This is why so many videos being suggested are extreme: they get lots of views...
The problem is that many of these views amount to "OMG, what is this shit, anyway?
People need to be way more aggressive on the thumbs down button after sizing up the moral car wreck.
I also find the "not interested" button works wonders after some initial persistence.
Google would fix something in the larger scheme if the viewing population normalized their rating habits to a 66% baseline rejection rate. Everyone should just post "thumbs down for tasteless recommendation" in the comments thread, until these comments drown out everything else. Google would learn fast were the adverse signal even mildly organized.
I'd say that the difference here is that a professional mathematician will exist in a certain environment. A math professor will read certain journals, associate with other math professors, teach certain things to students, etc. An amateur will be outside this environment.
Absolutely the crucial connotation.
Amateur, especially in egghead ventures, almost always implies a lone wolf, or at most the Chudnovsky brothers' hillbilly pen pals (five precocious amateurs, each one that much weirder than the last).
Hey Kubrick! Are you ever gonna get around to writing the second half of Full Metal Jacket?
People tend to rate sex highly, until they try heroine.
Sapolsky's book from last year, Behave, has a lot of material on how our dopaminic system rescales itself to available stimulus. The book is 800 pages long, and every page so far is dense with neuroanatomy. Unbelievably good, but I'm guessing it's not sexconker's preferred Flaming Doctor Pepper bomb shot.
For the record, the first time I read Lord of the Rings (all three volumes, one weekend, age 13) I experienced intense annoyance whenever Tolkien abandoned one narrative line to rejoin some other fellowship splinter group.
By the time I got to Full Metal Jacket I had mostly outgrown this, though it still annoyed me for ten full minutes. Basically, "not now Helga, can't you see I'm still banging your sister?"
Bad, Kubrick, bad.
———
Kubrick rarely hesitates to bend time in the other direction, either.
The litmus test for true Kubrick lovers is Barry Lyndon.
Like many other critics and filmgoers, I have grown so accustomed to films based on literary conventions and familiar structures, that to see a film which stretches one's awareness of what can be achieved in the medium seems prickly and puzzling.
Kubrick's films have a way—at least with some people—of working on in the mind, of passing through all the stages from irritation to exhilaration.
And curiously enough—for critics are supposed to be the most progressive an perceptive of filmgoers—it is the general public in this case, unencumbered by literary prejudices, that has done most of the leading in making 2001 and A Clockwork Orange not just films of immense popularity but of steadily growing stature.
In the scene that you're referring to, the voice-over works as an ironic counterpoint to what you see portrayed by the actors on the screen. This is only a minor sequence in the story and has to be presented with economy. Barry is tender and romantic with the girl but all he really wants is to get her into bed. The girl is lonely and Barry is attractive and attentive.
If you think about it, it isn't likely that he is the only soldier she has brought home while her husband has been away to the wars. You could have had Barry give signals to the audience, through his performance, indicating that he is really insincere and opportunistic, but this would be unreal. When we try to deceive we are as convincing as we can be, aren't we?
No wink. Blink and you miss it.
———
At this point, I also want to give a shout out to another very long film, La Belle Noiseuse (1991), with the 237-minute run time.
The film holds an approval rating of 100% on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes.
How does such a stupidly long movie earn a 100% approval rating? Not a single Michael Bay fan attended this movie by accident. French title, and not a single showing with a start time after 18:30.
She understands, puts it on, disrobes in front of him, and will be entirely nude for at least at hour in this film. Yes, at first we observe Emmanuelle Beart as a woman. Then we see her as a model. Slowly we come to see her as Frenhofer wants to: The woman inside, the essence, the being
Shannon's theorem: as you approach the Shannon coding limit, the cost of failure becomes linear.
The primary term in the linear model is cost_of_drive / (mean_working_life * drive_capacity). In metric, the unit comes out to Big Macs/B-s, but we'll use USD/TB-year.
There is also a power consumption term, and a performance term. The first of these is significant to Backblaze, whereas the second does little to differentiate the qualified brands in the present Backblaze business model (though it could quickly push you into a different product mix between HDDs and SSDs if the model changed; the proximal economic margin is vertical, not horizontal).
The main effect of the power term is that technological evolution in W/TB-year makes it reasonable to hard-cap drive service life somewhere around seven years (it used to be much less, but times they aren't a-changing very much these days).
If one brand hits the seven year wall with 95% of the drives functional, and another brand hits the wall with 98% of the drives functional, this justifies about a 3% difference in drive sticker price for the same capacity (and mean power draw under the specified workload).
Now, if you were working with a business model where coincident failures could feasibly add up to a risk of total loss, this calculation starts to involve an exponential term, and the factor of two in failure rate over seven years begins to matter again. Even if your total loss is just a spindle loss, and you have a 24-hour from tape, the magnitude of your 24-hour out-of-normal-service event starts to lift the exponential term into economic view.
I've given enough information here to construct a pretty good first-order linear approximation to Backblaze's efficient frontier.
Hint: to usefully diagram this, you need to 86 your third-year engineering school log-linear graph paper, and haul out some third-year elementary school linear-linear graph paper.
Over in MBA school—which you like to pretend is populated by linear-linear spreadsheet-toting cluetards—they will teach you that one of the arts of business is to devise a business model which runs against the grain of prevailing economic assumptions.
Shannon's theorem, properly understood, allows one to do this.
And, yes, the exponential cost model requires engineering school to properly understand, while the linear cost model requires only Econ 101 to fully understand, so of course, as hugely overtrained engineers we deride this model, with a sniff, as merely buying the cheapest shit they can find.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum: it's the engineers here who have failed to make the cognitive leap on Shannon's model, properly understood.
Shannon's corollary: once my theorem is properly understood, you don't even need to be smart anymore.
Shannon's theorem, properly understood, is a universal wormhole from log-linear to linear-linear. This pretty much makes it the most Fucking A theorem of the 20th century.
These an underlying reason why our digital technology grew like the Beanstalk of Babel, yet never ultimately toppled over under its own weight.
I'm presently reading Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy (2012) by Christopher Hayes (yes, that guy).
Chris attended New York's prestigious magnet school, Hunter College High School, where entrance is entirely based on an aptitude test taken at the end of grade five (pretty close to a pure merit system). Guess what? Asian enrollment is soaring, white enrollment is high, black enrollment is near extinction.
Hayes essentially argues that the "merit" test is primarily testing for environmental privilege (only the wealthy whites and the determined Asians can afford the private tutors, etc.)
Charles Murray (yes, that guy) argues in his book Coming Apart (2012) that this is exactly what one would expect to see after a generation of assortative mating among the Ivy league elites, where hereditary IQ advantages are a big deal on the thin tail.
I worked out that Hunter is selecting at about the 3rd S.D. above mean by several congruent Fermi estimates. In this rarefied region of the tail, it takes very little change in mean IQ to create a 10:1 admission differential.
Anyway, it was just weird to read Hayes describing a problem exactly as Murray predicted it would look, but with no recourse to any of the (increasingly radioactive) debate on assortative mating. It was even weirder that both Hayes and Murray were poking pretty much the same holes in Pollyanna-esque assumptions about meritocracy being an Unvarnished Good Thing.
And I'm a big believer in ancient Chinese technology.
According to scholarly consensus, the earliest example of an administrative meritocracy, based on civil service examinations, dates back to Ancient China.
The concept originates, at least by the sixth century BC, when it was advocated by the Chinese philosopher Confucius, who "invented the notion that those who govern should do so because of merit, not of inherited status. This sets in motion the creation of the imperial examinations and bureaucracies open only to those who passed tests."
Not even meritocracy escapes the law of unintended consequence unscathed. All tests are dimensionality reduced proxies for the real environment. Even if your test is largely unbiased, it still rearranges your population geographically, and concentrates success into small, elite coteries, who increasingly lose touch with everyone else.
Not that escalating social division is a problem that can't be solved with the right neighbourly fencing.
"Speculative execution" is just a management gimmick created to entice workers into dealing with process delays that management should have eliminated at the process level, to begin with.
Spoken like a true (defunct) Detroit union boss of the late 1970s.
Unfortunately, the Japanese had already discovered the magic of making as much progress as possible with the resources in hand, which allowed them to manage inventory on a JIT basis, streamline production, and kick American butt, bigly.
C++ - too many ways of doing things and everyone starts trying to demonstrate their extreme cleverness by trying to find the most insanely complex way of doing something using STL and Boost.
You think that's bad?
Someday you should count up the number of different ways God invented to compute pi.
pi = 16 arctan(1/5) - 4 arctan(1/239)
Seriously, any computation of pi more clever than that is pure showboat.
For movies, past performance is a very good way of predicting future performance.
Are you sure your signal stands up after normalizing for "contains Harrison Ford" and/or "original score by John Williams".
Surely the history (and demonstrated talents) of the cast and production team matter. Surely it matters if the original film was an epic blockbuster.
I almost wonder, though, once you subtract these terms, whether sequel-hood doesn't demonstrate a negative correlation with critical reception, alongside a mildly positive correlation with box office revenues due to a large audience base hugely risk-averse toward being disappointed in some novel, unpredictable way.
(Yes, I get it that the accounting is biased toward sequel-hood for additional reasons, having nothing to do with the appeal of the finished product.)
The Antwerp startup's AI analyzed 62 movies from 2015 and 2016, and claims it was able to successfully predict the box office failure or success of 52 of them, judging 30 movies correctly as profitable and 22 movies correctly as not profitable.
Way to make it impossible to calculate either the false positive rate, or the false negative rate.
I actually like style on a good day, but it does seem to suffer from endless episodes of sharp-object bathtub self-abuse with negative value add—until you get to the point where you mutter under your breath "there's a part of me that could live without this altogether, for the rest of my natural span".
Four numbers, creatively laundering into four instances of three numbers (62, 52, 30, 22) and a wrist bandage.
Odds are—and you can bet the casino's bank on this—that momentary exhilaration tapped you for $15,000 going the other way over the next decade.
There's a good reason the first hit of crack cocaine is usually on the house.
I'm pretty up to speed on the PFC, dopaminic down-regulation, the basolateral amygdala, and the nucleus accumbens today (all implicated in sketchy impulse control) as I just invested my first two hours with Sapolsky's recent book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst last night. Ten years in the making, and his hard work shows on every page.
This is the kind of book that makes people wake up and realize that A Brief History of Time was a total cake walk, even with here and there an equation or two. By the end of 700 dense pages, I fear my fresh knowledge will have all blended back together again.
If there's something systemic that is preventing women from breaking into directing, that's potentially a huge pool of talent wasted.
Unless the systemic factor is that women are less prepared to make the kinds of personal sacrifice that this kind of career demands.
I made that personal sacrifice myself, long ago, by reading everything Heinlein ever wrote (fat chance) starting at the age of twelve. At one point in my life, everything I knew about women came from Podkayne of Mars. No sane female would have made such a severe social mistake.
The point here is that men and women have fundamentally different drives.
Imagine you had a woman-world with many Shelleys and Ursula K. Le Guins. Le Guin's science fiction is rooted in the social sciences (such as anthropology and cultural studies). Shelley's story was based on her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, being something of a dick wad.
So on woman-world, you'd have a lot of this kind of SF and it would achieve some kind of market equilibrium based on the media consumption patterns of other women.
Back on man-world, you'd have a ready supply of Starship Troopers and Kubrick's calculated, cold, and sterile—in the highest service of art—2001. This, too, would achieve a market equilibrium, based on the tastes of men.
Obviously, these two equilibria would be the same, because men and women aren't really different biologically, Winston Smith would add the newspaper on a daily basis, from somewhere deep inside the nuclear-cooling-tower Deep State of a Brave New World.
Canada introduced metric product labelling circa 1976 and half of our grocery stores still boast their beef prices by the pound on the butcher display placards. But then it's back to kilograms at the cash register, due to the law, etc.
I read recently that the last person born in the 19th century just passed away at age 117.
This further supports my longstanding presumption that the last grocery store to promote beef by the pound will cease doing so circa 2050 (around the time that clear recollections of 1975 are hard to come by).
I'm metric/Imperial bilingual in a big way, but even so I have my own strange oases. Temperatures near the boiling point and yeast fermentation temperatures I know best in Fahrenheit. Food safe temperatures I know best in Celsius. Warm outdoor temperatures I know best in Fahrenheit. Cold indoor temperatures I know best in Celsius.
I also harbour these weird zones in mass and distance.
Patchwork transitions can linger in the weirdest ways.
On another note, I sure hope they ditch the ugly apostrophes. Orthographic transitions in 2018 should not be constrained by the 1984-era ASCII-centric bigotry of Big Blue's indestructible Model M keyboard.
I just realized that false equivalence is everyone's old-fashioned slippery slope goosed up with frictionless ropes, massless pulleys, and FTL travel.
China just copied the model.
I suspect social exclusion dates back to 93,000 years before Cain and Abel. Some gullible sot (or tribe of gullible sots) bought the story that it was a new squabble.
Make no mistake, what China is doing here is fuck-me-gently totalitarianism.
The television series MythBusters investigated the effectiveness of Chinese water torture in episode 25 of its 2005 season. They found that it was effective, capable of causing emotional cracks within a couple of hours, even in a controlled environment.
If I recall the episode, not exactly hardened targets. But this exercise is stupid beyond belief to begin with, because what makes torture torture is the lack of undo/erase/saved game. Hotel California for the nightmare fuel, deep in the ancient brain.
Fuck me gently, relatively speaking (Syriana clawback scene—later, Clooney winces just to dial a phone).
Mayer should be personally fined for "misleading investors while serving as an officer of a public company" or something.
I don't see the difficulty here.
Executive bonuses should be recalculated retroactively with these kinds of fines allocated to the point of cause rather than the point of outcome, and then clawbacks all around.
At the scale of Volkswagen, this would have wiped every executive bonus off the map, with effects spread over a multiple year period.
Yahoo was failing for a long time and I suspect bonus payments were not large as these things go, so it might not have especially sharp teeth in this case, but I still think it would go a long way toward offsetting this kind of executive behaviour, because it would encourage a culture of the executive team whispering very pointed questions to each other in dark, unmonitored corridors about the the probable magnitude of the future downside .
All industries (2017): 18,416.4 (thousands) Goods producing services: 3,875.9
That's 21.0% of jobs in Canada in the "goods producing services" sector as of freshly updated statistics for 2017.
This sector further breaks down: * agriculture * forestry, fishing, mining, quarrying, oil and gas * utilities * construction * manufacturing
Actual manufacturing: 1,724.8
That's less than 10%.
Right, Canada hasn't manage to integrate "social tasks" into driving those oversized, bitumen dump-trucks up in Fort Mac. To a first order, I'm guessing that 60% of this entire correlation could be explained by Canada being (geographically) just a tiny bit bigger than Korea, with correspondingly more jobs anchored behind a steering wheel (all of which would be categorized as "at risk").
True manufacturing sectors that remain in Canada and the United States are generally the hardest manufacturing jobs to automate, and with the largest value add.
Here's just one in depth discussion of the matter:
Adam Davidson of NPR's Planet Money talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about manufacturing. Based on an article Davidson wrote for The Atlantic, the conversation looks at the past, present, and future of manufacturing.
Davidson visited an after-market auto parts factory in Greenville, South Carolina and talked with employees there as well as with executives at corporate headquarters.
What is the future of factory work in America? Why are some manufacturing jobs in America while others are in China or elsewhere?
The conversation looks at these questions as well as how well or poorly the U.S. education system prepares students for the world of work.
Snippet:
Russ: Which is surprising. Because I think what is surprising, at least to a novice like me, we have in the back of our mind this idea that all these factories are so mechanized, there's so much robotic help--a robot, that's as smart, as precise, as careful, as repeatable, replicable as you'd want. So, why is it that there are--how can there be a quality difference between what a factory stamps out here versus there?
Guest: That was one of the big lessons that I learned. As the machinery that a factory uses gets more and more expensive, sophisticated, it requires more and more human intelligence to operate it. It doesn't require more people. It requires a lot fewer people. But the people that these new machines require often have to have far more skill and be able to think through problems with much greater sophistication.
Many of these jobs could be further whittled away, but mostly by re-automation. And this gets way harder with each iteration (and with less immediate ROI from the scant number of workers displaced).
———
Half the time Russ drives me nuts, because I'm not a neoliberal at heart, but I take my anti-neoliberalism seriously, because it deserves an informed critique (this requires endless hours wading into murky waters you don't really like, but that's simply the cost of not being an idiot). True neoliberals don't find it as painful as I do to be generally well informed; their posture is primarily to dismantle, and there's simply no end of things that suck and on the surface appear to justify hasty extermination, with only the selfish hand (powered by whose industry, exactly?) to fill and close the gaping wound. (Hard not to love the perpetual-motion-machine immune system of the invisible hand when it
In most modern Western legal systems, however, judges often instruct juries to act only as "finders of facts", whose role it is to determine the veracity of the evidence presented, the weight accorded to the evidence, to apply that evidence to the law as explained by the judge, and to reach a verdict; but not to question the law or decide what it says.
Similarly, juries are routinely cautioned by courts and some attorneys not to allow sympathy for a party or other affected persons to compromise the fair and dispassionate evaluation of evidence.
These instructions are criticized by advocates of jury nullification.
Now let's parse this automatic "true power" of your checklist-item clue stick to the second level:
Jury nullification is the source of much debate. : Some maintain that it is an important safeguard of last resort against wrongful imprisonment and government tyranny. : Others view it as a violation of the right to a jury trial, which undermines the law. : Some view it as a violation of the oath sworn by jurors. : In the United States, some view the requirement that jurors take an oath to be unlawful in itself, while still others view the oath's reference to "deliverance" to require nullification of unjust law: "will well and truly try and a true deliverance make between the United States and the defendant at the bar, and a true verdict render according to the evidence, so help [me] God". : Some fear that nullification could be used to permit violence against socially unpopular factions. : They point to the danger that a jury may choose to convict a defendant who has not broken the letter of the law. : However, judges retain the rights both to decide sentences and to disregard juries' guilty verdicts, acting as a check against malicious juries.
As a juror, you'd need your own fricking lawyer sitting beside you in the jury box just to halfway comprehend the true legal muddle you're operating within.
The real story here is that, should we evolve the technology to the point where no AI or person can detect it, there is a real hazard to liberty.
I've seen thousands of liberty narratives, in all manner formal dress and dishabille.
Have I ever seen a narrative about liberty which frames liberty as something we're lucky to have only because we we gifted a milieu of sufficient objective agreement (and this only through the magic social pixie-dust of unfakeable images?). No, I have not.
Libertarian defendant: But your honour, I rendered all these faultlessly realistic videos of my sworn enemies engaging in plausible criminal behaviours for my own personal enjoyment in the privacy of my own home!
Judge: If we had found ricin on your premises, that wouldn't be a good excuse. I fail to see much real difference here. Both of these activities are equally terrible hobbies.
———
This is the new equivalence: sticks and stones can break your bones, whereas misaligned zeros and ones can get your bones clad in an orange prison jumpsuit. The privacy of your own home shall not remain sufficient cover for certain categories of sticks, stones, sick zeros, and icky ones.
———
Suppose the Feds broke into Guy Fawkes' house on a search warrant and find all the gunpowder stocked in his basement.
Guy Fawkes: I'm just a novelist, for cripes sake!
Justice: Right. You need to stockpile actual gunpowder in your house, in large quantities, to write a novel?
Guy Fawkes: But the realism! The closer I surround myself with the elements of my diabolical plot, the more I really get into the mindset of my traitorous protagonist.
Justice:Well then, consider this a joint trial: you and your "fictional" protagonist on the docket together. How's the realism feeling now?
Guy Fawkes: Perhaps I should have bargained for a larger advance.
Justice:You had a publisher lined up?
Guy Fawkes: Just a figure of speech, your honour; I was, er, planning to self-publish all along.
Privacy is sacrosanct up to a point: try not to get a boner over activities identical to planning a real crime.
———
Scratch a libertarian, uncover a slippery-sloper.
The slippery slope of government overreach just came hard aground on the equally slippery-slope of reputation sabotage.
That's the real story here: all viable solutions now contain a term that reeks of "up to a point"-ism, distilled from the scandalous snot rag of social consensus (yes, most people agree on this point; the quibbles begin when you wade into the finer points about what to actually do about this).
Dumbest idea ever: that there's no way to constitutionally triage government overreach. We can't yet do this in social democracy for much the same reason that African states suffering under the legacy of tinpot dictators in the dark aftermath of colonial excess have a lot of trouble adopting democratic institutions western democracies now take for granted.
If the Central African Republic can some day fully embrace democracy, then Sweden and Britain and Singapore can someday manage to fully embrace government overreach triage. Hard, but doable.
And thus there will eternally remain certain earthbound activities where privacy is no excuse.
———
And then, all the fake incrimination porn will beam down from asteroid-belt outlaws. Meanwhile, Ceres shall overtake the Cayman Islands as the solar system's foremost tax haven.
And then one day the President of China wakes up on a foul mood and mutters (audible, just off camera) "nice asteroid you've got there, shame if something happened to it." A week later, a largish well-developed asteroid mysteriously disintegrates, and practically overnight the deluge of fake incrimination porn
Au contraire, what made the web a pleasure to use was multiple displays and tabbed browsing, open to motionless page views.
To this day, I write custom CSS that removes the majority of the images for most web sites (I turn this off when I think an image might actually matter to the article at hand). I wrote another one this morning, for a website that displayed too much non-essential cruft. (Stat check: I now have 300 user styles, and 95% of these do nothing but subtract visual cruft.)
If the image supports the text (certain key illustrations in explanations of deep learning come to mind) then you're amplifying your brain power. If the image supplements the text, if amounts to a second though process, which at best might not conflict too much with your textual understanding, and could help to anchor future recall. All the rest actively sabotage effective cognition. This being about 80% of all images on the internet.
Most people don't even realize that reading a single image-laden document (with its native visual commotion) is already a form of ineffective multitasking.
On the other hand, surrounding a issue from multiple sides is not a form of multitasking. For this task, one needs multiple displays and tabbed browsing. Anything less is a cognitive straightjacket.
Rarely, you find someone like Feynman who you can read straight through all day long and not feel like it's cramping your style (as a more humble example: Tim Wu). But even there, I'm liable to open twenty side-tabs per long read, just chasing down nuances of the technical jargon encountered (or refreshing my memory of the same).
For my money, Memex Multiplex is still the One True Killer App. No amount of candy-ass eyeball flypaper is ever going to change my mind on this point.
Think hard, play hard. Candy ass should have never escaped bucket number two to begin with.
[*] Google Images is a godsend of a second bucket: amazing how many hotties look spectacular in exactly one lucky photograph (the coyote vamps). In this sphere, too, I prefer to surround my subject matter. A woman who never takes a bad photo almost always has an inner light, and it's this inner light that ultimately makes pleasure a pleasure, supposing your mind is sufficiently uncluttered to detect the difference.
Every successful online community I've known had a core group of individuals making tireless sacrifice for the betterment of the whole.
Eventually this core group simply wears out. The battle is eternal, and the wages are next to non-existent (some social coin is achieved, but this only goes so far). To put this into Jordan Peterson terms, lobster status biology goes back 300 million years. You can issue a challenge in three words. There's an innate implication that everyone who ignores the challenge has backed down. This causes the troll to feel good (the weird enhanced social status placebo effect of a good electronic shunning , but there it is).
I guess that's one of the core problems: online, a troll can't tell the difference between successful intimidation and being actively shunned. And in the face of ambiguity, the vigorous work the seam.
In academia (also a trollish culture, but with higher table stakes) the way publication works is that every paper needs to assert its value add, ideally in the abstract (though sometimes this only hints at the value add and you have to snap to the concluding remarks before deciding that you've just been trolled by incremental resume fluff).
Here on Slashdot, what's the value add of yet another recitation of Hayekian orthodoxy? It's an age-old dynamic. The proponents believe that the only reason this hasn't worked is that not enough people have clearly heard and understood the unique and powerful and central wisdom of this view of the world (comprehension is inherently modelled by partisans as congruent with agreement).
It's complicated, because everyone is at a different point in the learning curve.
I believe that Hayekianism has the same fundamental flaw as the theory of evolution: it certainly tells you something valuable about certain modes of screwing up, but doesn't actually encode much tangible wisdom about the dynamics of complex systems. If you posit that an entire species gained a new genetic resource in a single generation, you're surely full of crap. The theory of evolution has slapped you down. If you posit that some smart guy pulling all the master levers of a large, complex economy is the way of the future, you're surely full of crap. Hayek has slapped you down.
But if you're trying to say something detailed and constructive about how either of these systems actually works, neither theory takes you anywhere deep. The devil is in the details. Surely, no theory at all is better than a hopelessly wrong theory (especially when certain hopelessly wrong theories tend to give people in power giant woodies). But that's not good enough, in the long run. When did humanity fold up our intellectual tent and decide that merely not being hopelessly wrong was good enough for the long haul? We know about a million times more now about the nature of complex systems than Darwin or Hayek knew (which is still just scratching the surface). A single Google data center now rivals the world economy in total complexity, as Darwin or Adam Smith once understood this, and we're only about another thirty years away from where a single data center overtakes the complexity of the world economy as Hayek once understood this.
If Dawkin's Blind Watchmaker was held to the same standards as neural networks, we'd been in the middle of a giant Darwinian Winter right now, because we've not yet managed to adduce intelligent life from first evolutionary principles. In that explanatory realm, the mere possibility that history might have performed this feat is considered sufficient (for many working scientists). We also haven't been able to show that it's wrong (I suspect the proof would be rather larger than we could commit to disk on the cylindrical margins of a modest data center).
In practice, this edifice is not much more falsifiable on particulars than it's principal rival: And Then a Miracle Happened (inherent in the notion of a miracle is that it doesn't leave behind much paperwork—or even striking anomalies in our
Step 1: Postulate that a viable UBI program increases economic vitality. Any tenuous, single-dimensional projection of the global economic system onto the Graph of Progress is fine here, so long as it incorporates at least a single macroeconomic truism (these are a dime a dozen; if you're having trouble coming up with one, it's because you're failing to appreciate the true, deep, eternal genius of sweeping-paintbrush oversimplification).
Step 2: Feed a new sustained economic growth rate into your super-duper exponential-growth-ifier (add as many extra increments of 0.1% to the sustained economic growth rate as your ego, steely biceps, and self-importance warrant—don't be shy here, think of these as economic vitamin pills for the betterment of the whole society).
Step 3: Presto, bingo the program soon pays for itself. Crow loudly. Why, you could even borrow NOW from such an illustrious, wealth-dripping future.
Bonus marks: And if you're really good, have the program pay for itself while cutting taxes at the same time (but don't try this at home, for professional bullshit artists only).
Rebranding is the easiest part of marketing a product.
Not even close. The customer—who is already bewildered by this unnecessary proliferation of meaningless distinction—enters into a terminal state of Johnny-come-lately fatigue.
The young males who purchase these products are easily fatigued by any process that resembles bureaucracy. You don't need very many faux-affluent young men to wander up to the $2 slot machines of impatient, precipitous margin to make a real killing off of this strategy (by age 30 many of these men will seriously begin to wonder where all their money went, without even a plush leather sofa to show for it; the oil sands in Alberta was, until recently, exhibit A for achieving faux affluence in your early twenties).
Impatient men don't wander up to the unfamiliar. That takes cognitive investment. Your flash-in-the-pan branding effort is completely worthless in the high-traffic areas of the plush, suck-them-dry casino carpeting.
Aaaaand a certain master Fire Brand when bankrupt in Atlanta.
Reportedly many (most?) rapists don't even show signs of arousal during the attack, and the attack is frequently done primarily with objects, not the attacker's genitalia.
You haven't hung out around very many drunken, entitled frat boys, have you?
And the guy was probably packing serious heat (in his pants) until that last beer shooter vaulted him into the "you wish" whiskey dick clover.
During a breakfast with Anna Wintour, the editor in chief of Vogue, Mayer asked if there might be any partnership opportunities between the magazine and Shine, Yahoo's site for women. According to Mayer's own telling of the story to top Yahoo executives, Wintour looked appalled. Shine, with its 500 million monthly page views, appealed to a mass audience, not a narrow and affluent one.
Nevertheless, Mayer quickly became infatuated with the idea that Yahoo could attract more sophisticated consumers. She began pushing for deputies to commission high-quality shows, the way Netflix was doing with "House of Cards" and "Orange Is the New Black." One Yahoo executive was forced to explain that only a company that sold subscriptions to consumers could expect to make money off such expensive productions.
Keep reading from that point in the article. Her legacy of dubious guidance doesn't end there.
We eat pasta because pasta is good for you, over almost all environments, over all of human history. It's only recently that humanity has stumbled into a 24/7 horn-of-plenty cheesecake buffet that flummoxes our dietary instincts. Note that this is only a marginal effect: pasta is good for you, until it isn't.
Most of chubby America these days lives on the far side of the marginal fence on the consumption of all three macronutrient groups.
In this marginal world, just about any calorie you push off your plate is good for you. Refined fructose and badly processed oils are surely the most effective calories to push off your plate. Foods rich in water-soluble vegetable fibers are probably the last calories you want to push off your plate.
Almost everything in between can be justified one way or the other within an overall pattern of judgement and moderation.
I suspect that eliminating refined sugar, bad oils (e.g. trans fats), industrial preserves (all those cookies and cakes and biscuits and chips in the middle of the grocery store), and substantially boosting nutrient- and fibre-rich vegetables (lettuce, broccoli, spinach, squash) would account for half of the total health improvement from dietary change presently available to most of the healthy-ish chubsters in American right now (regardless of caloric restriction).
This is why every fad diet studied always produces a net positive effect (because every fad diet does at least one of the things above, and usually any effort to stay on a programmatic diet makes people more aware of their snacking on the margins, so you usually get a mild caloric restriction along for the ride, even if the diet itself doesn't stipulate this).
That brings you to the knee of the curve, and then the narcissism porn sets in: how will I look in my bikini during spring break, how will I shave 0.5% off my personal-best marathon time in the next Boston marathon?
And now we're into a self-imposed regime of fascist adherence for marginal gains prominent in the second or third decimal point.
I'm not knocking elite levels of personal fitness, but there is a substantial opportunity cost involved.
The same guy busy posting about where he buys his organic carrots online for his organic smoothie is probably the same guy who didn't get around to updating his anti-ransomware antivirus filter (oh how that Vitamix whiles away the hours). He's probably the same guy who could have helped his teenage son get a decent grade in his grade seven math class, but was too busy running another preparatory 10 k.
Dietary tweaks don't make any mortal soul so godlike that this kind of peripheral neglect can be easily forgiven (immortality in this context is bequeathed by magazine-cover glossy shots).
All I've done here is explained the 80-20 law.
The problem here is that diet lives next door to the sexual-selection fitness function (on the exotic, aspirational tail), and boy oh boy is our general acceptance of 80-20 governing dynamics rapidly concealed in a basement closet if it casts the least doubt on our sexual preening reflex.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that many of these views amount to "OMG, what is this shit, anyway?
People need to be way more aggressive on the thumbs down button after sizing up the moral car wreck.
I also find the "not interested" button works wonders after some initial persistence.
Google would fix something in the larger scheme if the viewing population normalized their rating habits to a 66% baseline rejection rate. Everyone should just post "thumbs down for tasteless recommendation" in the comments thread, until these comments drown out everything else. Google would learn fast were the adverse signal even mildly organized.
Absolutely the crucial connotation.
Amateur, especially in egghead ventures, almost always implies a lone wolf, or at most the Chudnovsky brothers' hillbilly pen pals (five precocious amateurs, each one that much weirder than the last).
People tend to rate sex highly, until they try heroine.
Sapolsky's book from last year, Behave, has a lot of material on how our dopaminic system rescales itself to available stimulus. The book is 800 pages long, and every page so far is dense with neuroanatomy. Unbelievably good, but I'm guessing it's not sexconker's preferred Flaming Doctor Pepper bomb shot.
For the record, the first time I read Lord of the Rings (all three volumes, one weekend, age 13) I experienced intense annoyance whenever Tolkien abandoned one narrative line to rejoin some other fellowship splinter group.
By the time I got to Full Metal Jacket I had mostly outgrown this, though it still annoyed me for ten full minutes. Basically, "not now Helga, can't you see I'm still banging your sister?"
Bad, Kubrick, bad.
———
Kubrick rarely hesitates to bend time in the other direction, either.
The litmus test for true Kubrick lovers is Barry Lyndon.
John Hofsess: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love 'Barry Lyndon' — 1976
An interview with Michel Ciment — 1982
No wink. Blink and you miss it.
———
At this point, I also want to give a shout out to another very long film, La Belle Noiseuse (1991), with the 237-minute run time.
How does such a stupidly long movie earn a 100% approval rating? Not a single Michael Bay fan attended this movie by accident. French title, and not a single showing with a start time after 18:30.
Roger Ebert
No.
Efficient frontier
Shannon's theorem: as you approach the Shannon coding limit, the cost of failure becomes linear.
The primary term in the linear model is cost_of_drive / (mean_working_life * drive_capacity). In metric, the unit comes out to Big Macs/B-s, but we'll use USD/TB-year.
There is also a power consumption term, and a performance term. The first of these is significant to Backblaze, whereas the second does little to differentiate the qualified brands in the present Backblaze business model (though it could quickly push you into a different product mix between HDDs and SSDs if the model changed; the proximal economic margin is vertical, not horizontal).
The main effect of the power term is that technological evolution in W/TB-year makes it reasonable to hard-cap drive service life somewhere around seven years (it used to be much less, but times they aren't a-changing very much these days).
If one brand hits the seven year wall with 95% of the drives functional, and another brand hits the wall with 98% of the drives functional, this justifies about a 3% difference in drive sticker price for the same capacity (and mean power draw under the specified workload).
Now, if you were working with a business model where coincident failures could feasibly add up to a risk of total loss, this calculation starts to involve an exponential term, and the factor of two in failure rate over seven years begins to matter again. Even if your total loss is just a spindle loss, and you have a 24-hour from tape, the magnitude of your 24-hour out-of-normal-service event starts to lift the exponential term into economic view.
I've given enough information here to construct a pretty good first-order linear approximation to Backblaze's efficient frontier.
Hint: to usefully diagram this, you need to 86 your third-year engineering school log-linear graph paper, and haul out some third-year elementary school linear-linear graph paper.
Over in MBA school—which you like to pretend is populated by linear-linear spreadsheet-toting cluetards—they will teach you that one of the arts of business is to devise a business model which runs against the grain of prevailing economic assumptions.
Shannon's theorem, properly understood, allows one to do this.
And, yes, the exponential cost model requires engineering school to properly understand, while the linear cost model requires only Econ 101 to fully understand, so of course, as hugely overtrained engineers we deride this model, with a sniff, as merely buying the cheapest shit they can find.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum: it's the engineers here who have failed to make the cognitive leap on Shannon's model, properly understood.
Shannon's corollary: once my theorem is properly understood, you don't even need to be smart anymore.
Shannon's theorem, properly understood, is a universal wormhole from log-linear to linear-linear. This pretty much makes it the most Fucking A theorem of the 20th century.
These an underlying reason why our digital technology grew like the Beanstalk of Babel, yet never ultimately toppled over under its own weight.
Victory: MBA.
I'm presently reading Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy (2012) by Christopher Hayes (yes, that guy).
Chris attended New York's prestigious magnet school, Hunter College High School, where entrance is entirely based on an aptitude test taken at the end of grade five (pretty close to a pure merit system). Guess what? Asian enrollment is soaring, white enrollment is high, black enrollment is near extinction.
Hayes essentially argues that the "merit" test is primarily testing for environmental privilege (only the wealthy whites and the determined Asians can afford the private tutors, etc.)
Charles Murray (yes, that guy) argues in his book Coming Apart (2012) that this is exactly what one would expect to see after a generation of assortative mating among the Ivy league elites, where hereditary IQ advantages are a big deal on the thin tail.
I worked out that Hunter is selecting at about the 3rd S.D. above mean by several congruent Fermi estimates. In this rarefied region of the tail, it takes very little change in mean IQ to create a 10:1 admission differential.
Anyway, it was just weird to read Hayes describing a problem exactly as Murray predicted it would look, but with no recourse to any of the (increasingly radioactive) debate on assortative mating. It was even weirder that both Hayes and Murray were poking pretty much the same holes in Pollyanna-esque assumptions about meritocracy being an Unvarnished Good Thing.
And I'm a big believer in ancient Chinese technology.
Not even meritocracy escapes the law of unintended consequence unscathed. All tests are dimensionality reduced proxies for the real environment. Even if your test is largely unbiased, it still rearranges your population geographically, and concentrates success into small, elite coteries, who increasingly lose touch with everyone else.
Not that escalating social division is a problem that can't be solved with the right neighbourly fencing.
Spoken like a true (defunct) Detroit union boss of the late 1970s.
Unfortunately, the Japanese had already discovered the magic of making as much progress as possible with the resources in hand, which allowed them to manage inventory on a JIT basis, streamline production, and kick American butt, bigly.
You think that's bad?
Someday you should count up the number of different ways God invented to compute pi.
pi = 16 arctan(1/5) - 4 arctan(1/239)
Seriously, any computation of pi more clever than that is pure showboat.
Are you sure your signal stands up after normalizing for "contains Harrison Ford" and/or "original score by John Williams".
Surely the history (and demonstrated talents) of the cast and production team matter. Surely it matters if the original film was an epic blockbuster.
I almost wonder, though, once you subtract these terms, whether sequel-hood doesn't demonstrate a negative correlation with critical reception, alongside a mildly positive correlation with box office revenues due to a large audience base hugely risk-averse toward being disappointed in some novel, unpredictable way.
(Yes, I get it that the accounting is biased toward sequel-hood for additional reasons, having nothing to do with the appeal of the finished product.)
Way to make it impossible to calculate either the false positive rate, or the false negative rate.
I actually like style on a good day, but it does seem to suffer from endless episodes of sharp-object bathtub self-abuse with negative value add—until you get to the point where you mutter under your breath "there's a part of me that could live without this altogether, for the rest of my natural span".
Four numbers, creatively laundering into four instances of three numbers (62, 52, 30, 22) and a wrist bandage.
These are actually good for a quick pick me up on a random, drab day:
List of humorous units of measurement
List of unusual units of measurement
Q: What do you call a man who measures his penis size in attoparsecs?
A: Dick Twain.
Odds are—and you can bet the casino's bank on this—that momentary exhilaration tapped you for $15,000 going the other way over the next decade.
There's a good reason the first hit of crack cocaine is usually on the house.
I'm pretty up to speed on the PFC, dopaminic down-regulation, the basolateral amygdala, and the nucleus accumbens today (all implicated in sketchy impulse control) as I just invested my first two hours with Sapolsky's recent book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst last night. Ten years in the making, and his hard work shows on every page.
This is the kind of book that makes people wake up and realize that A Brief History of Time was a total cake walk, even with here and there an equation or two. By the end of 700 dense pages, I fear my fresh knowledge will have all blended back together again.
List of War and Peace characters ain't got nothing on neuroanatomy.
Unless the systemic factor is that women are less prepared to make the kinds of personal sacrifice that this kind of career demands.
I made that personal sacrifice myself, long ago, by reading everything Heinlein ever wrote (fat chance) starting at the age of twelve. At one point in my life, everything I knew about women came from Podkayne of Mars. No sane female would have made such a severe social mistake.
The point here is that men and women have fundamentally different drives.
Imagine you had a woman-world with many Shelleys and Ursula K. Le Guins. Le Guin's science fiction is rooted in the social sciences (such as anthropology and cultural studies). Shelley's story was based on her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, being something of a dick wad.
So on woman-world, you'd have a lot of this kind of SF and it would achieve some kind of market equilibrium based on the media consumption patterns of other women.
Back on man-world, you'd have a ready supply of Starship Troopers and Kubrick's calculated, cold, and sterile—in the highest service of art—2001. This, too, would achieve a market equilibrium, based on the tastes of men.
Obviously, these two equilibria would be the same, because men and women aren't really different biologically, Winston Smith would add the newspaper on a daily basis, from somewhere deep inside the nuclear-cooling-tower Deep State of a Brave New World.
Canada introduced metric product labelling circa 1976 and half of our grocery stores still boast their beef prices by the pound on the butcher display placards. But then it's back to kilograms at the cash register, due to the law, etc.
I read recently that the last person born in the 19th century just passed away at age 117.
This further supports my longstanding presumption that the last grocery store to promote beef by the pound will cease doing so circa 2050 (around the time that clear recollections of 1975 are hard to come by).
I'm metric/Imperial bilingual in a big way, but even so I have my own strange oases. Temperatures near the boiling point and yeast fermentation temperatures I know best in Fahrenheit. Food safe temperatures I know best in Celsius. Warm outdoor temperatures I know best in Fahrenheit. Cold indoor temperatures I know best in Celsius.
I also harbour these weird zones in mass and distance.
Patchwork transitions can linger in the weirdest ways.
On another note, I sure hope they ditch the ugly apostrophes. Orthographic transitions in 2018 should not be constrained by the 1984-era ASCII-centric bigotry of Big Blue's indestructible Model M keyboard.
Sometimes I'm slow on the uptake.
I just realized that false equivalence is everyone's old-fashioned slippery slope goosed up with frictionless ropes, massless pulleys, and FTL travel.
I suspect social exclusion dates back to 93,000 years before Cain and Abel. Some gullible sot (or tribe of gullible sots) bought the story that it was a new squabble.
Make no mistake, what China is doing here is fuck-me-gently totalitarianism.
If I recall the episode, not exactly hardened targets. But this exercise is stupid beyond belief to begin with, because what makes torture torture is the lack of undo/erase/saved game. Hotel California for the nightmare fuel, deep in the ancient brain.
Fuck me gently, relatively speaking (Syriana clawback scene—later, Clooney winces just to dial a phone).
I don't see the difficulty here.
Executive bonuses should be recalculated retroactively with these kinds of fines allocated to the point of cause rather than the point of outcome, and then clawbacks all around.
At the scale of Volkswagen, this would have wiped every executive bonus off the map, with effects spread over a multiple year period.
Yahoo was failing for a long time and I suspect bonus payments were not large as these things go, so it might not have especially sharp teeth in this case, but I still think it would go a long way toward offsetting this kind of executive behaviour, because it would encourage a culture of the executive team whispering very pointed questions to each other in dark, unmonitored corridors about the the probable magnitude of the future downside .
So superficial it makes my head explode, and stupid, too.
Employment by industry
All industries (2017): 18,416.4 (thousands)
Goods producing services: 3,875.9
That's 21.0% of jobs in Canada in the "goods producing services" sector as of freshly updated statistics for 2017.
This sector further breaks down:
* agriculture
* forestry, fishing, mining, quarrying, oil and gas
* utilities
* construction
* manufacturing
Actual manufacturing: 1,724.8
That's less than 10%.
Right, Canada hasn't manage to integrate "social tasks" into driving those oversized, bitumen dump-trucks up in Fort Mac. To a first order, I'm guessing that 60% of this entire correlation could be explained by Canada being (geographically) just a tiny bit bigger than Korea, with correspondingly more jobs anchored behind a steering wheel (all of which would be categorized as "at risk").
True manufacturing sectors that remain in Canada and the United States are generally the hardest manufacturing jobs to automate, and with the largest value add.
Here's just one in depth discussion of the matter:
Adam Davidson on Manufacturing — 2012
Snippet:
Many of these jobs could be further whittled away, but mostly by re-automation. And this gets way harder with each iteration (and with less immediate ROI from the scant number of workers displaced).
———
Half the time Russ drives me nuts, because I'm not a neoliberal at heart, but I take my anti-neoliberalism seriously, because it deserves an informed critique (this requires endless hours wading into murky waters you don't really like, but that's simply the cost of not being an idiot). True neoliberals don't find it as painful as I do to be generally well informed; their posture is primarily to dismantle, and there's simply no end of things that suck and on the surface appear to justify hasty extermination, with only the selfish hand (powered by whose industry, exactly?) to fill and close the gaping wound. (Hard not to love the perpetual-motion-machine immune system of the invisible hand when it
Way to tell half the story.
Jury nullification:
Now let's parse this automatic "true power" of your checklist-item clue stick to the second level:
As a juror, you'd need your own fricking lawyer sitting beside you in the jury box just to halfway comprehend the true legal muddle you're operating within.
I've seen thousands of liberty narratives, in all manner formal dress and dishabille.
Have I ever seen a narrative about liberty which frames liberty as something we're lucky to have only because we we gifted a milieu of sufficient objective agreement (and this only through the magic social pixie-dust of unfakeable images?). No, I have not.
Libertarian defendant: But your honour, I rendered all these faultlessly realistic videos of my sworn enemies engaging in plausible criminal behaviours for my own personal enjoyment in the privacy of my own home!
Judge: If we had found ricin on your premises, that wouldn't be a good excuse. I fail to see much real difference here. Both of these activities are equally terrible hobbies.
———
This is the new equivalence: sticks and stones can break your bones, whereas misaligned zeros and ones can get your bones clad in an orange prison jumpsuit. The privacy of your own home shall not remain sufficient cover for certain categories of sticks, stones, sick zeros, and icky ones.
———
Suppose the Feds broke into Guy Fawkes' house on a search warrant and find all the gunpowder stocked in his basement.
Guy Fawkes: I'm just a novelist, for cripes sake!
Justice: Right. You need to stockpile actual gunpowder in your house, in large quantities, to write a novel?
Guy Fawkes: But the realism! The closer I surround myself with the elements of my diabolical plot, the more I really get into the mindset of my traitorous protagonist.
Justice:Well then, consider this a joint trial: you and your "fictional" protagonist on the docket together. How's the realism feeling now?
Guy Fawkes: Perhaps I should have bargained for a larger advance.
Justice: You had a publisher lined up?
Guy Fawkes: Just a figure of speech, your honour; I was, er, planning to self-publish all along.
Privacy is sacrosanct up to a point: try not to get a boner over activities identical to planning a real crime.
———
Scratch a libertarian, uncover a slippery-sloper.
The slippery slope of government overreach just came hard aground on the equally slippery-slope of reputation sabotage.
That's the real story here: all viable solutions now contain a term that reeks of "up to a point"-ism, distilled from the scandalous snot rag of social consensus (yes, most people agree on this point; the quibbles begin when you wade into the finer points about what to actually do about this).
Dumbest idea ever: that there's no way to constitutionally triage government overreach. We can't yet do this in social democracy for much the same reason that African states suffering under the legacy of tinpot dictators in the dark aftermath of colonial excess have a lot of trouble adopting democratic institutions western democracies now take for granted.
If the Central African Republic can some day fully embrace democracy, then Sweden and Britain and Singapore can someday manage to fully embrace government overreach triage. Hard, but doable.
And thus there will eternally remain certain earthbound activities where privacy is no excuse.
———
And then, all the fake incrimination porn will beam down from asteroid-belt outlaws. Meanwhile, Ceres shall overtake the Cayman Islands as the solar system's foremost tax haven.
And then one day the President of China wakes up on a foul mood and mutters (audible, just off camera) "nice asteroid you've got there, shame if something happened to it." A week later, a largish well-developed asteroid mysteriously disintegrates, and practically overnight the deluge of fake incrimination porn
Au contraire, what made the web a pleasure to use was multiple displays and tabbed browsing, open to motionless page views.
To this day, I write custom CSS that removes the majority of the images for most web sites (I turn this off when I think an image might actually matter to the article at hand). I wrote another one this morning, for a website that displayed too much non-essential cruft. (Stat check: I now have 300 user styles, and 95% of these do nothing but subtract visual cruft.)
If the image supports the text (certain key illustrations in explanations of deep learning come to mind) then you're amplifying your brain power. If the image supplements the text, if amounts to a second though process, which at best might not conflict too much with your textual understanding, and could help to anchor future recall. All the rest actively sabotage effective cognition. This being about 80% of all images on the internet.
Most people don't even realize that reading a single image-laden document (with its native visual commotion) is already a form of ineffective multitasking.
On the other hand, surrounding a issue from multiple sides is not a form of multitasking. For this task, one needs multiple displays and tabbed browsing. Anything less is a cognitive straightjacket.
Rarely, you find someone like Feynman who you can read straight through all day long and not feel like it's cramping your style (as a more humble example: Tim Wu). But even there, I'm liable to open twenty side-tabs per long read, just chasing down nuances of the technical jargon encountered (or refreshing my memory of the same).
For my money, Memex Multiplex is still the One True Killer App. No amount of candy-ass eyeball flypaper is ever going to change my mind on this point.
Think hard, play hard. Candy ass should have never escaped bucket number two to begin with.
[*] Google Images is a godsend of a second bucket: amazing how many hotties look spectacular in exactly one lucky photograph (the coyote vamps). In this sphere, too, I prefer to surround my subject matter. A woman who never takes a bad photo almost always has an inner light, and it's this inner light that ultimately makes pleasure a pleasure, supposing your mind is sufficiently uncluttered to detect the difference.
for (i = 0; i < n; ++i) {
Do stop me precisely the moment I need a doctorate.
Every successful online community I've known had a core group of individuals making tireless sacrifice for the betterment of the whole.
Eventually this core group simply wears out. The battle is eternal, and the wages are next to non-existent (some social coin is achieved, but this only goes so far). To put this into Jordan Peterson terms, lobster status biology goes back 300 million years. You can issue a challenge in three words. There's an innate implication that everyone who ignores the challenge has backed down. This causes the troll to feel good (the weird enhanced social status placebo effect of a good electronic shunning , but there it is).
I guess that's one of the core problems: online, a troll can't tell the difference between successful intimidation and being actively shunned. And in the face of ambiguity, the vigorous work the seam.
In academia (also a trollish culture, but with higher table stakes) the way publication works is that every paper needs to assert its value add, ideally in the abstract (though sometimes this only hints at the value add and you have to snap to the concluding remarks before deciding that you've just been trolled by incremental resume fluff).
Here on Slashdot, what's the value add of yet another recitation of Hayekian orthodoxy? It's an age-old dynamic. The proponents believe that the only reason this hasn't worked is that not enough people have clearly heard and understood the unique and powerful and central wisdom of this view of the world (comprehension is inherently modelled by partisans as congruent with agreement).
It's complicated, because everyone is at a different point in the learning curve.
I believe that Hayekianism has the same fundamental flaw as the theory of evolution: it certainly tells you something valuable about certain modes of screwing up, but doesn't actually encode much tangible wisdom about the dynamics of complex systems. If you posit that an entire species gained a new genetic resource in a single generation, you're surely full of crap. The theory of evolution has slapped you down. If you posit that some smart guy pulling all the master levers of a large, complex economy is the way of the future, you're surely full of crap. Hayek has slapped you down.
But if you're trying to say something detailed and constructive about how either of these systems actually works, neither theory takes you anywhere deep. The devil is in the details. Surely, no theory at all is better than a hopelessly wrong theory (especially when certain hopelessly wrong theories tend to give people in power giant woodies). But that's not good enough, in the long run. When did humanity fold up our intellectual tent and decide that merely not being hopelessly wrong was good enough for the long haul? We know about a million times more now about the nature of complex systems than Darwin or Hayek knew (which is still just scratching the surface). A single Google data center now rivals the world economy in total complexity, as Darwin or Adam Smith once understood this, and we're only about another thirty years away from where a single data center overtakes the complexity of the world economy as Hayek once understood this.
If Dawkin's Blind Watchmaker was held to the same standards as neural networks, we'd been in the middle of a giant Darwinian Winter right now, because we've not yet managed to adduce intelligent life from first evolutionary principles. In that explanatory realm, the mere possibility that history might have performed this feat is considered sufficient (for many working scientists). We also haven't been able to show that it's wrong (I suspect the proof would be rather larger than we could commit to disk on the cylindrical margins of a modest data center).
In practice, this edifice is not much more falsifiable on particulars than it's principal rival: And Then a Miracle Happened (inherent in the notion of a miracle is that it doesn't leave behind much paperwork—or even striking anomalies in our
Step 1: Postulate that a viable UBI program increases economic vitality. Any tenuous, single-dimensional projection of the global economic system onto the Graph of Progress is fine here, so long as it incorporates at least a single macroeconomic truism (these are a dime a dozen; if you're having trouble coming up with one, it's because you're failing to appreciate the true, deep, eternal genius of sweeping-paintbrush oversimplification).
Step 2: Feed a new sustained economic growth rate into your super-duper exponential-growth-ifier (add as many extra increments of 0.1% to the sustained economic growth rate as your ego, steely biceps, and self-importance warrant—don't be shy here, think of these as economic vitamin pills for the betterment of the whole society).
Step 3: Presto, bingo the program soon pays for itself. Crow loudly. Why, you could even borrow NOW from such an illustrious, wealth-dripping future.
Bonus marks: And if you're really good, have the program pay for itself while cutting taxes at the same time (but don't try this at home, for professional bullshit artists only).
Not even close. The customer—who is already bewildered by this unnecessary proliferation of meaningless distinction—enters into a terminal state of Johnny-come-lately fatigue.
The young males who purchase these products are easily fatigued by any process that resembles bureaucracy. You don't need very many faux-affluent young men to wander up to the $2 slot machines of impatient, precipitous margin to make a real killing off of this strategy (by age 30 many of these men will seriously begin to wonder where all their money went, without even a plush leather sofa to show for it; the oil sands in Alberta was, until recently, exhibit A for achieving faux affluence in your early twenties).
Impatient men don't wander up to the unfamiliar. That takes cognitive investment. Your flash-in-the-pan branding effort is completely worthless in the high-traffic areas of the plush, suck-them-dry casino carpeting.
Aaaaand a certain master Fire Brand when bankrupt in Atlanta.
You haven't hung out around very many drunken, entitled frat boys, have you?
And the guy was probably packing serious heat (in his pants) until that last beer shooter vaulted him into the "you wish" whiskey dick clover.
In more than one instance at Yahoo, she brought a water-based fire extinguisher to bear on an electrical grease fire.
What Happened When Marissa Mayer Tried to Be Steve Jobs — 17 December 2014
Keep reading from that point in the article. Her legacy of dubious guidance doesn't end there.
The human brain is not a completely fool.
We eat pasta because pasta is good for you, over almost all environments, over all of human history. It's only recently that humanity has stumbled into a 24/7 horn-of-plenty cheesecake buffet that flummoxes our dietary instincts. Note that this is only a marginal effect: pasta is good for you, until it isn't.
Most of chubby America these days lives on the far side of the marginal fence on the consumption of all three macronutrient groups.
In this marginal world, just about any calorie you push off your plate is good for you. Refined fructose and badly processed oils are surely the most effective calories to push off your plate. Foods rich in water-soluble vegetable fibers are probably the last calories you want to push off your plate.
Almost everything in between can be justified one way or the other within an overall pattern of judgement and moderation.
I suspect that eliminating refined sugar, bad oils (e.g. trans fats), industrial preserves (all those cookies and cakes and biscuits and chips in the middle of the grocery store), and substantially boosting nutrient- and fibre-rich vegetables (lettuce, broccoli, spinach, squash) would account for half of the total health improvement from dietary change presently available to most of the healthy-ish chubsters in American right now (regardless of caloric restriction).
This is why every fad diet studied always produces a net positive effect (because every fad diet does at least one of the things above, and usually any effort to stay on a programmatic diet makes people more aware of their snacking on the margins, so you usually get a mild caloric restriction along for the ride, even if the diet itself doesn't stipulate this).
That brings you to the knee of the curve, and then the narcissism porn sets in: how will I look in my bikini during spring break, how will I shave 0.5% off my personal-best marathon time in the next Boston marathon?
And now we're into a self-imposed regime of fascist adherence for marginal gains prominent in the second or third decimal point.
I'm not knocking elite levels of personal fitness, but there is a substantial opportunity cost involved.
The same guy busy posting about where he buys his organic carrots online for his organic smoothie is probably the same guy who didn't get around to updating his anti-ransomware antivirus filter (oh how that Vitamix whiles away the hours). He's probably the same guy who could have helped his teenage son get a decent grade in his grade seven math class, but was too busy running another preparatory 10 k.
Dietary tweaks don't make any mortal soul so godlike that this kind of peripheral neglect can be easily forgiven (immortality in this context is bequeathed by magazine-cover glossy shots).
All I've done here is explained the 80-20 law.
The problem here is that diet lives next door to the sexual-selection fitness function (on the exotic, aspirational tail), and boy oh boy is our general acceptance of 80-20 governing dynamics rapidly concealed in a basement closet if it casts the least doubt on our sexual preening reflex.