So many words to say so little. In other words, a Harvard PhD in Psychology!
622 karma · joined November 7, 2017
I was lucky enough to sneak through the fence and explore the abandoned Polaroid plant in Waltham along 128 before it was torn down. So many miles of metal piping, so many valves, so many Giant Red Buttons!
The safety of cars for literally everyone in the world EXCEPT for the 1-5 people inside that car is not considered.
It was only a few years ago (2016, in Paris) that Christoph von Hugo, a safety engineer from Mercedes, was asked how a self-driving car would handle a "trolley problem" type situation, where the car could either hit a group of pedestrians, or swerve in a way that could injure or kill the driver, and he said, "Save the one in the car."
"Science" is not a singular object, nor a single method, nor even a set of ideas; what we must concern ourselves with is Science as it is practiced in our society.
Can one do Science without funding? Certainly! Any child with a simple telescope can observe celestial bodies in motion, reason about observations, make conjectures, and test them against more data. But this is a toy example, and this young scientist's influence may extend to a handful of child peers, and perhaps an interested parent.
The "Science" that concerns us almost always includes published, peer-reviewed research. And thus, it is inherently and obviously political. First, and most obviously: how does one become recognized as a peer whose work is eligible for publication? It necessarily requires many years of study, apprenticeship, and supervised practice. Admission to these ranks requires scholastic and social preparation, and is literally subject to the vote of a committee. That we pretend this process operates entirely on "merit" is but one of the many delusions and useful fictions we tell ourselves when we speak of a "Science" that is somehow "not political."
Second, consider not the training of new scientists, but the actual conduct of research. All research must be "sponsored" by someone, in rare cases, by the wealthy scientist themself – the exception that proves the rule. The sponsoring entity always has a material interest in the science it is funding, whether it is to extend the shelf life of canned goods, to more cheaply deposit thin strips of metal onto a substrate, or to meaningfully improve the accuracy of a weapon system guidance module. It is left as an exercise to the reader to discern the various ways that this process is clearly and nakedly "political."
I feared the worst upon viewing this article's title, yet held to a slender hope that the author might address the real threats of using science to achieve political ends, such as that posed by eugenics, or by nuclear weapons research. Reader, my hope was in vain.
We appear to have here another member of our society's establishment who has become too accustomed to unquestioning deference, yelping like a hit dog because, for instance, a presumptuous collection of students and faculty has dared suggest that perhaps UC Berkeley's $70,000 annual grants from the Genealogical Eugenics Institute Fund might be not only better named but more prudently distributed.*
One wonders if there is a corollary to Godwin's Law that stipulates that the first person to draw a comparison to Stalin has already ceded the argument?
*(this happened in October of 2020, you can look up the fund by name).
Tesla announces humanoid robot: 190 comments.
Rain at the summit of Greenland: 1 comment, after 7 hours.
While too simple, I think by analogy of a whirlpool current in a stream: we would not be surprised at all to observe that a given molecule of water participating in the whirlpool pattern at time (t) has only a (p)% chance of being in the pattern at time (t+1).
If humans are "machines," then who built us?
Can I tell your customers that the software you're selling them is only built for "low consequence" applications?
I'm well aware of the admixture of folklore, experience, and caffeine-fueled inspiration that constitutes much of the software that runs our world.
An American Airlines DC-10 crashed after takeoff from Chicago in 1979 (?), after one engine separated from the wing. At the time, it was the deadliest crash in the US.
Seriously, though: software "engineering" could actually earn the name, if we had rigorous professional standards, regulatory oversight, and product liability.
If I may speak slightly out of turn to a stranger, using a possible & currently imagined future person less scrupulous does not modify in any way your obligation, however you perceive it, to act ethically.
It's tragic that only the threat of a deadly disease could compel such a change, but perhaps we may find other levers to help us achieve such widespread beneficial changes in the future?
The debates are over and we are already living with the consequences of burning up so much fossil fuel. But your snark is, uh, really funny! Ha ha!
(Reference: In 2017, Boeing booked over $22 BILLION in revenue from the US government. https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2020/01/02/ho... )
(Full disclosure: I ported a prototype version of my company's globe data viz in 2013 using Three.js - it's terrific! Those folks are the real heroes in this story.)
Saying "APT29" or "CozyBear" doesn't make the accusation any more credible.
If multiple US agencies are trumpeting the same story, you really must ask yourself "Why? Why this? Why now?"
It's pretty amusing, in a depressing way, to see how quickly so many otherwise intelligent people can be made to snap to attention and fight the Russian Menace with a few anonymous government claims.
It's too easy for employees to subtly edit or shape data to please their managers / directors / shareholders. It can be as subtle as "cleaning" the data by removing records with "noisy" or "unreliable" data, or "correcting" outliers.
In the Waymo case, I consider self-disclosure to be self-serving.