What scientific term or concept ought to be more widely known? (2017)
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Instead of reading, reacting, or engaging with any of those ideas, people are just directly responding to the headline as though this is an ask HN thread. I'm not sure that that's what was intended here?
I would love to hear people talk about this "genetic book of the dead" idea. For instance, the terrifying drowning reflex that people have, there must have been scenarios in our evolutionary past where that happened often enough that this mutation came in handy, which is haunting to think about. I would love for this thread to be a discussion of the ideas presented in the article.
If you are here and have skipped the article, I strongly recommended it.
It is a fun and interesting read, and a jumping point for a bunch of rabbit holes I will probably end up wandering in this afternoon!
This is the first I’ve ever heard someone deliberately apply it to a disparate array of phenomena but I have to say that, to me, the phrase makes sense in all those contexts and has a nice ring to it.
But anyway to drive the point home I started calling it an impedance mismatch which makes sense to some and not others. :)
Labelling certain problems this way, dispassionately and without rancour, really took heat out of the discussion, which assisted in finding solutions. In such circumstances, differences are bridgeable with understanding, which inevitably provokes jokes about certain people being transformers, being tightly wound etc.
It‘s afaik not the DNA transporting the information, but epigenetics. Eg everything around the DNA deciding what parts to read/ignore.
Often the articles themselves aren’t even more than a few minutes reading and the comments have questions and ideas that were directly addressed by the piece. There has been a long discussion about what to do about this problem (from slashdot to digg to reddit and so on) - however the idea of requiring commenters to jump through hoops or unpaid moderators to somehow keep the discussion factual seems more like a way to kill the site.
For your amusement: pay casual attention to the comment count on any HN post that contains “apple” or one of their better known trademarks. No one is reading anything - it’s just a gangbang.
Sometimes I think the bandwidth/delay product is insufficiently appreciated but I can't quite say why.
Db are widely misunderstood. And RMS. Without a reference, 2x bigger is meaningless. Likewise s/n ratio is misunderstood. Scale free can be OK, but usually not.
People need to know that cells don't have walls and are not bags of liquid. At the scale we're talking about lipid membranes, and van der waals forces inside a cell and the like are not well described by "wall" and "fluid"
Wikipedia (heh) seems to support this idea, but my gosh is this all complex.
> Compared to ions, water molecules actually have a relatively large permeability through the bilayer, as evidenced by osmotic swelling. [...] Small uncharged apolar molecules diffuse through lipid bilayers many orders of magnitude faster than ions or water. This applies both to fats and organic solvents like chloroform and ether. Regardless of their polar character larger molecules diffuse more slowly across lipid bilayers than small molecules.
This is the purpose of BBC Radio's "More or Less", which can also be found as a podcast.
If you are driving 5 miles across town (dx), and you average 25 mph (v), it will take you roughly 5/25 hours, or 12 minutes (dt) to get there. By driving 50 miles per hour, you get there in 6 minutes. Is it worth the risk to yourself and others (bikers and pedestrians) to save 6 minutes?
If you are driving to work and it normally takes you 30 minutes to get there by going 60 mph (30 miles), then if you go 80 mph by frequently changing lanes and tailgating the guy in front of you you will save around 8 minutes getting to work.
dt = 30/60 = 30 min dt = 30/80 = 22.5 min
Is it worth the risk to yourself and others to save 8 minutes?
Drive safely with the appreciation of v = dx/dt!
The risk of serious injury in an accident increases exponentially with speed. This is especially true for pedestrian victims.
The most relevant concepts are probably impulse [1] and inelastic collision [2].
I stand corrected.
a = dv /dt.
With 220 work days and 16 wake hours I think you would lose less than 4 days.
The gist: consider a yes/no test that has a small chance of being wrong (false positive and false negative). Examples: spam filter, virus filter, pregnancy test, testing for another illness, etc.
How well it performs in reality depends enormously on the real ratio of yes vs. no.
Example:
Spam filter is 99% correct, 1% false positive and equally 1% false negative. That sounds good! And it is - IF your spam vs ham rate is 50-50. If, however, 99% of mails are spam, and you use this filter on 10,000 mails, then:
- 9900 are spam; 100 ham
- 1% of ham = 1 mail ends up in spamfolder
- 1% of spam = 99 mails end up in inbox.
So your inbox now contains 99 ham mails and 99 spam - an unacceptable 50-50 ratio, even though your using a superduper spam filter.
Changing the base rate of spam affects the outcome drastically. Obviously, 99% ham and only 1% spam flips the numbers around: inbox is fine, but 50% of your spamfolder isn't spam. Also not really okay -- and that with exactly the same filter, just a different base rate.
TL;DR: actual effectiveness of tests which have false positives/negatives is heavily skewed by the frequency of occurrence of whatever you're testing for.
- Conditional probability
- Bayes' Theorem
As in, not this: https://youtu.be/RxyQNEVOElU
https://thelogicofscience.com/2015/03/20/the-rules-of-logic-...
* actually grant-writing, but I’m not sure that counts either
Also, I’m pretty sure that the inclusion of “deferring to experts” in the accepted rules of formal logic would be a minority opinion among philosophy professors specializing in that area. “The fallacy guy” may not appreciate the irony there. It’s still a fallacy because it’s not logical in the strict sense of an argument (deduction from premise), regardless of whether it’s a good idea or not. It would only hold if the premise was that the “expert” source was an honest oracle, so without acceptance of that premise by both parties, the argument is erroneous.
We're also not talking about formal logic (I clearly started my comment by saying "in more practical terms", did I not?), we're talking about a distinction between an appropriate and an inappropriate heuristic. I highly recommend you finish reading the article I posted.
I find it amazing that people can argue endlessly about conclusions or personal judgements, especially when morals are concerned, without any effort to discover the premise upon which the disagreement rests. I think people should learn about argumentation as a method to discover truth and agreement, rather than a competition.
I’m not highly knowledgeable in this domain, just a person that would like to have more productive and less emotional or moralistic conversations.
People parodying two completely different court cases against each-other and claiming some kind of "injustice" is a common example of this. It's charitable to even consider this kind of lowball mental gymnastics a middle-school level of argumentation.
Tbh, I think most people who haven't studied logic or understand why first principles are important just let the current tide of politics / emotion completely drive their perception.
There simply is no history because the overwrites delete what was there before. If we evolve wings then our arms=arms gene gets deleted and replaced with a arms=wings gene?
That is clearly not how Dawkins thinks of it but I wish he had explained why the genes-as-mutable-variables model is wrong.
Everything else can come out of those two principles.
A big misconception about software among laypeople is it doesn’t need maintenance. It’s just not true.
Even the best of them need maintenance and up gradation for the simple reason that the environment in which operates is continuously changing.
An actual scientific/mathematical/statistical concept that ought to be more widely known is convergence to the mean.
How computer works from logic gates and up. (I think it was in the article under boolean logic) This one actually requires high school math to understand, but not that much. Knowledge is power and tech is everywhere in our life and society. Democracy as we know it can't continue to exist if the power is in the minds of a few technocrats.
Was that humour?
Have the workings of entanglement been explained?
Astrology in the context of personality traits or "archetypes", as you put it, has never been a science and has always been a pseudoscience.
Smarter minds than me understand the workings of quantum entanglement about as well as they understand the workings of gravity. There are plenty of things we don't know.
So you relegate all study of personality traits (which are different than archetypes) to the pseudoscience bin?
>> .. as well as they understand the workings of gravity...
So pretty much not at all then. This was my original point.
That’s called “psychology”. The real science even has that nice little observation that which side of the school admission year you’re born on is basically the only thing about when you’re born that makes any significant difference.