throwawayjava

But Illich also generalizes too much and has a weird reactionary twist. (It makes perfect sense to me that he was the sort of person who would devote his life to the church but subsequently run into political issues with the church.)

Schooling:

Learning Webs are basically the internet with some tokens for video-conferencing a teacher once in a while. (Proposed in the 70's, no less!)

And it's a great solution for some people in some subjects.

But many students don't have the discipline or need extra hand-holding, and so on in at least one vital subject.

For every student in some subject who learns on their own and whose frustration with the system holds them back, there's at least one student in some subject who just won't learn the material without something resembling a traditional school environment.

And the weird reactionary twist: he sort of harkens back to the good old days while ignoring the fact that we used to just not bother educating most people, and also dismisses anything that's not explicit deschooling.

I remember hearing a recording of him basically telling a teacher that the only way they can truly educate well is by totally giving up on schooling.

I lost a lot of respect for Illich's prescriptions after hearing that, even if I still think he has a great eye for some problems and potential partial solutions. Because I lived in the age of the learning web and could see in my own life that excellent teachers could overcome a lot of the barriers in the system, and there were a lot of things I couldn't learn just from books/websites and friendly folks on IRC and forums.

Also, that poetic tangent at the end of Deschooling always made me cringe.

Medicine:

You could say Illich predicted the opioid epidemic and prescribed lifestyle changes decades before modern medicine caught up, but at the same time if every doctor and medical researcher followed his prescriptions oncology would be stuck in the 70's. And a lot of his work would fit right in among anti-vaccination folks.

I mean, 90% of healthfulness is about lifestyle issues, and medicine in recent history has done a really poor job of stressing that component of treatment. But Illich kind of hard lines about the other 10% in a way that's totally unreasonable.

Transportation: Another great example of a 90% solution that goes off the rails when Illich demands that extra 10%. I'm 100% on board with biking everywhere (and I even do so in the summer, although even then often exceept 15kph). But also, it's nice to travel to different states without going on a months-long pilgrimage...

Illich was very much a brilliant reaction to the more damaging trends that started in the 1950's to 1970's, but he fell in that "extreme ideology" pit that a lot of politics from that era also suffered from.

1. Sometimes it is.

2. I already gave substantive reasons why this will commonly occur in environmental medical research -- dense datasets about small populations that capture sensitive information about individuals.

> I do not see how it's takeway from that paper.

Because that's literally the only assumption in the adversarial model other than "access to the published dataset". And correlating with an auxiliary dataset is literally how all actual instantiations of this attack work.

> just sprinkle some private data on it, show it to IRB, they cry out "no, this can't be released, no way!" - and voila, you are safe from review.

1. My proposal doesn't say "IRB happened to say you can't publicly publish this one particular protocol." My proposal says that IRB explicitly judges that no such protocol exists.

2. IRBs are not that arbitrary and are themselves audited.

3. If you're this paranoid about intent, then you can't trust the research anyways. If the research is committing intentional fraud, they could just do it at the data collection step.

The way I see it, either:

A. Even if we can't trust individual scientists, we can more-or-less trust a broad subset of scientists with different and well-aligned motives (as in, a whole group of: the IRB board, the PI, the people reviewing the IRB board) when they say that data can't be shared for privacy reasons; or,

B. We should expect that literally dozens of scientists, all with different motives, will routinely and actively collude to commit wide-spread fraud.

If (A), my approach makes sense. If we max out paranoia and go with (B), then I don't know why we should trust the data regardless of whether it's published publicly...

I mean, today, ditto. But for like at least 100M of the 300M+ Americans, that's not an option for various reasons...

Then you're one of today's lucky 10,000: "Robust De-anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets" http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~shmat/shmat_oak08netflix.pdf

A lot of environmental medical research results in dense and small data instead of sparse and large data, which obviously means it's even easier to de-anonymize.

And the really important take away from the above paper is that you need to know about all the other public data in the universe in order to really ensure anonymity. Even when anonymity seems like it's "obviously" not going to be a problem.

You never know what dataset will be leaked/published tomorrow correlating columns D-F in the spreadsheet you gave EPA to someone's first and last name. So privacy is like computer security: you can never be totally sure. So when the stakes are high you should be extra cautious. And the stakes when sharing medical research are very often high.

> If that's true, how people validate any medical research at all?.. I have very hard time believing that's the only way to do modern medical research known to our civilization.

This isn't exactly a new problem, so scientists have had a little while to figure out how to make peer review work.

You share the data. You share with trusted, relevant third parties who promise to preserve the anonymity of study participants. Just becuase you do not publish possibly de-anonymizable and definitely sensitive medical information on a public website does not mean you don't share the data with interested and relevant third parties.

> But you seem to have arrived to pre-determined conclusion already, and there in fact can be no middle ground that would be acceptable to you, as it seems.

On the contrary, I do literally exactly that in my very first post in this thread: There are some common-sense workarounds. For example, requiring an EPA or third-party audit of the original dataset and analysis. Or simply carving out exceptions for research whenever it can be demonstrated that an IRB (and therefore federal law) would not have allowed the research without restricting public access to data/analysis.

The situation where IRB says "no" to public disclosure should explicitly trigger exemption, with the duty falling back to the agency to prove the IRB was wrong in the first place. The fact that this exemption is not automatic is what makes this a catch-22 that pins researchers in-between their IRB and the EPA administrator in charge of evaluating their exception.

The scenario is not so hypothetical. The circumstances and particulars change, but this situation describes a lot of medical and environmental research.

Should the EPA take the researcher's word? Maybe not. But there's a lot of workable middle ground in-between "blind trust" and "anyone with access to a library computer and a stats textbook can figure out participant 494 -- who math tells us can only possibly be Johnny D. of Smallsville, VA -- has testicular cancer".

And the situation is even more difficult than this because de-anonymization is an active area of research with some surprisingly powerful results published in recent years; i.e., it is highly non-trivial to determine if a dataset is de-anonymizable. And the answer always depends on what data about a person's identity is publicly available, which especially in the age of annual massive data leaks change from year to year. So even if researchers don't think it's possible to de-anonymize study participants using today's mathematical tools and today's public datasets, they'll often choose to keep the dataset private just in case.

These rules are a hot political topic that are years in the making. The people pushing them are not scientists and have never expressed genuine interest in reproducibility outside of this one issue. And scientists who have spent years fighting for reproducibility have publicly stated they oppose this rule. And all the major proponents have strong anti-regulatory preferences.

These rules are not about reproducibility. This rule is an intentionally crafted Catch-22 designed to exclude medical research from consideration so it's easier to justify repealing or not implementing environmental regulations. Otherwise, the rules would find a middle ground; e.g., by allowing the EPA access to relevant scientific data and analysis without risking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-anonymization by posting sensitive medical information about thousands of patients on the public internet.

The proposed regulation provides that, for the science pivotal to its significant regulatory actions, EPA will ensure that the data and models underlying the science is publicly available

The public availability requirement sounds nice on paper, but in practice, it means ignoring a lot of science during rule-making because the original data can't be published due to genuine privacy concerns.

There are some common-sense workarounds. For example, requiring an EPA or third-party audit of the original dataset and analysis. Or simply carving out exceptions for research whenever it can be demonstrated that an IRB (and therefore federal law) would not have allowed the research without restricting public access to data/analysis.

> what does that have to do with this regulatory proposal?

Article's subtitle is: The agency’s proposed new rule would allow it to ignore the best available science

Summary:

* It's a 10-year plan

* NIST gets $400M for quantum research

* NSF gets $250M for quantum research and a mandate to establish 5 centers and to establish graduate traineeships in quantum fields. These traineeships are earmarked for US citizens.

* DOE gets $625M and a mandate to create up to 5 research centers, which go up for review after 5 years.

Nah, but I can ELI a person with some programming experience.

Pattern matching is super useful for writing code that spends a lot of time building and deconstructing syntactic data structures.

Non-linear pattern matching is useful when de-constructing large-ish expressions that might contain multiple occurances of the same sub-term.

Nonfree datatypes allow you to encode some constraints about your datatypes; e.g., "lists that are equal modulo permutation".

Supporting type-checked non-linear matching over nonfree datatypes allows you to encode a lot of constraints in the type system and syntax that would otherwise be encoded with lots of nested if-statements and only checked by tests, not by static type checking.

This combination of features could be very useful when implementing a lot of mathematical code that operates over algebraic structures. Which is why the language's homepage mentions the implementation of (features for) computer algebra systems as a sort of killer app.

> this is not a business pain, this is an academic interest

Not all innovation is motivated by the business pains of today's engineering managers. And often the solutions to those pains are not recognizable; e.g., thousands engineering manager in 1950 could've beneifted from CAD software but I bet very feew were sitting around saying "I could really use a good piece of CAD software right now".

Scala is another good example of that, despite a marketing complaints about messaging. No one asked for FP+OO, but Scala took off because the combination of FP and OO solved a lot of the pain caused by Java.

Substantially improving the ease of implementing new types of computer algebra systems could easily create a lot of business opportunities e.g. in providing improved analysis/synthesis tools for all sorts of CAD tools.

that said, I don't think this language hits the target. See the hodge operator example...

For the exact same reason that most software companies don't have a Computer Science Ph.D. on staff. Many companies don't need a high-caliber research department.

People who learn and understand how to apply ideas and theories from behavioral economics in biz and econ courses are well-represented in sales and marketing roles. Just like people who learn and understand how to apply ideas and theories from Computer Science in CS courses are well-represented in engineering roles.

> why none of the behaviourial Economists have ever tried starting up?

I'm sure many have lucrative consulting portfolios, but generally speaking: because they already have a pretty cushy and very well-paying job doing what they love.

You've seen pictures of the earth from orbit, right?

You probably mean that you haven't engaged in all of the crazy theories and arguments put forth by flat-earthers. But that's doesn't make your very simple observation-based opinion any less justified. Direct observation can and should eliminate the need for lots of hemming and hawing.

> Of course i believe in global warming, though ive never read a single paper / study on it.

There are many accessible descriptions of global warming and the evidence for it written for different levels (uneducated/child; HS-level; university-level).

> Of course i believe in evolution, i went to a school where they told me to believe it.

That sounds like a bad experience, and maybe that explains some flat earthing. When I was in school we were presented with a lot of concrete evidence for the evolution of the species, and Darwin's original was even required reading.

I think a few reasons:

1. It's not a sufficient replacement for sanitizing input. You need to sanitize; CSP is just an extra layer of protection.

2. relative new.

3. many popular frameworks don't support it out of the box.

I'm not sure where you get both "sad" and "preventable" from that documentary. The tragic decline of employment in the US steel industry was completely unavoidable.

The decline of American steel company's dominance between 1960 and 1980 might've been preventable, but the human carnage wrought by automation would've happened in any case.

Watching the documentary, you can see the coming storm. Every video of people working is a prelude to an industrial automation project. And it's no mistake that the documentary ends with an acknowledgment that today's steel workers operate a keyboard and mouse.

The most important lesson from steel is that competitive pressures + new ways of automating things = huge disruptions in the labor market (read: lots of poverty where once there was wealth).

> Uber confirmed it laid off about 100 autonomous vehicle operators in Pittsburgh and eliminated the position. The company plans to replace these jobs with about 55 “mission specialists”—specialists who are trained in both on-road and more advanced test-track operations, and who are expected to provide more technical feedback to self-driving car developers. Uber said affected operators could apply for these positions.

But I also try to write/architecture my code so that the big stuff always gets logged. In cases where the logging isn't as good as it should be, a few hundred lines of reflection/meta-programming can enable just enough aspect-oriented programming capabilities to enable this approach.

1. Green field+0 years: This particular portion of the system was designed in this way as a cargo cult.

2. Green field+2 years: Because that portion of the system was designed in that way, we had to modify this other portion of the system to achieve X.

3. Green field+3 years: Because of the change in 2, and this new constraint Y, we had to make this other change in a third portion of the system.

5. Green field+(3 to N) years: repeat steps 2 and 3.

6. Green field+N+M years: Wow 5 (or previous 6) has created a mess and exposed a serious architectural flaw from step 1 or previous 6. All of the logic in the various iterations of 2+3 are refactored as best as possible.

So, the "why" basically grounds out in "the refactoring we could afford to do in order to correct a mess that resulted from a cargo cult or previous refactoring of even older cargo cult".

Is that "why" functionally helpful? Usually not for me -- in either case, I can't really assume a lot and I have to proceed with laborious "just watch what the code does" debugging/logging that I would've done without the "why?".

But this is probably a ymmv situation.

> Besides did it double because of increased demand... or because of "modern computing"

My answer is basically "yes". The rest of my argument contains a lot of inter-related claims, so I'm going to number them to make things easier to follow.

But my fundamental claim is that modern computing played a large role on both the supply side and the demand side in the oil industry over the past 30 years.

1. Effect of computing on supply: Computing helped provide the steady flow of cheap oil.

1a. Computing enabled more efficient and more accurate discovery, driving down the price of extracting oil.

1b. Computing enabled new drilling techniques, driving down the price of extracting oil.

1c. Computing improved the efficiency of both old and new drilling techniques, driving down the price of extracting oil.

1d. Computing enabled improvements in refining, driving down the price of refining oil.

1e. Computing enabled improvements in predicting demand, decreasing the risks of destablizing cycles of under-production followed by glut.

2. Effect of computing on demand in developed economies: Computing helped decrease d(demand)/dt for oil in developed economies.

2a. Fuel efficiency in vehicles -- both planes and cars -- was driven in part by modern computing. Multiple mechanisms explain this: improved design (esp in the case of cars), more efficient usage (esp in the case of planes and plants), and efficiencies directly enabled by computing (esp in cars).

3. Effect of computing on demand in developing economies: Computing increased the rate of development.

3a. Indireclty: computing helped keep the price of oil more stable and lower than it would've been without computing (see: 1 and 2). Predictable and relatively lower prices enabled a faster rate development, which itself drove more demand. This cycle would've happened in any case, but by keeping prices lower and more stable, computing increased the rate of economic development inb these countries.

3b. Directly: In some of the most rapidly developing economies, development was directly driven by offshoring of IT/computing and especially of manufacturing related to IT/computing.

To conclude:

1. computing increased the availability and consistency of oil supply, driving down both volatility and prices (note: is is the subtle point. In the case of oil there's a feedback loop between supply and demand, so we have to consider prices for equal levels of demand in the real world vs. the hypothetical no computing world. The claim is that, when we fix the level of demand, prices are significantly lower than they would've been without computing. The claim is not that absolute prices are lower; I think without computing, demand would be significantly lower because large swaths of the world would be significantly less developed),

2. computing decreased the rate of growth in demand for oil in developing economies, allowing growth in supply to enable more rapid development in other economies, and

3. computing increased demand for oil by both directly and indirectly driving development.

None of this is to discount the role of other innovations: the spread of public health practices, vaccinations, the most recent wave of globalization, relative peace, decolonization, and so on all played major roles as well. My point is only that, without computing, the state of oil production and consumption would be substantially different with absolutely massive implications for all of the non-western world, and perhaps for the west as well.

Yes.

> We transported as much oil in the 70s without "all modern computing".

No, we didn't. Global production (and consumption) has close to doubled since 1970.

Also, "is this possible to do without computing?" and "would the sudden disappearance of modern computing seriously interrupt the way that we currently do this?" are very different questions.

This issue is still in flux and is more complex than this.

Santa Fe ruled that the school's practice of running an election to select a person who then says a prayer on a PA system before a football game was unconstitutional.

But after Santa Fe was decided, the 5th circuit ruled in favor of Ward by finding that explicitly prohibiting student-led prayers is also unconstitutional! (At this point you've got to feel real bad for the school... damned from one side and damned again by the other.)

Also after Sante Fe, Texas passed RVAA which explicitly allows student-led prayers at school events. The constitutionality of those provisions have not been tested in SCOTUS.

So generally, the current state of affairs is quite subtle and messy.

Student-led prayers at voluntary student-organized events are certainly allowed.

Employee-led prayers in front of students are certainly not allowed in any circumstance.

Everything in-between is murky, and none of the case law is particularly revealing. E.g., what if Sante Fe had not used the PA system and didn't have any voting/guidelines about praying? Much of the legal reasoning in the majority opinion would not have been applicable.

And as I said in my original post:

"I think it's wrong to construe one measure of "right-wing" (explicitly not "conservative") authoritarianism with "authoritarianism" generally, as the title of this piece does. But there's nothing wrong with designing assessments that are intended to work only in one particular culture."

> The survey takes the beliefs of a group (conservative Christians) and simply labels them “authoritarian."

No, it doesn't, and I think that's an unfair characterization of conservative Christians.

1. I only count 11 items that say anything at all about conservative Christian beliefs. The other 9 are totally orthogonal. Even if we score those items -4 (which most conservative Christians wouldn't; see item 2) and the other items +4, we end up in the low 100s. And more realistic answers typical of non-authoritarian conservative Christians in the midwest end up with scores in the 90s (again, see item 2).

2. of those 11 items that make reference to "Christian/family/traditional values", many would not elicit a "strong" score from all or even most conservative Christians following the survey's instructions.

Example 1: "Everyone should have their own lifestyle, religious beliefs, and sexual preferences, even if it makes them different from everyone else."

Most conservative Christians will strong-disagree with "sexual preferences".

But what about "lifestyle" and "religious beliefs"? Many conservative Christians support different lifestyles; e.g., homeschooling. And a STRONG majority support religious freedom.

According to the survey's instructions, which tell use to average the -4 re: homosexuality with +N for the other two items, this question would elicit a weak disagree or maybe even a weak agree from many conservative Christians.

Example 2: "God's laws about abortion, pornography and marriage must be strictly followed before it is too late, and those who break them must be strongly punished."

Many conservative Christians believe that divorce should be legal and pornography, though damaging, should not be outlawed. So using the survey's averaging rule, this might even end up as a "weak disagree".

And there are many questions that ask for moral comparisons between "traditional" and "non-traditional" people, but the bible is very clear on exactly this question: we are not justified by our acts.

It is true that there is a certain brand of conservative Christian who believe we should have a "strong leader" who uses the state to forcibly impose their personal conservative values on the rest of society. Those people would score highly on this test. But that set of people is definitely not the same as the set of "conservative Christians", because many "conservative Christians" have non-authoritarian values (and many right-wing authoritarians are not Christian.)

> As to your point about right-wing versus left-wing authoritarianism: you’re missing the point. Imagine a counter-part to this test that labeled support for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as “left-wing authoritarianism.”

Exactly zero questions in this survey mention a piece of legislation, and not a single question on this test automatically labels RWA for agreeing with a given piece of legislation. There are multiple types of questions for a reason.

There exist left-wing authoritarian tests. And yes, they do ask questions about typical left-wing issues. And yes, they should. Because measuring LEFT-WING authoritarianism without even bothering to ask if someone's beliefs are consistently left-wing would be silly and would miss the point...

Maybe DeMorgan can help. A low (L or R)WA score just means:

NOT (LR-wing AND authoritarian) == NOT LR-wing OR NOT authoritarian.

A below-average score could mean (LR-wing AND NOT authoritarian).

A below-average score could mean (NOT LR-wing AND authoritarian).

A below-average score could mean (NOT LR-wing AND NOT authoritarian).

A low LR-WA score does not imply "not authoritarian". It implies "not authoritarian in this particular way". A very high score indicates "authoritarian in this particular way". Borderline scores could mean "authoritarian but not in this way" or "this way but not authoritarian".

Survey design is difficult, and interpreting survey results is also difficult. A survey designed to measure the intersection of two properties will give higher scores to people who have one of those properties than people who have zero of those properties. That does not mean the survey is flawed; it means that the results have to be used with this effect in mind.

You seem to feel that this survey is a definition about individuals? That's not how the survey is intended to be used, and the fist chapter of the book that introduces it is full of caveats that the survey is not intended to be treated as a definition about individuals.

The author of the survey is very explicitly NOT providing a definition of authoritarianism or a litmus test for individuals. He is providing a survey whose scores correlate with right-wing authoritarianism in North America in the late 20th century.

The survey is a tool, the author of the tool is very explicit about what that tool is and is not for. I, for one, don't get angry when my hammers don't work as screw drivers. And also don't get angry at the inventor of the hammer when some random third party messes up my stuff by using a hammer on my screws...

> Take three of the things addressed in the questioning: animal rights, abortion, and LGBT rights

The survey is designed to measure RIGHT-WING Authoritarianism. That is, the conjunct of being both authoritarian and also right-wing in that authoritarianism.

If we asked 20 questions about authoritarianism but never mentioned anything about being right-wing, we might have a good test for authoritarianism but not a good test for RIGHT-WING authoritarianism...

On its own, it's not supposed to measure anything. There's more than 1 question in the survey for a reason. And incidentally, the questions that people are most likely to criticize -- the first two -- aren't even used in the assessment; they're throw-aways.

> To see why thia question is ridiculous: Imagine asking this question to people in Tehran during the Shah. In that case, the “proper authorities” were the western-aligned Shah government, while the “rabble rousers” would be the Islamists. But it was the rabble rousers’ view that was authoritarian.

From chapter 1 of the book in which this scale was introduced: the test, which was designed to measure right-wing authoritarianism in North America, will probably fall apart in markedly different cultures.

That same chapter goes on to directly address almost all of the criticisms I'm seeing in this thread.

I think it's wrong to construe one measure of "right-wing" (explicitly not "conservative") authoritarianism with "authoritarianism" generally, as the title of this piece does. But there's nothing wrong with designing assessments that are intended to work only in one particular culture.

If you want to make an accurate analogy, compare the disappearance of oil to the disappearance of all modern computing. Both would be catastrophic.

Society is complex and has lots of interdependencies.