If candidates from group A perform more strongly on average than those from group B there are other possible causes than bias in the selection process itself. For instance, members of group A may only apply at a higher level of self-assessment for how likely they are to succeed than those in group B. The reason for this could be opportunity cost not present for group B, overconfidence or lack of underconference in group B or underconference or lack of overconfidence in group A.
Right, and did you know that most climatologists are overwhelmingly climate-change believers?! That's just so unfair. Where are all the climate-change-denier climatologists, creationist biologists and libertarian sociologists, I wonder?
Comparing sociology to biology in particular ends up unflattering for the former. Biology is a lot more obviously successful than sociology. Sociology has so far failed to produce its equivalent to evidence-based medicine and whenever treatments it has tried to design for social illnesses have not delivered.
I don't think sociology is completely hopeless but given its track record so far I would sooner expect intelligence (and empathy, willpower, etc.) augmentation to cure whatever problems plague society than any attempt at "institutional change".
Sociology is not an applied discipline and most certainly doesn't prescribe "institutional change". I would sooner expect "solutions" from people who bother to study the system they seek to change rather than those who don't and cast aspersions on those who do.
But speaking of track records, I think that the record of those who have called for "institutional change" and got us civil rights, education and healthcare is far better than that of so-called scientists who have favored "applied artificial Darwinism" and advocated for eugenics programs.
At least climatologists actually observe the climate. If the sociologists observed the massive failure of communism in the 20th century they wouldn't be leaning left, that's for sure.
Let's see, so you're equating left-leaning social views with 20th-century communism, and assuming people dedicating their lives to the rigorous study of society don't do their job. Indeed, that is the kind of reasoning that directs both the author of the article as well as others who want to convince themselves they can find solutions to society's problems (or deny their existence) while being completely unwilling to actually study society first. Denialism at its finest. If the "reason folks" were as averse to math as they are to human beings we would have been reading similar unending tirades about why quantum mechanics is just illogical. It is the particular genre written by people who honestly believe their narrow view of the world combined with their self-ascribed intelligence is enough to reason about something they are not only completely ignorant about but actually lack any curiosity of. They will fight for their right to "reason" yet not learn (usually by ridiculing those who do bother to learn the subject first)!
Also, I find it a bit ironic that you call for taking lessons from 20th-century mass-movements considering that the article echoes others similar to it -- written by scientists -- around the same time of the Bolshevik revolution, and served to justify other movements with no better record than that of communism.
That's a very good point. I know you're trying to be sarcastic, but if you had any self-awareness you'd stop and ponder it. Who do you think ends up doing 'climate science'? Why?
Oh, I ponder it a lot, which is why after getting a 'math' degree I went to study 'history'. There are many reasons why certain people choose to study certain things, and surely 'climate science' draws people whose proclivities are, on average, different from those who choose to study 'physics', 'math', 'medicine', 'history' etc[1]. Nevertheless, taking that into too much considerations would leave us in a conundrum. If evaluating any research would require us to examine the psychology of the researchers, first, we would need lots of psychologists, and what about the psychology of those who study 'psychology'? We're getting close to a Russel's paradox here. In any event, I would sooner listen to those who first bother to study something and only then analyze it.
[1] I'm not a native English speaker -- I don't know if you are -- but you're the first I've seen to write the names of academic disciplines in single-quotes. Is that a thing?
It is unusual to claim that programming in a statically typed language is more error-prone than in a dynamically typed language, even if only when dealing with HTTP requests specifically. Could you elaborate? It sounds like there might be a story behind this.
Thanks for calling me out on that, I might have a hard time justifying the claim. It was a reference to the fact that, at your system boundaries the benefit of a strongly-typed language aren't only offset by the lack of flexibility, but, in the case of Go, it's weak reflection capabilities and type system.
A web app has 4 (often more, rarely less) such boundary:
- Getting input from users
- Querying a database
- Getting results from a database
- Outputting results to the user (html, json, ....)
Within these boundaries, yes, static languages are less error prone. But you get no compile time checks AT the boundaries. You'll need integration tests (and it's easier to write tests in a dynamic language (where IoC is a language feature) than static languages.
You deal with these boundaries via automated mapping (with annotations, or external files (like in Hibernate)) or manual mapping. Automated mapping might not be much more error prone, but it's certainly much more cumbersome (especially with weak reflection). Manual mapping is also much more cumbersome. Does this cumbersomeness make it more error prone? I don't think it helps.
That data is always a string (given the nature off HTTP requests). So the only issue there is converting the string to an integer when necessary. But since you should cleanse any data that arrives via HTTP request, you'd need to validate that your "integers" are actually purely numeric even in dynamically typed languages. So there's really no extra work there between dynamic and static languages.
>- Querying a database
You'd be querying an SQL database with either parametrised queries or ORMs. Both of which are data-type agnostic (ie you wouldn't be needing to convert integers into strings to embed into SQL strings).
As for No-SQL databases, there might be an issue with some and statically typed languages. But that's not an issue I've ran into with the languages and APIs against the (admittedly limited) range of no-SQL databases I've used.
>- Getting results from a database
This is where your argument is the strongest. Sometimes there can be an issue if you don't know what return values you're expecting from the database. But that's easily overcome if you actually chat to your database architects before hand. But in all honesty, I'd be disappointed in any web developer who wasn't the least bit interested in the datatypes of the records he's querying nor the structure of the database he's effectively writing a frontend for.
>- Outputting results to the user (html, json, ....)
All HTML is string, so that's a moot point. JSON, XML, etc is more a data structure problem than a data type problem. In fact I sometimes argue that JSON is statically typed since it has strings (in quotations), integers (no quotations), boolean (true / false), arrays and hashes / maps. So the real problem with exporting formats like JSON and XML is really a question of how good a language API is. Take C# for example, there's several different APIs available for encoding XML, some are appallingly bad and need about a page of boilerplate code, others are ridiculously simple. To go back on topic with Go, I've only ever worked with JSON, but outputting that in Go is very easy as Go's JSON encoder basically just takes whatever your data structure is and returns it's JSON encoded string counterpart (much like how Perl and Javascript work with JSON).
I do get the points you're making, and you're right that sometimes statically typed languages do make you jump through a few additional hoops. But most of the times these issues only arise if you're a careless programmer - in which case you're going to run into all sorts of dumb issues even with dynamically typed languages (eg if you don't validate your input data then you're going to write less secure web applications - regardless of your language of choice. That's why I sometimes look at statically typed languages as just another layer of data validation with regards to web development)
Software that runs on your own computer is not a weapon; software that is designed to run on other people's computers without their knowledge or consent probably is. That would put Wireshark clearly on the acceptable side of the line and Metasploit in a very questionable place.
I believe that democracy does not scale beyond roughly several hundred voters of roughly equal expertise and ability. I decide whether or not to vote accordingly, which means saying no to local and national elections.
That said, I vote on Hacker News stories. Could HN be an example of a moderated democracy (constitutional monarchy?) working well on a larger scale?
>I just feel like this is the one
thread where there are much bigger
things at stake.
I have no objections to your cause but your current headline is, whether on purpose or not, clickbait. I clicked it because I thought it described an usual event that already happened. I would guess most did for the same reason.
You can't justify clickbait headlines with them having noble causes behind them. It's how you end up with Upworthy.
OP's position depends entirely on being regarded as trustworthy. And in the first 11 words, OP lied to us in a pre-meditated fashion.
The clickbait headline is inappropriate and makes me (and I presume many others) much less interested in spending any time on this issue after being duped.
"One weird trick to get someone out of a life sentence..."
"5 things wrong with this case; you won't believe #4!"
I hear you. What we're dealing with is essentially the classic deontology versus util debate. Do we judge morality in terms of abstract principles or causal effects? You and I both know that the result of my headline isn't going to be ecoming Upworthy, but you flagged it because you, for better or worse, care about the principle more than the immediate consequence. Basically, rule-based utilitarianism.
You're right, maybe it was kind of a clickbait headline. I'm sorry you felt tricked or let down. Could you suggest a replacement you think would be fair?
I think the thing that distinguishes what I'm doing is that I'm not just asking for you to sign a petition or something. My dad and I worked for ten weeks reviewing thousands of pages of the record in order to create the document I'm sharing here, in the hopes of getting quality feedback. It's a real project that is intimately connected to the skills I use in all other hacking.
I'm trying to use those hacking skills to free an innocent man from prison. I can send you the compendium of exhibits, so you don't have to take my word about any factual assertions in the letter. I put in more than 200 footnotes cites to the record.
If you read the letter, you'll see that Ray Jennings is being wrongfully imprisoned, and has been for ten years. Please don't let my poor judgement in choosing the phrasing of the headline to stop you from looking at the evidence.
Finally, this one IS objectively better because those are tricks in the sense they don't offer something of value. There is no "weird trick" to actually transform yourself, etc. Here, you DO receive something pretty damn rare: conclusive proof a man sitting in prison is innocent.
I believe you have good intent. To that end, other headlines that might better balance "grabbing attention" and "not being a lie" are:
"An innocent man is serving a life sentence."
"Imprisoned for life for a murder he didn't commit. Help bouy his spirits while he appeals."
I wish you the best and if the facts are as you believe, I way, way wish the defendant in the case to be freed. There are few things worse than being imprisoned for life for a crime you didn't commit.
The problem with a pure utility argument to support what you did is that you're stating that your cause is worthy of attention and that's what makes it different from the others. I'm sure the others would make a parallel argument that their cause (even if it's just "making money by selling ad views so my kids can eat and have shelter") is also worthy, because the test merely requires the author of the headline to judge whether it's worthy of attention. You genuinely believe, but you're hardly an unbiased judge.
That very quickly escalates to a tragedy of the commons where no one can rise above the cacophony of clickbait screams. Instead, I go by the community guidelines, which include two relevant ones:
"Please don't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or exclamation points, or adding a parenthetical remark saying how great an article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's important."
"please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."
Speaking of politics, one of the most interesting practical user-facing things about Urbit that I saw in an earlier video demo was the user choosing his or her political affiliation when registering. The claimed affiliation then acts as a mandatory filter for political conversations. You can opt out of participating in any political discussion but not opt in to more than one camp. I think this is a brilliant idea.
Finding the video (https://vimeo.com/75312418) I see that the four political associations are far-left, left, right, and far-right.
Now I need to know where the Urbit developers are based, because how these terms are interpreted is very, very, very different depending what country you're in...
Off the cuff, I agree with you, but I also wonder if it isn't an approach only used by a minority of people involved in hiring, primarily those with a technical background. This is the sort if matter on which I would love to see an empirical study based on real data from the industry, not stimulated hiring experiments, unlikely as it may be to happen.
>The sooner we shift
from labor to education as our
source of social dignity the better.
Twin studies suggest educational achievement is highly (over 50%) heritable. If you succeeded at replacing labor with education as a source of human dignity it would be surprising if the relative amount of dignity with which one was imparted did not depend on one's educational achievement. Combined with the first point it would lead to the formation of a kind of hereditary estates of the realm; you'd have the clergy (the academics), the nobles (the highly educated) and the commoners (everybody else). Would you find such an outcome acceptable? (Just to be clear, I mean this as a genuine, not rhetorical, question.)
