alexandros

Hindsight is great. However the real question, is what could you have done in that time to attain a better epistemic position than the scientific consensus, and if you apply that algorithm today, what will it give you as responses.

In other words, if trusting scientists is a historically unreliable method, what's your less unreliable alternative?

I fear that as the scientifically correct action keeps getting further and further divorced from the 'common sense' action on any given issue, the two worlds will continue to divide, and as the distance increases, science will get harder and harder to follow.

The bridging has to be done by cultural evolution, so that the prejudices that form by 18 are not as counter-science as they are now, but even so, they cannot be adapted to future science when it's not yet in existence.

So we need a culture based on constant learning and adapting our views to evidence. Based on the amount of cognitive bias we have built-in, the 'uncoolness' of rationality, and the speed of scientific progress, I'm not hopeful save for deep de-biasing interventions on our hardware.

Let's see what 'anti-' movement that's going to raise.

Android was also a Labs project it seems. Perhaps Labs is a method for Google to assimilate its purchases?

I intend to spend next year building just this. The problem I have, which I suspect all similar efforts will face, is how to bootstrap a network like this, especially when your competitors are the social news sites where all your future users hang out.

This looks strange: In the 'all characters' tab, the Greek omega appears only with a stress, not in its regular form. Is this usual with fonts or a peculiarity of this one? I actually got excited to have a nice Greek-enabled font, but this threw me off.

I think it says a lot about how much Apple's brand is damaged for me that I can't think of one of those people in the ad, if they were alive today, using a mac without it diminishing their image in my mind.

Unfortunate indeed. Have a good time at home, and don't forget to look both ways while crossing the street! :)

I had the exact same experience coming to London from Athens. I was in absolute shock that cars were stopping for me to pass when I was at a pedestrian crossing. You can't even stand near a crossing without having cars stop, just in case. Of course this only makes it worse when I go back home, and get more and more irritated at the apparent invisibility of pedestrians..

Come to think of it, I didn't think there was another Greek HNer in London, this is definitely worth a beer. Drop me an e-mail, or come to the next HN meetup this Thursday.

That 'power saving feature' was the most irritating thing since pop-up advertising to anyone not using the mouse to scroll through.. I couldn't focus on the article because of the multiple interruptions and then the constant thought that I'd be interrupted again if I didn't move the mouse. Nice thought, horrible, horrible implementation.

He didn't say he was in on the negotiations. He said he was in the integration meetings, presumably after the sale had been agreed. So he didn't say 'we're selling you X', he said 'you've been sold X'.

Also, it's not clear whether any special presentation was needed to make the lawyers' eyes sparkle, other the mere possibility of extracting licensing fees from Google.

I don't see where the problem is with evolving context-specific altruism. We have numerous strategies that we evolved and use in specific contexts. Screaming, or crying or laughing for instance. Altruism could be another.

If I may venture into armchair evolutionary psychology territory, this seems to verifiy that humans evolved and use altruism as a survival strategy. A person of lower status would have more to gain by investing in relationships through altruism than a person who is already of high status or wealthy.

the video in the page can be seen here in full (at least from the UK): http://www.bbc.co.uk/dragonsden/entrepreneurs/lisamarshall.s...

"A glance at scholarly journals or university-press catalogs might make one wonder how much of this "research" is advancing knowledge and how much is part of a guild's need to credentialize its members."

A glance? Really? Judging the life's work of a few thousand people who got into academia to do research is easily judged in a 'glance'? It's interesting that some would like universities to be little more than vocational training programs, but I've never seen such dismissal of the work produced by academia in such a high profile outlet, with no evidence to back it up whatsoever.

EDIT: Reading further, I see that they did look more closely.. at sociology journals. Why the strange choice? Biology, computing, medicine, physics not interesting enough?

can anyone find references as to why the feature was removed?

There have been many formulations of the root problem in such cases, Campbell's formulation fits best here.

Campbell's law: The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbells_Law

clean uris are orthogonal to REST. They're nice to have, but you could have randomly generated strings of alphanumericals as resource identifiers and still be perfectly RESTful.

In a twist that the author certainly did not intend to happen, his description of books as an ad-free medium led me to think of a model where out of copyright books are printed with in-page ads and distributed for free. Would that work? :)

If all goes well, I'll be there.

By the same token, apple entered the cut-n-paste enabled, multi-tasking smartphone market. There is a word for slicing and dicing definitions until they come out just right for your predetermined conclusion: Casuistry. It is usually seen in religious debates, although we may not be very far from one with this article.

There is a certain irony in claiming that '"tweet" has not yet achieved the status of standard English', and yet "it has appeared 18 times in articles in the past month, in a range of sections".

Surely, the NYT considers itself a good sample of standard English usage?

I've written extensively on this phenomenon, take a look: http://lesswrong.com/lw/28r/is_google_paperclipping_the_web_...

If you're going to make blogging your only viable avenue of tech support...

Given the introduction, I expected to see Ballmer saying something outright idiotic. I didn't see it. He merely said that whether it's a tablet or a laptop or a desktop, it's still a personal computer. Fair point. Perhaps he used the word productivity to mean creative activities? Maybe someone could take issue with that? Sure, go ahead. I wouldn't work for Ballmer either, but this video is not why.

I call it 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions'. Some of the worst behaviours I have seen have been from people who believed they were being helpful or protective of someone.

68 comments and not a single one pointing out the obvious flaw with the article? If that was my blog, I'd be worried.

(Of course my blog is happy to have 3 comments on a post, but that is another matter entirely)

It's interesting to see the contrast in comments here vs. the comments on Derek's blog.

Surely some employers may prefer to use the event of an employee quitting to readjust things / change salary levels / bring in a good candidate they had no room for? It just seems a bit presumptuous to offer someone your job at your salary without the employer's prior approval.

I thought the idea of getting donations instead of having ads was to avoid the theoretical possibility of altering the content. If indeed this is related to donor perception you might as well rely on ads, which are not certain to alter the content AND will make Wikimedia a financial powerhouse able to pursue multiple other projects.

Although I must confess that at this stage, the thought of Jimmy Wales commanding a billion dollar empire does not necessarily excite me.

That was very interesting. I added a pointer to your article to the OP.