summerdown2

> If you're in a class, you will soon hear the overused phrase "The plural of anecdote is not data". > You can out-smartass them by replying "Actually, it is".

I don't think it is. The plural of anecdote is probably something more like "a lot of single points without any care taken to correct for variables."

To get real data there needs to be a lot than just more anecdotes. There needs to be careful measurement, followed by correction for a lot of other factors.

Here's one example: "I've never seen this tree before. I wonder if those fruits are edible"

"It's just an anecdote, but my father ate one of those, started throwing up 30min later, and died the same day."

"What did he do before that?"

"Oh, he swam the dirty river, then started playing with that striped snake over there. He was a brave man, what with his heart problems and the cancer."

> If you're looking for inspiration in places other than the commercial sphere, much interesting work on digital ontologies has been emerging from the EU in recent years.

This sounds interesting - do you have any recommended reading / websites here you would suggest?

Users perceive the app store as giving a level of curation and security. If it became a list of "all Mac software that exists," and one of those turned out to be dodgy, Apple's image would take a real hit.

Also, what would listing software that hasn't been through the submissions process actually mean? That the app is verified by Apple? That going to the site and putting your credit card number into the shopping cart is guaranteed to be secure? That other things that haven't been listed yet are not as favoured in some way?

I'm not saying I like the app store model, or that they can't have a second tier of lower-scrutiny apps. I do think it would need a lot of thought and care, however.

Mike Monteiro on the importance of a contract: "Fuck you, pay me."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h3RJhoqgK8

> 1) Private entities must pay for speech they disagree with on their private platforms and in their private conferences even if that opposing speech causes them to lose the funding that allows for them to pay for it in the first place.

Just thinking about your point (1), I'm not sure it is impossible, depending on the industry. Isn't it just the straightforward position for most companies that are considered common carriers - they can't discriminate?

> If we're not seeing it, it's probably because we don't want to.

This is the big problem for me. I have struggled with Facebook for years because I really do want my friend's unfiltered feeds. In the end it just became impossible. I would have conversation after conversation where people told me they had posted something but I just never got to see it.

There's precedent for something like this in the UK, and it's not a happy one. There was a moment in history where landowners who had a lot of sitting tenants on land realised they could make more by converting them into large sheep farms and removing the tenants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highland_Clearances

> Is absolute security really something that anyone desires from a general purpose instant messenger?

I think the problem is that security is an ongoing conversation between the government and the people. My guess is that most people, if pushed to a firm position, would probably agree with:

a) The government should have the right to look at communication to stop bad things.

b) The government should have to individually prove before an independent court that any one use of that power is justified.

The difficulty is that the government unilaterally broke (b) by having a rubberstamp court and a policy that let them collect everything and choose when to look at it.

And the response to the government's action is to start looking to redress this privately. I.e. a market solution to a perceived deficit of privacy. I suspect that if they had kept (b) intact, there would be much less call for absolute security, and much less of a solid argument for it.

> Consider an "individuals" example: I am a better cook than the average fast food worker, and I am also better than them at building databases. So why don't I split my time between my office and the fry vat? And why does the fast food worker have a job? Because if I do one thing, I can't do another - I have limited hours.

Do you think there's a scarcity assumption built into the theory, then? Because it seems to me that if you could perfectly automate fast food cooking, you could flood the market and still spend a full working day doing database creation - thus stopping my comparative advantage working.

The difference I see is that I'm not personally at risk from someone chomping down on fast food. But I may well be at risk from someone driving unsafely.

That's impressive, but the invention of sawmills didn't need to wait until the industrial revolution. I've just come back from The Netherlands, which had massive uses in wind powered technology in the 1500's, including windmill powered sawmills that led to the Dutch golden age because they could build boats faster:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelis_Corneliszoon_van_Uitg...

My biggest issue is the lack of control over routing in general. I've several times been in the position where all routes on the navigation device pass through the road in front of me, yet I'm sitting in the car looking at a road closure. At that point I know there's a way round the obstruction, but the navigation is of no use in finding it.

A simple "don't use this road" marker seems to me like a really useful feature, yet I've never seen it in any of the satellite navigation systems I've used.

> It's weirdly taboo in liberal American journalism to suggest that one's industriousness might be a major cause of one's economic status.

One way to see if industriousness is a major cause of economic status is to look at social mobility. Unfortunately for the argument, the US has lower social mobility than most other countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the...

> However, in recent years several large studies have found that vertical intergenerational mobility is lower, not higher, in the US than in comparable countries.

Now it is the case that this might still be true - and there might be factors making different socio-economic classes of people work hard. However, generally speaking, absent those effects, if some people like to work and that makes them rich, that would be seen in a lot more social mobility than appears to be the case.

You don't think there should be laws over obscenity, terrorism or monopoly ownership, then?

The reason I'm asking is that if a Facebook user decided to send out full instructions about how make a pneumonia virus with home dna equipment, for example, how would you feel about that?

Let's say they were in another country where they law couldn't or wouldn't stop them? Is it ok for Facebook to keep distributing the information in its walled garden?

> Medication is fairly inexpensive and if I have major surgery, I will only be out a couple thousand (the cost of a laptop).

I suspect that not everyone would think this is a small amount of money. From this article:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/05/my-secre...

"Nearly half of Americans would have trouble finding $400 to pay for an emergency."

An alternative way of looking at it is that societies do better when they make full use of their resources. Saudi Arabia has long been criticised (by lots of people, but particularly relevant here) by economists for the way they keep women out of the labour pool. They are making themselves uncompetitive by this.

It's the same for North Korea - who are getting rid of their most interesting voices for change into hell holes.

So an economic argument would be that we are currently running the years 67+ as unproductive, and the first society to change that will do better than the others. It's also possible that this is the first time in history it would be safe to allow life extension in a lot of countries due to the falling birthrate at the same time.

Oh, and immortality doesn't mean living forever. I read somewhere that even if we could extend lifespan, actuarial tables show that on average people would live to about 700 before dying of accidents.

> You could make the case that you continue to work past 65, but in what field. How many 85 year olds are in fields they could stay relevant in?

I think this depends on whether the brain can be made young, too.

This is actually one of the things AI is currently being developed for, and may not be that far off. Again, it won't be reasoning as we understand it, more a set of state tables that allow inferences.

But people are definitely trying to develop AI that can take a description of an event, and break it down into legal concepts such as "who was at fault here?"

I think this might just come down to a difference in directors. A few years ago, when Aaron Sorkin and Joss Whedon were making blockbusters, no-one would have complained about the lack of dialogue.

Certainly I can remember lines from Whedon's Avengers film, such as:

"Puny God"

and

"That's my secret, Cap. I'm always angry."

and of course:

"It's good to meet you, Dr. Banner. Your work on anti-electron collisions is unparalleled. And I'm a huge fan of the way you lose control and turn into an enormous green rage monster."

More here: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Avengers_(2012_film)

There must be more than two alternatives, though? Surely we can have a 21st century economy to match 21st century challenges?

I don't know what that might look like yet - but I think we will know in a decade or so. Currently there's a storm of protest from those being left behind (Trump in the US, Brexit in the UK), and it won't be long before different solutions will be tried for these - eg UBI, direct democracy, charter cities, etc. Eventually, one of these solutions will stick and look obvious in hindsight.

Also there is an argument that even if everyone objectively does better under a particular system, increasing inequality is still a bad thing. To take just one example, access to money may be correlated to access to better outcomes from the criminal justice system (eg rather than the facts of the case).

Although I expect my government to have a greater obligation to its own people than those outside it, I also would prefer (sadly not expect) them to take a longer-term view than "what suits the situation at the moment."

If putting out worldwide propaganda is expected to have a long-term effect of degredation of public discourse, I would expect my government to take this into account and temper their actions. In fact, whether or not it is known today to have this effect, I'd hope my government would analyse these things and take them into account when making policy.

Except that the comparison isn't:

320,000 people dead due to traffic fatalities over 10 years.

  vs

350 people dead in terrorism over 10 years

It's:

320,000 people dead due to traffic fatalities over 10 years causing little political fallout.

  vs

350 people dead in terrorism over 10 years plus a lot of political fallout for each event.

Bluntly, to shift the risk argument we'd either need to take politicans out of the decision making and give it to some independent fact-based body, or get the media and people in general far more riled up about car crashes.

I think maybe you need to read the book. Your question is the essential topic it deals with, and the author comes down heavily on fear being a net positive in those life threatening situations.

One example: a girl is being chatted up by a guy. He seems nice, says all the right things. Intellectually everything seems fine. But there's a feeling nagging at her that something isn't right. A feeling of fear.

Mr De Becker is saying that in all the cases he's examined, the women went on to ignore their fear - eg by the socially expected action of returning reciprocated trust. Someone tells you a bit of information, you return it. Someone reveals a bit more, you do the same. Ultimately, these women put themselves in danger by not listening to their fear.

Now I'm not sure what you mean by the difference between "no fear" and "ignored fear." Plainly they have ignored their fear. But if a situation seems off due to a feeling of fear, not having that feeling isn't going to help in any sense. Its a signal that is no longer available, so you lose one data point to make a decision. Decisions with less data tend to be less reliable.

The difference in mortality rates between teenage drivers and middle age drivers suggests a number of factors, but one that springs to my mind is that the teenagers don't have a fear level that reflects the danger accurately enough.

Edit: Also, this book by a threat assessment specialist talks about problems faced by women in particular who have the fear response in mild form, but suppress it. His conclusion is that the emotional response can actually be a lot clearer and more accurate than the intellectual one in a dangerous situation and it is wise to listen to it. If that man chatting you up is making you nervous, it's a sign you ought to be careful.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Gift-Fear-Survival-Signals-Violence/...

The lesson from the book is that fear is a second signal (in addition to reasoning) that may heighten perception of a dangerous situation and should not be ignored.

My understanding is that adblockers work by removing known third party app sites from loading items on a page.

If that's true, what would stop a website from proxying ads, so they appear to come from the website rather than the third party?

I guess that would involve more bandwidth and so less money for the site, but high-bandwidth items are the ones people complain about anyway. I don't see why text based ads would be impossible under that scheme, for example.

Absolutely.

And I'd like to strengthen the point you made even further. It's not just standard practice alone - it's the law. For example, from principle 8 of the data protection act:

Personal data shall not be transferred to a country or territory outside the European Economic Area unless that country or territory ensures an adequate level of protection for the rights and freedoms of data subjects in relation to the processing of personal data.

In my experience (with retail and banks), this means either hosting the data in a place where the law is the same (the EEA or acceptable countries), putting data under contract (EU Model contract), or using an acceptable scheme (such as US safe harbour).

At the moment, companies get around it as you said, by putting into the contract that the hosting has to be in the EU. However, if the US government win this court case, a lot of UK businesses will legally have to reconsider their use of US cloud companies at all.

I remember reading an interview with either Dunning or Kruger at one point. They were really disappointed that everyone had used their research to point fingers at others.

In actual fact, the authors had hoped the real value of their research would be in getting people to question themselves.

I.e. Instead of saying: "look at that dumb person, he doesn't know he's dumb."

The authors hoped people would say: "what if I'm not as smart as I think I am?"

I guess the "other people are dumb" meme is so much more comforting, though.

The thing is, technological advances can be exponential, too. Moore's law is one example, but there are others. Here's a quote from Ray Kurzweil, who's a leading exponent of this idea:

> "People declared the Human Genome Project a failure halfway through, when one percent had been decoded -- they said it'd take 700 years. My reaction was, no, we're almost done. It was finished seven years later."

Personally, I think Kurzweil is an optimist and I suspect it'll be too late for most of us, but we are just beginning to learn to rewire our genes. Take a look at this link, and notice how many significant events happened in the last fifteen years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_therapy#History

Now, imagine that level of change accelerating, because we're still in the early days.

Yes, the 2015 La Ligua winners, Copa de Rey winners and current European champions have indeed just lost a single match.

I'm not saying they're invincible, just very good.

I'm not sure how this applies to football (soccer). As far as I can see, Barcelona have the most superstar team in world football, and are winning everything. The next two teams with the most superstars (Madrid and Munich) are winning everything else.

Also, isn't this impossible, too? A team that wins everything over a long period will by default have their players considered superstars.

oops, sorry. For some reason it isn't giving me an edit option, so thanks for your correction.