328 karma · joined November 26, 2018
This ignores the sunlight that reflects back into space, and if conversion into electricity and slow return to heat actually increases the amount of energy that the planet can effectively absorb.
At some level, it's just a question of if the planet would heat up by painting the deserts black -- and I suspect that the answer is "yes".
That:
1. People don't trust doctors, partly due to how doctors act.
2. Doctors don't do a good job sharing medical knowledge.
I'm open to bets by anyone who wants to bet that either doctors are widely trusted by their patients or that they do a good job sharing medical knowledge, and am open to hearing ways to scientifically measure either.
But if you're not willing to bet against those two claims, then you probably agree with my conclusion -- that those two real problems are causing upset that's being (irrationally) channeled into things like anti-vaxxer movements.
Edit:
I can't find great quantified surveys, but this is a concern doctors have too --
https://www.physiciansweekly.com/doctors-losing-publics-trus...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterubel/2014/12/19/why-dont-a...
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/Trust_Be...
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-peter-rost/dont-trust-your...
http://mhealthwatch.com/more-than-half-of-all-americans-dont...
Yes -- and their ability to recruit and sustain their movement, like all movements, owes to a serious social problem that has a great deal of associated latent stress that they give an outlet to.
Namely, medical professionals have two serious problems:
1. They don't respect and communicate with their patients, as a matter of course. Just look at the standard discourse around medical treatment -- including the standard "15 minute blowoff" appointment.
2. (This is related, in that 1 likely caused 2, but --) They've utterly failed to explain modern medicine in a way understandable to their patients, forcing people to decide if they trust the same people who, eg, over-prescribed opiates based on shoddy science, leading to a national emergency. For a lot of people the answer is "no"; for some, it's "fuck no -- are you serious?"
The anti-vaxxer movement stems from these two facts of modern medicine, as much as whatever else you're trying to attribute.
The response that it's acceptable to use force against people for refusing to just shut up and trust you silently when you've routinely betrayed their trust without taking full, public accountability is psychotic.
That said, your comment is an excellent demonstrating of my point: it's technically incorrect, and focuses on shaming me for my opinion while lacking a substantive reply.
It seems strange to say that Godel didn't know it at the time -- Godel's work was part of the effort to mechanize logic, Hilbert's program, and the axiomatization effort started in response to contradictory calculus theorems, and followed Frege, Russel, Whitehead, et al.
Or rather, Godel's work showed that Russel's efforts to create a consistent and complete foundation for mathematics was fundamentally insufficient. Turing extended this work, by providing an explicit model of a calculating machine, to show that no algorithm could effectively determine the truth -- even without providing a proof -- locking the door on Hilbert's program that Godel had slammed shut.
Regardless, the entire point of Godel's work was exploring the relationship between our ability to "reason" and our ability "calculate" or "perform rote tasks".
(Missing details of the narrative aside -- it was a really good read.)
The problem is that unrestricted movement disrupts culture and lowers a lot of social statistics all at once - in a way that can be really disruptive to the host culture.
Similarly, no matter how you explain it, the deal in practice is "We'll take a lot of money from the middle class and give it to the globally impoverished."
Understandably, the people who are just being taken from don't seem to like that deal very much; and cultures which are rapidly disrupted by low-class migrants don't seem to do well.
Never mind that "free movement" is usually just political cover for people looking to import more workers after their leadership and the society they built is so toxic, it's killing the indigenous population. Naturally, the people being fed into the meat grinder and replaced aren't particularly fond of paying for their replacements to be imported.
Talking about "free movement" in that context has about the same tone as "right sizing" your business, while off-shoring.
I've had several.
The key feature is that they bring something to the table: I don't actually need technical guidance on how to build the product -- I (or another engineer) knows enough to solve the technical aspects, that's why the corporation is paying me (or them). But what I do need is help coordinating with other teams, help interacting with executives, help prioritizing tasks, help with the kinds of brainstorming exercises that nucleate the project plan, help with understanding and interpreting customer feedback, etc. Colloquially, the "people side" of the job -- it's just not what my skill set is.
So, I actually prefer non-technical PMs: I want people who complement me, not people who are probably less informed about technical issues trying to micromanage my choices there. A non-technical PM is bring a skill set that diversifies a team of engineers, and helps the team more successfully do its job of interacting with both the corporation and customers.
If the PMs here will indulge a couple questions from me:
1. What skills are most useful in an engineer, and how do we make you look good/help you make us look good?
2. What advice would you give to an engineer looking to move into a role like technical adviser, which more directly interfaces with management and executives?
It's also disturbing that the same people who brought us widespread hormone-like chemicals leeching into our food are arguing that this, too, is good for us.
Scientists are definitely batting low on responsible R+D and not causing society-wide or global damage through their amoral-to-immoral, ego-stroking work.
But sure. It's about mosquitoes and not some post-doc trying to be alpha nerd to the point they're willing to endanger the species.
> Yet what first drew the developmental biologist Kimberly Cooper to dabble in gene drive technology for mice was not conservation but evolution. In her laboratory at UCSD, she and her colleagues study the evolution of the jerboa, a long-legged rodent with a jumping, bipedal gait, which diverged from the mouse lineage tens of millions of years ago. Cooper and her colleagues are trying to find the unknown combination of genetic changes responsible for that evolutionary transformation by making lab mice carry incrementally more jerboa traits.
It's possible one of the washes or doping agents was contaminated, rather than the wafers themselves.
The counter-argument is that on the long term, killing a bunch of wealthy people seems to be the only mechanism that resets the behavior and norms of the wealthy.
Setting your house on fire is also an "efficient" way to generate heat, unless you account for the full future reckoning, which was similarly ignored in the move of manufacturing to China.
From 1980 to now, wealthy people have sold out the well-being of the US for slight increases in their personal wealth.
Historically, the solution is to kill wealthy people until they start acting better.
- 16x cost for new connections or flows per second.
- 32x cost for active connections or flows.
- 1x cost for traffic carried in GB per hour, which you'd expect.
It's easy to stray into leaving your phone on too long or forgetting one of the times. Leaving it at home is much harder of a boundary to cross without knowing.
Use your laptop if you must use a computer or the internet during the meetings, but you'd be better served by an independent (and dumb) tape recorder.
There, the Amazon video content is some kind of default invisible app accessible as a tab at the top of the screen and via searches, so it sort of "just happens". When I go to "Videos", there's just an extra lane of channels I've subscribed to below my watch list and suggested content -- if I pull them open, it brings up what's basically the home page again, but with only that channel's content displayed.
It's not a great app, I think your description of 'so-so' fits the experience, but it's better than some of the dedicated streaming ones (looking at you, DirecTV and Funimation!)
For reference, that's buying: Amazon Prime ($10), two channels on Prime ($20), Netflix and another streaming ($20), and a streaming TV subscription ($40-50). Notably missing is Disney SVOD -- though some Disney content is carried by the streaming TV.
Given the frustration of having to use multiple apps and services while still not getting everything because of the massive fragmentation -- never mind that most people can't afford anywhere near that a month on TV -- I'm not surprised people are pirating content.
Another solution would be that we end up with fewer people, through any of several rather nasty mechanisms.
I'm not as optimistic as you that society values animals which don't provide anything -- horses haven't gone extinct, but they're certainly not doing well either.
In the age of thinking machines, monkeys are the new horses.
It was four clicks for me to set up an email filter on Gmail in response to a message in my inbox.
And there's considerably more filtering options, had I wanted something non-trivial, than there are on FB or Twitter, which are all or nothing -- after all, on email I have the option to more than mute, such as to classify the message based on various parameters.
If the company doesn't extend an offer, it's because I didn't show them the value I can deliver their organization. Either I didn't present myself as a teammate that makes the group stronger or I didn't present the technical skills to make them realize the talent I bring individually.
Maybe I'm lucky -- it's a low sample size.
But I suspect that we all can do better at interviewing and at selling ourselves. Traditionally, that's a weakness in engineers.
It's also why, when I'm interviewing, I try to remind applicants what I need: give me something, anything I can use to sell you to my manager -- to argue "yeah, this cool guy is the right business choice". Help me help you. If you can't, you won't get hired.
Most of the modern "serverless" systems either operate with containers, or are just mounting your FaaS into a provider based container anyway.
Containers with provider managed infrastructure are really just "process as a service", which often are a better match to your software than "functions as a service".
Code repo -> docker build -> AWS Fargate. Easy to set up CI/CD pipeline that doesn't require you manage servers and can support long-running, CPU intensive, and even GPU applications.
(You may have to manage the fleet a bit for GPU support, ie create your own ECS cluster with autoscaling -- but not actively manage the deployment of instances.)
This is somewhere between slander and trying to explain away other social groups bullying engineers.
The truth is much simpler: engineers have responded to being bullied out of the debate by simply ignoring it, and implementing AI without concern for the results of that debate. Engineers have that power -- they can unilaterally change society by implementing a new kind of mind without approval or buy-in from other parties.
So I think my position is the reverse of yours: if business leaders, activists, etc want to meaningfully impact the AI debate, they should engage with the engineers actually building it -- rather than having a debate among themselves.
If the government can't keep staffing those teams, the responsible thing is to pull the servers down on their way out -- rather than leaving a government asset unmonitored.
Yes, just like you should throw the switch on the trolley car to kill one person instead of let it kill five.
Other people don't agree.
They run stories about how the military bombs some civilians while fighting jihadists, but not about how those same jihadists routinely round up and torture children, kill scores of locals, etc.
Outside of Iraq, which fuck Bush, can you name something about the "War on Terror" you think we'd be better off not doing?
I think it's a really shallow view to say it's better to not bomb a few civilians... then leave them to be preyed on by violent locals instead.
I'm a millennial, and didn't enlist at 18 because I didn't want to go to Iraq (and still don't support starting that war), but I'd have gone to Afghanistan, and as I get older, I find myself much more willing to support the military.
I suspect I'm not alone in that, either.