throwawayjava

The second portion of the parent's post is categorically not mistaken. If you've ever lived in a deep red state, you know that AGs are more than willing to spend millions of taxpayer dollars on a hope and a prayer to try and defend blatantly incorrect legal theories. Just because there's no hope of winning a court case doesn't mean that state AGs won't waste millions trying.

I'm very skeptical. This doesn't sound necessary, or in some cases even very smart. An extremely niche use case.

If you want to see what death of NN will mean in practice, look at what companies were willing to do in order to test NN regulations in the past. Hint: it's not prioritizing medical traffic.

> The point is that for an ISP, Internet packets are routed via dozens of network interconnects and millions of content sources on a variable QoS consumer demand basis.

The 2015 order may or may not be the best implementation of net neutrality. But I think it's entirely reasonable to have a regulation that says "you can't change what you charge / how you behave based on who is on the other end of the line, but you can -- in a pricing-agnostic way -- prioritize/shape traffic".

> I'm just pointing out that the electricity analogy is inaccurate.

I'm still not convinced.

You can equally make the argument that in a brown-out, electricity companies should be able to prioritize consumer-grade medical devices and so on.

The only difference is that it's easier to implement this prioritization.

"because we can" is a really poor justification for doing something.

Also, medical devices?! Hospitals can/do buy dedicated lines with QoS guarantees and then monitor their own networks' use of those lines; all of that is 100% allowed under NN... so unless your argument is that it would be a net good to add medical devices to the Internet of Crap ecosystem, this is a fantastic argument in favor in net neturality ;-)

> You can't do this with electrons.

Huh?! yes, you absolutely can.

We happen to mostly use photons these days, but I'm having a really hard time seeing why this distinction between "you can only use the electron for x,y,z" and "you can only use the photon for x,y,z" is anything but completely arbitrary.

If I happen to use a tranmission medium that uses electrons instead of photons, does that suddenly mean my ISP should be bound by NN regulations? Thats... rather confusing.

Or, more succinctly, "you can't microwave Netflix(R)-brand Popcorn with bits"

Yes. No demand.

> Would you agree that fundamental physics does not preclude a functioning nuclear rocket?

Fundamental physics also doesn't preclude a nuclear powered ferris wheel the size of the empire state building.

There are lots of things that humans can do but don't do.

> A live, radioactive (low-level, but still radioactive) exhaust stream is not going to happen in the US in the current culture.

This hasn't stopped us from building an enormous fleet of nuclear ICBMs and a rather large fleet of nuclear power plants.

"Proper following distances" means "you can react and stop in time to prevent a collision if the car in front of you brakes very hard".

Ripped from a wiki article on the topic:

"

The United States National Safety Council suggests that a three-second rule—with increases of one second per factor of driving difficulty—is more appropriate. Factors that make driving more difficult include poor lighting conditions (dawn and dusk are the most common); inclement weather (ice, rain, snow, fog, etc.), adverse traffic mix (heavy vehicles, slow vehicles, impaired drivers, pedestrians, bicyclists, etc.), and personal condition (fatigue, sleepiness, drug-related loss of response time, distracting thoughts, etc.). For example, a fatigued driver piloting a car in rainy weather at dusk would do well to observe a six-second following distance, rather than the basic three-second gap."

Bingo. You should be pissed at people who don't drive the speed limit.

Most every state in the USA has some sort of Professional Engineering law.

But I think there are only one or two states in the US where generic Engineer is a protected title (as opposed to e.g. "Civil Engineer"). So in most of the USA, you can call yourself a "Sales Engineer" and not worry about anyone coming after you.

But it's definitely a much more wide-spread practice in other parts of the world. And even applies to software.

E.g., Microsoft was sued in Canada for referring to holders of one of their technician certifications ("Microsoft Certified (TM)(R)") as engineers.

I'm referring to military ships and submarines. I'm not really sure where the financial incentive for nuclear comes from for anything commercial?

TBH it seems like you have a culprit (regulation) in search of a victim (nuclear utopia), and as a result, you have a solution (nuclear power) in search of a problem. If that's the case, there are really many much better examples.

> Nuclear test ban treaty, etc.

The NTBT covers intentional detonation of nuclear weapons... I'll be the first to concede that regulation has perhaps hamstrung the private sector nuclear weapons market :-)

> engines for nuclear rockets

Radiation is a bitch and lead is heavy. Conventional rockets that we need for human space flight already can, with modification, get us to where we've wanted to go so far. So we've instead focused our resources on doing useful stuff once we get there. NASA doesn't have inf money.

This is something that people continue to research. What's holding it up is a lack of priority in decisions about what science to fund and a complete lack of any private sector market large enough to justify the investment, not any sort of regulatory barrier.

> nuclear excavation techniques

...I'm having an extremely difficult time thinking of a use case where this would make any sense. Nuclear bombs are more powerful than conventional explosives. That power has an enormous tactical advantage in wartime because you can take out a city with a single missile instead of weeks worth of bombing runs.

But that's not really a particularly beneficial feature in e.g. a commercial mining operation. Plus radiation's a bitch.

Help me out? What are the possible use cases here?

> nuclear airplanes

Radiation is a bitch and lead is heavy.

> I don't see how this is a disagreement with what I was saying. Imagine if society had the same amount regulation on building software systems as dealing with radioactive stuff. Moore's law would not exist.

This isn't clear to me. I think the hardware would've still be invented. Perhaps the business impact would've been smaller, but regulation of commercial software systems wouldn't have stood in the way of the enabling physics and engineering research.

Also, see the Ford quote about Microsoft; if the nuclear industry worked like the software industry, we wouldn't even be here to have this conversation. We'd have BSoDed our way to nuclear Armageddon some time around 2001.

> nuclear power plants had grown exponentially for multiple decades... Why didn't that happen?

Physics is a bitch. More precisely, I'm unaware of any serious conjectures by modern nuclear scientists that there are obvious advances on the horizon that could give us exponential improvements to reactor output even in the short term. Let alone over 3+ decades.

Aside from power, and perhaps inter-planetary travel, nuclear is a case of "tried it, doesn't work for fundamental reasons" or "wtf now you're just throwing nukes on things for fun". And in the case of power, we have a lot of data points from a lot of different regulatory regimes, all of which point to "this is a quite expensive way to make power which won't pay off until fossil fuel externalities are finally internalized... i.e., never"

> For that particular party, there definitely wasn't blowback

PR is bigger than just internal opinion. Witness: this article.

> The interactions with the models would be similar to a kid interacting with Mickey Mouse at Disney

Oy

> the women were not dressed up as "Playboy bunnies". They were wearing regular shorts and a themed tshirt showing no cleavage... Also, there probably were male models on roller skates as well but I don't remember them for obvious reasons.

At least we all eventually agree that the obvious is obvious.

My logical brain says "it's not 1950 anymore; the PR blow-black has the potential to be truly brutal."

My emotional brain says "This is horridly objectifying and super awkward."

That's not true at all! Civilian nuclear power in the USA (and most of the west) has stalled out since the 70's, but nuclear technology has seen plenty of advances over the intervening time frame. See esp. modern nuclear propulsion systems. Super impressive.

Also, this isn't a problem caused exclusively or even primarily by safety regulation in the nuclear sector. The evidence is in the failure of nuclear power throughout the world, despite significant variations in safety regulations.

In fact, if you look at root cause analyses for the failure of nuclear energy, you'll find that lack of regulation is a major reason for the failure of the nuclear energy. If the FF industries had to pay for their externalities, nuclear would be extremely viable (at least in the 80s-00s; now it'd have to compete with solar and wind).

> Computer technologies were only allowed to progress so quickly because people did not think computers were dangerous.

Again, this is a pretty wild assertion... Moore's law >>>> regulatory environment. Seriously. If the output of nuclear power plants had grown exponentially for multiple decades, we'd be in nuclear-powered paradise.

> consider the gamifying elements of Khan Academy, Duolingo and other e-learning sites for example

It's worth noting that I've heard a lot of criticism of e.g. Khan Academy from certain components of the mathematics education community. Concretely, they feel that the material there is designed to increase engagement and provide a sense of accomplishment ASAP, and that the learning processes that fit those goals are detrimental to development certain mathematical skill sets. I.e. you might learn how to compute derivatives really well, but at the expense of really understanding limits or the fundamental theorem.

Mind you, mathematics educators have always been an internally divisive bunch, so take from it what you will.

If I read every PoS article vaguely related to my research, I'd never get anything done. In practice, I don't pay attention to impact factor. But I do pay attention to who's publishing. And that's basically the same as impact factor, in practice.

> that it is a lousy measure of what is likely to end up being true, reproducible and useful.

I don't think so.

High impact factor publications are MUCH more likely to be quality science than low impact factor publications (at least in my area).

The major venues would have to get at least two orders of magnitude worse before they became bad indicators of quality.

Of course, and obviously, that does not entail that all work published in high impact factor journals is high-quality.

I think the fundamental problem is just that you vastly under-estimate the enormous volume of utter crap there is out there.

That seems wrong. I'm not an accountant, but I have a damn hard time believing that accounting practices haven't changed significantly since the Italian Renaissance...

I wonder if the USA would've gone through the diplomatic rigmarole to get him extradited. Anyone familiar with these sorts of cases have an opinion?

My point was just that there are obvious up-sides... so it's not like e-voting is some pointlessly insane thing.

I happen to think it's a bad idea even with dead tree audit trails, but I can respect the position that, with appropriate audit trails, it makes the voting process more robust.

> If the data had been open from the start, this wouldn't have been a problem.

I mean, it sounds like there were serious legal obstacles going beyond "shit what did I do with that .csv file". And maybe the science wouldn't have existed at all if you demanded open access a priori.

Yes, but you seem to have confused the author's positive statement as a normative statement.

The author of that quote is not saying that's how the world should ideally be. He's saying that's how the real world really fucking works. In other words,

"The distinguished representative from Texas doesn't give a shit about science; he's made up his mind on climate change because there's a shitload of money at stake. If he can discredit good study X to weaken his opponent's point, or marshall shitty study Y to strengthen his own point, he'll do so. Because winning the political battle is more important than being 'correct'. So you're not going to convince him to change his mind by throwing science in his face."

The author is NOT defending the not-so-hypothetical distinguished representative from Texas. He's just observing the fact that this is how certain people process scientific claims. Not as scientists, but as motivated reasoners and political operatives with a priori agendas.

See also the discussion of the precautionary principle above for a less cut-and-dry example -- what's happening, in that case, is basically that two groups with different values are making different default assumptions about the level of confidence necessary to justify a decision. I.e., they have different values, and those values color the way in which they interpret the confidence intervals in studies on e.g. GMOs.

You're confusing a description of the status quo for a defense of the status quo. This is a ridiculous straw-man.

> What matters is "values" and emotions

Again, the claim is not "values/emotions are objectively more important than science".

The claim is "voters/lawmakers are more likely to be swayed by values/emotions than by science".

Those are two very different claims.

> It's an elaborate setup to push a view from certain segments of the humanities and social sciences to dismiss the epistemology of science and an "objective reality" entirely

That's quite the conspiracy theory, given that the overall tenor of the piece is decidedly pulling in the other direction.

Unfortunately, that's an unrealistic assumption in the messy real world. In fact, I doubt even the most genius of researchers could be reasonably expected to verify the veracity of all the scientific claims that are advanced in defense of various policies that lawmakers must form opinions on.

> Because of the prestige that science garnered - it gave us airplanes, radio, tv, internet, landed a person on the moon, etc, many knowledge disciplines branded themselves as "x science". Thus, has the word "science" become devalued.

This is perhaps a bit off topic, but I'll just note that this includes Computer Science [1]. Also, you can replace "science" with "engineering" in that quote ("Software Engineering").

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science#Etymology

The article is not about Science! The article is about public perception of science. About how very valid criticism of bad science can be used to paint with an overly broad brush, and about how that rhetorical trick works well when convincing voters and/or policymakers to ignore good science.

BTW, the piece quotes Steven Goodman -- one of the "good guys" leading the charge against unproducible social science -- making exactly this point.

No one is making the case for letting bad science slide, least of all Steven Goodman.

The things you are saying are true. But they have absolutely nothing to do with the article that they're attached to.

The article goes on, immediately following your quoted sentence, to draw an important distinction:

> But they’re also used as talking points by politicians who are working to make it more difficult for the EPA and other federal agencies to use science in their regulatory decision-making, under the guise of basing policy on “sound science.” Science’s virtues are being wielded against it.

> What distinguishes the two calls for transparency is intent: Whereas the “open science” movement aims to make science more reliable, reproducible and robust, proponents of “sound science” have historically worked to amplify uncertainty, create doubt and undermine scientific discoveries that threaten their interests.

And goes on to discuss how the term "sound science" was invented (or at least popularized) as FUD by Phillip Morris to discredit medical science on the health effects of second-hand smoke.

Assuming perfect security and absence of software bugs, we'd be insane to prefer human counters to machine counters.

But where can I get the kinds of returns that banks get from student loans? Especially without doing any real work?

What percentage of mortgages went into foreclosure in 2008? One source I found said 1/54.

So what?