ardillaroja

field: A particular field is a particular subject of study or type of activity.

So the authors are using 'field' to mean area of study which has standard usage in English I think so probably didn't need to be explained further.

When the authors wrote: "Nonetheless we think cataloguing these risks is important if we’re going to be serious about having an impact in important but ‘fragile’ fields like reducing extinction risk."

They are talking about 'reducing extinction risk' being a field of study. And the risks of doing damage to a that new field with early research.

Was halfway through an almost identical reply when you posted this haha (also enjoyed Sapiens!).

I think the level of absorption is as high if not higher than reading but I have been wondering if it 'counts' (and wondering what I mean by that).

With audiobooks we're not practicing the physical scanning of words (assuming that's a skill which can deteriorate) and difficult sentences are definitely easier to follow when stressed by a good voice actor. That said I think we're still picking up vocabulary, empathizing and learning which feel like the biggest wins of reading a variety of books.

Makes you question our free will...

Yeah absolutely. I don't agree with his 'examples', but I'll defend to the death his right to use them in the same breath. It seems absurd to claim a handful of humans to have free will and others not, not really sure what that would even mean.

As I understand it there's pretty firm evidence that both Jesus and Buddha existed and arguably they both had some pretty cool ideas...

I'm no fan of May and this is probably giving her too much credit (and oversimplifying) but is it possible she's nailing this?

Her "Brexit means brexit" and "No deal is better than a bad deal" rhetoric has kept the hardline Brexiteer tories from throwing her overboard. But maybe after a 'long, hard fight' she gives a theatrical sigh and accepts the Norway deal. Everyone gives a resigned shrug and we don't have country-wide riots.

But let's say the 48% that voted to remain in the EU had grown to say 55% that didn't like the sound of the Brexit deal being hashed out and would prefer the status quo. Would it be reasonable for our politicians to try and use the levers of government to reverse course to represent the new will of the people?

At the end of the day I don't think the public were qualified to answer the question as it was posed. There were too many unknowns and too much false information. We elect people to represent us because we believe they are qualified to do so.

There's a reason we'd never see this in a referendum:

What should the income tax rate be for UK citizens? [ ] 0% [ ] 10% [ ] 20% [ ] 40%

I think the analogy may still be useful/interesting. It's just that with financial debt you have borrowed money, with technical debt you have borrowed time. Financial debt reduces the efficiency of future available money (interest payments), technical debt reduces the efficiency of future dev time.

I agree with your point that technical debt is a lot harder to identify, the way to pay some of it off may not be obvious and taking on that debt is not usually a conscious decision.

Sometimes you'll cut a corner to get a prototype done or hit an important deadline and there it seems more of a clear trade off, time now for pain later. But, as you say, the creeping (and inevitable?) technical debt of aging projects is less obvious. More like maintenance costs for assets and investment in rust proofing?

Reminds me of Pratchett's Octarine. And seems reasonable to assume that impossible colours are only visible to wizards and cats.

"ISP's hate him!"

Not OP but this guardian article mentions some figures supporting that from UK, compiled by Press Association based on on ONS data.

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/aug/29/women-in-20s-e...

How hard would it be to create a gun that produced this new knightship and is that something the community would be interested in doing?

I could imagine it being trivially easy or mind-blowingly hard and have no intuition on what's more likely :)

Relevant xkcd (https://xkcd.com/989/)

> reasonably diverse backgrounds and worldviews

Definitely agree with the rest of your comment. Not sure about this bit though, I love the HN community but I think we're a pretty homogenous bunch. I would guess a lot of us work in technology, relatively well-educated, relatively wealthy, left-leaning, english speaking etc.

Disclaimer: I've no data on this...