HN user

jack9

1,011 karma
Posts0
Comments900
View on HN
No posts found.

Occams razor tells me that other animals probably do have a concious experience just like ours.

For most mammals, everything is so similar...including responses to stimuli like light, sound, temperature, pain, pleasure, even predictive behavior (knowing when they have done something to provoke a human response) that the same principle leads me to believe it's likely they have a very similar experience.

The linked page doesn't say anything about what is and isn't a human subject.

Why you decided that was a claim is your own bias talking. I was pointing out the relevant section. You've tried to raise something that isn't the issue, nor is it a sensible question as you undoubtedly realized (But even so).

Every human in an experiment is a human subject. Glad we got that out of the way.

The issue is what an IRB is looking for in evaluating the ethical feasibility of an experiment.

Experimenting on unwitting subjects is unethical

I had hoped that by now that would be something that didn't need stating and restating.

That's because it's your opinion. Seriously, go tell your local Target or College Bookstore to stop playing with the wall colors because there is no disclosure AND they make money off of it.

The IRB should not have allowed this to happen.

I see this repeated, but arguments like "You don't get to secretly do things to your subjects." are not sufficient nor is "it's arguably the most important software on the planet". These viewpoints are not agreed upon or codified anywhere that would affect an IRB decision.

"human subjects" qualification -> https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/center-drug-evaluation-and-res... (et al sources)

The notable history of outrage in some communities (did this make the evening news anywhere?) that has been created, may influence future decisions, at best.

The school must abide by policies and incorporate student's right to free speech,

"Though public school students do possess First Amendment freedoms, the courts allow school officials to regulate certain types of student expression. For example, school officials may prohibit speech that substantially disrupts the school environment or that invades the rights of others. Many courts have held that school officials can restrict student speech that is lewd.

Many state constitutions contain provisions safeguarding free expression. Some state Supreme Courts have interpreted their constitutions to provide greater protection than the federal Constitution. In addition, a few states have adopted laws providing greater protection for freedom of speech." - https://www.freedomforuminstitute.org/about/faq/what-rights-...

a sincere apology cannot in any way entertain doubt about the fact that there WAS harm

Someone will always be apologizing wrong for some. Some interpretation of what harm there was, is not necessarily the same as my interpretation. There are too many ways to construe what harm there was or may have been according to others to satisfy everyone addressed. This is an efficient wording that doesn't explicitly satisfy your (and many people's) specific issues out of "the community", which illustrates the point.

Indeed, honorary degrees are earned. The accreditation process differs for every individual, at a micro level and for individuals across organizations (and time and discipline, et al) at a macro level. The idea that a degree is "earned" based on a lack of the "honorary" descriptor belies a bias of ignorance, at best.

The phrase “earned degree” has a particular meaning: it means “not honorary”

Maybe you meant academic degree.

But they are what they are.

Still not clear on what that means. Recognition of expertise? They are that.

The convention is not to use the title “Dr.” on the basis of an honorary degree

Again, by those aforementioned.

"Doctor" is widely used throughout the US media without repercussion.

Dr. Phil - philosophy

Dr. Drew - medical doctor

Dr. Laura - physiology (honorary in tradition and culture from a tiny college)

Dr. Ruth - education

Dr. Oz - medical doctor

M.D. or Physician means what you think "Doctor" means. https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/20/702.404

Legally, it depends on the very lenient existing laws of the land to determine if you are prohibited (or default allowed) to be referred to as a doctor when you receive a doctorate. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5026525/ (mentioned US and CAN)

"earn" as in was granted by a university? The purpose of a graduate degree (Masters, Doctorate, et al) is to further knowledge. Without churning out "dissertations", Universities would be nothing more than echo chambers for what's already accepted and considered "known". https://vimeo.com/9270320 - Greg Wilso mentions this, because it's important to all modern human industry and somehow that's rarely understood.

In that vein, there are discoveries, studies and experts that occur or develop outside of universities. This is the source of an honorary degree. Famously, others have been given various degrees for effort and demonstrated competence (eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Joel). People who scoff at honorary doctorates are elitists, at best. Those who do not accept that expertise can be cultivated excepting through anything other than standardized processes understandably believe that no other process is legitimate despite the fact that there are narrow and wide fields of study for which there exists no framework.

There is some truth to the observation that age unfairly plays into academic accomplishment insofar as someone younger could not be granted a teaching position or honorary degree, even if they demonstrate comparable knowledge. Part of the leeway is due to a passion or commitment to topics that can only be demonstrated through a life-long pursuit of knowledge and criticality.

I wouldn't know how to make a case that any language is a bad language

I have a checklist I've been building which is purely based on my experience and is subjective. Appearing on the checklist makes teaching someone else more difficult and looks bad for the language in general.

I believe the ecosystem is part of the language. You can't do much without running into npm if you use node but you can avoid it if you just use JS - are they separate? I treat them so. If you aren't a general purpose language being used as a general purpose language, that's partially the language's (including ecosystem) fault. eg don't make a UI with erlang.

* Language has a toxic ecosystem - node

* Language makes it easy to do the wrong thing - node, js, PHP, lua, Perl (notice no Python)

* Language makes it hard to do the right thing - node, js, PHP, Perl, erlang, Python, Haskell, Java

* Language is based on an esoteric design principle - erlang, Haskell, lua (meta-things)

* Language which is internally inconsistent - node, js (floats, time, etc), PHP (bifs), Java (type system)

etc. I think there's plenty of languages which have problems and few seem to be shoring them up because we still don't have a consensus on how dynamic typing should be implemented, so we build upon the sand of flawed languages and argue about triviality.

The premise of this argument relies on assuming life arising on Earth and Mars are stochastic processes that each occurred independently

That isn't the premise. It's the premise of how it got there for a straightforward example, but doesn't avert the filter questions (regardless of how it got there).

I rather enjoyed this for awhile, although a bit repetitive and long-winded at times. He did mention it was rushed.

Decades later, I'm surprised that languages aren't changing to make programming less boilerplate and more convenient; eg nested comments, single type multi-var declarations and assignments. As a matter of interest, he generates a compile error in a small function at ~51:05 in his own language.

He doesn't think memory safety is important (13:25 "I don't give a flying toss...") but is going to be adding the runtime bounds checking (~56:50 "It's not hard to add...") in the future for arrays only? This is probably a good idea, since he thinks Rust is overly careful.

At about the hour mark, before his enthusiastic "clever pointer tricks" segment, I checked out. I'll see if this goes anywhere after he's made some tougher tradeoffs.

Questions 8 years ago

Why is US GDP growth so weirdly constant?

It's just a made up output with a wildly manipulated function. This is not unique to the USA.

Questions 8 years ago

He's not confusing it.

the price of everything rises by the same proportion

Due to regulation, that's simply not the universal case - e.g. rent control. The economy is conceptual, but prices are concrete leading to some ironic situations.

If you're an employee (no equity), be assured your employers don't care about you when the money starts to dry up. If you're overpriced for the revenue you bring in, you're gone. This is stuff everyone learned in the 90s bubble. Now the paper mags are falling over and he's acting surprised. SMH

That's only if you believe that discrimination (selection bias) is the same as discrimination (categorizing). There's no apparent failure of logic until you start confusing them (eg "starting to realize"). If some people are starting to believe that the definitions are synonymous, they are wrong and will have to deal with the issues that naturally occur when you confuse ideals with reality. Generally some population group suffers for another population group to be supplicated in an arbitrary way.

Libertarianism is ultimately an American flavour of (Classical) Liberalism, which is quite an old political tradition.

"Ultimately" being a weasel word for redefining it again to meet a particular ideology.

This is not correct, nor is historical cherry picking a compelling argument for the viewpoint.

He goes off on yet another tangent after trying to justify the interpretation, through parallel interpretation. They will continue to be one of the many people who are convinced they are right, deriding others with more rational and moderate position, trying to get into arguments to try to justify their beliefs.