NPMaxwell

This article appears in my HN feed with an article about throwing away React. The React article explains that having code that prevents engineers from doing whatever they want to is essential. If we can't trust engineers coding, why do we trust police arresting? Restraints are needed.

The life concept here is so different from the recent post about the MIT media lab. "I watched two brilliant students organize two massive hackathons to improve the breast pump, challenging assumptions about who gets to invent the future and what problems are worth solving. Another student launched a remarkably successful movement against facial recognition technologies by demonstrating that they often embed significant racial biases. ...And late one night, I saw a young woman walk past my door wearing a massive pair of delicate, filigreed copper angel wings" http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/2020/08/15/to-the-future-...

One example: https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/jan/19/undercover-police...

Yes. The attack in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7vlKbR3Gcs

Cool. HN timestamps show that took you no more than 5 minutes, maximum!

I think maybe the issue here is that the press did not cover the unidentified federal agents arresting the BLM protesters. The result is that it looks like the treatment of the Portland protesters is different.

It implies that your friend lives in Hong Kong or Taiwan, and that China employs people to read Facebook posts from those places. Unless you mean that she sent you a messenger chat (which now has end-to-end encryption). In that case, she lives in Hong Kong or Taiwan and the Facebook encryption should not be relied on to protect yourself from Chinese monitoring.

Is that a typo? It makes more sense as "good results can be wrong, and being right for bad reasons isn't acceptable"

And incredibly boring. The usual estimate is that data science is 80% data wrangling: finding, collecting, and cleaning up data. The term "data scientist" replaced "data miner", because miners are looking for gold. Scientists are obsessed with finding out the nature of reality, gold or mud. They will do seriously boring stuff to set things up so that reality is revealed.

At one point, the word "scientist" in "data scientist" was used to distinguish between people who took the time to develop domain expertise from statistical consultants who applied standard methodologies without reference to what the data was or where it came from.

I'm sorry we have switched on resumes from reporting years to reporting years and months. It used to be that even 20 months off could just disappear.

When you're ready, drop this Hacker News name. Switch to something like makingChances.

Sounds like restarting may be helpful -- not expecting to continue from where you were -- getting a contracting agency to pitch you and going from there. Once you're in a job, most people don't care about earlier gaps, except that managers who don't know how to collect people who can do the work get fixated on superstitions.

To restate what you're probably already hearing from your therapist: everyone can become depressed. It's something you learn. Some people are more clever at picking it up than others, but everyone can learn it. Depression is episodic. It goes away and comes back. A common recovery is for the gaps between episodes to get larger and the episodes get smaller. Depression grants three super powers. 1) You can see probabilities and how much control you and others have. People without depression cannot. 2) You are ready to serve, even at the risk of your life. This is something that doesn't apply to most of modern life, but does come up now and then. Think of Oscar Schindler. 3) While in an episode, you can be confident that you will not enjoy things. So if you're trying to resist a bowl of ice cream, you have help: you won't enjoy it.

Your negative thoughts and feelings are a natural part of mammalian neural systems, like kicking when you're tapped under the knee and being able to see dim lights easier if you look a little away. Those thoughts and the feeling of dread are not necessary or helpful (in almost every situation). You do not have to respect them. In fact, when they appear, you can disrespect them. They are just an evolutionary glitch that served primitive communities, but were never in the best interests of the people getting them.

A triumph of well-administered A/B testing combined with creative innovation in seeking out procedures to test

This reads as if "blog" is a metaphor for "product". I'm guessing that blog process is a pretty good indicator of development strategy. Stale bland blogs predict stale bland engineering.

Nice demonstration that the entire point and argument can be presented in one (animated) graphic -- like code that needs no comments.

Music, like weaving, is a predecessor in using algorithms to do work. For hundreds of years, music theorists have been codifying the algorithms, or creating new algorithms, that create good music (for particular definitions of good). Like other code instantiated in a network, this code is more tailored to specific prior states and is less available to analysis of its details than prior efforts.

So naive then. That's reassuring. I guess

What makes the increasing-Gini result confusing is ignoring variation. This is done by thinking of the full distribution as if it were its average. In this case, the pot is distributed using a pull from a uniform random distribution: The assets of a pair are combined into a pot, and a number, s, from 0 to 1 is drawn. One person gets s of the pot. The other gets 1 - s. On average, s = .5. When s = .5, the Gini coefficient of the pair after the transaction is zero. Their pair of assets are equal. As ABS(s) approaches 1.0, their inequality becomes larger. For example, in Russian Roulette, s is either 0 or 1. With p = the portion of the pot that came from one person, then, when ABS(s - 0.5) > ABS(p - 0.5), the transaction increases inequality. When s is a constant 0.5, every transaction will either reduce inequality or maintain the perfect equality. The system increases inequality in the population until it matches the inequality in the pool from which s is pulled. There's nothing surprising there unless you make a simplifying assumption that s = 0.5, the average of its distribution. Using this simulation to model economic systems comes down to choosing a distribution for s: whatever you choose, that's what you get. UNIFORM(0.49,0.51) will result in lots of equality. UNIFORM(-1,2) will produce some people in debt to others.

Part of what is astonishing here is the existence of a system that drives such gaming. It makes me wonder what the people who required a science publication were thinking. Were they naive or do they cynically disrespect scientific research?

OP is about a hotel that has planters on its walls so that exterior walls are covered in plants. People approve of this hotel. It is not that ratings on a website are overwhelmed by fake raters established in positions where they can spoof the system.

Alternative summary

About 150,000 Americans are homeless in the way you worry about homelessness: Suffering from addictions and other mental illnesses, they sleep on the street, and stay there for months or years. Most of these homeless people would have been institutionalized before the de-institutionalization of the 1970's.

Another 400,000 have no more addictions or mental illness than the housed population. They sleep in cars, shelters, or other protected sites. Their homelessness lasts for several days or weeks and then they are able to obtain housing again.

Summary of details

66% of unhoused sleep in shelters, cars, or other protected sleeping sites. 33% sleep on the street.

84% are housed within a few weeks.

33% have a serious mental illness and would have been institutionalized before 1970's de-institutionalization.

About 30% have addictions.

In the world of homelessness, violence is usually perpetrated by the housed on the unhoused, not by unhoused.

About 75% grew up in the area where they currently are homeless.

There are more empty rental units than unhoused people.

The fact that many theories are disproven is not evidence of pseudoscience. Popper suggested exactly the opposite: pseudoscience is when you cannot disprove theories.

As part of reproduction, honey bees leave the hive and form honeybee-units-combined structures. In < 7 minutes: a presentation that, in such a structure, honeybees in low mechanical tension (stress) move to areas of high tension. No over-dramatic video of a swarm flying around stinging stuff.

Before you invest in the Big Five, you'll want to check on how much it can change your posterior odds, and compare that to results of investing time and money into other approaches.

Are there any non-pseudoscientific psychology theories? That's a good question. Here's an off-the-top-of-my-head list: Rescorla-Wagner, Pavlovian learning, Habituation, failure to thrive, opponent processes, dominance hierarchies, learned helplessness, one-trial learning of disgust, avoidance theory of phobia, short-term vs. long-term memory, chunking, the hypergeometric forgetting curve, public inhibition of non-dominant behaviors.

A challenge for Psychology in the U.S. is that Statistics is usually included in the curriculum in Spring of Senior year -- an after-thought. I've been off-and-on poking at creating a course that would put statistics immediately after Intro Psych.

"Some professionals recognised talk of colours from the infamous Myers-Briggs test, administered by less-respectable management consultants. It built on the mystical ideas of the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, active at the start of the 20th century, whose theories are now mostly of historical interest. The theory of Myers-Briggs was not something modern psychologists took seriously. Since the test had been developed quite some time ago it had been the subject of extensive research and the results had revealed serious flaws."

The Myers-Briggs corporate product is an interesting confirmation of 20th Century scientific method. With standard methodologies, reviewed and published by standard peer review processes, Myers-Briggs was shown to be useless before 1990. So science seems to work well. Nonetheless, the last time a company I worked for paid (and spent on employee time) for Myers-Briggs testing was 2017. Science works well, but corporate purchasing of consulting does not have such a good track record.

I recommend remaining in ignorance of how good it feels to take heroin. You don't want to know

Write up of methodology & results: https://www.andrewoswald.com/docs/AdvertisingMicheletal2019E...