computers are very important but using computers all day can hurt your hands and wrists (and eyes, neck, shoulders). this is called RSI (repetitive stress injury).

it’s VERY VERY important to a good life to understand how to deal with RSI. there is a lot of information about this, but i wanted to add my emphasis to how important it is. and i noticed a lot of the information is lacking in the stretches and squeezes area – it will list several and leave out a ton of others. so making a better list there is my main motivation for writing this.

RSI can absolutely cripple people's lives and doing some stretches and squeezes can make a huge difference in staying healthy.

here are some of the most important general things:

do not wait until you have a problem and then learn about RSI afterwards. by then a lot of damage is already done and it will be much harder to manage and you might not fully recover ever.

take breaks. regularly. seriously, do it.

if anything hurts, that means you should have taken a break BEFORE IT HURT. you need to stop immediately, but more importantly take a break sooner next time. never ever ever ignore pain.

you should type with your wrists straight. whatever you do, DON'T put your palms on the table at the base of the keyboard, then bend your wrists up to type on the keyboard.

using a trackpad a lot can hurt your index finger which does most of the work. laptop users should seriously consider using a mouse part of the time. (mice are also better input devices – faster and more accurate. if you don’t experience it that way, that’s due to a lack of skill with a mouse which is completely fixable. also having acceleration enabled can make a mouse a lot worse to use.)

if you use a trackpad a lot or have issues with a mouse, you should learn to use trackpad and/or mouse left handed in addition to right handed. you'll be slow at first but you can learn it. then switch off sometimes. if you use your left hand a quarter of the time, that's a lot less work for your right hand.

trackpads and mice are harder on your hands than a keyboard. learn keyboard hotkeys/shortcuts and create new ones.

get a keyboard which requires a low amount of force to press keys down. apple's recent keyboards (with the very thin keys) are good here. there are other good ones too. if you have an old keyboard with full size keys (like half an inch tall) it's probably really bad. type with a light touch.

also a lot of mice really suck – they have problems like weighing too much, requiring too much force to click, having too much traction when you try to move them, and being imprecise. get a mouse that you can use with a light touch. also you need a good surface, probably a mousepad, so it actually works well (mice work poorly on most desks). Razer makes good mice. Apple makes bad mice (i tried an apple wireless mouse several years ago and it was heavy and the bottom had a ton of friction with the mousepad instead of sliding easily, and it took more force to click than a razer mouse and it wasn't very precise.)

get a good chair. and think about the arm rests. i use an Aeron chair with a pillow over the arm rests which creates like a big arm rest accross my entire lap. (i like this a lot but you need the right kind of pillow in terms of size, shape, softness. most pillows wouldn't work very well. i don't know where to buy a good one, sorry). i used to use a cheap office chair that was good too, but a lot of the cheap ones suck.

eyes: staring at a screen can hurt your eyes. look away and focus on distant objects sometimes. close and squeeze your eyes shut hard sometimes. massage your closed eyes with your palms sometimes. look into Flux and Gunnars.

google information about monitor height, keyboard height, chair height, etc. i won’t go into details on that for now except to mention that by attaching the screen to the keyboard, laptops make good ergonomics impossible without an external keyboard and/or external display. a good computer setup has the keyboard lower than the screen. it’s fine to use a laptop in your lap or in bed sometimes, part of the time, but using it like that all the time is a bad idea.

you should stretch sometimes. with skill, you can tell when you need it, when stuff is tight, etc. if you don’t have a lot of experience and understanding of this, do it regularly. you can stretch when away from the computer, e.g. when waiting in line, when waiting for your microwave, while walking to another room, while on the phone, etc

lots of websites and videos with information about stretches are way too incomplete and leave out a ton of great hand stretches (and often all the squeezes and all the shoulder/neck stuff too). here is a better list (soon, below):

note that in general anything done with one hand should be repeated with the other, and all stretches should be held for a few seconds. that can be 15 seconds or 30, it depends what you’re comfortable with. at first you should do ALL of these things (it really doesn’t take that long once you’ve done them a few times and remember everything). as you get more experience with them and get a better understanding of your body, you can get a sense of which are most helpful to you.

you should read a bunch of different guides on this stuff and learn a lot about it. my above information is pretty quick just to give a general idea. learn more. now here are stretches and squeezes which i will be more complete with:

STRETCHES AND SQUEEZES:

make one hand flat (with the arm straight), gently push on your fingers with the other hand to bend your wrist back. also repeat the same thing without using your other hand – just using the muscles in the first hand instead of pushing on it. and anything that’s for one hand, repeat it with the other hand after.

push the other way, on the back of your hand, to bend the wrist the other direction. and repeat without using the second hand to push.

pull your thumb back with the other hand.

put your two flat hands together (palms and fingers aligned). press downward so your wrists bend back.

rotate your wrists both ways and push gently with the other hand.

grip around your wrist and the area behind it with your other hand and twist the skin both directions. then move your hand up your arm a little and repeat. this massages it. also squeeze and slide your hand instead of twist to massage more.

put your hands on your hips with the thumb separate from the other fingers and press in to stretch the thumb away from the rest

spread out all your fingers. push them all outwards and backwards. (with their own muscles, not your other hand)

bend fingers over and under the next finger over. index to middle. middle to ring. and ring to pinky.

squeezes (it’s very important to do squeezes and use your muscles, not just stretches): make a fist, squeeze hard. bend just the tips of your fingers in and squeeze. make a fist with your thumb inside it and squeeze. grip one forearm with the other hand and squeeze. also get one of those balls to squeeze in your hand if you want.

put your left hand flat with fingers facing up. then grip it with your right hand, so your palms are together, but your hands are rotated 90 degrees to each other, so the fingers on your right hand will point left or forward. you should have your left thumb, then right thumb, then left 4 fingers, then right 4 fingers, in that order, counter-clockwise. then bend in your fingers and squeeze. and repeat with the other hand facing up.

interlace your fingers so they alternate one from each hand. with your palms together, squeeze – press in with all your fingers.

fingers still interlaced, put your arms at full length, palms facing away from you, and press outward.

shoulder and neck rotations (both directions) and stretches (move or turn head or shoulders in each direction they go to the max and hold it a bit)

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yes, try ALL of these stretches and squeezes. over time you can learn to feel which ones your body needs when and see which are most valuable to you. you should still do ALL of them sometimes, but you can adjust the frequency and amounts for different ones.

To suffer, you have to prefer X and then something contrary to X happens. If everything that ever happens matches your preferences, you’d be pleased with it.

If you do prefer X and things go another way, then consider:

What kind of preference is it? Is X a “nice to have”? A vague dream? An aspiration? Or a must-have?

And, specifically, either you are OK or NOT OK with not getting the X preference met. There’s only two possibilities there.

If you prefer X, and consider no X to be NOT OK, and X doesn’t work out in reality, then you’d suffer – you are NOT OK with how reality is.

There’s no other way to suffer.

And even if you get this kind of situation, you can think “well, this is a problem to be solved. so i’ll temporarily be OK with no X while looking for a solution. maybe i can find a different way to get X, and the delay would be OK rather than NOT OK. maybe i can find out X isn’t so great after all and genuinely lose interest in it. i’ll take a look.”

So suffering also requires that attempts to do rational problem solving like this fail.

i stop listening and think about other stuff when listening to Atlas Shrugged sometimes

i don’t pause or rewind. i just tune back in later. i know the book well enough it’s not a problem. i know what’s going on where i pick up.

i do the same thing, sometimes, with books i’ve never read before. if that’s how it’s convenient to read, so what? why try to get every detail out of the book? if it’s so great, read it again later in the same low-burden way.

figuring out what’s going on after missing some is interesting anyway. both with books about ideas and books with plots.

and it’s actually not fundamentally different than reading without skipping anything – where you also have to make guesses and use creativity to figure out what’s going on. all novels give incomplete information about the plot and leave you to try to figure some things out. all philosophy books try to explain a lot but can never do all your thinking for you.

I spoke with a Feminist on Twitter.





So first she accused me of not being open to discussion, then she ambiguously accepted my invitation to discuss. Then she didn't come have a discussion.

I'm not surprised. It's sad and pathetic though. Someone who is unwilling to discuss uses accusing other people of being closed to discussion as one of her main tactics.

I was going to follow up after a week and give her the benefit of the doubt, but I noticed her tweets were gone. Her Twitter page is now private. This hid all her tweets from the discussion above. Maybe she was embarrassed. Fortunately I had screenshots which preserve the record of her irrationality.

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Although she won't listen, I still wanted to share a few of my thoughts on the subject. Some of the things I would have told her, if she was open to discussion.

The point was not to defend fat shaming. I think fat shaming and fat-shamer shaming are both bad. (I do not think all criticism of fatness is fat-shaming though! There are legitimate criticisms of being fat, both in terms of health and beauty.)

I value diversity of thought and opinion. I think most feminists do not.

Roosh is an asshole (so what?). I only followed him on Twitter recently and already complained about several of his tweets to my friends. He's interesting though for being willing to say some unpopular things, some of which have truth to them. Unpopular truths are very valuable, even if someone isn't right about 100% of everything. Also I don't think he's trying to be mean and hurt people, whereas many feminists seem to actually want to hurt their opponents.

I think PUA has a lot of good points. I particularly like Mystery. I read some of his old Usenet posts, watched his TV show, and watched some of his PUA training DVDs, so I'm familiar with his ideas. This certainly doesn't mean I automatically like everything else vaguely in the same genre as PUA.

I often follow people on Twitter to see if I like them, and I'm very willing to unfollow. I was (and still am) giving Roosh a chance – he's in the undecided category. In general, I've noticed I find the anti-feminist Manosphere type people insufficiently PUA and dislike that. Plus they can be mean. PUA isn't mean! But on the other hand, there's a million things wrong with feminists, so sometimes I do agree with anti-feminists.

Anyway I think diversity of thought is a good thing. There are mistakes being made on both sides, so attacking Roosh and shutting him up isn't the solution. Feminists should try harder to get their own house in order.

And also, insulting Roosh won't shut him up. He retweets people flaming him. He likes the attention. He likes that people are reacting to him. The strategy of irrationally flaming him is only going to make him more confident that the feminist side is stupid, and he'll have fun with it. He won't be hurt.

Strategically, giving Roosh more stuff he likes to retweet is not how you fight him. That's absurd.

And shaming people is not how to deal with shaming. If you think shaming is bad, don't do it. Being inconsistent and contradictory is the wrong approach. Look at this deleted tweet by another feminist:



In their (purported) crusade against meanness, they can sure be mean.

Shaming and being mean also isn't truth-seeking rational argument.

I realize they've found being really mean works well to bully some other people. But it's absolutely not going to work on Roosh, who enjoys it when his opponents act like this. So it's inconsistent and it's terrible tactics.

I have plenty more to say on this if any feminists actually want to have a discussion. How about you join my discussion group and say hi, and we can talk about it? Any takers?

https://twitter.com/DrJohnLTaylor/status/584802877882904576

#IAMAPhilosopherBecause the unexamined life is not worth leading.

So he both misquoted Socrates (it's "living" not "leading") and omitted the quote marks when using a famous quote.

https://twitter.com/DavidDeutschOxf/status/590279039170043904

One should study philosophy only if addressing an originally non-philosophical problem forces one to.

Stay the fuck away from philosophy unless forced.

jfc

Once upon a time, DD promised me he’d write a good book about TCS before he died – I raised the issue because he intentionally left out major important TCS type ideas from FoR and BoI. He lied to me.

---

also DD misquoted Popper (C&R p95 for me in paper, i checked both paper and ebook, his text does not match popper’s text. it’s chap 2, section III, near start). and dropped italics which isn’t OK either. and DD’d replaced “which arise” with “[from]” just b/c of tweet length limit. (actually just to fit italics he’d have to drop the period on the end, no problem, and the space after the colon, ugh lol. but he still should have done that)

https://twitter.com/curi42/status/590295170651791360

get an ebook and stop inserting typos into what are supposed to be exact quotes. (Popper: “philosophize”. DD supposedly quoting Popper: “philosophise”.)

DD also omitted the quote source. presumably cuz of tweet length limit. it's still his responsibility.

Quotes from Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader. Bold text in quotes is my emphasis.

Given his uncertain position at the time, it wasn’t surprising that Steve was the more volatile participant. He was willing to admit a few mistakes, even allowing that Bill was correct in saying that Apple should have taken the IBM PC more seriously. Then he took that thought further. “The singular event that defined Apple’s place in the industry in the 1980s was actually not the Macintosh,” he announced. “That was a positive event. The negative event that defined Apple’s place was the Apple III. It was the first example I’d seen in my career of a product taking on a life of its own and developing way beyond what was necessary to satisfy customer demand. The project took eighteen months more than we’d planned and was overdesigned and cost a little too much. It’s interesting to speculate what would’ve happened if the Apple III had come out right, as a lean, mean upgrade to the Apple II that offered incremental features that made it more suitable for business. [Instead,] Apple left a real hole.” Later, he made clear that much of the blame could be laid at his feet: “One of the reasons that the Apple III had problems was that I grabbed some of the best people from that project to do research on how to turn what I saw at Xerox [PARC] into reality.”

Steve admits mistakes, Bill doesn't. Steve doesn't get credit. It "wasn't surprising" because of Steve's external circumstances. This is an example of quality critical thinking.

It was a fascinating admission. Steve was never much for looking back at his own mistakes, and yet during this very public conversation with a friend whom everyone but Jobs now acknowledged as the leader of the computer industry, he was downright contrite. Later in the conversation, he even pulled out a story he’d ripped from the pages of Newsweek to make sure that Bill wasn’t offended by the author’s claim that Steve was no longer his friend. “I tore this out and I was going to call you before I knew we were getting together,” he said, brandishing the page like a trial attorney. “This is not true at all, and I have no idea where they got that.”

This is the very next paragraph, after talking about Steve looking back at his own mistakes in a serious and thoughtful way, and making comments like how it's "interesting to speculate" about such matters. And what does the author do? Declare, without example, and contrary to the examples he just gave, that Steve "was never much for looking back at his own mistakes".

And with Bill, he implies Bill did not admit mistakes during the conversation, but because he expected that he doesn't criticize Bill over it. He's holding Steve to a different standard for no apparent reason. (People who are less succesful admit more mistakes? Bullshit. It can go either way. The guy on top might think he's in a strong enough position he can admit to some mistakes. External circumstances like these simply don't dictate who admits what mistakes.)

Theirs was a quiet, sincere friendship, enabled in great part by Catmull’s maturity. “Steve and I never argued,” he says. “We had disagreements; I won several and he won several. But even early on, when he wasn’t particularly skilled at dealing with relationships, I always felt that he was talking about a topic, not about who was right or who was wrong. For a lot of people, their egos are tied up in an idea and it gets in the way of learning. You have to separate yourself from the idea. Steve was like that.”

Again we see Steve has critical thinking skills others lack. He's called not skilled at dealing with relationships – meaning social graces and appeasement of irrationality – but at the very same time it's admitted he was superior at purely good skills (rather than mixed compromises) like focusing on ideas instead of making things personal.

The two men would eventually know each other and work together for twenty-six years. Catmull says he saw enormous changes over the years, but allows that this, too, was something Steve would never acknowledge. “I look at Steve as someone who was actually always trying to change, but he didn’t express it in the same ways as others, and he didn’t communicate with people about that. He really was trying to change the world. It didn’t come across as him being personally introspective.”

This is another passage with a strange duality. On the one hand it says Steve was good at something. But then it criticizes Steve, on that very topic, somehow. In this case it says he hid his virtues rather than bragging. Normally that'd be praised as humility rather than arrogance. Yet somehow Steve has a reputation for arrogance, and stuff like this is not used to dispel it. Instead, nonsensically, the lesson the book tries to convey here is not to hide your virtues from people around you – the very same virtues the book quotes people who knew Steve talking about, because they were not in fact hidden (which is somehow overlooked).

[Steve Jobs] believed that Amelio, who ascended to the CEO position after just one year on the board, had maneuvered himself into the gig by positioning himself as a turnaround expert. “But how can he be a turnaround expert,” Steve asked me, “when he eats his lunch alone in his office, with food served to him on china that looks like it came from Versailles?”

A nice anti-prestige comment. Steve is held up as this arrogant asshole who thought he was above the rules. Someone like Gil Amelio doesn't get that kind of criticism (partly because no one cares about him, but also partly because he's seen as normal and people don't see much to criticize. he just lacked the mysterious "greatness" quality, which isn't his fault or something that can be controlled – people falsely believe).

But really, Steve was more down to Earth. He interacted with people at his company, he could sully his hands with regular dishware, he was fundamentally more approachable and more a part of the regular world.

The four men became the core of what Catmull calls the Brain Trust—a collection of Pixar writers, directors, and animators who provide constructive criticism to the director of every Pixar movie. It’s a unique idea—the Brain Trust has no authority whatsoever, and the directors are only asked to listen and deeply consider the advice of its members. It became a powerful tool, helping to reshape movies like The Incredibles and Wall-E. But Steve was never a part of it. Catmull kept him out of those discussions, because he felt that Steve’s big personality would skew the proceedings.

Steve Jobs was the best critical thinker of the people involved with this. And he was kept out of the group that provides criticism, because he was too good at criticizing – intellectually – and most people don't actually like criticism and only want limited criticism.

Even with his stature, prestige, reputation, money (he owned 70% of Pixar when it split away from Lucasfilm, I don't know how much later but still a lot), people still had very mixed feelings about Steve because he was especially good at critical thinking.

How valuable is a critic like Steve?

Steve had his own misgivings about Toy Story’s commercial potential, mainly based upon what he was hearing from Disney’s marketers. “Disney came to do a big presentation to us about the marketing,” remembers Lasseter. “They told us they had a big promotional plan with Sears. Steve looks around the room and goes, ‘Has anybody in this room been into a Sears lately? Anybody.’ No one raises a hand. ‘Then why are we making a deal with Sears? Why are we not going for products we like? Can’t we be doing a deal with Rolex? Sony high-end audio equipment?’ And their answer was basically, ‘Um, um, this is what we do!’ He poked holes in every one of their ideas. He was just so logical. Why associate ourselves with products we can’t stand?” (In the end, the most prominent sponsor would turn out to be Burger King.)

You may think that sounds easy, he hasn't done much in this anecdote. And yet, it took Steve to get up and say this. It's a skill worth billions of dollars. The vast majority of people, for one reason or another, are unwilling to be like this. Steve would challenge things and criticize. Yeah not every criticism is super hard to think of, so it's deceptive – a big part of the skill is being willing to think of and say criticism at all, rather than being scared of being declared an asshole and excluded from the Brain Trust and other things.

In early 1998, just a few months after his return to Apple, he asked his chief information officer, Niall O’Connor, to come up with a proposal for an online store where Apple could sell its computers directly to customers, much like Dell Computer was doing then with such great success. O’Connor asked Eddy Cue, who was then an IT technician in the human resources division, to sketch out an initial version of what the store might look like from a programmer’s perspective. “I don’t think Niall thought I was his best person,” says Cue, “but he did think I could deal with Steve, for some reason.” Cue, who had never met Steve and knew little about e-commerce or retailing, sought advice from a number of people, including head of sales Mitch Mandich. “Give him your best ideas,” Mandich told him, “but it won’t matter because we’ll never do it. It would piss off the channels [the stores and distributors that had traditionally sold Apple’s computers].” One week later, Cue, O’Connor, Mandich, and others attended a meeting to review the initial proposal. Cue handed his presentation to Steve—he’d made it visual, because everyone had told him that Steve preferred visual presentations, and he’d put it on paper, because everyone had told him Steve hated sitting through slides, especially in small meetings. All the research seemed to have gone for naught. Steve looked at his pages, handed them back, and said, “These suck.”

Despite his gruff initial reaction, Steve asked the others in the room about Cue’s proposal, and about the basic idea of selling direct to customers online. The executives around the table started to talk about all the problems they could foresee with an online store—tying customized purchases into a manufacturing system that had been built to create computers with standardized configurations; not having any research indicating that customers actually wanted to buy computers this way; and, most worrisome, the potential for alienating Apple’s existing retail partners, like Best Buy and CompUSA. Mandich, who was senior enough to know that an interesting discussion was developing, kept silent. Finally, one of the senior guys opposing the idea spoke up. “Steve,” he asked, “isn’t this all pointless? You’re not going to do this—the channel will hate it.” Cue, who didn’t know any better, turned to him immediately. “The channel?” he exclaimed. “We lost two billion dollars last year! Who gives a fuck about the channel?” Steve perked up. “You,” he said, pointing at the senior exec, “are wrong. And you,” he continued, looking at Cue, “are right.” By the end of the meeting, he had asked Cue and O’Connor to create an online store where buyers could customize their purchases—and to have it completed in two months.

The online store went up on April 28, 1998. As Cue prepared to drive home that evening, he walked past Steve’s office to tell him they’d sold more than a million dollars’ worth of computers in just six hours. “That’s great,” said Steve. “Imagine what we could do if we had real stores.” Nothing would ever be enough, Cue realized. He liked the challenge.

Eddy Cue is now a Senior Vice President at Apple, and has done great work. That wouldn't have happened if the company was run by normal anti-critical people, instead of by Steve who appreciated Cue's critical thinking.

Even though critical thinking is worth billions of dollars, people still don't like it, to the point of excluding even Steve Jobs from things – and it's much harder for most would-be critical thinkers who don't have Steve as their CEO.

Twitter is my replacement for hacker news which was my replacement for reddit.com/r/programming which was my replacement for popurls.com which was my replacement for reading political blogs regularly (IMAO.us, scrappleface.com, little green footballs when it was right wing, setting the world to rights, and others).