pasabagi

So, I agree that good standards and (to a lesser extent) algorithms come out of practice.

However, the basic point about a standard is not that it's perfect: it's a coordination mechanism. Companies go bust all the time, technology changes all the time, but if you have standard components, large parts of complex systems can be maintained indefinitely. Like, I have a rolling press that was made in 1840, and I can still replace the bolts for it, because the standard thread gauge has not changed.

I guess the nice thing about both algorithms and standards are they are the two places where the software world is not just burning people's lives on relentlessly reinventing the wheel. If you contribute even a fraction to the study of an algorithm, your work will be part of software in a thousand years. If you contribute to a standard, you are producing the conditions for a thousand other programs. Both of these things are basically common goods, and they help everyone. I think a culture of programming where it's less about founding the next over-capitalized unicorn, and more about creating a mutually supportive ecosystem, would produce very good software.

I actually think Germany would be really good at digital infrastructure if they stopped being afraid of friend computer. Germany is immensely proud of its history of creating standards - there's literally a place in berlin called DIN Platz. Germany is also very proud, and rightly so, in its history of mathematical innovation.

Everything that isn't dross in the computer world is either a well designed standard, or a well designed algorithm. If the German government adopted a sensible standard for government documents, for example, and mandated that all documents must be saved in it, that would already make a huge difference.

I'm not sure I can do it justice in an adhoc way, but it's important to keep in mind there are a few layers of irony that the piece is working on. First, Socrates, who does not write, is being presented as a character, in written form, by his disciple. So obviously Plato does not share Socrates' views on writing, even if he finds them interesting and valuable.

Second, in the dialogue, there are a bunch of examples of texts that are presented by the characters: the speech from Lysias, which Phaedrus has hidden in his cloak, then the speech from Socrates, that he disavows, then another speech, taking the opposite position. There's also the (fascinating) recounting of a legend about Thoth, and the invention of writing, which plays on the fact that the greek word for 'medicine' is the same as that for 'poison'.

It's a really rich text - as, I guess, you might expect from a really brilliant writer who was also a disciple of a philosopher who never wrote a word. I tend to think of it as a serious attempt to describe the conceptual differences between speech and writing - something people tend to collapse ('writing is recorded speech', etc).

Pluto? Plotto? Platti?

Seriously though, that's a horrible bowdlerization of the argument in the Phaedrus. It's actually very subtle and interesting, not just reactionary griping.

Trying to prove correlations between race and crime is literally the historical basis of criminology as a discipline. They failed, it's stupid, and now people know better.

You can commission as many studies as you like on astrology, and they'll all be meaningless.

I mean, it's not a very interesting research topic? People who are poor and young commit certain categories of crime more often. That has nothing to do with immigration or race or whatever.

German spelling is ridiculously easy, whereas English spelling is quite hard. I guess the equivalent inverse would be comma use in German.

I've read that big pharma are primarily patent companies: most of the actual research is done by universities, then most of the production is outsourced.

I think even Russia and the US still do intelligence sharing on a lot of stuff - and that's before you consider that the US seems to be in everybody's networks anyhow, so non-sharing is probably just sharing with a bit more skullduggery.

The expectations for hostage-takers are pretty low, whereas the expectations for police are, if not sky-high, at least that they won't kill or injure you.

Disappointment is often proportionate to anger.

There's a second point which is, from a political perspective, police behaviour can be easily changed. Desperate criminal behaviour cannot.

Democracy is not supposed to settle technical questions. It is supposed to settle questions about societal goals and moires.

As such, there's no need for anybody to know about anything technical. And they don't: the president of the US suggested injecting bleach. The prime minister of the UK bragged loudly about shaking hands with absolutely everyone.

The various interventions vis-a-vis night-time strolls were basically technical measures in the end of a widely-agreed upon goal: avoiding mass casualties. You can say you are fine with the casualties. You can become an expert and identify a mistake in the argumentation. You can't vote on what the facts are, and whether or not 'do not leave the house' moves case rates up or down is a fact.

Expertise exists. You can ask a hundred non-mathematicians what a circle is, and get a hundred incoherent answers.

Sometimes, you just have to recognize that you don't have the requisite training to respond to a problem, and just follow advice from people who do.

I think I'm pretty good for a layperson at statistics + public health stuff, and a lot of the precautions we ended up taking in the pandemic were news to me: for instance, the effect of masks on protecting others, the relationship of infection surges to mass casualty events, and so on.

I figure a lot of people are just not used to following rules (they're office workers who don't wear PPE at work, etc) so when they had to follow rules, they freak out.

No need to presume: you can read the article. "dissemination of defamatory fake news and another probe over possible obstruction, incitement and criminal organization."

Which is fair enough, I think.

Do you have the same opinion on Jan 6 rioters?

Well, ~50%[0] of microplastics is car tyres, so you know, good luck. Support public transport, support cycle lanes, campaign for pedestrianization, etc.

Maybe move to a low-car-density enviroment? Holland?

[0]: https://e360.yale.edu/features/tire-pollution-toxic-chemical...

The Tony Blair Institute is perhaps the most powerful thinktank in the UK today, and Tony Blair loves AI in the way that only a man who peck-types can. The TBI put out a paper suggesting that 60% of public servants could be replaced with AI. The methodology? They asked ChatGPT. That's a portent for the policies of the future.

I think in many ways this is the real story of AI: we have convinced the decision-makers of the world of the power of computing, but they don't know anything about computers, so they are wildly enthusiastic about a technology they understand - a program that makes a computer behave a little like a person.

I dropped reading this about halfway: the author has some fairly cranky opinions about recent history.

Is it compassion? One of my cousins has downs, and she's something of a favourite because she's easygoing and sensible - exactly the sort of person that, if you were going to live hunter-gatherer style, would be great to have around.

I don't think you need compassion to recognize the value of non-typical people - just a lack of prejudice.

Eh, the per-capita housing situation in the UK is 1 house per three people, per gov.uk statistics[0]. A third of a house is plenty for most people. The problem is that these houses are very unevenly distributed, so a large majority are under-inhabited, then a minority are packed to the gills. Building more houses will not solve this - it will just result in yet more empty houses that most people can't afford to live in.

[0]: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/net-supply-of-hous...

My feeling is Britain is both paradoxically tolerant (I live in Germany, and the difference is stark), but also omnidirectionally hateful - for instance, British people are the only people in the world who, as a norm, hate children. It's a nation of sadists, not a nation of racists.

I don't know: as I understood it, the trucker thing was basically about showing that they occupy a strategic position in the Canadian economy. It's like the old rail strike idea: it doesn't matter if everybody hates you, if the trains aren't running, then the government has to make a deal, otherwise the economy collapses.

I don't think they actually did hold that strategic position (if the police had, you know, done their jobs, they wouldn't be blocking the roads for long), but if you know that the police won't do that (because they always baby right wing protestors) it makes some sense. And that was a lot of the rhetoric from the truckers about themselves: I guess we'd just come out of the pandemic with all these sudden realizations about essential workers, which definitely included truckers, and there's often (but probably not in the trucker's case) a connection between being 'essential' and 'occupying a strategically advantageous position'.

It's often pretty hard to do public protest without breaking some kind of law, even if you do everything you're supposed to.

I'm not a fan of the truckers (the loud horns were totally infuriating) but the fundamental problem was that the police didn't want to move them on, not that they were breaking the law.

I mean, it seems a bit unclear what his political positions actually were, but it does seem they were just opinions. As philosophers go, that's pretty small beer: Thales used to roast people alive in a brass container, Marcus Aurelius was responsible for numerous genocides, and Heidegger was a card-carrying Nazi.

Apparently bullshit, though: https://www.lexpress.fr/idees-et-debats/michel-foucault-et-l...

Guy Sorman wasn't Foucault's friend, and later said (about his statement) that he never actually saw anything he described, but just a 'convergence of disturbing clues'. You have to bear in mind that accusing gay people of pedophilia is pretty standard fare for homophobes up and to this day.

I guess it's a question of what change you push for. Imagine you go to post-revolution Haiti, and you just try to push for economic growth. You recognize that the country has an internationally competitive sugar industry. So you work out ways to convince everybody to go back and work on the sugar plantations, producing sugar for export. Except, you're in competition with the slave plantations, so you can't really pay people good wages or have good conditions. People don't like that, so they revolt, and you repress them with force. Before long, you have produced something like pre-revolution Haiti.

Sometimes it's important to recognize the history in order to push in the right direction. I don't know what the right direction is, but I think saying that Africans just suck because they've been dealt an awful hand seems unfair. I figure it's just really hard to get out from under the feet of an international system that was built for and by colonizers, and there are very few clearly good choices about how to do it.

I think the only country you've mentioned that's a) not a city state and b) run by the colonized people, not the colonizers, is Ireland. If you look around the world, there's a pretty strong correlation between length of colonial subjugation, and the misfortunes of the people who were colonized today. I mean, in the USA, it was a colony for a long time, and there are hardly any Native Americans left, and those that survived live in the worst parts of the country, generally in poverty. The same is basically true of Canada, or Australia.

Countries like Japan, never colonized, or China, only briefly and partially colonized, seem to recover way faster. I also don't think it's specifically an African thing: look at the Phillipines, or Pakistan, or large parts of the ME.

Isn't it a bit a matter of culture, though? Colonial administrations are built to extract wealth from a country. So, when you get independence, that's still what the government, hell, even the infrastructure, is built for. Half the rail lines go straight to a port, all the bureaucrats know is how to squeeze people. So you end up with 'bad governance', even decades later, because that's the culture of governance that gets passed on, generation to generation.

Or, immortal Joseph Stalin having breakfast with immortal Richard Nixon, while deciding who gets sent to the gulags today.

I guess my intuition for how a 'right-to-return' should work would be, if you have your property stolen and you are driven out of the land, and it can be proven beyond reasonable doubt that it is yours by inheritance, then you should be able to get it back.

It's to the eternal shame of Poland, Germany, and many other countries in Europe, that this is not what they did after the war. It's frankly shameful that this is rarely enforced anywhere.

If you do 'right of return' without the implicit return of property thing, it's pretty hollow if you've actually had your house/farm stolen, but it also becomes just a way of having an immigration policy that discriminates on an ethnic or religious basis.

I feel like people are generally pretty fine with accepting colonial borders: basically the whole world outside europe is divided by them. As long as they have a chance to live in peace, build businesses, live normal lives, I don't think people get that exercised about these things, on the whole. If you look at the lives of Palestinians, they look pretty humiliating. If I lived that life, had no chance to build anything or hold onto anything, I expect I would be pretty angry about it.