jb17

> E.g., there are regularly people that are sure they have > solutions to problems that are reducible to solving the > halting problem, but that don't have the theoretical > background to realize it is reducible to the halting > problem or why that means their "solution" doesn't work.

I think you might have gotten this the wrong way: All decidable problems are trivially reducible to the halting problem (just decide them and then map to a halting/non-halting Turing machine). On the other hand, if you can reduce the halting problem to a problem, it means it's undecidable.

I would be curious though which "natural" undecidable problems people claim to solve regularly.

Have you considered that muscle atrophy might be part of your weight less as well? It sounds like you were bound to a hospital bed.

It's also important to note that the supervising culture varies a lot between subjects. Computer scientists are usually spoiled by good supervision, but in the humanities you might see your supervisor only twice a year.. (and I do know people in Oxford in that situation).

OK.. It wasn't clear to me from what you said before that you even viewed disproportionate representation in tech as the problem. I agree with that.

However, as I said below, I think having tech conferences with women present might be more than just a trick to pretend that the problem is solved, but actually be a tiny part of the solution.

Thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed answer. We might actually disagree less than I thought.

However, with your main point I still disagree. If I understand you correctly, you say that the problem can only be fixed bottom up: that we can't fix equal representation in tech by having some conferences with equal representation. I don't think it is that clear cut: for example, having an event with a disproportionately large amount of (1/2) female expert speakers might allow more women at an earlier stage of their career (depending on the event, maybe even high school) to picture themselves on such a career path.

So, within your metaphor, the white car might come out a little pinker after taking a ride in the pink truck...

Apart from that, I completely agree with you and women feeling restricted to other career paths much, much earlier is an important problem to solve. Even your example, the CS 101 class, is probably a later stage in that progress.

> Professional technology workers are not half women. > If disproportionate representation is not discriminatory, what exactly is it?

You seem to answer your own question.

I suppose you are not talking about disproportionate representation of women in tech here?

I don't think ending discrimination is a simple thing and that in this case increasing the visibility of female experts in an area can have nontrivial antidiscriminatory effects (e.g. encouraging young women to go into an area, making women feel more comfortable at a conference, etc.) even if it involves positive discrimination.

Anyway, I'd still be interested to hear from you how (following your metaphor) you would suggest to dismantle the white car directly.

That one of them is the norm and the other one isn't.

OK, you're right, maybe I'm interpolating her argument because it is the only thing the article mentions her saying about why women don't join the gaming industry (or become engineers in general). Saying the problem is that there aren't enough women to hire is just another way of saying that only few women want to join that industry. That is not a problem analysis.

So I read the actual article in Forbes: She argues that the level of sexism in the gaming industry is similar to other male dominated industry and that the game industry just has a bad reputation. She then goes on to encourage women to join the gaming industry. That makes more sense then the sensationalist title/article on gamasutra.

Maybe it's just the low quality of the article that leaves me puzzled, but the Gabrielle Toledanos argument doesn't make sense to me.

According to the article she says that sexism is not the problem, but perceived sexism. So women don't join the gaming industry because they think it's sexist.

Assuming she is right (I'm not saying she is), doesn't that make removing the sexist reputation of the gaming industry the main issue?

I'm not sure Mother Theresa is a good example for anything, but regarding the general argument you are making here:

There is a huge difference between helping one person (decreasing the general suffering by a tiny but attainable amount) and making one person an example (hoping this changes the status quo somehow).

I use xflux on a 64-bit Debian system and it works. I'm not sure, but you might have to specify the location parameters when starting it.

You do realize that the video critiques gender roles in pop culture?

> Emergent phenomena don't have "objectives", mate. GDP is a derived statistic.

Either you are nitpicking (an economic system doesn't have goals ("objectives") in the same way you do), or you're making a pretty strong claim here. If you try to do the latter, I would say you're wrong. Marx has written a good primer on the topic, which shows that the primary objective of capitalist society is capital accumulation.

> countries that actually try to protect their citizens rights and privacy

Haha. I assume you're talking about Germany. Hahaha.

I agree with your main observation, but don't forget that 'jobs' in the sense of selling yourself to pay for your basic survival needs (and maybe a bit more) are historically a fairly recent phenomenon. The negative connotations that come with 'eliminating jobs' all have to do with that.

I think that automation could play an important part in a post-capitalist society.

Yeah, the British public is a bit sensitive when it comes to the army (and the queen). Islam4UK is a good example. They were an openly islamist group that wanted to overthrow the state to implement one based on Sharia law. No one really cared about that until they insulted 'our troops' (which eventually led to them being banned).

As I mentioned somewhere else in this thread, the binary search is not a reduction, because you need to use TSP-decide a polynomial number of times (and for a reduction you reduce to one problem instance).

What you show is that the problem of finding the lowest cost is in FP^NP (the class of function problems solvable in polynomial time with the help of an NP oracle). However, by taking your idea a bit further one can show that TSP is in FP^NP. In fact, it is known that TSP is FP^NP-complete, i.e. it is one of the hardest problems in that class (and thus likely not in FNP, the NP for function problems).

The binary search is not a reduction, because you need to use TSP-decide a polynomial number of times (and for a reduction you reduce to one problem instance). What you show is that your problem TSP-cost-optimize is in FP^NP (the class of function problems solvable in polynomial time with the help of an NP oracle).

I think the author actually adds to the confusion about TSP by being unnecessarily vague.

Both P and NP are classes of decision problems. That means they only contain problems that ask for a yes/no answer. So because TSP asks for a route, it is not just a decision problem, and can't be in NP. However, as the author mentions, NP does in fact contain the TSP-DECIDE problem in the way he defines it.

Moreover, the problem TSP of finding a lowest cost route can be solved by a polynomial time Turing Machine that can use a TSP-DECIDE oracle (i.e. call a constant time function that solves TSP-DECIDE). It is in fact complete for that class FP^NP ("= function problems solvable in polynomial time with an oracle for NP problems"), which means it is one of the hardest problems there. The class FP^NP contains all of FNP (NP for functional problems) and is believed to contain more problems -- so there is a good chance that TSP is not in FNP.