15 karma · joined April 18, 2015
E.g. people used to say "neural networks are a simple, flexible functional form for y = f(X,theta)". This turned out to be wrong: SGD training of neural networks has more advantages than the flexibility of the functional form. But it was a good hypothesis and starting point.
SVMs and decision trees have no statistical justification I know of. Low rank matrix approximation and k-means are justified by latent variables and non-parametric kernel methods respectively. I agree these justifications came after the fact, but they do give a way to understand how these models work.
Most importantly, all of the small tasks surrounding training a model are purely statistical, e.g. cross validation, different measures of accuracy, handling endogenous variables, etc.
If I have not studied statistics I will not have a solid foundation in statistics, even if I have studied probability and linear algebra.
You try to uncover X'ism in tech by pointing out ways in which common industry practice Y disadvantage people in group X. But to do this, you had to claim that people in group X would perform worse when practice Y was in effect. Oops! You're an X'ist yourself!
E.g. X = age, Y = working to deadlines/long hours, X = women, Y = speaking up in meetings, etc.
Statistics is a powerful lens through which to view all data science. E.g. supervised learning is building a model of the conditional probability P(y|x). Again, I am biased, but I think that methods that do not have some statistical interpretation are unlikely to be useful. E.g. if we take the graph of Facebook users and apply some matrix decomposition algorithm, who cares? What can we do with this decomposition? What does it predict?
I'm biased, but I think that data science is statistics, and therefore the foundations of data science is statistics and probability theory. If you want to understand data science at a fundamental level, I would suggest taking courses in these areas.
The other benefit is that it enables companies to do innovation where they would not have been able to keep the idea secret in the first place. E.g. a pharmaceutical drug whose chemical composition would be trivial to reverse engineer. In that case, the patent does not serve the purpose of making the knowledge public in exchange for a monopoly. What it does do, though, is incentivize innovation be rewarding the inventor with the "rights" to that idea.
The real problem with patents is when patents are of trivial things that anyone could have thought of without much effort. That is why I don't support any software patents, because it's so much easier to patent trivial things in the software world than the physical world.
I had always wanted and expected to achieve great things. I think this is a natural and healthy desire. But when I looked back on the last 10 years I realized I wanted to be a political figure (when I was left wing) then a famous scientist, then a famous scientist in another field, etc. The only common thread was the desire to be great and to have a big (positive) impact on the world.
To let go of this required me to realize that a small probability of having a big impact on the world was not better than the certainty of having a small impact. Once I was open to making a small impact, it became very easy to see the value in my work, and to focus on enjoying the fortunate position of having an easy job that paid well.
Today tech accounts for only 43% of the idnex, compared with 65% in March 2000 [just before the tech bubble burst]. Its P/E ratio of 22.15 is nowhere near the stratospheric levels seen 15 years.
Of course the thing with bubbles, is that everyone is always saying that we are in a bubble all the time, because to say otherwise is to look like a fool.
Therefore, two men giggling about dongles is viewed as inappropriate[0], while the hackathon "Stupid Shit No One Needs and Terrible Ideas" was widely lauded on HN in spite of containing body shaming[1] and explicit sexual content. The latter was not considered inappropriate because it was critical of tech culture, which is seen as being dominated by White males, and therefore deserving of highly negative satire.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_vigilantism#PyCon_Dong...
[1] http://www.stupidhackathon.com/ see "Intellectual Babes Calendar"
That is why right wing writers sometimes refer to postmodernism as "Cultural Marxism". I don't like the term cultural marxism because it sounds conspiratorial, when really all that is going on is people using big words and the fear of appearing stupid to cow other people into submission.
That's just completely wrong, watch the video again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndm_RSvAgO4
And your analysis is very shallow. Of course speech was "free" in the legal sense, that is not the issue. The issue is that even though his honest opinion was that in the long run, women's approach might not be a big disadvantage, he was forced to recant and give the "right" answer.
EDIT: for downvoters: why is it ok to point out diversity politics in universities and not in US politics?
It would be interesting to see studies that isolated the effects of genes and environment.
Sure, these things exist at a different granularity, but that doesn't explain why one is ok and the other is evil.
1. The Jewish connection to Israel has been exaggerated by Zionists. The Jewish people were one of many living in present day Israel/Palestine (see [0])
2. The existence of a Palestinian nation or kingdom is irrelevant, because a group of people can have a unique identity regardless of who is ruling them. Furthermore, there is no reason why the granularity of Jewish identity is the only relevant kind of identity. If Palestinians really only did possess a pan-Arab identity, it doesn't logically follow that they can be pushed out of where they live into any other Arab country.
3. Palestinians have been a recognizable nation since 700AD
3. Having left Israel and lived in Europe and other places for so long, Jewish people lost their right to return.
I can't help you see an analogy that you are unwilling to see. At some point people have to use judgment and intuition, beyond mere facts. In any case, here are the key points
1. A group of people wish to establish a new society in an area of land.
2. There are already people living in that land.
3. Some attempts are made to justify this by claiming that the people living there do not comprise a nation.
4. Arguing for peaceful coexistence in such circumstances is hollow.
I suggest you look into the history of Palestinians, their genetics and history. For example, Ashkenazi Jews and Palestinians are genetically very similar. Some hypothesize that Palestinians are descendants of Jews who converted to Islam.
Regarding the solution to the problem of Jewish people lacking a homeland, I don't have an easy solution for that. But at the very least a solution would involve acknowledging the similarities between Zionism and European Nationalism. You say the Jewish story is incomparable to other situations, but I think the parallels I've drawn are sufficient for most people to see that there is some discrepancy between how American liberals approach Israel, vs other kinds of ethnic nationalism.
You seem to treat it as a detail that the land where Zionists would be autonomous, was already occupied by non-Jews. The desire for Palestinians or Kurds to create a state is a different matter since they already lived there.
Your argument reminds me of the "terra nullius" argument used to justify the invasion of Australia. Being pedantic about the definition of a nation does't fly when discussing the terra nullius doctrine, and it's no more reasonable when discussing Zionism.
The majority of European invaders of America desired to establish new nations where old ones existed, wiping out, marginalizing or assimilating the existing ones, and creating societies where White Europeans were dominant, and which existed to preserve White European culture. This is equivalent to mainstream Zionism.
Now Einstein was a Labor Zionist. Imagine a European who roundly condemned the atrocities of European invaders of America, but supported them because he believed that ordinary Europeans and Native Americans had more in common than they had differences, and there were no real barriers to living in peace in a socialist democracy. Rings kind of hollow, doesn't it?