"But the real reason [married people gain weight] is moral hazard, or the tendency to take more risks and behave more irresponsibly when there are no consequences."
I'd never equated being overweight as behaving irresponsibly. If everyone thought this way, would we all be thinner? If my spouse can't nag me to lose weight (see #1), is there anything she could do to encourage it, or is it all on me?
Funny, I can't imagine being overweight as anything but irresponsible (mod specific health issues). And it is pretty much all on you.
One thing that can be very helpful is to schedule exercise with other people (e.g. spouse). It's easier to get going with a group, it's more fun, and there is a social cost to canceling. You don't even have to do the same exercises -- just go to the gym or pool or park or whatever and do your thing.
i.e. don't nag against bad activities, but support and encourage wholesome ones in their place.
In regards to equating being overweight and being irresponsible, I think you're right. I just had never seen it that way, and hopefully this can start a paradigm shift for me.
What this implies is that overeating/under-exercising should be taboo just like smoking cigarettes. These things aren't considered taboo by some people, but maybe that's the reason people aren't healthier.
I agree that in the end it's personal responsibility that determines whether you're overweight or healthy. But it has to be said that it has become more difficult to be thin (at least in western societies) given the ease with which most of us can obtain high energy/fat foods. Add to that the fact that most food producers have profit margins as their motivators instead of the population's health, and you can see why it's getting harder.
Agree completely. The point is that food producers are playing (wittingly or not) into the fact that our human biology is geared towards the storage of fat. Your body's primal survival mechanism is a hard thing to overcome. In more scarce times, people spent most of their energy in the pursuit of finding something to eat. Now you use about 8 calories to reach out your car window, grab your 1500 calorie supersized meal, and set it on your passenger seat.
Actually in some ways it is getting easier (for the geeks, anyway):
* adblock - no stupid commercials for fastfood places, etc
* Downloaded tv (whether brought from iTunes or downloaded from thepiratebay.org) doesn't contain commercials.
Add that a personal mp3 player means you are less likely to hear radio and it becomes that much more difficult to sell you stuff.
Recent research shows that obesity is caused more by the types of food that we eat than the amount that we eat. (And the types of food that surround us these days are increasingly the wrong kinds).
I would suggest that you and your wife do some research into obesity/nutrition and form a meal plan together. It is much easier to eat the right foods when you're doing it together. It's also fun to cook together. At least, that's working for me and my partner.
I suggest Gary Taube's or Mark Sisson's books for research.
It's tough. I certainly haven't mastered this, but it takes a reputation of delivering outstanding products, which often comes from passionate developers. Feeding that passion is key.
I liked Kurzweil's response best: "As long as AI has any flaws or limitations, people will jump on these. By the time that the set of these limitations is nil, AI will have long since surpassed unaided human intelligence."
Watson isn't the end, it's a building block. It's true that it's been largely hyped to some degree, but I think that opens doors that wouldn't have been opened otherwise. Chomsky's dismissal seems too quick.
Chomsky's point is that he doesn't think brute force AI really accomplishes much toward a theory of mind. He may be right or wrong about this, but it's an empirically testable point (over time).
He indicates that his inclination is toward a different research approach which is not brute force oriented (meaning it's more algorithmically/conceptually sophisticated but not fundamentally different).
This is why he trivializes the notion of "intelligence"... b/c he probably has a hard time calling the approach he favors intelligence, much less a far less intelligent brute force approach.
In Chomsky's world, intelligence essentially refers to "innate knowlege systems". If it's brute force than it's totally non-innate.
The writers had no knowledge of which clues would be used for the Watson episodes; they only mention that they don't use audio or video clues. I certainly haven't done any analysis of it, but I didn't feel like they were any less common in the preview round than normal. Between all the games I'm sure we'd see more "linguistically tricky" clues. I'm hoping for some good "before and after" questions.
I'm sure that's true for a lot of people, but I think there were probably a lot of people who thought of it as "try before you buy". This mentality certainly applies to some percentage of those who would have pirated it, but I think there are plenty of people who saw this as a free sample.
Another key to remember is that there is time after the button press to think of the answer - it's a common strategy to ring in when you have a certain confidence level that you can think of the answer quickly. Watson uses confidence levels, too, but he already has a particular answer in mind instead of a vague confidence level for the whole clue.
I can definitely follow along with this or any game of Jeopardy!, but my problem is that I just don't know all the answers. To me this is part of the appeal.
This is definitely faster-paced than regular episodes of Jeopardy!, but I don't think it's prohibitively fast for native speakers.
It's too bad that Jeopardy! doesn't fit in with international pop culture better. I think it's a perfect fit for a lot of AI problems.
Starting young is great. You're hinting at one of the other keys that has helped me, which is to make it automatic. This is often more important than the vehicle you choose for investment. If I automatically invest a certain amount each month it's just like you say - I never miss it because I never see it. Make saving as easy as possible (and what's easier than automatic?) and spending as hard as possible and that will drive your savings rate way up.
I think the point here isn't just that the CEO was performing a mundane task, but that he was doing work that had to get done, even though it wasn't a desirable task. There was a giant pile of dishes - he cleaned them. The dishes were the thing that needed to get done.
If he does it just once, I question his motives. This repeated behavior shows his true conviction.
Honest question: Is it still considered a stunt if nobody even knows that he's doing it? From the post, it seemed like he was just taking care of it with no fanfare or mention to the other employees.
For me, CEOs also need to enable their staff to produce their best performance. If the dirty dishes are getting in the way and the staff are honestly pushing to the limit elsewhere, IMHO it's a sensible enabling behaviour for the short term at least, regardless of who sees it.
I know if I have a busy few days and the housework starts piling up my heart sinks a little when I get in and see the task ahead; I'm quite sure it'd be the same in an office if I had that problem. That can just as easily be the point of this sort of action.
I think they left a few things out, like playing back local media. This appears to be built on android, though, so maybe that means that functionality like this can be enabled later. I wonder if it will support hardware decoding for H.264 and WebM.
Local media was not mentioned, but I don't see something like the Logitech box NOT doing local media. If not, I expect someone to write an Android app for it instantly.
I'd never equated being overweight as behaving irresponsibly. If everyone thought this way, would we all be thinner? If my spouse can't nag me to lose weight (see #1), is there anything she could do to encourage it, or is it all on me?