'Extreme' and 'unhinged' only have meaning relative to a baseline of what is widely believed and accepted.
914 karma · joined July 31, 2011
The Python type system really has quite a lot of overhead compared to this :P
This isn't an important use case for a lot of people, but's it's much more important to me than commuting :)
The USA has larger disparaties across quintiles, in large parts due to its history as a country of (sometimes involuntary) immigrants. I think it will be interesting to see how Sweden's favorable metrics here change as a result of their wave of unskilled immigration, which is probably too recent to be fully incoporated in any generational study. I'd also be interested to see mobility in 'absolute' terms, perhaps relative to global percentiles. Moving up 10% in a very disparate country might reflect more social motion than jumping two quintiles in a very flat country.
Also, moving between income quintiles misses other aspects that might be relevant for a broader definition of social mobility: moving into the top 1% or top 0.1% of income and any movement in wealth. I'm not having luck finding a source at this moment, but I recall seeing that the USA performs favorably on this metric compared to europeans with millenial legacies of state-sanctioned hereditary nobility.
I almost always have my phone on silent for that reason. I like to check my phone when I want to, not when it wants me to.
As an adult, some of my friends have asked me to switch to an iphone so they could use imessage features in a group chat. It's not hard to imagine being left out of a group for this reason. I don't think I've met a girl in my age group who has anything other than a negative opinion of "Android Users." This stuff doesn't bother me, but I can see how it would upset kids.
The important thing is establishing that one group has too many resources which rightfully belong to some other group. The rest is implementation detail.
This argument is hilarious but this is not a turn I expected it to take.
> you can be fairly sure that you all read the same thing
I don't think this is a given. The bible has been around for a long time, but for whatever reason there have been disputes over what information exactly is encoded in it that have been going on for centuries. It's definitely a little more consistent the spoken word though!
There's a good amount of research inicating that discussion and speaking lead to significantly more information retention than hearing or reading. The more individual the learning process is, the fewer opportunities there are for discussion. This is why I get into silly arguments on HN in the first place, gotta supplement that reading ;)
Reading makes knowledge acquisition easier, but it also decreases the fraction of knowledge that comes bundled with expert 1-on-1. This has both advantages and disadvantages.
> ... they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant
By claiming he doesn't notice something that he clearly and explicitly mentions, I feel you are directly making his point.
New information technology induces changes with how we interface with information, almost certainly a mixed bag of good and bad. Writing is directly associated with the decline of memory-based oral traditions. You can probably safely argue that writing brings many positives, but that does not preclude the existence of negatives.
If maximizing the total number of lives is really all that's important, we should cease all human activity that isn't necessary to sending ants to other planets.
The original comment just says the cops refused to chase... which you yourself acknowledge as likely in a child comment. If you believe that carjackings happen and that the police are unlikely to chase, I'm not sure what else there is to deny.
That is, other than the implicit challenge to the idea of an extremely safe gentrified Chicago. Violent crime doesn't only happen in Englewood. There's a pretty wide range of neighborhoods between Garfield Park and Edgebrook.
I grew up in Chicago, many of my family and friends still live there. I would categorize your experience as both atypical and extremely privileged. You should hesitate before extrapolating.
Two decades? Is there some other source for these predictions other than the book series he kicked off 8 years ago?
The claims in his 2014 book are much more measured:
- Russia needs to deal with Ukraine by 2020 (one of his few concrete timelines, a couple years off)
- Increased Albertan autonomy will enter mainsteam political discussion (Danielle Smith)
- China will run into issues from an unstable financial system (Evergrande)
I think it's clear his background is not technical, he's more than a little hyperbolic, but I don't think he does as poorly as you mark him. Unless he has some other more aggressive set of predictions than the ones I've found, he still has a good 30 years before he can safely be called a hack.
Crystalline silica is still silica.
> You don't get nanometer-sized structural changes in teflon by scraping it off your skillet with a spatula. You're being ridiculous.
The words of someone who has not spent time analyzing electron microscopy of fracture surfaces :) It absolutely does without any possible shred of doubt. But that's not even the point; the point is that the fine physical structure of compounds can matter in biological systems. If you accept this, that it is plainly obvious that chemical inertness of a compounds is an obviously insufficent condition for safety.
> I'm interested to hear what response you get from biologists when you propose to them that natural selection might be inoperative in the split-leaf philodendron. I imagine they'll wish they had a PTFE cord handy.
If you spend a lot of time around people with science PhDs, you will quickly learn that most of us are keenly aware of how little we actually know and how much of it is guessing. Murdering people over disagreements is the domain of religions, not science. Sadly for many these two are interchangable.
I think the topological bond analysis is actually really cool, and I think it might have wide-reaching implications in the study of liquids. I wonder if you looked closely at liquid phases without "long-range order", if you might occasioanlly see something resembling order if you looked through this lens rather than through the radial density function.
> I bet you can't find a study demonstrating natural selection in the split-leaf philodendron, either, but that isn't a good reason to go around saying "some questions remain unanswered"
It absolutely is! The criterion for whether a question has been answered is whether that question has actually been asked, studied, and answered. In cases where there is no specific evidence, you attempt to make assumptions that extend existing evidence into spaces that it does not explicitly cover. But these aren't answers; they are educated guesses. Some guesses are better than others, and really the fundemental act of science is feeling out these hypotheses and deciding which ones are sturdy and which are shaky.
So for example consider the claim 'PTFE doesn't affect human health when ingested, because there is strong evidence that is safe in implants and is chemically inert in acids.' This claim relies on two assumptions in the absence of quality direct supporting evidence: (1) Safety in one biological context directly transfers to other biological contexts and (2) Chemically inert compounds cannot affect human health. There is mounting evidence against ~both~ of these assumptions, and so claims based on them should be treated with caution, and probably as warranting further study. This is no witch-hunt, this is simply using critical thinking and available evidence to gauge the validity of assumptions, and updating the validity of claims based on changes in the validity of underlying assumptions. This process ~is~ the scientific method.
> Nanometer-sized pores matter enormously, (...) but not in ways that make other forms of amorphous silica more toxic than silica gel.
Try replacing your morning cheerios with silica gel and let me know the results. The pores in silica gel are specifically interesting because they allow silica to readily form hydrates. The human body has a lot of water in it. There are absolutely health effects that depend on the physical shape of silica in addition to its chemistry compared to say, consuming an equal mass of fully dense quartz particles.
You'd probably have to eat a lot of silica gel to really feel the effects, but there are other more accessible and serious health concerns that are driven by nanometer or smaller physical effects. The reaction between diet coke and mentos is primarily physical, driven by nanometer-scale surface roughness on the candy. Proteins sometimes fold in abnormal shapes, and in the right circumstances, the presence of a chemically identical but differently-shaped protein can induce other proteins to change shape as well, leading to prion diseases such as Mad Cow and CJD, both of which can be acquired via ingestion of the trigger protein shapes.
The claim that nanometer-sized structural changes in a compound can have no effect on human health when ingested is demonstrably false. Obviously, this calls directly into question the dependent claim that chemically inert compounds can have no possible impact on human health when ingested.
The title style "Evidence shows water does X" tends to make people think "there is concrete evidence that physical water does X", rather than "an abstracted model of spheres intended to mimic some aspect of water predicts that water might do X." When people read the article and find out the methods within don't support the conclusions they feel are presented in the title, they understandably become somewhat hostile.
As other comments note, the actual people doing this work are typically ~very~ aware the limitations of their models and that all results are best interesting fictions, but this typically does not make it into public-facing science communications.
Why the press release would be designed to encourage readers to inuit stronger conclusions that actually supported by the work is left as an exercise to the reader. How might this impact public trust in scientific institutions?
If it makes you feel better, this information isn't even clearly presented in the paper :)
For computational studies like this, one should generally assume that any explicit 'Temperature' or 'Pressure' is a fiction. The important things are the shape of the trends in behavior with T and P. But as this behavior is dependent on a number of other semi-arbitrary parameters, the actual values of T and P themselves with the simulation probably do not map particuarly well to real life.
Also, physicists like to use reduced unitless parameters (e.g. this paper uses T* = kT/e_BB, where e_BB is an energy parameter used in the colloidal model). This is convenient for math, and also keeps pesky reality separate from elegant models.