conjectures

It feels to me like some of that was having the same group of random strangers interacting. Rather than a constant flux of single comments.

This made me nostalgic for RSS. Is anyone reviving that in a nice way?

> if you only know the mean and variance of its value.

And why are they the only things you know? Most often, because they are the things you asked for previously... rather than, as OP hinted, e.g. some facts about quantiles.

Amazing that this isn't universally known at this point.

> What is "underground programming world"?

If you have to ask... ;)

Mostly agree, but politics is hardly chock-full of other STEM graduates. PPE, history and law:

https://studee.com/media/mps-and-their-degrees-media/

(The civil service is stuffed with PPE grads too.)

Actually, I think this has the potential to increase empathy between pure-business folks and coders. After having a crack and encountering the inevitable bumps in the road, more people will realize writing software isn't just about knowing some funny syntax.

The correct teenage response being to recite Dead Kennedys lyrics.

> As long as you make your paper easily available, as another commenter said, another person can make it more comprehensible for the general public.

I'm not sure you appreciate how hard this might be for someone who is not closely connected to a project.

The people who can do that reliably will have: a) the academic chops on a similar level of a peer reviewer b) social media skills. a) puts them back in the bracket of people you don't want to 'slow down'.

Yeah. Surprising also since Dawkins wrote The Selfish Gene about altruism 40+ years ago.

Mine too and I agree.

There is a big spread in the quality of work in the field. From thoughtful analyses of large datasets, to pretty bad examples of p-hackery with push-button software.

A root cause of problems is people asking scientific questions of fMRI data whose answers would lie at a much finer spatiotemporal resolution than the medium can support.

TL&DR: re-invents the idea of off-shoring, sans discussion of attempts to do it in the past.

How does insurance work?

I think it's because the font is correlated with higher-than-average quality for random docs one finds on the web.

This is often true in statistics also. It's high time monte carlo was brought earlier in the curriculum. It's the gift that keeps giving.

+1 for 'intended to replace the Matrix remote trigger system'

> When I say production machine learning, I’m referring to machine learning that manifests as a product feature. For example, Uber’s ETA prediction, or Gmail’s Smart Compose.

You can bet that prod services from companies you heard of are running on something more analogous to versioned docker images. Not a yaml file which says, 'Go run whatever predict.py is in the current folder.'

The moment one of your dependencies breaks your code, or snookers your performance, there will be a lot of head scratching going on.

By half way through the article, I haven't seen one decent argument presented to justify the author's dislike of The Economist. Instead, this is just an invitation to go boo, hiss when the reader hears the wake-word 'liberal'.

> I think Reiki would say that "energy" assists you to heal your own back, but it doesn't specify how that healing takes place.

Yeah, that's a problem. I'm literally asking what this mechanism is. A discipline not being able to take a clear stab at one is a serious yellow card (I appreciate the fact that you personally try below).

> The Reiki experience caused a change of data in your neural system due an information "covert channel" that exists between your system and the practioner, and your muscle tension is relieved.

So, how would this 'covert channel' work? If we can figure it out that is the beginning of scientific telepathy and would thus be a defining discovery of the 21st century.

> The Reiki experience caused a change of gene expression due numerous hormonal changes that occur in your body when you are in that environment.

This is, at least theoretically, falsifiable. Using a RCT between trained Reikists, a sports massage, random masseur, and baseline. It would be expensive.

It still leaves open the question of how the Reiki effects the gene expression. Of course, getting a regular massage or lying down for a bit is going to change your gene expression somewhat.

E.g. is the claim that the mana directly moves transcription factors to the right places so that more of certain proteins get transcribed?

OK, so what's the mechanism?

I have tense muscles in my back from WFH. A Reikist touches my back. What happens to relieve the tension? Does mana from their hands exert a force to directly extend the tense muscles? Does the mana stimulate the release of some chemical which relaxes the muscle? How does it work?

> What I mean about "subtle energy" is not the same as the "energy" of physicists.

There you go. This is why the idea is extraordinary. There is the energy of physicists which explains the motions of the planets, the vibrations of crystals ;), and the mechanics of your computer. In fact, it is the theory we have for everything in the universe except the phenomenon of someone touching someone else while thinking a special kind of happy thought.

> Subtle energy carries information

Regular energy carries information too. How do you think radio works? Or how cosmic background radiation yields knowledge about what happened just after the big bang?

> The problem is that, what we experience as consciousness, is in turn influenced and agitated by subtle energy.

How? What does the subtle mechanism look like? What are the corresponding subtle equations, subtle algorithms or subtle models?

It's extraordinary in the sense that there is no known mechanism for it to work.

E.g. soap kills viruses by dissolving them, some painkillers work by blocking transmission of signals along nerves, radiotherapy kills cells in the blast zone.

Other than through establishing a psychological effect around 'someone cares', there's simply no known way of positive thoughts in one person's head being transmitted down through the hands and directly doing some work on an illness.

If there were, what is it:

What kind of 'energy' do hands emit? How does the difference between Reiki hands and non-Reiki hands manifest? How does that 'energy' selectively effect diseases? How does thought modulate the diseases the 'energy' effects. E.g. how is the Reiki hand energy signature a function of the targeted disease? What's the molecular pathway by which the 'energy' improves the target ailment? If it's just regular 'energy' why can't we copy it with a machine and play it back en masse?

This is junk. Possibly even a case study exemplar of spurious correlations. Take a small set of units (high false positive rate, inter alia). Take some vaguely relevant sounding metrics (entry point for p-hacking). Does a bunch of regressions.

Here's the next paper from the group:

Distance from equator is predictive of authoritarianism. The more constant daily cycle causes a yearning for rigid routines, predisposing populations to authoritarian rule.

If you think I'm merely taking the piss, is it more or less plausible than the proposed causal mechanism here:

"Because many disease-causing parasites are invisible, and their actions mysterious, disease control has historically depended substantially on adherence to ritualized behavioral practices that reduced infection risk [9]."

Or maybe it's because we've already seen the data our whole lives, know which countries are authoritarian and can select any variable which separates democracies from authoritarian countries and bang, you've got p < 0.05.

Or, maybe you are spending a bunch of time making sure you don't break a rats' nest of dependencies and waiting for things to build.

After the n^th iteration of building an rpc server, such things may be fairly standardised, no?

Suppose you design a bank. How many different RPCs would be involved? 1600 sounds modest.

Figures, a fine objective, but not what I'd imagined.

Anyone know what statistical models Prometheus uses?

Having scanned this article, read the wikipedia entry and hit the landing page, I am none the wiser.

This is the missing description.

* Jaynes's

If there's one to grab, it's Janes's Probability Theory: The Logic of Science.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/probability-theory/9CA0...