748 karma · joined December 16, 2018
I think, though, that the author makes a really valuable core point: Most challenges are hard not because of the subject but because of our approach and perspectives. I can't think of anything important in life that doesn't benefit from the exploration of metacognition.
I doubt he actually believes the two things are comparable, rather he knows there's the right mix of pseudo logic and gratuitous drama to appeal to his target demographic.
Ethics thought experiments are interesting and sometimes fun and you can't deny the value of getting people thinking about choices and behavior.
But it's always seemed to me that they, along with ethics in general, miss the point. I don't think absolute right and wrong, or even absolute "lesser of two evils" is a particularly useful goal.
It's the contextual framework that matters... Values, priorities, fears, desires, needs, the things that comprise a person's identity and worldview. Those things are going to win over ethics every time when real world decisions are being made.
IMO there's a lot more value in exploring those things, as opposed to ethics, if the ultimate goal is to impact the behavior of a individuals in a society.
Asking for proof is useful, but it's a token exercise if you don't have an alternative explanation.
So we should look for empirical evidence.
At the same time brains are complicated, psychology is complicated, genetics is complicated.
We know a lot about all of the above but we don't really understand any of them.
The history of all three sciences is full of narrative fallacies.
Given what we don't know, absolute proof, especially in genetics, isn't currently possible. So we have to settle for the best working explanation based on what we know. I think there is plenty of peer reviewed support for the idea that we are biologically inclined to look for neat explanations so that we can file challenging concepts away as resolved and focus our bandwidth on other things.
A direct comparison would be target putting your product behind their product on the shelf where the shopper can't see it without digging for it.
While they don't delist items, their algo favors products they sell directly to the extent that Amazon will get the buy box over a third party seller even when that seller is reputable and cheaper. Add that the 3rd party seller has to pay a sales fee to Amazon, often making it impossible to compete with them without approaching zero margin.
It's not delisting but it's the next best thing. If Amazon starts selling something you sell, your sales are gone, you were just free market research for them.
I think that's undeniably true.
You hinted at something that to me is a key point: A lot of web apps are built by teams at big organizations.
In that environment trends are compelling because they keep everyone on the same page. It's easier to onboard people, it's easier to hand things off, easier to maintain going forward.
That makes a strong case for using the latest frameworks even when they aren't the best solution for a particular problem but it doesn't make it right from an efficiency or user experience perspective. There are a lot of reasons why arbitrary complexity is expensive. One example: what happens when your page load times start to rise above the threshold where it starts hurting organic traffic? You probably don't scrap everything and start over, instead you hack solutions on top of what you already have. Now you've lost money in both free traffic, one time development costs and increased maintenance costs going forward.
Again it's not that react is bad, and either way people aren't going to stop using it for things it's not ideal for until another trend replaces or absorbs it. But I think there's value in seeing things for what they are, and having conversations about it.
His points about censorship were as flawed as those about privacy... The YouTube video he mentioned was blatant misinformation which compared incompatible numbers to create the illusion of a valid point (for example case fatality rate of the flu versus an extrapolated estimation of what the population wide fatality rate would be for COVID-19). It was essentially another "COVID is just another flu" conspiracy theory dressed up with convincing sounding numbers.
And people bought it. I was forwarded that video more than once.
The protests that Facebook banned were found (thanks to the work of both homebound Redditors and various reporters) to have been funded by commercial astroturfing companies and run through gun rights groups. It was an orchestrated misinformation campaign that was putting public health at risk.
Again, people bought it, thousands of them.
I agree with the author that the open internet should be sacred and consolidation by a few large players is bad. I agree that privacy and free speech are important. I dislike government intervention that threatens those principles.
But the examples he picked are, ironically, the perfect counters to his premise: Contact tracing that doesn't actually threaten privacy. Companies shutting down undeniable misinformation in an age of Russian troll farms.
If social media companies aren't proactive about tamping down verifiably false information then at some point governments are going to do it, and they'll make a huge mess of it, as they have with most tech regulation in recent years.
The author seems to be unwittingly arguing for the latter outcome.
Which they "never received" but still paid the full amount over time.
It's a childish attempt to be able to say, nuh uh we didn't do it. Turns out that's all you really need.
Which seems like an unreasonable leap to make given the copious evidence that he's acted to provide plausible deniability for Trump in the past.
> However, higher dose use of chloroquine (600 milligrams as opposed to 450 milligrams) was stopped after just six days, after 11 of patients who were given the greater dose died.
To me that reads as an increase of about 1.35x rather than 4x.
It seems like a promising treatment, but in vitro effectiveness often doesn't translate to actual effectiveness.
I'm not saying they shouldn't use it, in an emergency sometimes experimental therapies make sense.
In these times, though, I think rational science is also important. We do not yet have studies of it's effectiveness in treating COVID-19.
Also from your link:
>CONCLUSIONS: There is rationale, pre-clinical evidence of effectiveness and evidence of safety from long-time clinical use for other indications to justify clinical research on chloroquine in patients with COVID-19. However, clinical use should either adhere to the Monitored Emergency Use of Unregistered Interventions (MEURI) framework or be ethically approved as a trial as stated by the World Health Organization. Safety data and data from high-quality clinical trials are urgently needed.
I genuinely think it's valuable (in our post fact world) to be able to tell the difference between the concepts of "evidence to support further study" and evidence of effectiveness in a particular application.
Edit: New thread here at HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22671404
Also happening in Nigeria: https://www.democracynow.org/2020/3/23/headlines/two_nigeria...
Note that there doesn't appear to be any evidence yet that chloroquine is effective in COVID-19 treatment. So far it has been studied only for other types of coronavirus.
If we get off easy it will be because warmer temperatures or mutation play a part.
Delayed testing, a disbanded pandemic response team, a president in denial for the first part of the outbreak, people not going to hospitals because they can't afford it... Do you sincerely think these things put the US on equal footing with the rest of the world in terms of responding to this?
No tinfoil hat needed unless we ask why Barr has made this a personal crusade.
Pretentious: adjective. characterized by assumption of dignity or importance, especially when exaggerated or undeserved: a pretentious, self-important waiter. making an exaggerated outward show; ostentatious. full of pretense or pretension; having no factual basis; false.
If you're suggesting that their analysis is false, you should probably point out why. The self importance part I'm not seeing. Aren't they just stating the facts as they see them?
This is immeasurably important.
We know about different types of inflammation and the cellular processes involved, we know how it turns on and off, we know more about how it effects different systems and organs in the body. We can distinguish between short term and chronic inflammation and differentiate between types of inflammation that are beneficial and types that aren't.
There are, of course, lots of articles and trends out there that over simplify and make unreasonable associations and leaps... the comparison to quantum mechanics is apt in that way. But irresponsible reporting doesn't invalidate the source.
Our understanding is well beyond abstract at this point, despite how much we still don't know. The bulk of what we don't know outweighs what we do in most areas of biology.
Yes environment is a better term (it includes diet, medically speaking). Modern life isn't something we're well suited for from an evolutionary standpoint.
> We rarely talk socially about symptoms like brain fog, memory lapses, mild pain, anxiousness, speediness, etc as anything related to diet or environmental exposure. Previous generations seem to have mental and emotional wellbeing the same attention as they gave to the supernatural, and we seem to have to continually shake off mindsets like “if I can’t measure it it doesn’t exist”
So true, and it's still a thing to a lesser degree in younger generations. Fortunately we increasingly can measure it.
Cognitive impairment has long been associated with inflammation in older adults: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3390758/
As well as the general population where illness is involved: https://psychcentral.com/news/2019/12/01/inflammation-linked...
And it contributes to a variety of disorders (potentially almost all of them). The research here is pretty broad, Google if interested. Notably, depression, anxiety and other behavior impacting problems are among the aforementioned disorders.
We know that exercise levels and diet can lower or increase inflammation.
So we have this sort of rare magic bullet when it comes to health, cognition and aging. Lowering inflammation won't fix everything of course, but it will lower your risk of pretty much everything.
And yet this truth is less a part of the zeitgeist than you'd expect, given it's impact. Maybe because it's simple but not easy to change your lifestyle. Or more importantly, the lifestyles of a population. Especially when part of the problem is financial insecurity.
And it is indeed an arms race, like everything that happens on the internet at scale where money is involved.
But I disagree that the problem is prohibitively hard to solve. In my experience you can always stay just ahead of the black hat players. They're rarely smarter or more talented than competent software engineers and data scientists.
Amazon's failure to stay ahead in this area is, to me, an indication that they're using the wrong strategies, probably because people with the wrong skillsets are being assigned the job of figuring out how to solve the problem.
They can make a dent in the problem short term with more manual review but as the spammers evolve better automation, if all Amazon has in the race are humans, they'll keep losing.
As more and more of these types of stories come out, over the course of years now, I keep expecting to hear about a big push from Amazon to clear out the noise. And it keeps failing to happen.
The knee jerk interpretation is that Amazon doesn't care about fake products because they still get paid. But, historically at least, Amazon is smarter than that. Part of their dominance comes from understanding that, long term, there is more profit in happy customers even if it that means accepting otherwise avoidable costs.
I wonder if this is the result of a changing culture or of it's an indication they've become too large and inefficient to respond to problems and iterate at modern tech company speed.