mind
(not macbeth)
+1,755|6662

SuperJail Warden wrote:

Superior Mind wrote:

I’ve been reading Moby Dick. Pretty fun read. Love all the random tidbits of zoological, geographical, and historical info.
“Call me Ishmael"

I haven't read it and don't plan to. I know a few things about the book that I can pick up references to it though.
I think you’d like it.
uziq
Member
+492|3422

Jay wrote:

Gladwell is better. At least he's less disjointed and can complete a story. I'm not sure this is worth finishing...
i think talib is undoubtedly a smarter guy. gladwell just writes in a kind of faux-naive storytelling way that's compulsive.

i really really dislike malcolm gladwell and his whole schtick. it's also very 'liberal-progressive', isn't it? all a bit nice, and pleasant, and amusing. meh.

moby-dick is INCREDIBLE. give it a good 80 pages to adjust to melville's style. it's really, really good.

i recommend blood meridian by cormac mccarthy for anyone who likes/liked moby-d.

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