It's not a problem that we're studying Western Europeans and Americans—we stand to benefit the most from having information available, after all, since we have the best infrastructures in place for putting new analytical discoveries into action. The issue is really about making generalizations about what is fundamental to human nature—without getting a good sample size from other environments, we can't tell what's universal and what's merely cultural.
While dietary immunology is certainly an excellent showcase of the perils of only focusing on one part of the world, I believe we're more focused on psychological considerations at the moment. Also, I think many of the results of detox diets can be achieved even with standard American groceries, or at least traditional European crops.
...yeah, it was an overstatement. I do think he was being unnecessarily defensive, though—and I really don't think you should wave around "communist" like that.
Why would a researcher only be able to study one nation, out of hundreds? It's not a real problem -- just do more and better research; or, narrow the scope of your conclusions.
It's a lot cheaper to study your own country.
The isolationist is one who justifies either the inclusion or exclusion of a single nation when claiming to speak for the "human condition". That's a lofty goal -- and one will have to work very hard to live up to it. Picking and choosing based upon arbitrary political borders may not be effective in reaching any sort of species-wide conclusion.
No, of course it's not ideal to leave anything out. It was a hypothetical argument about the best course of action if, for some imaginary reason, you had to leave one culture out.
The key is that Americans make up only about 4% of the world's population. There are many populations that are more average, and if you absolutely had to pick one culture to represent everyone, you should pick one that's less privileged.
Certainly there are things that are truly universal, and these will show up the same no matter who you test. But because Americans live in such a unique lifestyle, they're bad predictors of the rest of the world—and because they only make up about 5% of the planet's population, that means they have a very small impact on where the global mean lies. Presumably there are other cultures that constitute outliers of comparable strangeness, and perhaps there is no culture that is quite in the middle, but you can definitely do better.
Everyone is human, but Americans are outliers. If you could only study a small handful of people, they would be an awful choice. They are not representative of the average. That is one of Henrich's minor points. If you were trying to predict the average human behaviour, and had to leave out a country, the US would be one of the best choices, because it is so different.
The trend of studying only Americans was a result of cultural blindness. Paraphrasing the article: multiculturalism purports that all cultures are unique and special and have interesting intrinsic attributes, but academics refuse to discuss them because they don't want to be accused of racism or stereotyping. To avoid the question, they assumed that everyone was alike, and just chose to study people who were readily available (usually the undergrads at their campuses.)
Henrich et al. have shown this to be a bad decision, and have presented data that shows the study samples were not only deeply skewed by being from a Western, (culturally) European, industrialized, rich, and democratic country, but also that the United States was very atypical of other countries that met those same criteria.
The ultimate goal of the article isn't to claim that Americans are somehow no longer worth study, though, just that you can't make assumptions about everyone else based on how they act. They're accusing everyone else of cherry-picking, and want to encourage samples from around the world to be considered equally. That being said, though, the article doesn't discourage studying any particular group: it has a couple of observations about differences amongst American populations, too.
I'm kinda getting the vibe that you're a radical isolationist. You may wanna work on that.
Here's some figures to show you how drastic it is:
A 2008 survey of the top six psychology journals dramatically shows how common that assumption was: more than 96 percent of the subjects tested in psychological studies from 2003 to 2007 were Westerners—with nearly 70 percent from the United States alone. Put another way: 96 percent of human subjects in these studies came from countries that represent only 12 percent of the world’s population.
Among Westerners, the data showed that Americans were often the most unusual, leading the researchers to conclude that "American participants are exceptional even within the unusual population of Westerners—outliers among outliers."
In the context of TFA? So you can understand how they're different and what makes them unique. The article does actually mention people from the southern US, though perhaps not rednecks:
Men raised in the honor culture of the American South have been shown to experience much larger surges of testosterone after insults than do Northerners.
The second story is specifically about Da Vinci robots, which were supposed to revolutionize medicine by being able to perform the whole surgery automatically. As a general rule, when doing bone surgery, like knee replacements, the robots were prone to causing unnecessary ligament damage and generally left the patient with a very long recovery time as a result. This doesn't mean all robots in surgery are bad; with the exception of all-in-wonders like the Da Vinci, the vast majority are directly human-controlled and actually yield superior results to humans because they're more precise, more steady, and easier to sterilize. And they can often make cuts in positions and orientations the human hand can't get at, reducing the size of the wounds necessary (e.g. some chest surgeries can now be done through a tiny hole, rather than opening up the whole ribcage.)
Medicine already found the answer to the robots vs. humans question some time ago: advanced human-controlled machinery; generally called robot- or computer-assisted surgery rather than just roboticized surgery. I'm rather troubled by the fact that badrobotsurgery.com even exists; the conditions they're treating absolutely should not be handled with the Da Vinci I learned about as an undergrad.
What functionality is DynamoDB providing in this context that Lucene wouldn't? And what the hell is the client going to do with the database before Lucene is put into place?
Throughout the article the client says they don't want full-text search. The author says he can "add it later," then compresses the body text field. Metadata like authorship information is also stored in a nasty JSON format—so say goodbye to being able to search that later, too!
About that compression...
That compression proved to be important due to yet another shortcoming of DynamoDB, one that nearly made me pull my hair out and encourage the team to switch back to MongoDB. It turns out the maximum record size in DynamoDB is 64K. That’s not much, and it takes me back to the days of 16-bit Windows where the text field GUI element could only hold a maximum of 64K. That was also, um, twenty years ago.
Which is a limit that, say, InnoDB in MySQL also has. So, let's tally it up:
There's no way at all to search article text.
Comma-separated lists must be parsed to query by author name.
The same applies to keywords...
And categories...
So what the hell is this database for? It's unusable, unsearchable, and completely pointless. You have to know the title of the article you're interested in to query it! It sounds, honestly, like this is a case where the client didn't know what they needed. I really, really am hard-pressed to fathom a repository for scientific articles where they store the full text but only need to look up titles. With that kind of design, they could drop their internal DB and just use PubMed or Google Scholar... and get way better results!
I think the author and his team failed the customer in this case by providing them with an inflexible system. Either they forced the client into accepting these horrible limitations so they could play with new (and expensive!) toys, or the client just flat-out doesn't need this database for anything (in which case it's a waste of money.) This kind of data absolutely needs to be kept in a relational database to be useful.
Which, along with his horrible Java vs. C# comparison, makes Jeff Cogswell officially the Slashdot contributor with the worst analytical skills.
Keeping your teeth clean of cavity-causing bacteria. TFA is pretty confident that agriculture was responsible for the death of the normal human oral bacterial environment.
...nice guess, but RTFA and learn a bit of actual dental hygiene. What you eat isn't the problem, it's what it attracts. With the exception of extremely acidic beverages, the food we eat does not directly damage our teeth. Getting lots of calcium is certainly important for preventing osteoporosis, in teeth and elsewhere, but that's the whole story. You can eat as much sugar as you want if you're in a completely sterile environment. It won't hurt you. (Not that such a place exists.)
Every exposed surface both inside and out of the human body is its own little bacterial world. The flora in the intestines have been in the news a lot lately because it's become apparent that some diabetes and obesity cases are tightly linked to disruptions in the compositions of these communities—the wrong bacteria get in and cause trouble.
The big discovery of the story is that the bacteria in the mouth used to be a lot more diverse. Just like the intestines of the obese, agriculture has put our mouths (with very few exceptions like the bushmen and uncontacted peoples) into bad shape. It's not natural for us to even need to brush our teeth—note no other animal doing this.
I also think you've misrepresented life expectancy a little by componentizing things... as well as being a tiny bit low numerically. The wealthy in ancient Greece averaged about 70 years, without anything resembling sanitation, and the average Roman commoner made it to 45. It's true that some components stop functioning earlier, but that doesn't mean Mother Nature would disapprove of us pushing past it. Many of the changes the occur in middle age can have positive outcomes on the social group by encouraging the individual to focus on other aspects of life, primarily looking after the family or tribe.
Sadly, we're only talking about the literal words "intelligent design," not the actual subject matter. Otherwise I'd give you all of the upward-pointing thumbs I have readily available.
For what it's worth, I work with the evolutionary history of genomes all the time. The painful reality is that it's all so messy and idiotic and random that there is absolutely no way any kind of intelligence could have planned any of it. There is no debate whatsoever once you've seen the actual evidence... but no one ever gets that far.
...and just to mess things up a bit, in addition to hunger (which no one got), touch is actually four or five different mechanosensory phenomena—vibration, pressure (both fine and coarse), skin stretching. Pain is also completely separate, and (to the surprise of many) actually one of our slower senses.
Certainly one could design an artificial intelligence worthy of being ascribed sentience. But until that occurs, it is anthropomorphism to call a machine or computer capable of designing anything on its own. Crucially, the design process involves intent, which dumb machines lack. Even an engineer looking up the appropriate rules to cobble something together has intent. Philosophically, we can expect the meaning of "intent" to remain a grey area for at least the next century as cognitive science matures, but I would argue something like "a plan generated by a system which is capable of completely or nearly completely rewriting and relearning its ruleset in response to complex decision processes," which is a feat beyond the abilities of most invertibrates, and has only been achieved in machine learning in a very coarse sense in the last few years.
(As for your reading list: I know with certainty that Kurzweil and Minsky are outdated. I would also probably recommend steering clear of Penrose, though I haven't read him. Most physicists are appallingly bad at understanding the human mind, and as a general rule should not be allowed outside of their field; this goes doubly for the famous ones. The gist of The Emperor's New Mind given on Wikipedia reaffirms this.)
Sustained expansion is, obviously, unnatural and unreasonable. It'll take a while for everyone to realise this, of course, but I suspect that we'll see negative population growth once the entire planet has been brought up to full development, just like we see in many first-world countries presently.
The key, I think, is to wait till it's global. Once we've run out of non-first-world countries to make miserable, it's just a matter of time before we start running out of forms of scarcity.
That's within a country. We're talking about no one at all. Any situation with such a drastic disparity would eventually be eradicated through widespread riots, philanthropy, or welfare.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a problem that we're studying Western Europeans and Americans—we stand to benefit the most from having information available, after all, since we have the best infrastructures in place for putting new analytical discoveries into action. The issue is really about making generalizations about what is fundamental to human nature—without getting a good sample size from other environments, we can't tell what's universal and what's merely cultural.
RTFA.
While dietary immunology is certainly an excellent showcase of the perils of only focusing on one part of the world, I believe we're more focused on psychological considerations at the moment. Also, I think many of the results of detox diets can be achieved even with standard American groceries, or at least traditional European crops.
...yeah, it was an overstatement. I do think he was being unnecessarily defensive, though—and I really don't think you should wave around "communist" like that.
Why would a researcher only be able to study one nation, out of hundreds? It's not a real problem -- just do more and better research; or, narrow the scope of your conclusions.
It's a lot cheaper to study your own country.
The isolationist is one who justifies either the inclusion or exclusion of a single nation when claiming to speak for the "human condition". That's a lofty goal -- and one will have to work very hard to live up to it. Picking and choosing based upon arbitrary political borders may not be effective in reaching any sort of species-wide conclusion.
No, of course it's not ideal to leave anything out. It was a hypothetical argument about the best course of action if, for some imaginary reason, you had to leave one culture out.
The key is that Americans make up only about 4% of the world's population. There are many populations that are more average, and if you absolutely had to pick one culture to represent everyone, you should pick one that's less privileged.
Certainly there are things that are truly universal, and these will show up the same no matter who you test. But because Americans live in such a unique lifestyle, they're bad predictors of the rest of the world—and because they only make up about 5% of the planet's population, that means they have a very small impact on where the global mean lies. Presumably there are other cultures that constitute outliers of comparable strangeness, and perhaps there is no culture that is quite in the middle, but you can definitely do better.
Everyone is human, but Americans are outliers. If you could only study a small handful of people, they would be an awful choice. They are not representative of the average. That is one of Henrich's minor points. If you were trying to predict the average human behaviour, and had to leave out a country, the US would be one of the best choices, because it is so different.
The trend of studying only Americans was a result of cultural blindness. Paraphrasing the article: multiculturalism purports that all cultures are unique and special and have interesting intrinsic attributes, but academics refuse to discuss them because they don't want to be accused of racism or stereotyping. To avoid the question, they assumed that everyone was alike, and just chose to study people who were readily available (usually the undergrads at their campuses.)
Henrich et al. have shown this to be a bad decision, and have presented data that shows the study samples were not only deeply skewed by being from a Western, (culturally) European, industrialized, rich, and democratic country, but also that the United States was very atypical of other countries that met those same criteria.
The ultimate goal of the article isn't to claim that Americans are somehow no longer worth study, though, just that you can't make assumptions about everyone else based on how they act. They're accusing everyone else of cherry-picking, and want to encourage samples from around the world to be considered equally. That being said, though, the article doesn't discourage studying any particular group: it has a couple of observations about differences amongst American populations, too.
I'm kinda getting the vibe that you're a radical isolationist. You may wanna work on that.
Here's some figures to show you how drastic it is:
A 2008 survey of the top six psychology journals dramatically shows how common that assumption was: more than 96 percent of the subjects tested in psychological studies from 2003 to 2007 were Westerners—with nearly 70 percent from the United States alone. Put another way: 96 percent of human subjects in these studies came from countries that represent only 12 percent of the world’s population.
Among Westerners, the data showed that Americans were often the most unusual, leading the researchers to conclude that "American participants are exceptional even within the unusual population of Westerners—outliers among outliers."
Men raised in the honor culture of the American South have been shown to experience much larger surges of testosterone after insults than do Northerners.
Admittedly it wasn't my favourite class.
The second story is specifically about Da Vinci robots, which were supposed to revolutionize medicine by being able to perform the whole surgery automatically. As a general rule, when doing bone surgery, like knee replacements, the robots were prone to causing unnecessary ligament damage and generally left the patient with a very long recovery time as a result. This doesn't mean all robots in surgery are bad; with the exception of all-in-wonders like the Da Vinci, the vast majority are directly human-controlled and actually yield superior results to humans because they're more precise, more steady, and easier to sterilize. And they can often make cuts in positions and orientations the human hand can't get at, reducing the size of the wounds necessary (e.g. some chest surgeries can now be done through a tiny hole, rather than opening up the whole ribcage.)
Medicine already found the answer to the robots vs. humans question some time ago: advanced human-controlled machinery; generally called robot- or computer-assisted surgery rather than just roboticized surgery. I'm rather troubled by the fact that badrobotsurgery.com even exists; the conditions they're treating absolutely should not be handled with the Da Vinci I learned about as an undergrad.
What functionality is DynamoDB providing in this context that Lucene wouldn't? And what the hell is the client going to do with the database before Lucene is put into place?
Throughout the article the client says they don't want full-text search. The author says he can "add it later," then compresses the body text field. Metadata like authorship information is also stored in a nasty JSON format—so say goodbye to being able to search that later, too!
About that compression...
That compression proved to be important due to yet another shortcoming of DynamoDB, one that nearly made me pull my hair out and encourage the team to switch back to MongoDB. It turns out the maximum record size in DynamoDB is 64K. That’s not much, and it takes me back to the days of 16-bit Windows where the text field GUI element could only hold a maximum of 64K. That was also, um, twenty years ago.
Which is a limit that, say, InnoDB in MySQL also has. So, let's tally it up:
So what the hell is this database for? It's unusable, unsearchable, and completely pointless. You have to know the title of the article you're interested in to query it! It sounds, honestly, like this is a case where the client didn't know what they needed. I really, really am hard-pressed to fathom a repository for scientific articles where they store the full text but only need to look up titles. With that kind of design, they could drop their internal DB and just use PubMed or Google Scholar... and get way better results!
I think the author and his team failed the customer in this case by providing them with an inflexible system. Either they forced the client into accepting these horrible limitations so they could play with new (and expensive!) toys, or the client just flat-out doesn't need this database for anything (in which case it's a waste of money.) This kind of data absolutely needs to be kept in a relational database to be useful.
Which, along with his horrible Java vs. C# comparison, makes Jeff Cogswell officially the Slashdot contributor with the worst analytical skills.
Keeping your teeth clean of cavity-causing bacteria. TFA is pretty confident that agriculture was responsible for the death of the normal human oral bacterial environment.
Bread. Bread is the enemy. Not salad. Good old high-density carbs. Low-density ones (sugars), aren't great either.
To me that doesn't sound much like something the fast food industry would want to encourage. Definitely more of an expensive restaurant agenda.
...nice guess, but RTFA and learn a bit of actual dental hygiene. What you eat isn't the problem, it's what it attracts. With the exception of extremely acidic beverages, the food we eat does not directly damage our teeth. Getting lots of calcium is certainly important for preventing osteoporosis, in teeth and elsewhere, but that's the whole story. You can eat as much sugar as you want if you're in a completely sterile environment. It won't hurt you. (Not that such a place exists.)
Every exposed surface both inside and out of the human body is its own little bacterial world. The flora in the intestines have been in the news a lot lately because it's become apparent that some diabetes and obesity cases are tightly linked to disruptions in the compositions of these communities—the wrong bacteria get in and cause trouble.
The big discovery of the story is that the bacteria in the mouth used to be a lot more diverse. Just like the intestines of the obese, agriculture has put our mouths (with very few exceptions like the bushmen and uncontacted peoples) into bad shape. It's not natural for us to even need to brush our teeth—note no other animal doing this.
I also think you've misrepresented life expectancy a little by componentizing things... as well as being a tiny bit low numerically. The wealthy in ancient Greece averaged about 70 years, without anything resembling sanitation, and the average Roman commoner made it to 45. It's true that some components stop functioning earlier, but that doesn't mean Mother Nature would disapprove of us pushing past it. Many of the changes the occur in middle age can have positive outcomes on the social group by encouraging the individual to focus on other aspects of life, primarily looking after the family or tribe.
Sadly, we're only talking about the literal words "intelligent design," not the actual subject matter. Otherwise I'd give you all of the upward-pointing thumbs I have readily available.
For what it's worth, I work with the evolutionary history of genomes all the time. The painful reality is that it's all so messy and idiotic and random that there is absolutely no way any kind of intelligence could have planned any of it. There is no debate whatsoever once you've seen the actual evidence... but no one ever gets that far.
...and just to mess things up a bit, in addition to hunger (which no one got), touch is actually four or five different mechanosensory phenomena—vibration, pressure (both fine and coarse), skin stretching. Pain is also completely separate, and (to the surprise of many) actually one of our slower senses.
Certainly one could design an artificial intelligence worthy of being ascribed sentience. But until that occurs, it is anthropomorphism to call a machine or computer capable of designing anything on its own. Crucially, the design process involves intent, which dumb machines lack. Even an engineer looking up the appropriate rules to cobble something together has intent. Philosophically, we can expect the meaning of "intent" to remain a grey area for at least the next century as cognitive science matures, but I would argue something like "a plan generated by a system which is capable of completely or nearly completely rewriting and relearning its ruleset in response to complex decision processes," which is a feat beyond the abilities of most invertibrates, and has only been achieved in machine learning in a very coarse sense in the last few years.
(As for your reading list: I know with certainty that Kurzweil and Minsky are outdated. I would also probably recommend steering clear of Penrose, though I haven't read him. Most physicists are appallingly bad at understanding the human mind, and as a general rule should not be allowed outside of their field; this goes doubly for the famous ones. The gist of The Emperor's New Mind given on Wikipedia reaffirms this.)
Sustained expansion is, obviously, unnatural and unreasonable. It'll take a while for everyone to realise this, of course, but I suspect that we'll see negative population growth once the entire planet has been brought up to full development, just like we see in many first-world countries presently.
The key, I think, is to wait till it's global. Once we've run out of non-first-world countries to make miserable, it's just a matter of time before we start running out of forms of scarcity.
That's within a country. We're talking about no one at all. Any situation with such a drastic disparity would eventually be eradicated through widespread riots, philanthropy, or welfare.
When there is no way to earn a living, there will be no need to earn a living. Except maybe for neurotic economists.
This is most usefully helpful to know.