Prime numbers are tricky things. They are one of the most fundamental parts of our numerical systems, but they're difficult to predict.

You would kind of expect that something so elementary should be easily predictable, or follow a pattern. But while we've found some similarities (like the mersenne primes) there's still a kind of nagging feeling that there should be a more basic way to enumerate prime numbers than guess and check.

We've learned some simple things about them, such as the existence of Mersenne primes, or ideas on the probability of any given number being prime being inversely proportional to its logarithm.

But I think the biggest thing is that it's a puzzle. But a puzzle that bothers us because it seems like it should be easy to solve, but it's not.

Finding larger prime numbers tells us more about them. It lets us see other parts of patterns. Patterns that might lead to some insight on how to predict if a number is a prime, or how to factor large numbers. This might have an impact on cryptography for instance.

But finding this number doesn't solve a problem, it adds to a body of knowledge. It fills in a bit of the puzzle. In the end the hope is that we learn something about the puzzle, or at the least, learn why we can never learn something about the puzzle.

I read to my daughter every night starting when she was about 10 months old. Now, I read little books to her all the time prior to that too, but we read novels. The first book was the Hobbit, and then we read all the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, then we read Swallows and Amazons, and then we read a number of Discworld novels.

A few pages a night, a chapter, whatever. She enjoyed it. Now she is 2 and she reads for fun. She doesn't "read" read, but she can recognize letters, and she knows what letter her name starts with, what letter her cousin's name starts with, and can figure out the first letter of a bunch of words.

But she reads for fun, she will pick up her books and pretend to read them. She grabbed one of our Christmas cards and read it aloud to us. Apparantly this Christmas card said "Merry Christmas to the Princess" but reading is still something that to her is a fun thing, not a chore, and she does get better, she does recognize letters, she does recognize words, and when she does, she gets excited and wants to read more.

I think this is the big thing. I think the thing that school does to learning is terrible by making it a mandatory chore that you are punished (even indirectly) for not succeeding at.

Learning the way that my daughter is means that reading is always fun. If you pick up something and play with it, and then realize you've learned something, it's always fun. You never hate reading because when you don't want to do it, you just don't. Pressuring your kid to do it when they don't want to will teach them to resent the activity itself.

But your son is a month old. You will learn a lot more about him as he gets older. Everyone around me is surrounded by babies right now, I guess that kind of happens when you have a baby, but what I've learned is that every kid is super different, and the parents don't get to choose it, they just get to deal with it. You can't force your kid to be what you want him to be.

What is important I think is that you remove certain barriers, and leave certain barriers in. Leave in all of the barriers that he can learn to climb over. Help remove the imaginary barriers about what he's allowed to do or what is appropriate.

For instance, you might think that certain math or engineering tasks are too much to handle for someone his age, so you keep them away from him. These are the barriers you should remove. Don't force him to do it necessarily, but if he wants to know or wants to do it, unless it's going to hurt him (a 3 year old with a soldering iron might be an iffy prospect), then make sure he knows he has the opportunity to try in a safe space, or at least give him a path to get there. On the other hand, don't do too much for him, don't remove all barriers, if he wants to work with expensive materials, give him a limited amount, or find a way for him to earn it, especially if you can actually get him to earn the money to buy it directly. This teaches him to overcome those barriers.

But he's one month old, you're on a high, you're thinking about everything. Things will get harder, that high will fade, and you'll start wanting to take back your life. Keep him in your mind then, think about what he's feeling, and what he likes, and how you can encourage him. He's a person, not a project or a trophy.

One thing that I want to teach my child(ren) is how to function in school, and what the purpose of school is. I was always ahead of the class, and similarly I was bored and it actually hurt me in grades (but not what I learned).

I learned later in life that the purpose of school isn't to learn. The purpose of school is to try to guarantee a standard of knowledge. The other lesson to learn in school is that it's your teacher who determines your qualification, and that they're a person who gets frustrated, tired, can be lazy, can be angry or petty, but can also be happy, proud, encouraged, inspired, etc.

As an adult, I know how to behave in a classroom. I understand why showing off is not appreciated. I know why I have to go over things that I already know. Because I know these things, they don't bother me. There's always boredom, but you pay attention not because you need to, but because it helps the teacher, and making the teacher's life easier is better for the class and your evaluation. The goal of the game isn't to understand the material, the goal of the game is to be evaluated highly. Understanding the material is only half the game.

Essentially you're asking for the same thing. If you're constantly overthinking it's become involuntary.

Part of that cycle comes from stress hormones. One of the easiest ways we can motivate ourselves is to increase stress, we do that easily because one of the easy things for our conscious mind is to imagine or remember things, and if we imagine things that make us nervous, we can trigger a release of stress hormones which agitate us and push us to avoid some negative consequence.

For instance, if you have a paper to write, and you lack motivation to do it, you can imagine the result of not doing it, and that will make you anxious, and that anxiety will prompt you to seek out a way to avoid that uncomfortable feeling, which might be writing the paper to get it out of the way, or it might be flipping on the TV so you can crowd out your imagined fear of failure, and console yourself with the promise that you'll get it done later just fine if you rest.

Coffee helps you focus because it lets the stress hormones in your brain persist for longer, but it actually causes other problems. Stress-based motivation causes you to seek relief, sometimes that relief comes from tackling a problem head-on, sometimes that relief comes from avoiding the problem.

Avoiding the problem can lead to more stress (It's a lot more stressful to have a paper that you think you'll do terrible on due tomorrow than it is to have a paper you think you'll do terrible on in a week) but the thing about stress-based motivation is you have less conscious decision about what to do about it. It pushes you, you don't push it. You just help to control the amplitude.

Coffee helps maintain those stress hormones active in your brain, and that stress generally keeps you from sleeping, that's one of it's direct roles, as well as it keeps you worrying which is kind of a positive feedback loop.

First of all, this isn't necessarily a bad thing that needs to change. This is just a thing. But it's good to know how to change it. The first thing you would do is drop the Coffee altogether. Coffee's going to amplify this effect, and it's going to keep you awake at night. Proper sleep will help you relieve stress, and it will help you recover some of the more pleasant feeling interest-based motivation.

The next helpful thing would be to start doing some kind of mindfulness training. I like zazen, particularly just sitting. Essentially sitting in a calm place, and letting thoughts come to your mind, but not acknowledging them, more like watching them come and go. If you find yourself thinking about one of those thoughts, that's OK, start watching THAT thought come and go. The same with sensations or anything else. If you feel tired, you feel tired. If you feel hungry, you feel hungry.

If you do this for 15 minutes, it can feel like a very long time, and you will walk away a bit more objective. I like to conclude with a bit more mindfulness where I sort of take stock of my self. I focus on feeling everything across my body in discrete steps, each finger, my palm, my wrist, my forearm, my elbow, etc. Do I feel pain? Do I feel hungry? Do I feel tired? Then I end this step by thinking about what I might need to do to change these things, if I make myself more comfortable, or eat, or rest, will these things be less distracting?

You might find that you are doing too many things, and that's where this stress is coming from. You can go a for a long while with 10 things to do every day and no means to complete more than 8 of them. This is easy to do if you don't ever count them and get by through telling yourself that you can do all 10 if you just put your mind to it, and get frustrated when you fail.

But in slowing down, you might realize that everyone does this, and that while you can do 8 things better by putting 8 things on your plate rather than do 8 things poorly by putting 10 things on your plate, there's a cultural expectation that you have 10 things on your plate and be exasperated about it, and it's easy to fall into a trap where you're now getting stress from the knowledge that you would really like to have to do 8 things, but you need to do 10, added to the rest of the other stressful feelings you get from having to try to do 10.

Similarly everyone's mind is different, and we all learn to adapt to a different mental landscape. Some people, like people with ADHD, have minds built such that they blow through all of their interest-based focus very quickly. Then their mind wanders easily, and they might turn to stress-based motivation to get through the rest of the day. If you are like this you might be able to avoid the overthinking and the self-medication with coffee, but realize that you need to have a 3 hour work-day in order to not fall into that pattern, which is unreasonable. Or you might be prescribed medication which has it's own sets of upsides and downsides.

My only answer is, you can't really tell your mind to shut up. You're not really the boss of your mind, your conscious thought is just a part of your mind. You can learn about what's going on inside your mind, and you can even put yourself into a situation where you mind can become quiet. But you can't strongarm your whole mind into acting precisely the way your consciousness wants it to act indefinitely. It's much better to just learn how different parts of your mind work, and work to support them. Stress can be great, it's entirely necessary, it's not something you want to cut out of your brain. But it's suited to dealing with crises, and if you can arrange your circumstance so that you aren't using stress to be the motivation through your every day, you might be better off.

While he's misusing the word there's still value in the things that he's reporting.

What the article talks about is how there is a benefit both from focused thought, and involuntary thought. There has a growing trend towards trying to avoid 'wasteful' thought and on focusing attention on task, but that there's evidence and a counter trend showing that letting your mind do things without conscious direction is also beneficial.

I think it's definitely ironic that he's using the term mindfulness in the way that he does, but it's just a word. The concept that he's explaining is something that people who have actually practiced mindfulness have already learned.

Despite the fact that he's using the wrong words, I think it's a net gain for people to become more aware and comfortable with the things that our minds and bodies do without a conscious directive, and to learn to trust that they have value.

I've been kicking around the idea that "living a thousand lifetimes" is a highly inefficient computational process with little positive outcome. These wasteful thoughts are usually based on assumptions and the practice of speaking for other's intent and feelings.

Hiring who you want is agency and power. Being powerless hurts, and giving us less agency makes us more powerless.

Applying to a position to a human similarly gives us agency and power. It's a bit of competition. If we pass or fail, it's based on how we did at the interview.

We give these things up, and that harms us. One of the big fears about Communism in the post war era was that the Party would dictate what you did for work and how you would get paid. This fear came from this loss of agency, but communism still had support in some situations because of the idea that at least in this case everyone would get paid.

Algorithmic hiring at its extreme would lead to the same loss of agency in the hiring and applying process. The algorithm would be the one that dictated whether you would get a job, and if your ability to get future jobs are dictated by your past jobs, and your past jobs are dictated by the algorithm, you are powerless. If you're really interested in computers but you worked a few summers doing mechanical work in college because that was the work that was available, well, maybe you're better qualified to be a mechanic now, so you'll never get an opportunity to work on computers. Maybe it is strictly better for the mechanic shop to hire you than get a new junior mechanic, and maybe it's strictly better for the company to hire a person who has more experience in IT.

But what if the person that they hire for IT actually wants to be a mechanic, they just had jobs doing IT work? In the same way, the company keeps you on as a mechanic because you've got experience, and it's still better for the company to hire someone like him for the IT position.

This might be more efficient for companies. But is it better for people. My question is really, how do you define 'better'?

It's certainly easy to say that it's more efficient. But cold efficiency is the stuff that scared us in the cold war, luckily Communism failed to really take hold because that cold 'efficiency' was actually inefficient and people were starving. However, implementing it in a Capitalist society is even worse, because you get all of the bad that comes with a cold uncaring hand dictating your fate, it probably IS going to be efficient, and you've got no promise that the people left behind after this efficient system is done allocating all the labor that's necessary will be cared for. How will an algorithm rate a person who is 25 and has been unemployed since college? They'd certainly be a high risk compared to someone who has been working steadily. Bottom of the pile. What if that person has been unemployed because the algorithm filtered them out of jobs just because at the time other applicants were better or more suited for the task?

As humans, we can take a chance on people like that. We might even know that they're not the perfect person for the position, but maybe we'll have "a good feeling" about them. We might make a poor hiring decision, but we might elevate a human because of it at the expense of company profits.

I think algorithmic hiring can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Putting people in situations that are not optimal for them can cause them to grow. This might lead to situations where people are not as productive, or where they leave the job early either because it is not a right fit, or because they've built skills and found a better job elsewhere.

But in all of these situations the people grow. They've learned about why the job isn't right for them, they've built skills, even if they didn't have perfect skills to start with.

Choosing the person who is the best fit for the job is more efficient for the company, but it means that you're less likely to have someone take the chance when you're looking to broaden your horizons, even when you're truly eager to do so, because an algorithm says that you have some risk factors.

But there's a cost to society there, you start working in one career, and now the system feels you're optimized to continue working there, changing jobs is risky. If you have a run of bad circumstances that lead to you being laid off a few times, your average employment duration goes down and you become a higher risk factor, meaning you get fewer offers from the best jobs, and more offers from more desperate employers, which have a higher chance of conditions that might lead to a shorter length of employment.

A question is, what is the value to society of the most efficient hiring decisions? It keeps us from making hiring mistakes, but mistakes are things we learn from. It keeps us from taking hiring risks, but risks are something that we are occasionally rewarded for. It maximizes efficiency, which reduces the number of jobs necessary. It concentrates wealth.

I'm not saying that we should strive to be inefficient. I mean, that's easy to do, we could just hire the first applicant to any position. But I do think there's value in remaining human. I don't think we make better decisions than an algorithm in terms of maximizing the value of the hire. But I do think we can make more human decisions, which can't go into an algorithm because it is so subjective and dependent on an individual's personal experience.

But that's not what these algorithms are for. They're for hiring 5000 people instead of 5500 people. That's fine for the person who wants to profit off the work of those 5000 people. But it's less interesting when that inefficiency just leaves 500 jobs off the table.

I am not saying that an algorithm is bad, or is less efficient than human decision making. I'm questioning what we should value in society. I'm asking what we should give up. To let an algorithm dictate hiring practices is different than something like improvements to robotics allowing 10% more widgets to be made per factory worker.

It's taking something from us. It's removing human agency. Sometimes that is good, for instance, removing agency from human drivers can be good because it protect society by causing fewer accidents on the road. But what is the good of removing human agency from hiring? It only benefits really large hires, it makes more efficient labor, these situations are ones where people who are already wealthy make more money. It also limits the agency of the people applying for the job. No longer can you do better in an interview, or convince someone to take a risk on you. Your position is firmly set by your personal details and past, which are set in stone, and might have already been decided algorithmically for you.

We give up a lot, and the benefit goes to a few. Is it better for us to do that? I don't know. But I think with less and less labor needed, and more and more concentration of wealth, I'm not sure if it's worth giving up our control of both the hiring and applying process to algorithms, even if they are beneficial to the company hiring. Why throw away our ability to make our own decisions for so little, even if they are "better" ones?

I think it's a big challenge of culture. Substance abuse is a problem that becomes a symptom. Part of the issue I think is cultural ideas about mental health. American culture is strongly focused on good and bad, strength of will and weakness, and where to place blame. Both the person with the addiction and the rest of society are affected by this culture.

When you become addicted to a substance, it's like it becomes revealed to society that you're a weak person. Like weakness is part of your identity. A good person is strong, a good person has the strength of will to not abuse substances. You're not a good person.

When you look back at your life, you see the same faults and have the same regrets. You think of yourself as a weak person.

The problem with those sorts of ideas is they reinforce the behavior that leads to things like substance abuse. They isolate you, they make you lose motivation, they make you act in a self destructive manner because you think you are the kind of person who should.

These are cultural elements that are present everywhere but relatively stronger in American culture. It really likes to put people into boxes, quite literally. People who commit a crime are considered criminals. The crime can be pretty minor, but maybe it sends you to jail. Criminals are bad, and people who go to jail are bad. Good people won't interact with bad people. You can lose your job, you can lose the ability to find another, you can lose your home, you can lose your ability to find another. But good people don't care, bad people go to jail. Bad people need to be punished. Bad people don't deserve our attention. Bad people don't deserve our money.

Other cultures are a bit less polarized. The need to brand someone good or bad isn't as strong. If you commit a crime, you go to jail, but you're treated like a person, you're given opportunities to correct some of the issues that sent you there, you're released in a manner that tries to help integrate you into the rest of society. American culture sees things like this and gets very angry. How dare you spend MY tax dollars on feeding THOSE bad people nice food, and give them comfortable beds!? How dare you help bad people fix their problems when good people fix their problems themselves?

A person who abuses substances needs to be helped. It's a problem that is self-reinforcing and really need some external support to break. The issue is that to ask for help identifies you as weak. It lets out the "secret" that you're not good enough, you don't have that imaginary "indomitable will" that good people have that keep them from doing bad things. The person feels this and is afraid to ask, and society feels this and will punish you for doing so.

It's like how mental health issues, like suicide attempts can go into your police file and keep you from being allowed to cross the border. These sorts of cultural impacts cause people to be afraid to look for help, and not just be afraid, but be punished for looking for help.

I think for the person in that situation, there's very little you can do to change the rest of society. But I think you can change your own mind, and I don't mean you can buck up and use that indomitable will to shrug off your addiction. I mean, you can recognize that you aren't a bad person or a weak person. You're not significantly different than your neighbor, it's just that you had a different set of circumstances 30-40 years ago and ended up learning a different set of habits and coping behavior. Had they been exposed to the same things and presented the same circumstances, they could be in your shoes.

You can identify the small things in life that are important, and you can look towards what is needed to make your life a bit more like that. It doesn't even have to be getting rid of your addiction, it could be that you want to keep your home tidy, it could be that you want to eat breakfast in the morning, it could be that you want to get in shape, it could be that you like to read Stephen King novels, it could be that you want to spend time with a friend. And you can do little things to move that forward. You can throw a couple of things off the counter into the garbage, you can get a dozen eggs for breakfast tomorrow, you could take a walk around the block, you could read a chapter, you could chat with a friend for a few minutes.

It's a matter of not believing the lie that you're any better or worse. You're a person who does some things. You've done some hurtful things, but at this point you can only do things now. You aren't a bad person, you aren't a good person. You're a person who can do things. And while society can limit their interactions with you because of their own mindset, you still have a lot of latitude to do many things despite that.

You're judged by your lifestyle. Yeah, that's unfortunate. But you can still clean your house, get up early and go for a run, eat some breakfast, read your favorite books and chat with your friends after work. The unfortunate part is that even if you "get your life back together" people's mindset might never change and think about the fact that people aren't strictly good or bad. It's more likely they'll just think you've changed and now you're good.

But maybe you will have learned that, and that's something.

It's funny that you see it as flipped upside down. I see it as flipped left and right. In terms of whether the Y is up or down, neither of them are, but the original one had it leaning right, and the one currently on their page has it leaning left.

Perception.

Communicating with your friends online via insult isn't bullying. Bullying is about the power dynamic and about making another person feel weak or appear weak to their peers.

Forcing someone to withdraw from using social media when the rest of their peers are using it is on its own a form of bullying, especially when the person who withdraws is then categorically left out of normal social engagements because of that non-participation.

You can get away from it a little bit because being 30 something, you can maintain relationships without social media. I'm in the same boat at the same age.

My brother who is 10 years younger ends up doing a large majority of his communication with his social group through social media. He couldn't stop using it and maintain relationships, not because he's unable to, but because his peers wouldn't be able to easily communicate with him.

Maybe it was because I didn't value any relationship I made during highschool then. I assumed that I would likely lose contact with nearly all of those people, and I was correct.

I can count on one hand the people I still talk to from those days, and they are the only ones that went on to accomplish anything. They decided to keep in touch.

None of the others matter to me. The only thing I was focused on was getting the hell out of highschool and college and being left alone to do my own thing.

I find it hard to believe I'm the only one that was capable of taking this approach.

I'm 28 if this matters at all.

> Forcing someone to withdraw from using social media when the rest of their peers are using it is on its own a form of bullying, especially when the person who withdraws is then categorically left out of normal social engagements because of that non-participation.

Why would a single bully, whom I can block, force my withdrawal from social media?

And, if an entire group is doing the bullying, why in the world would you want to communicate with them? The Internet makes it damn easy to find people who don't suck.

Yeah, maybe you won't get laid at Podunkville High School homecoming--that sucks. However, if you spend that time making sure you get out of Podunkville instead, you'll be WAY better off. After you leave, most of the people you thought were sooooo hot look a whole lot more pedestrian. Yeah, one or two really are hot, but they likely weren't in your league anyway (or you wouldn't be being bullied). The rest were just big fish in a small pond.