Yep. They had an automatic system for doing that in the past for people who used the product and people who didn't but were in photos uploaded by users. I still don't have a picture on Facebook with my name for that reason. They've figured out a lot about me anyway. The many mistakes are hilarious, though.
While I appreciate being informed what does or doesn't make me a fool by internet strangers, I don't think that was the concern of the parent post. I believe their concern was that they would be seeing work related content popup while they were on their personal Facebook account thus mixing work/personal life.
I think the point of making it a completely separate account is to ease companies fears of users getting sucked into the endless scroll vortex while at work, and I would doubt they'd be jumping you back and forth and showing you notifications from personal/work Facebook when logged into either service. It would also be an obvious security/privacy issue if project info was popping up in users personal notifications.
Whether or not they are going to link the accounts on the backend for their data mining purposes, was not the intent or subject I was addressing/speculating about.
Nope, the concern of the parent post was that they would link my work and personal profiles behind the scenes. I don't want to see work-related content pop up, but it's a secondary concern. I don't want Facebook to know what I do both when I'm at work and when I'm on personal time, because I don't trust their company.
Sorry for misreading you and making assumptions. Can I ask why you are more concerned about Facebook having your workplace's information than your own personal information? Assuming that your workplace chose to offer their information up to Facebook by subscribing to their service...
I would not be concerned about them having my workplace's information if they did not have my personal information. I'm fine with them having personal information, or workplace information, but not both. The only thing missing for Facebook then would be to watch me while I sleep.
No, I'm not. But it appears that HiPPO decisions and their personal preference of Gmail over [other email software] is driving the world these days.
I'm well aware self-hosting can be hard, especially for global companies, with broad userbase, but I'm astounded how little managers and directors care about company "secrets" getting stored at providers these days.
I never thought I'm going to miss the old Microsoft, but at least those servers and services were bought and locally hosted. Sure, they may have had backdoors, but at least it was not obviously given to a company who's making their profit out of scanning contents and selling it to the highest bidder.
We don't know for sure it a paid Gmail is scannig mail or not; if a paid Dropbox is being treated the same way for, for example, "copyrighted" content the free tier is, but I would be surprised if it was completely different.
Yes, because I use Duck Duck Go for browsing and my personal emails are generally not very revealing. Google certainly has a good deal of my personal information, but I purposefully keep it limited. For that reason, I'm okay with having them as my work email provider.
On the other hand, I've just been at a place where "invented here syndrome" masked crappy developers to the detriment of the business. One tester spent 3 days tracking down a simple python dependency bug - but in the meantime he was productive because Travis is so easy to set up, and his Ruby tests worked.
Travis is definitely more appealing to me than maintaining my own Jenkins instance. But I can't help but feel that we would have caught this guy's crappiness much earlier if he had to set up his own Jenkins job instead of a travis.yml file.
Anyone can cook. Will people pay me a living wage to cook? Will that wage cover lost income from being on government programs? Does cooking (given the relative difficulty of becoming wealthy doing so) provide an income ceiling higher than getting paid via welfare/Social Security?
There is plenty of work to be done. It's just not paid work. How do you propose to coerce people to pay for this work?
I propose to replace welfare/disability fraud/etc with a guarantee job (FDR style) that pays in-kind benefits. I.e., if you claim you can't find a job, the government will give you a job fixing our crumbling infrastructure, providing child care for working women, or similar things. In return you get a room in a government dormitory, a healthy meal from the government cafeteria, a government track suit, etc.
Now the "sit at home playing video games and get free money" choice has been removed. You'll still have a minimum standard of living, but you must contribute to the world rather than simply living a life of leisure. I.e. shared responsibility.
No one is forced to do anything. Anyone who doesn't want a government job is free to refuse and make their own way in the world - in fact, that's the preferred option.
If you are actually saying you don't want your children taken care of by someone doing it for the money (or prefer a person selling the "artisinal child care" persona), that's fine. Many wealthy people in the west can afford to hold out for such things.
Others are less picky and just need a responsible adult to keep their children from eating poop or dying of thirst, and teaching them a little Marathi is just a bonus. Should those people be deprived since the service doesn't meet your standards? Note that public schools mainly just meet the latter standard - should we get rid of them also?
It is a matter of how that job offer is set up. If the terms are "pick one of these 100 government jobs or we cut your benefits" then clearly the people you will get for that job will be different than your standard public school teacher, who is supposed to have studied for that job (at least that is how it is in Germany). IF on the other hand you establish child care as a proper job that people can take or leave, just like being a public school teacher, then that would be adequate. But I would want some government regulated certification for that job, because what being a "responsible adult" means is too vague and too subjective for child care.
So, if child care is just another job (as it is now), what would your proposal mean? Basically, that the government pays for an army of child carers, and that that army would be funded by tax. Just like the public school system.
As I said repeatedly above, the basic job guarantee is just another job. It pays primarily in-kind benefits (i.e. rooms in govt dorms, govt cafeteria food, etc) and little money, and it's available to anyone who wants it. Also welfare is eliminated the day we create the basic job (or after some phase-in period, more realistically).
So basically yes, the government will pay for an army of child carers, an army of infrastructure fixers, an army of trash picker uppers, etc. It just won't pay very much and most of what it pays will be in-kind benefits rather than money (e.g. rooms in government dorms in low cost areas).
It's interesting that you are suggesting people who are currently on government benefits are disproportionately unsuitable for child care. Can you expand on this? My attempts to fill in the blanks here lead me to the idea that poor people are irresponsible and morally defective (e.g., they might ignore it when children start hitting each other with rocks), but I suspect that isn't a claim you'll endorse. Could you clarify in detail what you mean?
> So basically yes, the government will pay for an army of child carers, an army of infrastructure fixers, an army of trash picker uppers, etc. It just won't pay very much and most of what it pays will be in-kind benefits rather than money
This did not seem to work for Soviet Union (and its reluctant allies), and market realities still exposed themselves - if you wanted to hire a government plumber, repairman, electrician, dentist, etc., you were welcome to sign up for a long waiting list or miss a few appointments here and there, because hey, what exactly is the accountability here? They won't fire you.
If you actually needed to get the job done, be prepared to offer a generous tip, which in absence of solid money would have to be something bartered (vodka, spare car parts and gold were among the unofficial currencies pervasive in USSR).
Once such economy evolves, even the people who were trying to put in a minimal effort at their government-sponsored job just stop, because they feel they're getting the shorter end of the stick than the guy accepting generous gifts. Moreover, people at the occupations that are not typically monetized in a market economy (librarians, for example) start thinking of good ways to establish some barriers to force consumers towards such generosity (by withholding high-demand books, not providing information in a timely manner, etc.) Now a portion of a population is on an active mission to create problems in society rather than solve them, as their additional monetization efforts depend on existence of such problems.
This second-order effect seems to penalize the poor (and un-connected) even harsher than before.
The Soviet Union had only this system, nothing else. I'm proposing is using this kind of a system to provide government services (e.g. filling in potholes) in return for money we are already spending.
In the Soviet Union, there was no private sector. I'm proposing no restrictions on the private sector - in fact, one explicit goal of this system is to make government dependence less pleasant (you need to go out into the national park and build trails rather than sitting at home playing video games) so that more people enter the private sector.
> In the Soviet Union, there was no private sector.
AFAICT, this was strictly true (if at all) only between the first Five Year Plan and 1936; the private sector (that is, non-government directed business) was restricted in both what markets it could participate, and the forms of business (in most markets where private industry was allowed, the only business form allowed was the individual independent worker/owner, to use the language of capitalist economy) but it was not nonexistent.
> The only thing I'm proposing doing is reducing the disincentives to joining the private sector.
No, that's not all you are proposing. You are proposing a particular mechanism that you claim is aimed at that goal (not merely proposing the goal itself), which has concrete features beyond just the goal you claim for it.
> Comparisons to the Soviet Union are nonsensical.
Perhaps, but you haven't provided a reason to believe that, just offered a factually-incorrect distinction between your proposal and the labor policy of the Soviet Union.
In this dual system what happens to the government-run pothole-filling entity (and its employees) when it's outbid by a private pothole-filling contractor on most/all jobs?
Then the private pothole filling entity gets the contract, and the government directs it's dependents to do something else.
But it'll actually be pretty hard for the private sector to compete on any task requiring unskilled labor. The government gets labor at nearly zero marginal cost since it would be paying those people even if it didn't put them to work.
Again, literally the only thing I'm proposing is that instead of giving people money NOT to work, we instead give them money to work. I'm not proposing communism or slave labor.
> Again, literally the only thing I'm proposing is that instead of giving people money NOT to work, we instead give them money to work.
No, you are actually proposing giving them money, whether or not there is work, and then trying to scrounge up some (perhaps meaningless) work so that the money you give them cannot be used for personal development, small entrepreneurship, etc.
> I'm not proposing communism or slave labor.
Forced, economically inefficient (hence, why there is no demand in the private market including that fulfilling government contracts) labor through economic coercion rather than chattel slavery, but I'm not sure that the difference is meaningful, especially if there really is a problem of a growing-over-time number of people unemployable at any given time in the private market due to changes which render their labor superfluous given the available alternatives.
No, you are actually proposing giving them money,...
We already give them money. I'm simply accepting that this is unlikely to change.
Forced, economically inefficient (hence, why there is no demand in the private market including that fulfilling government contracts)
The labor is not forced you are free to turn it down. We have no way of knowing whether the labor is economically inefficient, due to existing market distortions caused by paying people not to work.
In any case, unless you are claiming that there is no valuable government work to be done at all (are you?), it's a little silly to suggest that my plan to redirect idle labor into providing those government services is inefficient. The labor is either wasted or it's consumed.
> The government gets labor at nearly zero marginal cost since it would be paying those people even if it didn't put them to work.
The motivation for the overseers is clear. The worker bees have two choices - work hard (and get paid) versus do nothing (and get paid). Why would the workers go for the former versus the latter?
I think the idea is that the jobs the government entity does are government-demanded jobs, and that private entities won't be given a chance to bid on them; they'll be reserved to the government and the pool of people it keeps out of regular work by reserving work for the command segment of the economy.
Right, if one introduces monopolies on certain job sectors, it's not a dual system, it's two parallel systems.
There are some short-term issues as far as performance and accountability for those hired into such monopolies, as well as aynrandian incumbency protection, such as rejecting light bulbs as too many are employed in the candle-making sector.
and for people who arent physically capable of doing these jobs? if we're dismantling welfare system then how are these people surviving?
what about people who get illnesses that take them away from work for extended periods? people needed multiple surgeries, months of physical therapy, assistance of medical devices, etc.
is healthcare included in this government job? if so, what isnt covered? if not, how are people expected to stay healthy enough to continue working?
mental health care?
how are these people expected to save for retirement?
are people over the age of, say, 75 expected to work as construction workers if they didnt save enough for retirement?
How and when would these workers have the time and money to become trained for better paying careers? does this job come with some tuition programs also?
you mention trash pickers, why wouldnt that be automated, or is this a scheme by which we outlaw the automation of sectors of the economy in order to protect these government jobs?
would these workers/companies compete on the open marketplace with others, or would this be a government monopoly?
if its not a monopoly, say im hired as a child carer. what do i do when one day theres no child to take care of because people dont want the shitty government child caretakers, they want to private ones? do i get fired? do i get paid to sit in the government office and wait? can i go home? is this an economically efficient use of a persons time?
if im to sit and wait in an office until the end of the day, how is that different than a UBI other than i have to sit in an office all day?
Please don't put words in my mouth I didn't say. It is a matter of motivation, you need people who are motivated to do a job and skilled enough to do it. YOU brought up the public school teacher as an example, and I like it. A child carer needs to be compensated with money, just as any other professional or teacher, because money means choice and power. A child carer should not be forced into a salary race to the bottom, and it is ridiculous to assume that a child carer would want to work just for food and a roof over his/her head. This is NOT a deal any responsible adult in my opinion should take, and somebody who takes that deal is per se disqualified to take care of my children.
True. A better way to phrase it would have been "are there any objectively measurable things that happen to the children which are widely perceived to be bad?"
This is 100% wrong. We have a large surplus of labor, and no demand for it. Wages have been stagnant for decades. If there was a demand for labor, wages would be increasing. They're not. It's common for a minimum wage job (or below) to have 200+ applicants.
You're suggesting that when 200 people apply for a single waitress job, all 200 should be hired? That's going to be a really crowded restaurant. The Fire Marshal might have a problem with that. How many people do you need to hand you your burger anyway?
Agricultural jobs are out. Less than 2% of the workforce now produces more than double the food the entire population needs, plus exports, cattle feed, pet food, biofuels, and agricultural products used in manufacturing, etc. Manufacturing is rapidly going the same direction. Soon less than 2% of the population will be able to manufacture way more stuff than we need. That leaves only the service sector. The service sector is a weird beast, ranging from the below-minimum-wage waiters/waitresses (for which there is no demand) up to professionals like psychiatrists (where we really do have a scarcity). But at the moment, at least, costs of higher education are skyrocketing. Sending those 200 unsuccessful waiters through 8-10 years of school to become psychiatrists would enable some few to excel, but what about the rest? And what about the cost?
Having 200 people serve you your burger is not a solution. Forcing 200 unsuccessful waiters through 8-10 years of higher education is not a solution. Forcing children, the elderly, and the disabled to work is not a solution. The main problem is a lack of demand for labor, and the only way to solve that is to artificially create a demand. But now you're just paying people to dig holes that don't need to be dug and then fill them back in. That's useless and degrading. Why are we even doing that? What is the law of nature proclaiming that anyone who doesn't spend most of their life making someone else richer should die of starvation?
We need to rethink the basics. We need to rethink what we expect of people and why. This is not a futuristic sci-fi singularity thing, this is something that is happening right here and now, and it's already affecting us.
The main reason most countries don't force those on welfare to work is that some of the current recipients will say "screw this I'm not working for peanuts" and turn to theft, selling drugs or prostitution. If they were allowed to just be they would entertain themselves at home. So you have to be willing to accept this increased crime tradeoff for this to work.
So poor people are a bunch of stationary bandits and we pay them money in tribute to prevent them from harming us? What horrible people you make them out to be.
(Note: I have no problem with people who sell drugs or sex and think both should be legal. I'm referring specifically to theft here.)
I'm not sure why we need to accept this increased crime tradeoff. Why can't we (here "we" refers to folks who are willing to work for money rather than steal) just wall ourselves off from them?
Most aren't, but some are, and as there is no way to separate the good from the bad you have to take this into account.
I'm just pointing out the main flaw in this plan and the reason it (as far as I know) has never been implemented. You can argue against a strawman all you like but it's not going to solve any problems.
Why is there no way to separate the good from the bad? Just have a strict "one strike and you're out" policy.
It's certainly a fallacy to say that a plan is impossible because no one has done it before; everything has a first time. It's irrelevant in this case, however. FDR implemented it, it was called the Civilian Conservation Corp and it was awesome - we got a national park system out of the deal. India does it too.
> FDR implemented it, it was called the Civilian Conservation Corp and it was awesome
Its an awesome solution to a particular kind of transitory unemployment (and, at the scale it had at its height, perfectly sensible when there is a large, national, temporary economic dislocation) where you expect that the kind of work that people were doing before will be in demand again.
Its less good as a way of dealing with long-term structural changes in the economy -- either in the proportion of people employable at living wages in the marketplace or the jobs demanded. Particularly the latter, since locking people into public make-work jobs with mostly or entirely in-kind, survival-necessity payment provides little opportunity for adjustment to labor market changes.
It's a form of culture jamming to disrupt the cognitive processes by which we accept things as "truth" or "reality".
Can you express this a bit more clearly? "Culture jamming" is not a broadly understood term. It's not clear why the words "truth" and "reality" are quoted. Additionally, it seems odd to combine a specific term like "cognitive processes" with a ultra-broad term like "things".
If there is an argument for postmodernism being something more than word salad, your comment does not make it well.
As an example of the problem he's addressing, look closely at your constructions like "is not a broadly understood term", "it's not clear", "it seems odd", and "your comment does not make it well".
These are all your personal opinions, and yet you've cast them in the language of objective fact, of truth. You assert without evidence that your view is identical with reality. Others reading you could take on those fact-shaped opinions as actual fact, especially if you have high social standing.
So by talking about "truth" or "reality", I believe he refers to the jointly held, socially constructed opinions that people mistake for fact.
An obvious political example of that is the way the various US state declarations of secession during the civil war assert that black people are naturally inferior, fit only to be slaves. To them it was experienced as truth.
There are also plenty of examples in the sciences; look at any major paradigm shift and you can see "truth" diverging from truth, "reality" diverging from reality. This is why Planck wrote, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it."
> A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it
It's going to be great once AI exists and we can point more concretely to something that doesn't work the way you describe (ie a purely evidence driven epistemology).
While we wait for that, I'll just point out that the pace of technological progress we're seeing in society -- faster than a cycle per generation -- indicates that technical theories don't work the way you claim. Math theorems don't become "true" because the opponents die.
There would be something deeply wrong with a theory that requires ignorance of the old ideas for someone to accept it. If science actually worked that way it would be no better than the humanities.
Physics theories are of course true (or not) regardless. But their "truth" (that is, the socially agreed set of things broadly agreed upon as true) does definitely vary as people die. Relativity has always been true, but it gradually became "true" in the first half of the 20th century. Luminiferous aether theory has always been false, but it was "true" for hundreds of years before.
And science really does work that way, which is exactly Planck's point. And Kuhn's, of course. It's a human enterprise, an essentially social one.
I also think that you're overfocused on Kuhn's words. He was being modestly hyperbolic. People are modestly capable of relearning, but the ability declines with time and they're better at it for marginal learning than foundational change.
Technology is not a counterexample. I've been coding for 30+ years now, and my dad started coding 50 years ago. I work very hard to keep up, but it's easier for someone new because they don't have to unlearn anything. They don't have to reconcile new data with a vast amount of old data.
A lot of technological progress happens because our field has been continuously expanding for decades, providing a flood of new people who seize upon the latest trends. And we work in a commercial context that heavily rewards innovation. Most major tech companies were founded by people who were young. There's a reason for that.
I think relativity is a red herring in this discussion because it was so famously hard to prove. That a theory which took on the order of a generation to satisfactorily prove required a generation for mass acceptance isn't in my opinion evidence for Kuhn's hypothesis, or particularly noteworthy. If you look at the different (though also foundational) example of Watson and Crick's discovery of DNA you won't see skepticism from the old guard but rather excitement. This is because the discovery, though revolutionary, was easily proved -- every cell has DNA, as can be verified by anyone once they are told how to look for it.
More broadly I think you will find that for every relativity-like-theory that was slow on the uptake (which is to say difficult to prove), there are also 10-100 promising theories which were discarded... and that the very real risk that a theory could be wrong is the principal reason for the eventually-winning-theories' slow uptake among scientists.
With that out of the way, let's take a closer look at your claim that technological progress isn't a counterexample. Your point that the expansion of new people into tech should count as a new generations is well received, and I think a good and interesting one... but you also admit you yourself have changed paradigms in your lifetime. Does that not count as you putting yourself forward as a counterexample, and agreeing with respect to tech more generally?
I do agree that as I've gotten older I grumble a bit more when I have to learn a new way of thinking about something I'm already familiar with... but when it can be shown concretely that the new way is better (for example the results from deep learning) I do spend the time to relearn. This reticence seems more than enough to account of the data Kuhn is using, so don't see why a fancier hypothesis involving me (and more broadly everyone) secretly refusing to give up on lesser ideas is needed.
DNA doesn't strike me as a good example. I don't think it was a paradigm shift. Crick and Watson didn't discover it; they just showed how this particular molecule fit well into people's expectations for what was going on.
As to this:
> you also admit you yourself have changed paradigms in your lifetime
I don't know that I have, really. Sure, some things have changed. But I'm still writing OO code that isn't that different than what I was writing in the late 1980s. I still build systems on Unix-ish OSes on collections of discrete servers. The major difference is that the servers are virtual, but that's hardly a difference.
As an industry, the phrase "virtual server" is a sign we're still struggling to make a paradigm shift. It's like "radio with pictures" or "horseless carriage". But look at how much hate the possible alternatives, like containerization or serverless computing get. And that pattern of hate is a common thing in technology. A large proportion of people just won't use anything new unless circumstances force them. [1]
> Does that not count as you putting yourself forward as a counterexample, and agreeing with respect to tech more generally?
No, because nobody is claiming that people never change. The notion is that they change more slowly than a completely rational actor would, especially when social status is on the line. The actual speed depends on a variety of factors. Planck exaggerated for rhetorical effect.
> so don't see why a fancier hypothesis involving me (and more broadly everyone) secretly refusing to give up on lesser ideas is needed.
I don't think that's the right question to look at.
The pattern of people holding on to old ideas because they're comfortable or socially beneficial is pervasive. For example, consider this graph:
The change there is very close to the death rate. Or look at the way religions change.
I think question with science is, "Is it essentially different than almost anything else people do?" And I think the answer there is no. Science is somewhat better due to having real data. But it's still a social enterprise among people embedded in status-driven primate dominance hierarchies. This leads to results like the issues surrounding the measurement of the mass of the electron:
> DNA doesn't strike me as a good example. I don't think it was a paradigm shift.
> I don't know that I have, really. Sure, some things have changed. But I'm still writing OO code that isn't that different than what I was writing in the late 1980s.
Hmm, okay, I think the issue we're hitting here is something like "no true paradigm shift" -- I would have thought that the introduction of, say, the world wide web in the 1990s would count as a paradigm shift with respect to technology. Perhaps it is incremental? That you have experienced no paradigm shifts working in tech since the 1980s (or at least none you have adopted) seems like a surprising claim.
> Crick and Watson didn't discover it; they just showed how this particular molecule fit well into people's expectations for what was going on.
With respect to Watson and Crick I have to admit I only have surface knowledge of the history of science here. I can say that googling for "Watson Crick discovery" does show a bunch of pages discussing a discovery, many of which seem to think of it as a paradigm shift.
> The notion is that they change more slowly than a completely rational actor would, especially when social status is on the line. The actual speed depends on a variety of factors. Planck exaggerated for rhetorical effect.
I agree with this. Inferential differences in humans has been experimentally demonstrated in the Cognitive Biases literature (psychology, not sociology).
> I think question with science is, "Is it essentially different than almost anything else people do?" And I think the answer there is no.
This is a place that we disagree then, although you may (perhaps rightly) come back and claim I'm taking a "no true scientist" position. To me the remarkable thing about science is how radically it differs from normal human cognition. The desire to submit ideas to falsification, and discard them in the face of data is not a very natural idea for humans, at least judging by history.
> it's still a social enterprise among people embedded in status-driven primate dominance hierarchies.
And here's the bit where you can claim I'm no-true-scientisting: I think much of good science is about subverting the status-hierarchy. This is why you're linking material on electron charge (which requires a stunning amount of agreement on physics to be of interest). If science and scientists behaved like the rest of society, it seems to me we'd still be dealing with the question of atoms existing. For another more concrete difference, willfully falsifying results isn't always grounds for dismissal in other professions (it mainly depends who you falsified them to). That's not true for science.
Which is to say I agree with you broadly ("yes, science is done by scientists who live in a social hierarchy"), but I disagree that this is a particularly useful insight -- if you had tremendous amounts of experience on other professions operating in a social hierarchy your predictions of scientists would be poor.
> [link] That's easily explained if you treat science as another human social activity, but hard to explain otherwise.
Which is to say I don't think the principal feature of that story is that scientists didn't want to embarrass themselves or others, but rather that there was a real possibility that their experimental apparatus was faulty. The Feynmann quote you linked to doesn't even believe they were doing it for status reasons, but rather something akin to the the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect
As to the web, I would hesitate to call it a paradigm shift in technology. For me, a paradigm shift requires going from an existing dominant paradigm (that is, overarching conceptual framework) to a new dominant paradigm. E.g., the Copernican Revolution.
The web was a paradigm shift for, say, newspaper publishers. It totally upturned their world. But from a technology perspective, it was pretty straightforward. It created new possibilities, but I'd call it a new frontier. The day before, we were writing daemons to output text over a network socket; we did the same thing the day after. Likewise, we were showing people text and images and getting them to enter data in forms. Indeed, I think the rapid spread of the web was only possible because it wasn't a paradigm shift.
I'd say a better example of a tech paradigm shift would be from mainframes to personal computers. Or from physical servers to whatever thing comes after virtual servers. Or from isolated computers to networked computers.
As to Crick and Watson, they did discover something, but I don't think some people on the Internet saying it's a paradigm shift means that it meets Kuhn's criteria for a paradigm shift.
I agree that the scientific method is important and valuable, but disagree that the social enterprise of science is therefore essentially different. Humans have always been social primates with modest empirical tendencies. The (social) mechanisms of science turn the knobs a bit away from "social primate" and toward "empirical", but it's a difference of degree, not of kind. It is still a social enterprise. We're still status-oriented primates.
As an example, look at the story of Barry Marshall. Sure, he eventually got the Nobel. But he endured enormous resistance because his opinions did not accord with those of the people with power in his field. There is no way to estimate the number of people who we've never heard of because they were not as stubborn as Marshall, but I'm sure it's not zero.
Finally, I disagree on your interpretation of Feynman's story. Humans are, like all their cousin species, intensely status-focused. They published wrong numbers because they didn't want to be wrong in public. "Wrong" here being defined not by actual factual correctness, but by social conformance. They were looking under a streetlight, but they all picked the same streetlight through a social process, not one imposed by the scientific method.
We totally agree on the scientific ideal. But I think it's vital to acknowledge the divergence between the ideal and actual practice, and to study the causes of that divergence.
> The web was a paradigm shift for, say, newspaper publishers. It totally upturned their world. But from a technology perspective, it was pretty straightforward. [...] The day before, we were writing daemons to output text over a network socket; we did the same thing the day after.
Again, I think we have a case of "no true paradigm shift" on our hands. My inner you says the same thing about the newspaper business actually: "the day before we were writing news stories and selling ads; we did the same thing the day after." Of course, in the technology case the kinds of software we were writing drastically shifted, which algorithms were important shifted, etc .. but that's also analogously true for news .. the beats and topics changed in value.
I'll go so far as to call this the central problem of sociology; the terms are vague enough that theories built on them can be bent to explain anything. Medicine has this problem too, in that tons of diseases are essentially catch-alls for unexplained pain, discomfort, or inflammation. Chemistry, Physics, or Math not so much. Psychology sometimes. I do think sociology has some value, but not more value than say science fiction or poetry (which also allows readers to think personally interesting thoughts that work with personal/non-objective categories).
> Humans have always been social primates with modest empirical tendencies. The (social) mechanisms of science turn the knobs a bit away from "social primate" and toward "empirical", but it's a difference of degree, not of kind. It is still a social enterprise. We're still status-oriented primates.
To be concrete, consider the "medicine" offered by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_Chinese_medicine and then compare with actual medicine. If you'd like to call that a difference in degree that's your right I suppose... but from an external results perspective they appear to me a difference in kind. Maybe that's splitting hairs? Is a permanent marker different from a whiteboard marker by degree or kind? I dunno, I guess maybe I see the glass as 90% full rather than 10% empty here.
I do know that a dataset on the history of TCM would perform extremely poorly at predicting the progress that Chemistry has enjoyed... however a dataset on the history of Physics would do rather well. That seems like a difference of kind to me. Absolutely a difference of category from a ML clustering perspective.
> I disagree on your interpretation of Feynman's story. They published wrong numbers because they didn't want to be wrong in public.
As I'm sure you know from the link, Feynman disagrees with you here:
> When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard
Fortunately for us, your claim can actually be tested. We just need to see if scientists care about being wrong when the error won't be public. They do. As evidence I #include Neuton's massive catalog of unpublished works, and Feynman's book title "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out". Much of science is an intensely single-player puzzle game. You play because it's fun, not to show off your high score.
I do agree that no one enjoys being wrong in public -- we spellcheck our work for others, not for ourselves, etc. I just think the effect size is waaaaay smaller here than most areas of human endeavor (somewhat higher, but on the order of the status effects that can be seen in crossword puzzle solving behavior). I think Feynman also believes this, as evidenced by the above quote, and his autobiography more generally.
> We totally agree on the scientific ideal. But I think it's vital to acknowledge the divergence between the ideal and actual practice, and to study the causes of that divergence.
I do have a category of "science pretenders" that I use to explain essentially non-scientists that someone has accidentally given tenure to. If you just ignore these people you can still do just fine as far as predicting the future of science goes in my experience and opinion. They don't publish anything interesting.
This is what I was meaning when I earlier freely admitted to being guilty of playing "no true scientist" -- if some university, say, adds a fashion sciences department, that won't make the people employed there scientists, or fashion sciences a science. It will be individuals applying scientific thinking (ie puzzle solving type thought). Because it all depends on small groups of puzzle solvers, that's where the modeling data is. Contrast with non-sciences where the personal tastes of big players need to be modeled, or worse yet other people's guesses as to what good personal taste of the big player is.
As you move to softer sciences I suppose I can see an argument needing to study primate behavior more, I guess I just don't see it for the hard sciences, at least if you're selected a good group to work with. Hmm... maybe not needing large grants to do you research is also important there too. So essentially I think it's important "for non-scientific purposes related to science".
Ok. I don't think it's my job to argue you into understanding Kuhnian paradigms as distinct from other uses of the word. I also believe you continue to misunderstand what's going on with both the oil-drop experiment and with Feynman's take on it, but I don't see more words from me helping there either, but I'm happy to agree to disagree.
I will say that sociologists are better than normal at making model disagreements sound like the other person's fault. Perhaps my understanding of a Kuhnian paradigm shift is wrong? It doesn't feel wrong, and I've read a fair deal on it in my early college days.
I never got the chance to talk with Kuhn himself, but I'd imagine if we could bring him back and include him here we'd have a third notion of what he was talking about -- and all the models would be consistent with the text he wrote -- not a bad thing in my view, rather like differing opinions on a poem's meaning.
Thank you for the link. I suspect we agree more than we disagree. It's good to be reminded that we can only falsify theories, not prove them. It's also good to check assumptions from time to time - your example of slavery is very apt.
I am not, however, going to modify the way I speak and write to emphasize that I am speaking my own opinions, with my own assumptions. That should be obvious.
You should certainly speak however you please. But there are three big reasons reason I often explicitly mention when something is my opinion. One, it signals to others that I am not one of those people who confuses my opinion with objective fact. Two, it creates conversational room for others to express differing opinions without the discomfort of interpersonal conflict. And three, it helps me remember that my map is not the territory, that my opinions really are just imperfect opinions.
Depends on how you look at the game. The point of the game for users is to catch pokemon. The point of the game for Niantic is to have users wander around, so they can make money via sponsored locations.
Certainly. Didn't mean it would be easy but that's the trick with all social and cultural change. You just keep at it until everyone thinks you were right all along.
2) I have some issues with (though I agree with the general direction).
I would still describe science, art, etc. as a job (or at least any successful system will have to). There is a big difference between saying, "let's give people money, and hope they spend their time painting or writing", and saying "let's give people money contingent on their painting, writing, etc. with some of their time". In both cases, we don't strictly need the work, but one carries the connotation of laziness. That has proven to be a large sticking point in the current discussion.
As others have mentioned, there is a big difference between living in a system where basic needs are met and getting to that system. In particular, it has never been clear to me why we assume that people in power decide to accommodate the number of people we currently have. If the number of jobs is a problem, a despot can do the hard work of finding a system that works with fewer jobs or they can engage in population control by other means, hoping to delay the onset of the problem.
(Disclaimer: I will vote for some candidate this election, but I would write in a name before voting for Trump.)
I see this conflation in almost all the election news I hear - people assume that Trump supporters are against any immigration. In fact, the white, blue collar workers making Trump's base are okay with most immigrants. They (quite understandably) dislike illegal South American immigrants, who compete with them for a shrinking pool of manufacturing and menial labor jobs. While immigration may benefit the country as a whole, illegal immigration from South America does not benefit them; instead, it contributes to ever-worsening employment prospects. To convince Trump supporters of the benefits of immigration, one must present a solution which simultaneously addresses the lack of jobs for workers at the low end. Until then, the tradeoff is clear - blue collar workers would rather ship illegal immigrants home than have increased local competition for employment, which I find understandable. Trump is also in favor of tariffs, etc. to keep American manufacturing jobs, and has spoken against NAFTA. For a blue collar worker, he may be the best candidate left in the race - and his protectionist position combined with a strong stance against illegal immigration may mean that he has been the best candidate in the race for a long time. (Again, seen from the perspective of a white, blue collar worker).
For Thiel, I can see a few reasons why a protectionist, anti-illegal immigration stance makes sense. He may believe we really do have an overpopulation problem, and wishes to stem the flow of illegal immigrants into America on those grounds. A protectionist stance makes more sense - America's prosperity in the 70's and 80's and South Korea and China's relative prosperity today make the case for keeping a manufacturing base at home, coupled with a reasonably strong creative and technical sector.
Again, this is just speculation on the beliefs of others; my own beliefs are different. But I think it's important to consider that Trump supporters may have reasonably nuanced views on immigration too, even if they don't align with our own stance.
I don't think Trump's opponents assume that his supporters are against all immigration at all. I think his opponents deliberately misinterpret Trumps' message to paint his supporters as ignorant racists. That's not to say that there aren't Trump supporters who are actually racist, but I see little actual evidence that it's the norm.
Throwing the racist card has been a pretty effective tactic for the left over the past 8 years, so I can't blame them for drawing from that well until it's dry, but I do get tired of the rhetoric. It's not helping the divisiveness in the United States.
"Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on..."
How does one misinterpret this message to be racist when it is so blatantly racist in and of itself?
"Throwing the racist card has been a pretty effective tactic for the left over the past 8 years..."
With all of the dark skinned people getting killed by police lately it seems more likely that the US has a huge problem with racism. In that context the notion of a "racist card" makes no sense at all in a logical argument.
Since there isn't even a Muslim race, all these claims of racism just seem to me like desperate heavings from people who hate dictionaries and love manipulating emotions.
Also, your last sentence effectively means "since racism is a thing, all accusations of racism are valid" which is almost offensively wrong.
You are being pedantic. Most Muslim's are non-white. It is implicitly racist to suggest we ban all Muslim's from the US.
My last sentence suggests we have a major problem with race relations in the US. You can twist my words however you want but it doesn't change that fact. The entire concept of a "race card" was manufactured to belittle legitimate claims of racism. Creating a term to discredit legitimate questions of racism is offensively wrong.
The racist label is interesting, I don't understand why that's the one that people reflexively reach for, especially when you could more accurately say that he is a bigot.
Bigot is more fun to say, plus it doesn't turn into an -ism when used in the adjective form. Because we have enough -isms.
This is a very weak argument that I see too frequently. Simply replace the word "racist" with the word "bigoted". It's no better to be a bigot than to be a racist so the complaint still stands.
>How does one misinterpret this message to be racist when it is so blatantly racist in and of itself?
While I do agree that banning Muslims from entering the country is a horrible idea, Muslim is a religion (and a choice), not a race. For what it's worth, Mexican is also not a race.
>With all of the dark skinned people getting killed by police lately it seems more likely that the US has a huge problem with racism.
I think it seems this way due to increased media coverage and the impact of social media. Undoubtedly there are some racist officers, but I am skeptical that the problem is as large as some would lead us to believe. As of the last count of which I am aware, 130 black people have been killed by police so far this year. It seems likely that the vast majority of these were justified (according to police procedure, which may be flawed but not inherently racist). Don't get me wrong, it's a huge tragedy whenever any innocent person is killed, but being a skeptic, I need some hard evidence to convince me that the US has a "huge" problem with racism. By hard evidence, I mean stats or studies that have NO other plausible explanation other than racism.
If this is the way you think about these problems you're ignoring thousands of years of historical evidence. The very nature of institutionalized racism is that it's largely invisible to those not directly affected.
Don't hold the victims to a higher standard of evidence then the perpetrators, when the perpetrators hold all the cards.
I am fully aware of the definition of race. The vast majority of Muslim's are non-white. To ban all Muslim's is to ban hundreds of millions of non-white's from the US. Banning hundreds of millions of non-whites from entering the US sounds pretty racist to me.
In regards to your comments on policing. I guess the black man who was shot today, unarmed, with his hands in the air and fully complying with police orders was just another outlier? How many black people need to be killed by police officers before you would consider race to be an issue? 130? 140? The prevalence of cell phone video has exposed an issue that has been present for a long time in the US.
Whether are not you think there is a "huge" problem with racism in the US, at least there is no doubt that there is a problem. Argue over the size of that problem if you'd like, but realize that openly racist groups have uniformly endorsed Trump for a reason.
edit: deleted reference to "white" officers because I don't think it is relevant.
Isn't it also possible that the fact that most Muslims aren't white circumstantial? If not, then why not? Isn't it possible that another explanation is that these people are scared of Muslim terrorists, and they are having a knee-jerk reaction (as humans are prone to do)? Why have so many immediately jumped to race as the only probable explanation with such shaky evidence?
As far as police debate goes, yes, that single person could also be an outlier, considering that there are somewhere around 13 million black Americans. If the police were truly "hunting black people", as the media and BLM would have us believe, I would think the number of black Americans killed by police would be far, far higher. As it stands, the odds of a black person being shot by police is extremely remote.
I would argue that the scope of the problem is very much important, given that racism will probably never truly disappear. Humans are inherently tribalistic. We find ways to divide ourselves by color, social status, political views, and which sports teams we support (sidenote: my dad was nearly killed by a Steelers fan for being a Bengals fan). It seems that it would take a major evolutionary shift for this to change.
As to the final comment, I would argue that Trump isn't fully responsible for the groups that choose to support him. For example, Hillary Clinton has received donations (via the Clinton foundation) from countries such as Algeria, where homosexual acts are punished by large fines and imprisonment. That does not mean Hillary Clinton is anti-gay.
I'll level with you. I think a Trump presidency would be a total disaster. I also think the police are far too quick to resort to violence and lack the training to properly defuse a situation or handle firearms. But I don't think the accusations of racism are entirely fair, and I believe in being fair, even to an enemy.
The important thing (which no fork can really change) is that the assumed likelihood of contracts having bugs went way, way up as a result of finding one critical bug so quickly in a large contract. You may not be able to steal a massive pot like theDAO again - but this shows that you can make a killing using exploits against smaller players. They either have to hard fork each time an individual gets their savings wiped out, or accept that there is risk of death by 1000 cuts when investing in ETH. Others may see things differently of course.
It's all going to come down to risk/reward. How much work does it take to find a bug in a contract, and how much money do you get out of it? It's possible that any given contract is likely to have bugs, but that it takes so long to find them that it's not worth the effort. That assumes that different contracts have different bugs, which may not actually be the case. And of course it could be the other way around, where bugs are easy and plentiful and the whole thing collapses. It'll be interesting to see how it actually ends up.
- Stop using facebook for personal purposes and treat it like a more featureful LinkedIn
- Quit my job and find another which doesn't require me to give work information to a company which has a trove of my personal information