Research being hard is not an excuse. The difficulty and assumptions should be made clear and the analysis should take this into account.
It's not a matter of "difficulty" here as it is in "selling your results." And it's not just "biomedical research" either. I've read plenty of scientific articles in fields closer to "hard sciences" (e.g., engineering research, "real" biology, chemistry, whatever) where a fairly limited experiment and data is "oversold" later in the "discussion" section as having much greater implications than it likely does. This is particularly true in smaller subdisciplines, where researchers are struggling to convince anyone that their work is useful.
Why? Because science works through grant money. You don't get it if you can't convince people that what you're doing is important. And while your data analysis may be presented straightforwardly, what people remember is that paragraph of "discussion" where the paper talked about broader implications... which leads to the paper being cited, and then once the paper becomes a "canonical citation" the conclusion of the discussion section basically assumed true, even if the data never proved it (and sometimes the authors even were pretty clear they didn't prove it).
Everybody's interested in the "big picture" and people want to see how research is connected to that -- whether researchers themselves or reviewers or grant reviewers or the media or public policy folks or politicians or the public. We all want to know "the story" or the "narrative" about why we should care -- because if we don't, nobody pays attention. And if nobody pays attention, future research never gets funded.
So medical researchers need to come up with standards for the medical field that are appropriate along with guidelines on how to present results
That's quite easy to say. Much harder to do. You act as though there aren't LOTS of people already trying to do this. Statisticians have all sorts of ideas about what's wrong with data analysis and how to make things more rigorous -- but you're hitting up against fundamental limitations on epistemology and valid conclusions in the kinds of stats you can collect with things like human subjects and limited samples.
So, while you can replace the current set of stats with others ones, there will ALWAYS be lots of "judgment calls" being made. Scientists who are honest about the data -- and more importantly honest with themselves, which is REALLY hard for most humans to be, since we are built to find patterns -- can certainly work to improve things. But then you'll have the vast majority of other people in the field who just need to publish and get grants... it's not that most of them are deliberately trying to do bad science. They just get caught up in various agendas (not only their own, but their research group, the various overarching paradigms and assumptions of their fields).
And there's just no statistical measure that will be able to correct for all of that. At one point I thought it was just bad stats, but really most stats can be "gamed" if you want to. And I once thought the solution was just requiring everyone to publish complete datasets, rather than just summaries, tables, and graphs with stats. But if you start doing that, you'll get people who selectively "choose" which data to publish.
And again, that doesn't imply anything nefarious -- we already publish selectively. Science in general seems to have decided that we selectively publish data that seems "interesting" and shows "positive results." You require publication of data, and people will continue to selectively publish stuff that may end up being misleading.
Then you crack down on that -- you start having grants require that ALL DATA EVER COLLECTED in the course of the grant be published, and strict audits are performed. But then scientists get worried -- they don't want to take risks, so they only start designing experiments where
Cooking is subject to trends, if you haven't noticed. Clunky 70s housewife equipment is out of fashion, to say the least.
Umm, while you may call it "clunky," pressure cookers are decidedly in fashion as an appropriate tool used for the right purposes. The cool, hip tech-savvy cooks use them along side their sous-vide machines and blowtorches for a number of important kitchen tasks.
Need examples? Nathan Myrhvold's Modernist Cuisine (2011), one of the recent "bibles" of molecular gastronomy, lauds the pressure cooker, in a list of "invaluable modernist tools" called it "a must-have; essential for stocks, tendering tough grains and seeds," and also noted its usefulness for sterilizing in various kitchen tasks. (For some specific home applications, see, for example, here.) Harold Blumenthal at The Fat Duck restaurant found that stocks made with pressure cookers were both faster and better-tasting once they understood the effects of diffusion laws on stock making. And here's a whole blog on Slate about their comeback.
I could go on. Pressure cookers may have been "out" a decade ago, but now they're back "in" again... best time to update your kitchen fashion files.
I realize parent was probably meant to be "funny," but since the post was modded "insightful" by some idiot mods...
Sure, but a pressure cooker? What is this, the 70s? Does anyone use them in 2015 for anything _except_ bomb construction and cooking meth?
Have the laws of physics or chemistry changed since the 1970s?
Pressure cookers cook many things faster, mostly because they are able to achieve higher temperatures. You want to cook dry beans, a pot roast, chicken or beef stock, braised ribs, oxtail soup, whatever.... in 1/3 or 1/4 of the time as usual, pressure cookers still work. And for dishes that usually take 3 or 4 hours minimum to get tender, pressure cookers are still extremely useful when time is short.
Spin? When for every two or three members of a profession who consider their job a net positive, there's one who considers their job an existential threat to all humanity, you're complaining that the 52% who think it will be overall good are being called a slight majority instead of just a majority.
Precisely. "Spin" is just a word thrown around when data is interpreted in a way you don't like.
But there are no perfectly "objective" ways to collect, report, or interpret data. We only look for and report the numbers that are the most interesting to us. In this case, GP complains that the emphasis is on the minority rather than the majority, but there's no reason why we always have to care about the bigger number. For example, it would rarely be useful for anyone to report that "99.9+% of humans were NOT infected by Ebola in the past year." Yeah! The majority of humans are Ebola-free! Woo!
But usually when reporting a disease, we're interested in the incidence, not the non-incidence. This story is interested in a small but not insignificant faction of AI researchers who think their job could produce something that's a severe threat to humanity. Other people may be interested in the majority of AI people who don't think this to be the case. There's always going to be "spin" the moment anyone collects and reports data... if you don't like what they're saying, of course.
And by the way, usually this argument tends to come up from people who want to claim economics isn't a "real science" or something.
The burden on proof really is on people (usually economists among themselves) that pretend that economics is a science.
I just want to be clear that I was in no way implying that economics is (or is not) a "real science" (whatever that means). The point of the end of my post was that this is often an argument brought up about Nobel Prizes, but such a criterion doesn't seem to be relevant given that there are prizes given for things that are definitely not "sciences" AND which were instituted by Nobel himself.
There isn't a Nobel prize in Economics though, even if that is what the article says. It is the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences as Alfred Nobel did not set it up.
Yes, it's technically correct, though I get tired of hearing this brought up all the time, as if it's some sort of weird conspiracy theory to make it sound like there's a "Nobel Prize" when there isn't one.
Look -- the Nobel Prizes are awarded by the Nobel Foundation. They use the same administrative mechanisms and process for choosing the economics prize, the same academic body (the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences) makes the selections as most other prizes, they give the same award money, and they give the award at the same ceremony.
The difference is that the other prizes were created by Nobel himself, while the economics prize was later endowed by contributions to the Nobel Foundation, who agreed to administer the prize under the same criteria.
So yes, while Nobel himself didn't set it up, the fact is that the only body that matters NOW is who awards the prize, that that foundation (which actually OWNS and administers things called "Nobel Prizes") has decided to award a prize in economics too, which it basically treats in every way EXACTLY THE SAME as the other prizes.
This strikes me like someone claiming that the Harvard Medical School or the Harvard Business School aren't REALLY "Harvard" schools, because John Harvard didn't explicitly will money to create schools of medicine or business or whatever back in the 1630s... he just wanted to create a college, and it was mostly a kind of seminary in the early days. So, you may think you are a Harvard Medical School grad -- but it's not REALLY "Harvard."
There IS a bit of a difference here because the Nobel Foundation itself tries to keep a subtle distinction in the naming of the prizes, probably due to legal constraints about how the will was worded exactly. But acting like there's some big difference and it's not "really a Nobel Prize" is ridiculous -- it's just a historical and semantic distinction, not one that actually means anything in terms of how the prize is administered, selected, or awarded. And that's probably why the media usually makes little distinction, because in all ways that ACTUALLY MATTER, there isn't one.
(And by the way, usually this argument tends to come up from people who want to claim economics isn't a "real science" or something. I won't get into that argument, but well, neither is "peace" or "literature.")
There is a New York state law banning male daycare teachers from changing diapers.
[Citation needed.]
Here are the New York State requirements for staff qualifications in child care facilities. I don't see anything in there that places restrictions on what male caregivers can do, let alone specific details about diapering.
I agree with you that there is a BIAS among some parents and among staff at many childcare centers that causes daycares to restrict what male staff do. That's horrible and ridiculous. But it is NOT enshrined in law as you claim.
There is a strong preference in custody cases that the child will end up with the mother, even if she isn't nearly as fit to parent.
You're referring of course to the tender years doctrine. That policy is no longer in force in most states, and in fact has been specifically repudiated in many states, in favor of new policies that try to treat both parents equally.
That doesn't mean that there aren't still judges and some policies (in some states) that favor mothers. But there has been a rather strong push in the past couple decades to weaken the assumption that children should always go with the mother.
Prejudice exists in the system and among lots of the public. I'll be the first one to stand up with you and complain about bias -- but more-and-more it's bias among the PUBLIC and specific people, rather than laws that create discrimination... both for men and for women.
There is actually more of a written inequality against men then woman.
[Citation needed.] There were written inequalities against both sexes in different places decades ago. There have been efforts to overturn these written inequalities for both sexes, though.
Amen! Science is a difficult profession with a long and winding road until you get a stable career, and no guarantees even after boatloads of education. You often have to be willing to sacrifice a family and personal life early on to make coin in the profession.
This is all true. But is it something inherent in the nature of science or is it something about the specific way science tends to be organized in our current social structure?
Women tend to value family life and family issues more than men. I won't put a value judgement on that preference here, but the practical side is that science is NOT a family-oriented line of work.
When I was younger, I didn't care that much about work/life balance. The older many people get, the more they realize that they have other things in life that they care about just as much (or more) than career.
Men are biologically more lucky in this regard, though, since a guy can equally choose to settle down and have kids in his 20s, 30s, or 40s (often even later), with little penalty. If it takes longer for men to "grow up" and figure out that working 16-hour days 6 or 7 days per week doesn't have to define their lives, that's okay... they can still have the family experience if they want.
For women, it's not that easy if they don't "frontload" the family experience. Once they get to the late 30s or 40s, there are biological constraints that make babies harder to have (and more likely to have birth defects, etc.).
So it's not a matter of "putting a value judgment on that preference" -- it's recognizing that our current standard of "work your ass off for 10 years or so after 20+ years of school until you can stop for a breath" isn't going to be biologically compatible with women's reproductive systems, while it still can be with men's.
From my perspective, the question we should be asking is the one I raised above -- it's a fact that science isn't very "family-friendly," particularly early in a career. But is there a necessary reason that MUST be so?
And if not, maybe we need to reconsider our standards... not lowering them, but adapting them to be more reasonable. It's not merely a gender issue here -- it's an age issue ("if you haven't met X criteria by age 35 or 40, you're obviously not a good scientist!!"), a prejudice against people who want to have multiple interests/hobbies in their lives, etc.
[On a broader more speculative note: In some cases, I think such prejudices can actually be detrimental to science -- for example, many of the most interesting and creative people I know tend to have a wide variety of interests, have unusual hobbies that get them thinking and working in very different ways outside of work, read voraciously on topics outside of the field, etc. Those people sometimes don't do as well in a "publish or perish" environment where they need to focus on rapid production of concentrated knowledge in a particular area. But having a "broader perspective" on the world often allows people to make weird connections across disciplines (or inspired in unpredictable ways from other disciplines)... and that can be important for "thinking outside the box" and finding a new way to tackle a problem that has stumped a discipline. OTHER people may thrive best through concentrated work in one area, but there probably is NOT one single personality or career organization/track that can predict contributions to scientific progress.]
More than one movement has talked about ending marriage, and all that did that failed.
My post wasn't about "ending marriage" per se. There are lots of ways to deal with the issues I brought up. But if we keep just "patching" broken laws without a real redefinition or re-examination of what we are trying to accomplish with these laws, we're just going to keep running into these sorts of legal and ethical conundrums. Perhaps the solution is to end marriage, but more likely we may need to create a number of different bundled legal contracts that are more appropriate for the various types of relationships. Or, at a minimum, we need to reconfigure legal "dependency" relationships created by marriage and redefine them based on actual financial dependency, for example.
Also, in this case, the public contract has been around so long that many laws have been written assuming it. "Family" law assumes and is built around government-approved marriages. To change marriage would change thousands of laws, with unknown and untested consequences.
This is all true, except we've been tinkering with these "thousands of laws" without dealing sufficiently with "unknown and untested consequences" for decades. Probably the strongest example of this is "no-fault" divorce, which came about for many noble reasons (not requiring people to PROVE abuse to get out of an abusive relationship, etc.), but which has had untold consequences requiring whole new mechanisms to deal with distribution of assets, support duties for dependents, etc. And the "patching up" of marriage law to deal with the increased rate of divorce following no-fault statutes is ongoing.... decades later.
I'm not arguing that no-fault divorce was bad, or that gay marriage is bad, or anything else. I'm happy to see people receiving equal rights: I couldn't figure out what the anti-gay justifications were 20 years ago when even the liberals in the U.S. were championing DOMA and "Don't ask, don't tell," so I'm glad people have in some ways realized where injustice existed.
On the other hand, decisions like this sadden me, because they serve as one more way to "punt" more essential problems and decisions down the road a couple more decades. Marriage laws as the parent noted came into formation to deal with a particular social construct. That social construct is now being altered in all sorts of ways, but yet we still award elements of the legal marriage contract (including a number of significant legal and financial benefits) that were originally granted to support marriage patterns that no longer are universal or in some cases aren't common at all anymore.
Eventually (a century from now?) we may start to finally address some of these problems head-on, but for the foreseeable future we're going to be stuck in various stupid legal conundrums because of changing ideas of what marriage is vs. why and how government regulates it. We'll see the polyamorist woman with three husbands arguing for rights (or the female threesome or whatever). We'll see the two brothers who want to do away with incest laws -- whether they want sexual relationships as consenting adults or not -- because they love each other and want the inheritance and other benefits that come from being spouses. We'll see all sorts of challenges in ways we just refuse to talk about now because everyone is just pretending that the "definition and purpose of marriage" is kind of irrelevant as long as we've given equal rights to the current minority group of concern.
At least 20 years ago people were all still talking about these real definitional issues and how shifting social perspectives are interacting with legal problems. While this is a great victory for equality, it is also yet another "patch" to a broken set of marriage laws that we are continuing to tinker with without considering the long-term consequences.... and why we even have these bundles of laws in the first place.
I tried that. But, to be Franck, I couldn't Handel how the sound Varese in this thing, so I ended up Haydn this Creation away; now it's just Leonin the server Cage. If I Figaro out what will work better, I'll make a Chopin Liszt, and go buy something that's Godunov.
I'm going to go ahead and say that it mitigates the serious of the damage caused in actuality since most IT people entrusted with serious and important data aren't going to be that stupid.
And that's where your assumptions are different from mine. I was discussing people who are probably NOT "entrusted with serious and important data," but nevertheless have their own personal data (which they think is at least somewhat valuable) and choose to run a RAID 0 setup because of some stupid reason, like it makes their system run a bit faster.
(Well, that's not a completely stupid reason, but it is a reason to have a good backup strategy for essential files and to segregate your data so only the minimum files are at risk on RAID 0. Many people don't worry about these things until it's too late.)
If you doubt such people exist, do an internet search or read some gamer forums. And given such people are more likely to be running a bleeding-edge new version of software than a IT pro with a server who does thorough stability testing before upgrades, I'd imagine that a bug like this will disproportionately affect those hobbyists.
I'm not talking about IT pros here. I'm talking about random idiots who run RAID without thinking of the consequences. For them, this bug could be really serious.
'Compactness' is not a remotely optimal means of determining whether a district is gerrymandered or not. Republicans want 'compactness' to be the standard because Democrats are more likely to be clustered in dense cities, where 'compact' lines will cause 'packing' automatically.
Do you have any clue what you're talking about? "Compactness" just means that a perimeter measure is smaller -- it doesn't mean the AREA is necessarily smaller. Population density can various a lot, so areas can vary too. One could draw a nice "compact" set of districts that split a city right down the center, for example.
Of course compactness is not an optimal measure of gerrymandering, but have you looked at many of the districts highlighted in the article I linked to? Do those shapes seem remotely reasonable to you?
Maintaining communities of interest has an actual benefit, allowing people with a shared community to select their representation.
Yes, that's true. But we're looking here at particularly egregious boundaries which tend to skew the metrics much more. Also, who gets to determine these "communities"? That's the problem.
They're not mutually exclusive; states with a non-partisan redistricting process usually do better at finding a happy medium, with relatively geometric-shaped districts that preserve communities.
Yep -- and basically the study I linked to seems to show that Democratically controlled states tend to do WORSE than non-partisan redistricting states, according to all measures of compactness. So, either Democrats just happen to be dominant in places where communities are unusually oddly-shaped, or there's a political bias at work.
Regardless, as I said, I'm not complaining about either party here more than the other -- both have PROVEN histories of using gerrymandering for political gain. Are you disputing that?
Would you say the same thing if the bug affected RAID 1 or RAID 5?
I suspect not, since his point seemed to be that you shouldn't be using RAID 0 for data that you care about anyway.
Exactly. About the only reason I would ever use RAID 0 is for some sort of temp data drive where for some reason I wanted to string multiple drives together. You've basically taken a bunch of drives that each would be vulnerable without redundancy and have produced one big drive that will fail whenever any component does, thereby greatly increasing failure rate over individual drive failure rate. There are only a limited set of use cases where this is a helpful thing, and basically all of them are situations where you can assume that 100% data loss won't hurt you.
t doesn't really make it ok for a bug to exist that destroys RAID 0 volumes, but it does mitigate the seriousness of the damage caused.
Well, it mitigates the seriousness of the damage a bug should cause, assuming that people use RAID reasonably. But that's obviously a poor assumption, since many people seem to love playing Russian roulette with essential data.
I was lucky enough to have a significant (but not catastrophic) data loss hit me when I was young and didn't have a lot of essential data to lose. It taught me the importance of redundancy and backups. Most people who haven't experienced such things are more cavalier with data -- and a RAID 0 bug could be catastrophic for them.
It has been well established for many years now that both learning and using "cursive" writing (I know it as "joined" writing) is important for the development of young brains.
Meh. Many of the cited studies in your link are relevant to general task types -- it's not the cursive writing per se that has the benefit.
There is something to be said for having kids do tasks that require fine-grained coordination, awards for precision, significant effort, lots of repetition to achieve perfection, etc. Among other kinds of tasks, of course.
Your argument is like the people complaining about why kids don't use logarithm tables anymore or that there should be more geometric proofs in high school or whatever. Lots of things teach important skills in school curricula, but often those skills can be taught in other ways (e.g., logarithm use encourages keeping track of magnitudes in calculations, but instruction in estimation, significant figures, and scientific notation can achieve similar goals AND... proofs are an exercise in formal logic that could be achieved by giving exercises in actual formal logic syllogisms, math proofs in other fields than geometry, doing programming exercises that require logical flow, etc.).
Cursive is fun and all. I spent many years perfecting mine, and I've actually spent some time learning older variants (Spencerian, Copperplate, etc.) because it's fun and elegant. But when I take my notes quickly and roughly, I usually print... it's faster and easier to read than the scribble I can create quickly in cursive.
But whatever. That's my experience. The point is that the benefits of cursive are minor, it takes a lot of instructional time, and it has become a less valued skill these days. So the question shouldn't be "Why should we retain cursive?" but "Is there something we could teach with that time which would still have similar cognitive and coordination benefits?" etc.
The joker in the deck was that presently the younger generation is less vanilla than the older generation
[Citation needed]
People have been saying the exact same thing about "those damn kids these days" for thousands of years. You really think the "hippie" generation of the late 60s and 70s was more "vanilla"? From a political standpoint, that generation was probably far more likely to openly defy the government, go to protests, get arrested, etc. than today's youth. They were significant political "activists" who hated the system and were actively demonstrating that they wanted to do something about it. Today, we have things like "Occupy," which means people camp out in tents in a park -- I'm not insulting or denigrating those actions, but how many of them would be willing to take the kinds of actions people were doing in the 60s/70s?
Anyhow, those hippies are now the "older generation," and while I know plenty of aging hippies who are still crazy liberal, I've seen many of them turn into crazy Republicans too.
and the older generation isn't being very welcoming to people who aren't like them and never will be.
Again, you'd need some sort of stats to prove this. What tends to happen in the real world is that as people get older, they get more conservative, but specific beliefs or values may still shift -- and those become adopted by the NEW older class. Which means that the party of old people tomorrow will be different from the party of old people today. It's likely that parties will gradually shift along with demographics, as they continuously have ever since they came into existence in the early 1800s.
So what used to be a pipeline from Democrat to Republican has developed a blockage and a lot of people are being squeezed out of the party pipes entirely.
Now, that's an interesting argument, and there do seem stats to be out there that show a growth in "independents" in some places. But that doesn't really matter as much as how those people actually VOTE. And the reality is that VERY few people tend to vote for 3rd-party candidates unless the 3rd-party candidate is already a celebrity or is otherwise well-known or something. You may lament the fact that people aren't choosing other candidates, but if they're still stuck choosing from the 2 major parties, one party or the other is probably going to become the "party of the old people."
Nonsense. Maybe Republicans have been more successful in gerrymandering, but both parties have engaged in this practice. That's why there are so many "reliable" Republican and Democrat seats.
Indeed. For anyone interested in the overall trend, I'd encourage them to have a look at this report, which does not appear to be biased toward or against any particular party and makes use of a number of different measures of gerrymandering.
After the 2010 census redistricting, they conclude the following regarding both parties' effects:
The mean Polsby-Popper, Schwartzberg and Reock scores
indicate that districts drawn with total GOP control have
a higher compactness score than districts drawn with total Democratic control under those measures. States with
split control fall in the middle. Nevertheless, districts with
a political party in control remain less compact than the
national average by every measure. . . . Using the convex hull measure shows a different story.
Districts drawn by a split in control come out with a higher
compactness score, with districts drawn by the GOP not
far behind. Districts drawn by the Democratic Party are
much less compact than either.
While districts drawn by Republicans in this decennial redistricting process may be somewhat more compact than those
drawn by Democrats, it is also clear that both parties appeared to take advantage of their situation and draw districts
more favorable to their party's election. For example, Democrats took advantage in Maryland and Illinois while Republicans took advantage in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Republicans just had many more states, which may have buffered their
average.
In other words, Democrats controlled fewer state legislatures than Republicans, but where they did control them, they introduced even WORSE (i.e., "less compact") gerrymandered districts than Republicans on average.
But since Republicans had control of more states, overall they may have ended up ahead THIS TIME in the gerrymandering war... maybe. Note that this crap goes on after every census, and whichever big party happens to be in control tries to exploit it. The Dems are certainly not more innocent than the Reps. They all should be thrown out of office for it.
Licensed, legitimate cab companies run a gauntlet of state & local regulations before they can collect fares. Uber and Lyft bypass them, start operating, and then act surprised when their illegal operation using unlicensed, unvetted drivers run into trouble.
Indeed. Can we just stop calling it "ridesharing," too? You want to offer a coworker a ride in your car to work? That's "ridesharing." You want to say, "Can you chip in a little for gas and wear-and-tear on the car and such"? That's still "ridesharing."
When you start offering these services to different strangers every day and trying to make a profit off of giving them rides, that's no longer "ridesharing" -- that's a taxi service.
And there are good reasons why many regulations exist to protect both drivers and passengers in these sorts of transactions. Inevitably, there are probably some bad regulations in most places -- ones that are unnecessary or bring in extra revenue to governments or end up protecting traditional existing cab companies or whatever.
But just because there are SOME bad regulations doesn't mean that NO regulations is the best idea (or is even better than having some bad ones along with the good ones).
Regardless, most businesses in the U.S. have to obey various rules according to the law. Don't like that? Then vote to change the laws or vote for representatives who will. But stop pretending that you're just trying to "share a ride" with people when you're running a business and trying to make money off of it. That's just as crooked and dishonest as some of the bad government regulations you're complaining about.
Yeah, yeah... I know the controversy. It was partly ironic in my post which was obviously intended to be funny.
On the one hand, I think most of the field of "economics" has severe methodological problems. On the other hand, I find those people trying to claim it's "not a real Nobel prize" are making a bogus argument too. Yes, it wasn't in Nobel's will, but who is Nobel to determine what fields deserve prizes for all time? It's not like the "peace" prizes are awarded with any accountability for intellectual rigor either. And the Nobel Foundation authorizes these prizes, chooses them basically using similar criteria to other fields, and awards them on the same day in the same ceremony.
Do I think there *should* be a Nobel prize for economics? Probably not. But pretending there isn't one is just stupid, until the actual organization that regulates Nobel prizes decides it will no longer award one or will call it something else.
Gold has value because it's virtually the only useful metal that doesn't corrode.
Yeah, yeah -- I wasn't going into too much detail here. Of course gold has some utility value, particularly in a technologically advanced society. But its current market price is a huge number of factors higher than that basic utility value -- and that "extra value" could vanish at any time. And the basic utility value can even vanish too -- in sufficiently dire circumstances.
But since I basically believe (on the basis of various statistical studies) that ALL advice trying to "beat" the market is worthless, which also somewhat negates your earlier complaint. ALL advice is crap, whether it's somebody yelling about doom-and-gloom or some ideas trying to get you to buy the most recent boom (gold! oil! etc.).
But the advice is only "worthless" if you measure of "success" is maintaining the market status quo. If that's all everyone wanted to do, everyone would have a 100% stock portfolio. Most people don't. Most people want to diversify, based on volatility, and at various points in their lives, they may prefer less volatility, even if it means lower returns overall.
In that sense, an imprecise bubble prediction, particularly for a specific sector ("This rise seems unsustainable in sector X and will likely bust in the next few years") can allow investors who do not wish to gamble as much to exit that sector.
Your assumption is that a bubble prediction is only useful if it allows someone to OPTIMIZE profits. That's the only reason you need to know exact time and magnitude. Other people may be much happier with less lofty goals -- and simply want to assess risk to balance a portfolio in a reasonable fashion.
Never mind that gold and silver were used as money for thousands of years before the printing press made it possible to issue fiat currency.
Nonsense. Gold and silver can be "fiat" currency just as paper money can be. Fiat currency just means that a currency derives part of its value from the government's declaration that it shall function as a currency.
For example, the U.S. government says that the "dollar" must be used to pay taxes. It could equally say that "gold" must be used to pay taxes, in which case gold's price would probably go up, since it would be more useful to pay for things with. That addition in value due to the government's endorsement is what produces "fiat" money.
People who don't understand what the term "fiat" means assume that "fiat" currency is always based on something that they consider "valueless" while whatever alternative "non-fiat" currency has some sort of "inherent value."
Except who determines that "inherent value"? Where does it come from? Food and water will always have some inherent value for humans, since they need it to survive. Other goods that fulfill basic needs (shelter, protection, etc.) also generally have a pretty basic value.
But gold only has value because it's rare and shiny, but there are many things in the world that are rare and shiny. Under sufficiently dire circumstances (e.g., being lost in the desert), your gold brick might be worthless compared to a canteen of water.
In sum, other than basic human needs, things only have value because as a society we agree that they have value. If a society starts valuing other things, the old "inherent value" items will lose value. Do I think it's likely that gold will become worthless anytime soon? No -- but its price in relation to other goods has and will fluctuate the same way a supposed "fiat currency" does. It's true that in sufficiently dire circumstances (e.g., hyperinflation) "fiat currencies" may lose significant value.
But in sufficiently dire circumstances, "all bets are off," i.e., what people may want is to trade for food or water or weapons or whatever -- they won't want gold unless they know that someone else will be willing to take it in exchange for food or water or weapons (and that's not always guaranteed in sufficiently dire circumstances).
The problem is, that "last time" people started shouting "bubble" in 1996. Then again in 1997, 1998, 1999, and 2000. Then in 2001, the crash came, and they said "I told you so", despite the fact that the bottom of the crash was still higher than when they first started shouting.
Meh. I'd have to look back at the detailed stats here for those years, but just because it takes a long time for a "bubble" to burst doesn't mean that there wasn't evidence of a bubble developing.
And just because the "bottom of the crash" is higher than the start of the "bubble" doesn't mean that the "bubble" people were completely wrong -- the market "correction" may not fall as much because the damage is restricted to a particular area or because overall economic growth since the beginning of the "bubble" predictions means that the new "floor" is higher, etc. Also, often the people talking about "bubbles" also tend to point out particular areas where problematic behavior is emerging, rather than the overall market. It may take quite a few years for that problematic behavior to become so widespread or extreme that prices become severely inflated -- but again, the causes may go back further in time.
In sum, you're right that evidence of an emerging "bubble" should be met with some skepticism. We shouldn't believe idiots shouting "Sell! Sell!" anymore than we believe idiots shouting "Buy! Buy!"
If you really think you are so much smarter than the market, then feel free put your money where your mouth is, and sell some shorts. Then when the crash comes, right when you predicted, you can come back here and brag about your new yacht.
This is a flawed idea, since it depends on the assumption that the market is fundamentally rational and non-chaotic. If one could predict a crash precisely in time, then the market would be so rational and efficient that there would be no bubbles in the first place.
On the other hand, that doesn't mean that there can't be indicators that suggest a particular trend is unlikely to be sustainable in the long run. In fact, many adventurous business plans depend on things that are obviously unsustainable, whether it's over the span of a couple months or a couple years or a couple decades. Noting that such a trend is apparent doesn't mean an imminent crash, but it may mean the "gambling odds" are changing.
Slashdot Mirror
Research being hard is not an excuse. The difficulty and assumptions should be made clear and the analysis should take this into account.
It's not a matter of "difficulty" here as it is in "selling your results." And it's not just "biomedical research" either. I've read plenty of scientific articles in fields closer to "hard sciences" (e.g., engineering research, "real" biology, chemistry, whatever) where a fairly limited experiment and data is "oversold" later in the "discussion" section as having much greater implications than it likely does. This is particularly true in smaller subdisciplines, where researchers are struggling to convince anyone that their work is useful.
Why? Because science works through grant money. You don't get it if you can't convince people that what you're doing is important. And while your data analysis may be presented straightforwardly, what people remember is that paragraph of "discussion" where the paper talked about broader implications... which leads to the paper being cited, and then once the paper becomes a "canonical citation" the conclusion of the discussion section basically assumed true, even if the data never proved it (and sometimes the authors even were pretty clear they didn't prove it).
Everybody's interested in the "big picture" and people want to see how research is connected to that -- whether researchers themselves or reviewers or grant reviewers or the media or public policy folks or politicians or the public. We all want to know "the story" or the "narrative" about why we should care -- because if we don't, nobody pays attention. And if nobody pays attention, future research never gets funded.
So medical researchers need to come up with standards for the medical field that are appropriate along with guidelines on how to present results
That's quite easy to say. Much harder to do. You act as though there aren't LOTS of people already trying to do this. Statisticians have all sorts of ideas about what's wrong with data analysis and how to make things more rigorous -- but you're hitting up against fundamental limitations on epistemology and valid conclusions in the kinds of stats you can collect with things like human subjects and limited samples.
So, while you can replace the current set of stats with others ones, there will ALWAYS be lots of "judgment calls" being made. Scientists who are honest about the data -- and more importantly honest with themselves, which is REALLY hard for most humans to be, since we are built to find patterns -- can certainly work to improve things. But then you'll have the vast majority of other people in the field who just need to publish and get grants... it's not that most of them are deliberately trying to do bad science. They just get caught up in various agendas (not only their own, but their research group, the various overarching paradigms and assumptions of their fields).
And there's just no statistical measure that will be able to correct for all of that. At one point I thought it was just bad stats, but really most stats can be "gamed" if you want to. And I once thought the solution was just requiring everyone to publish complete datasets, rather than just summaries, tables, and graphs with stats. But if you start doing that, you'll get people who selectively "choose" which data to publish.
And again, that doesn't imply anything nefarious -- we already publish selectively. Science in general seems to have decided that we selectively publish data that seems "interesting" and shows "positive results." You require publication of data, and people will continue to selectively publish stuff that may end up being misleading.
Then you crack down on that -- you start having grants require that ALL DATA EVER COLLECTED in the course of the grant be published, and strict audits are performed. But then scientists get worried -- they don't want to take risks, so they only start designing experiments where
Yes... sorry for the typo.
Cooking is subject to trends, if you haven't noticed. Clunky 70s housewife equipment is out of fashion, to say the least.
Umm, while you may call it "clunky," pressure cookers are decidedly in fashion as an appropriate tool used for the right purposes. The cool, hip tech-savvy cooks use them along side their sous-vide machines and blowtorches for a number of important kitchen tasks.
Need examples? Nathan Myrhvold's Modernist Cuisine (2011), one of the recent "bibles" of molecular gastronomy, lauds the pressure cooker, in a list of "invaluable modernist tools" called it "a must-have; essential for stocks, tendering tough grains and seeds," and also noted its usefulness for sterilizing in various kitchen tasks. (For some specific home applications, see, for example, here.) Harold Blumenthal at The Fat Duck restaurant found that stocks made with pressure cookers were both faster and better-tasting once they understood the effects of diffusion laws on stock making. And here's a whole blog on Slate about their comeback.
I could go on. Pressure cookers may have been "out" a decade ago, but now they're back "in" again... best time to update your kitchen fashion files.
I realize parent was probably meant to be "funny," but since the post was modded "insightful" by some idiot mods...
Sure, but a pressure cooker? What is this, the 70s? Does anyone use them in 2015 for anything _except_ bomb construction and cooking meth?
Have the laws of physics or chemistry changed since the 1970s?
Pressure cookers cook many things faster, mostly because they are able to achieve higher temperatures. You want to cook dry beans, a pot roast, chicken or beef stock, braised ribs, oxtail soup, whatever.... in 1/3 or 1/4 of the time as usual, pressure cookers still work. And for dishes that usually take 3 or 4 hours minimum to get tender, pressure cookers are still extremely useful when time is short.
Spin? When for every two or three members of a profession who consider their job a net positive, there's one who considers their job an existential threat to all humanity, you're complaining that the 52% who think it will be overall good are being called a slight majority instead of just a majority.
Precisely. "Spin" is just a word thrown around when data is interpreted in a way you don't like.
But there are no perfectly "objective" ways to collect, report, or interpret data. We only look for and report the numbers that are the most interesting to us. In this case, GP complains that the emphasis is on the minority rather than the majority, but there's no reason why we always have to care about the bigger number. For example, it would rarely be useful for anyone to report that "99.9+% of humans were NOT infected by Ebola in the past year." Yeah! The majority of humans are Ebola-free! Woo!
But usually when reporting a disease, we're interested in the incidence, not the non-incidence. This story is interested in a small but not insignificant faction of AI researchers who think their job could produce something that's a severe threat to humanity. Other people may be interested in the majority of AI people who don't think this to be the case. There's always going to be "spin" the moment anyone collects and reports data... if you don't like what they're saying, of course.
And by the way, usually this argument tends to come up from people who want to claim economics isn't a "real science" or something.
The burden on proof really is on people (usually economists among themselves) that pretend that economics is a science.
I just want to be clear that I was in no way implying that economics is (or is not) a "real science" (whatever that means). The point of the end of my post was that this is often an argument brought up about Nobel Prizes, but such a criterion doesn't seem to be relevant given that there are prizes given for things that are definitely not "sciences" AND which were instituted by Nobel himself.
There isn't a Nobel prize in Economics though, even if that is what the article says. It is the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences as Alfred Nobel did not set it up.
Yes, it's technically correct, though I get tired of hearing this brought up all the time, as if it's some sort of weird conspiracy theory to make it sound like there's a "Nobel Prize" when there isn't one.
Look -- the Nobel Prizes are awarded by the Nobel Foundation. They use the same administrative mechanisms and process for choosing the economics prize, the same academic body (the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences) makes the selections as most other prizes, they give the same award money, and they give the award at the same ceremony.
The difference is that the other prizes were created by Nobel himself, while the economics prize was later endowed by contributions to the Nobel Foundation, who agreed to administer the prize under the same criteria.
So yes, while Nobel himself didn't set it up, the fact is that the only body that matters NOW is who awards the prize, that that foundation (which actually OWNS and administers things called "Nobel Prizes") has decided to award a prize in economics too, which it basically treats in every way EXACTLY THE SAME as the other prizes.
This strikes me like someone claiming that the Harvard Medical School or the Harvard Business School aren't REALLY "Harvard" schools, because John Harvard didn't explicitly will money to create schools of medicine or business or whatever back in the 1630s... he just wanted to create a college, and it was mostly a kind of seminary in the early days. So, you may think you are a Harvard Medical School grad -- but it's not REALLY "Harvard."
There IS a bit of a difference here because the Nobel Foundation itself tries to keep a subtle distinction in the naming of the prizes, probably due to legal constraints about how the will was worded exactly. But acting like there's some big difference and it's not "really a Nobel Prize" is ridiculous -- it's just a historical and semantic distinction, not one that actually means anything in terms of how the prize is administered, selected, or awarded. And that's probably why the media usually makes little distinction, because in all ways that ACTUALLY MATTER, there isn't one.
(And by the way, usually this argument tends to come up from people who want to claim economics isn't a "real science" or something. I won't get into that argument, but well, neither is "peace" or "literature.")
There is a New York state law banning male daycare teachers from changing diapers.
[Citation needed.]
Here are the New York State requirements for staff qualifications in child care facilities. I don't see anything in there that places restrictions on what male caregivers can do, let alone specific details about diapering.
I agree with you that there is a BIAS among some parents and among staff at many childcare centers that causes daycares to restrict what male staff do. That's horrible and ridiculous. But it is NOT enshrined in law as you claim.
There is a strong preference in custody cases that the child will end up with the mother, even if she isn't nearly as fit to parent.
You're referring of course to the tender years doctrine. That policy is no longer in force in most states, and in fact has been specifically repudiated in many states, in favor of new policies that try to treat both parents equally.
That doesn't mean that there aren't still judges and some policies (in some states) that favor mothers. But there has been a rather strong push in the past couple decades to weaken the assumption that children should always go with the mother.
Prejudice exists in the system and among lots of the public. I'll be the first one to stand up with you and complain about bias -- but more-and-more it's bias among the PUBLIC and specific people, rather than laws that create discrimination... both for men and for women.
There is actually more of a written inequality against men then woman.
[Citation needed.] There were written inequalities against both sexes in different places decades ago. There have been efforts to overturn these written inequalities for both sexes, though.
Amen! Science is a difficult profession with a long and winding road until you get a stable career, and no guarantees even after boatloads of education. You often have to be willing to sacrifice a family and personal life early on to make coin in the profession.
This is all true. But is it something inherent in the nature of science or is it something about the specific way science tends to be organized in our current social structure?
Women tend to value family life and family issues more than men. I won't put a value judgement on that preference here, but the practical side is that science is NOT a family-oriented line of work.
When I was younger, I didn't care that much about work/life balance. The older many people get, the more they realize that they have other things in life that they care about just as much (or more) than career.
Men are biologically more lucky in this regard, though, since a guy can equally choose to settle down and have kids in his 20s, 30s, or 40s (often even later), with little penalty. If it takes longer for men to "grow up" and figure out that working 16-hour days 6 or 7 days per week doesn't have to define their lives, that's okay... they can still have the family experience if they want.
For women, it's not that easy if they don't "frontload" the family experience. Once they get to the late 30s or 40s, there are biological constraints that make babies harder to have (and more likely to have birth defects, etc.).
So it's not a matter of "putting a value judgment on that preference" -- it's recognizing that our current standard of "work your ass off for 10 years or so after 20+ years of school until you can stop for a breath" isn't going to be biologically compatible with women's reproductive systems, while it still can be with men's.
From my perspective, the question we should be asking is the one I raised above -- it's a fact that science isn't very "family-friendly," particularly early in a career. But is there a necessary reason that MUST be so?
And if not, maybe we need to reconsider our standards... not lowering them, but adapting them to be more reasonable. It's not merely a gender issue here -- it's an age issue ("if you haven't met X criteria by age 35 or 40, you're obviously not a good scientist!!"), a prejudice against people who want to have multiple interests/hobbies in their lives, etc.
[On a broader more speculative note: In some cases, I think such prejudices can actually be detrimental to science -- for example, many of the most interesting and creative people I know tend to have a wide variety of interests, have unusual hobbies that get them thinking and working in very different ways outside of work, read voraciously on topics outside of the field, etc. Those people sometimes don't do as well in a "publish or perish" environment where they need to focus on rapid production of concentrated knowledge in a particular area. But having a "broader perspective" on the world often allows people to make weird connections across disciplines (or inspired in unpredictable ways from other disciplines)... and that can be important for "thinking outside the box" and finding a new way to tackle a problem that has stumped a discipline. OTHER people may thrive best through concentrated work in one area, but there probably is NOT one single personality or career organization/track that can predict contributions to scientific progress.]
More than one movement has talked about ending marriage, and all that did that failed.
My post wasn't about "ending marriage" per se. There are lots of ways to deal with the issues I brought up. But if we keep just "patching" broken laws without a real redefinition or re-examination of what we are trying to accomplish with these laws, we're just going to keep running into these sorts of legal and ethical conundrums. Perhaps the solution is to end marriage, but more likely we may need to create a number of different bundled legal contracts that are more appropriate for the various types of relationships. Or, at a minimum, we need to reconfigure legal "dependency" relationships created by marriage and redefine them based on actual financial dependency, for example.
Also, in this case, the public contract has been around so long that many laws have been written assuming it. "Family" law assumes and is built around government-approved marriages. To change marriage would change thousands of laws, with unknown and untested consequences.
This is all true, except we've been tinkering with these "thousands of laws" without dealing sufficiently with "unknown and untested consequences" for decades. Probably the strongest example of this is "no-fault" divorce, which came about for many noble reasons (not requiring people to PROVE abuse to get out of an abusive relationship, etc.), but which has had untold consequences requiring whole new mechanisms to deal with distribution of assets, support duties for dependents, etc. And the "patching up" of marriage law to deal with the increased rate of divorce following no-fault statutes is ongoing.... decades later.
I'm not arguing that no-fault divorce was bad, or that gay marriage is bad, or anything else. I'm happy to see people receiving equal rights: I couldn't figure out what the anti-gay justifications were 20 years ago when even the liberals in the U.S. were championing DOMA and "Don't ask, don't tell," so I'm glad people have in some ways realized where injustice existed.
On the other hand, decisions like this sadden me, because they serve as one more way to "punt" more essential problems and decisions down the road a couple more decades. Marriage laws as the parent noted came into formation to deal with a particular social construct. That social construct is now being altered in all sorts of ways, but yet we still award elements of the legal marriage contract (including a number of significant legal and financial benefits) that were originally granted to support marriage patterns that no longer are universal or in some cases aren't common at all anymore.
Eventually (a century from now?) we may start to finally address some of these problems head-on, but for the foreseeable future we're going to be stuck in various stupid legal conundrums because of changing ideas of what marriage is vs. why and how government regulates it. We'll see the polyamorist woman with three husbands arguing for rights (or the female threesome or whatever). We'll see the two brothers who want to do away with incest laws -- whether they want sexual relationships as consenting adults or not -- because they love each other and want the inheritance and other benefits that come from being spouses. We'll see all sorts of challenges in ways we just refuse to talk about now because everyone is just pretending that the "definition and purpose of marriage" is kind of irrelevant as long as we've given equal rights to the current minority group of concern.
At least 20 years ago people were all still talking about these real definitional issues and how shifting social perspectives are interacting with legal problems. While this is a great victory for equality, it is also yet another "patch" to a broken set of marriage laws that we are continuing to tinker with without considering the long-term consequences.... and why we even have these bundles of laws in the first place.
You can also use it to Bach up your files.
I tried that. But, to be Franck, I couldn't Handel how the sound Varese in this thing, so I ended up Haydn this Creation away; now it's just Leonin the server Cage. If I Figaro out what will work better, I'll make a Chopin Liszt, and go buy something that's Godunov.
Okay, very punny. We done now?
I'm going to go ahead and say that it mitigates the serious of the damage caused in actuality since most IT people entrusted with serious and important data aren't going to be that stupid.
And that's where your assumptions are different from mine. I was discussing people who are probably NOT "entrusted with serious and important data," but nevertheless have their own personal data (which they think is at least somewhat valuable) and choose to run a RAID 0 setup because of some stupid reason, like it makes their system run a bit faster.
(Well, that's not a completely stupid reason, but it is a reason to have a good backup strategy for essential files and to segregate your data so only the minimum files are at risk on RAID 0. Many people don't worry about these things until it's too late.)
If you doubt such people exist, do an internet search or read some gamer forums. And given such people are more likely to be running a bleeding-edge new version of software than a IT pro with a server who does thorough stability testing before upgrades, I'd imagine that a bug like this will disproportionately affect those hobbyists.
I'm not talking about IT pros here. I'm talking about random idiots who run RAID without thinking of the consequences. For them, this bug could be really serious.
'Compactness' is not a remotely optimal means of determining whether a district is gerrymandered or not. Republicans want 'compactness' to be the standard because Democrats are more likely to be clustered in dense cities, where 'compact' lines will cause 'packing' automatically.
Do you have any clue what you're talking about? "Compactness" just means that a perimeter measure is smaller -- it doesn't mean the AREA is necessarily smaller. Population density can various a lot, so areas can vary too. One could draw a nice "compact" set of districts that split a city right down the center, for example.
Of course compactness is not an optimal measure of gerrymandering, but have you looked at many of the districts highlighted in the article I linked to? Do those shapes seem remotely reasonable to you?
Maintaining communities of interest has an actual benefit, allowing people with a shared community to select their representation.
Yes, that's true. But we're looking here at particularly egregious boundaries which tend to skew the metrics much more. Also, who gets to determine these "communities"? That's the problem.
They're not mutually exclusive; states with a non-partisan redistricting process usually do better at finding a happy medium, with relatively geometric-shaped districts that preserve communities.
Yep -- and basically the study I linked to seems to show that Democratically controlled states tend to do WORSE than non-partisan redistricting states, according to all measures of compactness. So, either Democrats just happen to be dominant in places where communities are unusually oddly-shaped, or there's a political bias at work.
Regardless, as I said, I'm not complaining about either party here more than the other -- both have PROVEN histories of using gerrymandering for political gain. Are you disputing that?
Would you say the same thing if the bug affected RAID 1 or RAID 5?
I suspect not, since his point seemed to be that you shouldn't be using RAID 0 for data that you care about anyway.
Exactly. About the only reason I would ever use RAID 0 is for some sort of temp data drive where for some reason I wanted to string multiple drives together. You've basically taken a bunch of drives that each would be vulnerable without redundancy and have produced one big drive that will fail whenever any component does, thereby greatly increasing failure rate over individual drive failure rate. There are only a limited set of use cases where this is a helpful thing, and basically all of them are situations where you can assume that 100% data loss won't hurt you.
t doesn't really make it ok for a bug to exist that destroys RAID 0 volumes, but it does mitigate the seriousness of the damage caused.
Well, it mitigates the seriousness of the damage a bug should cause, assuming that people use RAID reasonably. But that's obviously a poor assumption, since many people seem to love playing Russian roulette with essential data.
I was lucky enough to have a significant (but not catastrophic) data loss hit me when I was young and didn't have a lot of essential data to lose. It taught me the importance of redundancy and backups. Most people who haven't experienced such things are more cavalier with data -- and a RAID 0 bug could be catastrophic for them.
It has been well established for many years now that both learning and using "cursive" writing (I know it as "joined" writing) is important for the development of young brains.
Meh. Many of the cited studies in your link are relevant to general task types -- it's not the cursive writing per se that has the benefit.
There is something to be said for having kids do tasks that require fine-grained coordination, awards for precision, significant effort, lots of repetition to achieve perfection, etc. Among other kinds of tasks, of course.
Your argument is like the people complaining about why kids don't use logarithm tables anymore or that there should be more geometric proofs in high school or whatever. Lots of things teach important skills in school curricula, but often those skills can be taught in other ways (e.g., logarithm use encourages keeping track of magnitudes in calculations, but instruction in estimation, significant figures, and scientific notation can achieve similar goals AND... proofs are an exercise in formal logic that could be achieved by giving exercises in actual formal logic syllogisms, math proofs in other fields than geometry, doing programming exercises that require logical flow, etc.).
Cursive is fun and all. I spent many years perfecting mine, and I've actually spent some time learning older variants (Spencerian, Copperplate, etc.) because it's fun and elegant. But when I take my notes quickly and roughly, I usually print... it's faster and easier to read than the scribble I can create quickly in cursive.
But whatever. That's my experience. The point is that the benefits of cursive are minor, it takes a lot of instructional time, and it has become a less valued skill these days. So the question shouldn't be "Why should we retain cursive?" but "Is there something we could teach with that time which would still have similar cognitive and coordination benefits?" etc.
Times have changed since the 90's. Hell, as of 4 years ago gay marriage was banned in all states.
Huh? Gay marriage became legal in Massachusetts in 2003, almost 12 years ago.
The joker in the deck was that presently the younger generation is less vanilla than the older generation
[Citation needed]
People have been saying the exact same thing about "those damn kids these days" for thousands of years. You really think the "hippie" generation of the late 60s and 70s was more "vanilla"? From a political standpoint, that generation was probably far more likely to openly defy the government, go to protests, get arrested, etc. than today's youth. They were significant political "activists" who hated the system and were actively demonstrating that they wanted to do something about it. Today, we have things like "Occupy," which means people camp out in tents in a park -- I'm not insulting or denigrating those actions, but how many of them would be willing to take the kinds of actions people were doing in the 60s/70s?
Anyhow, those hippies are now the "older generation," and while I know plenty of aging hippies who are still crazy liberal, I've seen many of them turn into crazy Republicans too.
and the older generation isn't being very welcoming to people who aren't like them and never will be.
Again, you'd need some sort of stats to prove this. What tends to happen in the real world is that as people get older, they get more conservative, but specific beliefs or values may still shift -- and those become adopted by the NEW older class. Which means that the party of old people tomorrow will be different from the party of old people today. It's likely that parties will gradually shift along with demographics, as they continuously have ever since they came into existence in the early 1800s.
So what used to be a pipeline from Democrat to Republican has developed a blockage and a lot of people are being squeezed out of the party pipes entirely.
Now, that's an interesting argument, and there do seem stats to be out there that show a growth in "independents" in some places. But that doesn't really matter as much as how those people actually VOTE. And the reality is that VERY few people tend to vote for 3rd-party candidates unless the 3rd-party candidate is already a celebrity or is otherwise well-known or something. You may lament the fact that people aren't choosing other candidates, but if they're still stuck choosing from the 2 major parties, one party or the other is probably going to become the "party of the old people."
Nonsense. Maybe Republicans have been more successful in gerrymandering, but both parties have engaged in this practice. That's why there are so many "reliable" Republican and Democrat seats.
Indeed. For anyone interested in the overall trend, I'd encourage them to have a look at this report, which does not appear to be biased toward or against any particular party and makes use of a number of different measures of gerrymandering.
After the 2010 census redistricting, they conclude the following regarding both parties' effects:
The mean Polsby-Popper, Schwartzberg and Reock scores indicate that districts drawn with total GOP control have a higher compactness score than districts drawn with total Democratic control under those measures. States with split control fall in the middle. Nevertheless, districts with a political party in control remain less compact than the national average by every measure. . . . Using the convex hull measure shows a different story. Districts drawn by a split in control come out with a higher compactness score, with districts drawn by the GOP not far behind. Districts drawn by the Democratic Party are much less compact than either.
While districts drawn by Republicans in this decennial redistricting process may be somewhat more compact than those drawn by Democrats, it is also clear that both parties appeared to take advantage of their situation and draw districts more favorable to their party's election. For example, Democrats took advantage in Maryland and Illinois while Republicans took advantage in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Republicans just had many more states, which may have buffered their average.
In other words, Democrats controlled fewer state legislatures than Republicans, but where they did control them, they introduced even WORSE (i.e., "less compact") gerrymandered districts than Republicans on average.
But since Republicans had control of more states, overall they may have ended up ahead THIS TIME in the gerrymandering war... maybe. Note that this crap goes on after every census, and whichever big party happens to be in control tries to exploit it. The Dems are certainly not more innocent than the Reps. They all should be thrown out of office for it.
Licensed, legitimate cab companies run a gauntlet of state & local regulations before they can collect fares. Uber and Lyft bypass them, start operating, and then act surprised when their illegal operation using unlicensed, unvetted drivers run into trouble.
Indeed. Can we just stop calling it "ridesharing," too? You want to offer a coworker a ride in your car to work? That's "ridesharing." You want to say, "Can you chip in a little for gas and wear-and-tear on the car and such"? That's still "ridesharing."
When you start offering these services to different strangers every day and trying to make a profit off of giving them rides, that's no longer "ridesharing" -- that's a taxi service.
And there are good reasons why many regulations exist to protect both drivers and passengers in these sorts of transactions. Inevitably, there are probably some bad regulations in most places -- ones that are unnecessary or bring in extra revenue to governments or end up protecting traditional existing cab companies or whatever.
But just because there are SOME bad regulations doesn't mean that NO regulations is the best idea (or is even better than having some bad ones along with the good ones).
Regardless, most businesses in the U.S. have to obey various rules according to the law. Don't like that? Then vote to change the laws or vote for representatives who will. But stop pretending that you're just trying to "share a ride" with people when you're running a business and trying to make money off of it. That's just as crooked and dishonest as some of the bad government regulations you're complaining about.
There is no Nobel price in economics
Yeah, yeah... I know the controversy. It was partly ironic in my post which was obviously intended to be funny.
On the one hand, I think most of the field of "economics" has severe methodological problems. On the other hand, I find those people trying to claim it's "not a real Nobel prize" are making a bogus argument too. Yes, it wasn't in Nobel's will, but who is Nobel to determine what fields deserve prizes for all time? It's not like the "peace" prizes are awarded with any accountability for intellectual rigor either. And the Nobel Foundation authorizes these prizes, chooses them basically using similar criteria to other fields, and awards them on the same day in the same ceremony.
Do I think there *should* be a Nobel prize for economics? Probably not. But pretending there isn't one is just stupid, until the actual organization that regulates Nobel prizes decides it will no longer award one or will call it something else.
Gold has value because it's virtually the only useful metal that doesn't corrode.
Yeah, yeah -- I wasn't going into too much detail here. Of course gold has some utility value, particularly in a technologically advanced society. But its current market price is a huge number of factors higher than that basic utility value -- and that "extra value" could vanish at any time. And the basic utility value can even vanish too -- in sufficiently dire circumstances.
No, but it does mean their opinion is worthless.
Agreed, *IF* your goal is to "beat the market."
But since I basically believe (on the basis of various statistical studies) that ALL advice trying to "beat" the market is worthless, which also somewhat negates your earlier complaint. ALL advice is crap, whether it's somebody yelling about doom-and-gloom or some ideas trying to get you to buy the most recent boom (gold! oil! etc.).
But the advice is only "worthless" if you measure of "success" is maintaining the market status quo. If that's all everyone wanted to do, everyone would have a 100% stock portfolio. Most people don't. Most people want to diversify, based on volatility, and at various points in their lives, they may prefer less volatility, even if it means lower returns overall.
In that sense, an imprecise bubble prediction, particularly for a specific sector ("This rise seems unsustainable in sector X and will likely bust in the next few years") can allow investors who do not wish to gamble as much to exit that sector.
Your assumption is that a bubble prediction is only useful if it allows someone to OPTIMIZE profits. That's the only reason you need to know exact time and magnitude. Other people may be much happier with less lofty goals -- and simply want to assess risk to balance a portfolio in a reasonable fashion.
Never mind that gold and silver were used as money for thousands of years before the printing press made it possible to issue fiat currency.
Nonsense. Gold and silver can be "fiat" currency just as paper money can be. Fiat currency just means that a currency derives part of its value from the government's declaration that it shall function as a currency.
For example, the U.S. government says that the "dollar" must be used to pay taxes. It could equally say that "gold" must be used to pay taxes, in which case gold's price would probably go up, since it would be more useful to pay for things with. That addition in value due to the government's endorsement is what produces "fiat" money.
People who don't understand what the term "fiat" means assume that "fiat" currency is always based on something that they consider "valueless" while whatever alternative "non-fiat" currency has some sort of "inherent value."
Except who determines that "inherent value"? Where does it come from? Food and water will always have some inherent value for humans, since they need it to survive. Other goods that fulfill basic needs (shelter, protection, etc.) also generally have a pretty basic value.
But gold only has value because it's rare and shiny, but there are many things in the world that are rare and shiny. Under sufficiently dire circumstances (e.g., being lost in the desert), your gold brick might be worthless compared to a canteen of water.
In sum, other than basic human needs, things only have value because as a society we agree that they have value. If a society starts valuing other things, the old "inherent value" items will lose value. Do I think it's likely that gold will become worthless anytime soon? No -- but its price in relation to other goods has and will fluctuate the same way a supposed "fiat currency" does. It's true that in sufficiently dire circumstances (e.g., hyperinflation) "fiat currencies" may lose significant value.
But in sufficiently dire circumstances, "all bets are off," i.e., what people may want is to trade for food or water or weapons or whatever -- they won't want gold unless they know that someone else will be willing to take it in exchange for food or water or weapons (and that's not always guaranteed in sufficiently dire circumstances).
The problem is, that "last time" people started shouting "bubble" in 1996. Then again in 1997, 1998, 1999, and 2000. Then in 2001, the crash came, and they said "I told you so", despite the fact that the bottom of the crash was still higher than when they first started shouting.
Meh. I'd have to look back at the detailed stats here for those years, but just because it takes a long time for a "bubble" to burst doesn't mean that there wasn't evidence of a bubble developing.
And just because the "bottom of the crash" is higher than the start of the "bubble" doesn't mean that the "bubble" people were completely wrong -- the market "correction" may not fall as much because the damage is restricted to a particular area or because overall economic growth since the beginning of the "bubble" predictions means that the new "floor" is higher, etc. Also, often the people talking about "bubbles" also tend to point out particular areas where problematic behavior is emerging, rather than the overall market. It may take quite a few years for that problematic behavior to become so widespread or extreme that prices become severely inflated -- but again, the causes may go back further in time.
In sum, you're right that evidence of an emerging "bubble" should be met with some skepticism. We shouldn't believe idiots shouting "Sell! Sell!" anymore than we believe idiots shouting "Buy! Buy!"
If you really think you are so much smarter than the market, then feel free put your money where your mouth is, and sell some shorts. Then when the crash comes, right when you predicted, you can come back here and brag about your new yacht.
This is a flawed idea, since it depends on the assumption that the market is fundamentally rational and non-chaotic. If one could predict a crash precisely in time, then the market would be so rational and efficient that there would be no bubbles in the first place.
On the other hand, that doesn't mean that there can't be indicators that suggest a particular trend is unlikely to be sustainable in the long run. In fact, many adventurous business plans depend on things that are obviously unsustainable, whether it's over the span of a couple months or a couple years or a couple decades. Noting that such a trend is apparent doesn't mean an imminent crash, but it may mean the "gambling odds" are changing.