bradfordarner

I'm not sure the Anthropic principle can be applied here. There is a broader data set than that which is relevant for that principle, based on my understanding.

"Against all odds" would seem to be the key words here. There are countless other ethnic and religious groups that were integrated into the larger Muslim culture when Islam was first spreading. The same is the case for Christian Europe. In fact, the Romani people may be a good example of what we would expect to naturally happen to a dispersed and oppressed ethnic group. They have no singular culture, principles, or beliefs; they assumed most aspects of the surrounding culture's mode of life and beliefs.

It isn't a stretch to call the survival of the Jewish people an unexplained historical exception. There are countless historians (Jewish and non-Jewish) who have researched and written on the topic.

Or, am I misunderstanding the application of the Anthropic principle as you are applying it in this context?

Just to throw in an additional perspective of what I find fascinating about this topic.

I don't think that all long lasting things are particularly interesting. Rocks have been around longer than the Jewish people but we don't celebrate that as extraordinary. It is considered perfectly natural. It is noteworthy when something is unnaturally long lasting; when other peoples/belief system were put under similar pressures the results have been drastically different. Imagine 50 people are dragged under water on a beach by a horrible undertow and held underwater for an hour. 2 out of the 50 survive while the other 48 don't; the 2 who survived are definitely of interest because we would want to know how they survived.

> Science isn't free. Also, how on earth does one go about such an experiment humanely and in a financially prudent manner?

I think it is outside the scope of this paper. But that is part of the thing that struck me as being so bizarre. This isn't a paper about the efficacy of the spell on an individual level. It seems to be a paper that is discussing how a belief in X may have high potential risk to the holder of belief X and, yet, be beneficial to a group of believers in X. That is an interesting but counterintuitive idea. I could see the same model being applied to experimental cancer treatments on a purely conceptual level.

> "duh...because they are superstitious barbarians"

This is admittedly 100% rhetoric on my part and may be "too much". However, there is really the way that authors' view of these villagers came across to me. I'm sure that is partly due to spending time in Africa and the very positive impression of the people that I came away with.

As you said the authors start by mentioning: "unfalsifiable religious claims". So, they seem to start the paper by classifying this a one of those "unfalsifiable religious claims". But, they then immediately classify it as a "false belief" without any evidence for such being the case AND the "false" modifier being irrelevant within the context of the paper.

> The authors come to exactly the same conclusion

Once again, that is what I find so bizarre about the article. I guess it is just me. But, it doesn't sound like a scientist conducting a study; it sounds like one part cultural commentary and one part science. The conclusion doesn't seem to require the cultural inferences about belief systems and their falsifiability or lack thereof. Hence, it struck the wrong chord with me.

I guess I would like to believe that we (i.e. all science lovers) are really looking for a better understanding of the world and that we can do so without pre-conceived judgements of something that is foreign to us.

Certainly a possibility.

I totally agree with you that is seems downright ludicrous to think that a spell will cause bullets to bounce off of someone. We have to take the author at their word that such is actually the belief of those using the spell. (My experience in Africa would tell me that may be a rather naive understanding of the villagers' expectations of the spell's effectiveness. From what I've seen in Africa, it seems more likely that the villagers believed that the bullets would miss them or go around them; it just strikes me as a little too stupid to be believable.)

All of that seems irrelevant for the conclusions that the author is trying to reach. The belief is labelled as "false" without any evidence given for such being the case until the conclusion where it is written as "(false) belief". In other words, the word "false" is an unnecessary modifier. Hence, it seems like it is being used as a rhetorical device rather than a meaningful addition to the article.

Haha!! Well said, sir!

This paper leaves me feeling uncomfortable. There are so many problems with it on so many levels and, yet, I think it is fascinating in the sense that it is applying a well known concept to a novel context.

Personally, I have a hard time seeing how this "bulletproofing" technique could possibly be true. However, I find it incredibly disrespectful and lacking in basic scientific integrity to go into a paper with the assumption that it is a false belief and then making no attempt to justify why it is a false belief other than "duh...because they are superstitious barbarians". Whether the belief is false or not seems to be totally irrelevant in trying to show that the authors' conclusions are valid. Clearly, the members of the village believed that it was true. Because of their belief in the effectiveness of the "treatment" the results were x, y, and z.

As an aside, it seems weird to start with the premise that the belief is inherently false when the village was able to protect and free itself. You could very well make a claim that the "treatment" was effective from a scientific perspective; it would require replication in order to be validated. Why should I automatically assume it is invalid? That strikes me as the opposite of scientific enquiry.

The cultural hubris contained in this paper overshadows the conclusion. This sounds more like a piece of literature from an "enlightened" European priest visiting a wayward tribe of "barbarians" during the 19th century colonization of Africa than a modern, scientifically-rigorous scholarly article.

Lighten the mood and then talk to the universe/world (whatever you want to call the something that we are all a part of).

I know. I know. That might sound weird and all. But, it is the only thing that helps me. I grew up a very calm person but after many years in the military and a couple of combat deployments I seemed to develop a very strong aggression issue. I'm calm most of the time, but when something gets to me I can get into a deadly loop where it just gets worse and worse. It starts to feed on itself. Then, my wife can say something small and my internal monologue gets darker and darker and whinier and whinier.

So, yes, don't let it get to the "edge point"...that is hard. That takes a long time of understanding yourself (talking to the universe or journaling is the best way that I feel I make progress in that area too.) So, the first step when you get to the edge is to return to being happy. It doesn't matter what it takes. Watch a stupid video on YouTube. Just get back to a place of "happy" even if just for a moment.

Lighten the mood. Then, start journaling. But, the goal of the journaling shouldn't be whining: "why me, oh why me??" I've done that a lot. It is really not helpful at all. It makes it worse over the long-term.

So, what do you journal/talk-to-the-universe about? You start investigating who you are and why the current situation is making you upset. Start asking yourself: why am I angry. But ultimately, the goal is to drill down until you find the good in everything. For example: "Why am I angry that Joe is fighting me so hard with what I know is a bad direction as far as design patterns is concerned? Why do I care at all? Because I want to built software that I'm proud of. Don't we all want to build software that is well built and a meaningful creation? So, what Joe doesn't want that? Of course, Joe wants that as well. We just have different ideas about how to make the best software possible. By why am I so fired up and angry about it? Because I don't want to believe that I'm coming to work each day for nothing..."

Just keep going...even 15 minutes can make a major difference. I've had times in life where it took an hour and sometimes when it went on for over 6 hours. There isn't a goal in terms of what you are getting at. Productivity is certainly NOT the goal of the exercise. Just talking/writing is the goal of the exercise. In the end, my wife is happier and I feel that is the larger goal. I want to be kind to other people, especially my wife, rather than burdening people with negativity.

There seems to be a basic problem in this argument: a lack of definition of distraction or any discussion of its value.

For example, lets assume the consciousness is an illusion, a sort of biological trick of evolution. In that case, I'm not sure why we couldn't say that all the stimuli from advertisements, Facebook, Twitter, etc. are equal in value to "focused conscious awareness". They are stimuli of a different sort but qualitatively no different than the stimuli of "focused conscious awareness". I'm not sure why we would inherently assume that "focused conscious awareness" is of greater value. There are tons of people now who are living in a permanently distracted state and they seem to have a conscious experience that is not qualitatively different than other people's. They don't slip into a coma or get concussions or die.

Heck, maybe distraction is a better state than attention. After all, don't people complain of headaches when they focus on a problem for too long?

Honestly, this wasn't calling you out at all. I think it is great. It is a very well done presentation. You did a good enough job that it made me interested in the product.

Nice good catch!

I totally think this was all staged. I would love to think that they've made some huge innovation in OCR.

In any case, it is a good example of an MVP.

Great MVP pitch!

After signing up for the Beta, it hit me. Every single bit of this could have been staged without having done any coding at all!! Brilliant!!

I'm not sure if that is actually the case, but theoretically it is totally possible. This is a great example of the classic MVP pitch: validate interest before building.

Interesting article from an opinion point of view but I find very little real substance behind his arguments.

He is fight the original myth with his own myth except that his myth is founded upon his own assumptions and intuitions as opposed to those of someone else.

It seems more likely that we simply don't know the answer to many of these questions yet because we still have major disagreements around exactly what intelligence is. To use Richard Feyman's famous quote: if we can't yet build it, then we don't understand it.

> Basically, what I'm saying is that humans always describe things in terms of the technology of their age, but that doesn't mean it's wrong. Better technology means better description. Birds are unlike planes, but analyzing them using the model of airfoil we developed is a good idea and leads to more and better understanding.

Totally. "Better technology means better description" is a great idea/concept here.

Since reading Michel Foucault while I was studying in the UK (someone I feel like I never even heard mentioned in US university), it made me rethink the "what/essence" of the things we do/build. Just like the supposed lesson-learned (or potentially still to be learned) in the finance world after the financial crisis: models are models not reality. We develop a culture around the descriptions that we use but in the end we aren't truly describing the essence of the "what (i.e. the thing described)". We are layering various descriptions, cultural-ideas, and pre-conceptions on top of the thing itself in order to better communicate some aspect of it to other people. In a sense, different technologies gives us a shared set of concepts with which we can communicate with each other.

Your point is great. Just because they are "descriptions" doesn't mean they are wrong/right. They are a shared language that we use to communicate with each other complex ideas and, hence, we better understand previously wish-washy concepts.

Interesting.

I'm not entirely sure that "optimal" has an agreed upon definition. At best, "optimal" is relative to the system within which it is being applied. "Optimal" in a Trump world is very different from "optimal" in a Bernie Sanders world. Optimization seems to require some objective. In a practical sense, you cannot optimize a piece of software if you don't know what you are optimizing for.

It is a bold premise that the evolutionary process and human technological civilization have the same optimization goals.

So true! 50 years ago they were using concepts from early computing to describe how the human brain works. With each new wave of advances in computing, there is a new set of analogies that philosophers and neuroscientists adopt to say: "See, the brain is like this". It Seems problematic to me. Models are models, not reality. They may be good for descriptive effects, but that doesn't me they are anything other than story-telling devices.

As a tangent, this seems to me to be a problem with Daniel Dennett's ideas and why, in the end, David Chalmers seems to be gaining ground with every passing year.

How? Why? According to what line of reasoning?

What do you mean by "we" and "nature"?

How is it that everyone (82% Nationally) seems to agree that the most critical step forward (Funding Research in Renewable Energy) is a good thing BUT we spend all of our time arguing about whether or not global warming is happening??

This reminds me of a failing, early-stage start up. Rather than just getting to the grind and finding a way to make money, it is so easy to just spend time dreaming and argue about the way forward and spending your time ignoring complaining customers while I'm sitting around pondering how to change the world.

Of course, the irony is that Trump, an ardent capitalist and pursuer of wealth, ran on a platform of decreasing the influence of money in politics. According to his 100 day plan, he is going to put a number of serious barriers on lobbying.

I found this out after the election. It wouldn't have changed my vote had I known about it before the election (way too many other issues with Trump) but, at the very least, it is a hope that maybe something good will come out of this presidential cycle.

> If you throw a bag of a trillion^trillion^trillion particles into a purely self contained environment (i.e. the Universe), and let it stir for a while - whatever is going on - at least from a materialist perspective - is random.

This seems to lead to a meaningless/useless definition paradox. 'Randomness' comes to mean everything and nothing. This is one of the things that led me away from an interest in the materialist/physicalist position. Like you said elsewhere, it seems hard to swallow the idea that all that we can achieve in defining 'randomness' is a negative definition. Personally, I find it problematic that materialism has no positive definition of what 'randomness' is and does not seem capable of offering a meaningful/useful definition.

I would have to disagree with the other responses to this question. However, I cannot disagree completely. Learning Erlang/Elixir is a subject full of nuance.

Learning the procedural aspects of Erlang or Elixir is very easy. In that sense I agree with the previous responses. Erlang gets a lot of bad rap for the syntax. But, it is really no more difficult that any other language to learn. The syntax can easily be learned in a day. Elixir's syntax can be learned even more quickly because it looks a lot like Ruby or Python. Thus, you can certainly start write scripts in Erlang or Elixir relatively quickly. My guess is that the average, experienced developer could start writing basic scripts in an hour or two. However, those scripts would be entirely procedural in nature, unless they are already very familiar with functional programming and pattern matching.

The first hurdle in Erlang/Elixir is the functional aspects of the language and understanding the power of pattern matching. Both of these require rethinking how you build a program. But, both of these are also incredibly, incredibly worthwhile and powerful. Elixir in particular is a great medium for better understanding these concepts because it is a very approachable language. Getting over this hurdle did not happen over night for me. I rarely used recursion in Ruby or Javascript (there is no tail call optimization). On the other hand, in functional languages recursive functions are the norm. I learned to really love them with Erlang/Elixir and now it frustrates me when I can't use them elsewhere because it has become much easier for me to reason about recursive functions than loops. Overall, functional programming and pattern matching are amazing things to learn but really grokking them won't happen over night.

The next hurdle with Erlang/Elixir is understanding OTP. This is THE incredibly powerful aspect of the Erlang VM. However, it is also not an easy subject matter to approach unless you already have a strong background in distributed systems. I did not. Hence, it took me a while to compose programs that actually used the Erlang VM for what it was built for, OTP. Thus, this portion of the Erlang/Elixir learning curve felt long and slow. I was not used to spawning new processes on a whim and passing messages back and forth. Initially I would send messages only one way without realizing that the appropriate pattern is to view it in a standard server-client relationship where there should always be a request and a response. Eventually I started viewing all the little applications running inside my larger program as self-contained capsules/servers that communicated among each other. However, it took me weeks of really intense study to get comfortable with. But, once you get comfortable with OTP you have a lot of built-in power (people rarely mention Mnesia, DTS, ETS gen_server but they are awesome).

Overall, my experience with Erlang/Elixir has shown me one big thing: pick the best tool for the job and there are a lot of jobs that you don't need OTP for. When you need to build Whatsapp, you should pick Erlang/Elixir. When you want to build a simple web app that only has a couple of end points and much of the dynamism is handled on the front-end, use Go, Node, or my personal favorite Clojure. Erlang/Elixir shine in the context for which they were built. But, they are not built for everything. And, if you only want the procedural aspects of the languages, there is no reason to choose them over Go, Node, Clojure, or Scala...all of which have solid approaches to concurrency.

Interestingly enough, this was built with Angular 1.

Also, after doing a couple of searches, it is clear that this is a treasure trove of interesting articles that never made it to the front-page of HN. If I was simply "surfing" for interesting things related to programming/startups/development/etc., this may well be more worthwhile than Google.

Listening to the audio will certainly do the trick. He runs through a lot of the big picture explanations of the problems that he was working on with the whiteboard but those aren't primary. By his own telling, all of the problem details are really just to frame the principles that he is communicating.

That being said, I watched with the video. I didn't try to only listen to the audio. So, it might be harder to follow without the visual aspect. And, he randomly pops in the principles. I can't really say that the highlights were only at the beginning or ending of lectures.

Yes, I did. Sorry about the mistake.

I watched through the series a couple of months ago. I will do my best to provide a couple of the highlights that I really liked. Unfortunately, I didn't keep a detailed journal of the course as a I watched. I really should have.

General Concept:

Richard Hamming is a Turing Award winning Computer Scientist and Mathematician. He spent a long and illustrious career at Bell Labs. As with many other promising scientists of the day, Hamming took part in the Nuclear Bomb effort and worked in Los Alamos. He refers to himself throughout the series as little more than a scientific janitor at Los Alamos. However, he realized during his time at Los Alamos that he had the rare opportunity to observe and interact with some of the most famous and brilliant scientists in the world. He decided that he wanted to join their ranks. However, after the war, he found that his effort was blocked by the fact that he didn't really know how to become great. There was no instruction course in become a great scientist. Thus, he set out to find the principles for himself. This series is his summary of the decades of investigation and personal experience in becoming a great scientist.

--------

Principles:

The following are a list of things that stood out in the series. Hamming had a number of principles that he constantly harped on. I will try to do my best to note some of them here and explain the context:

"Luck favors the prepared mind"

The longer you stay with a problem the higher the likelihood that you are going to find a creative moment somewhere in the mix. This idea reverberates throughout the entire series. In some sense, Hamming is trying to break apart the luck part from the preparation part of the equation throughout all of his talks. Interestingly enough, he declares that he doesn't believe that there is a formula for creativity (or at least a formula that any of us can use or know about). Instead, he harps on persistence as a part of this equation. You have to go after a problem for a long period of time. Once you have spent long enough with the problem that it has mades its way into your dreams, you know that you are approaching the point were rare epiphany moments are possible.

"With that which you learn from other you will follow, with that which you learned for yourself you will lead"

This is another quote that you hear time and time again throughout the series. By this he means that you actively have to work through practice problems and concepts yourself. He has found a vast difference in his understanding of topics that he passively soaked up and those subjects that he active dug into and made sure that he understood. In some sense, he used the Feynman technique. He pushed himself to being able to understand the concepts well enough that he could explain it fully and confidently to others.

"Find the people who are doing important things and help them do those important things."

The series is full of examples of thus. Hamming made it a habit to go after interesting problems with other people at Bell labs. He sought out opportunities to contribute to other people's work. It was clear the Claude Shannon was a genius, so Hamming made every effort to help Shannon out by providing computing assistance for Shannon's projects.

One of the fascinating habits that Hamming had was to grab lunch with different departments at Bell Labs. He would make friends but lose them quickly as well. He was constantly pursuing people with the question: "What are the big problems in your space?" He would then follow up with: "Well, why aren't you working on them?" This made people uncomfortable. However, Hamming made the decision that he was going to do 'grade-A' work, as he refers to it. Hence, he knew that he needed to associate with people who were doing grade-A work. If they weren't then those people were useless to him. He laments that fact that many brilliant people at Bell Labs went down as making no significant contribution even though they were far smarter than Hamming because, for what ever reason, were hesitant to tackle big problems with other people working on big problems. You don't get the feeling at all in the series that Hamming was apologetic for aggressively pursuing big problems. He wanted to do great work...period.

"If things are changing slow, listen to the expert. If things are changing rapidly, experts are only good for providing historical context."

This is one of the gems from the series. Hamming says that he used this as a rule of when to listen to established experts and when to ignore them in favor of the possibility for something else. I wouldn't say that Hamming advocated rejecting expert opinion in the situation that things are changing rapidly. Rather, he viewed their opinion as carrying just as much weight as everyone else's. One of the examples that Hamming brought up numerous times was the switch from analog to digital. He had a lot of co-workers who got stuck on analog computing. They were brilliant men who fought the the move to digital computing. The analog experts had countless reasons why digital computing would not succeed. So, Hamming tried to judge it by how quickly computing technology was changing. He realized that things were simply changing too fast for anyone to claim some sort of supreme expertise on the subject matter. Hence, he didn't discard the expert opinions, he took them as just another data point that weighed just as much as all the other data points. He didn't make any 'decisions' he simply refused to take a hard stand on the subject-matter until it was resolved through history. In other words, this principle is more about staying open to possibilities rather than rejecting them outright and putting all your chips in one basic based on an expert's opinion.

"In order to do the work that you want to do, you have to do it on your own time at the beginning. Only then will others give you time to do it."

This principle is quite possibly the one that arises more than any other through out the series. Hamming found it frustrating in his early years that they wouldn't let him research what he really wanted to research. It was a catch-22 situation. In order to show the importance of the work that he wanted to do, he would have already had to have done the research. Otherwise, his directors wouldn't give him the time to do so. One night he was reading a random magazine and realized that he was wasting his time that he could have otherwise been using to conduct the research that he wanted to conduct. Thus, from that moment, he decided to not waste any more time. No one was going to give him permission to start his desired research. He had to give himself permission and take the lead. He had to start by doing it in his free time. He cut magazines and TV out of his life. He spent less time with friends and on leisurely activities. Instead, he devoted his spare time to doing the research that he really wanted to be doing. In the end, he was able to do enough in his spare time that he took it to his directors at Bell Labs and they then gave him the time to continue pursuing the research on the company dime. However, he didn't stop there. He took that opportunity to fill his newly spared time with other projects. He kept it up for decades.

"Stay abreast of new things"

There were so many new things arising everyday in computing that it felt overwhelming for Hamming. However, he knew that he needed to stay aware of what was happening. He didn't take that to mean that he needed to become an expert in everything but he needed to be aware of it. Hence, a lot of his spare moments in the day were filled reading about new developments and talking with people who were working on interesting projects.

"Friday afternoons were for big ideas"

Hamming had the habit of setting aside friday afternoons for thinking about big ideas. He was religious about this time. He would avoid everything else that he could so that he would have friday afternoons free to think about where the future might lead.

I wish I had the time to pick out more principles that I gleaned from watching the series. There are countless nuggets throughout the series. He spends a lot of time talking about the details of the different projects that he worked on. However, those are nothing but stories to frame the principles that he is trying to communicate. The above principles that I have listed at only a few examples. His stories certainly help give more context and make it easier to remember the principles. It would be easy to write a full commentary on his lectures.

EDIT: I've added a couple more principles that I remembered. However, nothing replaces actually hearing Hamming tell it in his lectures. I watched them at 2x speed on YouTube. It is easy to follow even at that speed. Hamming speaks relatively slowly at normal speed. So, 2x speed just feels like a quick conversational pace.

I'm hoping that you were not the one who down-voted a my perfectly legitimate point of view.

I agree with you that there is a little bit of a straw man attack going on here...if you haven't read Christensen's book. That being said, the author does present a number of cases in which Christensen's theory does not seem to apply. The general piece of advice that many people take from the Innovator's Dilemma is the idea of entering at the low end of the market where well-established firms will not compete with you. You can innovate in a much more narrow area with a small team and survive off of thin margins as you continue improving your value proposition. This is a very nice idea, but it is most certainly not some sort of universal formula for making money. I think the author of the article brings out some interesting cases of where this breaks down.

As far as the ARM processor...I'm not quite sure how that relates to Christensen's thesis that disruptive innovation enters at the lower end of the market and moves up. The ARM processor is most definitely an example of a sustaining innovation. Of course you could make the claim that the ARM processor allowed for a significant software advantage at a still reasonable cost, still fulfilling Christensen's thesis. I think that would be a weak argument and the rational error contained within is rather visible to any who was alive when the iPhone was released.

In any case, the article was well composed even if you disagree with his thesis. I didn't not comment that I felt as though this article was a masterpiece that was going destroy the Innovator's Dilemma. I simply enjoyed the article and thought the contrarian point of view was thought-provoking. In addition, the article did not claim to be an overview and rehashing of Christensen's entire thesis. He made very clear at the outset that he was summarizing Christensen's perspective. Hence, if you didn't like the article, fine. However, it annoys me that my innocent comment expressing enjoyment is discarded as if it were written without thought or consideration.

This is a really well written and interesting perspective. I really enjoy hearing contrarian opinions to commonly held beliefs. Well done!

I agree with you so much. I find myself digging into Erlang docs more and more.

That being said, I think there needs to be a communal effort to improve Erlang documentation. It is very terse. One of the points brought up in Garret Smiths talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MvKLOecT1I

I got the book last weekend. Chris has done a wonderful job!

For me, metaprogramming is one of the things that was a deciding factor with Elixir, in addition to all the other functional programming aspects that are part of the language. I'm most definitely not an amazing polyglot with a wide degree of experience with every single functional language out there, but this feature pushed me to invest time to learn Elixir. Metaprogramming has saved me immense time in numerous applications in Ruby. So, I consider it a critical thing to learn.

Of course, after investing time in Elixir you very quickly learn the power of the Erlang VM. Elixir is like a gateway drug! I now have a consistent mix of Erlang and Elixir syntax in the stuff I'm playing around with. One of the chief complaints for people with Erlang is the syntax. Elixir makes the entire proposition of learning Erlang far more appealing...and then you really it is all actually Erlang under the hood!

And, one of the big things that Elixir adds on top of the Erlang VM is metaprogramming. There aren't a lot of great sources out there on the subject. Chris's book is a great addition to the slowly growing Elixir library.

Agreed. This is a great example of a "straw man attack". He sets up an intellectually shallow definition of a philosophical ideal and then somehow manages to connect it to Florida politics...Brilliant!

He deals so fluently in generalities that he starts sounding like a new-age prophet predicting the next earthquake that will blight humanity.

Thank you for the note. I hadn't visited the github yet.

I will be interested to see whether people can whittle down the respective benchmarks.