Let us all love sao paulo, shall we? A robbery tale followed by an inspiring idea.

I was just robbed by an armed man. No big surprise for a Sao Paulo's citizen. The police didn't care shit either. Somehow I was a bit surprised with that...

I had a great phone to be localized, a moto razr hd. No batteries to remove, cyanogenmod didn't allow it to be turned off (it always turns itself back on). I could have improved upon removing the SIM card by breaking something on the clips hole, but well... It was enough so I did even pinpoint his likely home or place where he could stop and find a way to remove the chip. Not a cop nearby, not the 190 (like 911 around here) and not a third cop over the phone would care enough.

Very luckily, that's all he robbed.

The whole robbery was anything like the 3 stooges. I was walking a dark street with a friend and being very cautious. When we got to the light side, very close to a train station (those are generally very safe here in Sao Paulo) and I relaxed. That's when he appeared. I was pushing him away, as I noticed it was a robbery... I had many people attempt to rob me, I fight and never lost anything... But then he showed his gun. A revolver, not much different from that image on the side, from what I can tell. I don't know guns, but I knew that was one. Well, I entered "victim mode" and was ready to give him everything. He had hidden the gun soon after showing it to us.

But then I noticed he was a stooge. He talked slow, not very frightening. I was assaulted by non-armed boys who did much better, and got 2 bucks out of pity from me, while they wanted the same phone. But that's another story...

The robber looked all right. Like most armed ones, as I hear. He didn't look like the usual thief, he had the appearance of a regular citizen "of good". And he definitely wasn't ready to do what he was doing. I gave my phone first. Then, when I noticed he was slow, so was I. I slowly picked my wallet and showed to him. "Look, I got no money, can I keep it?". He hesitated.

A homeless came by. He stood right there, in the middle of the assault, yelling in low voice, like a very drunk person, but seemed to be sober. He was mumbling "stop that, don't assault them" or something like that. The robber got confused, I saved my wallet. He asked for the bags. My friends bag had only clothes. He gave up on her, asked for mine. "What you got worth anything there?" I showed him the iPad. He took the whole bag.

That's when a woman came running and screaming "thief, thief", and he started to run away. I saw that and ran after both. The robber stopped, was going to pick the gun, but hesitated again. Turned around, and continued on running away. We followed him very closeby, few steps away from the "Paraiso" (Paradise) subway entrance. He passed by it, turned back, dropped my bag and went down.

The crazy lady asked me if her purse was in my bag. I stopped to check. Of course it wasn't, he didn't have any purse when he approached me and my friend! We continued to try and follow him, but it was too late.

I had no idea what I was going to do if I reached him, but inside the station I would sure start to yell "thief" as well, in hope a security guard would appear. Well, after that it was a lot of frustrated attempts to make any kind of security or police to do their work efficiently. They're not here to work - just like airport security isn't there for anything other than theater. One cop even told me "This is brazil".

I'll just skip all that.

There must be a more intelligent way to deal with this...

First, I'll take a few extra measures. From now on I'll keep in mind I'll just lose everything I walk with. And deal with that. This is easy to think about, there's no real challenge there, except you have to police yourself every day. It's like going to a poor and unknown country streets - you take as little as needed, and you think as if you're going to lose it today. Every day be glad if you didn't. Sure, you can take extra steps to protect against dumb robbers (such as mine up there) but you have to keep in mind sometimes they won't be so dumb.

That's not what I mean by "a more intelligent way"...

Why Stack Exchange Network rocks!

Stack Exchange (SEN) is a Network of sites which uses a Question & Answer (Q&A) format in an attempt to "improve quality of the inter webs content", as they once described themselves as I recall and here adapted with my own words. It started in one of the "child" (actually the parent of all) sites, the Stack Overflow (SO), specialized in computer programming, in an attempt to "improve the quality of programming subjects in the inter webs", also as once they described themselves, etc.

I recently gained some moderation privileges by reaching 3k, which I weren't really looking for. Moderator is a tough job I never wanted. But since I was there, I decided to give it a try. While on it, I couldn't understand what people get by focusing on doing only janitorial moderation <-- so I posted that question and got some heat over it.

From that, I came to read many other things about SEN, specially experienced people talking on why the left, some saying why they would leave (but either haven't or came back soon enough), even why some people do the janitorial moderation for no game (to me, the honest answer is "because they're richer than they think and got nothing better to do", maybe I'll write about this some day), or simply some newbies talking why it sucks.

This later newbie, Serg, thinks SEN is a place to ask questions. He couldn't be more wrong. It's a place to find quality answers and, if the question have been posted already there is no reason to post a new one unless it adds something new. Duplicate questions have their value, as long as it helps people finding the same good answers. We don't think all the same way, we can't all think of the same question that will yield to the same answer.

SO practically reinvented what a Q&A site is, when it was launched, as an improvement of forums, where we used to go and look for answers. Forums were (and still are) dreadful. Flaming topics would gain pages of useless people trolling and bashing. They do serve a purpose (thus there comes Discourse), but it was a bad tool for finding answers. Regular Q&A format, such as the dead Aardvark and yahoo answers also serve a purpose, to get some kind of personalized support. I don't think we got a cutting edge service doing good in that area yet. At least, not as good as SO suddenly was for finding good answers. SO is not a tech support web site and SEN similarly isn't a place to ask questions - only good questions are accepted and that is mostly what makes them so good for finding answers!

Picture a room full of people. A forum would be a messed discussion room which someone start a topic and most will follow and give their opinions. This works for brainstorm, but not for getting answers. A tech support Q&A would be like the forum, except many would be asking the same question over and over again, and whoever feels like they can answer would come and give the same answer over and over again, though eventually a bit personalized. This works when you do need more customization, when a broader FAQ wouldn't work. Well, SEN Q&A is like a community built gigantic FAQ. In that same room, this would be like one person asking a good question, another one adding relevant info to that question and others will come in and offer their answers while everyone votes in which inputs are the best ones. This does not work for brainstorming neither for very customized questions, but boy, it sure works for most of our question and discussion needs.

Michael's experienced post (which I've already linked) was much, way much more well informed on his criticism, but I also would like to prove him wrong. He basically claims SO promotes poor pedagogy, has a bad scoring system and childish community. The scoring system is flawed indeed, but he forgets SO works. In fact, it works so well I don't think anyone can pinpoint why. There is yet to come another SEN site which works this good - even Super User, its second child, does not get anywhere close. SO has 7M (Mega, Million, 1'000'000) questions, 13M answers and 76% of the questions got answered. This is astonishing! I don't know how or why, but the SEN engines were set in place thanks to the scoring system. So until someone finds out how that works, or until it stops working, we better leave it as it is.

Sure, giving the fish isn't as good as teaching how to fish, but it's nonsense teaching how to fish without giving the fish first. You first show how it's done. Also, that's an oversimplification of the whole learning process. Hardly anyone ever become a fisherman, or a good one for that matter, by following some pre-established steps. You follow them to get started in basics and you lead from there. If you can get that base by finding a few basic answers, how's that any worse? In other words, we don't have any bullet proof pedagogic system anywhere, and most of the systems we got today are way dated, over millenias.

Finally the community is just as childish as any skeptical community, except on SEN they have community mod powers. In fact, skeptics @ SEN is the harshest community I've ever seen indeed <-- took me about 2 weeks of research to come up with that answer, and even asking questions there is harder than you might expect. We want to keep the post quality and, with that in mind, some bad things do happen. It's not an easy job to moderate it all. And it is indeed a hard place for newbies to come in. Which has a good side. It's what maintains its quality. The more abusive some mod become of its powers, the more likely it is for them losing it. That's just how a self regulated community works, and it is over time, and it will always have its flaws. That doesn't take away its merits.

And that's all reasons why SEN rocks. Great interface, big self regulated community, awesome answers. It fulfils its own purpose. Its current motto, "expert answers to your questions" could or even should be replaced by "Expert answers to the best questions".

The turning point in all the arguments I've stumbled comes from Jon Ericson's posts (not just his question, but his 2 answers there too). I think it's suffice to say the guy first loved SO then hated it, then he went away for a couple of years, give or take. Then he came back and became a moderator. Now, of course this is just 1 guy, but he's obviously not the only one. He doesn't even know why, but now he just enjoys participating in it. Well, to me it's simple: like anything in life it's hard to find your place. He struggled to find his, but he did. If it feels right, we gotta keep trying to polish up the bad stuff!

As for me, I had one reason I wanted to join the community in trying to ask good questions and give good answers: I wanted to have enough reputation so I could offer a bounty on questions that I might have and would be of great importance to me. That became a null point as I hardly ever used bounties myself.

So maybe the main reason I currently rationalize to excuse myself in continuing to participate, investing time, thus money, in something that hardly gets me any of that back (despite most of times not really having margin for such luxury) is because if I at least can one day find a great job thanks to my profile, everything will pay out instantly. And if not, well, at least I had some fun on the ride.

Just try to enjoy it, then it's easier to have no regrets! ;-)

Take at least 30 minutes to read this, if you want to know more about skepticism or speed reading

You may need to take a few hours if you want to know about both.

This could be my "smallest" post so far, because it could be just this link.

But since I don't like relying on links too much, because they will eventually break, I'll paste almost all of it here and then add a whole lot more...

    Take about 15-25 minutes to "read" this. Best case scenario. Speed reading won't help you here.
    TED talks to the rescue: https://www.ted.com/playlists/1/ho...    The first talk says it all needs to be said here IMHO. The brain have 1 function, and one function only: to generate movement. Don't try to understand my very short description here, go on the link and watch the first talk if you really want to comprehend this. Something around 15-20 minutes gone, until now, depending on how much of the video you've skipped without missing the point.
    We somehow adapted this amazing tool to do other stuff as well, such as calculations. It's almost like using the computer's video processors to do math calculations. It works, but you can't use both at the same time in extreme situations.
    While amazing, our brain is way more limited than some people would like to believe. It just isn't able to be quickly trained in doing something it wasn't meant to do. It is that simple. It isn't a computer and it isn't doing boolean operations.
    With that piece of skepticism in mind, you can quickly drop almost every single snake oil idea about the brain out there. Including this whole speed reading vs subvocalization and skimming idea.
    The other piece is offered by SGU: https://www.theskepticsguide.org/    Now, you either know about them already or you don't. If you don't know add, at the very best case scenario, some 2 hours to this "read", among listening to 1 episode, studying about skepticism from their point of view and, with some good coincidence, identifying the concept with one you had previously. In the worst case scenario in which you'd still get there, this could easily take years.

I meant to talk just about speed reading when I started writing that comment. But, as you can realize by the last paragraph, it inspired me into talking about skeptics.

The "skeptic" word was widely used by Carl Sagan (I like how old this link feels) in the first Cosmos voyage (which I didn't watch). Now we got a new awesome Cosmos odyssey thanks mostly (I think) to Family Guy's Seth MacFarlane, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Carl's wife and fox. In it, there is no usage of the keyword "skeptic" anywhere (at least in the first 5 episodes) anymore, as Evan observed. 

I believe that's because "skeptic" has now a wide variety of usage and many people will miss-define it as "hard minded" or something in those lines. So they will also associate it with people who don't listen, which couldn't be farther from the true skeptic, as still defined by SGU.

Anyway, skepticism is actually closely related to science. I've talked about this (in portuguese, with english translation link in the bottom, which I haven't read-proof) few weeks ago. Although it's not as closely related as we'd like, because too many self proclaimed scientists aren't really skeptics. But let's begin from the basics. I'll basically repeat some of my linked post there...

In short:

Science (from Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge") is a "systematic enterprise" that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. In an older and closely related meaning, "science" also refers to a body of knowledge itself, of the type that can be rationally explained and reliably applied.

To illustrate the scientific method, I love this video about "what is sea level":

The point is, defining even something that might appear as simple as "sea level" is actually far more complicated than we can intuitively anticipate. And if we don't study it hard enough, it will be defined wrongly. Going through all that tough job of doing it properly is what scientists do.

Now, there is big a danger there. A good skeptic will be a scientist by heart, and a good scientist must be always skeptic. But what is skepticism after all? If you missed my wikipedia link there (or if it broke):

Skepticism is generally any questioning attitude towards knowledge, facts, or opinions/beliefs stated as facts, or doubt regarding claims that are taken for granted elsewhere.

So, basically being a skeptic is being a curious potentially annoying kid. Thus the wrong definition many people have about it. The danger in science happens every day. Scientists forget to cast question and doubt in their fields. They often begin to think they have expertise in other fields. Science isn't easy and practically all of who have attempted showing they know way more than their narrow field of study have failed.

The scientific method shields nobody against logical fallacies. Skepticism does. But a skeptic is no scientist. A great skeptic will spend days, weeks or even months studying a subject before talking about it. A scientist will spend years or a whole life in just 1 subject (we usually associate science with physics, but that's just 1 field).

Each one have his role, and I am not either a scientist nor a good skeptic, as most of us. I just find it elucidating to realize their existence. I also think it helps me on my own personal quest while trying to understand the cosmos. And it helps to filter out the junk.

In the end, all this is just an attempt to illustrate concepts through defining words. I often find it's one of the worst methods for illustrating concepts, but ignorant as I am I know not many better practical ways. I hope you could grasp some of what I meant to transmit here.

Is There Anything Good About Men? (by Roy F. Baumeister)

Disclaimer

This is an article from 2007 that used to be under http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~baumeistertice/goodaboutmen.htm but it doesn't exist anymore. I found a copy somewhere on the webs and decided to make an extra copy here, just in case.

I just got a very kind answer from him, in which he says this preliminary speech is outdated and we should refer to his book instead:

-->  Baumeister, R.F. (2010). Is There Anything Good About Men? New York: Oxford University Press.

In any case, I still find it a great speech, and I agree with basically everything written here. I love it! It's very elucidating and it brings some awesome points.

Take a seat, this is a very long humongous read (for internet standards, at least). I hope you can give it proper attention.