Confusion

What matters most is actually selling when your strategy tells you you should. If you ignore your sell signals, you are toast.

It’s our knowledge of chemistry at work. I think https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothetical_types_of_bioche... is pretty disenchanting.

For all practical purposes: no. Less than 0.1% attends privately funded schools inside or outside of The Netherlands.

You basically repeat that ‘reading the old philosophers is important’ about three times, but give no reason for why that would be important and what exactly you would learn from that.

That they teach it at Eton is not a reason. At most a suggestion there could be a good reason for it.

To realize that ‘they were wise’ is not a reason. Why is that important to realize?

That there are ‘vast amounts of wisdom to be gleaned’ is a restatement, not an argument.

So whatever reading the old philosophers taught you, certainly not argumentation skills.

Externalities happened.

https://github.com/middleman/middleman may also be an option

Real time updates and hot reload are almost completely independent of js and webpack. E.g. Middleman has that via the ‘livereload’ feature.

> Airline pilot training is designed to handle this

It is certainly designed to do that, but even for airline pilots there are limits to what is possible.

You cannot train a human to react within 1ms; that's just physiologically impossible. Nor can you train a human to fully comprehend a situation within x ms, where x depends on the situation.

So the autopilot would have to warn a human say 2x ms before an event that requires attention, where it can of course not yet know of the event, so that amounts to 'any time there could possibly be an event 2x ms in the projected future'. Which is probably: most of the time. Making the autopilot useless.

Ashcroft and Mermin is only an 'introduction' in the graduate student sense of 'introduction'. I don't think you can make sense of it without previous grounding in both quantum mechanics and solid state physics.

Which should of course not be exaggerated and fully blamed on the reporter.

A reporter not understanding what a physicist explained does not mean they lack the ability to understand what a policeman or politician told them.

A reporter not being able to explain a theory does not mean they cannot correctly report on the plain facts of a murder or a policy proposal.

In such cases the risks are inferences drawn from the (lack of) facts, the reliability of the source (material), etc. Every kind of article requires scepticism of different aspects. Just ensuring you don't suffer from Gell-Mann Amnesia is woefully insufficient.

These numbers include losses and waste. In the most extreme case the US could be wasting a third of their food, while achieving the same intake. So these numbers imply very little about actual calorie intake.

Minor note: Dollar Shave Club was bought by Unilever, not P&G.

The problem is that we have a model that is incredibly accurate for all the things we can apply it to, but that has many conceptual loose ends and leaves some observations completely unexplained.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_beyond_the_Standard_...

From addressing the great many naive falsificationists that have heard of, or were taught, Popper’s basic idea without any of his elaborations and footnotes, let alone those by people like Quine, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend, ... A little knowledge can be a dangerously misleading thing.

People who build aircraft are not people who design aircraft.

Moreover, the point of the comment isn't about the titles assigned to these people by someone external: it's about the actual skills they have that would cause you to assign such titles to them.

If you know people who can design new aircraft, then they are, by definition, aircraft engineers. They may have a job as an aircraft mechanic, but that's besides the point. That doesn't mean the average aircraft engineer is capable of designing aircraft.

The point is you cannot trust your intuition, even if it is based on your own experience, to determine what works well.

As an example, 'regression to the mean' ensures that it seems like blaming works better than praising.

Isn't that just a safety feature, so a child's quick fingers won't do anything?

No one at Los Alamos ever thought that would happen. Someone did wonder if it could happen, suggested it should be checked and that is what they did. It turned out to be as impossible as creating a black hole at CERN. They didn't just go ahead without checking.

Everyone should flag this article. And anyone that upvoted the article should be ashamed of themselves.

They may be right to deride the memo. They are not right to deride anyone who wonders whether writing something like that, and sending it internally to a mailing list intended for discussions of this subject, is maybe not an offence that deserves the outrage it garnered. Nor what basically amounts to a social death sentence.

Otherwise I'm with you until your last sentence. This is not a kind of human nature that I think we should accept. Especially because, as you say, it just doesn't work.

Thinking that the natural state of affairs is 50% of both genders [1] in everything is exactly the assumption that Scott shows to be unsupported by data. And just to be sure: unsupported does not mean 'false'. The 'opposite' assumption is not supported either.

If there was no sexism, no racism, no *ism, no history and no cultural predisposition towards anything whatsoever, it could still be that only 30% of all leaders would be women, simply because women would be found to be less biologically predisposed to wanting to be the leader and leadership would go to the best suited person that wants to do the job.

Some women argue that in that situation 70% of all leaders would be women, because everyone would recognize them as better leaders and would ask them to lead. I recognize and acknowledge that as a fully valid option. That could also be. The point is that we simply do not know.

[1] 'all identities in ratio of their self-identification'

  If math vs. engineering is a mystery that can't be 
  explained by streotypes,

Scott gives an explanation in the article. Interestingly, it's exactly the suggestion commenter peacetreefrog puts forward: relatively many math graduates become teachers. And teaching is a 'person' thing.

As for engineering: the variation within engineering disciplines is much smaller than the variation between engineering and other disciplines and since we already have a hard time explaining the large difference, let's not worry about the small differences. Perhaps chemical engineering is perceived to be about 'people' more often.

I think 'considering the immediate response' used to be a valuable heuristic, but isn't any more. Too many people have become too polarized.

There are a bunch of folks from the tech industry on Twitter that I have followed for years, including some HN regulars, that are now, IMHO, in the 'too polarized' group. I no longer trust their opinion on various 'political' subjects to be the result of deliberate consideration, like I did for years.

Scott Alexander wrote another one of his great considerations of this sensitive subject [1], but he wisely disabled comments. To quote Scott:

  A lot of people without connections to the tech industry 
  don’t realize how bad it’s gotten. This [he quotes an 
  example before this paragraph] is how bad. It would be 
  pointless trying to do anything about this person in 
  particular. This is the climate.

  [..]

  This is the world we’ve built. Where making people live in 
  fear is a feature, not a bug.

Every suggestion that maybe this Google guy wrote something reasonable was met with derision, including by these people I follow, effectively shouting down anyone who responded in a moderating way. They are implicit in creating this climate, this world.

I bet none of them actually read the memo and know if the things this guy was saying were actually that bad. They were reacting this way because others were reacting this way, assuming someone down the line would be correct that there was a good reason to be angry. Yet I doubt anyone not already polarized knew.

As far as I can see this was a lynching and whether the guy was actually guilty, and how guilty, is irrelevant.

[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

You have hecksums and other internal consistency checks to deal with those.

There is, according to quite a few, also a huge etc. chasm between 'proved' and 'proved by a computer'. Especially if it's a proof through exhaustive enumeration.

> Splitting a company in two [..]

Splitting an organization in two so the non-profit part can enjoy the benefits the law intends to bestow upon a non-profit is exactly what the government wants you to do.

Separate rules for separate kinds of organizations are a lot easier to make than rules for combined organizations. The latter invites loopholes, but to prevent them the government tends to err on the side of 'anti-loopholes' such as the one the Krita Foundation fell into.

This is not even what the government intends, just an unfortunate side effect.

You call yourself a 'good person' in your bio, but you show little evidence of that. A good person would be charitable and assume good faith.

Boudewijn Rempt is a good person.

Now imagine what the Lindy effect implies when technology becomes available that undoes the damage caused by the mechanisms called 'aging'.

Generic graphical programming, in things equivalent to your examples, has so far sucked. Anyone who has ever been forced to do it for more than a trivial amount of time, creating more than trivial programs, has experienced that.

I understand the 'non-textual programming' evangelism as wishing for something 'better than textual programming', but it's like people wondering whether there isn't something better than math to describe Nature. Unless you come up with something, there isn't and you can't claim there is or has to be. Some small parts can be described by diagrams and words perfectly. For the most part: math or bust.