Aren't most discussions on HN an ideological debate of one form or another? I think my error is being on the wrong side of the popular view here. Oh well, you cannot please everyone all the time :). In parting I thank you for the great, and not appreciated enough, work you do as HN mod. My best to you, sir.
It's empirically the case that men are much more technically inclined than women these days. I think that is due to a combination of reasons, not some sort of inherent inferiority of females. Not do I think people who undergo modification of their genitalia should be singled out for condemnation. You are reading into what I wrote. I am pointing a basic dilemma resulting from the fact that men who undergo genetalia surgery do not suddenly lose the attributes that these days allow males to excel over females in certain domains. In which case there is still a power imbalance, and those on whom the benefit lies now can circumvent the protections erected for those needing special attention. Seems like a clear problem to me. The irony is the noble inclinations that motivate special attention for females may make people blind to when the allowances are being exploited by males.
Isn't it a legitimate question? We have special protection for under represented groups. So when the dominant group starts taking the identity of underrepresented groups and coopting their protections, they are no longer protected. The two things are at odds with each other.
Hmm, somehow I knew Justine is a 'transwoman' by this feat. Lucky guess I suppose...
Question: if all the high achieving women in tech end up being 'transwomen', is that a step forward or backward for women in tech? Will 'transwomen' be able to take advantage of hiring privileges given to normal women? If so, won't this effectively shut normal women out of tech even more?
I think trans/self identifying people should be in a separate category so they don't exploit allowances made for under represented minorities.
I would agree with that. There is often a practical question motivating comp sci and mathematical discoveries. The difference from Darwin's case is the mathematical conclusions are never wrong, regardless of the underlying motivation. That is what I mean by culture free. Change in culture cannot change the validity of mathematical deductions. On the other hand, Darwin's conclusions in Descent of Man are wrong, and he appears to have drawn these conclusions due to his cultural bias.
Yes of course there are cultural influences. But it seems some branches of STEM are fairly immune to the opinions of the surrounding culture. E.g. what can we say is victorian about any mathematical conclusion? Yet Darwin's supposedly scientific conclusions in this work appear to be very culture bound.
Well, for instance in computer science all the theorems are completely culture free, so it is not impossible. But it is indeed difficult, and to be expected for the most part.
Strange that Darwin's theory of human evolution was so culture bound. One would think looking to the science would transcend culture to a greater degree.
These really intense dreams, are you in control of the imagery, or is it something you are experiencing beyond your control? When I have intense dreams and try to control them the fidelity breaks down and I usually wake up.
When men exercise their reason coolly and freely on a variety of distinct questions, they inevitably fall into different opinions on some of them. When they are governed by a common passion, their opinions, if they are so to be called, will be the same.
One of the neatest aspects of git that I never see used is delta debugging, where git automatically finds the code that introduced a bug through binary searching the commit history. This requires many small commits, which is tedious.
Could all the porn consumption and masturbation be a factor? Also I have heard contraceptive use in the past can affect female fertility. There is also potential leakage of contraceptives into our water supply.
I would like to see a good treatment of Lucas like arguments. Most take the form of humans having their own halting problem. But, that objection is completely irrelevant, and it concerns me that objectors do not realize this. Makes me think they are missing something.
There are no mathematical theories of runaway intelligence growth. On the other hand there are many theorems of fundamental limits to maechanical processes. E.g. NP completeness codiscoverer Leonid Levin also proved what he calls independence conservation that states no stochastic process is expected to increase net mutual information. Then there are the more well known theorems with similar implications: no free lunch theorems, halting problem, Kolmogorov complexity's uncomputability, data processing inequality, and so on. There is absolutely nothing that looks like runaway intelligence explosion in theoretical computer science. The closest attempt I have seen in Kauffman's analysis of NK problems, but there he finds similar limitations, except with low K terrains, but that analysis is a bit questionable in mind. To make arguments like gwern and Kurzweil they are essentially appealing to mysticism; assuming there is a yet to be discovered mathematical law utterly unlike anything we have ever discovered. They are engaging in promissory computer science, writing a whole bunch of theory checks they hope will be cashed in the future.
I read a similar article by Scott Alexander, about the fact some psi researchers could generate a reliable signal with their studies, but since he a priori ruled out the possibility of psi, he is convinced there is something wrong with the scientific process.
He is handling the integration. The maintenance of the products falls on the ops team. He is doing a great job. I just don't think he will stick around to maintain things once he is done, and we will have two stacks to migrate and maintain.
My internal devops group has this issue. We had a working system on teamcity and the hashicorp stack and linkerd. Now we are working on a brand new system using gitlab and openshift and istio. Highly redundant with, from my perspective, only incremental advantage. At the beginning I spoke out against this, but failed to convince anyone. Progress has been alright because of our new 10x hire who hated the old tech and loves the new stuff. But once he is out of the picture, we will be maintaining two highly redundant stacks both requiring deep technical knowledge to maintain effectively. I guess bailing is always an option, but I would prefer to be a force for good somehow. Any suggestions?
The SRI at Stanford claims psi is very prevalent in the human population, but operates at low levels that require a large number of sensitive experiments to detect. Not saying they are right, but that could explain why these people were persuaded of paranormal activity, but it never popped out at you as a really obvious capability.