aflyax's comments

I think a good thing to assume is that when you work for someone, the product is not your product, but theirs, and the customers are not your customers, but theirs.

The simple truth is that science is a branch of entertainment industry. It’s part of the bread-and-circuses program funded by the US government. That’s all there is to it.

If science were solely funded by private entities, the situation would be different. (And that includes private grants, whose sole purposes is not to make profit, but to fund fundamental science. Still, they should be private. There should be many of them. And they should compete for private donations of their sponsors by demonstrating regular quality control. When you have a monopoly, the product always sucks, compared to a non-monopoly alternative. Basic economics.)

It’s not that the paper itself is verbose. You’re expected to write a book in a paper. You’re supposed to give a full story, with beginning, middle, and end, with villains and heroes, with a successful invasion, a dynasty change, a civil war, and a period of peace, with the beginning of a colonization prospects. I had a perfectly fine study that had only electrophysiology. Suddenly, it had to include molecular biology. And pharmacogenomics. And epigenetics. And behavior… with administration of anxiolitic drugs. WTF?..

Well, it’s a bad idea, but you can’t prevent masses from shooting themselves in the foot but feeling good about it.

>Economic historian Niall Ferguson beautifully describes fractional reserves as one of the greatest innovations of humankind in Ascent of Money. The miseries from bank runs and crashes are real, but even so, the total impact on human welfare from fractional reserves has been overwhelmingly positive.

That doesn’t make any sense. Runs and crashes are an important part of the free market, keeping banks in reign. Fractional reserve banking would be impossible or very limited if runs and crashes were allowed to happen. This would result in non-inflationary currency, improved value of savings, and decreased volatility of the markets (extreme booms followed by extreme crashes and long periods of unemployment due to constant reallocation of resources in the society).

All of this is prevented by central banks.

“The marine guard on duty was about to tell her the pretty, neatly dressed woman that the embassy was closed when she handed him her passport. He blanched…”

From what? Her name was Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva. “Iosifovna” is not that an uncommon patronymic because “Iosif” is not that an uncommon a name.

Except for reducing tax burden on the middle class, amazingly wrong all around.

Savings are not to be seen due to the inflationary policy of the FED.

Not pursuing a project that’s too risky, is not using the latest tools, and might not get you published in Cell/Science/Nature is all about scientific curiosity. Please. Such b/s.

tell her to switch to data science

Every single Ph.D. on my data science team has pretty much said the same thing (independently). The way I put it: Academic science is a branch of the entertainment industry in a socialist sub-economy.

It's related to population density. A lot more people want and try to live in NYC than Birmingham, AL. More people living and desiring to live per same square mileage ~ increased price of property.

The fact that people don't all prefer everywhere equally is a "troubling inequality"? Property value is just a reflection of demand vs. supply. People want to live in some areas of the country more than in others, but, since the area is limited, the increased desire drives prices up.

Is it really so shocking that more people would rather live in San Francisco than Alabama?

"Stealing an idea" is a poorly defined concept. What is one supposed to be stealing exactly? I.e., what is being owned? You can't own a piece of someone's brain (or otherwise privately owned information carrier... which, I repeat, is already OWNED by someone else -- not you), and platonic objects don't exist (or, at least, there is no evidence that they do, and the phenomenon of information can be explained without them, so... Occam's Razor).

So, it's like saying "square triangle" or "later than 3 but earlier than 1". It's an ill-defined concept and a legal fiction, and applying it in practice costs millions of dollars, people's lives, creativity, and violates people's rights to their ACTUAL, not fictional, property.

What are we supposed to be "stealing"? Information is a mental construct that humans use to make an easier sense of the world. It's like a component of PCA. Or some tree in a random forest classifier. It's not an independent object existing "out there". (Unless you believe in platonic objects: in which case you need to bring evidence to court to support your — apparently — religious beliefs.)

Information is just brains. And brains are already owned by minds/souls occupying/generated by them. The same goes for hard drives, DVDs, USB sticks, individual DNA molecules, etc. You can only "steal" information by stealing a brain or an actual USB stick. The same goes for "owning" it. (I will grant you that unauthorized access is a crime of trespassing, but in most cases copyright violations are not that.)

tldr: You can't just invent an imaginary category that you pretend is ownable, in pursuit of some social goal, and then threaten to put other people into a rape cage if they don't follow along with your fantasy. Well, you can, but that would make you an immoral bastard™.

[Analogy:

Look, imagine someone comes to court and says that he's suing his neighbor for blocking his driveway for an hour. He is asking for $1M damages. The judge asks what the damages are for, and the plaintiff answers: "For the death of my pet and resulting emotional suffering."

The judge asks: "Which pet?" The plaintiff says: "My imaginary invisible unicorn." How well do you think that would go?

Now imagine if the plaintiff admits that he actually doesn't even believe himself in the existence of the unicorn but just wants to invent his existence as a legal fiction to deter blocking driveways.

In case you didn't get it, this was all analogy for intellectual property. Downloaded from my imaginary platonic farm.]