Gamification is essentially the art of exploiting human cognitive biases so it is very meta to use gamification to teach rationality.

Chomsky? He is something of a bellwether for specious reasoning, which is a contribution of sorts. The obviously inconsistent logic of the various beliefs he holds makes his philosophy, such as it is, seem disjointed and arbitrary.

As a philosopher, he plays a "crazy uncle" character.

It's not confirmation bias when two people agree. It's confirmation bias when one refuses to take into account contradictory evidence. Do you have any?

This story is about rapid iteration rather than quantity. The "quantity" is the detritus of evolution created while learning to produce a perfect pot. If a machine was producing pots it would generate great quantity but the quality would not vary from one iteration to the next.

There are many stories and heuristics in engineering lore suggesting rapid iteration converges on quality faster than careful design. See also: OODA loops, the equivalent military heuristic.

That resonates well with me...when I decided I liked the way the people in the Bay area did things, I moved here. It had made my life much better.

I have always had this problem in a bad way, but the above prescription strikes me as flimsy. What is to prevent me from disabling the technical device so that I can get my pellet of rat food? What if I need to dig through a bunch of links for whatever work it is I am supposed to be doing? It does not structurally modify incentives or behaviors.

To put it another way, if it is a huge waste of time when you are supposed to be working on something else, is it ever not a waste of time?

The best solution to the problem of wasting time for myself is something that I tripped across accidentally, leveraging social media. I found that by carefully curating the feeds of "interesting things" from various sources to maximize signal to noise ratio, which produces a surprisingly manageable stream, it made most of my usual haunts boring. Over time, I simply lost interesting in all of my usual time wasting sites because I was extracting most of the value in concentrated form by other means before I ever wandered over to those sites. Most of what I spent my time on was wading through amusing crap to find a few nuggets, but while wading through that crap it was easy to spend time on amusements. When the incentive to wade through that morass disappeared, so did my exposure to distractions.

Aggressive social curation of my news feeds, originally done because I did not have time for the raw feed, achieved a signal to noise ratio where I lost interest in most of the time wasters. All I really did was inadvertently extract in pure form most of the value that made me expose myself to time wasters in the first place. It has been the single biggest optimization in me not wasting time in ages and all it really required was aggressive culling and tailoring for quality and uniqueness of content.

As a general comment based on my own experience, there is an enormous value in studying existing art to know precisely what science and study has actually been done -- not what people state has been done. And at least as important, learning the set of assumptions that have driven the current body of evidence.

This provides an enormous amount of context as to where you can actually attack interesting problems and make a difference. Most of my personal work has been based on following chains of reasoning that invalidated an ancient assumption that no one had revisited in decades. I wasn't clever, it was really a matter of no one asking "why?" in many years.

Some of these hobbies are not like the others. I would classify hobbies based on whether or not rationalism is an essential prerequisite for engaging in the hobby. Programming and poker make sense to me but the rationales for the rest seem to be thinner, ascribing lessons that could be ascribed to almost any activity.

The distinction, as I see it, is that both programming and poker require rationalist discipline in depth that must be internalized to be effective. I can play video games or read/watch science fiction and benefit from the entertainment value without any investment in rationalism. By contrast, the very act of programming requires a considerable amount of logic and careful reasoning to produce anything but the most trivial result. Without a significant investment in rationalist thinking, you can't participate in a constructive way, which to my mind defines a "rationalist hobby".

At a very high level, the problem is almost intrinsic; it is very difficult to stop a determined attacker given the current balance between defensive and offensive capabilities. A strong focus on hardening only makes it expensive, not impossible.

That said, most security breaches like the above are the result of incompetence, negligence, ignorance, or misplaced trust. In other words, human factors. Humans will continue to be a weak link across all of the components involved in security. There comes a point where systems are sufficiently hardened at a technical level that it is almost always easiest to attack the people that have access to them rather than the systems themselves.

For #1, having to drive, work, go to another important function, or being required to drink more later at some other function seems to be an acceptable occasional excuse but not a permanent one.

On #3, many cultures have sayings and aphorisms that share the idea that people who do not drink are not as trustworthy in various contexts. Much of it seems to follow from the idea that people are more honest when they've had a drink or two, and therefore people who do not drink are hiding their true character. The display of honesty is considered a trust-building exercise. I recall a proverb (Persian?) to the effect that people should not agree to serious matters sober that they have not discussed drunk.

On #2, if you must drink socially then drink very slowly. This can be developed to a fine art such that you are participating but consuming very little alcohol in fact. Also, there are also drinks you can order at any bar that have low alcohol content and large volume e.g. a redeye (tomato juice and light beer).