opaque

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Little_Fable is probably a close as Kafka got to a children's book.

"Alas", said the mouse, "the whole world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I am running into."

"You only need to change your direction," said the cat, and ate it up.

This is the critical question and the answer is no, as far as I'm aware. Like many such suggestions it's "A great tool for telling you things you already know" as my professor used to say. Physics should be judged on its predictive power.

This article is a general critique of the reward system in academia, bolted on the lab leak hypothesis for clickbait. "The Science Game" is a thing and often discussed on HN, but I don't see any causative link here.

> All to say: scientists create dangerous synthetic viruses to achieve “high-impact” scientific output.

Does gain of function research yield more high impact papers than more benign types of virology research? The article seems to suggest so, but provides no citations indicating that. Were the scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology publishing their research to general acclaim up until now? Given how little we know about it, doesn't seem so. Are these scientists driven by the same invectives as western university research academics? They're probably state employees on stable contracts for a start, not the PhD students and itinerant PostDocs of the university system, who are the main players of the Science Game.

I don't know the answers to these questions, but the article would be more persuasive if it did.

Interesting article, but some of the arguments are pretty weak.

>“Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship, and war.”

>"Capitalism led to the creation of monopolies ..., to food lines, and to war"

The author seems to think these two statements are a damming contradiction, which proves

> "When it came to recognizing unpalatable truths, it seems that Orwell had as much difficulty as the next man."

However, both Capitalism and Communism can be flawed (and are), there is no contradiction here. The ability to critique both is probably why Orwell's work endures.

> It seems to me that if we all weren't constantly dividing ourselves by an increasing number of characteristics that are not socioeconomic class, then we would have an enormous group of people working towards the problems that result from socioeconomic differences.

That's why some on the left believe that the elites (of both the NYT and Fox news persuasion) welcome and encourage identity politics. Marxists would say class is the important divisor and the rest is a distraction.

> She says she didn't publish this model for glory, but she also named it after herself.

She didn't name it after herself, the users did:

> collegues ... began using it and addressed it as "Tai's formula"

As is typically the way with eponymous scientific works, people citing the work add the author's name e.g. Maxwell's equations or Higgs' boson. The author doesn't typically declare "I have discovered X, which I shall call ${self.name}"

This argument is called "Bertlmann's Socks"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhold_Bertlmann#Bertlmann%E...

The other replies explain why it's wrong, but here's a link to Bell's refutation for good measure

http://cds.cern.ch/record/142461/files/198009299.pdf

So, what's the real story? Is it all just trolling?

Take curcumin papers with a pinch of salt. It's a pan assay interference compound (PAIN), prone to misleading results. Pubmed is full of thousands of papers claiming it solves all manner of medical problems, leading it to be dubbed an 'improbable natural panacea'.

See this article, by the same author as it happens.

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/01/12/cu...

> Would this describe the world of physics prior to Einstein and Quantum Mechanics? I'm not a physicist, but my impressions is that it absolutely was "something extraordinary that invalidates most of our current understanding."

I am (or was) a physicist. Even scientific revolutions like Relativity and Quantum mechanics don't invalidate 'most' of our prior understanding. Newtonian mechanics continues to be a very accurate model on the length scales that were testable at time it was conceived (apples and trees). The Relativity and Quantum Mechanics revolutions explained why classical mechanics breaks down at the scale of planets and atoms respectively. All that is invalidated is the idea that the current model is universal, but that would be naive thing to believe at any time. Scientific progress does not mean the prior results are wrong, it's an additive process, if done correctly.

"Port Out, Starboard Home" by Michael Quinion is a nice book about 'folk etymologies' that covers these and many more. He gives the real origin where it's known.

Every time I learn something new, a little of the old gets pushed out of my brain. Remember that time I took that wine making course and forgot how to drive?

- Homer Simpson

> But giant geographically, economically, ethnically diverse polities like the US have a much harder time.

I've heard this refrain from a number of otherwise sensible people and it always makes me shiver. Not only does it imagine all the world's non-US megacities are quaint "tightly-knit" monocultures, but the dog-whistle "ethnically diverse" component is particularly repellant. To give the benefit of the doubt: that's probably not intentional, but I really wish we could end this meme as to why the US has inadequate public services.

Sounds like you have both organisational and architecture problems here. A data team of ten and you're the only permanent employee? There's no data engineer or infrastructure team you can liaise with? I would discuss this with management, making the problem clear and that you're happy to help bridge the gap, but they need to hire someone with these skills.

For the software side Presto or AWS Athena will give you an SQL query layer over parquet files in S3, which should make life a lot easier. It will also hold the table_name -> s3_path relations. Lower effort than dumping to postgres, though at the current scale that is an option too.

> - the Everett interpretation - is the most popular with physicists

Source? On the contrary, this survey of physicists https://arxiv.org/pdf/1612.00676.pdf (Fig 13.) indicates Copenhagen is dominant, followed by no preference, with Everett a long way behind. This is also matches my perception as a former member of the community.

I'm reading the three body problem right now and I find the declarative (Tell) nature of characters emotional states and descriptions ("beautiful young girl") to be a real weakness.

In reality both are a highly nuanced and subjective. I would say my own emotional state is rarely definable as a single adjective with a direct cause.

I'm trying to ascribe it to translation and cultural difference, but it really does just seem like poor or childish writing. I'll have to read some other Chinese fiction as a control experiment.

Perhaps I'm inclined to read it that way from working in physics, which is divided into theory and experiment. He also refers to 'experimentalists' in the preceding sentence, which adds to the effect.

Also if you take the fully general meaning, it's so vague I don't understand how it's something you can 'love', but then maybe that's why I'm not a Philosopher.

Edit: The author's work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Maudlin is all on the Theoretical Physics / Philosophy boarder, in which "theory" vs "experiment" is the more common usage.

> So pure theory is not for everyone. But if you love theory, philosophy is the top of the heap of all the disciplines.

I think calling philosophy "theory" is a bit of a reach. Theories (Relativity, Quantum, Evolution) draw on, and can be falsified by, direct evidence. Philosophy is more argumentation on subjects that won't have scientific basis (morality, meaning of life) or don't yet have one and may never (consciousness).

MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson[1], wrote a tell-all autobiography in which he described an HR relationship between the city banks and MI6 whereby officers were 'retired' into city jobs with few questions about the gaps in their CVs. In return the bankers were given some intelligence tidbits as quid pro quo.

I should point out his departure from MI6 was acrimonious, so he's not an entirely neutral source, but interesting nonetheless.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Tomlinson

Perhaps I was unduly harsh, but I disagree that I was shallow. I pointed out exactly where the problems lay; poor use of language and people operating outside of their domain of expertise.

Selected quotes

> The role of self-learning algorithms would seem to be very significant in this context, since – like capitalism – they also hinge upon movement

> If the systematization of the possible is somehow reconfigured by self-learning algorithms, are the capacities of indefinite potential then also reconfigured when it comes to evading this very systematization ...

> An associationism that can never be known, a life of associating with other things and people that is not amenable to and not incorporable by calculation – is this now changing through AI?

> However, the distance between the actual output signals of their algorithms and the target output represents what I call a space of play. Indeed, the algorithm designers described ‘playing with’ or ‘tuning’ the algorithm so that the output converges on the target. Here I think that deep machine learning is not circumscribed at all by a limited spectrum of possibility ...

I don't think all humanities are gibberish, but this is. I'm sure a Philosopher would find my opinions on Nietzsche to be similarly half-baked.

> Remove Sweden and UK from the the European list and you have needles in a haystack.

Remove California and New York from the US list and ...

The fact that a third party can benefit from flaws is somewhat unique to smart contracts. However, if you or your company are party to an "unprofitable" contract, it's both legal and sensible to ask a lawyer if it can be broken. The more talented the lawyer the more options they may find for you.

Furthermore, some areas of law seem more open to "Technicalities" than others. It's hard to believe that tax structures like https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/double-irish-with-a-dut... were part of the intent of the law, though they are compatible with the word of it. The difference between avoidance and evasion often rests on a technicality.

Finding ways to subvert the intent whilst remaining within the 'rules', is the very essence of hacking. No one said the username input couldn't contain an SQL statement?

> then it may become profitable (and legal) to employ talented hackers to go around cracking contracts.

Replace 'hackers' with 'lawyers' or 'accountants' and that's already true in our present system.

Pretty strong selection bias here. Hackers that have showed up at an IRL conference are probably not on the more paranoid end of the spectrum.

Meanwhile pseudonym hacking continues (e.g. Phineas Fisher) and interesting data dumps make their way to journalists ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradise_Papers)

There was also an "atheist church" in London https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21319945

I wonder if they were aware the concept has quite a history.

It wasn't covered in any detail by my school curriculum, so I've been catching up. I had no idea they "reformed" so many aspects of civci life, including the calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar

I haven't checked the markup, but if you try and hit a linkedin profile page you just get forwarded to a login page. Perhaps if you don't follow the forwarding?

Not sure how this complies with google's requirements, I suspect if you're big enough you get a custom arrangement. However, that doesn't explain how hiQ are getting the data.

Does anyone know how they do this scraping from a technical standpoint. The articles allude to it being the same as data Google/Bing spiders, which can clearly access more data that average internet IP for making their result summaries. I had assumed big sites whitelisted specific crawler IP ranges or User-Agents for the search giants. Do they somehow spoof this?

Well if you explain that (very reasonable argument) to the jury at your trial I'm sure they'll be understanding. In practice it would be interesting to know how many suspects are formally interviewed before a lawyer is present. Anecdotally I would think it's low, but I don't know.