Reach AMA

[moches]

Re: Reach AMA

Who's the lady in your sig?

How has Stepmania changed you as a person, if at all?

[Reach]

Re: Reach AMA

Who's the lady in your sig?

How has Stepmania changed you as a person, if at all?

My girlfriend.

Yeah ok I wish. It's Phoebe Tonkin. I'm definitely mirin' dat pretty hard.


As for stepmania changing me as a person...I'm not sure. It certainly influenced my musical tastes and taught me a lot of things I wouldn't have learned otherwise. I don't think it affected my personality though or the way I think about things.

[DDRBaller123]

Re: Reach AMA

what made u play sm

[Reincarnate]

Re: Reach AMA

Happiest memory?

[Reach]

Re: Reach AMA

what made u play sm

Someone on another forum I was part of linked to FFR and we had a mini competition to see who could get the highest scores. Was addicted after that.

After browsing the forums for a bit I noticed people were playing SM and I was curious, especially after seeing scores from people like Arch0wl and Hirogashi.

Happiest memory?

Hard to say, since memories fade so much with time, but probably my first date with my current girlfriend, and when I got accepted into professional school.

[Reincarnate]

Re: Reach AMA

Thoughts on Arch0wl/Nima and that whole era of competition?

[A2P]

Re: Reach AMA

With yourself being an intelligent person, what are your opinions on the subject of knowledge and intelligence? Is intelligence something that people are born with, or can it be learned as well?

[Reach]

Re: Reach AMA

Thoughts on Arch0wl/Nima and that whole era of competition?

Arch0wl is a great guy and he's a good friend of mine now, but back in the day he was kind of a d-bag towards me in general and a narrow minded elitist when it came to simfile creation. I remember at one point he believed he had 'perfectly synced' a version of max300 and got into a big argument with me when I called out his stupidity and the offset variance between computers. Mind you, I was more antagonistic in general back then, but he seemed to have it out for me.

He was mediocre at best as a player. I played index once in awhile and I was way better than him at it anyway.

Outside of the game, fantastic guy.


As for nima, he posted a bunch of stupid scores that were impossible in his 'Omg...did insane...' thread and I never paid much attention to him after that, though we talked on MSN quite a bit. Decent guy. I think I was the only one at the time capable of understanding why those scores were BS aside from maybe a few others, but I'm not really sure what happened to nima after that since I stopped following the scene not long after TBH.

With yourself being an intelligent person, what are your opinions on the subject of knowledge and intelligence? Is intelligence something that people are born with, or can it be learned as well?

The manifestation of intellect is certainly an interaction between genes and environment. It's not really possible for it to be one or the other. It's much like the area of a field; it's a product of the width and length and you can't have the final product without both.


I believe g, or the general intelligence factor, to be the primary heritable variable when it comes to intelligence. G can most succinctly be described as a cognitive capacity for complexity and it appears to be tightly bound to working memory capacity. There is strong evidence that the g factor is highly heritable and correlated with performance in every mental task that can be performed.

Increases in g lead indirectly to increased intellectual performance across the board because of greater cognitive capacity, leading individuals with higher g to accumulate more knowledge over their lives and learn significantly faster with less tendency for error than their lesser g counterparts. This systemic effect is largely what leads to achievement discrepancies we see on a population level.


G inevitably interacts directly with environmental factors though. Especially in domains of specialized knowledge or performance, such as academia. Specialized performance on particular tasks can be increased through superior environmental conditions that allow the general factor to maximize its utility.

More specifically, G largely serves as a threshold for performance when it comes to specialized tasks. For example, one would not expect someone with an IQ of 80 to ever master quantum physics. They largely lack the cognitive ability to grasp the concepts at hand. However, once G reaches reaches a specific level at which the task can reasonable be completed and understood, performance will be largely determined by environmental factors (and personality factors, but that's a whole other basket of issues).

That's why you see IQ stratification amongst various jobs and academic fields, depending on the level of complexity. These levels are largely determined by the minimum intellectual capacity required to perform the task. However, beyond those minimum requirements, there is much variance and additional intelligence won't necessarily lead to superior performance.

[Zapmeister]

Re: Reach AMA

You're playing poker with a tiger. You're holding Ks Js and the flop is 7h 4h 2c. The tiger is being really hyperactive and pacing around the whole place as if it had too much sugar for breakfast or something. It excitedly places 2/3 of its chips into the pot. Do you fold? call? raise? or run screaming?

Is Nicole Kidman scared of butterflies?

Waffles or pancakes?

Why can you assume that you can separate the variables in homogeneous PDEs and still get all the solutions?

[Reach]

Re: Reach AMA

I said I would only answer serious questions, but:

1. Fold given the information, but I don't know how much I have committed, what the stack sizes are or the blinds.

2. Unlikely

3. Waffles

4. Sturm–Liouville theory

[kommisar]

Re: Reach AMA

how's dat dentistry going?

[Reach]

Re: Reach AMA

Good, albeit we're pretty busy right now. I'm at school for more than 12 hr a day 3 days a week. Starting to see patients, doing shit like crowns and bridges and prosthetics, a lot of resins. Get to start sitting in on some oral maxillofacial surgery, which is pretty damn cool though.

[FFRGreen]

Re: Reach AMA

hows life

[Reach]

Re: Reach AMA

Stressful, but overall I'd say I'm winning, so I'll give it an A+

[j-rodd123]

Re: Reach AMA

Good, albeit we're pretty busy right now. I'm at school for more than 12 hr a day 3 days a week. Starting to see patients, doing shit like crowns and bridges and prosthetics, a lot of resins. Get to start sitting in on some oral maxillofacial surgery, which is pretty damn cool though.

my uncle is an oral maxillofacial surgeon and wants me to take over his practise, can you do it instead as I have little interest in dentistry