Political affiliations in general have more to do with historic alliances than overarching philosophical beliefs. There's no philosophical reason for example to expect attitudes towards abortion, environmental issues, and military spending to all line up as they do.
Worse than that. A lot of countries outside the US would likely use ICANN to restrict content. China might want to restrict websites which talk about all sorts of things. European countries would want to restrict hate speech and Holocaust denial. Islamic countries would want to restrict blasphemous websites. Etc. For all the many faults of the US, ICANN is one thing that must stay in US hands if we value free speech.
There has been an increase in election of right-wing officials in the House certainly, but my many other metrics people have moved to the left. One prominent example is gay rights where 20 years ago gay marriage was almost unheard of as an idea and now has large scale support.
This would be a reason to worry less if it were a single data point. But this sort of explanation doesn't help explain the apparent increase over time unless you think people are getting less careful about reading questions or using context recognition.
There's prior evidence that higher education and intelligence levels lead to rejection of astrology. See http://www.unz.com/gnxp/the-less-intelligent-more-likely-to-accept-astrology-as-scientific/. However, astrology is more commonly believed on the left than on the right end of the political spectrum as measured by self-identified conservatives or liberals. See the prior link where about only 65% of liberals declare astrology to be not at all scientific as opposed to about 75% of conservatives.. (In general a lot of different pseudoscientific beliefs end up being more or less common on one end of the political spectrum, although these can change over time, such as anti-vaccination attitudes becoming more common on the right after the HPV vaccine came out.) The correlation is not that strong, but there has been a left-ward trend in the US in the last few years. It is possible that memetic drag has thus increased the belief in astrology.
After all, when you look at the Earth from space, you see mostly nitrogen, oxygen, and water vapor. It's always a problem to infer the interior of something from what you see on the outside (as in, you can't judge a book by its cover). The proposed LENR (Cold Fusion) physics, perhaps along with some notion of quantum decay of nuclei leading to outgassed hydrogen (my suggestion), could provide a way that a sun (or planet, including the Earth) made of mostly nickel and iron could produce a lot of internal heat from LENR.
No. The solar neutrino flux is almost precisely that which is proposed by models and this does let us check our models. We can also estimate the sun's density if it had an iron core. It would be much denser and it wouldn't have an easy way to prevent collapse. There's also no plausible model for anything remotely like this to form naturally. Those are just a few of the many problems with this suggestion. Thinking about ideas is good but please be aware that it is extremely unlikely that a single individual thinking on their own is going to come up with a serious problem in theories that withstood many empirical tests over the last 50 years, and even less likely to then come up with the correct hypothesis. Claiming that the sun is mostly iron isn't the same level as claiming that evolution hasn't happened, but it isn't that far off. At minimum, a glance at your website shows no predictions that would differ from standard. At minimum to be taking seriously you need to propose some test that can be done that will strongly differentiate your model from the standard explanation. Without that, there's little reason to pay attention.
Yes, I know that. But it is confusing to have the negative sign there. It would work just as well without it. In contrast pH which is concentration so if you want a positive number you need a negative sign. There's no really natural reason to have a negative sign for magnitude. It works fine but frequently confuses non-astronomy people. Really these are just arbitrary conventions and I was going for a funny aside. This is definitely not the only example of a system of measurement we use which is convenient largely for historical reasons.
Small stars can live a very long-time. For example a red dwarf that is a tenth the size of the sun can likely keep burning for trillions of years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_dwarf. A star of the size discussed here easily has billions of years more to it lifespan.
According to TFA this star itself was likely born from the death of a genuinely primordial star (which would have started with almost nothing by hydrogen and helium). One of the upshots of this work is that some primordial stars may have produced much less iron than some models have suggested which could explain some discrepancies in the observed isotopic ratios in some old stars. According to the actual article (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature12990.html which may be behind a paywall) this star has an apparent visual magnitude of 14.7. This puts this star just in the limits of amateur observations. Charon has an apparent magnitude of around 15.5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charon_(moon) and that's been successfully imaged by amateurs (larger apparent magnitude means dimmer because astronomers are silly) http://www.universetoday.com/20351/charon-imaged-by-amateur-astronomers/ , so this star could be looked at by a dedicated amateur in the southern hemisphere.
A major reason why dictatorships (or for that matter sometimes non-functioning governments of other forms, e.g. the Weimar Republic) is because of economic pressures as well as undisciplined monetary policies where they try to solve problems by just printing more bills. Bitcoin makes that impossible, so the end result will be that those governments will either not use such a limited currency, or will use it up until the point they want to print more where they will then either abandon the cryptocurrency or declare that some other currency must have some exchange rate with the Bitcoins and print more of those. That's before we get to the issue that functioning governments have legitimate reasons to adjust the money supply. So the summary's claim that this would appeal to countries struggling with heavy inflation doesn't really make sense.
I'm not a designer and they aren't paying me to try to do design. The only issue I brought up which was primarily a pictorial issue was the achievements display which has two such obvious solutions that they shouldn't need to be stated: 1) having the achievement information appear when you mouse over it 2) just use freaking text. Incidentally, the use of extra graphics over text is a really strange thing given that we live in an era of mobile devices.
It doesn't require detailed feedback to say that one should use a smaller default font. And asking that you have an option when you click on a comment from a userpage to actually go to the comment is so basic that I shouldn't need any special issue. Thank you for pointing out the typo in "interfact." if they aren't listening to people because of typos in feedback they aren't going to be listening to much at all.
Do you write these letters to all the sites you visit?
No. But I do write a letter when it is a website that I like and to which I actively contribute and where they've *asked for my feedback*.
Agreed. Here's the letter I sent to the feedback email about Beta:
I've been a Slashdot user since 2007. My username is JoshuaZ ID# 1134087. I strongly dislike the beta version. The large default font makes less on a page at any given time. The comment handling is inferior and is harder to follow. It makes it much harder to just see upvoted comments instead subjecting us to the entire thread. I don't want a choice between "all" and insightful, informative or funny. I want an option to just see the more upvoted comments with the other comments still there with their subject lines so I can then decide based on that if they are worth looking into.
The userpage interfact and display is also lacking. The new version of the achievement display is strictly inferior since it doesn't show when things happened or give any information about the achievements instead giving cutesy graphics that tell nothing about what an achievement is for. Even knowing what achievements are common, I had to use the inspect element feature on my browser to figure out which is which. Comments in the user page also don't show how much they have been upvoted or downvoted nor do they give their description of how they've been modded. There's also no way to just go directly from a comment on the userpage to the comment on the article page, but instead the link takes one directly to the top of the article. This means that if one wants to find the context of a comment one needs to go to the main article and then search for the comment itself. This is inconvenient.
Overall, beta has many minor inconveniences. Any of these by itself would be minor but the totality is highly unpleasant. All of these should be fixed.
Now that I've had even more experience with beta I'd have other fun things to add to that email. I'm not optimistic that any of this feedback is going to be listened to.
But that's exactly what this sort of thing shows is not the case! The data about cognitive biases is robust. This one is a variation of the framing effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_effect_(psychology) and the data shows that even smart people as individuals don't do well on such tests. We are all as individuals subject to cognitive biases. What's even worse is that knowing about cognitive biases can even be counterproductive http://lesswrong.com/lw/he/knowing_about_biases_can_hurt_people/ because we are much more prone to see them in other people than in ourselves even though we're all subject to them.
It seems like this is more in the gee-whiz category than anything practical and they seem to have the class more because it is cool than because they expect this to happen anytime soon. A few parts of the article stand out:
"Think about how much space you need in a typical house today, and how much of it you use at a given time," Olds said. "If the house could dynamically reconfigure itself to match your daily routine, you could find yourself being much happier in less space and using less energy. For example, a room could be configured as an office during the day, with a media wall that is used as a business display. But at night, it could be a living room, and then it could transform into a bedroom."
But much of the rest of the world outside the US has much smaller houses already. People here have massive houses not because they need to but because they apparently want to. This is especially true in the suburbs where the rooms are often much larger than they need to accomplish their goals. Large houses are status symbols and the size of American houses has little connection to what is practically necessary. Maybe this might work better in Europe or if it were restricted in the US to urban centers? The article also acknowledges problems with other ideas, such as how they discuss modular bathrooms but then acknowledge that getting all the pipes and the like to fit would be difficult. And nothing here even begins to touch on the many issues there would be with building codes.
I've never played Eve Online and have no intention of doing so. But I'm continually fascinated by how cool the space battles look. Essentially we have a computer game today where the unchoreographed battles look better than the space battles made using special effects from the late 1980s. That's an amazing testament to how far the technology has come.
The actual paper can be found here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.5761. People have suggested informally ideas somewhat similar to this one before, but Hawking proposal seems to actually have the math behind it. Possibly most importantly, he can show that his predictions are a consequence of gauge/gravity duality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdS/CFT_correspondence. This suggests that this may be a testale consequence of certain string theories if one could observe a black hole under the right conditions and see that it only was pretending to be a black hole.
Yeah, I was surprised by that. When I was on OKCupid my rate of getting a second date if I got a first one was greater than 50%. It may indicate that he's picky in ways that aren't easily described in the OKCupid system, but your point is well-taken. That particular statistic is evidence of systemic failure (although the 91 v. 99 is not).
As long as we're doing anecdotes, my own height is close to 5'2'', I never lied about that and didn't have much trouble at all. Height probably can help, but it isn't everything.
No, more a function of noise in the system. The difference between a 91% and a 99% in the OKCupid system isn't that large, especially since less compatibility can also result simply from someone answering fewer questions.
Yes, but it wasn't clear if that was because you actually understood that the individual had a decent relationship going on or was just further snark. More seriously, As far as I can tell from the article the main problem with his method was a poor signal to noise ratio which was made worse by the large number of candidates. The signal to noise ratio on online dating is always terrible, but it would be more noticeable when one has a larger pool. In fact people optimize profiles all the time (which hobbies they emphasize, which pictures of themselves they present, etc.). But somehow when one optimizes more effectively relying not on vague intuitions but actual data, then people have reactions like yours. (Possibly relevant disclaimer: I met my girlfriend on OkCupid. I did not do what this guy did.)
So, you have a testable set of hypotheses. Those hypotheses have non-testable consequences also. Calling those consequences "faith" seems off. For example, consider the following hypothesis "Every state is majority hydrogen." Now, there are stars which are in the process of disappearing from our future light cone due to the expansion of space. This hypothesis which we can get a lot of evidence for also implies that those stars are majority hydrogen. We will never be able to test that. Does that make that conclusion "faith"?
Slashdot Mirror
Political affiliations in general have more to do with historic alliances than overarching philosophical beliefs. There's no philosophical reason for example to expect attitudes towards abortion, environmental issues, and military spending to all line up as they do.
Worse than that. A lot of countries outside the US would likely use ICANN to restrict content. China might want to restrict websites which talk about all sorts of things. European countries would want to restrict hate speech and Holocaust denial. Islamic countries would want to restrict blasphemous websites. Etc. For all the many faults of the US, ICANN is one thing that must stay in US hands if we value free speech.
There has been an increase in election of right-wing officials in the House certainly, but my many other metrics people have moved to the left. One prominent example is gay rights where 20 years ago gay marriage was almost unheard of as an idea and now has large scale support.
This would be a reason to worry less if it were a single data point. But this sort of explanation doesn't help explain the apparent increase over time unless you think people are getting less careful about reading questions or using context recognition.
There's prior evidence that higher education and intelligence levels lead to rejection of astrology. See http://www.unz.com/gnxp/the-less-intelligent-more-likely-to-accept-astrology-as-scientific/. However, astrology is more commonly believed on the left than on the right end of the political spectrum as measured by self-identified conservatives or liberals. See the prior link where about only 65% of liberals declare astrology to be not at all scientific as opposed to about 75% of conservatives.. (In general a lot of different pseudoscientific beliefs end up being more or less common on one end of the political spectrum, although these can change over time, such as anti-vaccination attitudes becoming more common on the right after the HPV vaccine came out.) The correlation is not that strong, but there has been a left-ward trend in the US in the last few years. It is possible that memetic drag has thus increased the belief in astrology.
After all, when you look at the Earth from space, you see mostly nitrogen, oxygen, and water vapor. It's always a problem to infer the interior of something from what you see on the outside (as in, you can't judge a book by its cover). The proposed LENR (Cold Fusion) physics, perhaps along with some notion of quantum decay of nuclei leading to outgassed hydrogen (my suggestion), could provide a way that a sun (or planet, including the Earth) made of mostly nickel and iron could produce a lot of internal heat from LENR.
No. The solar neutrino flux is almost precisely that which is proposed by models and this does let us check our models. We can also estimate the sun's density if it had an iron core. It would be much denser and it wouldn't have an easy way to prevent collapse. There's also no plausible model for anything remotely like this to form naturally. Those are just a few of the many problems with this suggestion. Thinking about ideas is good but please be aware that it is extremely unlikely that a single individual thinking on their own is going to come up with a serious problem in theories that withstood many empirical tests over the last 50 years, and even less likely to then come up with the correct hypothesis. Claiming that the sun is mostly iron isn't the same level as claiming that evolution hasn't happened, but it isn't that far off. At minimum, a glance at your website shows no predictions that would differ from standard. At minimum to be taking seriously you need to propose some test that can be done that will strongly differentiate your model from the standard explanation. Without that, there's little reason to pay attention.
Yes, I know that. But it is confusing to have the negative sign there. It would work just as well without it. In contrast pH which is concentration so if you want a positive number you need a negative sign. There's no really natural reason to have a negative sign for magnitude. It works fine but frequently confuses non-astronomy people. Really these are just arbitrary conventions and I was going for a funny aside. This is definitely not the only example of a system of measurement we use which is convenient largely for historical reasons.
Small stars can live a very long-time. For example a red dwarf that is a tenth the size of the sun can likely keep burning for trillions of years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_dwarf. A star of the size discussed here easily has billions of years more to it lifespan.
According to TFA this star itself was likely born from the death of a genuinely primordial star (which would have started with almost nothing by hydrogen and helium). One of the upshots of this work is that some primordial stars may have produced much less iron than some models have suggested which could explain some discrepancies in the observed isotopic ratios in some old stars. According to the actual article (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature12990.html which may be behind a paywall) this star has an apparent visual magnitude of 14.7. This puts this star just in the limits of amateur observations. Charon has an apparent magnitude of around 15.5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charon_(moon) and that's been successfully imaged by amateurs (larger apparent magnitude means dimmer because astronomers are silly) http://www.universetoday.com/20351/charon-imaged-by-amateur-astronomers/ , so this star could be looked at by a dedicated amateur in the southern hemisphere.
A major reason why dictatorships (or for that matter sometimes non-functioning governments of other forms, e.g. the Weimar Republic) is because of economic pressures as well as undisciplined monetary policies where they try to solve problems by just printing more bills. Bitcoin makes that impossible, so the end result will be that those governments will either not use such a limited currency, or will use it up until the point they want to print more where they will then either abandon the cryptocurrency or declare that some other currency must have some exchange rate with the Bitcoins and print more of those. That's before we get to the issue that functioning governments have legitimate reasons to adjust the money supply. So the summary's claim that this would appeal to countries struggling with heavy inflation doesn't really make sense.
I'm not a designer and they aren't paying me to try to do design. The only issue I brought up which was primarily a pictorial issue was the achievements display which has two such obvious solutions that they shouldn't need to be stated: 1) having the achievement information appear when you mouse over it 2) just use freaking text. Incidentally, the use of extra graphics over text is a really strange thing given that we live in an era of mobile devices.
It doesn't require detailed feedback to say that one should use a smaller default font. And asking that you have an option when you click on a comment from a userpage to actually go to the comment is so basic that I shouldn't need any special issue. Thank you for pointing out the typo in "interfact." if they aren't listening to people because of typos in feedback they aren't going to be listening to much at all.
Do you write these letters to all the sites you visit?
No. But I do write a letter when it is a website that I like and to which I actively contribute and where they've *asked for my feedback*.
I've been a Slashdot user since 2007. My username is JoshuaZ ID# 1134087. I strongly dislike the beta version. The large default font makes less on a page at any given time. The comment handling is inferior and is harder to follow. It makes it much harder to just see upvoted comments instead subjecting us to the entire thread. I don't want a choice between "all" and insightful, informative or funny. I want an option to just see the more upvoted comments with the other comments still there with their subject lines so I can then decide based on that if they are worth looking into.
The userpage interfact and display is also lacking. The new version of the achievement display is strictly inferior since it doesn't show when things happened or give any information about the achievements instead giving cutesy graphics that tell nothing about what an achievement is for. Even knowing what achievements are common, I had to use the inspect element feature on my browser to figure out which is which. Comments in the user page also don't show how much they have been upvoted or downvoted nor do they give their description of how they've been modded. There's also no way to just go directly from a comment on the userpage to the comment on the article page, but instead the link takes one directly to the top of the article. This means that if one wants to find the context of a comment one needs to go to the main article and then search for the comment itself. This is inconvenient.
Overall, beta has many minor inconveniences. Any of these by itself would be minor but the totality is highly unpleasant. All of these should be fixed.
Now that I've had even more experience with beta I'd have other fun things to add to that email. I'm not optimistic that any of this feedback is going to be listened to.
Sure, tribalism exists and that's also a problem. But the central issue here is framing effect, and that occurs at an individual level.
But that's exactly what this sort of thing shows is not the case! The data about cognitive biases is robust. This one is a variation of the framing effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_effect_(psychology) and the data shows that even smart people as individuals don't do well on such tests. We are all as individuals subject to cognitive biases. What's even worse is that knowing about cognitive biases can even be counterproductive http://lesswrong.com/lw/he/knowing_about_biases_can_hurt_people/ because we are much more prone to see them in other people than in ourselves even though we're all subject to them.
"Think about how much space you need in a typical house today, and how much of it you use at a given time," Olds said. "If the house could dynamically reconfigure itself to match your daily routine, you could find yourself being much happier in less space and using less energy. For example, a room could be configured as an office during the day, with a media wall that is used as a business display. But at night, it could be a living room, and then it could transform into a bedroom."
But much of the rest of the world outside the US has much smaller houses already. People here have massive houses not because they need to but because they apparently want to. This is especially true in the suburbs where the rooms are often much larger than they need to accomplish their goals. Large houses are status symbols and the size of American houses has little connection to what is practically necessary. Maybe this might work better in Europe or if it were restricted in the US to urban centers? The article also acknowledges problems with other ideas, such as how they discuss modular bathrooms but then acknowledge that getting all the pipes and the like to fit would be difficult. And nothing here even begins to touch on the many issues there would be with building codes.
I've never played Eve Online and have no intention of doing so. But I'm continually fascinated by how cool the space battles look. Essentially we have a computer game today where the unchoreographed battles look better than the space battles made using special effects from the late 1980s. That's an amazing testament to how far the technology has come.
The actual paper can be found here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.5761. People have suggested informally ideas somewhat similar to this one before, but Hawking proposal seems to actually have the math behind it. Possibly most importantly, he can show that his predictions are a consequence of gauge/gravity duality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdS/CFT_correspondence. This suggests that this may be a testale consequence of certain string theories if one could observe a black hole under the right conditions and see that it only was pretending to be a black hole.
Yeah, I was surprised by that. When I was on OKCupid my rate of getting a second date if I got a first one was greater than 50%. It may indicate that he's picky in ways that aren't easily described in the OKCupid system, but your point is well-taken. That particular statistic is evidence of systemic failure (although the 91 v. 99 is not).
As long as we're doing anecdotes, my own height is close to 5'2'', I never lied about that and didn't have much trouble at all. Height probably can help, but it isn't everything.
No, more a function of noise in the system. The difference between a 91% and a 99% in the OKCupid system isn't that large, especially since less compatibility can also result simply from someone answering fewer questions.
Please read the actual article. His entire approach was optimizing his profile for other people's searches not the other way around.
Yes, but it wasn't clear if that was because you actually understood that the individual had a decent relationship going on or was just further snark. More seriously, As far as I can tell from the article the main problem with his method was a poor signal to noise ratio which was made worse by the large number of candidates. The signal to noise ratio on online dating is always terrible, but it would be more noticeable when one has a larger pool. In fact people optimize profiles all the time (which hobbies they emphasize, which pictures of themselves they present, etc.). But somehow when one optimizes more effectively relying not on vague intuitions but actual data, then people have reactions like yours. (Possibly relevant disclaimer: I met my girlfriend on OkCupid. I did not do what this guy did.)
Did you read the whole article? He ended up with his now fiance this way and they are doing well.
It is approximately one millionth of the surface area of all the pages in the Library of Congress.
So, you have a testable set of hypotheses. Those hypotheses have non-testable consequences also. Calling those consequences "faith" seems off. For example, consider the following hypothesis "Every state is majority hydrogen." Now, there are stars which are in the process of disappearing from our future light cone due to the expansion of space. This hypothesis which we can get a lot of evidence for also implies that those stars are majority hydrogen. We will never be able to test that. Does that make that conclusion "faith"?