foerbert

I've got nothing to say about what the actual cause is, but I see many lines of thought go this direction and don't think they are credible.

Not everything is a simple linear effect. There are all kinds of interactions that do not have a simple linear correlation between the amount of cause and the degree of effect.

Climate and the effects on various things we care about are particularly complex and full of these sorts of interactions. There is no inherent reason to doubt global warming is a plausible cause for something just because it took place (relatively) suddenly.

Is global warming the cause in this specific instance? I have no idea. But discounting the idea just because the river didn't slowly get lower over the past decade or two is not reasonable.

Because it can influence the behavior of people who might be going into adtech. If working for adtech becomes known for coming with a cost of harming future career prospects outside of adtech, it becomes far less attractive even without having to adjust compensation. This is also the kind of thing can get associated with moral failings, which can create significant social costs to joining adtech as well.

None of this occurs if you just sit back and encourage people to get out of adtech and make it nice and easy. People will just decide to do it for "just a few years" so they can "make some money."

On top of all that, this sort of change doesn't happen instantly. It'll start slowing and the momentum will grow. People current in adtech will have a chance to see the writing on the wall and jump ship before it's more than a minor annoyance.

Well, considering the guy from Pfizer quoted in this article says they don't believe the vaccines they are currently developing will be needed, and that you say we can't trust them when they tell us about the need for the treatment, I can only assume you're about to argue that we do actually need these new vaccines they are testing.

Seriously, did you even read the article? It's basically just reporting on what Pfizer and the others are actually doing, and it's very clear they're just preparing for something they may need to do in the future. It's not advocating for any particular stance on that even, much less taking a position that would encourage buying anything in particular right now.

I don't see what you're objecting to here.

I think this is far too important to be called a nitpick.

This is a very easy trap to fall into - both on your own and when guided to it.

Assuming children here means under 18 as the article never mentions a specific range, then the population size as of 2020 was about 73 million [0]. That means we're talking about the difference between 1.2% of children and 0.08% of children.

In terms of national impact, that's pretty significant. But in terms of your individual lived experience, I have doubts. I've already spent too much time looking for relatable events with a similar probability so I'm going to stop here, but I don't think most people are that clued in about kids to seriously expect to notice this kind of difference in their life.

Unless you count reading/watching the media as part of your life experience, I don't think most people would notice a difference here.

[0]https://www.childstats.gov/americaschildren/tables/pop1.asp

I think it's probably the correct argument to use.

As you pointed out, what the vast majority of gamers will respond to is performance. In order to get performance, you have to start cutting other areas like graphics. However, those are other important aspects - maybe particularly to marketing.

The reason it's not palatable enough to be widespread is because of it's technical limitations. If you throw enough resources at the matter to remove those limitations, you won't see all the pressure you're mentioning that keep companies from making maximal use of this kind of tech in all games all the time.

I'm pretty comfortable erring on the side of caution here. Cheaters are rather annoying, but at least it's a relatively contained problem with a fairly wide range of options for how I want to respond to it. Worst case, I can go try to find a smaller community or even just go play another game. Meanwhile, most every game being fully locked down in all the ways... I can't really do jack about that.

Honestly, this reads as more damning of the US political system than it does the Democratic party. Don't get me wrong, I've got plenty of bones to pick there. But the overall theme from everybody mentioned in the article is that there are very few important voters under the current system, and they are not the median voter.

The disagreements seem to largely center on how the Democrats could win over those few voters, with some unfortunately hidden subtext on the potential costs of doing so.

Meanwhile, I can't help but get caught up on the sheer disparity of power on full display here. It seems a number of incidental factors used to be pushing the end results to be closer to the average - enough to be plausible - but those factors have weakened and the ugly truth has become too blatant to continue to ignore. The current disparity doesn't seem sustainable, but it also seems the only real hope of addressing that issue is too weak to pull it off, and too feckless to even try.

I don't understand what endgame any politicians in the US are aiming for anymore.

This is the one position on taxes I cannot believe is uttered in good faith.

There are many things people say about taxes I can agree with. There are many things people say about taxes that I disagree with, but I can understand their reasoning. There are even things people say about taxes that I disagree with, and I even suspect their purported reasoning is actually just post-hoc justification.

And then there's that statement. And I cannot fathom any way in which it is possible to honestly believe that without being utterly delusional, to a degree that makes me concerned the person is possibly incapable of caring for themselves. I can only conclude these people are most likely being intentionally disingenuous.

At least flat Earthers aren't continually confronted with blatantly obvious contradictions in virtually every aspect of their daily life.

There's no way it's a genuine comment from somebody that has given the topic enough of a passing thought to actually comment on it.

The sheer number of things everybody interacts with everyday that are very directly related to tax-funded government actions is immense, and very blatantly so.

Yet they lead with "what have taxes ever done for anybody?" It's not a genuine or honest comment.

> The problem is that "winning the game" is about publications, tenure, and ...

Totally. 100% with you there. I didn't mean researchers aren't doing those things, but rather that papers built for those ends are probably not polluting 'science' as a whole. The body of work product is getting increasingly swampy, but the researchers are also the best positioned people in the world to sieve through it.

A large part of their job is to sort out what a paper actually tested and what it actually observed to begin with. These 'game playing' papers are quite blatant in comparison to the kinds of problems researchers already need to look for.

> What are the costs? I dunno, mis-education of the popular audience, for one, I guess. Maybe that doesn't matter, but, it kind of does?

Totally agree. I personally find it kind of abhorrent. I also can't honestly tell you why beyond "because" and am pretty certain most people don't feel as strongly about it as I do. I try to be mindful of that, but I think it mostly just gets used when I end up playing devil's advocate.

> And the opportunity cost of all the scientific labor being spent on "easiest to publish the most times" instead of what might be highest priority to discover.

Sure thing. It also increases time spent on literature searches for all that, and will for quite some time even if things changed tomorrow.

On the other hand, maybe it provides an easier on-ramp for teaching prospective researchers to be skeptical even if it's in a Paper, and even how to analyze them? At least it's nice to try to hope there's some benefit to all this.

> I wish I had your generosity of spirit about contemporary practice and motivations of academic science.

Ha! I seem to have given you a false impression. There's... so many problems. However, I don't think most (any?) researchers are actually ignorant of those problems. They are actually doing research somehow, so they've figured out the game well enough.

I apparently managed to disguise this well when I said 'assign the appropriate amount of significance.' The unsaid implication here was that it may well be virtually none, particularly if it doesn't fit with a larger body of work.

In this article for example, it's paired up with another similar finding from an actual physical experiment, which lends it more weight.

> But the researchers are clearly happy to give interviews and be quoted

I always wonder about this. When I've seen longer form interviews with researchers, they almost always seem appropriately uncertain. At least they do sometimes, I might just not be knowledgeable enough about the field to know if/when they aren't.

Meanwhile, you don't get much of that in popsci work, beyond maybe a small disclaimer at the beginning.

I think Adam Ragusea (a cooking youtuber of all people, though admittedly he's an ex-journalism professor as well, and also dealt being the interviewee and having things go poorly) actually covered the intricacies of this really well in a video[0].

I've tried too many times to write "Long story short, ..." here, and have ended up with way too much meandering. Just watch the video. It's worth it, and does a great job of covering the perspective of all parties involved.

I think it's appropriate to assume good faith in individual instances - there are reasonable justifications for misrepresenting the certainty of some work in this kind of context. It's unlikely to cause any actual harm, and probably gets more people intellectually stimulated (which is probably good in both objective and subjective ways). In this article it even lets them make a concrete suggestion that has no cost to try and can probably help some people.

I don't know that there is an objective way to weigh those benefits against presenting a more accurate representation of the certainty of some information, when a misunderstanding of it is unlikely to ever harm anybody. I assign quite a bit of value to that accuracy inherently, but that's coming from the core of my value system. I can't present a logical argument for it's correctness any more than I can the exact degree to which I think human suffering is bad. As a result I think there's room here for reasonable disagreements about where to draw the line.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxUnwsttr_8 (I think this is very illuminating if you're interested in this topic. I highly suggest finding the time for it, even if you understandably don't find the time to read the rest of this over-long comment.)

I'm inclined to agree with you, but I think the answer is actually more nuanced.

At a minimum, it seems like a good way to run a cheap and quick way to try to validate an idea before dumping more time and money into it. If it seems like there is something there, then a longer and more expensive study is easier to justify. And when that study does happen, you'll already have data on what people expect to happen which is nice.

It's not a perfect method for sifting through ideas, but at the end of the day you need some way of deciding what to pursue now, and without time travel there is no perfect method.

And because methods are included in publications, from a scientific standpoint there's nothing wrong with publishing it. Other researchers will read the paper and clearly see what was tested and be able to assign an appropriate amount of significance.

That significance may also vary through time. For example, somebody might conduct research about the accuracy of these imaginings in various ways. Maybe we find out we're actually quite good at them in some ways, and not so good in others. Maybe this is already done, and is why you've seen several recently? I don't know.

The problems mainly come from the popsci aspect. (Some) Writers and (some of) the general public see 'scientific paper' and more or less base their own assessment of significant entirely on that. You can also get a bit of the 'telephone game' going on, and the significance can get all jacked up. I don't know how to solve this problem, but I don't think the correct solution is to alter the scientific process itself.

Welp. I guess that's my daily dose of 'oh god everything is actually worse than I thought and I don't know why I'm surprised again.'

There's no way that's a decent no-history guess for what is intended.

Yep. It's way beyond anything I consider acceptable. I'm disgusted, really.

It's still pretty fresh, so it's possible my opinion softens later, but right now I'm thinking it's appropriate to consider Chrome and Firefox pretty much equivalent on 'ethical' (or whatever you want to call it) grounds.

Google is far more of a concern than Mozilla, but at this point it feels like Chrome is out to get you less than Firefox is.

I nearly acted on my impulse to start switching everything over to Chrome. The only thing that saved Firefox here is the memory of some concerns about adblocking on Chrome in the future. I haven't looked into it much, so I don't know how significant of a concern that is. But functionally no adblock is worse than being forced to turn off user-hostile options, so, here I remain. I guess. For now.

It wasn't my argument. I was explaining why I downvoted your comment, which I probably should have been more clear about.

You started by dismissing the proposed solution out of hand and then went on to attack a strawman.

You do end with a couple ideas of your own, but overall I find this comment more disingenuous than not.

I don't think I can agree that the GIL is mostly unnoticeable. I don't do all that much in Python and mostly use it as a scripting language for little personal stuff. I haven't had all that much need to dive into multithreading, but the few times I have, the GIL has always become vital to keep in mind.

My understanding is that when it comes the US maneuvers in international waters of the South China Sea, the purpose is actually defensive. Part of international maritime law determining the owner of waterways includes considerations for actual control of areas.

By navigating international waters against China's wishes, the US is demonstrating to the international community that China does not control access to those waters. This prevents China from making claims that those waters should no longer be international and instead be China's.

So this isn't the US going off to provoke China (or if you still wish to see it so, at least not for no reason). This is the US exercising rights granted by international treaties in order to prevent China from making effectively false claims to those waters under those same treaties.

I don't know, I think it's possible Canada has more weight in this kind of thing than you'd expect from it's basic stats. It might not harm Huawei much directly with a ban, but I can easily see that kind of thing spilling over to countries like the US, UK, and Australia as long as they don't intentionally screw up the PR for it.

I might be inclined to agree somewhat, except for the situation described in the article.

It's one thing if somebody raised internal concerns about possible misconceptions and it was ultimately decided that it wasn't likely.

It's another issue when those concerns are important enough to reach the CEO of Google-sized company, and that CEO then decides not to do anything lest they attract any attention. This is particularly true when dealing with something like a privacy mode.

One other aspect is that it's often not even fiscally reasonable to attempt to get the cash back. The costs of an attorney to take the case often outweigh the value of the cash seized. This means many times the only options are to give up on the cash, or try to do it yourself. Doing it yourself means even more time investment, and a lower expected return.

There is no way this isn't a significant factor in how many people leave the seizure uncontested. I wouldn't be so quick to assume anything uncontested is drug money.

This is true, but people can also judge ahead of time when problems are more likely to occur, letting them put down the cellphone and pay attention to the road when it is more likely they'll need to react quicker.

I'd also guess most people are not constantly on their phones as they are checking notifications/texts and that kind of thing, so you get more of an on-and-off effect rather than just being consistently drunk for the entire duration.

Not that it makes the practice any better, but it does seem like a complicating factor when trying to frame the problem in terms of drunk driving.

I'm not sure that would work quite the same. The personal shopper has very different abilities and incentives. They can actually be at your house to manage the delivery and potential returns, they will get to know your preferences in a way you probably wouldn't or couldn't express even on an open-ended form. And most importantly, their only incentive is you. There is no additional cost for them in rejecting an item and starting over. I'm not sure what common payment structures are, but it's even possible they are incentivized to be as picky as possible as long as they can do so quickly enough to not bother you.

The problem is that kind of incentive is really difficult, or maybe impossible, to do cheaply. How do you scale anything in a way that doesn't turn extra pickiness for a specific customer into a cost?

I was trying to use an absurd example to point out that it's not unreasonable to set some limits on what an employer can ask of a (possibly potential) employee.

I was not commenting on what those limits are or should be. I was only pointing out that they exist.

I don't understand how this relates to your own example. You seem to be trying to say that a contract is either completely mutable in an unlimited way or else totally immutable? I don't see how that's true at all. There are many limits on contracts already, and yet they still change frequently as situations change.

I mean, there's some big questions left out there. It says 'certain' apps. Is it all? Or just some?

If you do opt-out, does anybody get notified? Is it reasonable users are concerned somebody might get notified?

There's a lot going on there. And just to point out, this has moved on from saying Apple only removing features, to debating how bad the features they've added are.

I mean yes, but also no? And I think a lot of it depends on how much you want to take from the overall tone of the comment vs a particular statement in it.

Not everybody is going to read the whole article. Not everybody is going to put 2 and 2 together while they're reading and reevaluate his previous statements with that new context.

I think it's pertinent information when evaluating his statements and coming to a decision about how you feel these things should be handled. I'd say mentioning his financial interest is more akin to a pointed summary

That said I don't think this was an attempt a deception, nor particularly deceptive given all the context. But still, it's relevant. Some people would give an explicit disclaimer, others not. I don't think this is clear cut enough to say one way is absolutely correct.

Right. I wouldn't put things quite so extremely, and I think many YouTubers would honestly disagree with you. Which is why I think the GP's point was relevant in the first place.

But that's where people end up, not where they begin. Usually. At least that's the perception, for the kinds of channels you probably find most of the HN folks watching - including the channel ran by the man in question.

Somebody starts a channel about something they're passionate about, and are able to bring something to the table in relation to it, which lets them make some really cool videos that most people couldn't do.

Over time, things start moving in the direction you mentioned as it turns from a passion project they expect to go nowhere into a living. However I don't think most viewers exactly see it this way. I think there are a variety of reasons for this, including in particular just how far the medium pushes parasocial relationships. The slow change is also a factor for both the audience and the YouTuber themselves, I think.

I don't think the financial incentives question was so much a sincere question as it was bringing up a concern about other influences on his position.

I think it's a valid one. Humans are really bad at fully separating and understanding our influences, never mind selectively ignoring some them.

Given the perception of many YouTubers as being more 'pure' ideological advocates, I think it's reasonable to bring up. Now to be fair, most any YouTuber that's likely to be a topic of discussion has almost certainly moved far past the point of actually being that 'pure' ideological advocate.

I didn't get the impression the author alleged YouTube had any obligation to let him broadcast his material.

He even mentioned understanding why YouTube would be wary of his content, and mostly was unhappy that YouTube did not put some of their profits into being able to discriminate between home-made science and the quacks exploiting the vulnerable.

But none of this article made me even think the author believed YouTube had some sort of obligation to host content they did not wish to. He just wasn't happy with the decision they made.

There's a huge difference between government regulation of email services and a government email service. I doubt many people calling for the former would use the later.

This seems patently ridiculous. How can there be no limits just because a perspective employee can theoretically refuse?

What if all the companies decided to have these requirements?

There's an inherent power imbalance here that isn't so simple as dismissing any issues simply because there is no literal gun being held to the head at the moment of decision.

And I'll assume even you have limits somewhere. For example, predicating employment for a cushy remote via snail-mail job on a specific person happening to die... Eventually you just get to the most threadbare excuses for soliciting illegal activity.