acrefoot's comments

This podcast explains the three theories and adds the Benign Violation Theory: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/whats-so-funny/id15545.... Their theory can be summed up as “something is wrong, but ok/safe”, but it takes some illustrating.

I liked this skittles study, pulled from the transcript:

MANDY: The skittles study goes like this. Participants go into a room to fill out a survey. There's a table and a bowl of skittles, and there's an actor posing as a research assistant. And the goal of the study is to figure out the funniest way the actor can offer the bowl of skittles.

They ran this test in lots of different ways, but in the first condition:

<TAPE> CALEB: The actor will say, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I'm in a couple seconds. I'm supposed to offer you these Skittles. Would you like these Skittles?

MANDY: This isn't that funny.

MANDY: But then, things get a little weird. In another group, the actor just flings the skittles at them.

<TAPE> CALEB: Out of nowhere, they'd launch the bowl of Skittles and only afterwards say, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I was told to launch the bowl of skittles.

MANDY: This is surprising but not that funny. It's a little messed up. In the last group though, the actor gives them some warning before it happens.

<TAPE> CALEB: They say, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but in a few seconds I need to throw this bowl of Skittles at you. Then they launch the bowl of Skittles on the participant.

MANDY: It's pretty funny.

<TAPE> CALEB: there was more laughter, certainly, in both of the throwing conditions, but there was a lot more laughter when the person was told the Skittles were gonna be thrown at them first.

MANDY: Under Incongruity theory, people should be more likely to laugh if there's surprise -- but that's not the case here. People are more likely to laugh when it's not a surprise, when they're warned before it happens.

<TAPE>

CALEB: That's because once you hear that and the Skittles get thrown, you know, it's part of the study,

PETER: You're prepared

CALEB: You're prepared! The point of this was to show that it's not about surprise and surprise in some cases actually hurts.

MANDY: So if it's not surprise that's making people laugh when skittles are being thrown at them, what is it? This is where Peter and Caleb's own theory comes in: what they call the benign violation theory.

It’s no great joke, but it serves as a nice tool to examine the theories of humor. The humor from this joke doesn’t depend on incongruity. Maybe a bit on the relief of tension, but it’s not a great explanation. And the scenario with surprise actually hurts here.

I really like the ideas in Annie Duke's "Thinking in Bets". The book would suggest that the rightness of a decision shouldn't vary much with the outcome (or with time).

The book suggests that we judge the quality of the decision based on how comprehensively we evaluated possibilities before we made the decision. Our habit is to re-evaluate the quality of the decision based mostly on the outcome, even if that outcome was one of the possibilities we considered. The book suggests that a good decision can't be judged by the outcome alone, as every decision is a bet with a variety of possible outcomes. (Adjusting priors for future decisions is related to this, and one should strive to allow adjusting priors in a disciplined way while not beating oneself up or congratulating oneself too much based on outcomes which were not certain going into the decision.)

You can luck into winning the lottery, and luck into really bad outcomes while investing into index funds, but that does not make playing the lottery a good decision. In fact two decisions that lead to the same outcomes should be respected differently, depending on how much work went into them and the quality of the decision-making framework(s) applied.

Whatever Clickup uses for their Clickup docs, it reliably gets into a confused state and data is lost, during which not all editors show the same state locally.

Tonic.ai seemed to fit that bill, but we ended up rolling our own ETL job due to cost concerns, and some security preferences for a simple to audit tool to do this. tonic.ai does it on-the-fly, which was merely a nice-to-have for this use case.

Any comparisons to https://www.tonic.ai?

> Based on policies you define, individual fields can be encrypted/decrypted... Are the policies something like "retool" gets tokenized or faked data back, and the main app gets everything? Or is it more granular even within the main app? Like can I teach JumpWire about my app's users and our AuthZ ruleset?

> or they partition the data by putting some fields in a data vault and others in the main database I was considering using VGS to tokenize sensitive data, but I prefer self-hosted and reasonably auditable code for such sensitive systems. Is that the case here?

> We’ve seen entire teams dedicated to just maintaining ETL pipelines for scrubbing PII into secondary databases!

I do this to make staging environments more realistic, which makes them double as debugging tools on production when you can't give engineers any sort of direct production access. We whitelist non-sensitive fields (most importantly foreign keys), and fill in the rest with faked data. The app looks like production, but if all the users were bots who were saying nonsense at each other. At my scale (50 person company), it works reasonably well enough with just me maintaining it.

SICM has a similar complaint about ambiguous notation. See https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/gjs/6946/sicm-html/bo.... Footnote 2 in particular is worth reading for a particularly good example of problems caused by ambiguity.

SICM as a textbook is intended to be worked out entirely with a computer.

There was a pretty fun Radiolab episode (https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/episodes/91569...) that suggested that the process of recall changes memories, and that they are susceptible to change while the memory is being recalled. I'm sure ECT is disruptive in many ways, including just through damage and toxicity to the cells. But, in your fuzzing idea--a hypothesis might be that recall is triggered, and while the memory is susceptible, it's disrupted permanently. Another possibility is that the memory is still there, but the proper mapping to it is lost. Reality is probably a combination of many factors.

I'm not sure exactly what you believe, but since you're talking about information storage, can I ask if you mean for working memory or for long-term memory? For long-term memory, the storage is durable and mostly static, while recall is dynamic (and may even affect the storage after further consolidation). For working memory, I imagine it's a pretty dynamic process for both storage and recall. The top-level link seems to only be about working memory, so the title of the HN post should probably be changed to avoid confusion.

The headline says working memory, not long-term episodic memory, but the comments (and headline) here don't seem to distinguish between the two. We can disrupt short term memories in a variety of ways. When memories consolidate, they move to different structures. We can hold a lot more information in long-term memories than in working memory.

Because I hear this hypothesis come up from time to time--it's unlikely consciousness or long-term memory are maintained by e-fields generated in the brain, or that they require continuous electrical activity. Stark evidence against it come from ischemia studies. Ischemia usually accompanies serious underlying issues, so more controlled examples are easier to reason about: surgeons may use deep hypothermic circulatory arrest as protection for the brain in procedures with extended ischemia time requirements. In these cases, achieving electrocerebral silence (flat EEG) is one of the checklist items for the procedure. Clinical cases are worth reviewing for any hypothesis that suggests that long-term memory depends on continuous electrical activity* of neurons in the brain.

Since the events of ischemia, brain flatlining, and brain death are so closely linked in time, it's easy to conflate them. After a cold stop+start, the brain doesn't immediately jump back to normal function--there are a variety of processes that are worth studying better to get back to normal brain waves and brain function. Ischemia-related damage is often from a metabolic problems than from a discontinuity of electrical function. The reason for the cooling is to maintain the local energy reserves of the cells--when that is lost, the cells may have too much difficulty getting back to normal when blood is later reintroduced, and that's where you see brain damage or death. This kind of procedure is not without serious risk factors.

* Of course, electrical activity is needed for recall, but the point that I'm making is that the memory is later available for recall even after a period of discontinuity in the EEG.

Forgive me, because I still am unsure: can a bot in Slack be given permission to create channels, read from, and delete only the channels it creates?

Or must one give the Axolo bot permissions to all public channels in a slack workspace?

I thought street crime was a pretty terrible business for most? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UGC2nLnaes

Also, bank robbery isn't usually very lucrative, and they've made it harder and less lucrative over time. "According to the FBI a bank robbery averaged a take of $4,000 in 2009, which may not have been sufficient to yield the thieves a positive return on their enterprise. You see, at today's prices, the robbers would need to expend $4,442 for the guns, bullets, and masks used in a typical bank robbery." http://bastiat.mises.org/2014/09/the-basic-economics-of-bank...

Some crime has been made pretty unprofitable.

I wonder what we've lost ever since Adam Smith started bemoaning the practice of apprenticeships. 7 years under a master could give a person a very solid understand of the topography of their field, where their weak points are, and how to get better. Most of the incompetence in the Dunning-Kruger Effect comes from unknown unknowns, because without a list of things to improve, it's easy to believe 1) there's little left to improve, 2) the gap between oneself and anyone else is small or zero.

I have a few hypotheses to contribute, for those with appetite for unvalidated speculation.

================Tie in with Circles of Competence=============

I believe this to be a hint that was left in the comments by the original author: > do they know who they are? > Alex: good question! The answer is, I think, "not really." The Dunning-Kruger Effect has a fourth principle that I didn't mention, which is that as your competence increases, your self-evaluation diminishes. The most competent people apparently tend to rate themselves below their skill level.

Another hint from Munger/Buffett wisdom: https://fs.blog/2013/12/circle-of-competence/

Taken together, if one feels like there's an area where one has a ton to learn and a good understanding of how to begin filling those gaps, that's probably the start of a circle of competence.

A couple of attitudes to avoid at work would be: "it can't be that hard to figure out" and "use the right tool for the job", because that will just lead to using skills that one hasn't developed before. Perhaps the better thing to do would be to finish the task in a way you know will work, rather than ramping up on another way that might be more elegant or general. Use your circle of competence. Make time for filling in the parts of the map where you know you need to improve, but don't be eager to combine learning with getting things done. If you're lucky, you'll know someone who can code review and show you the better way to do it.

It means the stuff you end up doing won't seem special to you because there was nothing to figure out. It probably feels weird and strange to call that your "mastery".

================A Potential Strategy for those in school or early in their career=============

The importance of picking good schools, good classes, and good places to work early in one's career is hard to overstate. (You don't necessarily need to go to the most competitive school, as long as there are good professors to serve as your DGTS role models.) Once you have the opportunity of working with DGTS role models, do these two hard things: - stop making up reasons for why you aren't incredibly impressed by their ability to deliver solid results consistently - realize that "if I could just focus, I could crank that out in a weekend" is probably not true, and start to map out the skills you'd have to master from those who actually can and do work at that pace. Realize that pulling all-nighters to make more time doesn't count as mastery, and won't be something you can do later in life.

================Imposter Syndrome=============

I wonder if imposter syndrome hides one's circles of competence, as anything one does well will get downplayed in significance, and papered over by insecurities.

Files from FinCEN were leaked in September to Buzzfeed and icij.org

I appreciate the intentions behind this bill, and I'm sure we'll find far more corruption than we ever expected through this bill.

I'm reminded of the Patriot Act, and the ways the data collected were used (beneficially), and abused (for personal reasons) by people trusted with high-level clearance. How is access being limited and audited to the data collected by this new bill?

I feel the same way about the government grant system relying on the DUNS system (run by a private company) for business registration. I also feel this way about credit agencies like Experian and Equifax being the trusted source of truth on creditworthiness for Fannie Mae loans, and collecting records on essentially all Americans (no consumer choice and limited opt-out) which inevitably gets leaked. The liability of Experian and Equifax should have been their entire businesses, not a few slaps on the wrist and the offer of credit monitoring for just a year.

With all that in mind, I want to know--when this bill is implemented, how is this not inevitably going to result in abuses or harmful massive leaks? Or do you just assume that entities below a certain threshold of activity don't deserve privacy or some level of property obscurity to help people avoid criminal attention?

The kind of info this bill is collecting could be easily be used by identity thieves. Sharing this info with foreign entities makes the problem worse.

Civil forfeiture started off with good intentions, but in many places has a serious lack of recourse and oversight. There have been some reports that it's abused as a quick way for police departments to pad their budgets. Those doing the seizing don't even need to prove guilt of a person, since civil forfeiture is a dispute between police and property, not police and a suspected person. Sure, these policies let police cripple the more clever criminals that they had trouble bringing to justice, but it also gets used all the time in ways against people (I guess against property) that would reasonably argue innocence.

They do in China!

In the Bay Area, it’s more like $60-120/sqft/yr, and that’s triple net. Add in 50-100% because you need walkways and such between offices, bathrooms, security, mail room, IT, and other common areas. Then add more for building operating expenses, property taxes, building insurance, and common area maintenance. Yes, in commercial leases the tenant pays the property taxes, because the leases are for multiple years.

So dedicated office space can be expensive.

Back in 2008, I was fascinated by TeXmacs’ sessions concept. You could mix rich text with Python, or SAGE. This is long before the days of jupyter and I thought it was the coolest thing. Since TeXmacs isn’t TeX, and people weren’t looking for Python notebooks, it was hard to convince others to try this document processor with Emacs bindings. I still ended up using it for some personal classwork as an undergrad, and slowly watched Jupyter overtake it in polish and adoption.

One killer feature that made it possible to take real-time class notes in TeXmacs is that one could type symbols like Greek letters by typing something like “a” then <tab> to get α. For fast and accurate math entry, TeXmacs > LyX > text editors with completion.

No worries!

I have no problem with the paper authors. Most of the authors on the paper come from neurosurgery/neurology, and I don't doubt for one second that they have a strong grasp of "I can mess with the human brain in these ways and I'll get these behaviors". They shouldn't be expected to know everything we've ever looked at for time in the brain.

I am frustrated at one of the ways science journalism tends to report on neuroscience. I think they want to do it like they do physics, and it affects how people outside the field think. Rather than considering the brain as a complex system, we're looking for the Jennifer Anniston neuron, or time cells, or some single component that explains consciousness, much like we looked for the "god particle" (Higgs) or gravitational waves. It's not a great way to look at things.

My original comment on fragmentation is just my own opinion. Maybe it's not as much of a barrier as I think it is.

I hadn't read the paper, just the article. Which is primarily what I was commenting on. When I read "now researchers have identified cells in the human brain that make this sort of memory possible", I was lead to believe that NPR was suggesting that there weren't plausible mechanisms of timekeeping for episodic memory before now. Especially since they don't mention any other mechanisms, and Buzsáki (not a study author) and NPR together imply that people with hippocampal lesions who can't order events correctly are simply missing their time cells.

Anyhow, I've now read much more of the two linked papers, and some related papers.

In the 2011 paper linked from the NPR article, under "Neuronal Ensembles Signal Time, as well as Location and Behavior, during the Delay Period" (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089662731...) "time cells" are defined under their relation to "place cells". As far as I can tell, this paper coined the term. Now, in this paper, they aren't sure if the time cells are scalar time (Gibbon) or non-linear time (Staddon and Higa) or some combination of the two. Well, Gibbon's scalar expectancy theory for timing (SET) uses pacemaker cells in the theory. Now other papers do want to move away from pacemaker cells: Staddon and Higa point out that the "Weber law" that SET depends on doesn't scale well, so they have other theories. However, I could still imagine that pacemaker and timestamping neural circuits would work together, no?

This review article of timing in the brain seems helpful, though I don't have time to read it fully today: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089662731... It covers oscillators (pacemaker-accumulator/SET), ramping, and population clocks ("time cells" and other names). I find it problematic that the NPR article only focuses on one name for one possible explanation of the observed behavior. It makes for a nice article, and the metaphor of time cells and place cells are attractive. It doesn't leave

Time cells seem to invoke a chain of neurons firing, to encode events along the chain. I can believe that this orders events on the order of tens of seconds (the literature surveys from milliseconds to tens of seconds). But the NPR article suggests that the ordering of an entire tour of UCSD is also encoded in time cells. I doubt that there was one unending chain of ordering for that entire tour. Personally, I find that I have to reason about time on longer time scales, or I might mix up a recollection of how a story goes. (Once I tell a story a few times, I've learned a new skill--how to tell the story--so it becomes easier to recall a sequence I've chosen to highlight.)

The years I've gone to SFN, I've been amazed at how fragmented the field is. People get into neuroscience from all sorts of places. Neurosurgery, C. elegans research, optogenetic studies, fmri studies, biochemistry: these approaches to neuroscience are often so different they don't know about the advances of the others.