That's true. I bet YC is much more atheist than the general population. But I know a religious YC poster who's hesitant to express that kind of idea here; I also bet YC is a bit more religious than it appears.
I think it's also interesting that, up until the past century or so, many well-educated people were also openly religious. To wit, holding religious beliefs does not prevent one from doing excellent academic work... religion does not go hand-in-hand with stupidity or ineptitude.
I think you'd have to say "did not" rather than "does not."
200 years ago many well-educated people owned slaves. That doesn't allow us to conclude much about whether slave ownership and intelligence/education are intrinsically compatible.
I think you'd have to say "does not" rather than "did not."
Don Knuth is Lutheran, and has done some of the most excellent academic work of anyone alive today. Guy Steele holds Christian beliefs of some sort, and his work has been extremely influential in the programming world. Just two examples off the top of my head, but I think enough to keep the verb in the present tense.
We would be remiss to claim that religious beliefs imply academic stupidity. We would also be remiss to claim that lack of religious beliefs imply academic stupidity.
... I really don't understand why folks act that way.
They act that way because when 2 people disagree, and there is absolutely no way to determine who is right, the only way to convince the other person is to coerce them.
If I say "Santa has a blue suit", most people would say it's actually a red suit. Fine, lets go find santa and see what color his suit is, that is how you determine the truth, you go find out. But crapola, there is no santa, just fictional images of him, and if I take my 'facts' from a different fictional source than you, we will disagree forever because we are both hopeless morons.
But frankly, you don't have any reason to believe in Christianity. If believe you have talked to Jesus or an Angel, you need medical help. If you believe in these beings without having witnessed them then you are just buying into a very old rumor with no evidence whatsoever.
Oh, you do have a logical defense then? Or are you just spitting into the wind and claiming that "there could be a logical defense, so we shouldn't say there isn't?
I submit that there can't be a logical defense. This is not because of a weakness in religion but rather because of a weakness in logic. To get to the point where logic becomes relevant you have to build up a set of shared assumptions. The beliefs from which you argue are formed from a set of experiences. Unless you have something of a common experience it is difficult to share a set of beliefs from which to argue. The process of joining a religion is not a logical one. It is a spiritual one and is based in experience.
How, then, do we argue about experience? Either we discuss things and times and places that neither of us have witnessed, or we discuss and evaluate each others experiences. Perhaps we are fortunate and both accept a common ground distilled from some set of experiences. Maybe we are both physicists. But no such set of shared experiences seems to be broad enough to properly answer questions of religion.
If you truly want to begin to discuss intelligently then you have to seek a shared set of religious experiences. But that might be dangerous. Change can happen at that point.
I don't understand how shared assumptions being the basis of logical argument constitutes a flaw. Could you explain this further?
We argue about experiences in science all the time. We do this by documenting steps regarding how we rendered our experience so that other people may also experience what we did and perform measurements and comparisons and analyzations, et cetera, and once we've done that, we can apply other intellectual tools we have, like logic.
How do I render a religious experience for myself?
Thanks for replying to my comment. I was a bit surprised that no one did for a little while.
Although I said "weakness in logic," I didn't mean to say that logic is weak or flawed. I really meant that it is insufficient to use logic in the absence of shared assumptions. As you point out, sharing of assumptions can come through communicated and shared experiences.
I think that your description of how learning comes about in science is a powerful one. I believe that some aspects of it should apply to religion.
In my particular religion, the process of gaining faith, and then of moving from faith to knowledge is framed almost as a science experiment. You apply particular principles and see what the outcomes are. As you see the outcomes your faith grows. (See Alma 32:26-36 in the Book of Mormon--available online through LDS.org.) Faith is a word for something less than knowledge that becomes knowledge only through experience. You might look at it from a Bayesian perspective and say that with more data uncertainty grows smaller.
"How do I render a religious experience for myself?" This question strikes me as a little bit odd, and that may be because of a weakness in the metaphor between science and religion. Science studies things. Religion studies the Divine. What I mean is that religious experience may be more of a conversation than a solitary experience. Conversations happen by mutual agreement. However, it is still a good question because it shows progress from worrying about a tool that processes information to worrying about how to seek new information.
Here is a simple religious experiment: pray to God and ask if He can hear you. Document your frame of mind when you prayed. Did you actually want an answer? Were you willing to accept the possibility of no answer? Document any answer or lack of answer you experience.
In science, we generally come to knowledge only slowly, over time--although sometimes things progress more quickly than other times. It is the same in religion. The most likely answer to such a prayer is a gradual one, something spoken quietly to the heart. Such an answer is partial, at best. Maybe you manufactured it mentally. Maybe you didn't even hear anything. It was so quiet. Was anything really there? But something was there. At least enough to follow up on. And you move forward from there, performing experiments, seeking answers, asking questions and listening and acting. Just like a signal, over time, can appear out of noise, so religious truth, over time, arises out of uncertainty. You talk with others and compare notes. But in the end, for something this important, you really want to know for yourself. You have to perform the experiments, you have to have the experiences, you have to gain the knowledge for yourself. Besides, it's not like physics. With religion, everybody seems to be saying different things than everybody else. So it becomes up to you.
LDS missionaries seek to guide one person at a time through experiences that lead to enough personal knowledge of the gospel to warrant baptism. As far as I know, this is the only way that they can be effective.
Questions like this are really questions about words.
Was the Roman Empire too big to fail? Sortof, in that it so thoroughly changed how people thought and lived that even 2000 years later we are very obviously Roman in many of our laws, habits, and worldview. The key is that the ruling families of Rome are nowhere to be found as such.
So yes, the American economy will probably continue in much the same form for the next thousand years or so all over the world. Our huge amounts of natural resources, talent, and farmable land aren't going anywhere. The real question, the one coded into the title of this post, is "Is America influential enough to take a huge hit without the people who are currently very wealthy having to give up their money bins." and hopefully, for the rest of us who don't have money bins and can only become wealthy through our own work, and thus depend on a fair system, the answer is no.
This essay is bullshit, the author doesn't understand anything he is talking about to the point of absurdity (allocating objects on the stack takes 0 time???) and he largely repeats the common-knowledge on slashdot, as geniuses like this are so often caught doing.
Allocation on the stack is changing the stack pointer, space efficient heap allocation usually involves tracing through a bunch of tables to find space. It's the initialization that gets you, especially complex object construction, in either case.
Exactly. In .NET heap allocations are practically as fast as stack allocations, although of course there are other things you need to be aware of when using a compacting generational GC, such as avoiding medium-lived objects at all costs. .NET does also provide value-types that can be allocated on the stack, and you use them for reasons that are better than "heap allocations are slow".
I think the moral of the story is: to get the maximum performance out of your memory management system, you need to know how it works. This applies equally well to C++.
Incrementing a pointer is an op. Doing it in a loop takes O(N) time, doing it in a nested loop takes O(N^2) time. These are the timings the author of the article considered terrible for heap allocation. If you have to trace through some tables, then allocating objects in a loop is not O(N), but rather some much more complex big-O, which would have to take into account things like how many objects have been allocated elsewhere and the time complexity of traversing the tables or whatever. Granted, he was wrong about the complexity here, but that is my entire point, he makes up all sorts of wrong facts.
People need to be told when to be outraged. Most people, including the majority of people reading these words, don't understand how the banking system works, even on a simple level, or how stock exchanges work, on a basic level, or how the mortgage system works, except via media oversimplifications. This isn't some symptom of our 'declining modern times' or some such, it is the way it always have been. Hell, most farmers don't even know how to be good farmers, feel free to replace 'farmer' there with any occupation. Most people just aren't very smart, and getting even a 'regurgitate the basic facts' understanding of any of the topics I mentioned above would take them weeks of fulltime study. So how the hell can they be mad? Mad at what? The complex system they will never understand and doesn't seem to have any effect on their lives, or the media which tells them it's nothing to be mad about, confirming their day to day impressions?
Lets use the laymen's sniff test to figure out the level of WTF present in our system, using IndyMAC as an example.
You have all your money in an IndyMac account. They hold your mortgage. IndyMAC collapses prompting the FDIC to take them over and bail them out. What happens:
You lose at least half (probably more) of all the money you have in the bank over $100k. They get a fat bailout, so long and thanks for all the cash. You are still expected to repay your mortgage in full.
I know there's probably some logical explanation in financialese showing that this is the right outcome... But, come on, they lose your money and still demand to be repaid... WTF?!
Ok, you're confused here. Something can be an outrage, and something can cause outrage. The question "where's the outrage?" isn't "Where's waldo, see if you can spot an outrage", rather "why aren't people outraged!?".
Also, when the FDIC takes control of a bank, the shareholders of the bank are basically fucked. They lose their money, it isn't a bailout. The FDIC insures YOU against the fatcats, preventing them from blowing your money and leaving you destitute.
Finally, everyone knows that 100k is how much is ensured, and you should also know that that limit is per institution, so you can put money in 80 different banks and have 8M effectively insured.
There are all sorts of issues with the banking system, but it is fairly decent. It is certainly not some dystopia dreamed up by left wing conspiracy theorists (nor right wing, like ron paul).
Yea, I think this article is just flaunted stupidity.
The author assumes that all times where any user information is needed, that all the information about that user will be needed. That is silly. Secondly, they completely ignores the billion and one problems he will now have.
For example, how do you ensure that the same AIM username is not used on multiple accounts? With the normalized schema, this is trivially done via a unique constraint on the user_id, screen_name, im_service triplet (probably the 3 make up the composite primary key of the table anyway, so viola, consistent data is ensured).
With the de-normalized schema, you are hopelessly fucked. All data consistency would be forced into some kind of ugly trigger.
Finally, joins are really-really-really fast for things like this. Frankly, the real thing that bites you is inconsistent data that violates basic assumptions your application makes, leading to unintended behavior of your application, most often exceptions that are not handled reasonably. In this case, for example, you might have a way to find your friend via AIM login name, but your app blows up when 2 seperate users are returned by the query due to there being 2 results (or you or your orm only get the first result, making finding the actual friend impossible).
And on and on. It is better to have slower fully reliable data than faster bullshit.
