Recent content by Úlfheðinn

If we're operating on 2010 as the line, I just sneak in as a member of the old guard (June 3rd, 2009).

Elven years have gone by fast.

Also feel you on the data science, sometimes I'm pretty tempted to bail on academia and just make some cash (although that seems par for the course for getting your PhD).

And we're back.

If anyone needs dialogue from my end, just send me a PM and I'll get you something (or feel free to write something and then send it to me if you'd prefer I just approve something).

"A man thinks he can drink in peace, and then another man paints the tavern with blood. What a waste of lives and ale," Captain Doro stated loudly with some irritation in his voice. He drained the tankard of ale in front of him and stood to his full height, his armor clinking as he moved towards what remained of the dice game.

The aftermath of the fight, if it could be called that, did not move him. Violence was nothing new to the mercenary captain, certainly not when games of chance were paired with alcohol and women. He looked across the tavern with an easy air, surveying the panicked patrons that had shied away from the fighting. He could not help but notice with some interest that not all the tavern customers seemed unprepared to defend themselves.

Two tables caught his eye in particular. The gentleman in the corner of the tavern, the self-proclaimed delivers of justice, were of obvious interest. Men willing and able to commit such violence at the toss of a pair of dice were exactly the sort of men he was looking for. The stocky Imperial and the Khuzait with the bow stood out as well. Doro didn't doubt that the bowman would have added some corpses to the evening's tally had things not calmed down.

The captain stopped to examine the bodies that lay on the tavern floor and corpse nailed to the support beam with a crossbow bolt. It was good work. Clean, efficient, and coordinated. Whoever they were, they knew how to fight. The sergeant especially. It was impossible to miss his rank given the unmistakable command wrapped into each of his words.

"Best leave this bandit to the city watch," Captain Doro tutted, gesturing at the sobbing and bleeding thug. He took several steps closer, waving off his own compatriots who moved to follow. He wasn't worried. The strangers were no fools and for all their spontaneous violence, they had been remarkably measure in their response. "They'll have a chat with your friend here and resolve the matter."

Captain Doro turned his gaze from the Sergeant to Keith, flashing a broad smile,"You mentioned the most honorable House Tihr. I take it you command these men? Allow me to introduce myself, I am Captain Doro, and I am looking for men with courage and skill..."

Although I've pretty much been playing IL-2 exclusively the last couple of weeks, I have enjoyed seeing the rage about Swedish tanks in WT.

Semester is officially over and my students didn't fail (well barring a couple), so I'm back, will try to move things along shortly.

Samsies, end of semester is always a mess, but worst case I'll post again on Wednesday.

Too soon. :'(

Just American things.

My other favorite was learning that you had to actually prepare your taxes yourself or pay someone to do it if like most people you found the tax code here very hard to decipher.

Rujasu said:

I guess "mom has terminal cancer" is now another bullet point in the list of reasons why I'm probably not going to remember 2020 very fondly. The post-COVID world is going to look very different regardless of its impact.

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Damn man, sorry to hear, happy to chat if you want to talk to someone who's gone through the same thing.

Switched over to IL-2: Great Battles after getting annoyed at War Thunder.

There's a great duel/dogfight sever which I've been having boatloads of fun messing around on (I wouldn't want to always fly in this TDM way, but it's pretty nice to get away from the long periods of inaction in normal flight simming and the less great things about WT).

Tempest is a beast to fly, just a bit rough since the pilot has no g-suit. The P-51 has surprisingly become one of my favorite planes to fly (it's not great if you get slow, but at high speed it's a joy to fly, makes the Luftwaffe cry, and really only suffers a bit due to having .50 cals, which I like a whole lot less than cannons).

No worries, appreciate the rambling.

And yeah, I think there are pros and cons to both. My adviser is big on highlighting the stability of academia, but there's also the tenure track struggle (and I wouldn't consider an adjunct job because those are pretty predatory and lose the benefits that academia have). The hard part for me is balancing the work load and expectations of academia vs. higher pay, more places to apply to (we've got some nice ties with big tech companies, so it's possible that I could crutch on those to get into a sweet job).

Ultimately though I think it will really depend on how things look in 2 years (if there are people looking for post docs that I want to work with and they give me offers, then that's great), otherwise it will probably be industry (or some think tank...lol).

shades_o_grey said:

Incredibly enjoyable tale, I'm looking forward to reading the next parts.

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Awesome to hear, thanks for the feedback.

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A_Mustang said:

I did a thing. I think i made it too long. Ahh, well.

Tag! you're it.

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This is why we can't have nice bars...

Also who are you tagging?

Konstigt, incels är ju inte direkt super kull att ha att göra med, men det blir ju inte bättre om man bara låter dom va. Som du skrev, helt klart vikitigt att se till att dom får någon from av terapi/hjälp (finns ju incels som har blivit "bättre" och lärt sig att integrera i samhället på ett mer normalt sätt.

Flin Flon said:

Wooo I'm learning!

It feels a bit weird when people try to interpret information narrowly through their discipline's paradigm and from there extrapolate prescriptions, which happens to reputable persons. Both sociologists and economists can have good reasons to call each other out for being ****ing stupid (glorious fence sitting), because both can often enough neglect variables or the implications for their prescriptions. Which is why I really like interdisciplinary approaches. I like policy drafting a lot and I think the recent inclusion of sociology (like intersectionality) and psychology (bounded rationality) in (socio)economics for example is a really good addition in building more accurate models, which we can use to legislate better.

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The most fun work really happens when you take an interdisciplinary approach (also from a careerist point of view it's also great to see what other fields are doing, adapt it to the questions of your own field and profit). Given how much one has to know to conduct research, I think it's a bit silly/arrogant to assume that only the area one is working in has useful methods or theories or data.

Intersectionality is a great example of an area that I think sociologists actually have better/more interesting theories and work than psychologists (we've really only just started within the last ten year or so to branch out from single identities).

Part of the problem though is there's so much published research and theoretical work that you can't follow or keep up with that inevitably you end up specializing (although I think this is less of a problem as long as you are willing to talk to people outside of your area of research and when you recognize your own limitations). There's also a bit of trouble sometimes in terms of publications (editors/reviewers) as say I could personally love some idea from sociology, but if it isn't pretty established in psychology right now (e.g., a couple of well-known/well-received psychology publications have utilized said approach), I will probably have to do a lot more legwork to convince a psychology journal to accept my paper (so ultimately it can be easier to just stick to stuff your area of research has already "vetted").

Flin Flon said:

The problem is that accounting for more and more variables means that at one point you just lose people. Especially the public when things stop feeling intuitive.

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Yeah, there's a reason people love things like the Meyers-Briggs (even though it's empirically hot garbage), because with no training or real work at understanding the theory it tells you "hey look, this is a pretty general personality that pretty much has to apply to you in some way that you can know you use to reference when describing yourself."

Flin Flon said:

In more layman terms, I want to ask why rely on sociology for the study of society when social psychology seems to be better rooted as a behavioural science. But I think the difference is that sociology is more culture focused, right? Culture probably not being something you can disregard in your study of society. But also something that is hard to ascertain because it's so intangible, which is why sociology gets a lot of smack, I think. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Thanks a lot Ulf. Hope it's cool if I sometimes use you.

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My perspective is that it's a bit apples vs. oranges, that largely hinges on your background or training.

Psychologists on average tend to focus more on running experiments, sociologists tend to rely more on straight up surveys (psychologists also use surveys but there is usually some sort of manipulation or attempt to get at an underlying mechanism and surveys as I use them or more something to generate a variable that I can use to adjust for in my analysis) or more qualitative work. That being said, you have stuff like social network analysis which is really different from a lot of other sociological work.

To my mind, I think sociology gets more smack because sociology has more overlap with things like social theory (e.g., postmodernism, Marxism, , critical theory, etc.) which I would argue often have a very different perspective on what the goal of research is and what can be accomplished using science. In general sociology tends to still be very old school theory heavy (as far as I can tell), which isn't to say psychologists can't be dogmatic or have old theories we love, but there's defiantly far less of "spend three years of graduate school reading about papers or theories from 1800-1900). I think sociology still sort of has faculty and researchers that are for a lack of words pretty political or ideological. And while it's definitely true that psychology skews liberal/progressive, there really doesn't feel like there is as much place for ideology or critical theory (the closet psychology has is people who focus on social justice). Psychology in recent years has also started to push more towards computational approaches (like computational modeling) and work that overlaps with neuroscience (e.g., fMRI) which I think has shifted this divide even more (if you want good grant money right now, it's great to pitch a neuroimagnig study because NSF/NIH really want to see things like that).

There is also a kind of bias directed at qualitative work since it is pretty easy to dismiss if you want to (if I show you a super complicated mathematical model of how I think social vision works that employs machine learning and neuroimaging data, it's much harder for you to just say I'm wrong, but if I say I interviewed some people about their lives or experiences, it's pretty easy to just say it doesn't generalize). I would argue this is a bit unfortunate as qualitative work is actually very useful and people (both laypeople and researchers tend to overestimate how much you can conclude from quantitative work).

Most fields have become less focused on one level of study (e.g., no modern psychologist would try to argue culture doesn't matter or that things bigger than the individual are important to understand). There's also a shift towards more interdisciplinary work (for example, I basically do a combination of neuroscience, psychology, geospatial analysis, and social network analysis as part of my work), which I think is very needed and a lot of fun.

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Moose! said:

I used to be a social psychologist like Ulf, but then I took an arrow in the knee.

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Industry is a tempting arrow.

I also alternate between identifying as a psychologist and cogn neuro person depending on how much neural data I want to distract people with.

Gotta keep the people guessing.