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Pearl's attention to the do conditionality -- i.e., P(Y|do(X)) versus P(Y|X) is interesting and important in a certain sense, but I'm not sure it's really resolved debates about causality in any practical sense.

I don't really mean that in a dismissive sense, just to point out that his notation just begs the question of what do(X) means, in terms of why it is actually important. To me it just kind of formalizes a certain notation and kicks the hard theoretical can down the road.

In the books and papers I've read of Pearl's, he makes reasonable logical arguments for certain types of causal inferences, but when, in discussion with colleagues, we've tried to think of how they would be implemented outside the context of an experiment, we've been sort of at a loss. I say this as someone who identifies with observational study professionally, but who recognizes the importance of experiments.

My broader point is that I think Pearl's do-calculus can be reexpressed in traditional graph theory/structural equations/statistics without introducing anything new. In that sense, although I think his writings have drawn attention to important issues, I don't think they have solved anything.

Like intellectual property and some other issues, I have often felt that the appearance in public discourse of arguments for two very opposite, extreme positions is a signal that something is really wrong with the current situation.

That is, I suspect the reason we're having this argument is that border enforcement is getting too extreme, with too many burdens and moral problems that people are compelled to start asking whether borders are even necessary at all.

Even small cities have borders in a sense, but those borders only are visible or enforced in ways that are usually invisible to the average citizen in the US.

I've worried as I've become older that the younger generation will have not known what it was like to live in a US society where border enforcement and airport security was close to nonexistent. When there was no Department of Homeland security, and, as Samantha Bee has recently pointed out, no ICE.

Now, in retrospect, would I want to return to a society with no airline security? Probably not, but I do think the pendulum has swung much too far in the opposite direction, and I worry younger generations will just take for granted that the increasing authoritarianism in the world is the only way to live.

Ironically, international travel is one of the best ways to realize that many cherished assumptions that your society has about the right way to do things may be false. Reality permits far more flexibility than societies generally allow, and when it doesn't, societies tend to ignore it anyway.

Not really disagreeing with you necessarily, but you can hack pre-registration too, in a way that becomes more tenable with smaller studies, which benefit less from pre-registration anyway.

The tables are misleading too: of course p(h0=T|p<.05) is going to be about 0.50 if your power is 0.50 and p(h1) = 0.10. That is maybe the bigger problem than p-values per se. Also, he fails to compute the other cell, which is p(h0=T|p>.05), which ends up being about 0.95. The problem in that table is have no power to detect anything.

In real life, you don't know p(h0)--that's the point of doing the study. So Bayesianism doesn't really help you.

The real problem is lack of power.

Nim. I understand some reasons for this, as I didn't pay attention to it very much for awhile myself. I think it's only the last year or two that it's reached maturity. Its primary alternatives also have the advantage of huge existing resource bases.

I'm someone who thinks there is room for lots of good languages, and each has its role, so I don't think languages should be pitted against one another necessarily.

However, with Nim you have something very similar to Python in its expressivity, but with performance comparable to things like Rust and C++. The metaprogramming is very well done as far as I've seen, and it seems very well thought out. It also has solid, useful compilation targets.

It just seems like the whole package for a lot of use cases and I'm not sure why it's not getting a lot more attention.

I completely understand the issue of not wanting spam of various sorts broadly defined, but I do think restricting it to academic addresses is a huge mistake. As an established researcher on the verge of leaving an academic institution, but who is still very much interested in research, I'm becoming acutely aware of how cliquey academics is, and how problematic it is for the field and society as a whole.

The assumption that anyone who might have anything important to say would be at an academic institution is extremely dangerous (just as is the problem of access to journals outside of academic institutions, etc.).

This piece hits close to home, as it's really clear to me I am going through a midlife crisis and have interesting parallels and contrasts with the author in terms of my career and next steps.

What seems to me to be the heart of this piece is the telic-atelic distinction, which seems useful and deserving of more attention. There's some parallels, it seems, between the telic-atelic distinction on the one hand, and the distinction between more stereotypical "western" goal-oriented notions of success or happiness, and recent foci of mindfulness and other things having a kind of Buddhist bent. To me the telic-atelic distinction seems useful if for no other reason than to provide an additional historical and philosophical context to something gaining in the public consciousness. The atelic ideal seems similar to the mindfulness goals, but framed differently, in terms of types of rewards.

For me, although useful, I'm not sure this explains all of the midlife crisis. Maybe a big chunk, but for me personally at least I'd say more of it is about feeling like I took a wrong turn with certain choices, and feeling like there's no way to get out of it due to the limits of lifespan and sociocultural failings (e.g., stereotypes about age, gender, and profession, and ability to change, etc.). For me it's been less about asking "is this all there is?" and more like feeling like I've come to the conclusion that my vocation is a fraud, or that I'm not a good fit, and that humans in general are far more flawed and darker than I realized. There were similar feelings about other things in my early adulthood, but I always felt I could change my life, improve things, and move to something else; the difference is now, I feel like the change is more substantial due to the costs and investments involved, and I feel like societal stereotypes and failings make it harder. There's also the limitations of lifespan which are very real and make things difficult.

I feel profoundly disappointed in life and people, in the sense of being wronged, not in the sense of being bored. I don't want to feel this way, but am not sure how to get out of it.