Mandate all rich people give poor people everything every other generation?
I've already written once today (in partial jest) that there are two ways to obtain a benefit you haven't earned: through social programs and through inheritance--let's kill both.
I'm an R programmer IRL. I don't have much formal training in statistics, but when I need a second opinion, my bookshelf is stacked with the highest grade of bullshit detector. In the machine learning sector, that's a high grade indeed. You don't ascend to the top of the Kagglestalk by being full of shit. (I have not yet formed an opinion about Kaggle in general.)
I quickly came to the conclusion that the spousal unit of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have way oversold their analysis as an input to public policy. Nevertheless, it ought to be troubling how readily these slopes tip in an ugly direction. In data mining, most of what you get is suggestive. I find their approach closer to data mining than proper statistics. Human cognition for the most part is closer to data mining than proper statistics, so I'm not saying that suggestive signals are slight or worthless. I'm saying that juicy things you pick up off the floor should not enter mouth without second inspection.
From Snowdon's mad dog supplemental chapter:
It is fantastically implausible to think that Wilkinson and Pickett are not aware of the importance of outliers in statistics.
There's a certain type of thinker who loves to stop thinking at the invocation of a categorical word. Outlier is a word of many meanings in statistics. It's not an automatic red flag to invoke the purity reflex (conservatives are sometimes painted as having more intense purity/disgust pathways). An outlier due to a DRAM memory error is best discarded. When the outlier is a big fat juicy data point, you need to engage your brain. Your signal naturally shows up most intensely at the extremes. If you don't want to find a signal, by all means, terminate outliers with extreme prejudice, as Snowdon imprecates the vagrant bastards.
But if they really wished to "avoid being accused of picking and choosing" they would have used the same official measure throughout.
By page 200 or so, he's wound himself up to where he leaves his brain behind. Too bad, because his brain was useful when he used it. He's gone completely insane on the decision process of prudence: trying your best not to shop for the desired outcome, while also trying to step around contaminated inputs. One of the inputs W&P sensibly step around are self-reported psychiatric states. These are known to be dirtier than Netflix ratings. Snowdon by the end is promoting the merest sign of discretion as a hanging offence. I would also like to know why these small acts of discretion were invoked, but I don't immediately fear the worst. W&P could do much better in the scholarship department.
Snowdon loses it completely on race as a confound. Confounds aren't all that important until you get into causative interpretation, often a necessary step on the road to public policy. I don't think W&P is anywhere close to providing a solid foundation for public policy, so this whole causative rebuke leaves me cold. Attack dogs never weary of citing error, long after there was any point. If he's not an attack dog, why does he act like one?
Since there is no relationship between race and mental health, they cannot find a relationship with inequality. But since there are relationships between race and many o
I'm in exactly the same boat. This assistance they are so determined to extend in my direction can only jostle the elbow of merit-based purchasing decisions if I allow it to do so.
A meme I've dropped here in the past is how having a cable TV subscription is like parking a salty chip truck on your front lawn. One thing we know about human nature is that if you wish to prevail, you must win your battles in the store rather than at the refrigerator door where we quickly succumb to Decision Fatigue.
Eventually, at the rate this economic model is progressing, they'll have to legislate that failing to succumb to decision fatigue as theft of service. It's become our preferred payment program, hasn't it? There's no tax more widely lauded than a hidden tax. It's not that we hate to pay taxes, it's that we hate to know we pay taxes.
Since I jumped into this thread with both feet, I might as well continue my self-dialog under the burning bush.
I suppose I've listened attentively to at least 50 Econtalk episodes, including Cowen on the Great Stagnation. It didn't make a particularly strong impression. Russ gives a good interview and he invites smart subjects. Often he goosesteps over the pearls of wisdom he elicits on his Route 66 to Hayekville. That's his loss at the end of the day. I get a lot out of it applying a broader filter.
I think the majority of the explanation lies in the transition to doing more with less. Our productivity figures are pretty insane when it comes to this kind of thing. Counterproductive cycles are double counted, while real progress self negates. If you go back and dampen those old productivity figures with the careless waste streams and hidden liabilities, we're not doing so badly in the present after all.
It's a bit like hitting the 4GHz barrier in CPU design. Innovation hardly ceased, but it's bounty has become a lot less direct. In the kinds of systems that will soon replace the laggard tail of the human bell curve, those multiple cores will find their use.
I hate these telescopic footnotes, but I really should have added that depriving convicted felons of their franchise is shockingly un-Christian. What would Christ do, FFS? The man was after all notoriously tolerant of hypocrisy. He was not just some figure in any random Mel Gibson production. It's a brave act to become a Christian, if you really do it.
My father was a pastor until my teenage years. I was well on the path to atheism by the age of seven, when I realized that the distinction between God's will and my mother's will was unfalsifiable. My mother was incredibly stubborn, and I was not about to be left behind. I live in eternal fear that the first sound I hear after passing under the quantum noise floor is a stern voice intoning "Your mother was right."
Just yesterday I read the writ of cherem against Baruch Spinoza with a mild frisson. After the judicial preamble, it goes on to express how they really feel (cribbing from the bathroom wall of all knowledge):
By the decree of the angels, and by the command of the holy men, we excommunicate, expel, curse and damn Baruch de Espinoza, with the consent of God, Blessed be He, and with the consent of all the Holy Congregation, in front of these holy Scrolls with the six-hundred-and-thirteen precepts which are written therein, with the excommunication with which Joshua banned Jericho, with the curse with which Elisha cursed the boys, and with all the curses which are written in the Book of the Law. Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down, and cursed be he when he rises up; cursed be he when he goes out, and cursed be he when he comes in. The Lord will not spare him; the anger and wrath of the Lord will rage against this man, and bring upon him all the curses which are written in this book, and the Lord will blot out his name from under heaven, and the Lord will separate him to his injury from all the tribes of Israel with all the curses of the covenant, which are written in the Book of the Law. But you who cleave unto the Lord God are all alive this day. We order that no one should communicate with him orally or in writing, or show him any favor, or stay with him under the same roof, or within four ells of him, or read anything composed or written by him.
Ah, but there were compensations:
When he died, he was considered a saint by the general Christian population, and was buried in holy ground.
In 1800, no state prohibited felons from voting. On the eve of the Civil War, 80% of the states did, largely to block African Americans, who though rarely allowed to vote were disproportionately represented among felons.
Disenfranchisement amplifies the wedge. Winners tend to vote for more losers, don't they? America could potentially turn into a nation where a great mass of people have their backs against the chasm.
It's perfectly clear how this all pans out: celebrities will pay royalties to their fan base to prove their popularity to the royal court of second generation Stanford trillionaires. Most of us will earn our livings by making prudent decisions with the "like" button. (There are two ways to obtain money you didn't earn: social programs and inheritance. Let's kill both.)
Actually, I was writing about Adam Smith on a different thread yesterday. My personal Adam Smith reincarnation, if alive today, would be giving the Tea Party the back of his hand. He would be rolling up his sleeves to determine the structure of the labour force in 2060 with a grim expression on his face.
We already have severely disadvantaged individuals where any economic value the person could possibly contribute could be obtained with less cost and hassle by another means. These were people three or four standard deviations below the mean in good life fortune.
When that bar was way off in the weeds of the bell curve, the traditional economic fable of Schumpeter's creative destructive held sway. It's a good fable if personal reinvention holds pace.
Over the next fifty years, the bar of negative labour value will be emerging from the weeds into the second rough. Ten percent of the population will find themselves under the charity threshold: working in jobs we decided not to automate because it's cheaper to keep these people occupied. Maybe the whole program will be orchestrated by the American penal system. It seems to be gearing up capacity to meet demand. It will be an interesting day when the first prison administrator is convicted of bribing a berry picking operation to not purchase effective machinery, in essence allocating tough on crime dollars to their most valuable use.
Adding to the formidable complications would be any near term success in life extension research, further accelerating the devolution to gated communities and orange jump suits. We've tried the status segregation experiment once before: it was called slavery and it didn't work out so great. This time around, having the right skin colour won't save you.
If you feel left out and would like to be included next time, the email address is ebola@theregister.co.uk
I'm not sure their PR work is having the desired effect.
Yes they have contacted ICO, but, by their own standards, this is an epic FAIL.
Half of literature and human history consists of people suffering momentary lapses of standards they espouse. If you wear the goat horns valiantly, people will forgive if not forget. Some of the orgs criticized by El Rel are institutions with immense resources and public trust. I don't think I'd assign El Reg to either of those quadrants.
Discover/invent is an old debate fully resolved by tossing back a shooter of Wittgenstein/Austin admixed with Kolmogorov/Chaitin--of equally contentious optimal proportions.
Our patent system allows a person to invent a juicy peach that lands three feet from a swarming anthill if the anthill is preoccupied for a day or two with some fractured apples that landed on the other side, you know, because the ant hill would never get about without the exogenous incentive.
Invention is the ant gnawing through the peach stem six feet above the anthill to cause it to land there before the pterosaur alights on the neighbouring branch.
Applying a function to a function, was that above or beside?
Currying is a funny invention. We all simplify our mental models based on information already in hand. The purpose of granting the data flow of everyday life a formal notation was to facilitate a proof. Godel was the original ant up the tree, on a foot stool erected by Alan Turing. Godel discovered the peach just hanging there, after inventing a clever path to arrive where least suspected.
We navigate cognition through metaphor. It's the great leap of metaphor that constitutes invention.
Oh yes? Well... they better should be suited for that if they live in the Mariana Trench!!
Sheesh. And I thought they'd be well suited to sun bathing and the vacuum of space. Nature is one huge surprise after another.
Trying to come up with a rigorous definition of well adapted blows my mind. Although I can recall some classmates who were better adapted to junior high school that I was or aspired to be; perhaps "well adapted" hints at sad and pathetic when encountered later in life.
In the earth's long biological history, my take is that whenever an organism stumbled upon a giant resource, the organism either exploited the resource or was soon replaced by one that could. Humans have done with oil what any other species on the planet would do if they managed to stick their long snout into an underground ocean of glucose.
Unlike most any other species, we've invested perhaps 10% of this windfall wisely: primarily in the form of information technology and reading the genetic code. The energy intensity of those technologies is constantly falling (the intensity of progressing those technologies is another story).
Also unprecedented in biological history: we're discussing the consequences of our giant slurp well before the consequence arrives in dire form (excepting the extirpation of megafauna biodiversity, which started long before we found oil, and has subsequently accelerated).
In fact, I'm pretty sure we're the first species on the planet to conduct a census to determine if our numbers were getting out of hand.
If god lobs another rock at the planet--like a late-popping popcorn kernel--I'm sure we'll give Deep Impact the old college try, notwithstanding that this would be our biggest intrusion on the cosmic plan ever and not lose too much sleep over the philosophical implications. Yet here we are doing what every successful species does (expand into the available niche) and wringing our hands as if our current circumstance is some grand exception to the history of life on earth.
Since the way of things seems to be cycles of boom and bust, if we succeed in pulling off the soft landing following our trillion barrel feast, we will all deserve a nice pat on the back for turning a trick not yet achieved by life on this planet. Many people seem to think the task at hand is to address a deviant transgression; I think the deviancy lies in our future efforts to mitigate the consequence of behaving exactly as mother nature made us. The biological tiller of fate has been swinging wildly for many billions of years. Only now do we propose grabbing onto it and taking the helm.
If you're gonna screw with the planet go slow, get clues, make models, test worst case scenarios and for the sake of all that's holy, have a friggin exist strategy.
Sage advice from the 1940s which fell on deaf ears in the copulate-like-bunnies 1950s. Screwing with the planet dates back to the invention of agriculture. Then came the industrial revolution with soot, SO2, and aerosols. By my count were entering round three, at the very least. Neither of the first two rounds were preceded by any kind of useful model. Another one I should probably include is air transportation as a pathogen vector. Well, we're all still alive. So far, so good.
I guess the exit strategy on copulate-like-bunnies would be to refuse to feed two billion people. But since the consensus seems to be feed all those mouths (present company included), and we can only do so by continuing to burn fossil fuels, and much of the world's population resides near sea level, perhaps we're best served with a thoughtful blend of prudence and haste.
One of the things that could possibly go wrong is that Nero fiddles while Rome burns.
BTW, is it standard costume etiquette for precautionary superheros to enter the conversation swinging their hat like Slim Pickens surfing his big salami?
You know, when Galois laid to rest long standing questions in geometric construction, a geometer might view this as closing the book on a vexing mystery, whereas a different mathematician might choose to regard this as opening a whole new book.
In this regard, Adam Smith suffers terribly: his loud acolytes regard Smith as a good place to stop thinking, only the quieter acolytes regard Smith as a good place to start thinking. I regard myself as the later. I've never been moved to sell the Adam Smith sermon of capitalistic virtue, despite lodging him in a bunk bed above Evariste Galois in my personal pantheon of stellar insight.
Much of this boils down to boxes of economic autonomy. Under slavery or feudalism, wealth aggregation reaches staggering pinnacles, but total wealth hits a glass ceiling in total capacity of the system to navigate local complexity. The enlightenment brought us this giant new box of autonomy called liberty, the original root of Liberalism. The main dispute in the camps that spun off is whether you are more concerned with liberty from the church, or more concerned with liberty from the state.
Back in Adam Smith's day, the box of liberty--if you could get one--was a large and spacious box--like a pre-Carly office cubicle at Hewlett Packard.
In the modern world, we've since learned how to machine the box of liberty down to much smaller dimensions--in ways Adam Smith did not anticipate in its particulars--down to very small indeed: an electorate with nothing much to elect on the increasingly steep treadmill of middle-class comfort.
I'm not saying the autonomy that remains is of no great value, much to the contrary. But the pinch of circumstance certainly takes much of the glow out of the Adam Smith sermon for the vast majority of the population. Recently they've noticed; what terrible umbrage.
For the people who like to stop thinking at Adam Smith, it does function as an admirable defense against economic nerd sniping. What little we can do to bulk up our nest eggs is certainly not aided by sitting around on a backwards moving conveyor asking how Adam Smith might be brought to a mature fruition by Abel, Jacobi, Dirichlet, Hamilton, Weierstrauss, or Cayley.
Yet some of us persist in this endeavour of scant wallet-stuffing prospect.
Because the majority of us would rather be allowed to make our own way in the world and don't want to be subsidized by the rich. Some of us accept that there will be people who are capable of more and have more stuff in their lives even though we are not in that position. We want to have the ability to become filthy rich ourselves and don't have any ill will against those who were capable of doing so.
I've heard this sermon before. I don't subscribe to the smooth garden path of deserving. It goes hand in hand with evolution denial. In order for complexity on the scale of life to arise from a hot, uncaring universe, you need a mechanism of symmetry breaking--there has to be some detour on the rapid descent to maximum entropy.
Once you accept that symmetry breaking is a powerful force in the universe, it becomes easier to understand the diffuse relationship between merit and prosperity. Of those who try equally hard and well, the lucky marbles go up, the rest go down; tiny ratchets of winner-take-all determine the distribution of mass and money in the known universe.
Many wealthy people will concede that their spectacular success once hung by a thin thread of caprice.
Warren Buffet distinguished himself though his feats of acumen (and petty monopoly), but none so great as to surmount having parents of Eritrean nationality. If you put two ants on an elastic string heading left to right and then pull the ends apart with equal motion, the determined ant on the left for all his local progress still falls backward.
How much is the ant and how much the elastic? There's more to this story than virtuous ant sermons.
Cause and effect proclamations about cloak and dagger are mostly just a Rorschach over eigenvalues of paranoia.
You're effectively asserting that if he hadn't pissed off the banks, the money would not have been choked off, which is by no means clear. I think major banks, as institutions founded on secrecy and power, would be remarkably obtuse to take no alarm long before the BoA cross-hairs made them front line participants.
I will concede that anger does tend to cut through institutional inertia. When the threat is less overt, your adversaries might wish to not be seen wielding their power directly.
Banks are extremely reluctant to suggest that criminality or public disfavour of the recipient is grounds for non-payment: it's their least favorite publicity to admit they have a list of reasons for taking your money then not giving it back. Trust in reciprocity is their entire business model for accumulating their bankroll. Banks pretty much go to the wall, a very thick and heavy wall, before conceding in public that conveyance of funds is an act of discretion.
No, this wasn't that long ago -- 89, 90, something like that
Seems pretty unlikely unless you were in a deep backwater. Interactive terminals became commonplace very early in the 1980s. It wasn't uncommon to work on a batch processing system until the mid 1980s, but not with results delivered on paper.
The development model you're talking about properly dates to the 1960s and into 1970s, in backwaters where the future had yet to penetrate. FFS, the Xerox Alto was introduced in 1973.
Sixteen years later, you're still on a line printer development loop? I think your college needed a shot of Future Lube if your dates are accurate.
I wouldn't be unhappy to see property law evolve in the cloud era so that blocking a user from recovering those possessions in a reasonable process and time frame would constitute actual theft.
Property is a social construct and it changes as the embodiment of property changes (wives, children, slaves, agricultural boundaries, water, mineral rights, design, copyright, and in the ridiculous fullness of time as practiced by the legislature and legal profession... personal cloudwares).
Google's motto is "Let's make lots of money off of others' content and technology". Did anyone ever doubt that? It goes without saying.
Where Google comes close to evil is booting people off the Google services without making it possible for the booted user to collect his or her belongings before the door slams their ass. There's effectively no recourse if Google makes an error in their determination. I think this pushes fairly deep into caprice, and with no real upside that I can see. At least your jilted GF has the decency to pitch your possessions out the window. It can't be that hard for Google to implement a "data export only" authentication level.
The problem with inference from evil is that first you need to define evil, and if you elect to paint evil as "everything you don't approve of" you're left pretty much speechless by some of the things other companies do, if you're paying attention.
enough time/money/developers/balls/brains/whatever to suck it up and delay the release by the extra 6 months
Hiding under "whatever" you missed a big one: the closed platform. The competition starts with the same number of bugs per platform, but has to remove them 100 times.
In hockey, the secret of coaching success is a good goaltender. In software development, the secret to success is a monopoly over the kind of consumer who doesn't expect to play on home turf. In essence, the competition implements one extra feature, and it's a doozy: Able to run on a machine of your choice, configuration, and convenience.
He does have a point in that CS is a very small discipline in terms of its body of knowledge (in relation to other STEM fields).
One needs to be careful with this kind of pronouncement. Computer science branches from mathematics in much the same way that chemistry branches from physics. The PC revolution matches the great blossoming of polymer chemistry dollar for dollar, decade for decade.
Just one word: octane. Just one word: Isoniazid. Just one word: plastics. Just one word: lithograhy. Just one word: Visicalc. Just one word: infoglut. Just one word: megadata. Just one word: entanglement.
The Stomachion, concludes the historian, Dr. Reviel Netz, was far ahead of its time: a treatise on combinatorics, a field that did not come into its own until the rise of computer science.... "People assumed there wasn't any combinatorics in antiquity," he went on. "So it didn't trigger the observation when Archimedes says there are many arrangements and he will calculate them. But that's what Archimedes did; his introductions are always to the point."
Modern computer science is more about praxis that theory. But then, so is lithography. And music, too. Computer science is what you get if Mahler composed symphony of 100,000 as a jazz improvisation. There is no slight body of work to navigate to work yourself up from cowbells to timpani.
they look WHERE I am publishing my research; and most likely, they do not look at WHAT I am saying
It has become increasingly apparent that the value of education received in upper crust undergraduate programs or post graduate degrees rarely equates to the dollars spent. What people are really paying for is a premium rung on the social graph.
It's rarely clear how one recovers the investment, unless you're one of the bright lights that launch onto a lucrative career track. How many humanities graduates ever see tenure? I saw a study the other day which determined that out of an especially strong draft year in Ontario (long ago), of the 30,000 kids enrolled in hockey at the lowest levels, two players became well-known NHL regulars, and maybe twenty got a cup of coffee.
But people continue to sign up for big debt and small hope, more out of fear of losing your rung than a clear idea of how the loan is eventually retired.
I'm wondering if soon every good job out there is obtained after ten gruelling episodes on The Apprentice.
Perhaps we can train Watson to assess a little more importance to WHAT and a little less importance to WHERE, so that the parallel aristocracy of competence doesn't die out completely.
It would be funny, you know, if the computers are the first intelligent life form to curl their lip at the social graph.
It will be 2050 by the time these kids are entering their golden years. If you've been following the hollowing-out of the labour market into winners (few) and losers (many), your insightful brief can be successfully compressed to read:
Warn them that having a career will be high stress, high workload and have few long term options as they age.
It's not a big step from the invisible hand (hard enough to conceptualize) to the invisible telepathic hand, where markets allocate goods to their highest utility without the price ever changing.
Interesting to watch loss aversion shuttle the pea under the conspiracy shell after a tourettic stir fry in the amygdala.
'The technology has gotten substantially better in the last year,' says Jeffrey Harris, a former head of the National Reconnaissance Office.
This is what J. L. Austin analyzed as a performative: the truth lies in the fact that you said it, such as stating "I christen thee the Titanic" then smashing a bottle.
If people fear this technology, the outcome it exists to promote automatically improves. Interesting.
In the service of this handy performative, it's not necessary to divulge any correct information about the true workings of the program. That would be counterproduct, in fact. Best to cast your dart into the red herring suburb of vaguely truthful.
Nice to know that our intelligence agencies actually got the Dr Strangelove memo: deterrents are more effective when you boast in public. What the horny Dr failed to mention is that your boasts need to be merely plausible--and not necessarily truthful--to have roughly the same effect.
Maybe the program sucks at picking up the first order behaviours, but is pretty good at picking up dodges a nervous person might make concerned the program is looking over his shoulder. Wheels within wheels. You game such as system at your own peril.
We might not have heard of Manning, but we've certainly heard of the guest facilities where the people we've never heard of are sure to end up.
GCC intentionally resisted clean separation and layering because someone might do something evil like create a GPL'd program that did syntax highlighting and invoke it via a pipe from a proprietary program.
I've been around a long time, and I've never heard that. It has the kind of plausible ring that usually sends me to Snopes, where two thirds of the time I come away chastised for loaning the idea five seconds of credence.
What I know about GCC is that it had a rough adolescence and that over-arching design hardly entered into it for long stretches of time.
and ENZO is even better, but not Free and highly vendor specific
The GPL is intended to make writing proprietary software hard, the BSDL is intended to make writing free software easy.
There's some truth to this aphorism. GPL is designed around what Stallman doesn't want people to do. It builds from a negative. Stallman doesn't want others to take away his freedom by building something he can't have.
I admire what Stallman's dogmatism enabled him to achieve. We're probably better off on both sides of the license fence because of it. At the same time, his repurposing of the word "freedom" is one of the most toxic subversions in the history of language. No, he couldn't just come up with his own word, he had to take someone else's word away. I wonder what Marshall McLuhan could have come up with given the starting point "gift culture Lebensraum".
I think closer to the truth of the matter is that gcc gained far too many extremely important use cases to start dabbling in architectural modernism. You'll note over the same time period, that Linux remained fairly far to the monolithic end of the spectrum. When a project reaches that scale, specific success factors put the stomp on architectural ideology.
Futhermore, on the C++ side, the rapid evolution of the C++ language wasn't doing anyone any favours in IDE integration.
The time is ripe for a new approach. The king is dead. Long live the king.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn spell checker. My fingers do that one all the time, and my subconscious doesn't ring the mail chime until five minutes later.
I've already written once today (in partial jest) that there are two ways to obtain a benefit you haven't earned: through social programs and through inheritance--let's kill both.
There's a raging debate going on in the discussion thread at Richard Wilkinson: How economic inequality harms societies
I'm an R programmer IRL. I don't have much formal training in statistics, but when I need a second opinion, my bookshelf is stacked with the highest grade of bullshit detector. In the machine learning sector, that's a high grade indeed. You don't ascend to the top of the Kagglestalk by being full of shit. (I have not yet formed an opinion about Kaggle in general.)
My investigations quickly lead me to The Spirit Level Delusion: Chapter 10
I quickly came to the conclusion that the spousal unit of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett have way oversold their analysis as an input to public policy. Nevertheless, it ought to be troubling how readily these slopes tip in an ugly direction. In data mining, most of what you get is suggestive. I find their approach closer to data mining than proper statistics. Human cognition for the most part is closer to data mining than proper statistics, so I'm not saying that suggestive signals are slight or worthless. I'm saying that juicy things you pick up off the floor should not enter mouth without second inspection.
From Snowdon's mad dog supplemental chapter:
There's a certain type of thinker who loves to stop thinking at the invocation of a categorical word. Outlier is a word of many meanings in statistics. It's not an automatic red flag to invoke the purity reflex (conservatives are sometimes painted as having more intense purity/disgust pathways). An outlier due to a DRAM memory error is best discarded. When the outlier is a big fat juicy data point, you need to engage your brain. Your signal naturally shows up most intensely at the extremes. If you don't want to find a signal, by all means, terminate outliers with extreme prejudice, as Snowdon imprecates the vagrant bastards.
By page 200 or so, he's wound himself up to where he leaves his brain behind. Too bad, because his brain was useful when he used it. He's gone completely insane on the decision process of prudence: trying your best not to shop for the desired outcome, while also trying to step around contaminated inputs. One of the inputs W&P sensibly step around are self-reported psychiatric states. These are known to be dirtier than Netflix ratings. Snowdon by the end is promoting the merest sign of discretion as a hanging offence. I would also like to know why these small acts of discretion were invoked, but I don't immediately fear the worst. W&P could do much better in the scholarship department.
Snowdon loses it completely on race as a confound. Confounds aren't all that important until you get into causative interpretation, often a necessary step on the road to public policy. I don't think W&P is anywhere close to providing a solid foundation for public policy, so this whole causative rebuke leaves me cold. Attack dogs never weary of citing error, long after there was any point. If he's not an attack dog, why does he act like one?
I'm in exactly the same boat. This assistance they are so determined to extend in my direction can only jostle the elbow of merit-based purchasing decisions if I allow it to do so.
A meme I've dropped here in the past is how having a cable TV subscription is like parking a salty chip truck on your front lawn. One thing we know about human nature is that if you wish to prevail, you must win your battles in the store rather than at the refrigerator door where we quickly succumb to Decision Fatigue.
Eventually, at the rate this economic model is progressing, they'll have to legislate that failing to succumb to decision fatigue as theft of service. It's become our preferred payment program, hasn't it? There's no tax more widely lauded than a hidden tax. It's not that we hate to pay taxes, it's that we hate to know we pay taxes.
Since I jumped into this thread with both feet, I might as well continue my self-dialog under the burning bush.
I suppose I've listened attentively to at least 50 Econtalk episodes, including Cowen on the Great Stagnation. It didn't make a particularly strong impression. Russ gives a good interview and he invites smart subjects. Often he goosesteps over the pearls of wisdom he elicits on his Route 66 to Hayekville. That's his loss at the end of the day. I get a lot out of it applying a broader filter.
I think the majority of the explanation lies in the transition to doing more with less. Our productivity figures are pretty insane when it comes to this kind of thing. Counterproductive cycles are double counted, while real progress self negates. If you go back and dampen those old productivity figures with the careless waste streams and hidden liabilities, we're not doing so badly in the present after all.
It's a bit like hitting the 4GHz barrier in CPU design. Innovation hardly ceased, but it's bounty has become a lot less direct. In the kinds of systems that will soon replace the laggard tail of the human bell curve, those multiple cores will find their use.
I hate these telescopic footnotes, but I really should have added that depriving convicted felons of their franchise is shockingly un-Christian. What would Christ do, FFS? The man was after all notoriously tolerant of hypocrisy. He was not just some figure in any random Mel Gibson production. It's a brave act to become a Christian, if you really do it.
My father was a pastor until my teenage years. I was well on the path to atheism by the age of seven, when I realized that the distinction between God's will and my mother's will was unfalsifiable. My mother was incredibly stubborn, and I was not about to be left behind. I live in eternal fear that the first sound I hear after passing under the quantum noise floor is a stern voice intoning "Your mother was right."
Just yesterday I read the writ of cherem against Baruch Spinoza with a mild frisson. After the judicial preamble, it goes on to express how they really feel (cribbing from the bathroom wall of all knowledge):
Ah, but there were compensations:
To add a footnote to my post on a prescriptive bent: The best thing America could do in the short term is return the vote to convicted felons.
Why Can't Felons Vote?
Disenfranchisement amplifies the wedge. Winners tend to vote for more losers, don't they? America could potentially turn into a nation where a great mass of people have their backs against the chasm.
The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United
It's perfectly clear how this all pans out: celebrities will pay royalties to their fan base to prove their popularity to the royal court of second generation Stanford trillionaires. Most of us will earn our livings by making prudent decisions with the "like" button. (There are two ways to obtain money you didn't earn: social programs and inheritance. Let's kill both.)
Actually, I was writing about Adam Smith on a different thread yesterday. My personal Adam Smith reincarnation, if alive today, would be giving the Tea Party the back of his hand. He would be rolling up his sleeves to determine the structure of the labour force in 2060 with a grim expression on his face.
We already have severely disadvantaged individuals where any economic value the person could possibly contribute could be obtained with less cost and hassle by another means. These were people three or four standard deviations below the mean in good life fortune.
When that bar was way off in the weeds of the bell curve, the traditional economic fable of Schumpeter's creative destructive held sway. It's a good fable if personal reinvention holds pace.
Over the next fifty years, the bar of negative labour value will be emerging from the weeds into the second rough. Ten percent of the population will find themselves under the charity threshold: working in jobs we decided not to automate because it's cheaper to keep these people occupied. Maybe the whole program will be orchestrated by the American penal system. It seems to be gearing up capacity to meet demand. It will be an interesting day when the first prison administrator is convicted of bribing a berry picking operation to not purchase effective machinery, in essence allocating tough on crime dollars to their most valuable use.
Adding to the formidable complications would be any near term success in life extension research, further accelerating the devolution to gated communities and orange jump suits. We've tried the status segregation experiment once before: it was called slavery and it didn't work out so great. This time around, having the right skin colour won't save you.
I'm not sure their PR work is having the desired effect.
Half of literature and human history consists of people suffering momentary lapses of standards they espouse. If you wear the goat horns valiantly, people will forgive if not forget. Some of the orgs criticized by El Rel are institutions with immense resources and public trust. I don't think I'd assign El Reg to either of those quadrants.
Discover/invent is an old debate fully resolved by tossing back a shooter of Wittgenstein/Austin admixed with Kolmogorov/Chaitin--of equally contentious optimal proportions.
Our patent system allows a person to invent a juicy peach that lands three feet from a swarming anthill if the anthill is preoccupied for a day or two with some fractured apples that landed on the other side, you know, because the ant hill would never get about without the exogenous incentive.
Invention is the ant gnawing through the peach stem six feet above the anthill to cause it to land there before the pterosaur alights on the neighbouring branch.
Applying a function to a function, was that above or beside?
Currying is a funny invention. We all simplify our mental models based on information already in hand. The purpose of granting the data flow of everyday life a formal notation was to facilitate a proof. Godel was the original ant up the tree, on a foot stool erected by Alan Turing. Godel discovered the peach just hanging there, after inventing a clever path to arrive where least suspected.
We navigate cognition through metaphor. It's the great leap of metaphor that constitutes invention.
Sheesh. And I thought they'd be well suited to sun bathing and the vacuum of space. Nature is one huge surprise after another.
Trying to come up with a rigorous definition of well adapted blows my mind. Although I can recall some classmates who were better adapted to junior high school that I was or aspired to be; perhaps "well adapted" hints at sad and pathetic when encountered later in life.
In the earth's long biological history, my take is that whenever an organism stumbled upon a giant resource, the organism either exploited the resource or was soon replaced by one that could. Humans have done with oil what any other species on the planet would do if they managed to stick their long snout into an underground ocean of glucose.
Unlike most any other species, we've invested perhaps 10% of this windfall wisely: primarily in the form of information technology and reading the genetic code. The energy intensity of those technologies is constantly falling (the intensity of progressing those technologies is another story).
Also unprecedented in biological history: we're discussing the consequences of our giant slurp well before the consequence arrives in dire form (excepting the extirpation of megafauna biodiversity, which started long before we found oil, and has subsequently accelerated).
In fact, I'm pretty sure we're the first species on the planet to conduct a census to determine if our numbers were getting out of hand.
If god lobs another rock at the planet--like a late-popping popcorn kernel--I'm sure we'll give Deep Impact the old college try, notwithstanding that this would be our biggest intrusion on the cosmic plan ever and not lose too much sleep over the philosophical implications. Yet here we are doing what every successful species does (expand into the available niche) and wringing our hands as if our current circumstance is some grand exception to the history of life on earth.
Since the way of things seems to be cycles of boom and bust, if we succeed in pulling off the soft landing following our trillion barrel feast, we will all deserve a nice pat on the back for turning a trick not yet achieved by life on this planet. Many people seem to think the task at hand is to address a deviant transgression; I think the deviancy lies in our future efforts to mitigate the consequence of behaving exactly as mother nature made us. The biological tiller of fate has been swinging wildly for many billions of years. Only now do we propose grabbing onto it and taking the helm.
Sage advice from the 1940s which fell on deaf ears in the copulate-like-bunnies 1950s. Screwing with the planet dates back to the invention of agriculture. Then came the industrial revolution with soot, SO2, and aerosols. By my count were entering round three, at the very least. Neither of the first two rounds were preceded by any kind of useful model. Another one I should probably include is air transportation as a pathogen vector. Well, we're all still alive. So far, so good.
I guess the exit strategy on copulate-like-bunnies would be to refuse to feed two billion people. But since the consensus seems to be feed all those mouths (present company included), and we can only do so by continuing to burn fossil fuels, and much of the world's population resides near sea level, perhaps we're best served with a thoughtful blend of prudence and haste.
One of the things that could possibly go wrong is that Nero fiddles while Rome burns.
BTW, is it standard costume etiquette for precautionary superheros to enter the conversation swinging their hat like Slim Pickens surfing his big salami?
You know, when Galois laid to rest long standing questions in geometric construction, a geometer might view this as closing the book on a vexing mystery, whereas a different mathematician might choose to regard this as opening a whole new book.
In this regard, Adam Smith suffers terribly: his loud acolytes regard Smith as a good place to stop thinking, only the quieter acolytes regard Smith as a good place to start thinking. I regard myself as the later. I've never been moved to sell the Adam Smith sermon of capitalistic virtue, despite lodging him in a bunk bed above Evariste Galois in my personal pantheon of stellar insight.
Much of this boils down to boxes of economic autonomy. Under slavery or feudalism, wealth aggregation reaches staggering pinnacles, but total wealth hits a glass ceiling in total capacity of the system to navigate local complexity. The enlightenment brought us this giant new box of autonomy called liberty, the original root of Liberalism. The main dispute in the camps that spun off is whether you are more concerned with liberty from the church, or more concerned with liberty from the state.
Back in Adam Smith's day, the box of liberty--if you could get one--was a large and spacious box--like a pre-Carly office cubicle at Hewlett Packard.
In the modern world, we've since learned how to machine the box of liberty down to much smaller dimensions--in ways Adam Smith did not anticipate in its particulars--down to very small indeed: an electorate with nothing much to elect on the increasingly steep treadmill of middle-class comfort.
I'm not saying the autonomy that remains is of no great value, much to the contrary. But the pinch of circumstance certainly takes much of the glow out of the Adam Smith sermon for the vast majority of the population. Recently they've noticed; what terrible umbrage.
For the people who like to stop thinking at Adam Smith, it does function as an admirable defense against economic nerd sniping. What little we can do to bulk up our nest eggs is certainly not aided by sitting around on a backwards moving conveyor asking how Adam Smith might be brought to a mature fruition by Abel, Jacobi, Dirichlet, Hamilton, Weierstrauss, or Cayley.
Yet some of us persist in this endeavour of scant wallet-stuffing prospect.
I've heard this sermon before. I don't subscribe to the smooth garden path of deserving. It goes hand in hand with evolution denial. In order for complexity on the scale of life to arise from a hot, uncaring universe, you need a mechanism of symmetry breaking--there has to be some detour on the rapid descent to maximum entropy.
Once you accept that symmetry breaking is a powerful force in the universe, it becomes easier to understand the diffuse relationship between merit and prosperity. Of those who try equally hard and well, the lucky marbles go up, the rest go down; tiny ratchets of winner-take-all determine the distribution of mass and money in the known universe.
Many wealthy people will concede that their spectacular success once hung by a thin thread of caprice.
Warren Buffet distinguished himself though his feats of acumen (and petty monopoly), but none so great as to surmount having parents of Eritrean nationality. If you put two ants on an elastic string heading left to right and then pull the ends apart with equal motion, the determined ant on the left for all his local progress still falls backward.
How much is the ant and how much the elastic? There's more to this story than virtuous ant sermons.
Cause and effect proclamations about cloak and dagger are mostly just a Rorschach over eigenvalues of paranoia.
You're effectively asserting that if he hadn't pissed off the banks, the money would not have been choked off, which is by no means clear. I think major banks, as institutions founded on secrecy and power, would be remarkably obtuse to take no alarm long before the BoA cross-hairs made them front line participants.
I will concede that anger does tend to cut through institutional inertia. When the threat is less overt, your adversaries might wish to not be seen wielding their power directly.
Banks are extremely reluctant to suggest that criminality or public disfavour of the recipient is grounds for non-payment: it's their least favorite publicity to admit they have a list of reasons for taking your money then not giving it back. Trust in reciprocity is their entire business model for accumulating their bankroll. Banks pretty much go to the wall, a very thick and heavy wall, before conceding in public that conveyance of funds is an act of discretion.
Seems pretty unlikely unless you were in a deep backwater. Interactive terminals became commonplace very early in the 1980s. It wasn't uncommon to work on a batch processing system until the mid 1980s, but not with results delivered on paper.
The development model you're talking about properly dates to the 1960s and into 1970s, in backwaters where the future had yet to penetrate. FFS, the Xerox Alto was introduced in 1973.
Sixteen years later, you're still on a line printer development loop? I think your college needed a shot of Future Lube if your dates are accurate.
To follow up on my last post:
I wouldn't be unhappy to see property law evolve in the cloud era so that blocking a user from recovering those possessions in a reasonable process and time frame would constitute actual theft.
Property is a social construct and it changes as the embodiment of property changes (wives, children, slaves, agricultural boundaries, water, mineral rights, design, copyright, and in the ridiculous fullness of time as practiced by the legislature and legal profession ... personal cloudwares).
Google's motto is "Let's make lots of money off of others' content and technology". Did anyone ever doubt that? It goes without saying.
Where Google comes close to evil is booting people off the Google services without making it possible for the booted user to collect his or her belongings before the door slams their ass. There's effectively no recourse if Google makes an error in their determination. I think this pushes fairly deep into caprice, and with no real upside that I can see. At least your jilted GF has the decency to pitch your possessions out the window. It can't be that hard for Google to implement a "data export only" authentication level.
The problem with inference from evil is that first you need to define evil, and if you elect to paint evil as "everything you don't approve of" you're left pretty much speechless by some of the things other companies do, if you're paying attention.
Hiding under "whatever" you missed a big one: the closed platform. The competition starts with the same number of bugs per platform, but has to remove them 100 times.
In hockey, the secret of coaching success is a good goaltender. In software development, the secret to success is a monopoly over the kind of consumer who doesn't expect to play on home turf. In essence, the competition implements one extra feature, and it's a doozy: Able to run on a machine of your choice, configuration, and convenience.
Both models suck, one way or another.
One needs to be careful with this kind of pronouncement. Computer science branches from mathematics in much the same way that chemistry branches from physics. The PC revolution matches the great blossoming of polymer chemistry dollar for dollar, decade for decade.
Just one word: octane.
Just one word: Isoniazid.
Just one word: plastics.
Just one word: lithograhy.
Just one word: Visicalc.
Just one word: infoglut.
Just one word: megadata.
Just one word: entanglement.
In Archimedes' Puzzle, a New Eureka Moment
Since I'm presently under the late-month NYT blackout (the mote in god's eye), here is a refracted redaction, via In Archimedes' Puzzle, a New Eureka Moment:
Modern computer science is more about praxis that theory. But then, so is lithography. And music, too. Computer science is what you get if Mahler composed symphony of 100,000 as a jazz improvisation. There is no slight body of work to navigate to work yourself up from cowbells to timpani.
It has become increasingly apparent that the value of education received in upper crust undergraduate programs or post graduate degrees rarely equates to the dollars spent. What people are really paying for is a premium rung on the social graph.
It's rarely clear how one recovers the investment, unless you're one of the bright lights that launch onto a lucrative career track. How many humanities graduates ever see tenure? I saw a study the other day which determined that out of an especially strong draft year in Ontario (long ago), of the 30,000 kids enrolled in hockey at the lowest levels, two players became well-known NHL regulars, and maybe twenty got a cup of coffee.
But people continue to sign up for big debt and small hope, more out of fear of losing your rung than a clear idea of how the loan is eventually retired.
I'm wondering if soon every good job out there is obtained after ten gruelling episodes on The Apprentice.
Perhaps we can train Watson to assess a little more importance to WHAT and a little less importance to WHERE, so that the parallel aristocracy of competence doesn't die out completely.
It would be funny, you know, if the computers are the first intelligent life form to curl their lip at the social graph.
It will be 2050 by the time these kids are entering their golden years. If you've been following the hollowing-out of the labour market into winners (few) and losers (many), your insightful brief can be successfully compressed to read:
It's not a big step from the invisible hand (hard enough to conceptualize) to the invisible telepathic hand, where markets allocate goods to their highest utility without the price ever changing.
Interesting to watch loss aversion shuttle the pea under the conspiracy shell after a tourettic stir fry in the amygdala.
This is what J. L. Austin analyzed as a performative: the truth lies in the fact that you said it, such as stating "I christen thee the Titanic" then smashing a bottle.
If people fear this technology, the outcome it exists to promote automatically improves. Interesting.
In the service of this handy performative, it's not necessary to divulge any correct information about the true workings of the program. That would be counterproduct, in fact. Best to cast your dart into the red herring suburb of vaguely truthful.
Nice to know that our intelligence agencies actually got the Dr Strangelove memo: deterrents are more effective when you boast in public. What the horny Dr failed to mention is that your boasts need to be merely plausible--and not necessarily truthful--to have roughly the same effect.
Maybe the program sucks at picking up the first order behaviours, but is pretty good at picking up dodges a nervous person might make concerned the program is looking over his shoulder. Wheels within wheels. You game such as system at your own peril.
We might not have heard of Manning, but we've certainly heard of the guest facilities where the people we've never heard of are sure to end up.
I've been around a long time, and I've never heard that. It has the kind of plausible ring that usually sends me to Snopes, where two thirds of the time I come away chastised for loaning the idea five seconds of credence.
What I know about GCC is that it had a rough adolescence and that over-arching design hardly entered into it for long stretches of time.
There's some truth to this aphorism. GPL is designed around what Stallman doesn't want people to do. It builds from a negative. Stallman doesn't want others to take away his freedom by building something he can't have.
I admire what Stallman's dogmatism enabled him to achieve. We're probably better off on both sides of the license fence because of it. At the same time, his repurposing of the word "freedom" is one of the most toxic subversions in the history of language. No, he couldn't just come up with his own word, he had to take someone else's word away. I wonder what Marshall McLuhan could have come up with given the starting point "gift culture Lebensraum".
I think closer to the truth of the matter is that gcc gained far too many extremely important use cases to start dabbling in architectural modernism. You'll note over the same time period, that Linux remained fairly far to the monolithic end of the spectrum. When a project reaches that scale, specific success factors put the stomp on architectural ideology.
Futhermore, on the C++ side, the rapid evolution of the C++ language wasn't doing anyone any favours in IDE integration.
The time is ripe for a new approach. The king is dead. Long live the king.