You are absolutely right - most people are not knowledgeable about climate science, and their opinions on the science itself should be rightly ignored.
However, there *do* exist a group of people who *are* knowledgeable on the subject--scientists--and the conclusions of scientists should be respected, because they have actually thought carefully about the problem and analyzed it with the best tools at their disposal, and not just read about it on some blogs.
Doesn't that argument seem a bit ridiculous to you? It's contrarian-ness for the sake of being contrary. It's the idea that as soon as more than N% of the population believes something then it's automatically invalid. Yes, scientific theory is constantly being updated. But even when theories are modified, shown to be inaccurate, or even shown to be just plain wrong, doesn't mean that all scientific statements are the opposite of true.
Unless you want to receive a degree in science, or publish a paper in a peer-reviewed journal. In both scenarios you will face "gatekeepers" who have little to no interest in anything that deviates from mainstream consensus views. Oh and once you get that degree, if you want to be funded by grant money you again can't deviate too far from consensus views because you will be considered fringe and unworthy of funding.
This assertion is just ridiculous on the face of it. Science *thrives* on people upending conventional wisdom. One of the absolute best ways to make a name for yourself is to discover something that overturns the status quo.
I don't understand where people get an idea like yours. Have you ever had any interaction with anyone who does any kind of science that would lend substance to such a belief?
It could certainly be a factor. While the probability of actually being a target of such a suit has been small, the penalty is large enough that I'd guess there is at least some deterrent effect.
If I had to guess I'd probably say it's about a fourth-order effect, really, but it's impossible to know for sure. There's just too much going on in the market to properly isolate the influences.
This is a weird hangup for me, but WYSIWYG exacerbates my writer's block. It's like I sit there looking at the emptiness and think, "my god, how can I ever fill up this space." It doesn't matter how little space it is, I just focus too much on it, and it crowds out useful thoughts. For some reason when I'm writing plain text I can just focus on the content instead of the whitespace. I've never met anyone else with this problem, so I'll assume I'm a weirdo:-).
Just to place your opinion in context, are you against progressive taxation in general?
My thinking on the child tax credit is that it normalizes the marginal value of a dollar between a household with children and one without. I.e., if one makes $50k/year and has 2 children, an extra $1000 is considerable more helpful than if one makes $50k and has no children.
That's more of a problem with journalists, actually. Someone writes a paper, say, on "50 ml of coffee every day increases the memory abilities of people with AB-type blood". To journalists, this means "NEWSFLASH: Science Says Coffee Makes You Smarter!!!!!". Then, someone else writes another paper: "200ml of coffee every day increases the chance of a heart attack on heavy smokers"; journalists turn that to "NEWSFLASH: Beware! Coffee Can Kill You, Say Scientists!"
I kind of think there needs to be a moratorium on news articles about food-related health. It seems like anything between "don't drink bleach" and "eat your vegetables" is just too subtle to be in the popular press.
Personally I see three debates where the scientific community has come under fire from a segment of the public.
Evolution vs. Creation (science vs. religion)
Global warming (science vs. dislike of government regulation)
Vaccination (???)
In the first two cases, science is being pitted against deeply held personal beliefs (religion and politics FTW!). I can't neatly say what drives the anti-vaccine crowd, although it seems like a combination of powerful emotional appeal and the general tendency of people to be a bit wacky when it comes to health-related matters.
I think I generally agree with you - you definitely want to hire the people who will do the best engineering work for you, and the Ph.D. definitely does not signify that over all other considerations. But I don't agree with most of this statement:
I would also say that the 7 years spent doing the course do not equate to 10 years of industry experience. They're still fresh out of University, as far as I'm concerned. Most of the folks I've seen who come straight out of a PhD have: no idea how to drive a debugger, no idea what 'deadlines' are, no idea how to integrate their code with a team, and no idea how to schedule themselves.
I guess my experience is just very different from yours. When you say, "they're fresh out of university," are you saying that your average Ph.D. is about as skilled an engineer as your average B.S.? That would be very surprising to me and doesn't match my perception, but then again I have a limited sample. Most Ph.D.s have spent several years trying to solve a set of very hard problems, and most of them have written lots of very advanced code to do so.
I can't imagine being able to finish an advanced degree without having used a debugger (people researching theory don't count, and even there I bet the hit rate is close to 100%). I can't imagine they don't understand deadlines either, since conference paper deadlines are a major part of graduate school. Teamwork and scheduling, I can see your point, since lots of grads don't work in a large group (my experience was an exception), and grad students are known for poor scheduling... comes with too much workplace freedom:-)
Anyways, I'm not trying to say that doctorates trump experience or anything like that, so I should probably shut the heck up and agree with you already - it's short sighted and lazy to base hiring decisions solely on possession of a degree.
Thanks for that extremely in-depth, well-measured reply. I was in fact wondering whether you were referring to some aspects of climate science, but I didn't want to jump on that right away. I would be curious to examples of what may be considered junk climate science, but I can use Google too, so I won't ask you to provide them:-)
I'm not convinced that competition for grant money corrupts the science itself, but I have to remind myself that the science I am personally familiar with has few sweeping political or policy ramifications. My feeling is that competition for grant money does have some unpleasant side-effects. Scientists have to do some savvy marketing to get money. I don't think it crosses into fraudulent claims, because that would be too easy to check, but it may lead some to sensationalize their discoveries.
Maybe I'm just being gullible or naive, but it seems like if global warming were not happening, and a climate scientist could definitively prove it, that would be a career-making move. Suppressing it would seem to require quite the conspiracy. Then again, I suppose the continued funding for climate research as a whole rests on global warming being a real threat, so maybe it is just all individuals reaching the same self-interested decision. I could sympathize with that argument (without agreeing).
Of course, the scientific arguments themselves seem to be on the up-and-up to me, but in this area I am a layperson so my opinion can safely be ignored:-).
Too many career academics willing to do junk science in order to keep the grant money rolling in.
Can you give an example of such a thing? I do know of a few instances of scientific fraud, but they are relatively rare, and the coverage (to the extent it even hits the media) makes it fairly clear that it is rare.
The average length of time it takes to complete a Ph.D. in computer science is around 7 years. That puts most Ph.D's in about the same age bracket as someone with 10 years of industry experience. There are lots of reasons why hiring Ph.D.'s makes sense, not least because most have a track record of publications (not to mention the dissertation itself), which a hiring manager can look at to help decide whether to make the hire.
10 years' industry experience, on the other hand, can be a nebulous thing. What kind of industry experience are we talking about? I've known folks who have been doing "tech" for 10+ years that couldn't code their way out of a JavaScript-enabled paper sack. Of course I've known many who are fantastic engineers as well, but it can sometimes be difficult to see exactly how effective somebody is when their previous work was behind the closed doors of another company.
Now, that all said, if you have an effective interview process then you should be able to separate the wheat from the chaff and hire the best employees regardless of their degree (or lack thereof). I just don't like seeing you slam the Ph.D.s somewhat (to my mind) unjustly.
Neato, have you seen any range improvements/differences with 1.3 GHz? I'd heard a few complaints about range with the 5 GHz models. (Nothing from personal experience, I've been landline-less for years.)
I can actually predict what the machine is going to do when I write a line of code!
Ah, the good old popular misconception. For most practical purposes,
- you don't know what code the compiler will emit, especially if you're optimizing.
Ah, leave it to someone on Slashdot to take a little quip and pile on technical details. I love it, honestly:-).
While I admit I don't know precisely what the compiler/optimizer is doing, I think C in general has a fairly "transparent" programming model. Not much happens unless you explicitly make it happen. Contrast this with C++, where destructors and copy constructors and the like get called, and it's (in my opinion) much harder to understand what's going on when you write any given statement. Let alone something like Java that uses virtual methods like crazy, and there's always the garbage collector, watching, waiting... *grin*
Now, none of this rant is supposed to suggest that higher-level languages or bad, or that I have some kind of mystical precise microarchitectural knowledge of the state of a machine at any given nanosecond. Just that I have a nice warm fuzzy feeling when it comes to programming in C. You know, until I have to debug a memory corruption error...
Oh and by the way, I did not know that gcc 4.5 has link-time optimization. That is awesome!
Closing the source does not make security holes go away. It may make them *marginally* harder to find, but probably not much harder for experienced attackers. What closing the source does do is make it harder or impossible for people who know something about securing such things to help you.
Slashdot Mirror
Something like that has actually happened, though the paper doesn't specify whether it was a Xerox printer: http://dmca.cs.washington.edu/
You are absolutely right - most people are not knowledgeable about climate science, and their opinions on the science itself should be rightly ignored.
However, there *do* exist a group of people who *are* knowledgeable on the subject--scientists--and the conclusions of scientists should be respected, because they have actually thought carefully about the problem and analyzed it with the best tools at their disposal, and not just read about it on some blogs.
Doesn't that argument seem a bit ridiculous to you? It's contrarian-ness for the sake of being contrary. It's the idea that as soon as more than N% of the population believes something then it's automatically invalid. Yes, scientific theory is constantly being updated. But even when theories are modified, shown to be inaccurate, or even shown to be just plain wrong, doesn't mean that all scientific statements are the opposite of true.
Where do you get the idea that:
Unless you want to receive a degree in science, or publish a paper in a peer-reviewed journal. In both scenarios you will face "gatekeepers" who have little to no interest in anything that deviates from mainstream consensus views. Oh and once you get that degree, if you want to be funded by grant money you again can't deviate too far from consensus views because you will be considered fringe and unworthy of funding.
This assertion is just ridiculous on the face of it. Science *thrives* on people upending conventional wisdom. One of the absolute best ways to make a name for yourself is to discover something that overturns the status quo.
I don't understand where people get an idea like yours. Have you ever had any interaction with anyone who does any kind of science that would lend substance to such a belief?
It could certainly be a factor. While the probability of actually being a target of such a suit has been small, the penalty is large enough that I'd guess there is at least some deterrent effect.
If I had to guess I'd probably say it's about a fourth-order effect, really, but it's impossible to know for sure. There's just too much going on in the market to properly isolate the influences.
This is a weird hangup for me, but WYSIWYG exacerbates my writer's block. It's like I sit there looking at the emptiness and think, "my god, how can I ever fill up this space." It doesn't matter how little space it is, I just focus too much on it, and it crowds out useful thoughts. For some reason when I'm writing plain text I can just focus on the content instead of the whitespace. I've never met anyone else with this problem, so I'll assume I'm a weirdo :-).
Just to place your opinion in context, are you against progressive taxation in general?
My thinking on the child tax credit is that it normalizes the marginal value of a dollar between a household with children and one without. I.e., if one makes $50k/year and has 2 children, an extra $1000 is considerable more helpful than if one makes $50k and has no children.
That's more of a problem with journalists, actually. Someone writes a paper, say, on "50 ml of coffee every day increases the memory abilities of people with AB-type blood". To journalists, this means "NEWSFLASH: Science Says Coffee Makes You Smarter!!!!!". Then, someone else writes another paper: "200ml of coffee every day increases the chance of a heart attack on heavy smokers"; journalists turn that to "NEWSFLASH: Beware! Coffee Can Kill You, Say Scientists!"
I kind of think there needs to be a moratorium on news articles about food-related health. It seems like anything between "don't drink bleach" and "eat your vegetables" is just too subtle to be in the popular press.
Personally I see three debates where the scientific community has come under fire from a segment of the public.
In the first two cases, science is being pitted against deeply held personal beliefs (religion and politics FTW!). I can't neatly say what drives the anti-vaccine crowd, although it seems like a combination of powerful emotional appeal and the general tendency of people to be a bit wacky when it comes to health-related matters.
Is science in a broader sense doing so poorly?
And I don't get the off-topic thing, either. WTH, mods??
I think I generally agree with you - you definitely want to hire the people who will do the best engineering work for you, and the Ph.D. definitely does not signify that over all other considerations. But I don't agree with most of this statement:
I would also say that the 7 years spent doing the course do not equate to 10 years of industry experience. They're still fresh out of University, as far as I'm concerned. Most of the folks I've seen who come straight out of a PhD have: no idea how to drive a debugger, no idea what 'deadlines' are, no idea how to integrate their code with a team, and no idea how to schedule themselves.
I guess my experience is just very different from yours. When you say, "they're fresh out of university," are you saying that your average Ph.D. is about as skilled an engineer as your average B.S.? That would be very surprising to me and doesn't match my perception, but then again I have a limited sample. Most Ph.D.s have spent several years trying to solve a set of very hard problems, and most of them have written lots of very advanced code to do so.
I can't imagine being able to finish an advanced degree without having used a debugger (people researching theory don't count, and even there I bet the hit rate is close to 100%). I can't imagine they don't understand deadlines either, since conference paper deadlines are a major part of graduate school. Teamwork and scheduling, I can see your point, since lots of grads don't work in a large group (my experience was an exception), and grad students are known for poor scheduling... comes with too much workplace freedom :-)
Anyways, I'm not trying to say that doctorates trump experience or anything like that, so I should probably shut the heck up and agree with you already - it's short sighted and lazy to base hiring decisions solely on possession of a degree.
Thanks for that extremely in-depth, well-measured reply. I was in fact wondering whether you were referring to some aspects of climate science, but I didn't want to jump on that right away. I would be curious to examples of what may be considered junk climate science, but I can use Google too, so I won't ask you to provide them :-)
I'm not convinced that competition for grant money corrupts the science itself, but I have to remind myself that the science I am personally familiar with has few sweeping political or policy ramifications. My feeling is that competition for grant money does have some unpleasant side-effects. Scientists have to do some savvy marketing to get money. I don't think it crosses into fraudulent claims, because that would be too easy to check, but it may lead some to sensationalize their discoveries.
Maybe I'm just being gullible or naive, but it seems like if global warming were not happening, and a climate scientist could definitively prove it, that would be a career-making move. Suppressing it would seem to require quite the conspiracy. Then again, I suppose the continued funding for climate research as a whole rests on global warming being a real threat, so maybe it is just all individuals reaching the same self-interested decision. I could sympathize with that argument (without agreeing).
Of course, the scientific arguments themselves seem to be on the up-and-up to me, but in this area I am a layperson so my opinion can safely be ignored :-).
I think I could probably explain SVD to a 6-year old. Of course, it would probably take 20 or so years...
Too many career academics willing to do junk science in order to keep the grant money rolling in.
Can you give an example of such a thing? I do know of a few instances of scientific fraud, but they are relatively rare, and the coverage (to the extent it even hits the media) makes it fairly clear that it is rare.
The average length of time it takes to complete a Ph.D. in computer science is around 7 years. That puts most Ph.D's in about the same age bracket as someone with 10 years of industry experience. There are lots of reasons why hiring Ph.D.'s makes sense, not least because most have a track record of publications (not to mention the dissertation itself), which a hiring manager can look at to help decide whether to make the hire.
10 years' industry experience, on the other hand, can be a nebulous thing. What kind of industry experience are we talking about? I've known folks who have been doing "tech" for 10+ years that couldn't code their way out of a JavaScript-enabled paper sack. Of course I've known many who are fantastic engineers as well, but it can sometimes be difficult to see exactly how effective somebody is when their previous work was behind the closed doors of another company.
Now, that all said, if you have an effective interview process then you should be able to separate the wheat from the chaff and hire the best employees regardless of their degree (or lack thereof). I just don't like seeing you slam the Ph.D.s somewhat (to my mind) unjustly.
What right do you have to eat/drink/smoke whatever you like when other people are obliged by law to pay for your health care?
I don't really see a lot of restrictions on what I can eat/drink. Hell, the existence of the KFC double-down pretty much defeats your argument there.
Parent post is chock-full of win! Hilarious!
Oh false antecedents, is there anything you can't imply? :-D
Neato, have you seen any range improvements/differences with 1.3 GHz? I'd heard a few complaints about range with the 5 GHz models. (Nothing from personal experience, I've been landline-less for years.)
But I want to watch Fox news and you're completely scrambling it.....
*confused* But I thought Fox news was already scrambled!
I can actually predict what the machine is going to do when I write a line of code!
Ah, the good old popular misconception. For most practical purposes,
- you don't know what code the compiler will emit, especially if you're optimizing.
Ah, leave it to someone on Slashdot to take a little quip and pile on technical details. I love it, honestly :-).
While I admit I don't know precisely what the compiler/optimizer is doing, I think C in general has a fairly "transparent" programming model. Not much happens unless you explicitly make it happen. Contrast this with C++, where destructors and copy constructors and the like get called, and it's (in my opinion) much harder to understand what's going on when you write any given statement. Let alone something like Java that uses virtual methods like crazy, and there's always the garbage collector, watching, waiting... *grin*
Now, none of this rant is supposed to suggest that higher-level languages or bad, or that I have some kind of mystical precise microarchitectural knowledge of the state of a machine at any given nanosecond. Just that I have a nice warm fuzzy feeling when it comes to programming in C. You know, until I have to debug a memory corruption error...
Oh and by the way, I did not know that gcc 4.5 has link-time optimization. That is awesome!
A professor I worked with once quipped: "C is portable assembly language."
I think that's something I like about it... I can actually predict what the machine is going to do when I write a line of code!
The OP clearly conveniently named all his porn files with the suffix .xxx, so the * was getting expanded. :-D
$ grep vulnerability *.c | wc -l
0
Everything seems fine here to me...
Closing the source does not make security holes go away. It may make them *marginally* harder to find, but probably not much harder for experienced attackers. What closing the source does do is make it harder or impossible for people who know something about securing such things to help you.