MarkusQ

Why should public institutions be trying to get views for political purposes? Isn't that directly contrary to the intended role of public institutions in a democracy?

> So if copying a useful piece of code from Stack Overflow has always been acceptable

This has not "always been acceptable"; copy-pasta was a pejorative not that long ago, and people have been fired for simply copying code from SO and using it without understanding it.

I suspect you aren't reading well. I said:

> ...they are making huge numbers of identical copies with very rare (and usually non-functional) variations...

to which you replied:

> You're ignoring unsuccessful mutations...

You are also conflating absolute numbers with likelihoods; flipping two dozen heads in a row is a rare occurrence (1:2⁻²⁴). Saying that "if everyone on Earth tried it today we'd expect it to happen ~500 times" is not a counter argument.

You're also conflating the substitution rate (rate of mutation rate accumulation in the viral gene pool) with the frequency of copying errors (your "chaos monkeys" metaphor, to which I'm objecting).

Your objection to my statement that viral reproduction consumes resources from the host (which I shorthanded as "energy" since all cellular resources ultimately depend on this) is nonsensical. Who cares about the mass of the viruses?

That's like disputing the claim that "the vandals caused $3 million in property damage" by saying "but they only had $273.15 with them". It's completely irrelevant.

Inferring investor beliefs from market reactions is always tricky. Bond buyers might be less willing to buy treasuries because they feel the risk of default is higher (e.g. no longer negligible), but that is far from being the only possible reason.

Actually, no, they're still there even if you're indoors with your eyes closed.

Do you have any idea how many stars there are?

Viruses don't reproduce by mutation, they reproduce by getting the host to manufacture more copies of the virus, which takes resources (which ultimately come down to energy) away from the host.

The "monkeys" aren't trying huge numbers of variations, they are making huge numbers of identical copies with very rare (and usually non-functional) variations when they fail to copy exactly.

many ≠ all; chronic ≠ acute

Yep, at least on most static word lists.

It's a fun exercise to try and improve the rule by extending it compared to just switching to "E before I".

I can respect finding JORTS unacceptable.

In bats, it reproduces more slowly, doesn't kill the hosts, and thus the hosts live to spread it.

This is exactly the tradeoff I described.

The faster you kill your host, the less time you have to infect new hosts. Sure, you can loot the host to make a lot of new viruses, but when the host dies, they die too. Ideally, a virus "wants" to make the host live a long, gregarious life, touring the world and kissing babies. But that takes energy away from making more viral payload, so yeah, it's a tradeoff.

Thank you, that makes a lot of sense!

This is a weird mix. Some good, some meh, and others awful.

"Lord of The Flies", for example, is misanthropic trash that has done more harm than most people seem to realize. It grossly misrepresents what happens when small groups of people fall out of touch with civilization, portraying a rapid descent into savagery when in fact, what we see when this happens in the real world is almost always resourcefulness, compassion and nobility.

Sure, I suppose, this book will change the way you look at the world but unless you know enough going in to reject its premise it will make you less happy, less civil, and wrong.

"A bit fake"? This is a massive understatement. It's a battle of glib, easily debunkable falsehoods between parties with huge budgets and no apparent shame — mostly the US tech sector (arguing for) vs. the CCP (against).

If you look at the outlandish claims of either side in any detail, it's hard to imagine anyone would fall for them. But here we are.

We need something akin to the international geophysical year, but for data integrity. Make it an interdisciplinary priority to clean house and root out papers that are hanging by a thread of included / excluded outliers, biased samples, and outright fraud. It would be humbling, but we'd be in much better shape afterwards.

> A recent analysis by the Dark Energy Survey Supernova Program also finds a preference for evolving dark energy, in the same direction as DESI DR2, but with a slightly lower statistical significance (bringing the combined significance down from 4.2 sigma to only 3.2).

Is this right? It would seem that adding another finding "in the same direction" should always increase the statistical significance, even if only slightly if the new evidence is week.

Under what circumstances could additional evidence for X reduce the estimated likelihood of X?

The USA is a net exporter of oil.

"NoOneIsHappy.com" appears to be some sort of low-effort demoralization psyop or something. Who'd have guessed with a name like that?

It makes sense as physics (the QM version is even stronger), but the best part (given that we don't actually have time machines) is that it's a fantastic plot device. C.f. RAH's "By his bootstraps" or "Back to the future"

This is also true in science; some things reward depth of study in a way that just isn't apparent from the outside.

https://xkcd.com/877/

It is not an experimentally study. It's observational, e.g. from the paper: "we exploit the abrupt end of United Kingdom sugar rationing in September 1953 as a natural experiment."

They didn't perform an experiment, they took someone else's observational data from a real-world event, and attempted to interpret it as if it had been an experiment.

The stuff about ancient Greeks not seeing blue is absolute internet balderdash.

Not blaming, exactly.

But if the question is "why people don't quite feel like royalty despite all this" it's pretty obvious that "doom scrolling" might be a large part of the answer.

> "...doom-scrolling..."

This may be the load-bearing point of your lament.

If our education system, hiring processes, onboarding/skill transfer support, career development pipelines and similar systems continue to degrade, we should have something like what you're asking for before too much longer.

Or you can just look at the geometry. 3d slop is orders of magnitude easier to spot than text slop.

> The topology is usually an absolute mess

This.

"Absolute mess" may even be giving them too much credit, since most seem to have shot past "steaming pile" and are offroading in hitherto unexplored regions of sucky-space.