papeda

> I am constantly encountering people that Absolutely. Will. Not. Admit. Ignorance. Or. Fault. Even when it’s quite clear.

IMO this is one of the fringe benefits of a good math education. Almost everybody who does math for long enough, especially if you work in small groups with your peers, will have a moment of "oh, I see, I am totally wrong and you are totally right" and find out that being wrong does not make someone a bad person. And you will see your peers do the same.

It's one underrated side effect of clear and unambiguous reasoning. Yes, many things are grey areas, but there's value in a place where you can't throw up a muddle of goalpost-shifting and rhetorical tricks to run away from your own errors.

> mandatory office music

What?

What would you prefer? That anyone who receives government research funding be barred from entering the private sector later?

Not the point, but I love this bit:

> Lydia made the mistake of remarking, “What a beautiful tree,” presumably too casually, whereupon Wittgenstein glared and demanded, “What do you mean?” and she burst into tears.

Interesting, but today's prompt left me questioning the exercise. This is because the prompt doesn't spell out the main point of the text in its entirety. It doesn't even spell out what smaller goal the prompt is trying to accomplish. So I'm sure it's possible to reshape the prompt into something shorter and sweeter, but I don't know that it's better writing.

To me good writing is about communicating your point well. It's hard to tell what I'm supposed to communicate from a few isolated lines.

It seems easier to bankroll museums and concert halls (especially when Carnegie lived) than change the kind of legislation that gets passed. This article is more about the second impact.

I get that large sample sizes are impractical for experiments with monkeys, but I'm reluctant to draw conclusions from a study where all relevant groups have <= 10 participants.

Does your username come from your interest in trauma? A palimpsest is a pretty elegant physical representation of human memory.

The featured article's pitch is that there's still way more historical writing about war, including ignoble stuff, and this imbalance still strongly suggests that PTSD was somehow much less common.

(It's also funny that the BBC article mentions the strong Herodotus PTSD example that the featured article treats as a repeatedly-rehashed outlier.)

On a related note, a while ago I read a little about how ancient families coped with the deaths of their children. My takeaway, pretty much cribbed from this article [1], was that such deaths produced less trauma than they would today because:

(1) More families lost children. This lessened the trauma because a family could talk to other nearby families who had experienced the same thing. Those families would also be able to give advice. In contrast, losing a child is extremely rare (in developed countries) today. This rarity breeds isolation, which makes everything worse.

(2) There were established societal and religious ways to deal specifically with the death of a child. Think prescribed ceremonies that grant a form of closure and which pretty much all of your friends and neighbors subscribe to. Nothing like this exists today.

To me, this is very similar to the suggested explanation in the featured article for why war used to cause less PTSD: there was less stigma around war, a much larger chunk of society fought in wars, and there were universal and well-defined rituals for processing the experience.

The whole thing raises interesting questions about our modern understanding of trauma. I think the most common modern statement on grief is that it's intensely personal and people should never feel that their grieving process is "wrong", at least not for a long time (years?) after the event. That at least seems different than past practice.

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/642999?seq=1

This piece seems pretty short on details for such a strong claim. As far as I can tell, all concrete objections appear in this bit of text

> Who tells your phone that you’ve been diagnosed, for example? Given the possibility that – in a post-lockdown scenario – individuals with Covid-19 might be subjected to stigma, harassment or dismissal, they might be understandably reluctant to broadcast the fact. Then there’s the problem that not everyone has a smartphone, even though it’s commonly supposed in tech circles that they do. The pandemic has revealed that a significant minority of the population (mostly older people) still relies on olde-worlde feature phones. Moreover, it turns out that not all smartphones are created equal: one estimate is that 50% of all smartphones can’t use the proximity-sensing systems being developed by Apple and Google.

...which is followed by a hand-wavey "I could go on but you get the point".

All three complaints are about how effective the solution might be, not actual reasons why it would "kill democracy".

My pet theory is that a lot of "identity politics"-type stories are really about punching up vs. punching down. The success, overall, of Asian-Americans means discrimination against them at least does not feel like punching down, and therefore doesn't attract much attention.

(Our test scores are also better.)

My issue with this kind of extended contemplative analysis is that the actual form of the art becomes less important than the attention paid to it. So the real contribution of museums is not selecting the "right" pieces for display, it's giving them space and a context where people will can quietly shuffle up and look pensively at them for a few minutes. Like, I suspect people can pull this kind of thought-provoking analysis on arbitrary objects given a "this is art" context.

It's like a placebo effect. (And like the placebo effect, it's not necessarily bad.)

What movie is this?

Maybe this is sarcasm, buy Zoom has that exact feature.

The content of the article explores (and to a large extent answers) the question in its headline. It doesn't seem to make any value judgements.

It is interesting to see who is behind this cause and organizing to support it. The track record of the Dorr brothers suggests their involvement is not motivated by genuine interest in the cause.

Interesting, I wasn't aware of that. But I don't think it qualifies as "popular". The Wikipedia page says it lost around $10mil a year and then folded after 6 years in a mess of debts.

At around the same time, Rush Limbaugh's salary was $30mil+.

Same type of question: was there ever popular left-wing AM radio? Like a counterpart to Rush Limbaugh? Like highly emotive and monetized liberal (in the American sense) talk radio?

Here is a basic question: how are the sensitivity and specificity (false negative and false positive rates, IIRC) of these tests determined?

It seems like a learning problem with noisy labels. Does anyone know what they do in practice? Especially chaotic situations like this where there aren't reference tests? Are there reference positive and negative samples?

One concern also referenced for the Stanford study was that, as mentioned in a USC popular writeup on this study linked elsewhere on this post,

> Premier Biotech, the manufacturer of the test that USC and L.A. County are using, tested blood from COVID-19-positive patients with a 90 to 95% accuracy rate.

They must be factoring this into the 2-5% infection rate number somewhere?

I don't think so. The featured article only mentions 1) federal encouragement to relax these citations and 2) a city council resolution encouraging the mayor to evaluate the situation. Neither of these are law.

Similar but more general question: is testing available to everyone, e.g. random asymptomatic passersby?

Japanese honey bees have a remarkable defense strategy against these things. From the Wikipedia page for Asian giant hornet [1]:

> As the hornet enters, a mob of hundreds of bees surrounds it in a ball, completely covering it and preventing it from reacting effectively. The bees violently vibrate their flight muscles in much the same way as they do to heat the hive in cold conditions. This raises the temperature in the ball to the critical temperature of 46 °C (115 °F). In addition, the exertions of the honeybees raise the level of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the ball. At that concentration of CO2, they can tolerate up to 50 °C (122 °F), but the hornet cannot survive the combination of high temperature and high carbon dioxide level. Some bees do die along with the intruder, much as happens when they attack other intruders with their stings, but by killing the hornet scout, they prevent it from summoning reinforcements that would wipe out the entire colony.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_giant_hornet

I wonder if it makes sense to forbid members of congress from owning anything other than a narrow class of investments (for example homes and index funds, though I'm surely missing many).

This sounds like the old "cut their pay!" argument. The rejoinder to that argument is that it should be practical for people who aren't already wealthy to hold office, and a low salary would hurt that.

This is different because the hit to potential earnings from restriction to a basic generic portfolio seems small (maybe not relative to the upside from insider trading, but to what members of congress would make as average citizens). Heck, it's still possible to trade in index funds off insider information. But the advantage seems smaller.

Oligarchy translates literally as "rule by the few" [1], and aristocracy as "rule by the excellent" [2]. Kakistocracy is "rule by the worst" per the featured article. So kakistocracy and aristocracy are opposites, and oligarchy describes something different: the number, not quality, of rulers.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligarchy

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristocracy

The problem I keep running into is that the more room for nuance and fit and holistic evaluation that you inject into a hiring process, the more room there is for interviewers to fill that space with their own biases toward hiring people like themselves. In that sense, the white board problems are pretty fair, even if they're (very) imperfect.

This is doubly strange because “recounting dreams” is, in modern society, a pretty surefire way to bore other people. But it may be that when you live this kind of pre-modern life you don’t have all the random coins of so much life, media, and other humans around you, so the most reliable source of surprising material is dreams.

Reminds me of orangutans, too [1]:

> Males mature at around 15 years of age, by which time they have fully descended testicles and can reproduce. However, they exhibit arrested development by not developing the distinctive cheek pads, pronounced throat pouches, long fur, or long-calls until they are between 15 and 20 years old. The development of these characteristics depends largely on the absence of a resident male.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orangutan

Sure, that’s one point on the privacy-vs-utility spectrum. Is it the best one? Contact tracing to track the spread of coronavirus seems pretty high utility. If there’s a way to get a lot of that utility with a lot of (but not perfect) privacy, we should explore that, no?

Is this the right trade? When a restaurant goes out of business, we do lose a kind of stock of wealth. It's a tuned machine (suppliers, cooks, customers, an evolving menu maybe) and now we're starting over from scratch with an untuned machine. That's a real cost to everyone.

Is this reasonable to expect from a business where 6 months of cash reserves are not legally required? Can't the restaurant that saves 1 month of reserves instead of 6 months charge lower prices and still turn a profit, thus outcompeting the prudent save-for-6-months restaurant?