With that mindset, what makes oceans "natural boundaries" with any meaning? It's all just collections of atoms that humans socially assign meaning to.
2,973 karma · joined November 22, 2013
I fear the hacker ethos of the tech world, the mindset that cared about the right to tinker and to not have the government tell you what you can and cannot know, has recently become smothered under a mountain of VC cash and a stew of Bay-Area politics that is all too willing to look the other way if the outgroup is the one looking to assert their rights.
Thankfully, it seems like the EFF is making good arguments: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wjkzz4/the-self-d...
> “The design files at issue here, for example, are not ‘functional’ software that can be ‘run,’ ‘launched,’ or ‘executed,’” the EFF wrote. “They are storage files for text, images, and three-dimensional shapes, having “functional” consequences only after a third party interprets and implements them with software, hardware (such as a 3D printer), and raw materials. Even under the government’s flawed view that ‘functionality’ diminishes First Amendment protection, files here are, if anything, less ‘functional,’ and at least as protected, as the computer instructions for encrypting data.”
I'm reminded of a fictional quote from a video game (Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri), but it seems relevant:
>Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master. --Commissioner Pravin Lal, "U.N. Declaration of Rights"
It feels like a lot of attempted global social policy of the past 50 or so years has been trying to create a stronger consciousness of "humanity" as a thing, with our new enemies being abstract issues like poverty, hunger, climate change, drugs, inequality, etc. The "War on [...]" branding is part of that. Doesn't seem like it really gets the blood going as much. We'll probably have to have conquering aliens to fight against before that happens.
Conlanging isn't just gibberish, it's a legitimate artform like anything else.
However, I don't have any issue with using real-world languages to give the desired exotic flair for certain settings. I actually think that was one of the things that was great about, for example, the Avatar: The Last Airbender cartoon, because it took the time to use real Chinese calligraphy as part of the worldbuilding (one of the many flaws with the film adaptation was that it tried to deemphasize the explicitly Chinese influences and ended up with pretty uninspired chicken-scratch fake-ideograms for the writing).
Similarly, the video game Riven: The Sequel to Myst had some cutscenes where the fantasy native population were actually speaking Tok Pisin, which is a creole language from Papua New Guinea. This was only fragmentary, though, and much of the Myst games have a quite well constructed language "D'ni."
David Salo is a Tolkien scholar who was brought onto the film team to help expand some of Tolkien's conlangs for use in the film. While his work isn't strictly "canonical," he did do a lot of serious work to make his additions fit into what fragments we have. His blog is a good read: https://midgardsmal.com/
The two-assembly structure exists because it was a compromise to not give the densely-populated states all the power in the new Republic. Crucially, this sort of compromise was important because it helped the less-populated states get on board with the whole "federal government" concept without fearing that power over their own affairs would be continually swamped by places like New York. "Land" gets voting rights because those who were in charge of that land (the state legislators) wanted it in order to sign onto the project.
This is why I find the modern media complaints trying to do away with such structures very troubling. It may be more vestigial at this point, but the setup was supposed to emphasize a collection of states rather than mere administrative subdivisions of a faraway government. Frankly, if there would be any change to the state-based system for senators, it should come with a free ability for smaller states to secede as a group; because it would be going back on the deal.
This may or may not be the case, but if it is, I recommend not telling anyone about a new project/hobby until you've reached a stage where what you have is praiseworthy as an accomplishment.
Beware the rise of the techno-bureaucracy, as it is only a low-dimensional lossy encoding of what we actually want.
Putting aside the specifics of the gun control/rights question (if such a thing is possible), it's downright refreshing to see this guy's attitude. It's reminiscent of some of the earlier, more libertarian hacker ethos, of being focused on being able to do something and fighting hard against authority figures wanting (justifiably or no) to step in to suppress it. With the growth of the SV tech industry, it seems a lot of that fire has been stomped out.
>Current practices in study design and data analysis have led to low reproducibility and replicability of findings in fields such as psychology, medicine, biology, and economics. Because gifted education research relies on the same underlying statistical and sociological paradigms, it is likely that it too suffers from these problems. This article discusses the origin of the poor replicability and introduces a set of open science practices that can increase the rigor and trustworthiness of gifted education’s scientific findings: preregistration, open data and open materials, registered reports, and preprints. Readers are directed to Internet resources for facilitating open science. To model these practices, a pre peer-review preprint of this article is available at https://psyarxiv.com/nhuv3/.
So they gain it back once they stop being on calorie-restricted diets? This isn't a surprise to anyone. The point of any of these things, CICO or otherwise, is that you do them for your lifetime as a lifestyle change.
By this definition, that "problem by any social measure" already exists. The Jewish (undergrad) population at Harvard is 25% [0] whereas the U.S. Jewish population is approximately 2%. Given this already-existing 10x overrepresentation, would a significant increase in the percentage of Asian-American students vs the domestic population be a social problem? Maybe yes maybe no, it's a complex question.
[0] https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/The-most-heavily-Jewish-US-co...
- Among church congregations, it was common in talks about the Word of Wisdom for someone to bring up modern studies indicating something harmful about coffee/tea, as a sort of justification for the doctrine. (Being nutritional studies, seems you can find studies saying that both X is harmful and X is healthy, for all X.)
- I wonder what the reputation of coffee houses was in early 1800s America. I know that in England in the 1600s-1700s, coffee houses were a sort of salon environment where people gathered to philosophize; a lot of Enlightenment-era philosophies were bolstered by such places. The focus on politics and gossip in such environments made them less-than-reputable among some circles. Perhaps some of the reasoning for the "hot drinks" thing in the WoW was a desire for the membership to avoid such places and ideological influences.
- The main 'reason' to follow the WoW given in my family was that it was an opportunity to show obedience. Essentially, it may seem arbitrary in some cases (though in other cases there's obviously sensible stuff in it), but learning to follow guidance is valuable even if it seems arbitrary.
- Pero (also known as Caro outside the US) is a non-coffee/tea hot drink that is common among some LDS ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pero_(beverage) ) My mother drank it a fair amount when I was younger. Herbal teas also seem to be fair game, though I've only ever seen them drunk on an individual basis and not brought to like a ward activity.
- As for the question of iced tea/coffee, that seemed to be discouraged in general. I remember my dad saying that he chose not to drink them because he didn't want to acquire a taste for tea/coffee that would make it harder for him to keep the more set-in-stone guideline.
- Hot chocolate is fine and common on campouts.
- Caffeine was culturally thought of, particularly in Utah/Idaho, as the reasoning behind the coffee/tea restriction, but my devout Utah Mormon grandmother always had her caffeinated Diet Coke every day. Our family would jokingly call it her "vice," but none of us really felt like she was sinning or anything by doing so. The WoW occupies an interesting position of being half a "guideline" or good idea, and half a religious restriction.
One reason why there was so much repetition against human sacrifice in the Old Testament may be related to the fact that the Carthaginians, as a Phoenician civilization, were part of the Semitic language group, and so there may be more tendency for those cultures in that time to have those practices. It's easier to avoid falling into particular practices if those who do them are separated geographically, culturally, or linguistically from you. (For example, there probably aren't many people in Western countries looking to adopt sky burial traditions of far-off Tibetan groups.)
Part of the reason for these "surprising" results is probably the individualistic framing of the question. It makes a difference if only you have unnaturally long life, or if you are part of a family or society that is similarly long-lived. For example, the thought of lingering on after friends and family from my generation have died has no appeal to me.
In general, the implication that it's surprising that people didn't want "happiness" and "life expectancy" as the end goals speaks to assumptions of atomization among the creators of the study. Deep down, I think people want meaning and a sense of narrative structure to their lives, not just chasing after pleasures.
>And when people were invited to choose their ideal IQ, the median score was about 130 – a score that would classify someone as smart, but not a genius.
How was the question structured? I have doubts that most people get the statistics of what it means to be 130 IQ vs 150 IQ, etc.
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/342/6163/1169.4.full
>[...]We note that a highly relevant potential confound in the field study presented by Mani et al. is the possibility of retesting effects. The lack of any retesting effect in Mani et al.’s field study involving Indian farmers is clearly at odds with one of the more robust findings in the literature on cognitive testing (9). Retesting effects on the Raven’s tests are particularly profound among test-takers with little education (10).
>Mani et al. go beyond the data by concluding that “The poor…are less capable not because of inherent traits, but because the very context of poverty…impedes cognitive capacity.” We note that the correlation between income and IQ also appears in longitudinal studies in which IQ was measured years before incomes (11). Further research is needed to fully grasp whether poverty indeed affects cognitive performance, as proposed by Mani et al., or whether the effect found in their experiments is a test artifact. [...]
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I had similar doubts when reading the Princeton press release (though of course my doubts are only based on hunches and not rigorous statistical analysis). The experiment testing farmers pre-harvest and post-harvest has the potential issue of retesting/learning effects, because they had the same participants take the test both before harvest and then later after harvest. If they end up seeing an increase in performance from pre-harvest to post-harvest, that could also be due to learning/familiarity with the test and not just from the independent variable of altered poverty. I would want to see a similar study done either with separate (large) groups of participants pre/post-harvest, or to repeat the test over several harvest cycles so we can see if there is an oscillating rise/fall as it goes pre/post/pre/post-harvest.
Similarly, voting against the PATRIOT Act basically says 'we do not care about patriotism' to the country.