Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by
instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It
includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to
perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest
arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being
bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable
of leading in a heretical direction.
The mind should develop a blind spot whenever a dangerous
thought presented itself. The process should be automatic,
instinctive. Crimestop, they called it in Newspeak.
He set to work to exercise himself in crimestop. He
presented himself with propositions -- 'the Party says the
earth is flat', 'the party says that ice is heavier than
water' -- and trained himself in not seeing or not
understanding the arguments that contradicted them.
I take it you're getting at people avoiding thinking about the thought that race might be correlated with intelligence, lest they become an awful person. And it's a fair criticism. At the same time however, it has been noted that people have a subjective bias against people not of their own race.
Race is absolutely a factor, but only insofar as white people enslaved black people, then legislated them into second class citizenship. Post-1960s, I guess we're on to blaming them (hence the stupid & lazy stereotype) because we think they should've gotten over it & recovered by now.
I wonder what terrible things Asians did to whites such that they earn higher income, commit fewer crimes, and do better in schools than whites while living in historically white countries.
This is a complete non-sequitur. It was only until very recently that whites have begun to approach anything less than a majority.
ETA: likewise, Asians have not been in charge of the US for the majority of its history. In fact, they have typically been subject to whites' dominance. The WWII Japanese internment camps are a case in point.
But I get the sense that you're not really interested in exploring the complexity of different race relations as you are discounting said complexity with a trivially false equivalence.
This is the same kind of person who would write software to find anti-Islamic comments had he been born in Iran, or to hunt down dissidents if born in China. The kind of person who reflexively genuflects towards the current state-sponsored ideology, whatever it is (quick test: is Obama on your side?), because he loves the rush of feeling holier-than-thou.
As an example, the lint checks that "bro culture" is bad, but female-friendly (like Minted.com[1]) is assumed to be good. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. Very predictable. Like any neo-Puritan, he then comes after profanity, and beer, and even (god forbid) competitive-sounding job descriptions! His vision of the startup future: an HR drone stamping on a programmer's face, forever.
So how about thoughtlint? Avoid hiring rowanmanning, or anyone on their helpfully provided list:
People like this will spend their time being Adria-Richards-esque thought police rather than shipping code. Contrast with Max Levchin, who actually sold a startup for a billion-plus dollars:
Max Levchin: The notion that diversity in an early team is
important or good is completely wrong. You should try to
make the early team as non-diverse as possible. There are a
few reasons for this. The most salient is that, as a
startup, you’re underfunded and undermanned. It’s a big
disadvantage; not only are you probably getting into
trouble, but you don’t even know what trouble that may be.
Speed is your only weapon. All you have is speed.
If you want to work in an environment full of rowanmannings, that is your prerogative. Many others will select out and find places where people who enjoy bullying others with modern taboos on gender and the like don't self-appoint themselves as priests. Do you really want a team member who spends their free time getting people to upvote their new heretic-finding software to the top of HN?
It's common in software for us developers to create tools to "scratch our own itches". In this instance, the author might just not personally appreciate those kind of work cultures. This does not imply a fascist desire to exterminate brogrammer culture or any other culture.
For myself, I would not want to work at a place that advertised pingpong, beer, or pizza, because to me, those imply both a homogeneous age (young) and a desire for long hours at the office.
As I get older, I prefer to eat more healthy (haha I wish) and limit my working hours to spend time on the people that matter. I prefer to work cooperatively with my colleagues, not competitively. A positive, supportive working environment is very important to me. If people are swearing at each other, that's a huge red flag.
That doesn't mean that the kinds of work environments are intrinsically bad. For some people, they would be perfect! But if I'm looking for a job, I know up front, they're not for me.
But that's why I work for the government instead of for a startup. :)
The "fascist" element (I wouldn't have used that word, it's incendiary and counter-productive) is the undercurrent of an objective truth and the discounting of preferences (and, not least, the holders of such preferences) not in line with that truth.
If this tool had been written and "marketed" as a personal linter, in which you can taylor your own preferences, it would have been great. It could have had a pre-set "bro" profile that "fails" the lack of beer pong and a "cube" profile that fails mentions of any technology released in the past 15 years. That would have been both hilarious and actually useful.
>If you want to work in an environment full of rowanmannings, that is your prerogative
I have worked in an environment with one rowanmanning in it. It was awesome.
A more open-minded, funny, smart and generous guy you couldn't hope to meet. More to the point, he was one of the best coders any of us had ever worked with.
A company full of rowanmannings would therefore be a chilled out place where we'd learn from each other while having a laugh and turning out enough quality code to crush an army of pizza-fuelled dinosaur brogrammers waving their false-victimhood like a banner.
Boycotting the Nature Publishing Group
The Nature Publishing Group publishes not only the
prestigious journal Nature, but also many others. When this
company bought Scientific American, it raised the
institutional subscription price seven-fold. Now they are
insisting on quadrupling the fees for 67 journals to which
the University of California subscribes.
Right now, we pay them an average of $4,465 per year for
each journal we subscribe to. After the increase, this
would soar to $17,479 per year. In response, the University
of California is considering a system-wide boycott of the
Nature Publishing Group — for example, cancelling
subscriptions to all their journals.
Rowan Manning works for a gang of monopolistic rent-seekers who currently have the scientific community over a barrel. His salary comes from a closed-access model which is soon to be obsolete. Thus "cutting-edge" technology is actually highlighted as a fail!
I'm sure he doesn't. Just as I'm sure we don't want to work with religious fanatics. Go forth ye neo-Puritans and build a startup without a competitive environment, where no one can curse or drink beer and must be "professional" at all times. I'm sure you'll set the world on fire!
Provo, Utah is a hotbed for startups despite being made up of at least 90% people who don't curse or drink beer. There's your counterexample.
What's with the "we"? Are you attempting to speak for developers as a whole?
Thing is, I've never met a great developer who gave a crap about a coworker's religion, political beliefs, whether they drink or not, etc. I've met plenty of mediocre ones who do.
Well, it looks like the mediocre developer's qualities are on display in this tool, as Rowan Manning sure seems to care a great deal about whether you drink beer or not. We are talking about the kind of person who thinks "cutting edge" in a job description is a "fail" because it sets a competitive expectation.
There's a difference between drinking beer at work and actively advertising that this forms part of your "culture" at work.
The company I contract for has a bar in the office and has had beer in the fridge on Fridays for the last few months. This is not something they put in their job adverts.
Given your sympathies to Levchin's views, I'm surprised you're opposed to tools like this. How does one accept rigid cultural conformity inside an organization while rejecting employee-side culture fit analysis tools? If culture fit is a major requirement, and your company has a "bro culture" you obviously don't want to hire, or even waste your time interviewing, anyone who dislikes "bro culture."
And I'm curious as to why you (or anyone) should feel this tool is different than all of the other methods employees use to weed out employers: salary, benefits, location, job role, technologies used, company reputation, etc. This tool simply adds "culture fit" to that list.
I'm not really sure what point you're making with these remarks, but it does come across as rather biased.
It is entirely possible that some of these "Adria-Richards-esque thought police" developers, as you call them, weren't very good, but labelling Rowan or the contributors as incompetent is just plain ignorant.
My counter to your comment is that if you want to hire developers who's performance is based entirely on the lines of code shipped, then that's your prerogative. I, on the other hand, prefer to hire developers who can think for themselves, who have the motivation to be creative with their work, and who like to involve themselves in other projects.
It's not "reverse sexism", it's just sexism. Anti "bro culture" prejudges all women on not appreciating bro culture. I know plenty of women who enjoy things from "bro culture" such as beer, sports, and not being a bore to be around.
> "bro culture" is bad, but female-friendly (like Minted.com[1]) is assumed to be good. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
You're confusing a non-discrimination policy with a positive-discrimination policy.
Nobody ‘decides’; it isn't subjective. If you're discriminating by giving an advantage to a minority when hiring in the interests of boosting the numbers of said minority, then that is positive discrimination. My comment wasn't meant to state any personal opinion of this practice, but to highlight it as being entirely different from choosing to have a work environment in which discrimination (e.g. sexism, as is assumed to be the case with ‘bro-culture’) is not tolerated.
I like how one random person writes a lighthearted script and suddenly Barack Obama and Adria Richards are teaming up to turn us into Iran or communist China. It's a shame Hugo Chavez is dead because he would make an excellent addition to the team.
> This is the same kind of person who would write software to find anti-Islamic comments had he been born in Iran, or to hunt down dissidents if born in China. The kind of person who reflexively genuflects towards the current state-sponsored ideology, whatever it is (quick test: is Obama on your side?), because he loves the rush of feeling holier-than-thou.
Ah yes, someone who writes a simple tool to check for red flags and warnings common in job postings for their industry is totally a fascist looking to hunt down fellow citizens for the state.
> As an example, the lint checks that "bro culture" is bad, but female-friendly (like Minted.com[1]) is assumed to be good. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. Very predictable.
Bro culture is bad, it implies the people working and doing the hiring are looking for a very narrow type of person and aren't really open to having different kinds of people employed. Further, being woman-friendly is a huge plus, because usually that means women are able to access leadership roles in various capacities, something that isn't common in our industry. Unless, of course, you think that companies that actively look to correct that imbalance are the problem, in which case I would pose that you are the problem.
> Like any neo-Puritan, he then comes after profanity, and beer, and even (god forbid) competitive-sounding job descriptions! His vision of the startup future: an HR drone stamping on a programmer's face, forever.
Some people don't like profanity in the workplace or highly competitive environments, those people have a right to know that info up front when looking at job descriptions. Nobody is forcing anyone to use this tool, there is no censorship being applied here.
Moreover, mentions of beer and alcohol in a job post are highly suspect, as such posts will automatically exclude people who don't drink or are alcoholics. These types of places often base social activity around drinking and that can be highly alienating to a wide variety of people.
> People like this will spend their time being Adria-Richards-esque thought police rather than shipping code. Contrast with Max Levchin, who actually sold a startup for a billion-plus dollars:
Ah yes, because calling people out on dick jokes at a professional conference is exactly like the thought police. Also, that Max Levnchin has made money off of creating mono-culture workplaces doesn't mean that is appropriate or correct for every company or potential employee.
> If you want to work in an environment full of rowanmannings, that is your prerogative. Many others will select out and find places where people who enjoy bullying others with modern taboos on gender and the like don't self-appoint themselves as priests. Do you really want a team member who spends their free time getting people to upvote their new heretic-finding software to the top of HN?
If you are selecting jobs based on those companies that will tolerate your sexism and delusions of oppression, remind me to never work anywhere you have, ever.
> Unless, of course, you think that companies that actively look to correct that imbalance are the problem, in which case I would pose that you are the problem.
I'm not the OP, but I think it's as unethical to be biased towards any group. A company should do it's best to ignore gender and focus on merit. Companies that 'actively look to correct that imbalance' make things worse and reinforce stereotypes with token hires.
> Ah yes, because calling people out on dick jokes at a professional conference is exactly like the thought police.
> Companies that 'actively look to correct that imbalance' make things worse and reinforce stereotypes with token hires.
Looking to correct the balance doesn't mean having some sort of quota for hiring women. It means getting rid of the bias that exists already, not tilting the scales in the other direction.
(note, I am an alcoholic, I'd have to eat my five year chip if I lapsed)
As much as I agree with everything else in this response, the "offering alcohol excludes recovering alcoholics and non-drinkers" is a non-starter. Offering vegan meals or vegetarian meals for those with such disposition is not excluding meat eaters like me, offering meat is not excluding vegans and vegetarians unless some office drone will force those things down the respective person's throat.
We're alcoholics, not children. We live our lives around people who can responsibly and sensibly drink (and some who can't). Adding a few bottles of beer into the workplace on Friday is much, much, less an issue than drinks during festivities, the fact that most weekends start and end in bars, or that "just one sip" is a family mantra.
We're dealing with all those, we can deal with some beer in the office on Fridays. We manage to be part of society, social and professional circles, and have romantic, social, and professional relationships despite not lifting the stein, what makes you think we're that weak when it comes to Fridays at work?
Avatar was quite negative. Syriana, Rendition, and Jarhead were as well. Your general point definitely stands, post 9/11 at least, but those are notable exceptions.
Over the last decades, numerous researchers have
painstakingly collected, analyzed, dated, and calibrated
many data series that allow us to reconstruct climate
before the age of direct measurements. Such data come e.g.
from sediment drilling in the deep sea, from corals, ice
cores and other sources. Shaun Marcott and colleagues for
the first time assembled 73 such data sets from around the
world into a global temperature reconstruction for the
Holocene, published in Science. Or strictly speaking, many
such reconstructions: they have tried about twenty
different averaging methods and also carried out 1,000
Monte Carlo simulations with random errors added to the
dating of the individual data series to demonstrate the
robustness of their results.
Marcott et al.'s graphic states that their model reflects historical temperatures so accurately that it can measure the average temperature of the entire globe continuously back to 8000 years ago, to within a small fraction of 1 degree Celsius (i.e. the 1-sigma error bars). That is simply an extraordinary claim given:
1) The "divergence problem". The lack of correlation between model inputs like tree rings and the instrumental record over the last few decades is acknowledged by all; climate scientists generally state that it is due to anthropogenic factors, arguably assuming the consequent.
In other words, key model inputs used in climate reconstructions do not strongly correlate with the instrumental record over the last 30-40 years ("the divergence problem") and climate models have so far had a poor track record over the last 15 years, with average temperatures winding up below the envelope of model predictions. These predictive failures in the datasets we can check bode ill for the prospect of hindcasting global average temperatures to within 1 degree more than 8000 years ago.
In the same article, they explicitly mention that the study is not based on tree ring proxies. In fact, all the global reconstructions are based on many different proxies.
I also think you misrepresent the 2nd article. The question is what and on what time scale are you trying to predict. I believe they are talking about more precision more short-term models. Just like we can predict winter and not predict weather, we can predict warming due to human forcing, but not the specific details.
In the end, however, it's completely irrelevant to AGW if there was a higher temperature in the past or not. The theory of AGW doesn't stand just on that argument (nor any other single argument, for that matter).
Well, there are a certain number of explicit and implicit caveats that don't make it into the made-it-to-the-top-of-HN pretty graph.
One is that this is based on other people's work, as the GP mentioned. Updates to those works will affect this one; the hope is that those 73 underlying datasets aren't systematically biased and any errors will cancel out. Another is that those error bars are probably 95% confidence. So we fully expect that about 550 out of the 11,000 years in this chart will fall outside of that range. A final bit is that we're only reconstructing averages here; it's a lot easier to guess the average number of shoes owned by 1000 people than the exact number of shoes owned by 1.
These extra caveats don't invalidate the data or render it useless, they just qualify it. You shouldn't look at the graph and think, "Here is the exact temperature for the last 11,000 years", you should think, "Given our current best understanding of the available data, the average global temperature for 10,450 out of the last 11,000 years probably fell into this 0.4 degree C range."
> Well, there are a certain number of explicit and implicit caveats that don't make it into the made-it-to-the-top-of-HN pretty graph.
They're not supposed to. These are supposed to be caught by peer review. If you believe Nature, then you should believe Science, too (I am talking about journals here :-)).
BTW, they explicitly discuss the possibility of "missing" temperature peaks in the RC blogpost.
1) This kind of article is pure propaganda, intended to make money for Business Insider by "raising questions" and selling ad revenue against the pageviews.
2) "We" aren't responsible for the decisions of people who live within a 100 mile radius. If "we" are held responsible for their outcomes, financially and morally responsible, then "we" will also demand control over their lives to a degree you'd find unpalatable. This can be trivially solved by re-institutionalization and a Boston-Bombings-style sweep and cleanup of the camp. It won't be because the idea is to give them (and Business Insider) our money without giving us any control over their behavior or the use of funds.
But they don't talk about quantitative easing or Bernanke's 85B/month in mortgage purchases, which have the express intent of driving up home prices.
One could go on. But the right answer is that we didn't cause this, we're only paying attention to it because of BI's SEO, BI itself isn't going to dedicate its operation to donating money, you aren't going to dedicate your life to helping them, and so on. The right answer is no action on this issue that you heard about today, will forget about tomorrow, and is insoluble anyway.
Refuse to be guilt-tripped by cynical manipulators relying on maudlin sympathy, people who want to draw your attention to an issue, blame it on you, and then charge you (involuntarily via tax) a pretty penny for not solving it. For how many billions have been spent on "the homeless" to date? The result is only to subsidize them and build a permanent caste of homeless caretakers.
The real solution is to reverse de-institutionalization (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation), but that would be fought tooth and nail by "homeless advocates" who'd see their budgets vanish in a trice. Public homelessness as we know it is subsidized, it is a government-and-NGO-caused phenomenon.
There ARE people who refuse to help themselves. They do exist. The only way you can believe to the contrary is because you haven't worked with the homeless. No amount of money can currently cure mental illness or drug addiction, or make people work if they don't want to work.
That's a silly response. There are seven million people in the Bay Area. A tiny fraction are homeless. Try lifting up an adult human being sometime. It's not easy. These people are frequently mentally ill, addicted to drugs, or otherwise incapable of taking care of themselves. Example:
She ended up homeless when she turned to California's
shelter network and hated it. ... Five years ago she moved
into The Jungle and says she has no regrets.
If you think differently, I recommend you go down there and try to lift them out of poverty. Once it's your responsibility, you'll quickly find there is a reason they are living like that.
What is the difference in your view? Very interested to hear this. The sums involved in this case ($20000) are less than those involved in most employment scenarios.
Interesting. What's the best study you have, with scatterplots, that shows that the "very old" models performed "very well"? Insofar as we have seen actual quantitative predictive modeling by Keynesians of macroeconomic quantities, the plots tend to look like this:
Neither seem particularly textbook, but you're obviously thinking of something. Given that people who think differently from you invented Bitcoin (and thus have at least a glancing familiarity with advanced mathematics, if the solution of the Byzantine Generals problem means anything) it would be great to see some plots to the contrary. Not just models, but X/Y plots or tables in which Keynesians predict something and nail it. It's not hard, after all to find many examples of Krugman, Bernanke, Goolsbee, or Orszag making quantitative predictions that turned out flagrantly wrong [1].
It's very difficult for me to figure out what you're trying to say here. The first graph seems to be about Obama, the second a time series of the monetary base, and the link in the footnote long statements from random people. Only the last mentions a model, and only in terms of how well it worked[1].
>Given that people who think differently from you invented Bitcoin (and thus have at least a glancing familiarity with advanced mathematics, if the solution of the Byzantine Generals problem means anything) it would be great to see some plots to the contrary.
I don't know what Bitcoin has do do with anything, or what it is being presented as an example of.
>Not just models, but X/Y plots or tables in which Keynesians predict something and nail it.
You're the first person to mention Keynesians, I mentioned economists. If you want to find something that Krugman nailed, though, try the unemployment rate from your first graph.
Ha. Methinks you doth protest too much. But I'll be very precise. Show me the equations and code that Krugman wrote in 2009 that predicted the unemployment curve over the last four years. OMB (full of economists!), to their credit, at least essayed a quantitative prediction. As the first graph showed, it was completely wrong.
So: what "very old" models performed "very well"? You must be thinking of something here. I'm not talking about a Krugman blog post where he says the stimulus was too small. I'm talking about an actual scatterplot, a time series prediction with the X axis as time, the Y axis as the dependent variable, and actual empirical measurements plotted vs. the predictions of theory.
You can see the graph halfway down the page, with theoretical predictions as the red line and actual empirical measurements as the black line. The Nature article admits they don't match well. But in other fields they do match well. For example:
In ballistics the predicted time series match experimental results very closely. So I ask again: what "very well established models" in economics performed "very well"? Which of them nailed the curve?
