Scienz

If you do it scientifically, meaning by experimentation, you've really only shown that in all observed cases water boils when you add enough heat. It's an inductive process, which unlike deduction is never logically valid - excluding mathematical induction which is really more like deduction, since you can actually test all possible cases that way. It is a philosophical issue, but epistemology is the basis of the validity of science.

Point taken - I may have ADHD or I may not, as I implied I don't really know, and the bad reaction to adderall obviously isn't universal. Though I'll also say the dosage wasn't unknown, and the professionals gave me extensive reasons not to trust them. Drugs don't affect you differently depending on who prescribed them, and the main point of the story was that I didn't trust these people to accurately diagnose or prescribe anything. If they won't even let me question them about their diagnosis, I wouldn't trust them to listen to me about my reactions and side effects either.

This is a controversial subject though, so I'm going to step out now. Just wanted to share the story of my negative experience with it.

Personal anecdote, since there are some comments here by people claiming an early ADHD diagnosis might have changed their life: I was "diagnosed" with ADHD about five years ago, at around age 25, and it was a horrible experience. I'm not sure if I have ADHD, but at the very least was very depressed at the time, and they gave me some self-evaluation asking a bunch of questions like, "Do you have trouble concentrating? Does your mind wander?" Of course being very depressed I tended to be pretty hard on myself answering, they gave me the diagnosis, and at the first sign I gave of skepticism about it they basically ridiculed and humiliated me, telling me I was in denial and nothing in my life would ever change unless I started taking medication. They completely ignored any other problems I was having and other possible explanations once they pinned the ADHD label on me. In a conversation that lasted an hour, I didn't get a single word in after making the comment, "Well I'm not really sure if I have this..."

A few years later I did try taking some Adderall, unofficially acquired from a friend, and in three days it caused me to start having all kinds of mental health problems (OCD and Tourette's type symptoms, fyi) that I'm still not fully recovered from. Admittedly I think I took a bit too high of a dosage, but I'm scared to even try again if only three days of something could basically turn me halfway insane. Maybe if I'd started on only a half dose it wouldn't have happened, but I'm worried about the fact that such people were trying so hard to push a drug that ended up having those kinds of effects in only three days from only a slightly elevated dosage.

So I definitely think this whole thing is a huge pharma scam at this point. I'd be highly skeptical of any ADHD diagnoses, especially when they're all based on self-reporting (notoriously unreliable) and a bunch of therapists, teachers, etc. who are quick to jump to whatever explanation fits with their prejudices about a person. It scares me that they're pushing these drugs on people, especially at such young ages, not to mention how it prevents the real underlying problems from being solved.

Interesting, and I'm glad to hear any counterarguments (no idea who downvoted you). I'll have to read the book and/or studies before I could give a good reply, but judging from the Amazon reviews, it looks like even he mitigates it in the book by saying some parental actions can have important effects (for an extreme example, being violently abusive to your kids). Given stuff like that, and a lot of the recent stuff in social influence on epigenetics[1], I'm a bit skeptical where to draw the line between nature and nurture. But I'll really have to read the book and twin studies before I could debate those points.

[1] http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/the-soci...

My problem with Caplan's arguments on education, which I've admittedly only read a few of, is that he seems to derive them largely from an elitist, Ayn Rand-ian sort of worldview where most people are simply beyond hope and investing in their education isn't worth the resources (as priced by market forces). My view is more that most people have a distaste for learning, education and autodidacticism because they grow up steeped in a culture that discourages these things, while simultaneously rewarding the opposite sorts of behaviors. Though it seems to have gotten better in the past few decades with the rise in popularity of "geek culture." Rather than promoting only the top 5% or 25% of people achieving advanced educations, I'd rather look at the culture and socioeconomic factors that cause the bottom 95%/75% to not be as anxious about advancing their knowledge as the ones at the top.

The whole thing easily leaves him open to accusations of trying to build a world of grunt workers who will serve as cheap labor for those at the top, especially when you consider how much of people's potential isn't determined by their genetic gifts, but by the socioeconomic environment they're raised in, who their parents, teachers and peers are, etc. His suggestions seem like they would create a self-fulling prophecy towards a caste system, where as I'd rather see something more akin to "posthumanism for everyone."

This is why I'm just throwing the idea out there (though, as you say, it's probably not even a very original one). It would take some thought to figure out a way to make it work as well as the current hashing system. Perhaps "pointless" was a careless choice of words, but the incentive is to put all those cycles to a use that had more value for society, apart from the value of creating bitcoin itself. I forget the exact order of magnitude, but iirc it's something like tens of millions of dollars of electricity being used by miners each year, for no other purpose than to verify the blockchain. It'd be convenient if we could still have cryptocurrency, but all the computing power was going into something like BOINC instead. Hashing is used for good reasons, as you point out, but it's a wasteful use of resources, in my opinion. Even if it wasn't the best cryptocurrency, something that would crash and die with new scientific/mathematical advances, I'd still consider it successful if it got all those resources working on more valuable problems for a while.

It's definitely a half-baked idea. I'd like to take a shot at seeing if I could work out those details, but it's not the top priority on my list of projects. Maybe in a few years, if it is possible and no one else has managed it yet.

I had two ideas, not exactly sure how to get them to work though:

1) Replace the pointless hashing with some actually useful calculation or form of work. Trouble is, I'm not sure what kind of asymmetrically difficult function could be used instead of hashing that would have some value for society.

2) Replace the hashing with some kind of genetic algorithm or other AI solution search. So instead of trying to find the proper hash, you're trying to find the proper algorithm to some currently-posed problem. Miners who find the current-best solution can then be rewarded with some form of bitcoin, which can be traded among themselves as currency, or used to decide what the next problem the network searches for a solution to will be. I figure this would make the entire blockchain into a giant sort of AI/brain, with the problems it tackles being more or less democratically chosen by whoever wants to spend the most of their bitcoin for it. The spent bitcoin then goes to the people who find the best solutions, in addition to whatever small amount of new bitcoin is mined. And replace "bitcoin" with whatever the new name would be, of course.

May be possible, maybe not. There's basically no chance I'll be able to implement some version of either any time soon, so feel free to run with it if anyone thinks they can.

Great - the HN title is no longer the above one, but now "We Aren't the World (2013)"... a non-descriptive one giving no idea of what the article is about, and furthermore assuming that "we" are all Americans, or at least one of the W.E.I.R.D. cultures described in the article.

I hate to complain, especially when I really do love this site and the community, but if someone is going to edit a headline, at least make it an improvement.

Yeah, I was already wondering how they were going to reconcile that particular speech with whatever nuances of the prize rules would be required to keep people from giving a speech like that one.

It gets weirder when you consider that a) an AI could have plausibly (though not likely) have generated such a speech in answer to a real question (for example, "discuss a flaw in the TED program", and b) no one rejected Watts' talk as unacceptable, though they probably would have if an AI had generated the same talk.

I am actively working on starting stuff I consider important, but the main things holding me back are:

1. Compile-time/linking errors with every C++ serialization library I've tried so far (boost, autoserial and cereal, so far). Half joking here, this has been screwing me up all week.

2. Lack of experience and lack of collaborators means projects that would take others days or weeks take me months or years. I hope I'm at least improving, though.

3. Lack of funding to hire said collaborators, and unwillingness to commit my few savings to something that may not have a guaranteed ROI. I'm not interested in seeking funding or trying something like YCombinator since I don't really want to share ownership in my vision, and figure it wouldn't be enough to last very long anyways.

4. Having to stop to deal with other life stuff, such as classes and moving to a new place.

Especially if you're using your monitors for gaming and such, in addition to work. I was a bit disappointed at first, having just upgraded to 3x 27" 1920x1080 monitors, thinking I could have had 2x 39" 4Ks for about the same price. But 30Hz would basically eliminate gaming on them, much less Eyefinity/Nvidia Surround. With the 3x 27" set up you can easily move them between rooms when you're not using all three, too.

This is just a guess, but I would suspect it's the fans. I remember seeing actual riots at my former school over a football (the American variety) game - the cars flipped, fires started, campus-police-in-full-riot-gear-firing-tear-gas kind. The fans probably just associate it as some brainiac professor declaring war on their culture and insulting their beloved players, and respond with hatemail and death threats.

This is highly anecdotal, but when I was younger (from ~5-15 years ago), I noticed I was far more likely to have people start fights* with me when I was in a good mood and enjoying myself. Yet this never seemed to happen when I walked around with a bit of an angry look in my eye, like I had been having a bad day and was just waiting for someone to start something. I even informally experimented with it, sometimes approaching people in a cheerful, happy way, and other times approaching them like I was in a really bad mood. Men seemed to treat me much better when I was faux-pissed, and much worse when I was in a good mood. The authors didn't experiment with this (that I could tell), but I'd hypothesize that males have the same reaction towards happy expressions in other males - they don't like them and it initiates aggressive tendencies.

*You might ask why I was getting into fights in the first place, and all I can say is that high school and college are rough and most of the population doesn't seem to be as sophisticated as the typical HN reader.

The part of "Surely You're Joking" where he cracks the safe at Los Alamos makes me wonder more if he would have gone the way of Aaron Swartz, in today's world.

The mentality of the world as a competition between different groups of people, where either men win and women lose, or men lose and women win, doesn't seem particularly helpful either. A race implies winners and losers, so I think this is a bad analogy. An idea of "let's treat men worse for a while as revenge for years of male-dominated history" isn't very sophisticated, no particular offense intended. Also, giving special privileges to all the known groups will just disenfranchise the people not associated with any particular groups (in this case, one might consider trans people). Human equality (or even including non-human-persons equality) would seem a better ideal than just male-female equality.

If we're actually intelligent creatures, let's try and fix the underlying problems instead of just pushing them around for someone else to suffer from.

It seems doubtful that the answer to social inequalities is to make special privileges for each group to match the special privileges already enjoyed by others, as opposed to working more towards an ideal of equal treatment for everyone. I kind of cringe every time I see some study or argument saying something to the effect of, "Women are, in fact, better suited for this type of work than men are." The healthy thing to do would be to judge each individual on their own merits, regardless of what group they belong to. Women-only type things seem a bit regressive in that respect, in that they fight fire with more fire rather than fixing the underlying issue of automatic special treatment based on which group you belong to. Not that I'm actively against such programs, anymore than I would be against a bachelor's party or a girls-night-out. People have the right to organize and I know such programs were instrumental in helping to decrease the amount of sexism in society. The point is just that the more you isolate people into special groups and make them stand out, the more you encourage inequality in society as a whole. So yes I think this was a good post.

Those are good suggestions, but I'd mention that it's much easier for me now to analyze my situation in retrospect, understand what happened and the mistakes I made, and turn it into a cohesive narrative. At the time I didn't really understand why I was doing poorly or what the root causes were, so while I did seek "support" on a number of occasions, it didn't help. I simply assumed I wasn't smart enough to graduate, much less do physics. In retrospect I see this obviously wasn't true, since I'm happily reading a quantum field theory book in my spare time now and, as I said before, ended up being one of the better students in some of my classes. But if you'd asked me at the time I'd have probably just rambled a bunch of guesses and speculation. I suppose my point is that, even following those suggestions, some people will still fall through the cracks. And also that most of these institutions are just bureaucratic monoliths that aren't built to be flexible with every students particular needs and such. The bias there tends to be heavily towards the institutions, too, since students who do poorly are just deemed slackers or unfit for college, instead of considering it a systemic or structural aspect of the system that favors certain people and situations over others. Even the stereotypical "partiers" who drink their way through college could be viewed as a systemic result of a toxic social environment. I believe there was another comment here to the effect of "this is college and you're done with baby hand-holding," which is true in one sense, but it shouldn't be used as an excuse to disregard anyone doing badly in the system or a particular school as acceptable attrition for a just-good-enough educational system.

I am indeed a huge proponent of the alternative routes method. My criticisms of higher education could go on for a long time, and I'm not even going to try and list them all here. My experience has also been that professors who also do research are not nearly as good teachers as the ones who don't. The best teachers I had were in community college, despite probably not being as "qualified" or well-versed in the subjects as the ones publishing papers, a good number of them actually cared about the students and went out of their way to help you get through the class. Counterintuitively, it seems the more prestigious the school the more self-centered and hostile the professors.

they cannot afford to throw people out.

Not always true. I flunked out of my last school due largely to depression issues and extreme isolation which led to heavy drinking and low grades. My advisor, who I'd only talked to once before when switching into that major, was so happy to see me go he wouldn't even speak to me when I needed him to sign a form so I could drop out, instead of failing out. Instead just told me he was busy and left me sitting outside his office for an hour and a half before I finally got the point (I waited so long because I at first assumed he was actually busy, and not just blowing me off). Needless to say it's hard to do well at a school in spite of isolation and depression when your professors automatically assume you're just a lazy shit who isn't trying and your advisor won't even let you into their office. I know in his head he was probably "upholding the quality of the degree for the alumni" or some shit, but it's hard to justify that when they're doing so based on snap judgments about students who depend on them and who they've never even really spoken to, and furthermore refuse to. Also, to justify that I'm not actually as much of a loser as this guy thought I was, I should say that part of the depression was due to failing to maintain a 4.0 GPA in my classes (I wanted to go to grad school for physics and felt this was required). I found out later I'd actually been one of only three students to even pass the hardest class, and somehow ended up with a B in it despite thinking I was failing the entire time.

Trust me, they do not give a fuck about you. Unless you can get their name on a paper you're publishing, you're just an ID number and a tuition payment to them.

I wanted to read it, and considered paying since it claimed to be a mere $1, then realized my main interest in reading it was simply that it confirmed my prejudices about the (non-)educational system. Kind of silly to pay for an op-ed just to reinforce stuff you already think to be true, as opposed to paying for new information or debunking your false beliefs, so I think I'll save that dollar. Plus there's the google cache link below.

I had already recently come up with a list of things to stop doing:

- eating meat and dairy (mostly... I just don't want to contribute to the animal cruelty/factory farming epidemic. I'll still eat fresh caught fish and free-range meat)

- using Facebook, Google, and other stuff that contributes to the surveillance state.

- using non-open source stuff. Starts with transitioning to Linux.

- purchasing stuff that supports IP law or DRM.

- using "herbal supplements" that support violent drug cartels. Still fine with anything produced by other means.

The hardest part is building a habit of not doing stuff that you've been trained to do since birth, such as changing your diet to vegetarian. Decided to use a spreadsheet to keep track. I may still forget and screw it up, but at least every day I have to remind myself whether I did it right or not, which slowly reinforces the correct habits. Has been working pretty well so far.

Don't worry, I'm sure the next person you meet will bring you crashing back to reality.

@OP.. it may not help much in your position, but that Man in the Arena quote seems relevant here. Imo you still deserve more respect (all other things being equal) than the vast majority of the world that not only never attempt great works, but actively try to prevent others from trying or succeeding too. Hope that your next endeavor goes better.

2nd best: reddit for pseudopseudo-intellectuals

I disagree of course, but it did make me lol.

It's hard to take a "scientific study" seriously when the researchers claim the results to be some worthless platitude like "happiness is love." That is hardly an objective conclusion from the findings.

These are kind of false comparisons. It's comparing man-years spent watching Gangnam Style against years spent building the Taj Mahal. There's a huge difference. Divide the number of years given by the population of planet Earth to get the number of years the entirety of humanity wasted on Gangnam Style (it's something like 0.00000207 years - off by 11 orders of magnitude). Or multiply the number of people who built the Taj Mahal by the number of years they spent building it to get the number of man-years they spent. I'd guess around 1,000 people built the Taj Mahal. That's 21,000 man-years, even more than was spent watching Gangnam Style.

Of course, if you added all the numbers for all the stupid youtube videos, memes, worthless news articles, facebook posts, etc. together, then you'd probably get something terribly depressing. My guess is some tiny fraction of humanity actually sustains the rest of the species. They are the (much less than) 1%.

Relativistic physics often measures the passage of time in units of distance, though I doubt Han spent ~39 years making that Kessel run.

Haven't had time to read the paper yet, but the blogger seems to miss the obvious. We could probably assume civilizations capable of interstellar trade would have advanced enough genetic engineering and biological 3D printing such that trading lifeforms and their by-products between planets wouldn't be required. Different planets, with different atmospheres, geologies and ecosystems, would lead to comparative advantages in production though, which is the primary incentive behind trade relations. However the net benefit of trading would be at least partially offset by the cost of transporting goods over such long distances. With low thrust, high efficiency engines attached to the cargo the cost could be low enough to make trading an economic benefit, but that would require even longer time periods between the production of a good and its being put to good use. Civilizations would have to plan ahead and estimate the supply and demand many years, centuries or millenia into the future. You could really have a lot of fun with this kind of analysis. Looking forward to reading the full paper later.

Downloaded and it didn't show up as an launchable app, so I tried adding it as a widget, which gives the "TwLauncher (process com.sec.android.app.twlauncher) has stopped..." error. Tried the obvious fixes for that but none worked. Not sure I'm ready to try a full reset yet. Using a droid charge, if it matters.

This article was written in 1984, 29 years ago. Some of the information used in it is a bit out of date.

1) It refers to the triune brain model that has been debunked already. See this Scientific American blog entry: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2012/09/07/re... So most of the speculation regarding reptilian, limbic and neocortical intelligences isn't really valid. Though this doesn't affect the chordate vs. ganglionic argument.

2) The article states that "consciousness is an emergent of neuronal sentience" which isn't a necessary assumption. Recent research[1] has hinted at intelligent behavior as being a thermodynamic process occurring when a physical system acts such as to maximize its number of possible future states. Quick video summary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZB8TNaG-ik If true, a typical neuronal structure (i.e. brain) wouldn't necessarily be required for intelligent or conscious behavior, maybe not even a typical computational structure. One could imagine a cloud of gas undergoing chemistry such that it maximized its entropy production and could potentially possess superhuman intelligence or consciousness.

3) The article discusses the theoretical limits of intelligence as being a system possessing 10^50 bits of information per kilogram. But the maximum limit of a computational system should be given by the Bekenstein bound[2], which limits the information the system can process to a factor proportional to the surface area of the enclosed volume (for a 1 cubic cm sphere this comes to about 10^66 bits), the speed of light limiting the speed at which these bits can be processed, and the particular structure of how they are processed (e.g. the flow of logic gates). One could imagine a (quantum?) computer with the maximum encloseable surface area of the universe which transmitted information optically between different gates in the system. There may be other limits preventing that from being remotely feasible (e.g. heat dissipation, energy requirements, entropy production leading to the heat death of the universe, etc.). The main point is that comparing the Apple II at +5 SQ on a scale of 0 to 50 is kind of silly, when one could imagine an intelligence the size of galaxies, or even the known universe, operating according to a principal of maximum entropy production similar as referenced in the previous paragraph.

Not to knock the article; my main point is that there have been a lot more theoretical advances in the almost-30-years since it was written.

[1] http://math.mit.edu/~freer/papers/PhysRevLett_110-168702.pdf

[2] http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Bekenstein_bound

Well, yes. It obviously wouldn't be a foreign language to the speechwriters, of which I assume there were many people involved in writing, editing and reviewing. Unless someone expects an English language document addressed to US citizens to have been written by a Russian-born writer who didn't speak English.