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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: May 8th, 2024

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  • This. I’ve done a bit of all of it (science trained), and worked with others too. People with good science and stats backgrounds seem to have a better grasp of the pitfalls of data analysis. People with only software or data science background sometimes struggle with stats concepts.

    Basically, it’s easy to pick up enough coding and data viz skills by yourself if you understand the stats. But it’s NOT easy to pick up statistics by yourself if you only understand coding and data viz.





  • It’s absolutely fascinating. I was really enjoying watching it evolve. That’s tapered off a lot now.

    But I also find it really off-putting when people use it for meaningless illustrations that just reek of laziness. Especially so when the images are supposed to represent something meaningful, but are full of errors and nonsense. This is particularly the case when the illustrations accompany academic texts. Fucking gross.

    Probably if we lived in a society that didn’t inventivise doing meaningless, environmentally destructive shit for profit, then I might be more into it now.



  • I think it’s important to get a diversity of social interactions. That way you learn how broad the world is, and people can disabuse you of your wack ideas. It doesn’t really matter how you find that diversity though, so if your dad has lots of friends, that sounds like a good avenue (albeit not super diverse).

    You could also look around for clubs or groups of people that do the hobbies you’re into, and go check them out (perhaps with your dad).






  • I do. I was offering an explanation for why someone else might be feeling depressed.

    Personally I think the aim should be to focus on neither negative nor positive news, but to try to get the clearest, broadest understanding of the true state of things, which means trying to focus on news that has systemic relevance (I think your examples do).

    Unfortunately I do think it’s pretty reasonable to be … maybe not pessimistic, but at least fairly worried about the state of the world. Some things are definitely changing for the better, but some things are really fucked, and looking like they could get a lot worse, really quickly (looking at you in particular, US politics). My personal reason for optimism is that a) it could mean the end of US capitalist hegemony, and b) it could open the way for a massive progressive backlash. But who knows? We’ll fund out soon, I guess.