efaith · HackerTrans

17 tahun yang laludiscuss

You usually have to make a lot of marks on some physical medium in order to have highly developed thoughts. They might not be writing - they might be diagrams, or equations. I doubt there are many physics Nobel winners who didn't use up a lot of chalk, or pencil, or ink. This is not to say that there are no exceptions, just that it's a pretty strong generality.

efaith

17 tahun yang laludiscuss

Heh, that's what I came to the comments to say, too.

efaith

17 tahun yang laludiscuss

There is a very similar file briffa_sep98_e.pro where the similar code does not appear to be dead code (or, at least, it does not die as soon as the code in the file the blogger was looking at). Most importantly, the above-quoted comment, "very artificial correction for decline" is not found in the code that the blogger looked at. But it is found in the code that I am talking about.

efaith

17 tahun yang laludiscuss

"the reason we were taught to hate it was because it was a threat to our masters."

That's sophomoric pseudo-wisdom, and a cliche to boot. Who hasn't heard that one?

efaith

17 tahun yang laludiscuss

I don't see anything here that you can't say to quite a lot of people. And I'm not surprised. After all, if you couldn't say it, you sure couldn't publish it for the world to see.

A genuine list of things you can't say has not been written and will probably not be written, because such a thing is nearly paradoxical. Even if someone is foolish or suicidal enough to write one, nobody who reads it will want to pass it along to anyone else as that would taint them as well, so it will remain obscure.

efaith

17 tahun yang laludiscuss

"If I had a persistent gadfly like Stephen McIntyre..."

...or Socrates...

You do realize that "gadfly" is how Plato described his beloved teacher Socrates. "Gadfly" has a two thousand year old positive connotation. Is that the word you want to use? Though, granted, gadfly he is. And persistent, too, like Socrates.

"...who would use every opportunity to twist my data and words to his own political ends"

This, at any rate, is the view taken by those upon which McIntyre is a gadfly. It's completely understandable: the Athenians felt approximately the same way about Socrates, so strongly that in the end they executed Socrates. There are emails in which these guys express similar attitudes - at least one in which one of these guys wishes he could punch out the lights of one of the gadflies (not sure if it referred to McIntyre).

But as third parties, onlookers, we need not adopt the attitude of the Athenians/climate scientists toward their respective gadflies.

efaith

17 tahun yang laludiscuss

Indeed, but it imperils one of the major points made against the skeptics and vindicates one of the major points made by the skeptics.

efaith

17 tahun yang laludiscuss

"The problem is that when you do find a few toasters that match your requirements on Amazon, most have reviews like "stopped working after 2 months" "completely uneven toasting" "doesn't pop toast" etc etc. So then you have to wade through review upon review on model upon model in order to find the least sucky toaster. That is when the toaster hunt becomes a time sink."

No, you don't have to. You didn't in a brick and mortar store. Why do you have to here? Because there are customers saying the product broke? But the only difference is that in a brick and mortar store the failures are hidden from you.

Look, products fail. That's just the way it is. Get over it. Realize that every product has a potential story of failure and the best products will have unsatisfied customers.

Counting is good. Statistics are good. I've found Rotten Tomatoes to be much more reliable than individual reviews, and I don't even have to waste my time reading the reviews. Similarly, the Bestselling ranking at Amazon is not a bad way to sort out the better from the worse, if you don't want to spend the time.

If you don't want to spend the time you don't have to! Sure, if you don't spend the time, your choice won't be as good as it could have been. But if we were back in brick and mortar land your choice would be worse! Now you have the choice, and even if you choose not to spend the time, your resulting purchase is still better. It's win win win in every direction.

efaith

17 tahun yang laludiscuss

Go to Amazon. Type in "toaster". Pick "House & Garden" to let you sort. Sort by bestselling. Look at the first six items and pick one. Done. Time taken: it need not be more than 60 seconds. Quality of purchase: unlikely to be worse than what you would have gotten by visiting an appliance store.

As for me, I do take more time to select. But that's because I choose to. I don't have to. I am not in a situation where failure to spend half an hour selecting is going to ensure that I get garbage.

In short, shopping is not broken, at least not judging by the very example he gave. Shopping is better than it has ever been - even for items like toasters.

efaith

17 tahun yang laludiscuss

And should publishers also remove the names of the authors from the covers of their books, on the theory that they don't want to "bias" potential readers? How do you imagine this working out? In a bookstore, if books don't have the authors on the covers, then if I read a book I like, I will have trouble finding other books by the same author. This will doubtlessly counteract my "bias" in favor of that author, but is that a good thing? It's a good thing if your greatest desire is to dethrone Stephen King and Dan Brown and J. K. Rowling by making it hard for their fans to find their books, forcing them to read books by authors who may or may not be enjoyable for them to read. But if you care at all about maximizing the ability of people to find stuff they like to read, then the name of the author is an important bit of evidence that they can use for that purpose and you would be depriving them of it.

efaith

17 tahun yang laludiscuss

An alternative way of measuring the degree to which mathematics has "fragmented" might be to look at the pattern of citations in the mathematical literature. Look at it over time to see how it develops. And compare it to citations in other fields to see whether the phenomenon is specific to mathematics or is part of a more general development toward greater fragmentation.

efaith

17 tahun yang laludiscuss

It was thought to be bad. Maybe that was a mistake. The history of anti-trust is riddled with mistakes.

efaith

17 tahun yang laludiscuss

He's comparing Google Reader with Twitter. That seems very apples and oranges to me. It seems a bit like saying, "I don't buy books any more because television is much more up-to-the-minute."

efaith

17 tahun yang laludiscuss

I don't take issue with your conclusion, but I don't think the Internet is a natural monopoly. It's not the Internet itself that is sold, after all, but access to the Internet, and it's entirely possible for two access providers to compete with each other to sell access to the Internet. There is only one Internet, but there isn't only one access provider to the Internet.

At the moment I'm online via cell phone tethering, and I have a choice of several different providers of that tethering from the very location that I am writing this. My provider hardly qualifies as a monopoly if I can choose from several competing providers if my provider decides to block certain content. I suspect that over time wireless will become even bigger.

Television cable companies are currently the fastest and most ubiquitous providers of broadband access to the Internet, and these are indeed somewhat monopolistic. I have my choice among cable broadband providers but I understand that not everyone has my choices. For those people, their broadband provider is an effectively a monopoly. However, this is just one moment in time. How will things be five and ten years down the road? At the moment, cable broadband access to the Internet is a monopoly for many customers, but I don't think this should be taken as a fundamental statement about the Internet itself. Over the years access to the Internet has evolved and it will keep on evolving. I put the probability that we will be at the mercy of our tv cable broadband providers ten years from now at close to 0%.

UNLESS the government intervenes! If the government intervenes, then all bets are off. The government can use its power to create and maintain a monopoly. In fact, this is what the government did with telephone access and also US mail. Ma Bell (which you may or may not remember) and the US Post Office were not natural monopolies, but government monopolies. They are both similar to the Internet in that they connected people in far-away places, so the analogy is not that bad. My point is that it was government that made them (for a time) monopolies by making competition illegal.

Anyway, sorry for the length. I just wanted to address that particular point.

efaith

17 tahun yang laludiscuss

People will talk about all sorts of things. If they talk about it but don't do it, then that's evidence that the talk is impotent, and that's even more reason not to regulate.

The relative lack of competition introduces many problems aside from net nonneutrality (which is currently a "vaporware" problem, like Duke Nukem Forever). One problem is relatively high prices and relatively low bandwidth compared to what appears technically feasible (judging by other countries). Net neutrality regulation will not kill this bird, but one stone stands a good chance of killing many birds: de-regulating the cable providers, ending their local monopolies. Provision of cable television is one of the many examples of a non-free market in the US. Other examples are medicine and banking, and in America today our major crises are in... yup, medicine and banking. Computer manufacturing is highly deregulated, as I think is clothing and (for the most part) food (though there are some subsidies and protection for certain items, like sugar and corn). There isn't, so far as I know, a computer crisis, or a clothing crisis, or a famine. The main computer crisis I remember was the Y2K bug, and that is famous for being a non-spectacular crisis, if it was a real crisis at all.

efaith

17 tahun yang laludiscuss

But that does not negate the competitive principle that he articulated. Many, perhaps most of the products we buy involve a chain (or tree) of producers, all keeping each other honest by the competitive principle. In the making and selling of the pencil, one company mines the graphite, another shapes it into the final form, a third makes it immediately available to the public, and there may be many in between. Similarly for the other components of the pencil - the wood, the rubber, the metal, the paint. It's a vast cooperative effort, and most of it is not directly connected to the final customer.

efaith

17 tahun yang laludiscuss

It seems a strong improvement, at least in principle. Bias toward early comments has been a big problem. However what I have long thought of as the main problem remains: the people who are doing the voting. Karma does not solve this problem either, by the way; arguably it exacerbates it.

efaith

17 tahun yang laludiscuss

Chatting with my girl, my left hand on my keyboard and my right hand on my, uh, "mouse".

efaith

17 tahun yang laludiscuss

Was any of that jargon fake? A good chunk of it was real and recognizable.

efaith

17 tahun yang laludiscuss

"If a study, significant at p=0.05, is replicated again at p=0.05, then the odds of that happening when there actually is no effect (assuming independence) are the product of the two (0.0025)."

I think that must be approximately right, but I'm not sure it is precisely right. Imagine you do a very large number of studies and suppose the null hypothesis is in fact true. P will always be less than 1, maybe slightly less than one - or suppose that it is 1 occasionally. This is because P varies from 0 to 1. Now go ahead and multiply these Ps, and if you've done enough studies, the product is going to be very small even if all the individual Ps are close to 1 and even though the null hypothesis is true.

So I don't think a simple multiplication is exactly the right formula, though it does seem as though it must be about right.

I googled the question and found a formula for combining P of two independent studies, but it's not simple multiplication. You start with the Ps, find the corresponding Zs (I do not know what those are), then add them and divide by sqrt(2). This is your new Z, and then you take the corresponding P. Also, it requires that the Ps must be one-tailed, so it is not a fully general formula. I do not understand the Zs but my point is that if it were simply a matter of multiplying the Ps then why go to the trouble of adding Zs? I found it here:

http://books.google.com/books?id=nxOFMQYMIlgC&lpg=PA527&...

As for why it doesn't match exactly the familiar formula for combining independent probabilities (i.e. you simply multiply them), I think the answer lies in the nature of P. P is not really "the probability of that result" but "the probability of a result that is at least that extreme", and this subtly different meaning results in a different way in which the individual Ps must be combined.