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Hi, I just successfully
Great! Why all that? I consider forking the LW reddit codebase for my own blog - mainly because I didn't find a commenting system that suited me. I may push back improvements into the main trunk. We will see. Just one question: What do I have to respect when using the codebase? Are there any licenses I have to take care of beside CPAL? http://opensource.org/licenses/CPAL-1.0 Does anybody know?
I'm playing around with writing a Chrome extension that identifies countries of the world in the browser and marks them up with expandable, at-a-glance summary data for that country, like GDP per capita, composite index scores (HDI, MPI, etc.), literacy rate, principal exports and so on. I find myself regularly looking this up on Wikipedia anyway, and figured I'd remove the inconvenience of doing so.
This example probably isn't that useful for everyone, but it got me wondering what other sets of things could be marked up in the browser in this way. Another example that occurred to me was legislature voting records, where a similar plugin would provide easy visibility of how elected representatives voted on legislation. Again, not useful for everyone, but I could imagine political junkies getting some use out of it.
Such a set of mark-uppable entities would have to be either identifiable by format (like an ISBN) where the data could be fetched from a remote source, or a finite list of a few hundred items (like countries), where the data could be stored locally. What kinds of things would you like this sort of visibility on in the browser? Is there a set of entities you find yourself tiresomely looking up data for over and over again?
(Partly inspired by the Dictionary of Numbers)
The Elon Musk biography that just came out is quite entertaining, but I didn't any significant actionable knowledge in it.
There's an interesting turn at the end. The author thought at the beginning of the project that Musk was particularly terrible with people. At the end, he says he thinks he gets it: Musk has basically just calculated the work of his companies to be more important that the feelings of its employees, and to go against that calculation would be illogical, which for Musk makes it kind of physically painful. So he'd rather put someone down in 5 seconds than waste another minute that he has a better use for on politeness or common decency. And it isn't that he has no empathy, he just has more empathy for mankind as a whole than for the guy standing in front of him, and he's drawing logical conclusions from that difference.
Now first of all I admire that. But this reminds me that even if I could be that consequentialist, most people would still find it hard to recognize me as one, and comparatively easy to just put me in the asshole category.
And it isn't that he has no empathy, he just has more empathy for mankind as a whole than for the guy standing in front of him, and he's drawing logical conclusions from that difference.
That's a risky game. It makes the company culture less enjoyable. That makes hiring harder and can motivate people to quit. Musk can afford this because of the strength of the vision of his company, that makes people to work there but it's still not clear that it's optimal.
I have my genome data from both 23andMe and BGI. I am wondering what to make of it. BGI reports about thirty times as many SNPs as 23andMe. 23andMe: 598897, BGI: 19695817.
Of these, 475801 are reported by both. I looked to see how well they agree with each other, and summarised the results as a count, for each occurring pair of results, of how often that pair occurred. In descending numerical order, and classifying them by type of match or mismatch, this is what I get. (No individual SNPs are identified here.)
87565 CC CC
86952 GG GG
75289 TT TT
75087 AA AA
31069 CT CT
30817 AG GA
27542 CT TC
27484 AG AG
6818 AC CA
6767 GT GT
6373 AC AC
6297 GT TG
270 CG GC
251 CG CG
146 AT TA
138 AT AT
420 C C
402 G G
336 A A
291 T T
582 CT --
576 AG --
426 CC --
399 GG --
348 -- CC
340 -- GG
330 TT --
316 AA --
270 -- AA
240 -- TT
139 GT --
136 AC --
123 -- GA
121 -- CT
113 -- TG
110 -- TC
104 -- GT
101 -- CA
93 -- AC
86 -- AG
26 -- --
5 -- AT
4 CG --
4 -- GC
3 -- TA
2 AT --
2 -- CG
14 C --
13 T --
9 G --
8 -- C
7 A --
5 -- G
2 -- T
51 CC CT
33 AG AA
32 AG GG
31 GG GA
31 CT TT
30 CT CC
25 TT TC
23 AA AG
18 GG AG
15 CC TC
15 AA GA
11 TT TG
11 CC CA
9 TT GT
9 TT CT
9 AC AA
7 CC AC
7 AC CC
6 GT TT
6 GT GG
6 GG GT
6 AA AC
5 TT CC
4 GG AA
4 CC CG
4 AA CA
3 CG CC
3 CC TT
3 AT TT
2 TT TA
1 TT GA
1 GG TG
1 GG GC
1 GG CG
1 GG CC
1 CG GG
1 CC GC
1 CC AA
1 AT AA
1 AA GG
1 G A
The first five lines make sense: the two analyses agree for a large proportion of the SNPs. The sixth shows 23andMe reading AG when BGI reads GA 30817 times. It looks like 23andMe are reporting unequal pairs in alphabetical order, while BGI are reporting them in random order. Taking these as matches, the great majority of SNPs reported by both are reported identically.
Then there are a few thousand SNPs that one or other analysis (in 26 cases, both) list in their output but don't report anything for. What causes this?
Finally, there are a few hundred that the two analyses just give different results for. For most of these, one reports homozygosity for an allele present in the other, but in a few cases the reports are completely different, e.g. one occurrence of TT/GA.
Is this amount of mismatch typical for such analyses?
The conflict between liberty and equality seems to dominate contemporary political philosophy, but do we all understand this conflict only happens when you already have fairly high levels of both? If the lack of liberty means someone gets to give you orders, you are clearly not equal with that someone, so you cannot achieve meaningful equality through repressing liberty. Conversely, why a purely wealth/income inequality is compatible with liberty, there is a more fundamental sense of equal respect or consideration that is a prerequisite for liberty. Liberty means a rich man may want to build a really glorious skyscraper but if the poor man's shack is in the way and he is unwilling to sell it, then he cannot. This only happens if we think the property, and through that, the choices, the goals, the aims of the big and the small people are equally important. Throughout most of history, we had the kind of hierarchies where neither liberty nor equality was high. And they occasionally come back, and besides, most of the planet is not there either.
I don't really know what follows from it. Perhaps, that when taking a global view, opponents could cooperate. Those who want liberty should understand that in most cultures it comes through and with more equality, and those who want equality should understand that in most cultures it comes through and with more liberty.
I suspect that when people frame the question as whether A or B is more important to you, they are trying to take one of them from you. No, it does not follow technically; but why else would they ask such question?
When you agree to play the game and say that you e.g. prefer A to B, in the next step someone will offer to take B away in exchange for a promise to make A really safe.
I recommend this essay, entitled appropriately Confessions of an ex Commie.
I've heard that lots of folks from LW have graduated from App Academy. Has anyone from LW participated in a data science bootcamp?
I've been looking into data science bootcamps which accept people who don't have PhD's, because data science seems much more intrinsically interesting to me than web design. Zipfian Academy's data science program looks interesting, though I've just started looking into the idea of doing a data science bootcamp, and am not yet committed to the idea of doing one. Thanks for any thoughts or recommendations!
Ray Kurzweil spouts more innumerate nonsense. Why does a date 15 years from now sound like some far-off future time to him? I could see how FM-2030 made the year 2030 as the arrival date of the Cool Future sound sort of plausible back in the 1980's. But Ray should know better than to say something like this now:
Ray Kurzweil: Humans will be hybrids by 2030
http://money.cnn.com/2015/06/03/technology/ray-kurzweil-predictions/
I'll give you a prediction I have more confidence in: According to the actuarial tables, a man Ray's age has a 45 percent chance of dying over the next 15 years. I submit that the actuarial tables have a better track record for predicting "the future" than Kurzweil.
Suggestion: We should ask futurists to predict what will happen 5 years in the future. Then publish the results. Then publish it again 5 years later.
With shorter time period (but probably still long enough to trigger wild imagination in some) we could get more iterations, so we could filter out the worst ones, and still get a few useful predictions from the remaining ones.
Ray Kurzweil: Humans will be hybrids by 2030
http://money.cnn.com/2015/06/03/technology/ray-kurzweil-predictions/
It's unfair to criticize someone making claims in that area that are based on the summary of a CNN journalist. To me the most likely explanation is that the CNN journalist doesn't provide a good summary of what Kurzweil said.
It's under the standards we should have on LW.
I'm trying to understand fear of public speaking, because that's an emotion I appear to lack entirely.
So if you have it - a little or a lot - can you tell me if it is better when your audience is paying full attention, versus when they're somewhat distracted, looking somewhere else, versus when they're not listening at all but looking at their cellphones or something?
What does it feel like when someone is silently looking at you with a blank expression, and how does that feeling change depending on whether you're speaking?
That's something I've never understood about myself: I'm terrified to ask a passerby for the time of day, or ask a prospective love interest out on a date, or even call to order a pizza, but I have absolutely no problem standing in front of a room of strangers and speak for hours and hours. My suspicion is that it's a power dynamic issue: when I need to ask something of someone, I'm at a disadvantage, but when a group of people have already been convinced to gather in a room with little choice but to listen to me, I don't need to be afraid.
Another hypo: it is a confidence issue because you know you are an expert of what you speak about and the audience is interested and how good a presenter you does not matter so much. So you are full of confidence. You know you are giving them a good product, you know they want to buy this product, maybe the packaging is not so good but that is okay.
For the other situations, you don't know the product is good and you don't know they want to buy.
This Video Will Make You Angry by CGP Grey discusses the meme-ic virility of controversial arguments.
A few different sources have also discussed the idea that we are out of the Age of Information, and into the Age of Attention, and that attention is the currency of the day.
Now, has anyone found these ideas combined in a short online text or video to present the idea that: If you find an idea to be ideologically offensive, the best way to fight it is to not engage it in argument but to starve it of attention and let the cat photo and inspirational quote weeds of social media grow over what ever fertile soil it may have found.
If you find an idea to be ideologically offensive
...then you should consider disengaging the concepts of "idea" and "offensive".
the best way to fight it is to not engage it in argument but to starve it of attention
That depends. Some ideas will wither and die, but some will spread like weeds without opposition. I don't know how to decide ex ante what will happen to an idea ignored.
Great video!
But I agree with Lumifer that ignoring bad ideas is not always the answer. Many bad ideas are kind of marginal and if you ignore them they'll wither. Others will catch on. Even if they die off eventually, they can cause a lot of damage before they do (the 20th century provides ample evidence of this, and the 21 is providing addition evidence).