grepherder

Actually, you were right to correct me to begin with, see the other reply.

You're right, I might have misinterpreted. He didn't actually write anything else that implies he found the positive correlation counterintuitive. I don't know what the author's actual meaning was, so I still can't say for sure, but you're right, there was some cognitive bias involved in my reading. My apologies to the author.

What makes you think that? The author is the one claiming the result, which is that people who study science (which is amoral, not immoral) tend to be good people, is counterintuitive. If anyone, the author is the one in confusion.

If you thought he could've meant that people who aren't good could be amoral instead of being indecent, then you are most likely, although not absolutely wrong. Keep in mind amorality for a human is not well-defined, it is more often used to describe non-intelligent life or abstract entities. Society would consider an amoral person "immoral" in a casual sense of the word, because a person who is indifferent towards morality is per definition likely to commit immoral acts if there are no repercussions.

On the surface, these results seems counterintuitive; science, after all, is — in the strictest sense — amoral.

Either this is just another insincere sentence thrown in to fill the article, or the author's intuition is terrible. Something along these lines: "They are engaged with something amoral, therefore they must be amoral!", genious. A farm or the act of farming is also amoral, so I guess you expect farmers to be pretty indecent. Really, it's been so many years and why do journalists still think these filler sentences help their article?

Let me put it this way: I'm all for one person who's interested to learn coding. Sure, if you wish, even let all this public campaigning and incentives be there. I'm fine with it. I will help this hypothetical guy personally if he comes my way. Nothing wrong here.

But... You (you, with the coding = literacy idea) are seriously overestimating the masses. I'm not sure why, might be due to some bubble effect. I don't live in SV or anything that resembles it. And my view is that even if you decide to go with the coding = literacy analogy, you will run into trouble because most people are not even literate beyond the absolute basics they can get away with. I'm speaking about professionals, and even a certain "majority" of college graduates. I'm speaking about a randomly sampled manager from a medium sized enterprise. Ask this guy to write a single page essay about something he knows about. I'm talking about writing, the kind of literacy we're talking about in the coding = literacy analogy. If you are really in a bubble, you might be surprised that only a minority of people living in the first world can write coherently beyond the length of a twitter update or an SMS. So, I would suggest to find another analogy for your public campaigning if you mean learning coding as in learning to code beyond hello world or fizzbuzz.

Another problem: where are those magical people that want to increase productivity? Most professionals I know don't even work most of the time! And they want to get away with the absolute minimum that can still achieve the maximum possible return. This is basic human behaviour. I don't endorse it, and I don't say this is everyone's standart behaviour, so no need to take offense, but I don't think anyone would argue against that what I posit here holds for the majority. Now, you want these people to learn coding to increase their productivity? Good luck. I'm sincerely all for it, and I will even help in ways that I can, excuse my cynicism.

Obviously Google translate is not error free, nor is any statistical translation system going to be comparable to a human translator in the very near future, but you're underestimating the current development of statistical translation. Granted, I'm not a native speaker but I think "I need to meet up" is not even a sentence with proper grammar. Underlying model probably predicted something like meeting (satisfying) requirements due to the lack of an object in the sentence and context. Situations like this where the input is very short and noisy is obviously going to be a weakness of statistical systems for a long time to come, but looking at technologically how far we are from mastering biological systems, I think it's safe to say this is going to be the way of doing it for a while, and will be very successful in translating properly structured texts if proper context can be provided. Currently statistical translations have (almost) no awareness of context beside some phrase-based or hierarchical models. Many people are probably not factoring in the fact, that with exponentially more data, and exponentially higher computing power, a model can utilize the context of a whole book while translating just a sentence from that book - which is actually still much less than what human translators utilize in terms of context. While translating a sentence, I might even have to utilize what was on the news the night before to infer the correct context. We are currently definitely far from feeding this kind of information to our models, so I'd say this kind of criticism towards statistical translation is very unfair.

As a european, I trust neither. Trust? I mean really, one of them is only caring about monetizing everything possible, the other has its own (sometimes mysterious) motives, why should I trust anyone but my friends and family? I think the question itself is just a play on emotions, people with bad experiences with either is going to say they trust the other more, but all in all I don't think any sensible person trusts the government or companies in the true meaning of the word.

We have similar chess history, but I think you're being emotional here in your "rebuttal of chess". I've had similar thoughts but I've come to the natural conclusion that all that matters in the end is whether I enjoy playing it or not.

Some things you mentioned don't add up. You don't have to be a human database to play chess as a hobby, even at club level. Playing at club level can be fun, and can definitely be a healthy hobby which doesn't take more time than any other sports or any other gaming activity. If it's not fun for you, or if you obsess over how better you could get if you just studied this or that opening, or how you'll never even reach 2200 ELO, then chess is probably not for you or not fit to be a hobby for you, that is true.

In short, thinking you would gain more mentally that would help with your engineering skill-set by playing chess instead of just, well, studying and working as an engineer, is fallacious to begin with. If there aren't any such studies, which I doubt, then why would you assume that? Of course, if all you want to do in life is being a better engineer, then anything but doing that is a "huge waste of time", not just chess.

But I think I still understand you emotionally as we had similar thoughts. Maybe, like me, you too rationalized your time spent in chess by saying to yourself that it helps your focus and concentration at work etc., but that's really not any more logical than rationalizing smoking, in the end you're just fooling yourself spending time doing something you enjoy. I'd think this was obvious, and I knew it even when as I was doing it myself. Maybe you just needed that external heads-up, from that older engineer you mentioned.

On a completely different note, I could still argue chess is not entirely useless in that sense. Compared to legos, you're forgetting that chess is a social activity. You're facing real people, and beating them can build confidence, and losing also has its lessons - socially, not chesswise. I've learned a lot about competition at a young age, and I've experienced what "winning" and "losing" is like. This is different than team sports, because you're out there alone by yourself, with no luck involved. And although we don't share the same success with him, a friend who doesn't spend more than a few hours per week playing chess became rather successful (2000+ ELO), and I see that it made him a lot more confident. Also for what it's worth, a lot of people - you may find the notion stupid - perceive him to be a very smart person, which is pretty valuable socially. I think that is an incredible value gained for that effort, arguably more efficient than a college education considering all this talk nowadays about the bubble.

The Cyrillic script[1] and the Armenian alphabet[2] were also devised in similar fashion, and probably many more. It is not unusual for writing systems or alphabets to find widespread usage in this manner.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_script#History

[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_alphabet#History_and_d...

Yes, also yes to the exaggeration bit, but intelligence is just, well, intelligence. A complex "brain" can be about emotional depth, about being able to communicate that emotional complexity, it can be about processing senses in amazing ways or many other functions we may not even think of. That is just the complexity of a certain nervous system though, not intelligence per se, for us what matters is indeed problem solving capabilities which lead to technology.

Neanderthals? Yes with them our cousins there is the possibility of interbreeding having occurred, but most likely is that as a species as a whole they went extinct from competition. If even with our similarities and closeness there was enough competition to drive them extinct, I can hardly imagine any (land) species could have been thriving in coexistence with us.

Yup, I kind of acknowledged that already, what you say is true of course. Yet in my environment I can still imagine software scenarios where I can say "you need a technical guy for this" to my friends and mean a non-programmer or a special type of programmer. I say no harm in being precise if it costs nothing.

Came here to say almost the same thing, but one more tidbit. Technical = Technical, Programmer = Programmer, and in some cultures even Technical != Programmer. Granted I'm not in US, and I know in the jargon around here people who can code would generally be called technical, but where I live if someone asked me if I was technical I would say no. I can code and I understand maths. I'm not an engineer or anything, neither do I have knowledge worth anything about hardware. That doesn't even pass as "technical" around here. I know it's a bit nitpicky but wording is important if you value your time as you claim.

>> Memorizing a foreign language word is not just translation, it's about understanding context and usage for that word.

Exactly. I didn't mean to suggest that you can actually "learn" those 100 words in a meaningful way. That treshold is also difficult to measure indeed, I also can't back that up besides anecdote without spending some time looking into research. Anyway, my point wasn't that at all. I was actually trying to state it's not realistic to assume a 100 word per day acquisition, because that would mean you would spend 4-5+ hours a day _just_ to know certain translations of those words, without any context or very little if any. I'm talking about something very mechanic that would gain you very little in real language acquisition terms for the effort you spend. Unrealistic scenario unless you're trying to win a bet.

Also, it's worth to note that this depends strongly on how you actually define new words, i.e. what kind of inflections etc. you consider to be distinct words. In languages where you can derive an average of 3-4 new words for every word you learn this can become almost trivial.

100 words per day is definitely possible with very clever techniques and hard work, so is a vocabulary of about 20,000 words in 5 months, but to be fluent (C1) in using them is another story. It is certainly unrealistic unless we're talking 8+ hours a day immersion.

>> Daniel Tammet learned Icelandic in one week.

Your point? Daniel Tammet is an autistic savant. And some people have eidetic memory. There is little relevance unless we find a method to recreate these traits in "normal" people, there is by no means any evidence that every human has latent super powers.

As a normal person having nevertheless high language aptitude, I reached C1 or very close to C1 in about 6-7 months. I say close to C1 despite reaching C1 level in a test, because I don't think it's fair to claim you have every capability for C1 as described by CEFR just because you passed a 4-hour test, in certain ways you just cheat by learning for the test. Anyway, even that was with a very generous amount of immersion, about a minimum of 8 hours a day including long hours of grammar practice. Still, despite praises from native speakers, at that time I wouldn't assert that I was fluent in speech or writing. Now to claim you can be "fluent" in 5 months just by studying 30-60 minutes a day is a bit outrageous.

I can't tell you how much our brain can really "absorb" and "retain" in one day, but there are very real limits in language acquisition after a certain age. I won't say it's impossible, but to realize your claims, we definitely need a magic pill or surgical operation / cybernetics.

I agree with everything you wrote, but couldn't resist adding: being first is good, being great is better, but being lucky is best. After a certain point entrepreneurs have to humble themselves down and accept the fact that sheer luck, or more scientifically, factors that you can't predict or model, play a huge role in the outcome. I'd say most people are overanalyzing this, there's no point in trying to analyze chaos, unless you're literally a theoretical physicist trying to predict an orbit somewhere.

The tip is of course valid and pro, and I'd recommend the same, but it's already being done, under machine translation. Also, in this area big data loses its meaning, as you don't really need traditional databases, you just process raw text. There are literally thousands researching how to intelligently select and process this data.

"Frauenquote" is just a specialization of the term "positive discrimination" in the UK, France, Spain and in most of the EU, and "affirmative action" in the US and some other countries. Other countries do not have a specific term for the gender case, but it is exactly the same thing, and lots of similar policies exist. You can see this by taking a look at Wikipedia/Quotenregelung which is linked to Affirmative action in English Wikipedia.

About the Pirate Party's take on this: I don't think there's a mature consensus yet. According to a recent poll (http://www.taz.de/!89247/) only 6 percent sees the party as postgender.

I think your statement is somehow not well thought out, and by "your" statement I mean "almost everyone's" actually, I just semi-randomly picked out yours to comment on because it captures my counter-argument well. You're saying Google released the video prematurely, based on your assumption google does not want everyone to try beat Google to the punch. It's obvious that Google is well aware that every piece to realize this tech is out there already. What I don't understand is how it is not immediately obvious to everyone that Google wants this idea out there, for people to experiment with it, for people to share their thoughts about UX concerning such a piece of technology which is what they really need at this point to develop this product.

The linked video and the comments it generates are an excellent example of this.

I can see how it's his own fault from a practical viewpoint, but really? Considering opt-in vs. opt-out, status quo bias and all that? I think he has (people have) a right to criticise at least.

What's the harm? Even if it's a mass hysteria (a bit of a hyperbole), it's certainly not one of those destructive ones (TSA et al.). At worst people wrote some overly dramatic stuff on social media and wasted a small amount of our time here, at best it raised the alarms pre-emptively and (hopefully) prevented any company having such thoughts from doing so by raising social awareness.

I'm not taking any sides on this, but yours is another hyperbole, Facebook is definitely not as harmless as email. If every email from everyone around the world went through the same company, and they could data mine it as they wished, then they would be on equal terms.

>> for your brain to stop thinking about an unfinished task, you must (1) know and trust that an external system will remind you to perform that task when it is time to perform it, and (2) have chosen the next action taken at a sufficiently concrete level that your brain is no longer trying to plan it out in the background.

Wow, I do this instinctively all the time, but to be frank I feared it was just a stupid obsession of mine and suspected it could be detrimental, that it made me less efficient. I'm relieved to know this is an advised method of managing your mind, even if there isn't of course much science behind it. Anecdotally, this does help with my concentration.

>> 3. Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean "More people died" don't say "Mortality rose."

Am I the only one that doesn't agree with this, at least in general? I mean, the idea behind the advice is of course sound, just a basic form of keep it simple stupid. But in this case, why? This isn't engineering, it's about communication of thoughts. And thoughts can be abstract. I find I can think more efficiently and also more rationally when using abstractions, especially ones I'm familiar with. Just like chunking in memory, there is data I have ready when you speak of mortality, instead of trying to explain to me in plain words that people die.

That said, it might just be me (or people like me). I have to constantly make a conscious effort of writing and speaking less abstractly, just to not annoy people. It might have to do with the fact that English is not my native tongue, and as I don't use it in my daily life, I lack the touch for concreteness to make sense to me that easily.

I'm not going to partake in the discussion about whether fictional work should or should not objectify women. I have my take on it and others theirs, and we can agree to disagree. No moral absolutes.

But to be against a work of fiction that _parodies_ negative concepts, like objectification of women, which is clearly what LSL is about if you ever played it, is not acceptable from a freedom of speech perspective. Once you start finding disagreements with parodies, you're on a slippery slope. Next thing you are disagreeing with religious or political parody. A parody is about conveying a negative concept humorously after all, if the common mindset found the concept agreeable, it wouldn't be called a parody in the first place.

This really just boils down to saying, "the society is too stupid to understand subtleties, so we better keep humor and entertainment direct and remove any irony/parody/cynical/dark humor". There are countries where this mindset is common, and censorship is what it leads to, I know this because I've been there.

Good point. To disagree so strongly when anectodal evidence is shared regardless of context became a culture in itself rather than a model for rational behaviour and is disruptive.

Academic science is an entirely different story. It's a growing body, and it grows by using previous information in its body, so any probability of disruptive/wrong data entering the system has to be reduced as much as it can with strict discipline. To apply the same standard to our daily lives is absurd - you could as well be against spoken conversation because it's too lossy and converse using pen&paper - speech recognition is tricky after all.

This doesn't take much more than common sense to get - you could formalize it for specific cases statistically, maybe using shannon entropy and such - anectodal information is still information and the loss of information by virtue of not being backed up by scientific method is in most cases insignificantly low - just think of it as an efficient compression algorithm.

If you aren't ethically against lossy audio/image/text compression, there is no reason to take such a strict stance against anectodal information. Most times it's very useful, just have your rationality filter/bs detector and the like on at all times like they should be.

Ditto, I too think this discussion is a bit tired. It's a free market, if someone agrees to do something for a certain pay, let them. Obviously, in most cases, you are going to get more commitment and possibly even higher quality work from said person as a co-founder. It all depends on what you need. There are thousands of examples of successful projects with hired work (I can speak for the European market), just not so many on the web, but I would guess the lack of success in that area correlates with other factors.

OK - I stand corrected, actually rereading what I wrote it came out a bit strong ("doesn't have anything to do with"), it does have more than a bit even, true.

Concerning the other point, it's also true but it's something else entirely. I never meant a mathematician will outdo someone with software engineering education, obviously he will at least have to read about good software engineering practices. I can also confirm your experience, from firsthand account even, as someone who began coding to do basic applied math. Thinking mathematically generally leads to (at best) efficient but unreadable, one-time-use-only code.

Isn't this trivium? It's almost like saying a mathematician can be an excellent physicist.

Also, beware - correlation fallacy. In my experience it doesn't have anything to do with the education itself, I believe you can easily generalize and say the average person taking up mathematics has a better analytical mind than the average CS major who's in it for the hype.