logicrook

When I was in high-school, reading a lot of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Kant, and Stoics, I got the idea that if you thought hard about a difficult issue and couldn't decide on your stance, then you should just throw a coin and go with it as if it was coming from your heart. It worked pretty well.

>Which are sadly fictional.

For context, these are reviews lampooning the style of modern horrible reviews, applied to some landmark TCS papers.

So I'd say these reviews being authentic would be very sad.

>I suspect the tumblr blog may be as well, though I don't know the language in biology reviews.

I hope sending some of the most hateful ones would get the reviewer a good scolding, not a good laugh.

For those who like to read these, be sure to read the hilarious "We are sorry to inform you" by Simone Santini [0]. It's quite hilarious, and illustrates most common tropes of bad reviewers.

[0] https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/misc/reject.pdf

>yeah you are right in terms of concept art; I figured that unfortunately more often than not the lines between concept, mood, detailing etc tend to be blurred depending on who looks at it; Also this is not going to replace individual character design or other specific assets, but might remove scalability issues w/ project that require a huge number of different backgrounds, texture variations.

You can already do that in 3D if the overall concepts have been decided and some basic assets are there. Just switching the textures, lightning conditions, and some predefined building blocks do basically the same thing as this algorithm, except it's already part of the pipeline, and it gives you much more since it's 3D.

The other thing is that these algorithms look indecently good when you see a thumbnail, but very bad if you're looking at it too closely. These cool 'concept art' pieces that look good are 90% of what people see, but they do not represent 10% of the concept art work; most of it are boring details of joints, how the blade is strapped to the costume, how windows open, unsexy stuff as can be (that you can't do with such algorithms).

But Erewhon came in 1872, and contained many ideas that are still very strong (emergent life, creation of the technological system and clash with the ancient order (Church))...

It's a bit like the 'Seinfeld is unfunny' trope; even at the time, some people found it unfunny. It does not mean that this effect does not play a role, but you seldom hear "well, Copernicus is such a greaaat guy for discovering that the Earth revolves around the Sun", while it does suffer from it.

And I wouldn't be surprised if the Greeks had devised such stories illustrating some mathematical concepts; it's just that more than 150 years ago, the audience for 'geeky stories' was not so big, as well as the potential writers for such stories weren't so numerous (although Gauss seems a bit cheeky on his portrait). HN just wasn't there.

No, it's a gross misunderstanding of what is concept art. A concept art piece is about the idea, not the style; if you take a famous protagonist, say batman, you can have it drawn in a medieval, realistic, sci-fi version, drawn in a stylized, realistic, cartoon way; in each case you will recognize him because the idea, the shape language, have nothing to do with the style of the drawing.

Even for illustrative work, where it can give you a good base, it still sucks, because for actual painters this step (thumbnailing) is actually the quickest; most of the time-consuming painting process is 'finishing', or 'detailing' the rough.

However, where it's great is in giving the ability to inexperienced people to paint well. The hard part of the painting is getting the lightning, color scheme, perspective right, but the finishing process is quite mechanical. So it could ease the outsourcing of some art assets creation.

This is more from the perspective of the language designer, not from a "you get a binary, is it malware" one, in which case Turing-completeness basically has no importance. So for an example...

Many exploits use stackoverflows to get the execution of arbitrary code. You can prove that in some bounded languages such things cannot happen, regardless of the inputs the program gets.

Obviously you still rely on assumptions such as "the OS is not going to do random things with the memory", but that's outside of your power anyway.

Well, take things that way: if your language is not Turing-complete, you could lock things down so that no crazy stuff happens, and prove that there is no way to bypass the security --assuming this problem is decidable, which can be the case if the language is not Turin-complete, but is hopeless otherwise.

So it's a bit like saying "well, both are dogs so both can bite", when one is well-trained and leashed, and the other is loose and raging.

Most of the transcript of the video is on the main page (http://miegakure.com/), along with illustrative images and gifs.

They evoke how their inspiration was flatland, which when I read it I found strikingly unimaginative. To explain, the characters are 2D objects; the book describes some of the problems these beings encounter, but doesn't really solve them, so the described society doesn't really hold up. One instance is that their field of vision is just a line with a dimension for color, so you need to see a form move into space to understand what it is (maybe I'm wrong, but I think the author does not say clearly that points do bear some 'depth' and 'texture' information, otherwise this wouldn't work). But there are creative ways to solve these problems: for example the beings could 'see' using a bat-like interpretations of echoes to get a sense of the space around them (we see in 3D, not in 2D). Life under different constraints ends up having different features than us humans. So in a sense, it is a bit like somebody who would stumble upon a mathematical paradox (say, the barber's one) and would just deduce 'how funny are words and numbers' (well, a bit like Lewis Caroll).

What a pernicious double-entendre.

>I don't know why anyone would assume that, given how poorly it works.

You're tough. Every type of computer generated visuals have some cases that won't work well, given that there are so many semantic choices: anti-aliasing, dithering, textures, forms, compete for the information of each pixel. Each pixel can encode any subset of these features. We rely on the human brain to parse it and decode it meaningfully, and even then, it doesn't always work. If you've tried yourself at pixel art, you'll understand quickly (you can also look at the research on upscaling algorithms). So the result is very far from an actual product, but it's really impressive.

This is about trusting what you read on the NYT, not trusting the site.

In both cases, caution is advised :)

Programmers, hackers, mathematician, often tend to fall into this trap. It was pretty well illustrated by Swift, in Gulliver's travel. When the protagonist arrive in Laputa, the city of mathematician, they take his measurements to make him a suit. But they only take one measure! Because we can compute all other measures through fancy equations... and that's how everyone in Laputa ends up with suits that are not well-adjusted.

This is a cheeky comment from Don Knuth.

If you're into jazz, you can check the label Rune Grammofon; you can start bands that are easy to listen to, such as Elephant9 (just listen to Fugl Fønix and try to resist the groove), and then get into the rest (woohoo, Shining). After that, you shouldn't find these bleep-bloops that hard.

When it's well intentioned... A friend went to a statistics-focused master degree, and her first internship made her come back with the comment "well, during class we had one prof tell us exactly what we shouldn't do with the data to analyze it honestly. That's the exact list of tasks I was given for these last few months."

Oops, the quote was from the article, not Feynman (I've edited my post now); note that the author is Gelman from 'the statistical crisis in science'.

But it throws back to Feynman's speeches on Cargo cult science, what is science and what isn't. The idea is basically the same, we can describe what good science is by the rigor put in the experimental process, but this is not something that can be captured simply by the p-value.

So basically, social sciences are still at the sad state of affairs Feynman described.

From the article:

>"One reason so many of these Psychological Science studies are so dead on arrival is that they hinge on noisy measurements in uncontrolled, between-subject designs. That puts you right here, and no amount of preregistration or fancy statistics is going to solve your problems."

It must be great to work in a field where you decide what the result is. You can't do that in mathematics unfortunately. It must be why all these mathematicians are so bitter with social sciences.

The headline should definitely say "at least Mac". It so annoying to hear about "computer viruses"... (protip: it's Windows, Osx, well, maybe even Linux virus).

Well, Gowers went at great length explaining its motivations [0] (see the following quote, from [1]). So saying that Gowers started attacking Elsevier "by accident" and "was surprised that it grew as a movement" is very disrespectful to Gowers, to truth, and also a bit to the reader.

>"Once I did hear about Elsevier’s behaviour, I made a conscious decision not to publish in Elsevier journals and I started to feel bad about cooperating with them in any way. [...] Now, however, I have decided that my previous quiet approach was not enough."

[0] https://gowers.wordpress.com/category/elsevier/

[1] https://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-...

>"Timothy Gowers's first big assault on academic publishing started almost by accident.

In 2012, the Cambridge mathematician took to his blog to write a post bemoaning the exorbitant prices that journals charge for access to research. Gowers vowed to stop sending his papers to any journal from the world's largest academic publisher, Elsevier. tim gowers

To his surprise, the post went viral — and spurred a worldwide boycott of Elsevier, [...]"

>Be top scientist

>Publish a statement of intent on your widely followed blog

>People who have felt the same way but could not express their opinion without damaging their career follow

>be surprised

How much is this article insulting the reader's intelligence?

So you say 'no' but you don't refute the argument? Can you explain why following correct substitution principles does not work?

You could also try to answer to the arguments of harry8, who gave you polite and well-written points, that you consciously ignored and resorted to name-calling ("you're heavily clueless about what psychology is") when you have absolutely no element to back your claim.

>Fuck me, but it's funny when detractors claim that psychology is full of unscientific behaviour, while they're way overgeneralising the entire field on a subsection of it.

What I mean by filled is that this subsection (which exists in any field, even mathematics) is an important fraction of this particular field. And before you bring this up: I read a lot of important papers in the field, and they were all below my expectations, which were admittedly not very high. I came to think that the "journal of irreproducible results" is one the most serious publications in soft sciences.

>Apparently arguments become stronger when you add "fuck" qualifiers

Fuck me!

>OSC researchers tried to reproduce an American study that dealt with Stanford University students’ attitudes toward affirmative action policies by using Dutch students at the University of Amsterdam.

If they do conclude things on "students" based on this study, then reproducing it on Dutch students is perfectly fine. If they did conclude something on "Stanford University students", then it is a bad reproduction. You see, there's a very good justification there, that you can interpret as subtyping, or the liskov substitution principle.

>'low reproducability' != 'unethical'

This is akin to saying "ok there's this theorem, but I won't give proof, just a bogus heuristic argument", or even worse, saying "that person is guilty but I won't justify why". Both these behaviors are unacceptable. Why would "social sciences" be above that?

> or 'crisis'

A field is filled of politically oriented baseless claims, but this is not a crisis, just another day in Oceania.

That said, if the meta-study was sloppy, then it still justifies that research standards should have been upped a while ago; the "terrible"" meta-study was accepted precisely because terrible papers are accepted in the first place.

I can't see how you can make such a comment while being efficient. When you're looking for some software, you don't want "X that does Y". There are already solutions (maybe hacky ones) to do Y, so you want some X that will be good in your workflow. And this is not something you can decide with "Do Y. Awesomely." Honestly the current page is not so bad, but it is still a far-cry that the convincing thing: a demo, a quickstart tutorial, or a video.

Hey, do we have to read the articles before commenting now?

Let's take a stand for free speech! Ill, unadvised speech is still speech!

The whole "drug users are victims" makes absolutely no more sense that "any criminal is a victim". You can't find a single person in the world who doesn't have bad circumstances. Even the people at Goldman-Sachs may have had a bad history of bullying, a difficult childhood because of divorce, a family that induced an unhealthy relation to competition or money, whatever. This example is not even a joke. Many "privileged" people had really bad psychological circumstances. But you won't say that any of the wall street crooks are victims.

I know a guy who spent 8 years of his life in prison, in many visits, mostly for petty theft and drug use/traffic (mostly cannabis). He had a really horrible life, and is a pretty cool guy, although he's obviously still struggling with addiction. He often says "there are only innocent people in prison, at least they all say that".

The analogy is "I decide to drive my car" while drunk "then I hit someone".

In which case you are responsible. There is no accident.

It's all a question of probabilities and risk. The probability to hit someone while driving normally are pretty weak, and the consequences fairly low in normal circumstances (i.e. while you respect every law). When drunk, the probabilities go through the roof, as well as how damaging the consequences can be.

When you start to take drugs, even considering all the surrounding context, the consequences can be terrible and the probabilities are quite high.

So no, it not an accident, assuming you see yourself as a human being, able to think about these. If you see yourself as a victim who couldn't foresee anything, then good for you.

But little kaka is very poor, the poor little guy has been reduced to begging over the internet. And you expect him to pay you for your work? Monstrous Thénardier. You should pay such a genius to use your lowly software. Don't you know he's, like, totally the third millennium m0zart? Come on, it's 2016 already.

Psycho-Pass is to GITS what Equilibrium is to Orwell/Huxley: what happens if an idiot tries to rewrite the original. The form is there, but there is no substance.

Although there are major differences between the movie and SAC. The two movies are strongly influenced by Mamoru Oshii's ideas, to the point of contradicting Shirow's point of view on certain subjects. SAC is much closer to the author's intent, but can feel at time like a clumsy homage to the source material.

If you haven't, read them, as well as the hit-and-miss sequel Man-machine interface, and Appleseed (which unfortunately has been tarnished by terrible adaptations).