ajarmst

I've not read the original report (and am unlikely to), but this quotation: '“WSPR is like a bunch of tripwires or laser beams (graphic below), but they work in every direction over the horizon to the other side of the globe,” Mr. Godfrey says.' is not an accurate characterization of this (or any) use of WSPR. It implies a degree of precision and clarity of signal that is completely misleading. I'm also very concerned about Godfrey's clear comfort with taking this very weak and contingent signal and using it to ascribe thoughts, motives and behaviour to the aircrew of MH370. You don't do that without substantial corroborating evidence from other sources when you have an intact Cockpit Data Recorder, much less whatever this is. Looks a lot like a familiar pattern: starting with a theory, finding some nice noisy data that needs 'expert interpretation', and then massaging it to confirm your theory.

They should perhaps revisit their title, then.

I'm not sure that "killer robots with lasers that can be field-trained to identify specific targets" would be quite the blessing that everyone seems to think.

Readers of this would likely find some of Jonathan Haidt's (viz. "Positive Psychology") research on disgust and elevation--as extremes of the same emotional continuum and potentially linking moral emotional reactions to evolutionary mechanisms around food selection and aversion.

Edit: I now note that seneca made the same point before I did, in particular citing "The Righteous Mind" as a good source on this.

I'm not qualified to comment on legal issues and contracts. In the case of EULAs, my understanding is that no contract where you surrender fundamental rights is valid or enforceable. But even then, I'd want a lawyers advice before assuming it. And, of course, that's a good argument for reading EULAs very carefully.

I've learned over several decades that any simple pronouncement that "X is ethical/unethical" is an effective way of ensuring that you will be wrong about some particular case. Yes, I think there might be cases where it is justified, but it would be very rare and require extremely careful monitoring and review. Two areas where it might come up would be medical research and research on children or adults of diminished capacity. In the former, there might be situations where the value of the research to the collective health and safety of the entire community would be sufficient to balance the use of such deception. In the latter, it may not be possible for your subjects to give informed consent (side note: this is, of course, also a ethical problem in experimentation on animals). The ethical dimensions of parents or guardians consenting to experimentation on their charges is extremely complex.

I will go out on a short limb and assert that ethical experimentation using that sort of deception depends a great deal on the details of a given case. Very subtle changes in the experimental protocol could easily change its ethical acceptability.

P.S: And, of course, there are a vast number of things that are completely legal but absolutely unethical.

Only one of those groups is having their time and effort squandered. To me, it comes down to whether someone is being harmed. Researchers use statistics and anonymized demographic data on large populations all the time. You could argue that the population in question have become research subjects, but (1) they are not being harmed and (2) they are not being actively misled by the investigators. The moment this group started submitting patches in bad faith, they were actively misleading their subjects, and they are harming those subjects by using their time and effort without consent.

TLDR: Yes, but deceiving a subject about the details of how they are being studied is different from deceiving them about the fact that they are a research subject.

Yes, this happens all the time. But note the salient features: (1) the subjects are aware that they are research subjects and have agreed to participate (albeit without full knowledge of how the collected data will be analyzed). They have agreed to be studied, and have agreed that their time may be used in pursuit of this research. (2) All such studies undergo a very stringent ethical review and are usually monitored closely by third parties (at least since Milgram made it extremely clear that this was a necessary policy). These issues are complex and difficult to navigate---which is precisely why we have review boards. Every experiment has to be evaluated to balance the requirement to act ethically with the value of the research data to be collected. Skipping that requirement is unacceptable.

In my experience, the moment a research team starts looking for reasons not to classify what they are doing as human experimentation is the moment when it becomes extremely clear that they need board review.

It's an insightful review into some of the issues and regulations around this. I'm not American, so our local rules are different, and I resigned from my institution's IRB several years ago, and these issues have become more fraught in this period. However, the way I was trained to look at these issues were around the concepts of harm, both actual and potential. In this particular case, as Dittrich notes, the questions are around the ethics of using deception in research. Deception does have a role in legitimate research. Arguably, double-blind experiments, the sine qua non of medical research have a fundamental component of deception. They also represent the most common way the ethical dilemma is resolved: subjects are told that they may be deceived, and they have an opportunity to give informed consent. That could have been done in this case: have project leads inform people working on the project that, in the interest of evaluating the patching process, patches that are incorrect or which introduce vulnerabilities may be submitted by researchers. That, of course, would require some senior members of the organization be aware the study was going on. That last is the way penetration testing and red team investigations of security resolve the ethical question---and distinguish themselves from mere vandals and criminals.

Other ways to resolve it include collecting data without deception: instead of introducing flawed or malicious patches themselves, researchers identify such patches that have historically been submitted and then review the processes that led to their acceptance or rejection. This is more difficult, but might arguably produce better results. In the case that there are few or no such cases on record, then I would question the value of doing the study at all: deceiving people to study a phenomena that doesn't appear to occur at an appreciable rate is difficult to justify.

There's a simple heuristic: if you're studying a group of human beings that you are not a member of, and for which no members are consciously participating, you must be extremely careful. The general rule in anthropological and sociological research is that you do not lie to your subjects. There are cases where the value of the research is sufficient, and for which no other options are available, to break that rule. But they are rare and the utility must be clearly shown and carefully reviewed by a qualified third party. This experiment doesn't come close.

There will certainly be those those willing to argue that this isn't human experimentation and thus does not require ethical review. If your experiment depends on misleading human beings---directly or by omission---then it requires an ethical review. It is unethical to waste people's time to no purpose. In the case of an open source project where volunteers are donating their time, it is particularly egregious: they were squandering volunteers' time. In effect they were destroying part of the contribution people made to a project they care about. That requires a very clear justification, which this particular project absolutely does not provide.

I recall a conversation with other IRB members shortly after the Sokal Hoax became known. Our general consensus was that it was hilarious but absolutely unethical if considered as an experiment.

There are some relatively minor issues with this apology that appear to already have ample discussion here, and I'll not repeat it. I want something more: I want to hear from the sponsoring faculty, research ethics board, and editors of the journal that published the article. There appear to be some systemic issues in addition to the investigators' ill-considered project. How was it that this research, which is clearly unethical, ended up being published? I've sat on an IRB: this study would not even have been a close call. Did sponsoring faculty even send it for IRB approval? Did they disclose that they were misleading their subjects? If so, did the IRB approve it? Did it make any recommendations? When submitted for publication, did they state they had IRB approval? Did they disclose that they were misleading experimental subjects? Did any reviewers express ethical concerns? Were the ethics of this study discussed by editors? Because there's either some serious systemic flaws in the review and publication process for this paper or the investigators engaged in serious misconduct. If the latter an apology (while absolutely required) is far from sufficient to address the issue. If the former, then there are several other apologies due, along with confirmation that the process will be reviewed and corrected.

Not sure. I expect that editors at such journals tend to assume that studies with an institutional sponsor will be held to professional standards by the sponsor, or take the authors' assertions at face value. I suspect that reviewers might have assumed that the study was done with the knowledge and permission of GNU project managers, even if not the line programmers (as in the case of ethical pen testing). That would make it less of an obvious ethical breach.

I'm much more fascinated by the languages that made both lists. Any language (Haskell and Scala as well as---inexplicably---HTML, SQL and Shell programming) that makes both a 'most dreaded' and 'most loved' is probably interesting enough to investigate)

p.s. I must confess some disappointment at no Lisps on either initial list, especially on a Y Combinator site, but I think Haskell has usurped the "Language beloved by people who make it very clear they think they're better than you" throne. I blame Norvig's defection to Python.

pps: Shell? HTML? SQL? Really? Also: VBA is still a thing? Ewwww.

It means they either lied to the IRB or the IRB is absolutely incompetent. Possibly actionably so. I've sat on an IRB. This experiment would have been punted on initial review. It wouldn't even have made the agenda for discussion and vote.

I used to sit on a research ethics board. This absolutely would not have passed such a review. Not a 'revise and resubmit' but a hard pass accompanied with 'what the eff were you thinking?. And, yes, this should have had a REB review: testing the vulnerabilities of a system that includes people is experimenting on human subjects. Doing so without their knowledge absolutely requires a strict human subject review and these "studies" would not pass the first sniff test. I don't think it's even legal in most jurisdictions.

Related, from the "most people don't understand their shoes" file: it's pretty rare to see a proper heel lock on athletic shoes: https://www.gearpatrol.com/fitness/a696423/extra-lace-eyelet...

My brain initially parsed "meta robot" as "megarobot" and I was really excited until I got to the last part of the sentence.

I'd also suggest that cellular automata are now an important area of theoretical Comp Sci (and a number of related fields). Wolfram's contribution in that area compares quite favorably with the pioneering work by Von Neumann and Conway, providing a lot of the foundation for systematic study of those types of system.

Wolfram did speculate that 110 would be Turing complete, although others proved it. Particularly in the Maths, an insightful but as-yet unproved assertion can be at least as valuable as its proof (hence all the Mathematicians who are justifiably famous for a conjecture).

I'm a fan---I even own a copy of the gorgeous hardcover edition of A New Kind of Science. However, this should be understood in context: Wolfram has been claiming that this approach would generate revolutionary changes (a paradigm shift, to use Kuhn's now hackneyed phrase) to how we understand and approach the universe for at least three and a half decades. He's brilliant, and has made some very important contributions to complexity theory, chaos, theoretical comp sci, discrete mathematics, etc. He also has a Bobby Fischer-level awareness and focus on his own superiority, and whatever the exact opposite of debilitating impostor syndrome would be. Still, that's true of many people that I admire but would probably not enjoy having dinner with (Nicholas Taleb, I'm looking at you.) Probably best to take some of his claims with a grain of salt until he proves them (which is not entirely unlikely in Wolfram's case).

ksh93 supports both completion and history. I lost interest in looking before uncovering information about versions of ksh more than thirty years old, but neither feature is mentioned in descriptions of differences between ksh93 and predecessors, so I suspect the feature has been there for longer. Posix compliance is neither necessary nor sufficient for a reasonable colloquial definition of "shell."

ok, I'll bite. What current Unix systems ship with a default shell that supports neither command-completion nor command-history?

One hopes that the author didn't need me, a stranger, to tell them that this site is missing most of the fundamental features of a shell. Feedback is valuable, but strangers aren't going to visit something that clearly doesn't work a second time to see if they're making progress. There is a reason that early testing and feedback on prototypes is limited to in-house or pre-existing customer review. The author is entitled, and even encouraged, to ignore me--but my feedback is that they should have waited until they were closer to their goal and general feedback would be more valuable than hundreds of copies of "it doesn't work".

That the quality of someone's work doesn't matter because they don't care about it or expect it to be useful isn't a particularly compelling argument.

Cool. It's probably not an original idea, but it's good one. I might even steal it from you at some point. Good luck with the project.

This is pretty late in the cycle for O'Reilly to not realize that the adaptive 'algorithmic government' he is describing would result in government optimized for clicks and highly responsive to weaponized performative umbrage by groups acting in bad faith. Which is, of course, exactly what we have.

Maybe we need something stable that can maintain a functional equilibrium and act in the defence of the norms of the whole system. Responsiveness and stability are usually antithetical, and systems designed to be responsive to the immediate urges of large masses of humanity are rarely anything but monstrous.

No command history, no tab completion. One assumes that "shell" is aspirational rather than descriptive. It's an interesting idea, but if you present what appears to be a shell interface to users expecting a shell interface, they're going to wander away pretty quickly after discovering it's merely facade. I wish you luck, but this isn't really ready for visitors yet.

I'm fine with that restriction. But that isn't the axiom of antisymmetry. That's the axiom of antisymmetry plus a rule that holds that equality implies identity (which would be typically described in terms of the axiom of extensionality). My problem is with the implied claim that antisymmetry alone gives you that restriction, which is incorrect. Antisymmetry is entirely consistent with collections that contain equal but distinct elements.

If we agree that the axiom of extensionality applies, then the restriction of no ties is implied. I don't think antisymmetry is necessary or sufficient for it.

Ok. But I still don't agree that the property of antisymmetry implies or requires that restriction.

I keep getting bounced out of the flow by the author describing the relation A<=B as "A is bigger than B". I get that the order relation is arbitrary, but that's just irritating. Perhaps using "precedes" rather than "is bigger" would be helpful. I also don't think the assertion that anti-symmetry excludes equality ("no ties are permitted"). The usual definition of antisymmetry specifically requires equality: a<=b && b<=a -> a==b (i.e. a<=b -> !(b<=a) is a stronger restriction than mere antisymmetry.)

The sentiment certainly isn’t original. The phrasing sounds like me, though. I can get pretty pedantic.