phobosanomaly

Great comment. Was curious w/ regards to Ulam. Found this on Wikipedia:

In January 1946, he suffered an acute attack of encephalitis, which put his life in danger, but which was alleviated by emergency brain surgery.

...

Another friend, Gian-Carlo Rota, asserted in a 1987 article that the attack changed Ulam's personality: afterwards, he turned from rigorous pure mathematics to more speculative conjectures concerning the application of mathematics to physics and biology; Rota also cites Ulam's former collaborator Paul Stein as noting that Ulam was sloppier in his clothing afterwards, and John Oxtoby as noting that Ulam before the encephalitis could work for hours on end doing calculations, while when Rota worked with him, was reluctant to solve even a quadratic equation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislaw_Ulam

Agree as well.

We're seeing a lot of coming-to-terms with both the positive and negative fallout from this access.

Hopefully soon we might be able to start deriving a utility function based on what people are using the devices for, and then assigning positive and negative utility accordingly, with externalities factored in.

Then we could make an attempt at assigning dollar values, and begin to figure out what that means in an economic sense.

California does have twice the population as Florida and a much, much larger economy.

It could just be that all the elderly Floridians sit at home in gated communities, while Californians are more likely to be going-in to work surrounded by a much larger, more dense population.

Could also be an effect of prevalence of multi-generational housing. Perhaps the elderly Floridians are more concentrated in gated community-type housing, and not living with extended family in a smaller living space.

Great comment.

Just wondering what you meant by this phrase:

> The monkey systems around us.

I wikipedia'd it before I posted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...

United States - Total English Speakers: 283,160,411

India - Total English Speakers: 246,344,737

There's no other word for people from the United States because of the weird naming of the country.

Canada - Canadians, Mexico - Mexicans, Brazil - Brazilians.

United States - ......United Statesians?

That's like people from the DRC calling themselves 'Democratic Republic of the Congolesians.' Nope, they just shortened it to Congolese. The United States of America just did the same thing. 'Americans.'

They all use it, and for the most part so do their neighbors.

Until some clever soul figures out a better way for the bologna of the North American sandwich to refer to it's citizens, the largest collection of English speakers on the planet will probably keep on trucking with the same boring term.

I have a similar opinion of the usage of the phrase 'systems thinking' in the context of 'you're just not a systems thinker.' Absolutely insufferable.

Slightly different tack, but I was thinking if you had a license frame that had enough infrared LEDs around it, it wouldn't be visible to LEO officers, but the glare might disrupt any license-plate scanners on police cars, or traffic cameras.

I googled it, and it's been discussed a bit in a previous HN thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9258462

Despite being perhaps the most benign example anybody could come up with off the top of their head, In-N-Out has actually already been targeted as having racist and ageist hiring practices:

The class action suit, brought by a Berkeley law firm, claims that the Irvine-based fast food chain with the cute paper hats "recruits, hires and maintains a work force that is predominantly under the age of 40 and/or non-African American." Out of 210 locations and thousands of employees, "very few" are older than 40 years old or black. The suit is also calling for a payout in the form of back pay, compensatory damages and punitive damages on behalf of everyone over 40 and/or not white that In-N-Out has wronged with their allegedly unlawful hiring practices.

https://sfist.com/2012/09/06/new_lawsuit_accuses_in-n-out_bu...

I suppose that, by implication, it would be par for the course for their corporate culture to be accused of supporting white nationalism by anyone looking to nail them on something.

Unless a company is aggressively promoting itself as anti-racist in a very public way, it's very open to this sort of criticism (regardless of whether-or-not there's any actual merit in it).

Add to this that there is a lot of research that goes into production processes and translation from a basic-sciences setting to a production setting.

So, say you have a novel antibody, you have to have a ton of non-academic researchers who have to figure out how to make the thing stable, safe, scalable, deliverable, cost-effective, etc.

It's all research, just not university-style research.

There's this loop in medical education where people come into it with lofty goals, but are then hit with $240k of tuition (excluding living expenses). They then take out loans on that, and then have to pay them back. So, when people talk about cutting salaries, there are all these new doctors that are going 'wait a minute, by this point I'm $300k (just on postgraduate training) in the hole after 4-years of hellish training, and I have to pay that back.'

If we were able to take some of the debt burden out of medical education, you'd have people still lining up out the door to go to med school, they'd probably be willing to take lower salaries, and work in more underserved areas.

The research part is often funded by public grant money.

> They aren't paid to get the PhD.

PhD students are often paid salaries/stipends derived from (often public) grant money.

It's unfortunate to see people disadvantaged by pursuing a truly difficult major.

A 2.97 in bioengineering could represent someone who simply took more challenging courses, and got lower grades because the courses were truly difficult.

A straight bio major might have a 3.8, but never had to work through a year-long Pchem sequence, instead padding with softer, more grade-inflated courses.

> "Reporters are just awful human beings."

You can't make a statement like that and expect anyone to take you even remotely seriously. Here are some journalists I've particularly looked up to over the years:

[CJ Chivers]

C.J. Chivers, a former foreign correspondent, is a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. His Pulitzer Prize-winning cover story for the Magazine in 2016 led to the release from an Illinois prison of an Afghan war veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.

[Dexter Filkins]

Dexter Price Filkins ... is an American journalist known primarily for his coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for The New York Times. He was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for his dispatches from Afghanistan, and won a Pulitzer in 2009 as part of a team of Times reporters for their dispatches from Pakistan and Afghanistan. He has been called "the premier combat journalist of his generation".

[Tim Hetherington]

As a freelance photographer and filmmaker, Hetherington was interested in creating diverse forms of visual narratives from long-term projects. He spent eight years focused on stories in Africa, living in both Sierra Leone and Liberia. In Liberia he covered the Second Civil War behind the lines with rebel fighters, helping to film James Brabazon’s Liberia: An Uncivil War (2004).

He was killed by shrapnel from either a mortar shell or an RPG fired by Libyan forces while covering the 2011 Libyan civil war.

[Robert Fisk]

As an international correspondent, he covered the civil wars in Lebanon, Algeria, and Syria, the Iran–Iraq conflict, the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Islamic revolution in Iran, Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, and the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Fluent in Arabic, he was among the few Western journalists to interview Osama bin Laden, which he did three times between 1993 and 1997.

I hesitate to label it the equity/social justice movement itself. I mean, we should be striving for these goals.

I would argue, rather that the country seems to have been stuck in a place of frustration similar to when a child gets frustrated with a puzzle and sits down and starts sobbing.

A good parent sits down, and patiently says 'Ok, you're stuck, but that's ok sometimes we get stuck. Let's come up with a plan and keep trying and we'll get there.'

As a society (on both sides of the aisle) we have been in the position of the child. Frustrated, helpless, and projecting our frustration in emotional outbursts.

And instead of a patient leader coaching us to become better and work through our problems, we've had our leaders egging-on the sobbing. 'This puzzle isn't fair. It was designed to not be fair to you in particular.'

And so the country's sobbing became worse and worse.

But, things have been remarkably quiet in the past month, and our current leaders (whether or not I agree with their policies) seem to be setting an example by working quietly and patiently. Maybe the sobbing will subside, and we just might get a chance to start moving forward without constantly being distracted by each side's emotional outbursts and frustration.

In the past few years we've nearly solved protein folding, developed a novel vaccine technology, watched the lightning-pace of private space-tech, and a bunch of other cool stuff I'm sure I've missed. Imagine how much cool stuff we'll be able to accomplish when our leaders aren't constantly pitting us against each other for cheap political points.

Depends on your point of view.

Most people don't own companies and never will.

The guy who parks his Porsche in front of the office makes a few million less, but globally people have cheaper access to new technologies to make their lives better.

Big shrug from Joe in the warehouse or Steve the depressed code monkey.

I don't think a great many people care that much unless you make it about nationalism.

Why wouldn't they have a tactical improvement?

It's a lever attached to the bottom of the rifle.

It allows:

1. The stock to remain in-line with the bore of the rifle.

2. Additional leverage to control recoil.

3. Quicker and more intuitive return of the weapon to-shoulder after running or changing magazines.

4. The wrist to remain in a neutral position when depressing the magazine release button.

The Sten, BAR, and the PPSH were pretty much the last generations of fully-automatic rifles to use a horizontal grip configuration, and in both cases, (Soviet and Western) weapons designers converged on the pistol-grip for subsequent designs of the autoloading light rifle, despite substantial differences in design between the M16 and the AK-47.

Why did they make the change? All three of those weapons (Sten, BAR, PPSH) were in widespread combat usage at the time, as were horizontal-grip semiautomatic rifles like the SKS, M14, and M1 Garand/Carbine (as well as a variety of horizontal-grip bolt-action rifles). Why not keep the same configuration for the next generation of rifles so that soldiers would be using the same basic setup that they had originally been trained on? Why did the StG 44, AK-47, Thompson, and later the M-16 all make the switch? Even the Swedes started adding pistol-grips to the BAR in the twenties.

Horizontal-grip rifles just don't seem to be as well-suited for controllability of fully-automatic, or rapid semi-automatic fire.

You raise some really good points, and I appreciate the thought behind your response.

I wanted to kind of try to maybe unpack the point you made as best as I can:

> Do you not find it easier to simply take action with mental healthcare for the weeks, months, and years prior to the shooting?

We have zero mental health infrastructure in the United States, and it would take decades to build a working system (there's not even the political will to try at the moment).

In the case of the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting where 17 people died, the police were well aware that the suspect was a threat, they had received multiple tips that he was going to shoot up the school, and they knew he had guns. But there isn't framework in the United States to do anything about it because we have such strong free-speech and civil liberties protections. It's also perfectly legal for someone who hasn't been convicted of anything or put on an emergency mental health hold to own a semi-automatic rifle. As a result, the guy who told everyone exactly what he was about to do took his gun, walked into his high school, and murdered almost 20 people.

People are looking for pragmatic solutions to prevent these types of mass shootings.

1. We could enable the police to arrest or detain people who haven't committed a crime, but that would conflict with constitutional free-speech protections, and would set a stronger precedent for police arresting people for things they haven't actually done yet (slippery slope).

2. We could build an entire mental health system from scratch (decades of work assuming at some point in the next ten years this would be a priority for the president and congress).

3. We could increase restrictions on certain types of guns to prevent them from falling into the hands of a disturbed 19 year-old (incredibly easy to do, there's widespread popular support, and all Congress would have to do is pass a single bill). The only people negatively impacted would be a minority of people who would be slightly inconvenienced, but still be able to pursue their hobby. The majority of people would gain the ability to send their kids to school without wondering if they're going to get murdered.

Only one of these options (#3) seems to be within the realm of actually being achievable. We're just not going to build a mental health system from scratch anytime soon, and people aren't thrilled about giving the police more ability to arrest people who haven't actually committed a crime. We're left with more weapons restrictions as the only pragmatic solution (what Europe, Australia, Canada, Mexico, etc. have done).

Only a minority of Americans own guns, and there's consistent support among the majority of voters for increased restrictions on firearms.

I enjoy shooting guns myself as a hobby, and I live in California which has some of the most restrictive gun laws in the country. The laws really aren't such a big deal. It just means an assault rifle has a 10-round mag restriction, and it's a little slower to change mags since they require a few additional steps to swap out. I don't find that to be a particularly big deal, especially since it helps my friends, family, and neighbors not have to worry about the safety of their children. I still get to pursue my hobby, and there's no way I need more than 10 rounds for home defense. Even if they outright banned assault rifles, I could have fun for the rest of my life target shooting with bolt-action rifles.

At the end of the day, it's just a hobby.

I'd agree with you in the sense that it isn't a magical force-multiplier or anything.

> Look at rifles like the SV98 or AW series.

These are both bolt-action rifles.

The purpose of assault-weapons bans are to reduce the likelihood of a single, mentally-unstable person from killing large numbers of people with a semi-automatic rifle.

> you can evade pistol grip laws by making butt stocks with holes that provide the same effective hand positioning

Not in California. That grip is considered a 'feature' and is not allowed in conjunction with detachable magazines on a semi-automatic rifle.

https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/california-legal-ar-15/

> You only need one .223 centre mass or in the intestines to require immediate surgery.

Center-mass is on-target. For an inexperienced person working their way through a school or office-building, they are trying to increase the number of on-target shots, and reduce the number of magazine reloads.

> The fact that some commit heinous crimes is mentall illness, not the fault of the gun or even more so the fault of legal gun ownership.

We can't ban mental illness, so the purpose of the laws is to reduce the likelihood of certain weapons systems from falling into the hands of people with mental illness, or those with an ideological grudge and the motivation to carry out an attack. This has worked out pretty well in the state of California so-far.

> mounting a good infrared scope on a hunting rifle helps hunters place humane one-shot-stops rather than blindly causing suffering.

If a hunter needs an infrared scope to place a humane shot, then they need to go to the range and get better before they go outside and shoot an animal.

> If anything, you want to motivate people to like the guns they own, so they shoot more often and are more disciplined.

I understand this perspective, as I am a shooting enthusiast as well. However, this perspective is simply not in-line with the opinions of most voters, who don't really care how much anyone enjoys these weapons. They simply don't want to have to worry about themselves or their children getting shot by some lunatic with a gun. When they hear 'more disciplined,' they hear 'more skilled at killing my kids.' Since firearms for the vast majority of gun owners are little more than a hobby, it's really hard not to see the logic in their perspective.

> The Mini-14 has also been used in mass shootings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruger_Mini-14#Criminal_use

Not in the United States since 1986 according to that list.

Tactical maneuverability when discharging rounds at a rapid rate can come from maintaining the stock in-line with the bore of the rifle as-with a pistol grip, which allows for better control of rapid fire. It is also easier to pull the rifle into the shoulder quickly, which allows you to re-sight more quickly when firing rapidly, and transitioning from running to a shooting position. If you look at a standard, factory wood or synthetic-stock Mini-14 (not a side-folder), the bore is elevated over the stock. The fractions of a second needed to re-sight the rifle would create a disadvantage when rapidly discharging a weapon in close quarters. This is especially important for someone who has not received extensive training in handling weapons in these situations, such as the people who go postal in schools and nightclubs and such.

> At that range, the AR-15's greater difference between bore axis and line-of-sight becomes a disadvantage compared to the Mini-14.

This seems like a weird example, since I don't believe any modern, well-funded urban combat operations team uses the factory Mini-14, or any similarly-configured rifle with a more horizontal-grip stock. The prototypical close-combat rifle, the MP5, most definitely uses a pistol-grip, and SWAT teams in the United States seem rather fond of the AR-15-style platform.

Although I do not have evidence to support this, I would also make the argument that a pistol-grip offers advantages in quickly swapping mags in a high-pressure situation, as the mag release button is nicely situated with the wrist in a neutral position, and the ability to bring the rifle back-up to shoulder using the pistol-grip as a lever following a mag swap would be easier, especially for someone who is inexperienced, moving quickly, and prone to fumbling.

Plus, people are tired of seeing mass shootings on TV, and just don't want to have to worry about lunatics running around with these types of weapons. The definition of 'these types of weapons' will evolve, and typically correlate with what people see being used in mass shootings on the news.

I don't know that people's negative reaction to these weapons is particularly unreasonable in this context.

Why wouldn't a pistol-grip impact leverage? It's literally a lever attached to the bottom of the rifle.

> does not make it more deadly since you can always fire more rounds if you miss

More rounds on-target is the definition of more deadly.

> Pistol grips are simply easier to manufacture than weird shapes of wood or plastic.

I don't follow. A hollow pistol-grip is not only more plastic, it also requires a much more complicated mold.

There's a reason every modern, light, self-chambering rifle system uses a pistol grip. If it were simply a matter of ease of manufacture, or of comfort with zero tactical advantage, nobody would care if AR-15s were banned because they'd be perfectly happy with their Mini-14.

Form follows function.

The addition of a pistol grip does lend increased tactical maneuverability to a rifle. It doesn't just look scary. The tactical ability of a semi/fully-automatic rifle does not exclusively come from its ability to rapidly chamber rounds, it also comes from its tactical maneuverability, especially when firing multiple rounds in a short period of time.

This is why the military uses rifles that look like the M4 platform, and not rifles that look like the M14 platform anymore. This is why the AK-47 doesn't look like the SKS. The addition of a pistol grip to a semi or fully-automatic rifle represents an advance in military technology.

The 2015 San Bernardino Shooting, the Sandy Hook shooting, and the Orlando nightclub shooting all involved light, tactical rifles with pistol-grips. Stephen Paddock had 21 pistol-grip rifles, and not a single Mini-14.

There is a meaningful advantage in the ability to kill people in in-close, rapid-fire situations with a light, semi-automatic rifle featuring a pistol grip. This is why people whose job descriptions involve killing people at relatively close-ranges (military, SWAT) use this style of weapon, and not a weapon that looks like a Mini-14.

The stock Mini-14 looks like a traditional hunting rifle, because it is engineered for hunting. Its design is not optimized for controllability when rapidly firing multiple rounds in multiple directions in a tactical setting. A good hunter shouldn't need to discharge much more than two rounds, and they have one single target. They're not controlling for recoil over the course of an entire 30-round magazine, while pivoting in multiple directions.

In that context, the legal classification of an assault weapon does make pretty good sense.

I think you may be vastly overestimating the scientific literacy of the general public.

I don't mean to imply that most people are stupid or anything. Far from it I've met many tradesman (and tradeswomen) who I consider vastly more intelligent than many people I've met with PhDs.

But, I suspect the willingness of most folks to care about the distinction you're making is negligible at best.

It's sort of like being a car salesman who truly loves cars. And the type of car you're selling has a brand new oil-pump bearing design that is 30% more efficient than the prior bearing design. It doesn't make much of a difference in the overall performance of the car, but you're fascinated by the engineering prowess of it. Unfortunately, 99.9% of the people who walk in the dealership simply don't care about the oil pump bearing. They care about the heated seats, and the bluetooth audio, and if they can get it in seafoam green with the black trim package.

In a similar fashion, although I find knockout mice to be absolutely fascinating (to steal your example), my friends and family simply glaze over when I start to ramble on about such things. They simply don't care. But when they need the gene therapy that resulted from studies performed with the knockout mice for their weird cancer, well, then they're interested (but not too much).

And, so, most people don't know a for loop, from a plasmid, from a cloud chamber, from a difference-in-differences regression equation in economics research. And as a result, they're not even remotely interested in the degree of stochastic factors that may be influencing the research design of the study poorly-summarized in the Medium article that pops up on their Facebook feed.

I would love for people to be more savvy in interpreting the products of the scientific method (or any variation thereof) that they may encounter. But most people are so far behind in being able to approach such detours into the methodology that such a semantic distinction would prove useless. Hell, I have more years in grad school under my belt than I care to admit, and even I will tell anyone who will listen that I barely understand most stuff outside of my field. A political science paper utilizing network models to analyze trade fluctuations with third-party nations following bilateral trade agreements. Maybe I could get the gist of it, but I'm probably not confident enough to definitively say if it's bullshit or not.

Rather, I argue that we focus on piquing the public's curiosity, and doing our damndest to act as scientific ambassadors to the next generation. Rather than changing what we classify as 'science' in the colloquial sense, give a nephew or niece a copy of Calculus Made Easy (and actually help them get through it), show them how to use a metal lathe, give them a brief demonstration of OLS regression by hand, get them a decent microscope to look at pond water with, build a TTL flip-flop with them on a breadboard, and read them The Logic of Collective Action as a bedtime story for the hell of it. The only way we lift the ability of the general public to understand the application of the scientific method in all of it's forms, is by teaching the general public to give a shit about it in the first place. For most people, it's just too late, but it's certainly not too late for us as a collective society.

Fair enough.

So, in the category of science, that leaves Physics, and what else?

What would you call all of what we now call the biological, social, medical, sciences at the moment?

What would be your proposal for a new category for everything that uses the scientific method, but that may have variations in the individual elements of the treatment and control groups?

Maybe it would be more practical to change the name of Physics to something else, rather than re-categorizing all of the other fields.

We could refer to physics as 'Invariant Studies' or something like that, and keep calling everything else science. That way might be easier across the board.

I would propose as an alternative that we work to improve general scientific literacy so that the general public might be more familiar with the methods used in each field. For example, if more people knew how regression analysis worked they might be better able to understand it as the foundation for many of the conclusions in the social sciences, and so might be better able to understand the generalizability and potential limitations of what they are seeing when they are presented with a conclusion in one of these fields.

What's the purpose of being so strict about what constitutes that basis for a valid generalization?

What does it ultimately accomplish?

I answered one today from the IRS Federal Criminal Something-or-Other, pressed 1, was connected to a real human, and asked the guy to take me off their list. He said without hesitation "Give me $100."

I always answer and ask to be taken off their list. I know they'll never do it, but if we all do it in aggregate, it might waste so much of their time that it's no longer worth it for them.

When they say they won't take you off their list, just hang up immediately. The whole process takes only a few tens of seconds.

Here's a repeatable experiment in the social sciences:

Do Conditional Cash Transfers Improve Child Health? Evidence from PROGRESA's Control Randomized Experiment

Author(s): Paul Gertler

Source: The American Economic Review, Vol. 94, No. 2, Papers and Proceedings of the One Hundred Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association San Diego, CA,

January 3-5, 2004 (May, 2004), pp. 336-341

From Section IV (you're gonna have to Sci-Hub it):

"The randomization and the fact that the control and treatment samples are well balanced in the observed characteristics imply that a simple comparison of mean outcomes post-intervention will likely provide an unbiased estimate of program impacts. However, I also control for other observed socioeconomic characteristics in order to reduce idiosyncratic variation and to improve the power of the estimates."

Is this really more sus than a cell bio paper? Are the conclusions so weak that it's not real science? Were you just being sarcastic and it went over my head?

It's probably some adjunct teaching, while the tenured faculty sit at home and fill out grant applications.

My buddy is in this position. The university forces him to show up and deliver an in-person lecture for the undergrads. After a few weeks the students figured out that the lectures are streamed anyway, so it's easier to just watch it at home and there's a lot of lecturing to an empty room.

The grad students still show up to seminars though.

At the very least she's extremely manipulative. She faked her voice in public for years. That's next-level dedication.

Although, after reading Bad Blood, David Boies and his law firm came across as one of the scarier characters in the whole thing. Theranos' lawyers were completely willing to terrify and intimidate anyone who got in the way of their fraud.