This is a really cool collection! I feel like it needs a manual once-over though, particularly in regard to the images. Having even a handful obviously wrong images makes the rest of the site feel less trustworthy.
I'm surprised it's so few! I'm in the 60-70% here -- I've never gotten it (despite many deliberate efforts), but I've never known anyone else who seems to be immune.
Their point was more that, if every 'weekly download count after a new release' (or whatever record) is consistently being broken on each new release due to generally increasing popularity, then it doesn't make sense to imply causality between the messaging around this particular release and its already-expected record-breaking status.
I think it's closer to: develop something similar to Google's Piper as (hopefully!) an open source project and sell this to enterprise, similar to Perforce's business model but with the benefit of an excellent and well received frontend tool.
Though, to be more specific, it's even moreso about high-level behavior that has a negative impact, which is highly variable, particularly with environment. I think most would agree that this is extremely messy. But is there a better option?
For practical purposes, it makes some sense to diagnose based on high-level behavior and negative impact on one's life. Describing the relevant what rather than the currently-unknown why.
I do think a more granular approach would have benefits as far as treatment and such goes, though. I know a lot of folks with Asperger's diagnoses were upset when that was rolled into autism. I don't think that was the best distinction to be made, but I think it does show that the people with these conditions often aren't opposed to more granularity (myself included).
What’s interesting about this is, as you point out, the “negative impact” side of this is extremely situational - many of the most talented engineers I’ve ever worked with were very much on the spectrum, and within the bounds of the work we needed them to do, they were phenomenally better adapted than the more neurotypical members of the team. We accommodated them instead of making them accommodate us and they were absolute superpowers for our team.
Say Bob pays a $5 subscription and listens exclusively to artist Foo, 100 song plays. Alice pays a $5 subscription and listens exclusively to artist Baz, but plays their songs a whopping 300 times.
If it was paid out per user, Foo and Baz would both get $5. But paying out based on overall listener numbers, Foo would get $2.50 and Baz would get $7.50.
Essentially, it's a zero sum game, and one artist getting a play takes away revenue from every other artist. Even if you exclusively listen to your favorite artists, the vast majority of your subscription money is going towards the top artists.
This is why Spotify is always pushing their own playlists, smart shuffle, and encouraging background listening with ambient / sleep playlists and such; the more they can shift listeners toward music they've produced themselves or have special license agreements with, the less they have to pay out to typical (i.e. smaller) artists using their platform.
Persistence hunting likely wasn't a major driver of those evolutionary changes.
The hypothesis is really only supported by the fact that we have adaptations that make it theoretically possible, but the times and places those adaptations came about doesn't really match up with the times and places it would have been effective (i.e. woodland where the ground would be too hard for effective tracking [0]).
There are some other things that point away from it, too; it's worth doing some googling.
It's certainly possible that persistence hunting happened to some degree, and it's a fun idea so it really caught on in popular consciousness, but the actual evidence is limited.
Persistence hunting isn't just running 25km to catch 1 deer.
It may also involve multiple scout runs (perhaps 50km or longer) to find where the deer are after the current local deer supply is exhausted. It may also involve moving the entire tribe unit to a location 100-200km away from the current one, which would involve people less fit than tribe hunters.
> It's certainly possible that persistence hunting happened to some degree, and it's a fun idea so it really caught on in popular consciousness, but the actual evidence is limited.
Well, the problem is that evidence for just about everything related to our existence from before the glacial period ended is very limited due to a population bottleneck.
But there's no reason to assume that our ancestors did not use every tool available at their disposal to survive, one of the tools being persistence hunting, which we are still very good at, despite there not being evolutionary pressure to be selected for for the last 7-8 thousand years.
To be clear, they began a recruitment ad campaign targeting gamers, and ended up meeting their hiring goal of 2,000+. It's not like they pulled 2,000 gamers off the street and stuck them in ATC towers.
> With only about 25 percent of controllers holding a traditional college degree, this effort is focused on reaching talented young people pursuing alternative career paths, many of whom are active in gaming. Feedback from controller exit interviews reinforces this, with several controllers pointing to gaming as an influence on their ability to think quickly, stay focused, and manage complexity.
there are similar campaigns in Canada for NavCanada hiring ATCs as well
their ads have been targeting busy waiter/waitress staff, as handling a bumping restaurant floor gives the multi-tasking skills needed, or so goes the thinking
This is kind of beside the point but... Shouldn't the the evolutionary metaphor be the opposite of how the author's using it?
They go on about how we've settled in the trough, but the whole local optimum problem is about settling in an early peak, and being unwilling to cross a trough to get to a higher peak. The workarounds would be propping up the first peak, not evidence that we've settled in the trough.
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