maxander

I clicked on this article expecting a graph of an exponential curve, and they utterly failed to deliver. Who cares how many cars they’re making, if they can’t make a decent exponential curve? That is the #1 priority product of any California hype house! How are we supposed to believe they’ll amount to anything if they can’t show us a trend line that would consume all matter on the planet by 2045?

There is almost a 0% chance that the GP, as (presumably) an educated and well-fed citizen of a first-world country, has a serious vitamin deficiency. That's not the failure case that he's avoiding. My guess would be that that "weird feeling," in most cases, is a sugar rush from eating something with a high glycemic index; do that a lot [1] and it puts pressure on your liver and kidneys and otherwise causes non-optimal results. Not as serious as an iron deficiency, certainly, but worth paying attention to.

[1] Most people do. White bread has a high glycemic index.

The article is a bit hyperbolic. Nutrition is complex and hard-to-study, the research is under various distorting pressures from several industries, and it's been gotten disastrously wrong in the past, but such is science- science is hard. Just because we've gotten it wrong before doesn't invalidate more recent results, and just because there are important uncertainties in our current knowledge doesn't mean we can't quantify and manage that uncertainty.

The real issue is, and the author's real point (whether he knows it or not), is that non-scientists don't, and currently mostly can't, know anything about nutrition. To get a decent, self-respecting nutritional fact, you need to trace it back to the studies (to make sure it's not corporate BS,) make sure these studies are relatively recent (so that they're not deformed by the various assumptions and flawed conceptual frameworks that dominated the field a couple decades ago,) and ensure that the researchers and statistics at work are reasonably trustworthy (to make sure it's not some of the bad research that is still being done[1].) This is not something that most people can do, and that's simply to access the limited and uncertain facts we currently have. To the typical highschool graduate trying to make dinner, it's worse than useless.

([1] Which is, again, not unique to nutritional science. Bad papers are published in every field.)

More than a lack of knowledge, we have a lack of trustworthy authority. If someone wants to know about chemistry or math, trustworthy sources are easy to find, and their pronouncements can be taken on faith if the student doesn't want to get bogged down in the details. If someone wants to know next week's weather, the available answers will be uncertain and untrustworthy, but everyone at least knows the right people to ask, and has some idea of how to deal with "50% chance of rain." In nutrition, no one knows where to ask, and no one knows how to deal with what information that is available (for instance, raise your hand if you know the glycemic index of your most recent meal.) The answer to this can't be the scientific method; it's a social process.

Incidentally, the present nutritional wisdom is probably best summed up by Michael Pollan's "eat food; not too much; mostly plants." From that you'll be fine. (If you want to be really fancy, know the calories-per-serving of the ~10 most common foods you eat; by then you'll be eating healthier than about 95% of Americans, most likely. Know the glycemic index and you're past 99%.)

Increasingly, you can simply contract out the physical end of experimentation out to dedicated commercial labs (at least in the biological sciences.) It takes a bit of money (well, a lot, even) but it’s much friendlier to small-scale enterprises, among the other advantages.

And this is the climate while tremendously powerful corporations consider personal data collection to be a lynchpin of their moneymaking strategy (i.e., advertising.) Once internet advertising becomes broadly recognized as being not worth the cost, the demand for this data could fall off a cliff- what will policy look like then?

I consider it a reason to be optimistic.

This is why open source software works so well- layers of duct tape transition seamlessly into the thing itself.

There's going to be a bunch of these "OMG a robot car hit someone!!!" stories that then morph into "the robot actually had nothing to do with it." Perhaps it will finally cue people in to how intrinsically dangerous cars are.

I mean, even if autonomous cars are x100 times safer to be around than human-driven cars, they're still orders of magnitude more of a risk factor for ordinary (U.S.) citizens than say, terrorists, or sharks.

The article doesn't really say how the algorithm works aside from "they use machine learning," but the basic principle turns out to be pretty simple. In the work by Amgartden, they classify lengths of sequenced DNA by looking at the counts of k-mers (read: substrings of length k, where they use k between 2 to 10) that occur in each; it simply turns out that k-mer occurrence differs sufficiently between viral DNA and cell DNA this works.

The article mysteriously doesn't cite Roux, and I don't have time right now to track it down, but it's probably similar.

Terrorists are a simple-to-state example of the problem, but if that doesn't sound convincing, remember that most (or all?) of these fabs are in a region dominated by a superpower that is moving towards dictatorial authority [1], and additionally, that this region is also (one of the many) moving towards a pattern of extreme weather events [2]. There are many possible events that could seriously disrupt such a concentrated industrial base, and only one would have to happen to cause problems.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/17/china-reappoin... [2] https://phys.org/news/2017-02-china-severe-weather-patterns-...

This sort of thing shows how scarily centralized electronics production is. If a disruption at one plant can take out 3.5% of global production, how many of these plants are there? On the order of 30? Imagine a terrorist group decides to bomb them all simultaneously; there goes the production of every device that uses these chips, potentially for years. Are they needed for something critical? How many products do we rely on that all come from the same dozen or so places?

Everything in biological systems depends on everything else; all variables are global, all methods are public, and all definitions are recursive. It's all spaghetti code- there is nothing like the separation of functionality that we impose on our designed artefacts for the sake of our limited minds. A signal needed to be sent from one place to another, and the brain has the machinery for endocrine functions already, so why not have it handle it? So while this is a quite valid and interesting result, it's not nearly as exciting as the popular press is going to make it out to be.

Your idea of "morphogenetic fields" is fundamentally incorrect; re-read the wikipedia article you linked to, the word "electricity" doesn't appear in it at all. It's talking about "fields" of chemical gradients which control the development of tissues; that kind of idea has been established developmental biology for over a century.

Meanwhile, in terms of the parent article, yes- it turns out that "bioelectricity" is an important part of the embryonic development. But this is not at all serving the same role as DNA; DNA stores durable information, whereas these fields are being used for, essentially, intercellular communication. I would think that the fact that the researchers successfully replace a frog's entire brain, for developmental purposes, with a simple tweak to an ion channel, pretty clearly demonstrates that the amount of vital information being carried this way is minimal.

Score one for the deist "divine watchmaker" idea.

If they can make a "flying taxi" airplane that isn't unsafe, isn't obnoxiously loud, isn't energy-guzzling, doesn't require undue landing/takeoff space, and is scalable beyond the ultra-elite, great!

But how many of those criteria do you think that even Page could get, simultaneously? Two, maybe three? Flying cars are known for being a somewhat difficult engineering problem; that they've been hard enough to prevent partial solutions may turn out to have been a blessing.

And it's not like there aren't other solutions to transportation issues, either.

Just for the sake of asking interesting questions, and not in contradiction of your point about “most people’s conception of God”: Roughly speaking, the “God hypothesis” is simply that the ultimate cause is a person of some sort. What is the Kolmogorov complexity of “personhood”?

I suspect the issue is that, if whole classes of chips that are important for military purposes (wireless communications, for example) are made exclusively by China, they could put in backdoors and other traps that would compromise U.S. military hardware. I haven't seen anyone discuss this angle openly, though, so either I'm off base somehow or it's not something the U.S. wants to loudly discuss (because they're likely doing it too.)

What we ought to have is a blackout shade that will automatically roll down at night and back up in the morning, when we want sunlight to start waking us up.

Are you saying someone has to either be a paragon of virtue or just give up on ethics altogether? No one is at either extreme. As you pointed out, even wearing clothes makes you complicit in the moral turpitude of pennies-for-the-hour overseas sweatshops. Are you committed enough to justice that you'll go naked the rest of your life? I'm not, I'd I'm wearing several things that I'd assume were made by terribly oppressed people, as I write this. But when I see the military (or police, or whatever) engaging in wanton destruction, should I just say "well, I'm wearing pants, so I guess I can't complain"? That's preposterous.

One wonders if we've made technology unnecessarily complicated. In order to build something like the Oculus Rift, they obviously needed expertise in hardware design, optics, display technology, manufacturing, user interface design, etc etc. Also, they apparently needed expertise in managing the ins-and-outs of the Windows driver security system. Adding one more subject to their already crowded curriculum wasn't very nice of Microsoft.

A lot of applications and environments seem to be built with the assumption that they can add arbitrary complexity to their interface, since they're only going to be used by "experts" who can be expected to know everything of relevance and work through a thick documentation to understand the system. In truth, the "experts" who use your programs are going to also be using a dozen other applications, each with their own piles of documentation (or equal amounts of lack-of-documentation,) and have little brain-space left for the intricacies of your framework. So, they're going to use your system while knowing the minimum possible amount about it; if that system contains traps that cause problems for this kind of user, that's bad design.

It's possible to participate in injustice in a multiplicity of implicit, difficult-to-see ways and yet still object to participating in explicit, obvious injustices. Doing so is still far preferable to not objecting to obvious injustices, regardless of what you're up to in your spare time.

Russia is a perennial political issue for most of the Western world, yet has a GDP somewhere around that if Spain. They’re not China- if they try to make internet giants now to their authoritarian norms, the giants are going to realize they come out best by just packing up and leaving the country.

I think the key question of the article is finally asked explicitly near the end:

> Why are we the way we are? Is Kenneth Eng a schizophrenic whose illness finds expression through florid racism? Or is he a racist asshole who is also schizophrenic?

In psychology there's the assumption that mood disorders and antisocial delusions can be distinguished from non-pathological "being an asshole." I'm not nearly well enough informed about psychiatry to say how this is done clinically, or how quantitative these methods are. But cases like Eng show that as a society we barely even try to make the distinction, or that our ability to do so is profoundly lacking.

There's thousands of homeless people who are on the streets because they're incapable of getting along socially or holding a real job. And a substantial portion of humanity is prepared to leave it at that; they didn't do anything to earn money or companionship, and they don't have what they didn't earn, so all is well. But when you can quite clearly see that one of these people is where they are because of an illness that, in better conditions, would be treated and leave them a productive and happy member of society, that rings hollow. The fact of the matter is that an amount of what we call "motivation," "agreeableness" or even "talent" come down to the functioning of relatively simple, purely mechanistic biochemical processes, which can be subject to incidental malfunction just as you can dislocate a joint or get an ingrown toenail. If you want to assign blame the individual for one and not the other, you have a lot of philosophical explaining to do.

Another case where “the winning move is not to play.”

One wonders what these people are thinking, when the very suggestion of having these weapons available to use puts the whole planet incrementally nearer to nuclear catastrophe. The cost-benefit analysis is so painfully slanted against anything like this that it's absolutely absurd- we have the nuclear triad already, for what it's worth, and it can do it's job better than we need. These toys have no well-defined safe use case and risks that the human mind can scarcely comprehend.

Is this part of some diplomatic tit-for-tat against the Russians over the attack in Syria last week? That's the most reasonable explanation that occurs to me, which is saying something.

As a Bostonian, I am absolutely mystified by this “never met anyone who mentioned that they have recently eaten seafood” thing. Sure fish is hard to find in middle America, but California and Florida? Fish on restaurant menus, at least, can’t just be a New England thing.

> These changes are coming, and we need to tell the truth and the whole truth. We need to find the jobs that AI can’t do and train people to do them. We need to reinvent education. These will be the best of times and the worst of times. If we act rationally and quickly, we can bask in what’s best rather than wallow in what’s worst.

Saying "find the jobs that AI can't do" like it's this obvious thing; we haven't the slightest clue what AI can't do in five years. Practically yesterday Go was the go-to example of what computers couldn't do, and now it's the go-to example of how they kick our ass. Well-informed predictions for widespread self-driving car deployment range from "in five years" to "half a century at best." And the jobs that aren't threatened by AI, and that are accessible to most people, are threatened by much "dumber" kinds of automation. Human-facing "empathetic" jobs are often considered safe, but what positions actually need a human, anyway? People are happy to do a bit of extra work to get "expert advice" from a database when it comes to travel, law, or finance; stores are happy to let customers use automated checkout rather than talk to a cashier. Dextrous, highly-physical work is still safe (pending advances in robotics, which seems to move a bit slower), but only until someone figures out a way to offload the dexterity-requiring bits onto a factory, or render the whole thing obsolete. And finally there's second-order effects of the resulting economic turmoil; if most of the middle class can't count on keeping their jobs, not enough people are going to be ordering fancy lattes to pay for your role as a barista. Planning a relatively low-skilled career (anything less than a four-year technical college degree) is walking a minefield.

Us highly-educated technical generalists are probably fairly safe, but not everyone wants to study for 6+ years after highschool- and regardless, they could expect to have to relearn all the applied skills in their chosen field when the tool they originally studied gets replaced by something completely different and orders of magnitude better. The old model of "learn a skill, get a job applying that skill, eventually retire" will no longer reliably work on any point of the scale.

Yeah yeah, I’m excited too. But it figures this is being done by Amazon- for years they’ve been out to condition us to like having all our needs met by an inhuman yet weirdly friendly technological regime.

Good odds the Minds all sound remarkably like Alexa. :)

DNA sequencing is mature and, if anything, almost getting to be late in the game for new startup entries. Determining gene function through ML methods is a whole different thing, and that's what I, and the OP, was talking about. Are we all responding to the same article here?

This is a course on a fairly novel field of research, not a method to do anything remotely consumer-facing.

Have you ever worked retail? There was presumably much much more to that guys job than reading books to kids.