> For example, it may one day be possible to give people precise information about their abilities, and of the likelihood of achieving success in particular domains given those abilities.
As a technical matter, sure.
However, part of me would like to suggest that using tech as some sort of Delphic Oracle for human lives (especially the young) may not be in optimal taste.
Possibly just letting life be life, and not getting too frisky with putting boundaries on human potential, may be preferred.
Shifting from the singular to the plural, this kind of analysis might actually be helpful. Telling the young person that the marriage has a diminishing likelihood of existing over time could help to cool some hormones.
And then, obviously, corporate risk management is not new, and anyone making large moves without banging the numbers won't be making large moves for long.
Just don't tell the kids to stop believing. Hold on to "that feeeeeeeling".
> using tech as some sort of Delphic Oracle for human lives (especially the young) may not be in optimal taste.
I feel like we have plenty of dystopian science fiction warning us not to go down this path. GATTACA is a personal favorite of mine.
> Possibly just letting life be life, and not getting too frisky with putting boundaries on human potential, may be preferred.
I'm inclined to agree... but all life is competitive.
For example, the idea that we might someday be able to cheaply and effectively choose or alter babies' genes gives me the "ick" in a major way. And yet, someone is going to do it. And the ones who do will probably end up out-competing the ones who don't. What to do about it?
Aa lava? I always spelled it that way in undergrad. Now I’m curious. I guess one could argue without the accents it’s incorrect. But then we get into the pedantry of how most words are wrong as they’re mostly borrowed and mutate over time. No true Scotsman in the dictionary.
The only native English word with a phonemic glottal stop, uh-uh, includes it in the spelling, for obvious reasons. You could write ah-ah, or a-a, on that model, but this isn't done.
> But 'A'ā isn’t the right kind of correct either?
That preserves a bunch of information that can't exist in English regardless of how you write it.
"Aa" does the opposite, erasing information that is critical to the pronunciation of the word. There is no way to read "aa" as being more than one syllable long.
> Tournament winners often don’t know any of the language the symbols are borrowed from
This might be true in less than 0.1% of tournaments so I think "often" is overstating it.
You've got Nigel winning in French Scrabble which is 1 example. You've also got Thai people playing English Scrabble, but nearly all of them have at least some working knowledge of English.
Beyond that though the humongous majority of tournament scrabble games are played in English and won by native English speakers.
> I grew up with a math version of scrabble where you wrote equations. I loved it.
I had that one as a kid too, though I never played it much (actual scrabble was way more fun to me). there's a current version called "A math" available in Thailand, from the same company that sells "Crossword game" (scrabble but without the trademarked name)
I had an English teacher in high school who was ranked like #3 in competitive Swedish scrabble. He didn’t speak Swedish in any meaningful sense, just memorized all the good words.
Memorizing the words is one thing, but as the article mentions it's a lot more strategy involved. Rack management, memorizing the right hooks, knowing when to use the right hooks, closing up the board for your opponent etc.
Minor tangent, one of the main subjects of this article, Conrad Bassett-Bouchard, was a student in our Master's of Human-Computer Interaction program at Carnegie Mellon University many years ago. He joined after winning the National Scrabble Championship. I had the pleasure of teaching him in one of our courses (Programming Usable Interfaces, sort of an intro to prototyping and programming for non-programmers). I briefly quizzed him one time about how many words you can spell using hexadecimal (0xDEADBEEF, 0xCAFEBABE, etc).
He went on to be a UX designer and manager on Google Store and Google Fi (see his home page at https://www.conradbb.com/).
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 62.9 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40391290 Scrabble, Anonymous
As a technical matter, sure.
However, part of me would like to suggest that using tech as some sort of Delphic Oracle for human lives (especially the young) may not be in optimal taste.
Possibly just letting life be life, and not getting too frisky with putting boundaries on human potential, may be preferred.
Shifting from the singular to the plural, this kind of analysis might actually be helpful. Telling the young person that the marriage has a diminishing likelihood of existing over time could help to cool some hormones.
And then, obviously, corporate risk management is not new, and anyone making large moves without banging the numbers won't be making large moves for long.
Just don't tell the kids to stop believing. Hold on to "that feeeeeeeling".
I feel like we have plenty of dystopian science fiction warning us not to go down this path. GATTACA is a personal favorite of mine.
> Possibly just letting life be life, and not getting too frisky with putting boundaries on human potential, may be preferred.
I'm inclined to agree... but all life is competitive.
For example, the idea that we might someday be able to cheaply and effectively choose or alter babies' genes gives me the "ick" in a major way. And yet, someone is going to do it. And the ones who do will probably end up out-competing the ones who don't. What to do about it?
Taking performance past natural, OTOH...
Tournament winners often don’t know any of the language the symbols are borrowed from.
But… when played less competitively, like with kids, it’s a wonderful word learning game.
Also to your joke about Risk: I grew up with a math version of scrabble where you wrote equations. I loved it.
The only native English word with a phonemic glottal stop, uh-uh, includes it in the spelling, for obvious reasons. You could write ah-ah, or a-a, on that model, but this isn't done.
I’ve seen it written in a lot of ways from Aa to A’a to ah-ah to 'A'ā. So which true way do we accept and why? And does it matter?
That preserves a bunch of information that can't exist in English regardless of how you write it.
"Aa" does the opposite, erasing information that is critical to the pronunciation of the word. There is no way to read "aa" as being more than one syllable long.
This might be true in less than 0.1% of tournaments so I think "often" is overstating it.
You've got Nigel winning in French Scrabble which is 1 example. You've also got Thai people playing English Scrabble, but nearly all of them have at least some working knowledge of English.
Beyond that though the humongous majority of tournament scrabble games are played in English and won by native English speakers.
I had that one as a kid too, though I never played it much (actual scrabble was way more fun to me). there's a current version called "A math" available in Thailand, from the same company that sells "Crossword game" (scrabble but without the trademarked name)
He went on to be a UX designer and manager on Google Store and Google Fi (see his home page at https://www.conradbb.com/).