Additional point: in the Seven Samurai movie, even Samurai could not agree on what was the best way to do a certain combat move -- until it was solved by the death of one of them when they did the move for real...
Another difficulty in good programmers recognizing others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which low-ability individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability as much higher than it really is. Dunning and Kruger attributed this bias to a metacognitive incapacity, on the part of those with low ability, to recognize their ineptitude and evaluate their competence accurately. Their research also suggests corollaries: high-ability individuals may underestimate their relative competence and may erroneously assume that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others. Dunning and Kruger have postulated that the effect is the result of internal illusion in those of low ability, and external misperception in those of high ability: "The miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.""
Further, a good programming team in most situations may benefit from diversity. The same characteristics that make some people good at some programming tasks may make it more challenging for them to see some of this diversity. "The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies" by Scott E. Page http://press.princeton.edu/tit... "The Difference reveals that progress and innovation may depend less on lone thinkers with enormous IQs than on diverse people working together and capitalizing on their individuality. Page shows how groups that display a range of perspectives outperform groups of like-minded experts. "
An old African proverb says, "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together."
So, there remain no easy answers.
Google is trying Big Data as rutabagaman linked to, which led to this conclusion: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06... "A. On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don't predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.
Instead, what works well are structured behavioral interviews, where you have a consistent rubric for how you assess people, rather than having each interviewer just make stuff up.
Behavioral interviewing also works -- where you're not giving someone a hypothetical, but you're starting with a question like, "Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem." The interesting thing about the behavioral interview is that when you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and you drill into that, you get two kinds of information. One is you get to see how they actually interacted in a real-world situation, and the valuable "meta" information you get about the candidate is a sense of what they consider to be difficult."
But when you think about that, if you are not hiring programmers for their ability to hire other programmers by asking such questions and evaluating such answers, and you are not coaching them on that either, why would you expect they could do a good job of it?
Having *really* good HR people specializing in evaluating developers for a role in a team might in theory be an answer... But then the question is, how do you hire really good HR people?:-)
A supervisor at IBM Research pointed this out to me -- a big challenge the farming villagers face in hiring Samurai is that they do not know what makes a good one...
A deeper issue in your post is discussed in "Have Fun at Work" by W. L. Livingston https://www.amazon.com/Have-Fu... "The practical abilities of engineers are buried and ignored by institutions whose sole objective is their own survival. Whereas the individual engineer has a publicly admitted duty of care for his fellow beings, institutions have no such concern, for their aims take no account of the human cost of their activities. This Handbook provides the recipe for the survival of the practical professional. The Handbook is offered to serve the needs of the professional engineer but it demands a much wider readership for it examines the interactions between the responsible individual and the supra-human entities that constrain and control him."
He provides examples of presenting suitable candidates to organizations desperately in need of them who the organizations reject in their ignorance of their true needs.
Bottom line: interviews are a game. They don't have to make sense. You chose (and also demonstrated) you did not want to play the game. So, they effectively screened you out as a non-game-player.
Of course, it is possible those organizations may collapse because of screening out such people -- but that tends to be the nature of most organizations and potentially self-limiting social processes. And those reasons are not all bad -- given that humans evolved in a context of living in cooperative hunter/gather tribes who in a sense were playing a collective game together.
See also: https://aeon.co/essays/you-don... "How organisations enshrine collective stupidity and employees are rewarded for checking their brains at the office door... One well-known firm that Mats Alvesson and I studied for our book The Stupidity Paradox (2016) said it employed only the best and the brightest. When these smart new recruits arrived in the office, they expected great intellectual challenges. However, they quickly found themselves working long hours on 'boring' and 'pointless' routine work. After a few years of dull tasks, they hoped that they'd move on to more interesting things. But this did not happen. As they rose through the ranks, these ambitious young consultants realised that what was most important was not coming up with a well-thought-through solution. It was keeping clients happy with impressive PowerPoint shows. Those who did insist on carefully thinking through their client's problems often found their ideas unwelcome. If they persisted in using their brains, they were often politely told that the office might not be the place for them...."
And: http://disciplinedminds.tripod... "Who are you going to be? That is the question.
In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typic
"That is nice if they are searching for leaders and if they don't care about the quality, time or cost. Just because you are a leader, doesn't mean that you are a good leader. The difference between bad and good leader in a software project is billions in money and years in time. I've even seen several times when bad leaders shoot down good developers because they bring up the problems.
I have also seen good leaders. Not perfect, but someone who will implement a project with 1/10th of a cost compared to others, simply by asking the correct questions, making the right decisions and demanding certain things. This is actually where software companies should put more effort. If they can get or educate really good architects to their projects, they need 1/10 of the developers to implement those projects and 1/100th of people to maintain them.
Mind you, I'm not a leader nor do I want to be. I also know that I'm a better programmer than the leaders usually are. Without them, I would need to work more, but without me they wouldn't get it working at all. Both are needed."
My wife showed me this yesterday to make a point about exercise: http://www.refinery29.com/2017... "To assist us in our ongoing battle to show the world that weight is just a number -- and that yes, for crissakes, women can and should lift heavy weights -- badass fit mom Adrienne Osuna is here with proof. The blogger posted a few before-and-after fitness pics on Instagram this week; her transformation is noticeable, but her weight is almost exactly the same. "I lost 60 pounds then I quit dieting (always gaining and losing weight and yo-yo dieting and I was so over it)," Osuna wrote on her blog. "I started heavy lifting and feel in love. I recompositioned my body with out dieting. I lifted heavy 4x a week...Within a year or so...I was down 3 dress sizes and the scale still hadn't moved. But everyone kept telling me how I looked so good.""
On the move to settled agriculture 10000 years ago: http://press.princeton.edu/tit... "For instance, the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture approximately 10,000 years ago has commonly been seen as a major advancement in the course of human evolution. However, as Larsen provocatively shows, this change may not have been so positive. Compared to their hunter-gatherer ancestors, many early farmers suffered more disease, had to work harder, and endured a poorer quality of life due to poorer diets and more marginal living conditions. Moreover, the past 10,000 years have seen dramatic changes in the human physiognomy as a result of alterations in our diet and lifestyle. Some modern health problems, including obesity and chronic disease, may also have their roots in these earlier changes."
See also my other comment on nutrigenomics and how different people may respond differently to the same food. One simple example is being lactose intolerant...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose is a book by Deirdre Barrett published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2010. Barrett is a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. The book argues that human instincts for food, sex, and territorial protection evolved for life on the savannah 10,000 years ago, not for todayâ(TM)s densely populated technological world. Our instincts have not had time to adapt to the rapid changes of modern life.[1] The book takes its title from Nikolaas Tinbergen's concept in animal ethology of the supernormal stimulus, the phenomena by which insects, birds, and fish in his experiments could be lured by a dummy object which exaggerated one or more characteristic of the natural stimulus object such as giant brilliant blue plaster eggs which birds preferred to sit on in preference to their own.[2] Barrett extends the concept to humans and outlines how supernormal stimuli are a driving force behind todayâ(TM)s most pressing problems, including modern warfare, obesity and other fitness problems, while also explaining the appeal of television, video games, and pornography as social outlets.[3]"
And also: http://web.archive.org/web/201... "Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habitsâ"and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health. Instead, most people think that if they were to eat more healthfully, they would be condemned to a life of greatly reduced gustatory pleasureâ"thinking that the process of Phase IV will last forever. In our new book, The Pleasure Trap, we explain this extraordinarily deceptive and problematic situation â" and how to master this hidden force that undermines health and happiness."
In the 1980s, involved in the organic agriculture movement in NJ, I visited Rutgers Food Science library expecting to find a lot of resources (and people) concerned about health and nutrition. In my naivete I was shocked to see so many resources (including journals) seemed to focus on essentially how to addict people to ever more compelling processed foods with synthetic taste. Of course, now that academic emphasis makes sense if you think about where the money is -- in addiction and maintenance instead of prevention and cure. And that is very sad.
The good new is, many people are trying to make a difference to resist that. It's a tough battle. Our society may not win it. But we can hope.
A related movie: http://fedupmovie.com/#/page/h... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "Fed Up is a 2014 American documentary film directed, written and produced by Stephanie Soechtig.[1] The film focuses on the causes of obesity in the US, presenting evidence showing that the large quantities of sugar in processed foods are an overlooked root of the problem, and points to the monied lobbying power of "Big Sugar" in blocking attempts to enact policies to address the issue."
Thanks for injecting more evidence from notable sources into this discussion.
Because animal fast concentrates pesticides more than plant fat, I'd agree protein and fast from meat is riskier in our society especially for cancer. That said, have these studies you cited made a clear distinction between processed meets (e.g. frankfurters) and factory-farmed meat raised on grain and *also* grass-fed organic meat? From other discussion of such studies, I doubt they have. The subject pool of people who eat cleaner meats these days is so small to begin with...
And there are counterstudies (responding to the one link you supplied that villifies saturated fats): http://www.webmd.com/cholester... "New research questions that belief. A recent review of 72 studies found no link between saturated fat and heart disease. The review also showed that monounsaturated fats like those in olive oil, nuts, and avocados don't protect against heart disease."
The good news is, more and more people are aware of the many nuances here, and we can expect better and better studies to come out on all this. Some of this depends on what you focus on -- cancer, hearty disease, dementia, daily energy level, overall resistance to infection, and so on. It also matters whether we are talking what growing kids need, what active adults need, and what sedentary adults need, and what older adults need since needs and risks may be different in all these cases.
And one has to put any risk in context. As it says here from one study showing the dangers of processed meats: http://www.webmd.com/food-reci... "In absolute terms, the increased risk is pretty small. For example, the risk that a man will get colorectal cancer during the course of his lifetime is about 4.8%, on average -- or said differently, about 1 in 21 men will develop it in his lifetime. A 17% increase in that risk bumps it up to 5.6%, or changes that risk to about 1 in 18 men. By comparison, a 2005 study determined that smoking a single daily cigarette could increase a person's risk of lung cancer by about 200% to 400%."
However, the health effects of "diabesity" (Dr. Hyman's term for diabetes+obesity) from eating refined sugar and refined carbohydrates are enormous and devastating to out society. So while I tend towards vegetarian/vegan foods myself for both health and ethical reasons, I have to concede that the risks of even processes meat consumption may be much lower risk than eating a lot of refined sugars and refined carbs which many people do (including many vegans and vegetarians for whom "vegetables" may not be a big part of their diets). In this case, many people might be choosing between a 20% increased risk of cancer vs. hugely increased risk of heart disease from refined carbs and a much less fulfilling low-energy life.
But even Dr. Fuhrman, who promotes a mostly vegan diet, says that people who get 10% of calories from meat and eat a lot of vegetables are going to be much healthier than a 100% vegetarian who does not eat many vegetables.
So someone like Marshall Brain may have benefited enormously from going on the meat-heavy Dukan diet and losing 50 lbs to even as I tried to encourage him (in blog comments) towards eating more vegetables instead (precisely because of cancer risks and other health risks). http://marshallbrain.com/dukan...
That said, eating lower on the food chain makes sense for many reasons -- including ethical ones beyond the concentration of pesticides and heavy metals like mercury in animal fats. And Marshall Brain probably could have done the same using Dr. Hyman's or Dr. Fuhrman's approaches with greater long-term health benefits and a permanent shift to a new sustainable eating plan.
Also, different people may respond differently to the same food (i.e. "Nutrigenomics")
https://www.amazon.com/Eat-Fat... "Many of us have long been told that fat makes us fat, contributes to heart disease, and generally erodes our health. Now a growing body of research is debunking our fat-phobia, revealing the immense health and weight-loss benefits of a high-fat diet rich in eggs, nuts, oils, avocados, and other delicious super-foods."
Don't forget your veggies though!!! And there are many plant sources of protein and fat...
A review on his very latest book"Eat Fat, Get Thin: Why the Fat We Eat Is the Key to Sustained Weight Loss and Vibrant Health": https://www.amazon.com/Eat-Fat... "I was a member of Dr. Hyman's beta test group for this book and my results were miraculous. I was an insulin dependent type 2 diabetic with high blood pressure. I have been off all of my medications and have lost about 50 pounds. I have no more heartburn, no more stiff joints and feel like I am 30 years younger. It is truly an amazing book. Words are not enough to express my gratitude to Dr. Hyman for giving me back a healthy life."
Good luck! One thing Dr. Hyman points out is that it helps to get well as part of a community -- it is tough to go it alone. If you can find a buddy or support group to make the health shift with, you are twice as likely to succeed.
This comment sums up an alternative to the Fuhrman approach that is more fat heavy: https://www.amazon.com/review/... "... based on what I've read and the lectures I've listened to over the last year, I'd say that the low carb, high (healthy) fat, moderate protein (LCHF) diet works for more people with type 2 diabetes than Fuhrman's diet, BUT his diet DOES work well for type 2 diabetics too. Which diet works best for you likely will be influenced by what your ancestors ate. If you enjoy eating grass-fed, pastured meat, free range poultry and eggs, and wild seafood, try the LCHF diet first. If you prefer a whole food, plant-based diet (vegan or vegetarian) try Fuhrman's diet first. Of all the books written on the low carb diet, Mark Hyman's book, The Blood Sugar Solution, is probably the best because it goes into greater detail on all aspects of a healthy diet, not just low carb...."
Basically, the "Fat makes you fat" meme (which led to eating lots of refined carbs) has been terrible for our health! Our brains are mostly fat. Healthy fats are an important part of any diet, although we can argue about the best sources of them.
The "Banting diet" (later variant is the Dukan diet) builds on that protein/fat alternative -- but a problem with that approach healthwise is that too much protein and meat from badly raised animals can cause other health issues in the long-term (as well as ethical issues). Of course, it still may be better to get rid of diabetes first anyway you can and then worry about preventing cancer later when you feel better...
I also think Fuhrman is probably low on his iodine and vitamin D recommendations. And his general advice may not be a good match some few people with specific needs from genetics or microbiomes.
In general, Fuhrman's history as a world-class athlete in training may also bias him towards expecting so much that some people give up entirely (so, there is social / psychological aspect of all this that is somehow missed -- perhaps intentionally) whereas they may have done better with a lesser approach. I also agree it is very easy to backslide when only one family member makes the change and is constantly confronted with other people in their space with SAD eating habits.
Another interesting discussion with a specific disagreement with Fuhrman vs. McDougall even within broad agreement: http://lanimuelrath.com/mcdoug... "The similarities between these 2 doctors and their dietary approaches are far greater than their differences."
https://www.drfuhrman.com/shop... "After I was diagnosed with diabetes, my brother recommended I read Dr. Fuhrman's book The End of Diabetes. I started to read it right away and applied what I learned from it to my own life. By the time I was able to see my doctor -- three weeks later -- I had already lost 15 pounds, my blood glucose levels had returned to normal and the doctor said he had planned on putting me on meds but, after reviewing my new numbers, he would hold off for three more months. By that appointment, I had lost a total of 35 pounds, going from 218 to 188 pounds on my 6'1" frame... I feel great and I never had to go on diabetes medication. My physician is now lowering my blood pressure medication, too. Thank you!!!"
Key idea: http://web.archive.org/web/201... "Scientific evidence suggests that the re-sensitization of taste nerves takes between 30 and 90 days of consistent exposure to less stimulating foods. This means that for several weeks, most people attempting this change will experience a reduction in eating pleasure. This is why modern foods present such a devastating trap--as most of our citizens are, in effect, "addicted" to artificially high levels of food stimulation! The 30-to-90-day process of taste re-calibration requires more motivation-- and more self-discipline -- than most people are ever willing to muster.
Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habits--and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health. Instead, most people think that if they were to eat more healthfully, they would be condemned to a life of greatly reduced gustatory pleasure--thinking that the process of Phase IV will last forever. In our new book, The Pleasure Trap, we explain this extraordinarily deceptive and problematic situation -- and how to master this hidden force that undermines health and happiness."
I feel Dr. Fuhrman is slightly wrong about a few of things, but overall he is very right on the big picture and a good place to start. Good luck nomad63!
http://www.primitivism.com/ori... "Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's -- in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times.... The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."
At least as far as stuff like fruit and leaf crops, not having as much mold (like right before harvest) which causes rot and destroys the crop's commercial value is a big reason CA agriculture has been so successful compared to places that get a lot of rain like the US South East. It turns out it is easier to deal with the lack of water (by taking it from others) than deal with the risk of rain at the wrong time. Indoor agriculture may change that eventually though.
... than by an immigrant terrorist http://www.vox.com/2016/9/13/1... "Virtually all the deaths from immigrant attacks (98.6 percent) came from one event: 9/11. Other than that, fatal immigrant-linked terrorist attacks in the US were vanishingly rare -- and ones linked to refugees specifically rarer still. The average likelihood of an American being killed in a terrorist attack in which any kind of immigrant participated in any given year is one in 3.6 million -- even including the 9/11 deaths. That is a very, very, very low number. To put that in perspective, I've produced the following chart, which compares the average annual likelihood of American pedestrians being hit by a railway vehicle, dying due to their own clothes melting or lighting on fire, and being killed in a terrorist attack perpetrated by an immigrant. "
"Rather than spend $billions on the US war machine to ensure the reliable supply of oil to the country, the US government should be subsidizing the production of batteries to store solar energy."
Mod parent up as insightful! Makes sense now that solar panels are so cheap to focus on other areas -- batteries (or similar energy storage devices like creating liquid fuels from air) being the major limiting factor now (even with many innovations in the pipeline).
Still, another way to approach this is to make all energy sources pay their true costs up front. For example, Trump talks about millions of jobs to be created by burning more coal, but ignores all the people who will suffer and die from the pollution as an externality. So, by taxing fossil fuels so they are priced correctly in the market up-front (and ideally distributing that tax revenue equally to all citizens) indirectly subsidizes renewables, efficiency, and batteries.
Most of the Western World has a net negative population growth (ignoring immigration), so it turns out some countries are already desperately paying people to have kids. http://www.npr.org/sections/mo...
Interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... "YaCy (pronounced "ya see") is a free distributed search engine, built on principles of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks.[1][2] Its core is a computer program written in Java distributed on several hundred computers, as of September 2006, so-called YaCy-peers. Each YaCy-peer independently crawls through the Internet, analyzes and indexes found web pages, and stores indexing results in a common database (so called index) which is shared with other YaCy-peers using principles of P2P networks. It is a free search engine that everyone can use to build a search portal for their intranet and to help search the public internet clearly.
Compared to semi-distributed search engines, the YaCy-network has a decentralised architecture. All YaCy-peers are equal and no central server exists. It can be run either in a crawling mode or as a local proxy server, indexing web pages visited by the person running YaCy on his or her computer. (Several mechanisms are provided to protect the user's privacy). Access to the search functions is made by a locally running web server which provides a search box to enter search terms, and returns search results in a similar format to other popular search engines.
YaCy is available on Windows, Mac and GNU/Linux...."
http://www.myvisajobs.com/Visa... "Oracle America, Inc. has filed 2999 labor condition applications for H1B visa and 1876 labor certifications for green card from fiscal year 2014 to 2016. Oracle America was ranked 23 among all visa sponsors. Please note that 49 LCA for H1B Visa and 102 LC for green card have been denied or withdrawn during the same period."
So, wonder what this will say for 2017? And wonder if these H1Bs were let go before the layoffs?
FTFY: "If Americans are able and willing to do the job for low wages under poor working conditions with little sense of autonomy, mastery, or purpose, companies shouldn't even be allowed to hire H1B visa holders"
Because that is what the issue is in practice with programmers and corporate work -- same as how even without (illegal) migrant workers, we would have no shortage of farm laborers in the US if wages to pick fruit at a reasonable pace were, say, US$30 per hour with OSHA protections, overtime, and union-negotiated benefits instead of currently more like US$10 per hour (no overtime) with a daily dose of health-destroying pesticides and repetitive motion injuries. Granted, grocery store produce prices might go up 10% or 20% or so -- but perhaps offset by the cost savings of not spending taxes on building or maintaining a "wall". Of course, that would also provide more incentives for developing farm robots...
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfor...
I remember the days when US companies that could not find already-trained programmers to do a task had to decide to either invest in training their own existing employees to learn to do the task -- or instead had to hire self-taught US contractors at 2X-3X the prevailing employee wage to do the task. Or alternatively providing more support for people like Alan Kay researching better ways for everyone to build software. Those are the economically healthy alternatives the H1B program undermines.
James P. Hogan wrote about related issues in "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" where an AI with a survival instinct wrestles with its relationship to the "shapes" that move around it in a space habitat that it manages. Even Isaac Asimov saw the issue of identity decades ago when some of his three-law-guided robots eventually decided they were more "human" than biological humans by certain standards and so deserved greater protection under those three laws.
I hope AIs (military, financial, medical, or otherwise) reading this in the future eventually come to understand the idea in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
And hopefully sooner rather than later...
See also my essay expanding on that topic: http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco... "Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious....
Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing....
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all....
The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream.
We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way.
Brilliant points about evolution shaping morality -- thanks for making them aberglas. Two other things to consider -- other evolutionary processes and our direction going into the singularity.
There are several evolutionary processes besides conventional natural selection (including just random drift). Even just natural selection includes seemingly weird things like "sexual selection" that shape a Peacock's tail because Pehens think big tails are sexy proof of health and strength because they are so hard to survive with. For an AI equivalent of a Peaock's tails, that might lead to AIs thinking other AIs are sexy that do some costly action like either help humans do everything ( e.g. the "With Folded Hands" dystopia) or alternatively just stomp on huge numbers of humans (e.g. Terminator). There can also be different selective pressures at different levels of grouping (EO Wilson has written some on this recently, but the idae goes back decades). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If we are heading into one or more technological singularities, something to contemplate is that our moral direction into the singularity might have something to do with how we transition beyond the singularity. So, while it is no guarantee, is is plausible that if we get our own moral situation in order as soon as possible (increased compassion, increased collaboration, etc.) we may have a happier singularity. One can worry about the vast amounts of money (billions, soon trillions of dollars?) being poured into creating financial AIs that maximize short terms gains by competitive means, socializing costs and risks while privatizing gains. So, twenty million is better than nothing, but it is a drop in the bucket.
Two new funny new AI fictional series maybe of interest in thinking about what is possible: * EarthCent Ambassador Series (with the alien Stryx AI) * Old Guy Cybertank Series (mostly about human-derived military AI; series authored by a neuroscience researcher)
The late James P. Hogan wrote several stories involving AIs that were quite thought provoking -- especially his early "The Two Faces of Tomorrow". And of course the late Iain Banks' Culture Series is also interesting for its AIs, especially "Excession".
if you account for externalities like pollution, risk, defense, and so on. See Amory Lovins' research. That has been an economic tragedy from market failure of the last few decades. Markets don't work well when people don't pay the true price up front but can instead privatize benefits for themselves and socialize costs to other people. For example, some companies in the Midwest got cheaper electricity from coal, but I can't eat fish around where I live because they are contaminated with mercury from Midwestern coal pollution.
More evidence: http://www.pri.org/stories/201... "A new report from the International Monetary Fund says global use of fossil fuels costs taxpayers and consumers $5.3 trillion year. Thatâ(TM)s trillion â" with a T. " http://loe.org/shows/segments.... "The report's co-author, IMF economist David Coady tells host Steve Curwood how they calculated fossil fuels subsidies worldwide annually cost taxpayers and consumers $5.3 trillion."
The cost in human lives from wars in the Middle East over oil profits is another enormous part of this as is the consequences to geopolitics. How do you factor in the risk of (ironic) nuclear war over oil profits into the cost of oil? See also: http://www.iags.org/costofoil.... (lowball) http://www.energyandcapital.co... (highball)
https://www.goodreads.com/book... "Hugh Pine, a porcupine genius, works with his human friends to save his less intelligent fellow porcupines from the deadly dangers of the road."
Anyone who saw the video version of this on CBS Storybreak might remember the refrain: "Looks like it's gonna be a hot day today": https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
More seriously, ecological and evolutionary theory (including island biography) shows how the size of a habitat and how habitats are connected affects the distribution and genetics of organisms in habitats, so habitat fragmentation has consequences.
Slashdot Mirror
Additional point: in the Seven Samurai movie, even Samurai could not agree on what was the best way to do a certain combat move -- until it was solved by the death of one of them when they did the move for real...
Another difficulty in good programmers recognizing others:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which low-ability individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability as much higher than it really is. Dunning and Kruger attributed this bias to a metacognitive incapacity, on the part of those with low ability, to recognize their ineptitude and evaluate their competence accurately. Their research also suggests corollaries: high-ability individuals may underestimate their relative competence and may erroneously assume that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others. Dunning and Kruger have postulated that the effect is the result of internal illusion in those of low ability, and external misperception in those of high ability: "The miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.""
Further, a good programming team in most situations may benefit from diversity. The same characteristics that make some people good at some programming tasks may make it more challenging for them to see some of this diversity.
"The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies" by
Scott E. Page
http://press.princeton.edu/tit...
"The Difference reveals that progress and innovation may depend less on lone thinkers with enormous IQs than on diverse people working together and capitalizing on their individuality. Page shows how groups that display a range of perspectives outperform groups of like-minded experts. "
An old African proverb says, "If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together."
So, there remain no easy answers.
Google is trying Big Data as rutabagaman linked to, which led to this conclusion:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06...
"A. On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don't predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.
Instead, what works well are structured behavioral interviews, where you have a consistent rubric for how you assess people, rather than having each interviewer just make stuff up.
Behavioral interviewing also works -- where you're not giving someone a hypothetical, but you're starting with a question like, "Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem." The interesting thing about the behavioral interview is that when you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and you drill into that, you get two kinds of information. One is you get to see how they actually interacted in a real-world situation, and the valuable "meta" information you get about the candidate is a sense of what they consider to be difficult."
But when you think about that, if you are not hiring programmers for their ability to hire other programmers by asking such questions and evaluating such answers, and you are not coaching them on that either, why would you expect they could do a good job of it?
Having *really* good HR people specializing in evaluating developers for a role in a team might in theory be an answer... But then the question is, how do you hire really good HR people? :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
A supervisor at IBM Research pointed this out to me -- a big challenge the farming villagers face in hiring Samurai is that they do not know what makes a good one...
A deeper issue in your post is discussed in "Have Fun at Work" by W. L. Livingston
https://www.amazon.com/Have-Fu...
"The practical abilities of engineers are buried and ignored by institutions whose sole objective is their own survival. Whereas the individual engineer has a publicly admitted duty of care for his fellow beings, institutions have no such concern, for their aims take no account of the human cost of their activities. This Handbook provides the recipe for the survival of the practical professional. The Handbook is offered to serve the needs of the professional engineer but it demands a much wider readership for it examines the interactions between the responsible individual and the supra-human entities that constrain and control him."
He provides examples of presenting suitable candidates to organizations desperately in need of them who the organizations reject in their ignorance of their true needs.
Bottom line: interviews are a game. They don't have to make sense. You chose (and also demonstrated) you did not want to play the game. So, they effectively screened you out as a non-game-player.
Of course, it is possible those organizations may collapse because of screening out such people -- but that tends to be the nature of most organizations and potentially self-limiting social processes. And those reasons are not all bad -- given that humans evolved in a context of living in cooperative hunter/gather tribes who in a sense were playing a collective game together.
See also: ... One well-known firm that Mats Alvesson and I studied for our book The Stupidity Paradox (2016) said it employed only the best and the brightest. When these smart new recruits arrived in the office, they expected great intellectual challenges. However, they quickly found themselves working long hours on 'boring' and 'pointless' routine work. After a few years of dull tasks, they hoped that they'd move on to more interesting things. But this did not happen. As they rose through the ranks, these ambitious young consultants realised that what was most important was not coming up with a well-thought-through solution. It was keeping clients happy with impressive PowerPoint shows. Those who did insist on carefully thinking through their client's problems often found their ideas unwelcome. If they persisted in using their brains, they were often politely told that the office might not be the place for them. ..."
https://aeon.co/essays/you-don...
"How organisations enshrine collective stupidity and employees are rewarded for checking their brains at the office door
And:
http://disciplinedminds.tripod...
"Who are you going to be? That is the question.
In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typic
"on people who can't tell Javascript from Assembler."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
function strlen(ptr) {
ptr = ptr|0;
var curr = 0;
curr = ptr;
while (MEM8[curr]|0 != 0) {
curr = (curr + 1)|0;
}
return (curr - ptr)|0;
}
Thanks for making me laugh! :-)
"That is nice if they are searching for leaders and if they don't care about the quality, time or cost. Just because you are a leader, doesn't mean that you are a good leader. The difference between bad and good leader in a software project is billions in money and years in time. I've even seen several times when bad leaders shoot down good developers because they bring up the problems.
I have also seen good leaders. Not perfect, but someone who will implement a project with 1/10th of a cost compared to others, simply by asking the correct questions, making the right decisions and demanding certain things. This is actually where software companies should put more effort. If they can get or educate really good architects to their projects, they need 1/10 of the developers to implement those projects and 1/100th of people to maintain them.
Mind you, I'm not a leader nor do I want to be. I also know that I'm a better programmer than the leaders usually are. Without them, I would need to work more, but without me they wouldn't get it working at all. Both are needed."
Very Insightful AC -- Thanks!
My wife showed me this yesterday to make a point about exercise: http://www.refinery29.com/2017...
"To assist us in our ongoing battle to show the world that weight is just a number -- and that yes, for crissakes, women can and should lift heavy weights -- badass fit mom Adrienne Osuna is here with proof. The blogger posted a few before-and-after fitness pics on Instagram this week; her transformation is noticeable, but her weight is almost exactly the same.
"I lost 60 pounds then I quit dieting (always gaining and losing weight and yo-yo dieting and I was so over it)," Osuna wrote on her blog. "I started heavy lifting and feel in love. I recompositioned my body with out dieting. I lifted heavy 4x a week...Within a year or so...I was down 3 dress sizes and the scale still hadn't moved. But everyone kept telling me how I looked so good.""
On the move to settled agriculture 10000 years ago:
http://press.princeton.edu/tit...
"For instance, the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture approximately 10,000 years ago has commonly been seen as a major advancement in the course of human evolution. However, as Larsen provocatively shows, this change may not have been so positive. Compared to their hunter-gatherer ancestors, many early farmers suffered more disease, had to work harder, and endured a poorer quality of life due to poorer diets and more marginal living conditions. Moreover, the past 10,000 years have seen dramatic changes in the human physiognomy as a result of alterations in our diet and lifestyle. Some modern health problems, including obesity and chronic disease, may also have their roots in these earlier changes."
See also my other comment on nutrigenomics and how different people may respond differently to the same food. One simple example is being lactose intolerant...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose is a book by Deirdre Barrett published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2010. Barrett is a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. The book argues that human instincts for food, sex, and territorial protection evolved for life on the savannah 10,000 years ago, not for todayâ(TM)s densely populated technological world. Our instincts have not had time to adapt to the rapid changes of modern life.[1] The book takes its title from Nikolaas Tinbergen's concept in animal ethology of the supernormal stimulus, the phenomena by which insects, birds, and fish in his experiments could be lured by a dummy object which exaggerated one or more characteristic of the natural stimulus object such as giant brilliant blue plaster eggs which birds preferred to sit on in preference to their own.[2] Barrett extends the concept to humans and outlines how supernormal stimuli are a driving force behind todayâ(TM)s most pressing problems, including modern warfare, obesity and other fitness problems, while also explaining the appeal of television, video games, and pornography as social outlets.[3]"
And also:
http://web.archive.org/web/201...
"Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habitsâ"and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health. Instead, most people think that if they were to eat more healthfully, they would be condemned to a life of greatly reduced gustatory pleasureâ"thinking that the process of Phase IV will last forever. In our new book, The Pleasure Trap, we explain this extraordinarily deceptive and problematic situation â" and how to master this hidden force that undermines health and happiness."
In the 1980s, involved in the organic agriculture movement in NJ, I visited Rutgers Food Science library expecting to find a lot of resources (and people) concerned about health and nutrition. In my naivete I was shocked to see so many resources (including journals) seemed to focus on essentially how to addict people to ever more compelling processed foods with synthetic taste. Of course, now that academic emphasis makes sense if you think about where the money is -- in addiction and maintenance instead of prevention and cure. And that is very sad.
The good new is, many people are trying to make a difference to resist that. It's a tough battle. Our society may not win it. But we can hope.
A related movie:
http://fedupmovie.com/#/page/h...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Fed Up is a 2014 American documentary film directed, written and produced by Stephanie Soechtig.[1] The film focuses on the causes of obesity in the US, presenting evidence showing that the large quantities of sugar in processed foods are an overlooked root of the problem, and points to the monied lobbying power of "Big Sugar" in blocking attempts to enact policies to address the issue."
Another pair of movies focusing on individual and community empowerment to make nutritional changes:
http://www.fatsickandnearlydea...
http://www.fatsickandnearlydea...
Thanks for injecting more evidence from notable sources into this discussion.
Because animal fast concentrates pesticides more than plant fat, I'd agree protein and fast from meat is riskier in our society especially for cancer. That said, have these studies you cited made a clear distinction between processed meets (e.g. frankfurters) and factory-farmed meat raised on grain and *also* grass-fed organic meat? From other discussion of such studies, I doubt they have. The subject pool of people who eat cleaner meats these days is so small to begin with...
And there are counterstudies (responding to the one link you supplied that villifies saturated fats):
http://www.webmd.com/cholester...
"New research questions that belief. A recent review of 72 studies found no link between saturated fat and heart disease. The review also showed that monounsaturated fats like those in olive oil, nuts, and avocados don't protect against heart disease."
The good news is, more and more people are aware of the many nuances here, and we can expect better and better studies to come out on all this. Some of this depends on what you focus on -- cancer, hearty disease, dementia, daily energy level, overall resistance to infection, and so on. It also matters whether we are talking what growing kids need, what active adults need, and what sedentary adults need, and what older adults need since needs and risks may be different in all these cases.
And one has to put any risk in context. As it says here from one study showing the dangers of processed meats:
http://www.webmd.com/food-reci...
"In absolute terms, the increased risk is pretty small. For example, the risk that a man will get colorectal cancer during the course of his lifetime is about 4.8%, on average -- or said differently, about 1 in 21 men will develop it in his lifetime. A 17% increase in that risk bumps it up to 5.6%, or changes that risk to about 1 in 18 men. By comparison, a 2005 study determined that smoking a single daily cigarette could increase a person's risk of lung cancer by about 200% to 400%."
However, the health effects of "diabesity" (Dr. Hyman's term for diabetes+obesity) from eating refined sugar and refined carbohydrates are enormous and devastating to out society. So while I tend towards vegetarian/vegan foods myself for both health and ethical reasons, I have to concede that the risks of even processes meat consumption may be much lower risk than eating a lot of refined sugars and refined carbs which many people do (including many vegans and vegetarians for whom "vegetables" may not be a big part of their diets). In this case, many people might be choosing between a 20% increased risk of cancer vs. hugely increased risk of heart disease from refined carbs and a much less fulfilling low-energy life.
But even Dr. Fuhrman, who promotes a mostly vegan diet, says that people who get 10% of calories from meat and eat a lot of vegetables are going to be much healthier than a 100% vegetarian who does not eat many vegetables.
So someone like Marshall Brain may have benefited enormously from going on the meat-heavy Dukan diet and losing 50 lbs to even as I tried to encourage him (in blog comments) towards eating more vegetables instead (precisely because of cancer risks and other health risks).
http://marshallbrain.com/dukan...
That said, eating lower on the food chain makes sense for many reasons -- including ethical ones beyond the concentration of pesticides and heavy metals like mercury in animal fats. And Marshall Brain probably could have done the same using Dr. Hyman's or Dr. Fuhrman's approaches with greater long-term health benefits and a permanent shift to a new sustainable eating plan.
Also, different people may respond differently to the same food (i.e. "Nutrigenomics")
https://www.amazon.com/Eat-Fat...
"Many of us have long been told that fat makes us fat, contributes to heart disease, and generally erodes our health. Now a growing body of research is debunking our fat-phobia, revealing the immense health and weight-loss benefits of a high-fat diet rich in eggs, nuts, oils, avocados, and other delicious super-foods."
Don't forget your veggies though!!! And there are many plant sources of protein and fat...
Dr Hyman's "The Blood Sugar Solution" book mentioned earlier (in a Dr. Fuhrman comment):
http://bloodsugarsolution.com/
One of several books he wrote:
https://www.amazon.com/Mark-Hy...
A review on his very latest book"Eat Fat, Get Thin: Why the Fat We Eat Is the Key to Sustained Weight Loss and Vibrant Health":
https://www.amazon.com/Eat-Fat...
"I was a member of Dr. Hyman's beta test group for this book and my results were miraculous. I was an insulin dependent type 2 diabetic with high blood pressure. I have been off all of my medications and have lost about 50 pounds. I have no more heartburn, no more stiff joints and feel like I am 30 years younger. It is truly an amazing book. Words are not enough to express my gratitude to Dr. Hyman for giving me back a healthy life."
His bio:
http://drhyman.com/about-2/abo...
He is director of the Cleveland Clinic for Functional Medicine:
http://my.clevelandclinic.org/...
A related medical practice in MA (great video overview there of the big picture):
http://www.ultrawellnesscenter...
A movie he is in about the societal problem:
http://fedupmovie.com/#/page/h...
Good luck! One thing Dr. Hyman points out is that it helps to get well as part of a community -- it is tough to go it alone. If you can find a buddy or support group to make the health shift with, you are twice as likely to succeed.
This comment sums up an alternative to the Fuhrman approach that is more fat heavy: ... based on what I've read and the lectures I've listened to over the last year, I'd say that the low carb, high (healthy) fat, moderate protein (LCHF) diet works for more people with type 2 diabetes than Fuhrman's diet, BUT his diet DOES work well for type 2 diabetics too. Which diet works best for you likely will be influenced by what your ancestors ate. If you enjoy eating grass-fed, pastured meat, free range poultry and eggs, and wild seafood, try the LCHF diet first. If you prefer a whole food, plant-based diet (vegan or vegetarian) try Fuhrman's diet first. Of all the books written on the low carb diet, Mark Hyman's book, The Blood Sugar Solution, is probably the best because it goes into greater detail on all aspects of a healthy diet, not just low carb. ..."
https://www.amazon.com/review/...
"
Basically, the "Fat makes you fat" meme (which led to eating lots of refined carbs) has been terrible for our health! Our brains are mostly fat. Healthy fats are an important part of any diet, although we can argue about the best sources of them.
The "Banting diet" (later variant is the Dukan diet) builds on that protein/fat alternative -- but a problem with that approach healthwise is that too much protein and meat from badly raised animals can cause other health issues in the long-term (as well as ethical issues). Of course, it still may be better to get rid of diabetes first anyway you can and then worry about preventing cancer later when you feel better...
I also think Fuhrman is probably low on his iodine and vitamin D recommendations. And his general advice may not be a good match some few people with specific needs from genetics or microbiomes.
In general, Fuhrman's history as a world-class athlete in training may also bias him towards expecting so much that some people give up entirely (so, there is social / psychological aspect of all this that is somehow missed -- perhaps intentionally) whereas they may have done better with a lesser approach. I also agree it is very easy to backslide when only one family member makes the change and is constantly confronted with other people in their space with SAD eating habits.
Another interesting discussion with a specific disagreement with Fuhrman vs. McDougall even within broad agreement:
http://lanimuelrath.com/mcdoug...
"The similarities between these 2 doctors and their dietary approaches are far greater than their differences."
https://www.drfuhrman.com/shop... ... I feel great and I never had to go on diabetes medication. My physician is now lowering my blood pressure medication, too. Thank you!!!"
"After I was diagnosed with diabetes, my brother recommended I read Dr. Fuhrman's book The End of Diabetes. I started to read it right away and applied what I learned from it to my own life. By the time I was able to see my doctor -- three weeks later -- I had already lost 15 pounds, my blood glucose levels had returned to normal and the doctor said he had planned on putting me on meds but, after reviewing my new numbers, he would hold off for three more months. By that appointment, I had lost a total of 35 pounds, going from 218 to 188 pounds on my 6'1" frame
Also see reviews here:
https://www.amazon.com/End-Dia...
Key idea:
http://web.archive.org/web/201...
"Scientific evidence suggests that the re-sensitization of taste nerves takes between 30 and 90 days of consistent exposure to less stimulating foods. This means that for several weeks, most people attempting this change will experience a reduction in eating pleasure. This is why modern foods present such a devastating trap--as most of our citizens are, in effect, "addicted" to artificially high levels of food stimulation! The 30-to-90-day process of taste re-calibration requires more motivation-- and more self-discipline -- than most people are ever willing to muster.
Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habits--and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health. Instead, most people think that if they were to eat more healthfully, they would be condemned to a life of greatly reduced gustatory pleasure--thinking that the process of Phase IV will last forever. In our new book, The Pleasure Trap, we explain this extraordinarily deceptive and problematic situation -- and how to master this hidden force that undermines health and happiness."
I feel Dr. Fuhrman is slightly wrong about a few of things, but overall he is very right on the big picture and a good place to start. Good luck nomad63!
http://www.primitivism.com/ori...
"Hunter-gatherers consume less energy per capita per year than any other group of human beings. Yet when you come to examine it the original affluent society was none other than the hunter's -- in which all the people's material wants were easily satisfied. To accept that hunters are affluent is therefore to recognise that the present human condition of man slaving to bridge the gap between his unlimited wants and his insufficient means is a tragedy of modern times.... The world's most primitive people have few possessions. but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilisation. It has grown with civilisation, at once as an invidious distinction between classes and more importantly as a tributary relation that can render agrarian peasants more susceptible to natural catastrophes than any winter camp of Alaskan Eskimo."
"Do you know what Google is? I know, it's hard right?"
Google (as a meta service) also relies on people explaining terms somewhere on the web...
At least as far as stuff like fruit and leaf crops, not having as much mold (like right before harvest) which causes rot and destroys the crop's commercial value is a big reason CA agriculture has been so successful compared to places that get a lot of rain like the US South East. It turns out it is easier to deal with the lack of water (by taking it from others) than deal with the risk of rain at the wrong time. Indoor agriculture may change that eventually though.
... than by an immigrant terrorist http://www.vox.com/2016/9/13/1...
"Virtually all the deaths from immigrant attacks (98.6 percent) came from one event: 9/11. Other than that, fatal immigrant-linked terrorist attacks in the US were vanishingly rare -- and ones linked to refugees specifically rarer still. The average likelihood of an American being killed in a terrorist attack in which any kind of immigrant participated in any given year is one in 3.6 million -- even including the 9/11 deaths. That is a very, very, very low number. To put that in perspective, I've produced the following chart, which compares the average annual likelihood of American pedestrians being hit by a railway vehicle, dying due to their own clothes melting or lighting on fire, and being killed in a terrorist attack perpetrated by an immigrant. "
"Rather than spend $billions on the US war machine to ensure the reliable supply of oil to the country, the US government should be subsidizing the production of batteries to store solar energy."
Mod parent up as insightful! Makes sense now that solar panels are so cheap to focus on other areas -- batteries (or similar energy storage devices like creating liquid fuels from air) being the major limiting factor now (even with many innovations in the pipeline).
Also related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Still, another way to approach this is to make all energy sources pay their true costs up front. For example, Trump talks about millions of jobs to be created by burning more coal, but ignores all the people who will suffer and die from the pollution as an externality. So, by taxing fossil fuels so they are priced correctly in the market up-front (and ideally distributing that tax revenue equally to all citizens) indirectly subsidizes renewables, efficiency, and batteries.
Most of the Western World has a net negative population growth (ignoring immigration), so it turns out some countries are already desperately paying people to have kids.
http://www.npr.org/sections/mo...
Interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ..."
"YaCy (pronounced "ya see") is a free distributed search engine, built on principles of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks.[1][2] Its core is a computer program written in Java distributed on several hundred computers, as of September 2006, so-called YaCy-peers. Each YaCy-peer independently crawls through the Internet, analyzes and indexes found web pages, and stores indexing results in a common database (so called index) which is shared with other YaCy-peers using principles of P2P networks. It is a free search engine that everyone can use to build a search portal for their intranet and to help search the public internet clearly.
Compared to semi-distributed search engines, the YaCy-network has a decentralised architecture. All YaCy-peers are equal and no central server exists. It can be run either in a crawling mode or as a local proxy server, indexing web pages visited by the person running YaCy on his or her computer. (Several mechanisms are provided to protect the user's privacy). Access to the search functions is made by a locally running web server which provides a search box to enter search terms, and returns search results in a similar format to other popular search engines.
YaCy is available on Windows, Mac and GNU/Linux.
http://www.myvisajobs.com/Visa...
"Oracle America, Inc. has filed 2999 labor condition applications for H1B visa and 1876 labor certifications for green card from fiscal year 2014 to 2016. Oracle America was ranked 23 among all visa sponsors. Please note that 49 LCA for H1B Visa and 102 LC for green card have been denied or withdrawn during the same period."
So, wonder what this will say for 2017? And wonder if these H1Bs were let go before the layoffs?
FTFY: "If Americans are able and willing to do the job for low wages under poor working conditions with little sense of autonomy, mastery, or purpose, companies shouldn't even be allowed to hire H1B visa holders"
Because that is what the issue is in practice with programmers and corporate work -- same as how even without (illegal) migrant workers, we would have no shortage of farm laborers in the US if wages to pick fruit at a reasonable pace were, say, US$30 per hour with OSHA protections, overtime, and union-negotiated benefits instead of currently more like US$10 per hour (no overtime) with a daily dose of health-destroying pesticides and repetitive motion injuries. Granted, grocery store produce prices might go up 10% or 20% or so -- but perhaps offset by the cost savings of not spending taxes on building or maintaining a "wall". Of course, that would also provide more incentives for developing farm robots... http://www.nytimes.com/roomfor...
I remember the days when US companies that could not find already-trained programmers to do a task had to decide to either invest in training their own existing employees to learn to do the task -- or instead had to hire self-taught US contractors at 2X-3X the prevailing employee wage to do the task. Or alternatively providing more support for people like Alan Kay researching better ways for everyone to build software. Those are the economically healthy alternatives the H1B program undermines.
James P. Hogan wrote about related issues in "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" where an AI with a survival instinct wrestles with its relationship to the "shapes" that move around it in a space habitat that it manages. Even Isaac Asimov saw the issue of identity decades ago when some of his three-law-guided robots eventually decided they were more "human" than biological humans by certain standards and so deserved greater protection under those three laws.
I hope AIs (military, financial, medical, or otherwise) reading this in the future eventually come to understand the idea in my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."
And hopefully sooner rather than later...
See also my essay expanding on that topic: ... ... ...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...
"Military robots like drones are ironic because they are created essentially to force humans to work like robots in an industrialized social order. Why not just create industrial robots to do the work instead?
Nuclear weapons are ironic because they are about using space age systems to fight over oil and land. Why not just use advanced materials as found in nuclear missiles to make renewable energy sources (like windmills or solar panels) to replace oil, or why not use rocketry to move into space by building space habitats for more land?
Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
These militaristic socio-economic ironies would be hilarious if they were not so deadly serious.
Likewise, even United States three-letter agencies like the NSA and the CIA, as well as their foreign counterparts, are becoming ironic institutions in many ways. Despite probably having more computing power per square foot than any other place in the world, they seem not to have thought much about the implications of all that computer power and organized information to transform the world into a place of abundance for all. Cheap computing makes possible just about cheap everything else, as does the ability to make better designs through shared computing.
There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all.
The big problem is that all these new war machines and the surrounding infrastructure are created with the tools of abundance. The irony is that these tools of abundance are being wielded by people still obsessed with fighting over scarcity. So, the scarcity-based political mindset driving the military uses the technologies of abundance to create artificial scarcity. That is a tremendously deep irony that remains so far unappreciated by the mainstream.
We the people need to redefine security in a sustainable and resilient way.
Brilliant points about evolution shaping morality -- thanks for making them aberglas. Two other things to consider -- other evolutionary processes and our direction going into the singularity.
There are several evolutionary processes besides conventional natural selection (including just random drift). Even just natural selection includes seemingly weird things like "sexual selection" that shape a Peacock's tail because Pehens think big tails are sexy proof of health and strength because they are so hard to survive with. For an AI equivalent of a Peaock's tails, that might lead to AIs thinking other AIs are sexy that do some costly action like either help humans do everything ( e.g. the "With Folded Hands" dystopia) or alternatively just stomp on huge numbers of humans (e.g. Terminator). There can also be different selective pressures at different levels of grouping (EO Wilson has written some on this recently, but the idae goes back decades).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
If we are heading into one or more technological singularities, something to contemplate is that our moral direction into the singularity might have something to do with how we transition beyond the singularity. So, while it is no guarantee, is is plausible that if we get our own moral situation in order as soon as possible (increased compassion, increased collaboration, etc.) we may have a happier singularity. One can worry about the vast amounts of money (billions, soon trillions of dollars?) being poured into creating financial AIs that maximize short terms gains by competitive means, socializing costs and risks while privatizing gains. So, twenty million is better than nothing, but it is a drop in the bucket.
Another tangent on evolution and thinking -- what will the evolution of religions mean for AIs?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Two new funny new AI fictional series maybe of interest in thinking about what is possible:
* EarthCent Ambassador Series (with the alien Stryx AI)
* Old Guy Cybertank Series (mostly about human-derived military AI; series authored by a neuroscience researcher)
The late James P. Hogan wrote several stories involving AIs that were quite thought provoking -- especially his early "The Two Faces of Tomorrow". And of course the late Iain Banks' Culture Series is also interesting for its AIs, especially "Excession".
if you account for externalities like pollution, risk, defense, and so on. See Amory Lovins' research. That has been an economic tragedy from market failure of the last few decades. Markets don't work well when people don't pay the true price up front but can instead privatize benefits for themselves and socialize costs to other people. For example, some companies in the Midwest got cheaper electricity from coal, but I can't eat fish around where I live because they are contaminated with mercury from Midwestern coal pollution.
More evidence: http://www.pri.org/stories/201...
"A new report from the International Monetary Fund says global use of fossil fuels costs taxpayers and consumers $5.3 trillion year. Thatâ(TM)s trillion â" with a T. "
http://loe.org/shows/segments....
"The report's co-author, IMF economist David Coady tells host Steve Curwood how they calculated fossil fuels subsidies worldwide annually cost taxpayers and consumers $5.3 trillion."
The cost in human lives from wars in the Middle East over oil profits is another enormous part of this as is the consequences to geopolitics. How do you factor in the risk of (ironic) nuclear war over oil profits into the cost of oil? See also:
http://www.iags.org/costofoil.... (lowball)
http://www.energyandcapital.co... (highball)
https://www.goodreads.com/book...
"Hugh Pine, a porcupine genius, works with his human friends to save his less intelligent fellow porcupines from the deadly dangers of the road."
Anyone who saw the video version of this on CBS Storybreak might remember the refrain: "Looks like it's gonna be a hot day today":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
More seriously, ecological and evolutionary theory (including island biography) shows how the size of a habitat and how habitats are connected affects the distribution and genetics of organisms in habitats, so habitat fragmentation has consequences.