astazangasta
astazangasta on Hacker News
Actually, would you please ban me? I'm not sure i agree with you about ideology vs. curiosity, I'd say rather that ideology is one of the primary things I am curious about and something I appreciate about HN is that there are smart people here willing to discuss it.
But I do think my comments suffer from a meanness I'd like to avoid, and that my use of this site is something like a nicotine habit; I'd appreciate the nudge towards quitting.
It's not a hand wave - my argument is that those things could all be better developed, and indeed have been, by programs that are directly focused on that kind of technology development. Ancillary technologies are nice, but why settle for ancillary development that MIGHT yield things that are useful, instead of directly focusing your technology development on those useful things in the first place?
Yeah, where would we be without LASIK? I'll also note that that article notably elides things like ICBMs and the other myriad military applications, since it is clearly intended as a puff piece to make us view space technologies as benevolent and positive.
As for my tone, perhaps you are right that I don't need to employ ridicule; but I wish to, because I feel contempt for this position so strongly I want to make it known. Space fetishism is a diversion that exists to bilk engineers into careers and positions that are in aid of the military.
Most industries get their start in the military because that is where the money always is; however, semiconductors have definitely moved on to other applications, whereas rocketry remains mostly about making missiles.
Space enthusiasts are always trying to sell their fetish with this line, but the fact is that technology development is not some generic facility; if you develop technology devoted to getting things up into orbit, it will basically give you the expertise to do that. It doesn't, say, develop your semiconductor design, biochemistry, medicine, agriculture, or whatever else your country might need. It basically helps you build weapons, the main reason people get so excited about rocketry. This is the last thing India needs.
Exactly this; also, as a computational biologist I cringe at the stacking of dubious models that produced this "mapping". First is the "interactome", a terrible way to model biology, which is used to predict drug interactions, a highly dubious proposition, which is used to identify similarly-acting molecules in foods, again highly dubious - this isn't even GIGO, it's GIGIGIGO. And at the end of the day, none of this crummy methodology is going to result in any wisdom superior to "eat more kale". It's unfortunate that this is the prism certain investigators have trapped themselves in.
I find those terms particularly perplexing because the idea of ridiculing people for their sensitivity to particular political concerns is an exercise in demonstrating your sensitivity to particular political concerns. Cura te ipsum!
This is in the category of "outrage outrage", where we are outraged that other people are getting outraged about things.
I'm not sure what to do with this remark. You said my definition of social construction was untenable because the implications were too broad and you seemed to find that frightening. I responded by saying that social construction IS a theory with broad implications and gave you a reference to read, since you seem to be unfamiliar with these concepts. Your response seems a non sequitur.
>Our definition of intelligence continues to refine itself to be a highly generalizable aptitude for certain abstract skills.
This is exactly what social construction is: reifying a set of observations into an abstract notion. Intelligence is a social construction.
I'm guessing you are not a parent. I have a toddler and a one month old. It is rewarding in many ways, but it is also crushingly boring, repetitive work. It's also overwhelmingly placed on women; men simply don't do as much child care by a factor of probably ten. I'm pretty sure no woman is trying to have her cake here, and every single one would choose to have help so they could do anything else on occasion.
Claiming success is a social construct seems to me to be trivially true, not a staggering claim. Intelligence is less obvious since there is a vast literature around it, but, again, it is clearly a social construct; we must struggle to agree on a useful definition of intelligence, therefore it is a social construct.
I'm also not sure what "scientific evidence" would look like here. You seem to have had some sort of allergic reaction to the assertion of social construction and retreated instinctively to familiar but hollow epistemic grounds.
This is garbage. Contrary to popular belief, remission is in fact common in schizophrenia, so n=2 demonstrates precisely nothing. In addition, there is no evidence that schizophrenics have any brain dysfunction other than that caused by taking neuroleptics for decades.
No, this is not right. Most power generation is done by steam in the US (85%). Steam can get much hotter than boiling water, and it is cheap and makes no waste.
You're right, I didn't read enough or do enough back-of-the-napkin math. I read more; this seems plausible in life cycle terms, but now I have doubts about the economics. At $30/ton, 30Gtons becomes $900 billion a year. For comparison US discretionary spending is $1.4 trillion. It's not clear to me where this level of spending is going to come from (jewelry sales?), for an activity that has no useful economic output other than sequestering carbon. In addition I'm not sure that $30/ton is an accurate estimate of all of the capital outlays and so on required - entire industries have to be created to facilitate this process at scale. Much of this activity has to be done in decentralized fashion, i.e., it is not a single polity or entity that must partake in olivine mining to make this viable, which adds cost and political overhead.
I'm also not clear on what putting 30 gigatons of rock onto coastal sea shelves each year is going to do in terms of ecosystem impact, and how tolerant local polities will be of this. For example, Costa Rica gets something like 6% of its GDP from tourism, a lot of which is ecotourism; it seems unlikely they will be happy about a significant mining and rock-dumping operation taking over its beaches.
EDIT: Also, on the life cycle question, I'm unclear on how real the "1 ton for 1.25 tons of CO2" claim is - would a real beach weathering actually produce this much absorption per ton? Would it happen on a 1-year time scale so that we could actually offset this much every year? Uncertain; if you have citations demonstrating this please post them, if you're not above arguing on the Internet.
Thanos doesn't understand exponential growth. If you actually want to have an effect, cutting a population in half does nothing, it'll just grow back in whatever the doubling time is, probably on the order of decades; you need to decimate or eradicate.
This is exactly the kind of logic that led to Silent Spring. "We think we have a viable solution, we haven't really evaluated any of the side effects, but we need to act, and act fast!" We went through this with DDT. It worked; we killed all of the insects. It had side effects we didn't anticipate. Then it stopped working due to resistance.
The question is, did we learn anything from this history, or are we going to be equally incautious with each new technology we come across?
This seems like it would fail energetically; the amount of energy required to mine and transport a bunch of rock to a beach would surely exceed the amount of CO2 sequestered.
The problem is that people routinely underestimate the scale of vested interest. Bill McKibben famously quantified the problem as the amount of actual capital (as in, can be used as collateral) in the ground for some companies - trillions of dollars worth. But the problem actually goes far beyond this.
The real vested interest is Washington, DC - what is being confronted here is not a few oil companies and their lobbying power; that could easily be overcome, there is a ton of public interest and pressure in fighting climate change. The real barrier is that Washington's imperial power is tied to fossil fuels.
Starting as early as the 1920s there was the recognition that US oil supplies were dwindling (they peaked in 1969 and have been falling ever since), and that the bulk of remaining oil was in the Middle East. This remains the case, although Venezuela is an important new source in the era of not-so-cheap oil. Since that moment, Washington has used control over the Middle East not as a way to get oil, but as a way to exercise imperial control over world affairs.
This is why our foreign policy includes a close, bizarre, and to most Americans anathema, alliance with the repressive, dictatorial, feudal monarchy in Saudi Arabia; one of Obama's signal achievements was selling this regime $115 billion in weaponry. All of this effort, along with the effort of the Iraq War, the Afghanistan war, and the 70-year long campaign to control Iran, was organized to ensure the continuation of American power by maintaining dominance over the global oil supply.
None of this power is possible without this concentration of oil resources. If the world, instead, moves to a decentralized system based on cheap, accessible technologies, the result would be an instant loss of control for Washington. All of the military power arrayed to dominate the Middle East would become irrelevant. This is intolerable.
It is THIS vested interest that we must overcome to fight climate change. Few activists appreciate this; little of our rhetoric around climate change is organized around the war machine. It continues to be along the lines of, "This is just good sense, why can't we have a technology transition, screw the oil companies?"
Without confronting the war machine, without aiming at the real organized power that stands behind our use of fossil fuels, we're unlikely to win.
Like most grand theories of history most of this is only works as a result of approximation. For example, the Unification stuff appears to me to be pure garbage. There is no moment in history when people went from cleanly separating outsiders from insiders. The examples given are both wrong; Egypt was likely ruled by a dynastic elite that came from outside (a common pattern across many cultures in Asia throughout history); the Romans, ironically, are the ones who gave us the word "barbarian". People still rail about foreigners; cf. Brexit.
Given the gaps in our knowledge of early life, a definite statement in either direction is unlikely to be in the offing. However, terrestrial life is decidedly unlikely. Life is decidedly unlikely, and no one has so far suggested an even remotely plausible mechanism for abiogenesis on Earth. This means if you are betting, an extraterrestrial origin is the safe bet; if the odds of abiogenesis are so slim, while life once formed is tenacious and hardy enough to travel through space, it is more likely life traveled here.
This is idiotic. We don't need a recession to clear detritus from the economy, that should be the result of routine investment. We get recessions because the economy as a whole overcommits to speculation because investors have too much money and too little sense. This is unnecessary, as thw Great Moderation shows.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moderation
>the same as the privacy populists who obsess about data, most of whom lived in advanced democracies in which the data isn’t used for serious assaults on people
This observation betrays a serious misunderstanding of the way democracy functions. The reason these assaults don't happen (or rather, don't happen more, because they do happen) is there is a robust public discourse that is critical of these moves and keeps them in check. Democracies don't magically grant people rights, they must be fought for.
Saudis buy weapons BECAUSE they are educated in liberal institutions. Elites around the world have been sending their children to be educated in the West for centuries; what they learn here is an affinity for Western elites, because they are being educated along with the scions of Western families. Then they go home and govern their countries according to the dictates of the liberal order, viz., support the Washington consensus, partner with western companies, buy weapons, etc.
No. Plato wanted to present an idealised world ruled by philosophers like himself. He wanted to deny that this world was equivalent to the highly unpopular government that had been imposed on Athens by their nemesis Sparta. That is, he wished to deny that Critias, despite being educated in the manner Plato favored, was a true representative of that philosophy, since the result was so unpopular. This is a position taken by many ideologues, Marxist, capitalist or otherwise, who repudiate the failures of their system in practice - the system fails because it is not "real" Marxism, etc., which can remain forever perfect in theory. In reality it isn't difficult to see the outcome of Plato's philosophy (I am thinking mostly of The Republic) as playing out in real life exactly as the Thirty Tyrants did - a bunch of rich brats raised to think they were wise philosophers visiting their "wisdom" on a captive populace.
It could still be an artifact of something else, e.g. differential digestion associated with age produces length and GC artifacts.
I agree we can learn from studying Riefenstahl, and also that the film is amazing, but i deny that we are learning about "human nature", a concept which I generally abhor and which is used to end sociological arguments at a desired point.
My koan about human nature comes from my child, who at 18 months, just barely after talking, was able to sustain the notion of video chat with no real instruction - that is, that the image in the wall that was speaking to him was a person he could interact with. Nothing in the evolutionary background prepared him for this. If there is a "human nature" it is to be pliant to an ever-changing circumstance.
Plato was a young man when Socrates died. Imagine a bitter fascist a generation later attempting to keep alive the cult of a noted collaborator put to death for his collaboration. Of course he will say Socrates did not support the tyranny.
This article is moronic. We are supposed to learn about human nature from Leni Riefenstahl, a propagandist whose films were designed to make the Nazis look as good as possible?
You know what is unsustainable? Fascism. Literally. It had no economic program, and it flared out dramatically fighting conflicts with every other country. Its soldiers had to be fueled by methamphetamines to prosecute this war. And on both ends it was bookended by democracy.