The Duty of a Scholar | Hacker News Reader

The Duty of a Scholar

daemonology.net

134 pointsgslin37 comments

Wow that showed up quickly.

Readers might also consider my 2020 post "On the use of a life" to be an interesting companion piece: https://www.daemonology.net/blog/2020-09-20-On-the-use-of-a-...

All this talk of "truth" and "duty" implies some larger context in which such abstractions would be evaluated.

One continues to be fascinated by the very human dichotomy in which (the global) "we" want to allude to, or leverage, these concepts, while stridently avoiding evaluating them in any way that might lead to behavioral conclusions.

For a specific example, consider: International Law, in all its emphemerality.

> All this talk of "truth" and "duty" implies some larger context in which such abstractions would be evaluated.

I suppose not engaging with these principles however vague would reduce down to an immediate, might makes right cause-benefit analysis for any given situation. I think it's probably good that people still hold themselves to some standards, regardless of how universally comparable they are across different people.

> “All this talk of "truth" and "duty" implies some larger context…”

I’m not a philosopher, but I enjoy reading philosophy. From my reading, I would bisect the whole of judgments of this sort into ethics and morality. Simply making ethics the domain of “what is good in and of itself” and morality as adding the social dimension. Once you add the matter of social good, everything becomes more complex. Nevertheless, health, welfare and a host of other matters are good in and of themselves.

Are you aware of a program down south called Medicaid?

In my state it covers anyone making below $1,799/mo, with no asset test. The details do vary, that's for adults without dependent children or disabilities. I believe you were unemployed at the time?

I mention because:

> Had I been living in the USA, I would have needed to prioritize seeking employment and medical insurance and likely would not have been able to discharge the duty which fate had thrust upon me.

Normally I just shrug this kind of cheap dig off. Most people don't care about what's true, and that just has to be accepted. But surely the duty of a scholar includes a duty to the truth? I know you would prefer to keep that bit, since I'm certain it correctly reflects your rating of our country's respective approaches to health care.

But it isn't true. Is the thing.

anyone making below $1,799/mo, with no asset test

Is that how it worked in 2005?

Yes, but with a lower income number.

Prior to the ACA, states were not required to cover adults without dependent children.

> Members of the IEEE commit, for example, "to hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public..." without that duty being limited to hazards arising from projects employing the Engineer in question: The duty "to disclose promptly" vests in any Engineer who recognizes that the hazard exists.

As an active member of the IEEE for over a decade now, I have never seen anyone (aside from the author here) take this duty seriously. There are plenty of IEEE members working on things that directly cause such hazards.

The Intel claim it wasn't a problem: [1]

Today, it would be a bigger deal. In the age of AI, exploiting hard to exploit holes is so much easier. AI has patience limited only by your budget.

[1] https://www.itnews.com.au/news/intel-soothes-hyperthreading-...

Linus said some silly things too. Fortunately the security and cryptography community mostly understood.

Intel's response was:

> Timing exploits has been known to the security community since the mid-nineties. From a real world standpoint the attack is not practical.

And this is basically the state of the art today, even with Spectre. You can demonstrate the vulnerability under controlled conditions but having those conditions arise in production is not practical in the engineering sense.

Does "opening a malicious web site in Chrome" count as "controlled conditions"?

He sounds somewhat like R. K. Merton, and thus it was a good read.

> While I had some bills to cover — being a type 1 diabetic, I had to purchase insulin — living in Canada meant that I didn't need to worry about the risk of extraordinary costs from a hospital stay. Had I been living in the USA, I would have needed to prioritize seeking employment and medical insurance and likely would not have been able to discharge the duty which fate had thrust upon me.

God bless Canada.

He would’ve likely qualified for Medicaid in the US if he was living in any liberal state that expanded eligibility.

This took place in 2005, nearly a decade before Medicaid expansion went into effect.

Q: How much does generic/biosimilar insulin cost in the US if you aren't insured? Does this vary by state?

It varies by state. Many states by now have programs capping it at 35$/mo, but I believe that often entails being insured under their state public insurance or another plan operating in that state (and so may not count as “uninsured cost”).

That's a lot of asterisks for a gotcha. We need universal healthcare yesterday. We are barbaric.

Federal requirements for Medicaid starting in January will result in large numbers of people losing coverage.

and if he was living in the other states?

I'm not sure modern academia has very much left to do with scholarship in the sense quoted in this article.

This is unfortunate.

And what pray tell do you think modern academia is about? I have trouble understanding why so many Hacker Newsies have such disdain for a class of people whose main objective in life is to discover and share knowledge, and have sacrificed tremendous amounts of their time, and potential money, to do so.

By revealed preference, modern academia is about churning incremental papers in order to obtain tenure and research grants.

Yeah, those greedy guys just want to (1) keep their (underpaid) jobs and (2) have a bit more money to increase pay for their (underpaid) students. :) As with software engineers, and every other job, some academics are crappy and some are amazing. Let's not paint everybody with the same brush. As for incremental, well, the AI you're all so fond of was incremental academic research for a couple decades before it was this sudden world changing thing.

I think they're criticizing the system, not the people who participate in the system.

While i don't disagree that there's a problem with publishing for the sake of publishing, we really do need the incremental papers. GPS (the evergreen science example) is the result of incremental papers starting in the 40s with grants for atomic clocks

That is not "revealed preference". That is literally what is demanded of them else they be fired.

Revealed preference of academia as a whole, not of the individuals working within it.

Still same bullshit claim. These are requirements for academia to get money or other resources. No grants and no papers, no resources. And yes, resources are necessary.

Venture capitalists and Silicon Valley have strong anti-intellectual tendencies as a whole. See how many founders pride themselves of being drop-outs and how many of them openly reject humanism and liberal arts. HN is mainly a plattform of Ycombinator to advertise and find like-minded workforce.

There are whole disciplines whose telos is now activism rather than knowledge production.

https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-wpfsx/wp-content/uploads/sites...

You linked a pdf but I'm not going to scroll 30 pages on a phone to figure out your cryptic statement

There are whole companies whose only goal is to make money for shareholders! Most people on HN work for them!

And those companies make money from government sponsored R&D. and educational pipelines.

Yes.

People working hard on problems that other people are willing to freely compensate them for is a good thing.

Activism disguised as research is a bad thing.

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