siglesias

There are a couple of flaws with this reply.

1. This doesn't appear to be a falsifiable position with respect to being overly conservative. Any action that results in the hospitals not being overwhelmed will be taken as somehow likely causing the hospitals not to be overwhelmed. It's not clear by this logic how hospital capacities are ever chosen given various uncertainties in the environment.

2. It commits a status quo bias. Only the risks of deviating from shelter in place are considered. On the one hand we have a virus with a CFR of around 0.5% with fairly well understood vulnerabilities to various parts of the population. On the other we have a completely unprecedented shutdown triggering a 2T spending package and causing record unemployment, with an unknown end goal. Is the risk of continuing down this path somehow less than the risks to the hospitals based on our knowledge of disease?

that's not how percentages work

What about the supply? Wouldn't the real culprit here be patents and other protections?

Citation? There seem to be cases in high technology where the market is very patient for long term returns. Case in point: AMZN trades at a 320 P/E because the market (thus far correctly) can’t see a plausible scenario in which it cedes any e-commerce or AWS share.

Maybe this is optimism bias writ large? Another possibility is that even if there is robust demand despite certain destruction, these houses are really worth many millions for the short term (for cachet, status, etc.). Here we model them as really expensive vacations.

This sort of assumes the only return from seeking a prize is the prize.

If anyone is interested in Bach's keyboard literature, it's hard to top the interpretations of Glenn Gould, a fascinating musician in his own right. Here, for example, is a seminal performance of the D minor concerto, conducted by Leonard Bernstein: https://youtu.be/9ZX_XCYokQo?t=5m9s

Good to see that nuance is alive and well.

This is slightly specious. There is an expectation that AMZN or GOOG will eventually issue dividends or repurchase shares, and there's noting fundamentally preventing them from doing so. There's no way to form a valuation otherwise.

I don't find this line of argument compelling. It's a form of moral induction that specifically selects things that are still in play today (like chess) while ignoring valid warnings that altered a trend (vehicle safety) or halted a trend (smoking). Every moral or health threat needs to be evaluated on its own merits regardless of whether it has the syntax of a historical warning that ended up in hindsight seeming kind of absurd. This is exactly the kind of argument corporations exploring potent forms of addiction want trotted out.

It will be interesting to see if theoretical physics and computer science converge at all over the next century. Intuitively there’s much to suggest that our understanding of computational limits on things (not to mention the idea that the world itself is a simulation of some kind) has analogs in fundamental physical limits (speed of light, quantum noise).

This can be difficult because everybody has been overexposed to 440, which is nearly impossible to control for. Even if you log an effect it can be argued that the effect is not of 432 but of a certain deviation from a norm.

Anybody else struck by the irony of the glaring "Don't miss Tristan Harris's next story" dialog at the bottom of the article?

Note the verbiage exploiting Fear of Missing Something Important.

Diversification only lowers risk. The expected value doesn't change.

I don't think anybody is claiming that science is "completely broken," but there are some who want nice, clean, logical delineations, who think that science is filling out some invisible, giant truth table. And that by each assertion in that truth table, there's a straightforward "this is how to falsify me" entry that scientists can look up and enact.

Based on how science actually works, this notion is fanciful. No such table exists. If you were to have the luxury of asking the top physicists, say, to create such a table for you, they'd very likely all look different.

Also, your comment regarding homeopathy is something of a strawman. Paradigms are incommensurate. If we do incur a paradigm shift in our lifetimes, it's likely that our current ways of speaking about science will be unable to capture it.

My point about Mercury was important because it shows that there is an appreciable level of "give" that a theory has before the scientific community agrees that there is something wrong with it. That level of give is socially determined. It does matter if the discoverer of the anomaly is a Cambridge phd or a crackpot with no credentials. The measurement instruments matter, and the fallability of those instruments play into the acceptance of the results, too. A Popperian viewpoint is somewhat naive because what constitutes a falsification is incredibly fraught! Read Lakatos. He models scientific progression as a series of research programs that have "hard cores" of belief that are protected by ancillary theories. In the event of a negative result, it's those theories that are investigated first. For example, is my telescope correct? Is the theory of light that informs my telescope correct? Is there a dark planet influencing things that I can't see? In hindsight, Mercury should have falsified Newton, because all of the falsifying observations were valid. But it didn't because reasons.

We (and by we I mean Popperians) want to believe that science is a series of universally positive logical assertions that can be cut down by a single negative observation, as logic would dictate. But we don't always know what the criteria are for successful negative observations. The criteria are less rigid and well defined than we would be willing to admit. They vary from community to community. Robert Milikan won the Nobel prize for measuring the charge of an electron with his brilliant oil drop experiment. Only problem? His measurement was wrong. As folks tried to repeat it, they deviated more and more from his original measurement, until many repetitions and many publications later they landed on the correct value. If you were to plot the "true" measurement for the charge of the electron against time, you would see something deviating very slowly from an arbitrary incorrect value to the correct one. You have to ask, how on earth is this possible? Bias, authority, imprecision over truth criteria—all at play. And I think it's this sociological fuzziness in play in many thousands of small ways that lead us to at least question the assumptions on which truth is founded.

I think this is a very naive refutation of what the point was about Kuhn.

First off, the notion that engineering "validates" science. What do you mean by validate? Do you mean successful engineering informed by a set of scientific principles, somehow, in a scientifically rigorous way, renders those principles true? As in, end of story true?

Because most of mechanical engineering is done on the assumption that force equals mass times acceleration. The industrial revolution yielded countless engineering marvels on the back of Newton--cars, trains, breathtaking buildings and bridges. But the theory isn't "true," because Albert Einstein did some thinking and realized that all of the physics change as you go really fast--something "engineering" missed, despite the fact that the stuff "worked."

But somehow it feels wrong to say that Newton was wrong, right? Because in his world, with the kind of thinking and set of scientific instruments available to him, and the battled hardened inverse square phenomena [1] that could be painstakingly measured and applied in engineering, it was infallible. It was true. But only in historical context.

1) Actually not quite so. The strange orbit of Mercury was out of line with Newton's equations, so much so that the planet Vulcan, placed out of Earth's visible observation, was invented to explain it. And so the theory was saved, until General Relativity explained it away, too. So much for "truth."

by the time you're physically close to it, it's too late.

Using a home presence API (like Nest's), this thing could also abstain from updating the time until you were home or in the same room as it. That could dramatically reduce wear and tear.

Developers won't actually absorb the full discount. A decrease in the fee will force a drop in prices (if that's possible) as developers attempt to find new customers with their newfound margin. If you have a more price-elastic customer base, those customers will reap most of the value of the shift as many will come to enjoy their lower prices.

Secondly, wouldn't this create the perverse incentive for developers of multiple apps to release apps under multiple accounts--some might call them shell accounts--in order to minimize their app taxes?

How did this work out for him?

The article literally states:

the results highlight the critical role of beliefs about willpower in self-control performance

I don't know how generalizable the results are, and I'm not making claims about its generalizability. I'm simply refuting the notion that it's wholly incompatible with depletion theory. Speaking personally, I would have appreciated some notion of how common any belief whatsoever is for people.

One could argue that this study is showcasing a strategy for people of a certain mindset to improve their willpower; what it doesn't offer is proof that the many other studies that have supported depletion theory use "very shaky" science.

It's undeniably dismissive. Yes, the first sentence is a question, but "is it anything more than X?" is a rhetorical flourish meant to imply that the product is trivially replicated. The next sentence goes on to say that he's not impressed.

As pg put it:

Maybe you think you're making some sort of important point here. Or maybe you realize your comment is inane and you think it's witty. But (perhaps without realizing it) you and the people upvoting you represent one of the worst forces at work in the world. The people who ridicule new things when they first appear in incomplete form are one of the worst drags on innovation. [1]

1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4356562

A very dismissive and short-sighted comment. The ambition here seems to go beyond the current implementation, to have a "magic" chat view that tracks voices and transcribes them in differing colors automatically and with minimal setup. I laud the effort and encourage the team to play this out for the sake of the hearing impaired. I hope that in the next decade deaf people--and their interlocutors--won't have to hobble together a slew of disparate technologies just to enable a group conversation.

I seruously doubt either of those worked for "some users." Just an impression grab.

While this is partially true, you need to remember that about half of the pitch here seemed to be that this item is fashion. Fashion typically isn't "pitched" as a solution to "problems" (right? runway?). Thus, Apple found itself in a very delicate balancing act between showing off this device's capabilities and appealing to our rational capacities while not going overboard and establishing it as something in a line of succession to Mac, iPhone, iPad with traditional, as you call it, foreplay. The device had to spend a lot of time speaking for itself, as good fashion does.

They do have the world's best search engine for products.

It's kind of a catch-22, isn't it? Are folks on the lower third of the willpower bell curve (those who need it the most) going to be willing to endure extensive mindfulness training? Especially with all those distractions sitting in their pockets?

I think if you ask most people battling health issues or have eating problems whether they could force their future selves for the next month to be not allowed to order dessert, they would choose to. They wouldn't trust themselves in the heat of the moment.

There's a fundamental disconnect we have between our short term and long term interests, and it manifests in all kinds of problems people end up with, including their health, finances, and relationships. There's an overwhelming body of psychological evidence that suggests that these issues are real, prevalent, exploitable and exploited.

To give an example, there's evidence that shows that we're more likely to succumb to temptation when we're mentally exhausted. If that's not bad enough, actively resisting temptation is exhausting! [1] That's why putting a snack bar full of M&Ms, Snickers, and apples near a bunch of stressed out engineers leads to a more unhealthy workplace (guess which snack is always left over). You can say that the engineers are free to not partake, and I say there's more freedom to focus on other things in their absence.

To bring it back to this topic, I think computers need mechanisms to help people with self-control, and a great first step is to curtail software that exists to exploit people with poor impulse control.

There's a saying that I am reminded of:

"The mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master."

1) http://danariely.com/2012/08/15/understanding-ego-depletion/

I'm not saying that the users know that free options have lower cost-benefit tradeoffs, but in reality, experiments show that they do, specifically the on I cited.

But you raise an interesting point. It could well be that the "mental cost of even having to do a cost/benefit analysis" is too high for many people to consider paid options. That reenforces the proposal that Apple should wean users off of low (even negative) utility free options and train them to make such evaluations efficiently, the way many of us who are used to paying for software can. Again, all of this predicated on the thesis that benefit - cost - mental cost (which improves as we learn how to evaluate software) of many paid apps is higher than the average benefit of free apps.

As for my notion that people's actual behavior doesn't conform to a model of rationality, perhaps we should agree to disagree. There is plenty of research to suggest that people are bad at making calculations and require intervention.