buvanshak

This is not always possible. For example, take the claim that a certain thing X in some eatables is harmful/not harmful for human beings. Such a thing might not be possible without long term study. Or the claim that smoking will kill you, but what if you want to know if smoking moderately is as bad as exposing to automobile pollution every day? Or living in an area with polluted air. Mainstream narrative today emphasizes on the dangers of smoking, but it does not really does the same with automobile pollution? What if you want to know the truth about this? Can this be so easily done by a common man?

Even in cases where this is possible, like pesticide residue in vegetables, You might have to run the experiments for a large number of samples for some amount of time to get a real picture. Which might be feasible, but way out of the comfort zone of a concerned person, who has a normal life and the associated hassles to deal with...

>None of these associations are actually true,

Have you done research on any of these yourself? Also, I don't think you can put all those things in the same basket. For example, the last two. Doing the research on those might require huge resources that are way above the head of a single individual or small organization...

And in similar manner, every such issue might have different aspects that it might be stupid to generalize all of them into one category.

Human beings have a natural tendency to do this, which is why we are so easy to fool. May be, don't try to do that...

I think that the common people have no way of knowing the real truth about something. And all our decisions should be based on this simple fact of modern life...

And also, Any amount of study does not say much if all of them uses flawed methodologies ("but that is the best we have" does not make it any better), which has been a serious issue lately..

Yes. but the first step is to acknowledge it. That is the point the parent is talking about..

>because doctors, who generally consider vaccines to be very effective and mostly harmless, are not particularly financially vested...

Interested does not always have to be financial. It is hard for a community to go back on its beliefs. So in all probability, it is possible that a doctor can ignore the negative effects of a vaccine they are seeing due to this and huge perceived peer pressure in talking against the current medical consensus (Which is, as stupid as it sounds, All vaccines are completely safe)

Glad to know that a vaccine was pulled out of market due to safety concerns...Another one that followed the same was the Rotavirus Vaccine [1], even after it was found "safe" during trials.

1. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4843a5.htm

There is something so wrong with this comment that all the problems with today's tech culture can be extrapolated from it...

>As opposed to the hundreds a day dying from conventional drivers?

That does not justify putting half baked tech in a position where it could kill people.

Glad to know that a vaccine was pulled out of market due to safety concerns...Another one that followed the same was the Rotavirus Vaccine [1], even after it was found "safe" during trials.

1. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4843a5.htm

I think these articles are the work of their PR. Because they want to paint what they are trying to do to be Impossible.

Even though this might be common knowledge, Elon Musk wants to inspire blind belief aka create a reality distortion field around him. For this, continuously emphasizing the impossibility of what they are trying to achieve is very important..

Even if you agree with that how is "treating raising capital as one element that he needs to solve" work any better that the, you know, the other, non-engineer like methods others use to raise capital?

Yes. sadly, I think this is spot on. I started noticing this trend with PEP 498 (Php like string interpolation). One can only hope it won't ever become so bad...

> This has been possible in functional and "expression" languages since forever, and it's considered a very good practice.

Really? Can you show an example?

>It feels like accepted PEPs are slowly coming under less scrutiny and disregarding the idea of feature orthogonality and low overhead.

I have been noticing this long before. For me it was with the pep that dealt with automatic string interpolation, i think it was 498..

> But I don't feel anything from poetry. > ones where I do feel something is more because of the story

Just curious. Do you find some combination of words more "beautiful" then other combination of words that says more or less the same thing?

For example "I wandered lonely as a cloud" vs "I wandered alone, like a cloud".

I gave up on Mysql long time ago when I found out that it cannot refer to temporary tables multiple times in the same query. Not sure if it has been fixed now...

EDIT: Does not seem fixed https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/temporary-table-prob...

Seriously. I sometimes thing if these articles are doing for Elon Musk.

So Mr Musk is attempting something, let us call this X. If he simply do it, no one else notices, and the future potential investors might fail to notice...Same if he fails.

So he has to make sure that they notice when he succeeds. What better way than to make a bunch of articles that says what he is trying to do is impossible. Then if he succeeds, then the (artificial) voices that were saying what he is doing is impossible, ends up amplifying his success 100 fold. If he fails, then not much of his current reputation is changed.

So if you are handling PR for Elon Musk. Why wouldn't you make these articles happen?

>It's thanks to this try-and-fail that this man was able to build things that nobody thought to be feasible.

Can you list a couple of things that this man built, that everyone thought not possible?

> reliable

Is it really time to say this?

Yes. But two things.

1. We don't know all the mechanisms that a brain employs to achieve intelligence. We see billions of interconnected neurons and we assumes "Yea, this might be generating intelligence".

2. We don't know if we are already at some fundamental limits of intelligence. For example, you can see may instances in nature where a pattern emerged that maximizes some sort of efficiency. (Like Honeycomb pattern). So, the end result of this will be that, even if we transfer the process by which our intelligence work to a machine, it will have the same performance as an average human brain...

A bike is standing straight, completely still, with the front wheels completely straight. According to you, if I lean this stationary bike, to left, you are saying the front wheel will turn to right, right?

That is bullshit. If I just lean to the left, the bike does not "react" by leaning to the right. If I lean to the left without touching the handle bars, the cycle ll start turning to the left.

With counter steering, it can be made much quicker and in a much responsive fashion.

> Bike leans right, front wheel turns right

Agree. But this is not what the other person is saying.

Suppose you see an object A, moving straight line getting caught in the gravity of object B, ending up in a orbit around it.

Deriving an underlying theory would be deducing the force of gravity from it.

Axiomizing the very specific behavior would be making a rule that says. "If the object A (and object A only), while moving in a straight line, comes at so and so coordinates with respective to B, will end up in an orbit around it"

> When you lean to (your) left, the center of mass of you+bike goes left of the plane of the wheels, this causes the front wheel to rotate away

This does not seem correct. Why does it cause the front wheel to rotate away (right) ?

If you lean a stationary cycle to the left, the front wheel will turn left.

>If you lean left, front wheel will "do" countersteering itself (same as noted).

I am not sure. If you lean left, then the handle bar ll slightly turn left automatically.

In actual countersteering, it greatly helps only because it helps to quickly initiate a tilt in the required direction. For example, if you want to go to left, then turn the handle bar to the right, which causes the front wheel to slight start to offset in the right, which in turn causes the whole bike to tilt to left, and once it start to tilt to the left, then the normal process of turning is applied...

> What does that have to do with reproducibility?

That is exactly what I wanted to ask you originally when you cited the celestial mechanics example. It is not relevant in cases we are deriving a theory underlying the behavior, rather than axiomizing the very specific behavior itself...

> If they can't even get the basics right how can Musk be sure that his strategy is the right one?

The strategy is right one as long as it sells cars.

Musk is a salesman in engineer's clothing.

> But nonetheless, the experimental data that went into this discovery was largely non-reproducible.

I am finding a hard time to grasp what you are telling here. If you deduce a set of laws A from an event X, you don't need X to repeat to check the validity of A. You can check it against another event Y, where you predict its characteristics using A. If the laws are valid, the prediction ll match the actual observation..