tmuir

I've assumed that. I appreciate the advice. I got a little heated in the Berkeley Study article this week. I guess I get to a point when some things are plain as day to me, such as "Humans learn better when they are more awake than less awake", and then read people pontificate about how this is such a profound insight, and confirms a hunch they've had their whole life. Its like I can see myself getting wound up, but I can't resist correcting my detractors. It only get's worse when people can enumerate the trees, but roll their eyes at others claiming a forest.

I even knew going into my final retort to /u/dang that he'd swing the banhammer. But something in the back of my mind just said "hold my beer".

I fully agree that honey kills more flies than vinegar. But I'm also a Lord of the Rings fan. Pip and Merri only convince the Ents to go to war through forcing them to confront the clear cut forest. It was the Ents position, much like the US before WWI, that this too shall pass, and we shouldn't involve ourselves in the affairs of men/europe.

I'm not saying confrontation is always defensible, but its also not always indefensible.

I guess I struggle at picking my battles.

The paywall prevents me from finding out the economist's theory, but I can put forth my own.

The two movies Sully and Deepwater Horizon, which both came out in 2016, are near mirror images of each other in many ways.

Sully is partly the story about a pilot who has spent his entire career landing failing airplanes, effectively training him to do it again with higher stakes, where its never happened before. But its also the story of all of the regulation that has prevented all commercial aviation disasters since 2001. Sully may stay calm under pressure, but he's standing on the shoulders of giants. The flight attendants stick to their training. The port authority and the captains of the boats that rescue all of the passengers stick to their training. The NTSB even sticks to their training in certain ways. Plans were set forth, and followed. Even at the end of the movie, it is made clear that the NTSB's flaw was to control for all of the time constraints Sullenberger faced, all of the stress, and hid the fact that it was something like the 20th attempt in the simulator that was the first successful landing.

Deepwater horizon is the story about a company that has successfully captured their regulatory framework. There was inadequate training, inadequate safety measures, inadequate equipment to properly measure the specifics of the well. And so when the shit hits the fan, does everyone stay calm and exercise the plan to effect their continued survival? Nope, they all panic, and they nearly all die.

Planes and Trains are far safer than automobiles because of ratio of humans to engines.

"Other areas of cortex can support 'declarative' memory formation. For example you can learn things like the definition of a new word (lang), features of a novel object (vis), where you parked your car outside your new apartment (spatial/episodic), within just a few seconds."

Can you provide other examples of this phenomenon? It seems like the ones you put forth here are all examples of relying on previous experience, which seems more on the "habitual" end of the spectrum, which is the articles claim in the general case.

I can learn new word's definitions because I've spent a significant amount of time learning definitions to all sorts of words throughout my life. Thus, the process is very familiar to me, and is a habit.

I have learned over the course of my life that novelties are by definition outliers. Just like all animals with a survival instinct, I've learned that strange things can be dangerous, so it is an effective heuristic to expect danger from strange things. Another heuristic I favor is that the best way to defang danger is to understand it enough to avoid its mechanisms.

I have learned over the course of my driving experience that keeping track of where I parked my car is crucial to locating the car again in the future. Thus, through experience, I know that it is an important piece of information to remember.

These three examples seem to fit perfectly well within the hypothesis of the article. They aren't new tricks. They are by definition the application of old tricks.

I posit that this is largely due to your frame of reference. I will assume from your presence on hacker news that you already have learned programming. You are already familiar with its utility. You have found over your career that tools that sacrifice expressiveness for ease of expression are nearly always crutches, that if depended on too heavily, will foster reliance, and give no incentive to actually learn more advanced tools.

Yet, like all crutches, the provide a superior alternative to certain groups of people. People with broken legs use crutches, but only for the purpose of self sufficiency until their leg heals.

Perhaps this is where the flaw in the business model is revealed. Anvil is largely incentivized to get its users to depend on its crutch. But users are still able to utilize the crutch to ease the learning process, and perhaps explore something that might interest them enough to seek out more traditional development workflows.

Rental of goods exists as a viable service, because there is demand for its supply. When you fly somewhere distant, at least in the US, your first order of business is to pick up your rental car. This is not a bad business practice. You are making the correct judgement that given your limited resources, renting something in the short term is more prudent than purchasing it.

Are you familiar with Node Red? It is an IBM project that is a self hosted website you can run on a raspberry pi, or a traditional PC or server.

The tool allows you to graphically build Node.js applications, through some key abstractions. Node you drag into the canvas has inputs and or outputs which can be connected to other nodes, by simply clicking and dragging between them.

As an embedded developer, I was far more interested in determining the viability of an implementation than learning node.js. To me, Node Red is the superior evolution of node.js. But I can certainly appreciate that people who learned node.js to any degree, before finding out about Node Red, see far less utility in it than I do.

For a mirror image of this phenomenon, Arduino allows novices to circumvent the traditional learning curve required to develop embedded systems, through its key abstractions. Yet, every embedded developer I know immediately attacks the downsides of Arduino. Its not really teaching its users much. At least in its infancy, much of the underlying code was cowboy spaghetti. You would never use Arduino in a production environment.

Yet somehow, Arduino is flourishing. I'll admit that since it's open source, that is a key distinction. But Adafruit.com, and Sparkfun.com are literally printing money with Arduinos and the ecosystem they facilitated. Each is a private company, but each has revealed at least one year of revenue exceeding $30,000,000. Each also provides schematics, datasheets, and tutorials for every single product they sell, if it is within their rights to provide such information.

I can appreciate that they are different tools, but to accept your challenge, I submit three.js, along with the multiple websites that have boatloads of single feature demos. In the particular venue of 3D graphics in the browser, I contend three.js would provide more depth than anvil's breadth.

That being said, I see no reason why you couldn't combine the two, and get the best of both worlds.

It's interesting to think about how apex predators are the keystone that propagates order in their ecosystem. For as long as humans have been aware of wolves, we have sought to eradicate them. After all, they kill livestock. They are immortalized in stories as a symbol of evil. Little Red Riding Hood. The Three Little Pigs. The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

Yet once we were successful in eradicating them, to our complete amazement, we found that the eradication of wolves caused the proliferation of all of these negative effects that would have been otherwise kept in check by wolves.

I think the key takeaway is balance. Everything in moderation, even moderation, and especially moderation of the Internet.

Please stop jumping to the conclusion that I am off topic.

My thesis that ties this story together, and showering in PE class, is that some people see boats, guns, and sailors moving through the water, but are somehow incapable of acknowledging that it constitues a navy.

The result in this article, people do better when their awake, can be thought of as a frequency plot. This study effectively performed fourier analysis. They studied a comprehensive data set over a long enough time to deduce the cohesion that is evident when controlling for time.

Here's a thought experiment: can you empathize with a transistor? Imagine your a transistor, and I'm a transistor, and we can somehow still communicate. Im a pnp, and you're an npn:

npn: Its obvious that we're just transistors. You keep spouting nonsense about these logic gates, and how their the future. But please, show me the logic gate. I don't see it. You can't even tell me what it looks like.

pnp: look, when you put enough transistors together, you get an AND gate. In another configuration, you can get an OR gate.

npn: Please stop posting your controversial opinions here. This guy. I bet you're gonna tell me about magical flip flops and arithmetic logic units. Thats because you get all your news from science based sources. You should really try and get your information from a more diverse set.

I just laid out the derivative of your behavior, and then you said

"thats ridiculous, we quickly adapted over a short amount of time".

So, if I hear you correctly, what your saying is that as your understanding over time, lets call this du/dt, has a positive rate of change?

You're probably right though, the biggest trick Copernicus ever pulled was convincing everyone of heliocentricity by employing mathematics. We've been under the illusion ever since.

Allow me to contextualize all of your controversial deflection:

You specifically selected parts of the body that finish maturing earlier than my statement, because it was the most controversial thing that popped into your head. It didn't pop in to your growth plates, it didn't pop into your elbow. It didn't pop into your left middle toe. It popped into your head.

You should allow these very statements to marinate in that same head, and see if you can come to the correct conclusion as to which part of your body I was referring to in my original comment.

Here's a secret: we all did.

But ask yourself this. Think back in time to those dreadful experiences and remember the people who didn't _appear_ to dread the experience.

Those people dreaded walking naked amongst their 14 year old peers as well, they just did a better job at convincing you that they dreaded it less than you.

You could even say that those were the victors who wrote your history.

The irony of defining a regional term in the context of other regional terms.

All people are particular about their routines. Some to greater degrees than others.

Are you familiar with the phrase: "There are two types of jobs, those you shower before, and some you shower afterwards."

Does it make your nebulous conspiracy theory more believable or less believable when you consider that the age of 18 is generally when people's bodies have reached full maturity?

Personally, if my 22 year old self travelled in time three years backwards to meet 17 year old me, and then travelled 20 years forward to present day to me current me, I have no doubt 18 year old me would the odd man out in this triplet.

Let me guess, you believe governments should be run like companies, right?

Perhaps, ask yourself why you come down on the side of moneyed interests in every point you make.

When I see this kind of dogmatic badgering, Its almost like my brain is superimposing a Fast Fourier Transform frequency plot on that person, and all of the energy is found to be in a single bin.

Your single bin is money. As this pure tone, it is literally your equation.

I don't have to tell you that this makes you give whores a bad name.

What was so traumatizing about the showers available to you in high school? Because I certainly remember first period gym, and I just took a shower afterwards. Then I was right as rain.

But those are controversial ideas that are not part of the reverence around Dr King. The conventional wisdom about Dr King is that he inspired an entire movement to universally take the high road and protest with nonviolence. In this sense, he is seen as pure.

The same holds true for Jesus Christ. It's just as likely he was objectively a flawed person in reality, and has been lionized by his supporters.

I don't argue that they've been particularly successful, I simply said relatively successful. I mean relative to other recent movements that have never gone anywhere at all. The very fact that you confidently use the acronym BLM, and that its expansion is a common term in the American lexicon in the last several years proves that they have been successful to the point of at least resonating with supporters of the cause.

But I would generally agree, they have generally failed to motivate others to do much of anything outside of basic tolerance or superficial support of their cause.

The true power in microtargeting lies in the iteration speed achievable by computers. As with any effective weapon, if you can wield yours faster than your opponent, you will emerge victorious in the normal case. This is the same principle at play in High Frequency Trading. And just like High Frequency Trading, which was pioneered by the chairman of Cambridge Analytica, Robert Mercer, the less competition you have, the less entities that can usurp your temporal advantage. There is no "mastery" of this technique, only being able to do it faster than everyone else. Thus, there is no balance lent by proliferating the algorithm, as I see it.

I guess as an irrational actor, which we all are as humans, I would either seek one of two outcomes, neither of which resulted in giving away the algorithm. If I felt no moral qualms empowering someone else with this ability, then that is the same lack of qualms to use the ability for myself. If I were so inclined, I could use this technique to make that fat paycheck, and never have to walk away. This technique is effective in many fields beyond elections. In the situation I'd walk away, it would only be to suppress the work, in the hopes it stays undiscovered.

More than anything, its really hard to keep ones emotions in check after they realize they've been mindfucked for the last 1000 days or so. Some people react in anger at whoever tricked them, and others get overly excited when, like a bell, everything that has confounded them and challenged everything they understood before, suddenly makes sense in the context of some keystone piece of information, restoring faith in those heuristics the mindfucker convinced them to abandon.

I am firmly in the latter category. I have purposely made my arguments controversial to the entire "There's something vague I can't quite put my finger on about this guy and why I don't believe him", crowd, because the responses I was bound to get were certain to come from this very same crowd. I say certain, because I myself play 4D chess, and you've all telegraphed your moves to me through the cohesion of your arguments over time. Time is that fourth dimension, after all. The people constantly making vague arguments about how "we don't really know, but gosh, just think of ramifications of it being true, we better just be safe and investigate this closer" are dropping breadcrumbs, meta data, if you will, in the fourth dimension. It is the accumulation of these breadcrumbs over time that reveals the cohesion of your behavior in the aggregate. You are literally powerless to the tantalizing nature of conspiracies that confirm what you assume is true about the Left. Your primary heuristic is that conspiracies are filled with intrigue and mystery. Thus, anywhere you find intrigue and mystery, your brain immediately jumps to conspiracy theories. This is literally the effect of your media bubble trolling you so hard with controversy for so long, all of your previous heuristics you used to use to discern the truth have been weakened by the information vacuum perpetuated by that very controversy. As nature abhors a vacuum, your mind fills in the gaps in lieu having the phenomenon explained to you by someone who understands. This is literally the effect at play in horror movies where they rarely show the monster/killer. Your imagination is far better at evoking fear than any hollywood writer.

I just showed you a 4D chess move, and now I'm showing you the pawn I took with that move. I don't claim you will be able to fully see it, but it is right in front of your face, nonetheless.

To the degree that a person can be found to possess high cohesion in the aggregate of their behavior over time, that person can be said to displaying that behavior with purpose, and as a habit. By high cohesion of their behavior, I mean they are consistently achieving the same outcomes.

Trump has unwittingly telegraphed his intentions through the cohesion of his behavior and communication. That behavior and communication is nearly exclusively controversial. Trump has recently admitted he really likes conflict, so even he agrees with me. Donald Trump will start a fight with nearly anyone. I know you'll correct me with the idea that Donald Trump is responding to attacks from the left. I'm willing to even back off to that looser definition. Trump likes to fight back. Trump's cohesive action that accumulates as his habit is the fact that he injects controversy everywhere, at the expense of context. Trump's main skill is he understands that by picking issues to advance that are most rabidly supported by his base, he is concurrently giving his base what they want, and angering/frightening those who oppose those issues. This is the underlying mechanism of demagoguery. Give these people what they want, and make those people extremely unhappy about it. So Trump is really good at reading certain people, and telling them either what they want to hear (his base), or what they don't want to hear (his opponents). Trump is most effective when he uses the same subject to achieve both of those at once. It comes down to his timing in how fast he can iterate on which controversies resonate with the people he is telling them too. If he can read the listeners response to his speech faster than they can think of a logical framework to understand it within, and some how play off of their response to perpetuate their doubts, he can successfully repeat this process until he finds the speech his listeners respond to the best. This is why he likes "High Energy". The high energy is the validation he has properly read his audience.

Cambridge Analytica, through microtargeting, is performing the same process. Expose people to controversial information. Gauge their responses to this information through their social media responses. The main difference that makes Cambridge Analytica more effective is the speed with which they can iterate the process. More iterations will yield more insights, and give that much more stiff competition to the truly effective methods. Its actually strikingly similar to the Fourier Transform. Find the frequencies present in a periodic signal containing multiple harmonics by multiplying that signal by a range of single frequency signals. The results of this multiplication is a set of bins, each mapping to a specific frequency. If a particular frequency is present in the complex signal, then multiplying it by a signal with just that single frequency will yield a more significant value than a frequency that is not present in the multi frequency signal. The fourier transform is literally seeing which single frequencies resonate with the complex signal being transformed.

I posit that you can't refute any of these underlying principles. To the extent that we agree on the underlying principles, but disagree on their effect in concert, I will have enumerated the ships, the weaponry, the sailors, and the uniforms, and your contention will be that those don't constitute a Navy.

Lets imagine you developed a Deep Learning algorithm that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt to be able to pull off what CA pulled off. Why on god's green earth would you ever tell people that you have the algorithm, if you could instead use it for your own benefit? Why would you ever publish?

Like Orangutans?

Do you have context to add to the story, or just more reasons to look somewhere else, preferably away from this story?

Oh, I almost forgot. A good way to think about downvotes is your subconcsious admission that the best recourse you have to any argument is to try and make sure as few other people read it as possible.

That means part of you that you have no control over knows the truth, but for whatever reason, decides your better off not knowing that truth.

Well, then you're gonna love love love love this. Faked videos are certainly bad, but lets travel in our mental time machines back to February 18th 1990, the day before Photoshop was released.

"We are rapidly nearing a world when its trivial enough to create complete faked pictures", they cried. "How will we evaluate truth in the future?"

"Hah," you exclaim. "You can just look at the pixels. There is always a way to tell if you look close enough."

But alas, they can't hear you, because this is my time machine, and I said so.

Just because we haven't had to adapt our lives to the new reality yet, doesn't mean we wont with the same relative ease we always have once that reality smacks us in the face.

You know how Donald Trump says he doesn't telegraph his moves?

You know how Donald Trumps supporters talk a lot about 4D chess?

There are several people playing 4D chess with Donald. The Cambridge Analytica story is lining up a path to Donald's opponent's queen, to entice him into taking that queen. Once the queen is taken, Donald Trump is in check, possibly mate.

And its all because Donald telegraphed his moves.

You've been triggered so hard to believe the Fake News narrative, you don't have a snowballs chance in hell at detecting the difference in this story. Its the same for your boy.

Facebook is the Red Herring, the delicious smoked creature served up on a platter to those most likely to bite into it.

Donald Trump will be (already is) in check, because once he bites on the controversy that Facebook losing control of the data is the actual problem at the root of this story, he will gush to us all about his far superior data operation, that hardly relied on facebook at all.

It is as Donald spits these flakes of herring meat he will confess.

You know how I've told you alot of this story in the future tense. Well, it turns out some of the players confessed right away, but they still don't know it. Here's one now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fFbVwuU8bM

I posit that its a beautiful piece of artwork designed as a honeypot. The sweetness that will draw certain people in is all of the conflicting, and therefore inherently controversial information that can be used to paint Facebook and Christopher Wylie as the true problem here, and the incredible Donald is just the poor guy caught up in the middle.

This is evidenced by the conservative media's discrediting of all of the people telling the story. I don't even contend that Buzzfeed is conservative or liberal, so I think Buzzfeed is either an unwitting accomplice in this honeypot, or perhaps it is their pot. Time will tell.

My thesis is that, just like actual honeypots, the sweetness is coverfire for the trap lying inside. That trap is to frame this whole story as if the most heinous part of the story is just Facebook losing control of the data. Once the key players admit to the microtargetting, but claim everybody does it, the jaws of the trap will spring shut.

Some of those players have already made their confessions, literally on Fox News, a week after the election, and they couldnt contain their joy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fFbVwuU8bM

It is obvious that Donald Trump intuitively understands the general concepts at play in microtargetting, but also just as obvious that he doesn't understand its mechanics.

Microtargetting is literally a deep learning algorithm, and Cambridge Analytica is a Robert Mercer affiliated outfit. You may remember Robert Mercer from such travesties as high frequency trading. After all, he invented it, and used it to become a billionaire. Microtargeting is to humans as high frequency trading is to investment markets.

The underlying principle is the same. If you can glean information about your target faster than your competitors, you can act upon that information to your own gain. Microtargeting is literally a computer evolving its algorithm to influence the targetted. It is A/B testing what will unite one half of an electorate with the reddest of red meat policies, which by definition induce panic in the other half of the electorate.

Cambridge Analytica has cracked the code on how to divide or unite people with an algorithm. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out which one they are aiming for.

This makes me think about what someone said in regards to the Black Lives Matter movement, and its relative success. Essentially, if you're waiting for Jesus, or even just Martin Luther King, Jr, to come back, and be the pure, untainted perfect black person to martyr themselves because you think every other victims imperfections are cause of your struggle, then someone else has convinced you to rely on your predjuidices, instead of thinking clearly without emotion.

There are certainly common aspects, such as mantras, and the general motivation for meditating, vs seizing control of your mind, to not let it be lead by the cigarette.

Carr specifically addresses this point in the book. He said that he was hurt to find out that after he'd published his book, and gave signed copies to friends, in the hope they would quit, many of his friends never even started the book. One of them finally admitted to him that they knew if they finished the book, they'd have to quit. So to prevent that, they just never started the book.

He also approaches the subject from the angle of timing, and that stressful periods may be more difficult, because stress is one of the triggers. Or at least we convince our selves it removes stress.

So I 100% agree that just like learning anything else you have to be willing to hear the information and process it without just dismissing it out of hand. Somewhat related is the Upton Sinclair quote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”.

I totally went in with tons of skepticism. Here's some huckster telling me theres a secret way. Yeah, ok. But I guess after reading enough of it, I started to realize that I had become really good at coming up with excuses, and that skill was being used against me to keep smoking. In my view, he made a persuasive argument, and wasn't trying to sell me more shit. By the time I finished the book, I was completely convinced that he was correct, even though I had not yet had my last cigarette.

I also read the book over two days, so I really got the whole message in a short amount of time, as opposed to reading a page or two a day for six months.