Of all the scientific fields, computer science is the one that is mostly closely related to fields where theory is most worthless. If you have a computer science theory, then write some damn code to prove it. Then share your code. Others can then run it and replicate those results. At the "theory" phase, the idea is worthless.
> "doing the science" means "writing the text of the paper"
The point is to show your work. You film yourself setting up the experiment to prove that you actually did the experiment. You also film yourself collecting the results, proving that you actually got the results you claim.
The only kind of science that consists of "just writing the paper" is math. Math will be exempt from this requirement. Fake math is not an epidemic
In my opinion, the solution to all of this is to get rid of the whitepaper system all together.
From now on, all scientists who want to publish science, they publish their work in the form of a video. They film themselves doing the science and then put that video on YouTube, or maybe some science specific version of youtube. Other people can then watch the video and determine for themselves if the science is valid or not.
Its much harder to fake science if there is a video involved. Its too easy to make fake science if all you have to do you "prove" it is write some words.
There is something about this article that kind of annoys me. It's my understanding that back in the year 1006, the entire world was not using the same calendar. Each of these observations would not have been recorded as simply "May 1, 1006", they would have been in each observer's respective calendar... Yet this article just states them as being recorded on the same day using the Julian/Gregorian calendar format that we use today. I would have liked the article to go into more detail about how they were able to sync up the dates across the various calendar systems.
It's just a bunch of numbers scribbled onto a tablet. For all we know it could just be some guy writing down the number of sheep he is willing to sell to his neighbor or something. To say this tablet proves the Mesopotamian knew about Pythagorean's theorem is quite a stretch.
To the people who want to believe, there is nothing that can be said. Believe what you want.
Also, this tablet has no provenance. According to the wikipedia page on this tablet, it says "It is unknown where in Mesopotamia YBC 7289 comes from" Basically it just magically appeared one day. For all we know it could be faked. In any other field, this artifact would be ruled inauthentic. But in this field, for some reason it just doesn't matter.
How is this different from seeing a fuzzy video of some lights in the sky and then coming to the conclusion that it is definitely a UFO? If you're so convinced that this carving definitely proves that the carver was intending to express the Pythagorean formula, then what is the evidence?
Some people's definition of "evidence" is different from my own. If somebody really wants to believe something, then just about anything qualifies as evidence. This is why UFO people consider literally every single fuzzy video as undeniable proof that aliens exist.
I've seen this tablet before, and an not convinced that it is actually the Pythagorean theorem. Its just a tablet with some tick marks inscribed onto it, along with a circular looking thing. It's very much a stretch to say the person who etched those markings intended to express the Pythagorean theorem.
There was a point in time when I was very interested in ancient civilizations from Mesopotamia, but in more recent years I an way less interested in it. The scholarship in that field is just terrible. In my opinion, a lot of the stuff is on par with alien "investigators" and stuff like that, yet for some reason the general public sees the field as totally legit.
The solution to this problem is to require the submitter to include a unit test that demonstrates the problem along with the CVE. If the unit test succeeds in DDosing or whatever, then the CVE is published. If your unit test fails to produce the security problem, then it is ignored.
> We'll probably see something similar happen with "Tankie" and "CCP" and "Moscow shill"
Those terms are all specific to political discussions. The Dunning Kruger effect is known across every single cross section of the internet, and it is absolutely everywhere.
> In that sense the update wouldn't be "here's another thing I see all the time" but "here is the absolute maximalist claim I can make about a person's character."
Well, the text of the law states that the probability of Nazis coming up "approaches 100%". This is to say the law was made after an observation of how common the argument was. In my experience, the Dunning-Kruger argument has the same probability on the modern internet.
I really hate this attitude. This is a very common belief held by non-technical people. They believe that it is impossible to have perfect security, and that every single piece of software ever built is either already hacked, or waiting to be hacked by future hackers.
I truly believe one day a cryptographic voting system will be rolled out, but it's a long way away, not because for technical reasons, but for cultural reasons.
If you ask 10 different people why they are depressed, you'll get 10 different answers. This illustrated why I think the scientific method is the wrong way to go about understanding the human mind.
Also, if you ask a depressed person why they are depressed, they may not know exactly why they are depressed. I spent my entire high school years depressed. It wasn't until a few years after I graduated college before I realized the reason why I was depressed: it was because I had abusive parents. If you had asked me in high school why I'm depressed I would have said something like "I'm a bad person but I have no reason why". At the time I thought my parents treated me like I was a bad person was secondary to the actual problem.
If you really want insight on what makes the human mind depressed, then ask people who have overcame their depression. The first step to overcoming depression is to discover what is making you depressed. If someone is still depressed, they probably don't know what is making them depressed, and so their "data" is just noise.
The problem with the psychology field is that it has an obsession with "data". Everything has to be on a pie chart of a line graph or something like that. Every "study" has to be on a grand scale and then averaged together to make a single conclusion.
The problem is that the human mind of not replicatable. You can perform a "study" on a sample of people and get a result, and then replicate that exact same study on the exact same sample of people at a later time, and still get a different result. In order for the scientific method to be applicable, you have to be able to get the exact same result each time you replicate the study. This is not possible in psychology.
I feel the same way. Imagine if Harvard had the ability to enroll one billion students per year. There would be no need to use either grades, SAT score, personal essays or anything else to reject students. They would be able to accept everybody, and then everybody could get an elite education and society would be so much better off.
But that would never happen. The whole point of ivy league is that they are exclusive. Companies get to feel special when they hire an ivy league grad so they can feel special for having one of the special chosen ones. If everyone gets to have an ivy league degree, then the ivy league degree becomes worthless.
I'm not building a filesystem. I'm building a non-filesystem. Not metadata jammed into a filesystem. A whole new system that is used by the end user in lieu of the filesystem.
https://github.com/priestc/LibraryDSS thats an old repo from when I tried to write code for this about a year ago. Most likely if I ever get around to working on it again, I'm going to make a new repo for it.
The user constructs a query then sends it to a server, the server returns a list of items that match the query. For instance this may be a query:
INCLUDING artist contains "Pink Floyd"
and the results will look like this:
[
{"artist": "Pink Floyd", "title": "Another Brick In the Wall", "mimetype": "audio/mpeg", "album": "The Wall", "url": http://drive.google.com/blahblah.mp3" etc },
{"artist": "Pink Floyd", "title": "Money", "mimetype": "audio/flac", "album": "The Wall", "torrent_url": http://drive.google.com/blahblah.torrent" etc. },
{"artist": "Pink Floyd", "mimetype": "image/jpeg", "album": "The Wall", "url": http://drive.google.com/albumcover.jpg", "purpose": "album artwork" etc.}
]
You can add more to the query to filter out the content you don't want. The query language is much like a SQL WHERE clause. The query language is meant to be super simple and something your grandma could figure out.
The app then can retrieve the actual file from the url. The end user has no idea about the underlying file crap.
My system is only meant to be used by humans. Software will still use the traditional filesystem.
Instead of the user supplying a filename/path for new content, they submit arbitrary metadata. When retrieving content, they query via a language called LQL (Library Query Language).
Basically the system works a lot like ID3 tags for mp3 files. 'Arbitrary metadata' is a lot like the fields for 'title', 'date', 'album', etc except they are arbitrary (you can use any set of key/value for metadata items)
Libraries can connect to other libraries. A 'Library' is much like an email inbox, except its one user per machine instead of multiple users per machine. Each library is 'addressed' via a domain name. All communication between libraries is done through HTTPS.
Traditional filesystems use a permission system that is very archaic. In 1960 it was common for there to be multiple users on one machine, but in 2014, everyone has their own machine. File permissions are useless, since I'm th one person who ever uses this computer. "Permissions" in the 2014 sense is which of my facebook friends gets to see these photos.
![http://drive.google.com/albumcover.jpg"](https://drive.google.com/albumcover.jpg"){kind=link}
How does the discovery described in this paper help engineer something the world has never seen before?
As an engineer, I'm always looking for some new thing to make. What does this paper make more possible to make that was less possible to make before?