grovulent's comments

You're punching air mate.

I think the point was just that if we don't help these boys - then they are more likely to fall into patterns of crime and violence - which is a cost everyone in society would like to avoid. What is there to disagree with here?

I think this is far less mysterious than people suppose.

Hypothesis - if someone on facebook views your profile then facebook is more likely to suggest them as a friend. Increase the probability if the person is a low degree of separation from you.

Obviously people on dating apps are often going to be searching each other out on facebook to see more info.

I guessed this was how facebook did it because I saw an ex of mine once on the street (I don't have the fb app on my phone or anything like that - so I doubt it was using location data). We never spoke - but made eye contact. Later that day she appeared as a friend suggestion for the first time. My guess is that she viewed my profile out of curiosity.

I'm genuinely trying to understand how this has any significance at all. They are implementing emoticons - all of which could be expressed in other ways on the platform (in a comment etc).

The only thing that changes is that now facebook will be able to explicitly map the emoticon expression to the posted content - something that humans could do already given the contextual clues in the use of an emoticon in a comment.

Generally, people "like" the person far more than the like the content (i.e. it's various aspects of the person, e.g. status, that are primarily causal with respect to others wanting to click that 'like' button.) My prediction is that people will be unlikely to use these extra buttons because they confuse this essential signalling game. A 'wow' emoticon, for example - can often be ambiguous as to whether or not you are aligning with the recipient, or signalling negatively toward them. Thus folks will struggle with the fear of sending the wrong signal.

If facebook persists and people do start using them - then the result will be a greater number of signalling failures, increased conflict, and greater user dissatisfaction.

Github's actions are entirely understandable - I agree. They are just trying to survive as a business.

But I don't agree that the resultant alarmism is mind boggling. Folks are becoming increasingly anxious at the ever increasing signalling costs being applied to innocent discourse; applied by people who have little to no institutional authority, and who certainly aren't recognised by folk AS authorities.

In response - folk are responding instinctively by upping their own application of signalling costs in retaliation. So you see folks saying things like: I'll never use GitHub again if they do this, instead of just remarking to themselves privately - gee, that was a bit harsh of Github, and moving along with their day.

What I personally find interesting is that I'm not seeing much discussion about what the real causes of these rising signalling costs are. I kind of expected Hacker News to be interested in that sort of thing - but here, as everywhere else, everyone is just getting caught up in the fever. We are all human I suppose.

My favourite explanation is one predicted by various game theoretic models about punishment in human groups. Game theory predicts that as human group sizes increases more people become "punishers" and apply higher signalling costs. I can link to research papers if people request.

With the internet - of course - group sizes have increased massively. Furthermore - the economic costs of signalling have dropped dramatically. So we are collectively applying much higher social signalling costs to compensate.

I haven't been able to find research that specifically tries to confirm this hypothesis - but various related hypotheses, as well as the game theoretic models that generated them, have obtained significant confirmation. Hence I set high credence for this particular hypothesis of mine (though it does need a much more rigorous formulation).

Woah - I've read quite a lot about that lawsuit, but haven't seen this accusation before:

"When Ellen Pao arrived at Reddit, her resume consisted of no accomplishments. She was filing a frivolous lawsuit against her former employer, private equity firm Kleiner Perkins, for sexual harassment. The only reason she had the job at all was because Reddit investor and rival firm Andreessen Horowitz wanted to lend credence to that lawsuit. In the highly competitive world of private equity dealings, Andreessen Horowitz viewed a cowed, demoralized Kleiner as a less capable bidder for funding deals. They cared little about how she managed Reddit and Imgur. They just wanted her to look like executive material in front of a jury."

----

Is there any evidence at all for this claim? It sounds potentially libelous to me.

edit: actually I wish I could take back my vote up on this article. There is probably some truth to the contrast OP is making here - but there are some pretty wild, unsubstantiated claims - and the tone overall just goes too far (wanting feminist marxists to all die)... I'm not a fan of them either personally. But we need to tone down the rhetoric...

So - according to the bill, anyone with a complaint has to send it to a delegated agency that will be responsible for assessing each complaint. It is there to screen for trivial cases, etc.

If there is cause, they can then send it off to a court which will then determine what is to happen. The court can refer it back to the agency for more attempts at mediation etc... before making a ruling.

These are all reasonable checks on balances from the point of view of ensuring that this is not abused to censor speech etc. The courts are even instructed to take account of the "intent" of the communicator. So it's not like the nutso feminist-left - with their "intent is not magic" belief - are driving this bill.

So from this point of view the bill is actually quite reasonable...

Of course, from another point of view - i.e. when you consider the sheer number of assholes on the internet, it remains completely insane. The stated intent of the bill is to provide timely redress to victims. Lol - when hell freezes over.

My prediction - The delegated agency is going to be woefully under-funded. As far as I can see in the legislation - it is actually toothless. Any enforcement has to come from the courts. So people will learn to ignore the agency... feed-backing more cases onto the courts which see their time getting taken up because people can't get along on the internet. edit: the problem being that people WILL submit frivolous cases. Lots of them.

Victims won't by-and-large get the timely redress promised - except for a couple of high profile cases that make it into the media. And this non-result will come at great expense.

But thanks for being the test case NZ... nothing like empirical confirmation of any point of view.

I developed them myself.

Mostly this doesn't add much overhead to the learning process. As I'm working through a math's text book (in ebook or pdf form) I use the windows 7 snipping tool to create two images - one of the question and solution. And then I just insert these into my card program. This takes about 15-30 seconds at the most.

I use mnemosyne as my repetition software which allows me to insert images - and I can also annotate my cards with latex. I have a number of latex macros set up on my keyboard so that I've become pretty quick at inputting latex.

I continue to annotate my cards as I progress. For a complex problem, what starts out as a simple cut and paste from a text book grows into a voluminous set of notes covering every aspect of the problem that I've had trouble with on different repetitions of the problem. These notes become what I use to create the smaller cards.

For abstract and complex material - there is no substitute for creating your own cards imo. You need to read through a text book anyway to ensure that there is no important context that you've missed. And it isn't much overhead to create your base set of cards, cutting and pasting as you go. But your gaps in understanding are your own - and only you can identify those and fill them.

I disagree with this in part. I'm using spaced repetition to learn maths - and without it I just wouldn't progress at all. My natural aptitude isn't great.

Can you say a little bit more about what you mean by immersion? Do you mean - say, having a teacher who can show you a problem from multiple angles, allowing you to triangulate your understanding by asking numerous questions... etc? Things like this?

I do agree that in terms of developing immediate understanding - having access to this environment allows you to obtain understanding quicker. And I agree that it doesn't cohere well with spaced repetition learning.

However, the problematic thing with learning with this way is that unless you go on to use it daily, you lose almost all of it. So all you manage to do is pass tests throughout your life - never developing a full suite of knowledge that you can deploy. What an enormous waste of time!

Given that the energy needed to learn/recall an individual card drops exponentially over time, over the long term this is a vastly more efficient process for retaining information.

The only question is whether it can be used to learn complex and abstract ideas. I believe it can.

Here's how I typically progress with learning a difficult, abstract mathematical concept or problem.

First pass - I'll rote memorise a solution.

Then after a couple of weeks - I'll typically forget various parts of the solution. More often than not these will be sub-problems that I don't completely understand. So I'll create new cards that will provide training on these smaller sub-tasks. In the meantime, I'll rote learn the solution to the larger problem again.

What I find is that no matter how many times I rote learn a complex solution, eventually I typically forget it. But the smaller, easier concepts stick. Eventually my rote knowledge gets swapped out progressively by the smaller units of understanding and I end up being able to work through the solution without remembering it as a whole at all.

This is a frustratingly slow process in the beginning - particularly if you are starting at the very beginning of a new field (as I am with maths). But in my experience it's worth it. For the first time in my life I feel I'm actually really learning a topic in a way that I'll truly own.

I've been reading some overviews - I'm already disturbed.

The assumption is that the difference in response times between the association of categories reveals preferences. And they tested by using groups that were expected beforehand to have certain preferences (boys liking insects more than flowers and vice versa for girls correlated with their reaction times).

But when faced with circumstances where these reactions DON'T correlate with self-reports, the conclusion is that the test reveals unconscious biases. If they confirmed their hypothesis about reaction times with groups that correlated - what entitles them to infer this further variable of unconscious bias to defend their hypothesis where the correlation fails?

Uggh... I can see it's going to take an enormous amount of time to find in the enormous literature a decent answer to this question. I can't be bothered.

So - does anyone have a good understanding of the quality science behind those implicit association tests?

To be honest - I tend to take any psychology results with a grain of salt... given the crisis of replicability that it is currently facing.

You make some pretty sweeping claims - strung together with some pretty appalling logic. Take for example:

--- And the rationale for this is like something right out of Alice in Wonderland. Supposedly, proof-of-work makes it prohibitively expensive for an attacker to control more than half the network. But it also makes it similarly expensive for anyone else to participate in the network at all. So the only people who'd be deterred from participating in the network with malicious intent are people who would also be deterred from participating in the network with any other intent. ---

The last sentence is just empirically false. Heaps of people are using the network.

And neither is it true that the costs of using the network are similar to attacking the network. To attack the network I need to accrue 51% + of the hashing power. That's an enormous cost. To use the network - I don't even have to download the blockchain. I don't have to mine. And even if I was mining - I don't have the same costs as a 51% attacker - simply because I don't possess that share of the hashing.

Overall this article is pretty poorly thought through.

It's is amazing how many psychopathic corporate shills you'll find astro-turfing all over the place. It's disturbing too how much they are able to influence the discussion.

This is not a story.

Google is only even announcing it because were there to be even suspicion that a google car had been the cause of an accident there would be hysteria (irrespective of the statistical reality) - so they don't want to look like they have anything to hide.

Fair enough on Google's part. By why is Ars reporting a complete non-event? Is news that slow atm?

I don't have anything intelligent to say about this - but this for me is one of those moments where I feel positively in awe of how next level some people are.

Oh okay - so you're talking about product which is intrinsically valuable to its creator, irrespective of it's potential intrinsic value to others. Seems reasonable... don't know if I agree with your larger thesis... but it is an interesting discussion. :)

I'd be interested to know if you can give a coherent account of what "value in itself" actually means.

Because from at least one interpretation - 'value in itself' means that it is not valued because it has a use in the production of something else which is valuable, but valued for its own sake. And on this definition it doesn't rule out having commercial value at all, since having commercial value simply means that people will pay money for it. It doesn't mean that they have to put it towards some other use.

Yeah - living long enough to reproduce in modern times is easy enough now - but it wasn't back in the day.

I do wonder if survival back in the day actually required the level of risk taking that adhd people are capable of. If you stayed in one place - maybe you ran out of food - things like that.

adhd folk are natural risk takers... so this result is unsurprising.

One thing I've always wondered is how adhd folks didn't get selected out through their risky behaviour. Their existence could certainly confer some group benefits - but I thought group selection was no longer well regarded in the evo biol community.

And don't forget they were trying to minimise the potential competition and challenge to their revenue streams that modding represents.

A lot of labs are very much like this... with the actual science work getting done by the post-grads.

What the author doesn't realise that while the lab heads might not be doing a lot of science on a day to day basis - most are overloaded with a bunch of other stuff that is forced upon them... endless committee meetings, grant writing, teaching and teaching administration etc...