cljs-js-eval

If I accept that technical difficulty and infeasibility is no defense, then I want that standard applied to lawyers as well.

Overly litigious firms causing rising legal costs across industries? I don't care if it's hard to solve, the onus for fixing it is on the firms, they figure it out or face penalties. Perhaps in the interests of helping the disenfranchised we could institute something like what real estate has, where banks are required to sell a quota of mortgages in certain areas regardless of the financial viability. Lawyers could be forced to seek out clients they would ordinarily never entertain due to the risk of loss. If would stink for them, but what do I care? That's their problem.

True. I do like aspects of the "duties > rights" mindset, though - it becomes clear that the person with a duty is responsible for the whole job, and not just the parts that line up with specific rights.

For example, in the U.S. there's a culture that if a government is not infringing on the rights of its citizens, it has done enough. For example, the secretary of state that runs my DMV does a good job of respecting the human rights of the disabled, and a good job of respecting the human rights of their employees, but I don't get the feeling they feel compelled to provide good service.

If they had a duty to be the best administrator of a DMV around, they would need to be focused on accessibility, their employees, and the level of service provided to their customers. An administrator who did not focus on providing great service could be chastised for that in a way I don't see happening (in my state, at least).

This is kind of an interesting cultural difference between Europe/America and China. While we talk about universal rights, they talk about universal duties, and this only sometimes converges on the same values.

For example:

Both the West and China believe that old people deserve care in their old age. The West would justify this by saying that the elderly have fundamental human rights, which would be neglected without care. Chinese would justify this by saying that the young have a duty of care to the old.

Both the West and China (at least superficially) believe that rulers should treat their subjects with respect. In the West, this is because each subject has human rights. In China, this is because the ruler has a duty to treat their subjects respectfully.

So I would not make the mistake of thinking that the Chinese are somehow amoral because they do not subscribe to the doctrine of human rights. It must honestly seem to them like a Western concept that clashes with their view of morality (or at least it would if I were in their shoes). But the Chinese government must have a set of duties to their people. I would love to read a document where they outline those, I'm sure it must exist somewhere.

They have everything to do with showing that the primary field that makes use of IQ, psychology, is unreliable.

If someone says that IQ is unreliable, they're likely right just given the track record of that field.

The point of bringing up priming is this.

There is a big body of literature on priming. Each study is generally done to get a p-value < 0.05. In a sense, there are a bunch of replications of the effect itself. That points to priming as an effect large enough to matter.

There is another viewpoint, where priming is not an effect large enough to matter. (This is the viewpoint I hold.) The arguments for this viewpoint are that the original study does not replicate - the 2018 replication attempt I linked used a ~300% larger sample size (1014/343), but achieved a p-value of 0.366 and had an effect size 80% smaller than the original. A second argument is that priming is not used in industry, though the effect would be useful in fields like advertising or military psyops. A third argument is that there is a widespread suspicion in the field that psychology researchers are p-hacking to get spurious results.

A whole subfield exists on an effect that showed an 80% reduction in effect size with a 300% larger sample size and a 4000% increase in p-value on a direct replication. And my focus on this study ignores the fact that the group of replications turned up 9 failures in 21 replications pulled exclusively from studies picked from Nature and Science.

If psychology can botch the literature on priming this badly, what else have they botched?

I really, really wish people took bad methodology criticisms more seriously. I have a degree in the social sciences, and if there is one thing that completely defines the field right now it is that you can't use their findings for absolutely anything.

A good portion of studies don't replicate, including fundamental ones (in particular see the failed replication here [1] on one on Rand et al, a study on the effects of priming). Priming is a huge topic in social psychology.

He understands statistics. I'm not sure his opponents properly understand that when you complain about methodology, the implications are not just "add a section in the paper acknowledging the potential for error", it's "your whole study might be fatally flawed in a way that invalidates all your conclusions".

[1] https://authors.library.caltech.edu/91063/2/41562_2018_399_M...

No, but these [1][2][3] sure do:

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17456916156099...

[2] https://osf.io/ezcuj/wiki/home/

[3] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716.full...

You should have very little confidence in the predictive power of most psychology findings since the founding of the field.

One of his repeated criticisms of analysis like this is using regression to fit datasets that don't necessarily follow a straight trend line.

His larger point with respect to IQ is that it only predicts substandard IQs. Measures like the variance are largely influenced by the effects of IQs below the average, not above the average.

A second point which I don't see addressed is that IQ measures share features with testing. If how you test in school affects future income, and testing well in school predicts testing well on IQ, then more robust analysis is needed. A sample space of people in a wide band of IQ ranges who all got about the same grades in school would be a true test of the predictive value of IQ on income.

Every English class I've had growing up in America has a bunch of assignments like this:

1. Pick a topic.

2. Pick a position.

3. Find sources that support your position.

4. Write.

If English were held to the same high standard as the sciences, it would go:

1. Pick a topic.

2. Research sources.

3. Pick your position.

4. Write.

It's not surprising that the people who do the best in English have carried this mindset with them to their job.

There's an ongoing replication crisis in psychology that suggests that most of the findings in the field are fatally flawed [1][2][3].

In light of this, it's not really fair to say that tech cannot be inherently complex because psychology is more complex, and they somehow manage. The psychologists have, empirically, not managed very well.

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17456916156099...

[2] https://osf.io/ezcuj/wiki/home/

[3] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716.full...

The :display is a keyword, which works like keywords in Ruby or Erlang; it's a special, never-garbage-collected string for when you use the same string over and over. Though I'm not sure whether the implementation is the same when compiling to Javascript instead of the JVM.

Not really - and that's why I like it. I like JSX too.

Yeah - I've seen and worked with (very talented!) people like Brad, and I feel for them. They're good at working with this presentational stuff, but it's never been necessary to learn that when they're creating an <input> they're secretly creating an HTMLInputElement. And then one day, they're expected to learn this framework that fits so nicely with the frontend because they try to emulate that hierarchy of objects on the frontend and deal with them in code.

It would be weird to go from a DSL and realize that to move forward you have to get good at general programming. I'm not sure that I would handle that transition very well.

You should check out CLJS's reagent. It mixes the best of both worlds, everything is a plain CLJS object without special syntax, but it's also obviously HTML/CSS:

  [:div {:style {:display "flex", :flex-direction "row"}}
   [:label {:for "email"}]
   [:input {:type "text"}]]

Repeat interrupters have the mental capacity to figure this out. This is coddling people who don't deserve it.

Clojure has "reader conditionals" which enable you to write a single file and only have divergent code paths when you need to do something that is JVM or JS specific (or CLR-specific, if you're into that).

It's super helpful for shared libraries. A lot of our code can be shared between JVM servers, JS lambdas, or JS frontend code without much development effort. It's mostly just a matter of naming a file .cljc and you're off to the races.

This doesn't pass a very basic sniff test. All marginalized groups need is to be called some specific terms? This is entirely a question of terminology rather than a fight by marginalized people to achieve specific, better outcomes?

That view is so convenient that I have a hard time believing that it's right.

edited to remove a typo

A relative order of outcomes could also work, yeah. You'll have a date in there somewhere, though, even if it's not driven off the amount of work. Could be "and if we can't achieve this outcome by X date we give up on this whole outcome".

In the spirit of that second paragraph - focusing on outcomes, not specific implementations - here's a rewrite:

Original:

So…what’s the way out? It’s a smart focus on clear outcomes, not output, with roadmapped outcomes replacing planned milestones, with trusted product teams, not project teams, empowered to vet assumptions and discover the minimal path to value.

Rewritten:

So… what’s the way out? It’s a focus on clear outcomes, not output. There should be dates for when specific outcomes should happen. Teams should be empowered to find the minimal amount of work needed to achieve the outcomes.

It's a really wordy way to say what any good leadership class would tell you. Focus on what you want more than how you get it, and let your subordinates decide how to get it. Both good product teams and project teams are capable of working that way.

This kinda sums up my problem with endless agile vs. waterfall vs. whatever discussions. The interesting parts aren't really new ideas and the extra buzzwords add nothing.

We really do need animations on everything, SPAs, etc. Having a less pretty looking site makes us appear much less trustworthy to non-technical customers, who don't care that their browser was not originally created for our online storefront. I imagine that's the same for pretty much every other e-commerce site.

It is basically a direct replacement for the experimental software that necessitated my university to support Windows 3.1 VMs in their psych lab, so this is a group that likely can't afford Qualtrics. This replaces a host of bespoke, free, but unmaintainable software in university labs.

I don't dislike people using the statistical tools available to them, but in my own field (social sciences) there's a huge replication crisis going on right now. And a lot of that is due to people who were never good at math taking easy-to-use statistical tools like Excel and SPSS and blindly running stats without programming or math training.

Is it too much to ask that people treat a field with a bit of respect? Like, just because NYT reporters can use some of these "data skills", can they hold off a bit until we figure out if they're even any good at statistical analysis after their crash course? We currently have an entire academic field that has to throw away a lot of their findings because tools like sheets and SPSS gave them false confidence. I don't have any higher hopes for the NYT newsroom.

wyzant.com is a good start

The spec authors would have done better to make the semantic stuff attributes. It's difficult to tell what CSS rules you're going to have to apply to any given semantic tag, which makes people instinctively reach for <div>s and <span>s. React native gets this right, with <Text> and <View> and just a handful of others, with attributes like testID and accessibilityLabel driving automated software that needs to read the screen.

I'm glad we're finally taking anti-trust seriously, but this timing is incredibly suspicious. Right after we put sanctions on Chinese tech, we start taking steps to limit our own?

A good, plausibly deniable soft power attack would be to make an antitrust case, present it to the feds with the work already done, and let them do their thing now that they basically have to take action or look foolish.

No malicious actors involved, except for the people who choose to trigger the audit at the opportune moment.

His point about the misleading headline is good. But the poverty stat still stands. Needing to borrow to come up with $400 is slightly better than not having $400, but, like... not by a lot?

I view it in the same terms as an elected official who willfully courts lobbyists or something else legal, but still distasteful. Members of those pension classes have known forever that their pension amounts would bleed the city dry, but they went along with it anyway. It's technically not their fault, but only in a dry legal sense. They knew they were leaving the rest of us in a bad state.

It's archaic and should be changed, but the way the system works in the U.S. is pretty well known to its citizens, which makes it at least partially the fault of the pensioners. I live in Chicago and every retired schoolteacher and police officer I meet knows full well that they're making an exceptional amount of money in retirement. It's usually part of why they took the job.

There's a certain type of engineer that makes a business out of staying late to fight fires that they set themselves. I'm not sure if there's much chance of changing that culture.

Because it appears that no news outlet wants to link to the actual dashboard:

https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/pr...

Looks like they try to account for neighborhood environment, family environment, and high school environment. Seems a bit fairer than I expected, assuming family environment is given the weight it deserves. Otherwise it may penalize people who try to go to a better school or a better neighborhood.

Also looks like a play to sell a dashboard. Maybe related to the regulatory environment of colleges - they can prove they're selecting across a broad enough socioeconomic stratus, similar to how banks like to prove they're meeting HUD requirements for lending.