Hacker News Reader

tokenadulton Esperanto: the language that never was

There are two different ways to treat Esperanto, both of which come up in the comments. One way is to take Esperanto seriously as a proposal for a world auxiliary language that people from all over the world can use for intercommunication if they didn't grow up speaking a common native language. This first way of treating Esperanto for discussion immediately runs into practical issues and real-world trade-offs. As the article kindly submitted here for our discussion notes, "Because, of course, the massive, trumpeting, stamping, ear-flapping, blanka elefanto in the room is… English; English; English; the English language; the widespread global adoption thereof." It is already well known that the plurality of daily use of English around the world is use of English as an "interlanguage," communicating among persons who are not all native speakers of English, including millions of conversations a day in English that don't include any native speakers of English.[1] I have personally overheard hundreds of conversations in English in multiple countries among people who didn't grow up speaking English, and English is of course the interlanguage of online discussion sites such as Hacker News. (I have also overheard, and participated in, many hundreds of conversations in Modern Standard Chinese that include no native speakers of that language, as Chinese is my most proficient second language.)

For practical value for a language learner, incentives matter. People respond to incentives in deciding which languages to learn, and how attentive to be to opportunities to learn languages. And more opportunity to learn, with more sound recordings to listen to and more texts to read, makes it easier to learn a language. The pervasiveness of English all over the world makes English an easy language to learn--I'm not kidding. Precisely because hundreds of millions of people use English every day as an "interlanguage," English is quite "fault tolerant," full of social conventions about how to get around people with a beginning command of the language communicating with one another, including officially adopted controlled vocabularies for occupations like seafaring.[2] (Again, Modern Standard Chinese is similar in that poorly pronounced Mandarin Chinese is an actual lingua franca in many parts of southern China.) English-language daily newspapers abound all over the world, English-language videos number in the millions on YouTube, many recorded by second-language speakers of English, and English-language books and advertisements make up the plurality of the world's books and advertisements.

Languages spread around the world mostly by people using them or not for practical purposes. The majority of the settlement of the interior of North America by Europeans was done by Europeans who were not native speakers of English. (For example, both of my maternal grandparents, both of whom were born in Great Plains states, grew up in German-speaking families and had all of their schooling in the German language.) The freedom of the United States included a freedom to speak whatever language people pleased. (Abraham Lincoln funded German-language newspapers to help his presidential campaign, and Theodore Roosevelt campaigned in English, German, and French, the three languages he knew from childhood, in various places in the United States.) English was the customary language of governance in the United States, and still is not official at the federal level, but mostly English won out in the world's third most populous country because it was a common language that immigrants from a variety of places could use to communicate with one another (as happened in my paternal ancestral line). The huge population base of native speakers of English (in the following generations) in the United States who still had family ties to other countries provides English with a great advantage in spreading around the world.

Another way to treat Esperanto is to take it as a hobby, an exploration of the characteristics of a constructed language. Many language hobbyists have explored Esperanto from that point of view,[3] as I have. For a hobby language, the main criterion is fun, and I do not judge anyone else's opinion about what is fun. I don't waste my time in online discussion debating whether coin collection or knitting is a better hobby, for example. To each their own in hobbies.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#English_as_a_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaspeak

[3] http://interlanguages.net/Esp.html

http://miresperanto.com/konkurentoj/not_my_favourite.htm

http://www.zompist.com/kitespo.html

http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/

tokenadulton Esperanto: the language that never was

廢話。How many native speakers of various Chinese languages do you know how converse with you regularly in Esperanto? The phonological system of Esperanto is noticeably worse than that of English for native speakers of Chinese to acquire.

tokenadulton Esperanto: the language that never was

A regular participant in the sci.lang newsgroup on Usenet compiled a partial list of irregularities in Esperanto a long time ago.[1] Basically, the whole project of building Esperanto as a constructed international auxiliary language was full of internal inconsistencies, especially in word derivation,[2] and full of bizarre arbitrary differences from any natural human language that just make it hard to learn to speak fluently.[3] I have lived in more than one country, and have studied Esperanto quite a while during the 1990s, but it's never had any day-by-day usefulness for any practical purpose for me that any other language has had.

[1] http://www.zompist.com/kitespo.html

[2] http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/hh.html

[3] http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/#d

tokenadulton Is ‘grit’ overrated in explaining student success?

The personality psychologists I know tell me that Martin E. P. Seligman, the originator of the idea of "learned helplessness" and the author of helpful books such as The Optimistic Child, advised his student Angela Duckworth to call "grit" by that term as a marketing move to make people pay more attention to the idea. In the psychology literature, people have been writing for a long time about the personality dimension "conscientiousness," and grit is very little distinguishable from that. I'm a homeschooling parent of four children, and it's plain as day to me (and consistent with all the statistics in the research literature) that conscientiousness matters at the margins. Two equally smart children (per IQ test), one conscientious, one less conscientious, will differ in life outcomes. Everyone knows that.

The HUGE question that is well worth investigating is how much parenting or good teaching or anything else can change a young learner's level of conscientiousness. Conscientiousness changes over the course of life, so it isn't completely fixed for anyone. It varies (somewhat) among identical twins, so environmental influences do matter in development of a given degree of conscientiousness. But so far we don't know a lot yet about what kind of parenting or what kind of teaching might work best to develop conscientiousness. That's well worth learning about. Calling it "grit" is regrettable because that prompts people to neglect the prior research literature.

AFTER EDIT: Comments below this comment asked for definitions of "conscientiousness." I'll put a few links here.

http://pages.uoregon.edu/sanjay/bigfive.html

http://http-server.carleton.ca/~tpychyl/011382000/BigFive.ht...

http://www.personalityresearch.org/papers/popkins.html

tokenadulton This Biology Book Blew Me Away

I simply meant that there are no data to show that any current living thing derives from a different earliest ancestor from all of the other currently living things. You are welcome to show me a counterexample if you know of one.

tokenadulton This Biology Book Blew Me Away

The economical (Occam's Razor) explanation of the patterning of life on earth, based on genetic studies, is that all current living things share a common ancestor. That's what the quoted sentence says, and what you wrote doesn't show that the quoted sentence is a "deeply flawed origin story".

tokenadulton Is Gut Science Biased?

You've heard about the most shocking defecation story related to Nepal, haven't you? United Nations peacekeeping troops from Nepal are thought to have been so lax in digging latrines in their camps that they introduced cholera to Haiti when stationed there after the earthquake there. Until then, the island of Haiti had never had a reported case of cholera, but now cholera is endemic in Haiti.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1198743X14...

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=2114342...

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2...

tokenadulton Study: Speaking Multiple Languages Staves Off Dementia

I would like to believe this opinion, because I am able to speak both English and Chinese. 因為我會說英語和中國話，我願意相信這意見。But the best considered opinion, according to a well reported article in The Atlantic earlier this year,[1] is that there is no strong evidence that bilingualism is especially helpful for cognitive function in old age. No problem. 沒問題。

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/02/the-battl...

tokenadulton Effect of Acute Exercise on Prostate Cancer Cell Growth (2013)

Shouldn't there be replication of a 2013 preliminary finding by now? Where is it?

tokenadulton We Don’t Need More Blood Tests

A lot of the comments here reveal not having read the fine article (which is not very long). If you look at the graphic labeled "How Accurate Tests Can Be Mostly Wrong," about halfway down the displayed Web article, you will see a very carefully worked out (and realistic) example about how even a very accurate medical test can result in mostly false positive indications of a disease--all that is necessary for that, mathematically, is that there is a low base rate of the disease. Examples like this have been commonplace in books about statistical reasoning for making medical decisions for more than a decade, and I have shared links to Hacker News before that make this same point. This is something everyone needs to know (but the investors in Theranos didn't know) to make sound decisions about how much testing to do and what to do with test results.

Other authors who write about this issue are cited in the article kindly submitted for our discussion. I urge everyone here to read a lot of the writings of Dr. John P.A. Ioannidis,[1] who is quoted in the article.

[1] https://med.stanford.edu/profiles/john-ioannidis?tab=publica...

tokenadulton We Don’t Need More Blood Tests

If you read the fine article, you will see a very clear example of how a highly accurate test can still be misleading for clinical practice if the clinician is deciding whether or not to treat for a low-base-rate condition. Examples like this have been in books about statistical reasoning for medical decision-making over and over and over again since the turn of the century.

tokenadulton Private schools, painful secrets

Alas, there is this problem at public schools too. What helps over the long term is for families to have the power to shop, so each family can look for a school that is affordable for their family with characteristics that are safe for that family's children.

tokenadulton Caltech Professor Emeritus, Author Tom M. Apostol, Dies at 92

I learned about Apostol's death from a post by a very astute mathematical biologist, Lior Pachter, who was once a student of Apostol's. The post is "The Ice Cream Cone Proof,"[1] which nicely illustrates Apostol's brilliance as a teacher.

[1] https://liorpachter.wordpress.com/2016/05/09/the-ice-cream-c...

tokenadulton How Much Is a Good Teacher Worth? (2011)

Do you have evidence for this statement? The author of the article submitted here is certainly aware of that claim (he has been researching education reform for many years), but his claim, with evidence shown, is that teacher quality matters more. I think so too, partly because good teaching can change student behaviors toward learning.

tokenadulton Medical error in hospitals is the third leading cause of death in the U.S.

A thoughtful point-by-point response to the underlying medical journal publication:

"Are medical errors really the third most common cause of death in the U.S.?"

https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/are-medical-errors-real...

Simply put, the headline of the article kindly submitted here surely exaggerates the actual problem. What's undoubtedly a problem is that we don't yet have good data-gathering about when patients die unavoidably and when they die when they could have been saved by standard-of-care medical treatment.

tokenadulton The German reference letter system

In the United States, free speech principles as they apply to defamation law basically allow anyone in your former company to say TRUTHFUL things about your PUBLIC behavior in the workplace without fear of legal liability. But because most employers are allergic to lawsuits, they generally advise their employees to say NOTHING other than verifying dates of employment (to prevent employees saying illegal things about their former colleagues like what race or religion they are, for example). But if you actually phone up references, many of them are quite talkative. Whether they follow the boss's advice not to say much is on them. And a really wonderful way to use references (which I did, as a community volunteer advised by a professional search firm for my local school district many years when it was hiring a new superintendent) is to call and ask for BACK references, that is "Who else do you know who could comment on how well Mr. Smith could do this job he is applying for?" That is perfectly legal, and very informative.

tokenadulton The German reference letter system

Contacting former employers or talking about your former employees to a prospective employer is illegal in France.

The law is different here in the United States, of course, and in most countries. I wonder how much of the slow economic growth and high unemployment in France is connected to this information-denying and thus efficiency-frustrating law?

tokenadulton New Record Bid Set for World's Cheapest Solar, Undercutting Coal

Bloomberg News reports[1] that David Keith, a Harvard professor of applied physics and public policy, used to be a solar power skeptic but has reexamined the economics of current solar power and now expects solar power to be important because the economics have changed.

Professor Keith's recent essay on solar power, "Cheap Solar Power,"[2] shows the facts and calculations to explain why solar power now beats several other sources of primary electricity for many applications. It is very likely that many industries will move to places where solar power is especially abundant and inexpensive.

[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-04/harvard-sc...

[2] http://www.keith.seas.harvard.edu/blog-1/cheapsolarpower

tokenadulton Why Are Your Gut Microbes Different from Mine?

From the article: "The microbiome field is negotiating the same cycle of hype, backlash, and introspection [other preliminary medical findings have experienced]. Thousands of studies have linked the microbiome to almost every condition you can imagine, but many of these correlations are likely to be illusory. 'A lot of people have been annoyed by the hype surrounding our area, and I think they were probably right,' says Raes. 'It’s time that, from within the field, we look critically at what we’re doing ourselves. We tried to do that with our paper. Yes, we’ve had the hype. Now, it’s time for the consolidation.'"

Here on Hacker News, I have seen repeated articles become greeted by comments that assume we already know all about how to regulate what microbes are in our guts and how that influences health. In fact, we have no idea about such things and don't have nearly enough data yet to make any definite statements about how gut microbes really to human health, or even if they influence human health at all for most people.

tokenadulton Ask HN: The “New” page – bug or feature?

I visit the new page at least daily, sometimes more often. I agree that it is up to us to upvote the stories that best fit the Hacker News guidelines and are from good sources and gratify intellectual curiosity.

tokenadulton A golden age of ancient DNA science begins

I'd appreciate comments from someone who follows this research about what John Hawks says about ancient DNA studies and their recent findings. I get the impression that he is reaching some different conclusions from the author whose essay was kindly submitted here.

http://johnhawks.net/weblog/reviews/neandertals/neandertal_d...

tokenadulton A 120-Year Lease on Life Outlasts Apartment Heir (1995)

The Social Security Administration in the United States publishes an Actuarial Life Table that is updated once in a while based on recent experience of life expectancy at various ages, going all the way up to age 119. This table always UNDERestimates a person's probability of living into the future, because the experience of each age group keeps getting better (that is, the death rate keeps decreasing) for each age group over time.

https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

You wrote,

Someone posted a nice infographic where you could put in your age and it would give you some simulated death ages.

I think I saw that posted to HN back in the day. I've recently been looking up new information about longevity, and a link I've not seen posted here before, from the Harvard Gazette,

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/2006/07.20/10-deathquiz.html

is interesting on the long-term trend of increasing life expectancy.

tokenadulton How the New York Times Sandbagged Bernie Sanders

A lot of us here in the United States who are pickled in news about electoral politics at this time of year don't appreciate stories that are purely about electoral politics creeping on to Hacker News. The guidelines here say, after all, "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic." I'm familiar with how to find Matt Taibbi's stories published in Rolling Stone, and I don't usually find them up to the "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" standard expected here on Hacker News. This particular article digs into how a piece published online by the New York Times gradually underwent editing after first publication, which is interesting to any of us who do online publishing, so I thank the participant here who kindly submitted it, but it's apparent that most comments here are responding to the headline, or to the campaign in general, and not to the article's content at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

tokenadulton America's High School Graduates Look Like Other Countries' High School Dropouts

I always wish these reports would break out the average vs. the distribution.

The report does that for you, if you trouble yourself to look it up, and I quoted that part of the report in a comment I posted yesterday. Here is a longer quotation for you.

"In numeracy and problem solving in technology-rich environments, the United States performed below the PIAAC international average. In numeracy, the U.S. average score was 12 points lower than the PIAAC international average score (257 versus 269, see figure 1-B), and in problem solving in technology-rich environments, the U.S. average score was 9 points lower than the international average (274 versus 283, see figure 1-C). Compared with the international average distributions for these skills, the United States had

"• a smaller percentage at the top (10 versus 12 percent at Level 4/5 in numeracy, and 5 versus 8 percent at Level 3 in problem solving in technology-rich environments, see figures 2-B and 2-C), and

"• a larger percentage at the bottom (28 versus 19 percent in numeracy, and 64 versus 55 percent in problem solving in technology-rich environments at Level 1 and below)."

There is more detail for you to read about if you are interested in the details, in the study report published by the international study group, with the report linked here hosted by the United States National Center for Educational Statistics.

http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2016/2016039.pdf

tokenadulton America's High School Graduates Look Like Other Countries' High School Dropouts

Thanks for the follow-up question. Here is a link to a LONG article about Russian textbook that I learned about from a fellow HN participant years ago.

http://toomandre.com/travel/sweden05/WP-SWEDEN-NEW.pdf

tokenadulton America's High School Graduates Look Like Other Countries' High School Dropouts

The study is about comparative data, and I can well believe (having lived in another country) that there are countries where a larger percentage of adults than in the United States can use commonplace technology of today. The math literacy (numeracy) advantage for other countries I absolutely believe, as I have read the textbooks from other countries (I am an American who can read Chinese), and the textbooks are simpler better in other countries than they are in the United States.

tokenadulton America's High School Graduates Look Like Other Countries' High School Dropouts

Here is a link (hosted by the United States National Center for Educational Statistics) to the study report referenced in the news story submitted to open this thread, that is "Skills of U.S. Unemployed, Young, and Older Adults in Sharper Focus: Results From the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) 2012/2014: First Look". The report includes a summary of findings, including findings about numeracy and technology skills:

"• a larger percentage at the bottom (28 versus 19 percent 6 in numeracy, and 64 versus 55 percent in problem solving in technology-rich environments at Level 1 and below)."

http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2016/2016039.pdf

tokenadulton Pentagon admits it has deployed military spy drones over the U.S

From the article:

"The Pentagon has publicly posted at least a partial list of the drone missions that have flown in non-military airspace over the United States and explains the use of the aircraft. The site lists nine missions flown between 2011 and 2016, largely to assist with search and rescue, floods, fires or National Guard exercises.

"A senior policy analyst for the ACLU, Jay Stanley, said it is good news no legal violations were found, yet the technology is so advanced that it's possible laws may require revision."

This sounds a lot less dramatic than the article headline, but it's good that this is being reported and discussed publicly.

tokenadulton The mercury doesn’t lie: We’ve hit a troubling climate change milestone

Paywalled? I tried to reach the page, but got a page not found notice using either of two different Web browsers.