No, Occam's Razor does not suggest that there is a powerful, sinister organization which is ruthlessly stamping out any leaders who even start to surface--that's your false dilemma talking.
At least two much more reasonable possibilities present themselves immediately. The survey may have been worded poorly (or suffered from some other methodological flaw) such that it grossly overstates the degree to which American and dissatisfied with their government; or, to address your particular claim, the problems which America face may be too intractable to be solved by any one leader, no matter how competent.
Sorry, but many slashdot posters have an IQ of 140+.
First of all, 'many' is not 'most', nor is it any other meaningfully quantifiable term (e.g., the average slashdoter has IQ of 140+; 20% of slashdotters have an IQ of 140+); so unless you have detailed statistics about the distribution of IQs within Slashdot's population you have not shown that the average slashdoter will be smarter than any other random person. See: Many Canadians have an IQ of 140+. That puts Canadians well into the top percentage of IQ across whatever reference group you care to name. Odds are thus pretty damn high that a random person a Canadian bumps into will be less intelligent than him or her.
Second, I don't know how you know the IQ of 'many' slashdoters, but if you're basing that on the self-reported IQ here in the comments, then you really need to shake off the groupthink.
As for my second paragraph, I was adding some thoughts about the problems with relying on statistical trends about a large population, even when those trends are true, which Derbyshire does in some of his more reasonable bullet points. It wasn't directed at you, and there's no need to get so angry about it.
Hmm. Many slashdot posters are almost certainly smarter than any random black person they're going to meet.
Almost certainly smarter than any random white, yellow, purple or green person too. That's an unfortunate downside of being intelligent.
If you actually believe this you need to stop reading so much Slashdot and shake off the group-think.
Furthermore, even if you accept Derbyshire's assertion that whites have statistically higher IQs than blacks, it's still racist to assume that you, or any other random white, is smarter most black people you'll meet. First, because such attitudes do real and lasting harm to society; and second, because in any actual interaction you'll have much more immediate and telling evidence about your black interlocutor's intelligence than some extremely broad statistical generalization. You ought to judge people based on specific facts pertaining to the individual--any thing less is lazy and, in some circumstances, racist.
Which 'talk' did you read? I read the non-black talk, and all of the black talks Derbyshire linked to, and none were as racists and unreasonable as Derbyshire. I started the article expecting to see some tone-deaf statements that were overblown; but I was wrong. That's the most overtly racist published article I've ever read.
I rarely ever took notes. I'm sure I was the only one in lecture theatres of 180 people.
Given that this is at least the fifth such comment I've read, I'm reminded forcefully of XKCD Vol. 610. You're (presumably, given your use of the past tense) not an adolescent any more, so you have no excuse for thinking your situation is utterly unique in all the world. If even Stephen Hawking can dredge up a little humility, so can you.
A librarian with programming knowledge would be snapped up immediately (since most libraries are being forced to digitise their collections).
Someone who can speak arabic would be much better writing an english -> arabic translator than the vast majority of programmers.
If you're writing animation software, an animator who can program is much more valuable than a programmer who knows nothing about animation.
No, they would write unmaintainable, buggy crap. Ideally you'd have both a domain expert with programming knowledge and programmer with domain knowledge (if they're the same person, even better!), but if you can only have either a programmer with some domain knowledge, or a domain expert with some programming knowledge, you need the programmer.
Writing software that others depend on is hard.
You need to predict when it will be ready to use, you need to validate for strange inputs, and make sure it either works, or fails in such a way that the user knows it has failed. You need to write the code in such away that someone else can take over for you if you quit. You need to anticipate future changes, at least to the degree that you don't have to rewrite the thing every three months. You may have to discern what the program should do from the vague and contradictory statements of users who don't even know what's possible
There's so much more to software engineering / programming / application development / whatever-you-want-to-call-it than designing and implementing an algorithm, or writing a script to automate some frequent task.
Programmers are only a commodity for those who don't care about quality.
Too unlikely or undesirable to be considered a possibility
Therefore the word doesn't necessarily say anything about how much thought has been put into a contingency. Next time you feel the urge to write a pedantic nit-pick post which adds nothing to the discussion you ought to get your facts straight first.
To avoid being found guilty of exactly what I just accused you of, both GP and GPP are wrong. X is a cliche excuse for Y is itself a cliche excuse for not confronting the truth that the world is a complicated place with few right answers and even fewer absolute truths.
Nice Strawman. The issue isn't whether the government can abridge the freedom of the press, but rather what activities ought to be protected under 'freedom of the press'. In other words, since the Constitution doesn't explicitly define what 'the press' is, there's room for discussion about whether new activities, such as blogging, ought to be included.
Try this. I may just be a prude or paranoid, but if I lived in the States, I wouldn't want to be caught showing that to a child. I'd end up on the Sex Offender Registry.
you pay money to the government in return for the privilege of living and working in your nation.
Parent:
You don't pay the government for the privilege of living, and reading that actually makes me a little sick to my stomach.
A beautifully subtle and clever troll. Who will notice if you omit a tiny preposition that is a couple words away from the verb it is linked to? Still deserves a Troll mod though. Too bad my points ran out earlier today.
Good point. The only place I worked which did their own payroll was IBM, and they, somewhat ironically, had a god-awful system from the 70s that you had to run on an emulator or some bullshit.
Seeing how that data for those years has yet to be recorded, he cannot possibly compare the forecasted values to the actual values to test the accuracy.
Of course he can. His data comes from a model, so he can produce data for any 'years' he wants to.
It's entirely relevant to the accuracy of the model. You cannot use fictional data to try to understand the causes and variation in a real world variable.
The article doesn't address understanding causes and variation of a real world variable, it address the ability of a model to track the underlying model it was built from. Whether the underlying model was reality or just another model, if anything, ought to make the task easier.
I called out his "calibration" as bullshit.
Your work, as you've described it, is no different than what the article claims does not work.
Care to tell the class what you do for a living and your educational background?
Masters in Computer Science--not that my credentials are relevant to the strength or weakness of my argument.
We've already established that I have reason (both educationally and career-wise) to know WTF I'm talking about
First, your education and career may indicate that you ought to know what you're talking about, but the arguments you put forth show that you don't.
Second, this is perhaps the crux of matter addressed by the article. You, and I assume many other economists, think you know what you're doing, but you don't. You're practicing cargo cult science--going through the motions of statistical analysis without understanding what you're doing or why, and consequently producing garbage models that don't predict anything other than the 10 years of data you tested against.
He had two models. The first model produced hypothetical historical data (analogously, the data from 1950 to 2010). He then created a second model, built on part of the 'historical data' (1950-1999) and tested on the remainder (2000-2010). He then used the first model to produce another segment of data (2011-2020), and found that the second model did not predict this 'new' data at all.
You and he are doing the same thing; the fact that your 'historical' data comes from reality and his comes from a model is irrelevant so far as the second model is concerned. The phenomenon described by the article is known as 'over fitting the training data' in Machine Learning circles, and is widely known in other fields, according to the comments. Perhaps if you pursued a degree in something a little less soft than 'Applied Economics' you might understand the Math you're blindly applying.
If you've done a good job collecting a large enough data set and including the necessary variables, you'll have some pretty damn good predictions for the first part of your time series.
Did you even read the article? Allow me to quote the relevant portion:
The problem, of course, is that while these different versions of the model might all match the historical data, they would in general generate different predictions going forward
Regardless of your spurious claims about 'not calibrating models', the point remains that in any complex system multiple different models can be found that fit the small slice of time you use for accuracy testing, without fitting the unseen future data.
Slashdot Mirror
No, Occam's Razor does not suggest that there is a powerful, sinister organization which is ruthlessly stamping out any leaders who even start to surface--that's your false dilemma talking.
At least two much more reasonable possibilities present themselves immediately. The survey may have been worded poorly (or suffered from some other methodological flaw) such that it grossly overstates the degree to which American and dissatisfied with their government; or, to address your particular claim, the problems which America face may be too intractable to be solved by any one leader, no matter how competent.
Sorry, but many slashdot posters have an IQ of 140+.
First of all, 'many' is not 'most', nor is it any other meaningfully quantifiable term (e.g., the average slashdoter has IQ of 140+; 20% of slashdotters have an IQ of 140+); so unless you have detailed statistics about the distribution of IQs within Slashdot's population you have not shown that the average slashdoter will be smarter than any other random person. See: Many Canadians have an IQ of 140+. That puts Canadians well into the top percentage of IQ across whatever reference group you care to name. Odds are thus pretty damn high that a random person a Canadian bumps into will be less intelligent than him or her.
Second, I don't know how you know the IQ of 'many' slashdoters, but if you're basing that on the self-reported IQ here in the comments, then you really need to shake off the groupthink.
As for my second paragraph, I was adding some thoughts about the problems with relying on statistical trends about a large population, even when those trends are true, which Derbyshire does in some of his more reasonable bullet points. It wasn't directed at you, and there's no need to get so angry about it.
Hmm. Many slashdot posters are almost certainly smarter than any random black person they're going to meet.
Almost certainly smarter than any random white, yellow, purple or green person too. That's an unfortunate downside of being intelligent.
If you actually believe this you need to stop reading so much Slashdot and shake off the group-think.
Furthermore, even if you accept Derbyshire's assertion that whites have statistically higher IQs than blacks, it's still racist to assume that you, or any other random white, is smarter most black people you'll meet. First, because such attitudes do real and lasting harm to society; and second, because in any actual interaction you'll have much more immediate and telling evidence about your black interlocutor's intelligence than some extremely broad statistical generalization. You ought to judge people based on specific facts pertaining to the individual--any thing less is lazy and, in some circumstances, racist.
Which 'talk' did you read? I read the non-black talk, and all of the black talks Derbyshire linked to, and none were as racists and unreasonable as Derbyshire. I started the article expecting to see some tone-deaf statements that were overblown; but I was wrong. That's the most overtly racist published article I've ever read.
128K? What a bunch of bloated crapware. I was working on code that had to fit within 28K last year
Don't feel so bad. The treatment probably causes cancer.
In any case, what other, easy to use term would you use for a modern long gun.
Does 'long gun' not serve?
I rarely ever took notes. I'm sure I was the only one in lecture theatres of 180 people.
Given that this is at least the fifth such comment I've read, I'm reminded forcefully of XKCD Vol. 610. You're (presumably, given your use of the past tense) not an adolescent any more, so you have no excuse for thinking your situation is utterly unique in all the world. If even Stephen Hawking can dredge up a little humility, so can you.
A librarian with programming knowledge would be snapped up immediately (since most libraries are being forced to digitise their collections).
Someone who can speak arabic would be much better writing an english -> arabic translator than the vast majority of programmers.
If you're writing animation software, an animator who can program is much more valuable than a programmer who knows nothing about animation.
No, they would write unmaintainable, buggy crap. Ideally you'd have both a domain expert with programming knowledge and programmer with domain knowledge (if they're the same person, even better!), but if you can only have either a programmer with some domain knowledge, or a domain expert with some programming knowledge, you need the programmer.
Writing software that others depend on is hard.
You need to predict when it will be ready to use, you need to validate for strange inputs, and make sure it either works, or fails in such a way that the user knows it has failed. You need to write the code in such away that someone else can take over for you if you quit. You need to anticipate future changes, at least to the degree that you don't have to rewrite the thing every three months. You may have to discern what the program should do from the vague and contradictory statements of users who don't even know what's possible
There's so much more to software engineering / programming / application development / whatever-you-want-to-call-it than designing and implementing an algorithm, or writing a script to automate some frequent task.
Programmers are only a commodity for those who don't care about quality.
A few links for the interested:
Temperature Record
Hockey Stick claim
Sedimentary data claim
An astute observation! I suggest a revision:
-inanimate-noun- don't -animate-verb- people. People -animate-verb- people.
\Computational Linguist
No. Here is a definition of unthinkable:
Too unlikely or undesirable to be considered a possibility
Therefore the word doesn't necessarily say anything about how much thought has been put into a contingency. Next time you feel the urge to write a pedantic nit-pick post which adds nothing to the discussion you ought to get your facts straight first.
To avoid being found guilty of exactly what I just accused you of, both GP and GPP are wrong. X is a cliche excuse for Y is itself a cliche excuse for not confronting the truth that the world is a complicated place with few right answers and even fewer absolute truths.
I have forgotten what SOPA is a couple times a week for that same period :(
Yeah! A magazine full of faceless women isn't creepy at all!
Nice Strawman. The issue isn't whether the government can abridge the freedom of the press, but rather what activities ought to be protected under 'freedom of the press'. In other words, since the Constitution doesn't explicitly define what 'the press' is, there's room for discussion about whether new activities, such as blogging, ought to be included.
It's jokes all the way down!
Try this. I may just be a prude or paranoid, but if I lived in the States, I wouldn't want to be caught showing that to a child. I'd end up on the Sex Offender Registry.
you pay money to the government in return for the privilege of living and working in your nation.
Parent:
You don't pay the government for the privilege of living, and reading that actually makes me a little sick to my stomach.
A beautifully subtle and clever troll. Who will notice if you omit a tiny preposition that is a couple words away from the verb it is linked to? Still deserves a Troll mod though. Too bad my points ran out earlier today.
You're giving advice to someone you've never met about what his girlfriend, who you've also never met, will like to do on vacation.
This comment sums up Slashdot so well: Complete arrogance married to utter ignorance.
Good point. The only place I worked which did their own payroll was IBM, and they, somewhat ironically, had a god-awful system from the 70s that you had to run on an emulator or some bullshit.
Seeing how that data for those years has yet to be recorded, he cannot possibly compare the forecasted values to the actual values to test the accuracy.
Of course he can. His data comes from a model, so he can produce data for any 'years' he wants to.
It's entirely relevant to the accuracy of the model. You cannot use fictional data to try to understand the causes and variation in a real world variable.
The article doesn't address understanding causes and variation of a real world variable, it address the ability of a model to track the underlying model it was built from. Whether the underlying model was reality or just another model, if anything, ought to make the task easier.
I called out his "calibration" as bullshit.
Your work, as you've described it, is no different than what the article claims does not work.
Care to tell the class what you do for a living and your educational background?
Masters in Computer Science--not that my credentials are relevant to the strength or weakness of my argument.
We've already established that I have reason (both educationally and career-wise) to know WTF I'm talking about
First, your education and career may indicate that you ought to know what you're talking about, but the arguments you put forth show that you don't.
Second, this is perhaps the crux of matter addressed by the article. You, and I assume many other economists, think you know what you're doing, but you don't. You're practicing cargo cult science--going through the motions of statistical analysis without understanding what you're doing or why, and consequently producing garbage models that don't predict anything other than the 10 years of data you tested against.
He had two models. The first model produced hypothetical historical data (analogously, the data from 1950 to 2010). He then created a second model, built on part of the 'historical data' (1950-1999) and tested on the remainder (2000-2010). He then used the first model to produce another segment of data (2011-2020), and found that the second model did not predict this 'new' data at all.
You and he are doing the same thing; the fact that your 'historical' data comes from reality and his comes from a model is irrelevant so far as the second model is concerned. The phenomenon described by the article is known as 'over fitting the training data' in Machine Learning circles, and is widely known in other fields, according to the comments. Perhaps if you pursued a degree in something a little less soft than 'Applied Economics' you might understand the Math you're blindly applying.
If you've done a good job collecting a large enough data set and including the necessary variables, you'll have some pretty damn good predictions for the first part of your time series.
Did you even read the article? Allow me to quote the relevant portion:
The problem, of course, is that while these different versions of the model might all match the historical data, they would in general generate different predictions going forward
Regardless of your spurious claims about 'not calibrating models', the point remains that in any complex system multiple different models can be found that fit the small slice of time you use for accuracy testing, without fitting the unseen future data.
What machines are you aware of that can operate without humans servicing and powering them for even one year?
That is what made you think he was a pretentious git? Lol.