jmh

• jmh 17 May 2019 13:37 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: ricraz's comment on: Which sci­en­tific dis­cov­ery was most ahead of its time?

  In as­sess­ing the ques­tion don’t we also need to look at other, prob­a­bly failed and per­haps even “quack­ish dis­cov­er­ies” to get much mean­ing from the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion? What I’m won­der­ing about here is, are we fully iden­ti­fy­ing what was re­ally a good sci­en­tific in­sight or merely the win­ner of a bunch if cre­ative the­o­ries/​ideas from the time?

  I think it would also be in­ter­est­ing to con­sider cases where ideas were ini­tially too at odds with the ex­ist­ing state of knowl­edge and largely ig­nored but later re­dis­cov­ered and found to have been in­sights that did lead to ad­vances in knowl­edge—the­o­ret­i­cal and ap­plied.

  That would be the com­pan­ion vol­ume to the one about “wrong the­o­ries and sci­en­tific facts we used to ac­cept as true.”

  Any­one know of such a book?

• jmh 17 May 2019 13:19 UTC

  1 point

  on: Why I’ve started us­ing NoScript

  Tan­gent to the gen­eral dis­cus­sion here I would be in­ter­ested in hear­ing other’s opinions on a view I hold re­gard­ing the en­tire state of af­fair with on­line mar­ket­ing tech­niques around track­ing (both in terms of URL and ge­olo­ca­tion).

  I try to think about what we would do if mar­ket­ing fol­lowed the same ap­proach in the real world as in the vir­tual world (as­sume the costs were near zero). I would think most peo­ple would con­sider the real world ac­tions to be a form of stalk­ing and con­sid­ered ille­gal.

  Why treat it differ­ently in the vir­tual world?

• jmh 16 May 2019 15:03 UTC

  1 point

  on: Eight Books To Read

  I cer­tainly agree with the view on news (and wish some jour­nal­ists and ed­i­tors would take up the challenge of im­prov­ing their in­dus­try). Without a bet­ter con­text, in­formed by the lo­cal as­pects around any news story, it’s re­ally difficult to come away with an in­formed un­der­stand­ing and view.

  I am struck by one as­pect of the lat­ter idea, for un­der­stand­ing global so­ciety. It seems very west­ern cen­tered and so pos­si­bly could lead to un­in­ten­tional bi­ases.

  I do re­al­ize that the al­ter­na­tive is a bit challeng­ing, we can read im­por­tant books from other cul­tural her­i­tages but I sus­pect most will be limited as I am to those trans­lated into English. That it­self will in­tro­duce a slant that could be “west­ern” bi­ased as well.

  Over­all good ad­vice and thanks for post­ing.

• jmh 24 Apr 2019 12:53 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: shminux's comment on: On the Na­ture of Pro­gram­ming Languages

  An in­tel­li­gence that is not hin­dered by hu­man short­com­ings would just cre­ate the al­gorithm and run it with­out any in­ter­me­di­ate lan­guage/​com­piler/​de­bug­ger needed.

  Is that a “There are 10 types of en­tities in the uni­verse. Those the un­der­stand bi­nary and those that don’t” type of state­ment ;-)

  I did find the ini­tial ques­tion in­ter­est­ing but sus­pect it will re­main one de­bated a while—which is not a bad thing. Our ex­is­tence is rather messy and tan­gled so ul­ti­mate truths or an­swers prob­a­bly more tran­sient than en­dur­ing.

• jmh 24 Apr 2019 12:31 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: johnswentworth's comment on: [An­swer] Why wasn’t sci­ence in­vented in China?

  And it prob­a­bly did not hurt that the Ro­mans saw the Greeks as “thinkers” and also spread their ideas west­ward (north?).

• jmh 24 Apr 2019 12:27 UTC

  2 points

  on: [An­swer] Why wasn’t sci­ence in­vented in China?

  Two re­sponses from skim­ming the es­say. 1) I didn’t see much about cul­ture in the com­par­i­son. Cer­tainly the Chi­nese, and other Asian cul­tures of the time, were aware of things like gun power be­fore Euro­peans. But when I think of things like sci­ence and how it re­lates/​is in­ter­preted by so­ciety I get the im­pres­sion much de­pends on the ap­pli­ca­tion of the tech­nol­ogy. 2) Re­lates to cul­ture but is more about what lens we ap­ply in view­ing the progress. Many think Chi­nese Medicine is voodoo and BS and that view was I think largely pushed by a nar­row vi­sion from a Euro­pean per­spec­tive. I think any fair as­sess­ment would say east­ern medicine is not re­ally in­fe­rior to west­ern medicine—both have strengths and weak­nesses. I would say both de­rive from sci­ence and a sci­en­tific method.

  I sus­pect both these as­pects, the un­der­ly­ing cul­ture and the type of lens that cul­ture im­poses if one is not care­ful may have played a role in cast­ing your ques­tion and the an­swers you ten­ta­tively find.

• jmh 22 Apr 2019 14:43 UTC

  −1 points

  on: Mov­ing to a World Beyond “p < 0.05”

  One of the ideas voiced seems to be that too many sci­en­tists (hard and soft) want to short­cut the work of ac­tu­ally study­ing the data and an­a­lyz­ing it. Put a bit more tersely, too many are lazy. I won­der how much that is driven by

  1) the de­mands to pub­lish (and the refer­ee­ing pro­cess) in academia and other re­search based organizations

  2) Fund­ing by NSF and similar pub­lic money grant pro­gram.

  3) The gen­eral view that ed­u­ca­tion and de­grees are nec­es­sary for suc­cess­ful par­ti­ci­pa­tion in a mod­ern econ­omy—par­tic­u­larly when most em­ploy­ment is within large cor­po­rate en­tities.

  I also thought it a bit in­ter­est­ing that they men­tioned con­fi­dence in­ter­vals as an al­ter­na­tive. The prob­lem there, it seems, is that too many don’t un­der­stand what those re­ally are. They see that their es­ti­mated value is within a 95% con­fi­dence in­ter­val and claim the prob­a­bil­ity that they es­ti­mate is cor­rect is 95%. That is not what that statis­tic is say­ing.

• jmh 29 Mar 2019 15:15 UTC

  1 point

  on: What are CAIS’ bold­est near/​medium-term pre­dic­tions?

  I’ve not read the pa­per, but did just go to the link. One thing I would be in­ter­ested in hear­ing from the com­mu­nity here on is Figure 1, Classes of in­tel­li­gent sys­tems.

  I am a bit sur­prised that I don’t see any type of par­allel refer­ences in the higher or­der lev­els to hu­man re­lated in­sti­tu­tions. If we’re putting hu­mans at the in­di­vi­d­ual agent level it seems some of the ex­ist­ing hu­man in­sti­tu­tions might fit at the higher, in­for­ma­tion or task-ori­ented, level.

• jmh 27 Mar 2019 19:18 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Raemon's comment on: Do you like bul­let points?

  On thing that comes to mind for me here is the abil­ity to iden­tify points (for re­fu­ta­tion or oth­er­wise) than is of­ten the case with prose.

  In a sense I read that as a state­ment about de­com­pos­ing a writ­ten ar­gu­ment that is not laid out as some for­mal log­i­cal ar­gu­ment (p1, p2, p3, … qed). I’m not en­tirely sure that is the case but rather more about the writ­ers skills.

  So one thought is which al­lows some­one to most clearly ar­tic­u­late their rea­son­ing—at least for the case where an ar­gu­ment is ac­tu­ally be­ing made?

  I did like the idea that we do think in “bul­lets” and these thoughts are not ini­tially log­i­cally or­dered—that fol­lows from the first and sec­ond round of think­ing I sus­pect.

  I gen­eral I do like both bul­leted and enu­mer­ated lists but am not sure they are gen­er­ally the best style for blog en­tries—in that a poorly pre­sented list­ing is as con­fus­ing as ram­bling prose. I think they are great for get­ting points defined and pos­si­bly very good for posts seek­ing to start a dis­cus­sion about how they re­late or where they might col­lec­tively lead if the au­thor is look­ing for that type of feed­back.

  I also find it in­ter­est­ing—and true for me—that bold in a bul­let list con­text does prompt me to jump on rather than finish­ing the bul­let where as in prose that does not oc­cur.

• jmh 15 Mar 2019 12:35 UTC

  12 points

  on: Black­mailers are pri­va­teers in the war on hypocrisy

  I don’t re­ally fol­low the logic that cer­tain cases of asym­met­ric in­for­ma­tion are bad from some gen­eral per­spec­tive and so the world/​so­ciety bet­ter off if that asym­me­try is re­duced, there­fore black­mail is good.

  Black­mail is about pri­vately benefit­ing from main­tain­ing the con­di­tion of asym­met­ric in­for­ma­tion within what­ever pop­u­la­tion is rele­vant.

  I did like jim­ran­domh’s com­ment about norm differ­ences, which then gets to the whole ques­tion about pri­vacy rights, in­di­vi­d­ual free­doms and other as­pects of so­cial life that need to be un­rav­eled be­fore one can say and given case of re­veal­ing the se­cret is a pos­i­tive or nega­tive.

• jmh 12 Mar 2019 16:03 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: ryan_b's comment on: Me­gapro­ject management

  As the pro­ject grows large enough, we should ex­pect to be per­pet­u­ally chok­ing on one bot­tle­neck or other.

  I did un­der­stand that but was sug­gest­ing that the crite­ria as a mega pro­ject was re­ally not about the costs—though fully ex­pect a high costs to be as­so­ci­ated with such effort. As you say, they can­not be eas­ily be sep­a­rated into more man­age­able sub-pro­jects. Per­haps I can rephrase my though. Is the po­si­tion that any and ev­ery pro­ject that costs $X or more nec­es­sar­ily has the type of com­plex­ity and non-sep­a­ra­bil­ity?

  If not then the abil­ity to clas­sify high cost pro­jects should be use­ful—and point to al­ter­na­tive man­age­ment re­quire­ments if all pro­jects greater than $x still suffer from many of the same in­effi­cien­cies.

  Each new stake­holder is a stu­pen­dous in­crease in the poli­ti­cal com­plex­ity of the pro­ject, so much so that even at the smaller level of pro­jects where we know the right an­swers about how to do them ap­ply­ing the right an­swers is of­ten im­pos­si­ble be­cause of the differ­ent in­ter­ests at play.

  Sure, and you run into whole prob­lem of what ex­actly is the right an­swer as the differ­ent stake­holder are max­i­miz­ing slightly differ­ent (and likely equally le­gi­t­i­mate) crite­ria. That alone is not a bad or wrong thing. But the ap­proach of limit­ing par­ti­ci­pa­tion, in a way, seems ex­actly the same thing as chunk­ing the pro­ject into man­age­able bites. But it’s not clear that can be done much bet­ter than dis­assem­bling the pro­ject into smaller, sim­pler and more man­age­able sub pro­jects.

  If so, limit­ing the stake­hold­ers then the as­sess­ment of the pro­ject will always be one of par­tial failure. That would also drive var­i­ous type of cost over run and time de­lays when such ex­cluded stake­hold­ers seek to in­fluence the pro­ject from out­side the man­age­ment pro­cess.

  It’s not clear to me that would be the op­ti­mal solu­tion to all mega pro­jects.

• jmh 11 Mar 2019 17:39 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: elityre's comment on: S-Curves for Trend Forecasting

  Plus one on that point.

  In once sense though it seems a re­jec­tion of, what I will call, the S-Curve men­tal­ity. That would be the think­ing all growth always plateaus (and it seems that is a dom­i­nant view in terms of eco­nomic growth there—de­vel­op­ing economies can grow faster then de­vel­oped economies so all these fast grow­ers are doomed to the fate of Ja­pan, Europe or the USA). That think­ing can lead to ac­cep­tance rather than effort to over­come some cur­rent limi­ta­tion/​con­straint.

• jmh 11 Mar 2019 17:16 UTC

  1 point

  on: Me­gapro­ject management

  In­ter­est­ing. One think I would like to see more of men­tioned here—but per­haps will have to dig for my­self—would be about the struc­ture of the pro­ject man­age­ment. It seems one clear char­ac­ter­is­tic is com­plex­ity of the whole. While cost, and over­all “size”, would clearly be well cor­re­lated. How­ever I don’t think that is the crit­i­cal fea­ture. I would per­haps pose it as a sep­a­ra­bil­ity is­sue. Can the over­all whole be chun­ked out into bite-sized bits with­out too much co­or­di­na­tion type work or not?

  As more of a side thought, I won­der if any­one has done much in the way of spill-over type effects on these mega pro­jects and if any cat­e­go­riza­tion or char­ac­ter­is­tics are iden­ti­fi­able. We know there have been spillover from both the space pro­gram and mil­i­tary pro­grams. Not sure about more com­mer­cial or gov­ern­ment mega pro­jects. But you would think all in­fras­truc­ture type pro­jects should benefit from some pos­i­tive net­work ex­ter­nal­ity effects.

  I don’t try to make any “if you built it they will come” ar­gu­ment here. If any it would be a “peo­ple are pretty good at figur­ing out how to make lemon­aide from a lemon” type “ar­gu­ment”. This kind of goes along with the too com­plex to man­age well cases as well. We of­ten will not know what the end benefits will be for many things—if the USA didn’t do the elec­trifi­ca­tion pro­ject to get power to ru­ral com­mu­ni­ties would we have the same type of com­mu­ni­ca­tions net­works we cur­rently have? Worse? Bet­ter???

  Of course this is not re­ally about how to bet­ter man­age such pro­jects and it’s likely bet­ter man­age­ments would al­low such as­pects greater po­ten­tials and lessen any such af­fects.

• jmh 26 Feb 2019 14:56 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: jmh's comment on: Less Com­pe­ti­tion, More Mer­i­toc­racy?

  Small edit to my own com­ment. I ne­glected to point out my com­ments and as­sess­ment were re­ally about the what I un­der­stood to be the po­si­tion of the pa­per un­der re­view and not about the anal­y­sis per se.

• jmh 25 Feb 2019 17:54 UTC

  3 points

  on: Less Com­pe­ti­tion, More Mer­i­toc­racy?

  First, I did not get though the en­tire post. That said, some thoughts that oc­curred to me.

  • Un­der what con­di­tions is does this gen­er­al­ize? I was try­ing to ap­ply it to my world. If I am hiring part of the prob­lem is not about hard skills but soft skill—and those will differ a bit based on what team the new per­son will be part of.

  • Good game the­ory always wins seems to have di­rected at the can­di­dates but what hap­pens when the game mas­ter (lack of a bet­ter term) has poor game the­ory or doesn’t think such be­hav­ior good? Again, from a cor­po­rate hiring stand­point that might be a real situ­a­tion. In terms of con­sumers shop­ping around that might also ap­ply (the av­er­age ad­ver­tiser is a bet­ter game the­o­rists than the av­er­age con­sumer). Do the con­clu­sions still hold here?

  • Closely re­lated to the first bul­let, just what mar­ket set­tings were con­sid­ered for the anal­y­sis.

  • I re­call an old pa­per that asked if duopoly was more com­pet­i­tive than the stan­dard atom­istic com­pe­ti­tion in the Econ 101 pure com­pe­ti­tion model. That was largely driven by search costs and asym­met­ric in­for­ma­tion prob­lems. Would the­ory here be com­ple­men­tary?

  My gut re­ac­tion is there is some value and truth here but that it should not be taken too se­ri­ously. Con­sider it an area of con­sid­er­a­tion and el­e­ment of a solu­tion rather than a solu­tion to any prob­lem of get­ting the best out of the messy so­cial in­sti­tu­tions that me­di­ate our ac­tivi­ties and greatly in­fluence the col­lec­tive/​ag­gre­gate re­sults.

• jmh 12 Feb 2019 16:18 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Bucky's comment on: Spaghetti Towers

  Ex­tend­ing that the leg­is­la­tion and law in gen­eral seems ap­pro­pri­ate as well. I won­der if one con­trasts and com­pares slice of time views of both com­mon law regimes and statu­tory law regimes if there would be any differ­ences.

• jmh 7 Feb 2019 16:16 UTC

  3 points

  on: Spaghetti Towers

  I seem to work (and pos­si­ble live) in such a set­ting ;-)

  On one level I won­der how much we need to worry. The idea be­hind that com­ment is the prob­lem we all face with the asym­met­ric na­ture of our knowl­edge when fac­ing the fu­ture. The dis­tinc­tion here is not to say that sloppy plan­ning and main­te­nance should be con­sider ac­cept­able but that we can only avoid the spaghetti to some ex­tent. This is not to sug­gest the au­thor was sug­gest­ing that. Only say­ing we might want to think about where the mar­gins of effi­ciency are.

  I was also won­der­ing if some of the in­no­va­tions in graph the­ory might help man­age de­ci­sion-mak­ing in a spaghetti world. The idea of a pro­gram­ming lan­guage that can help re­fac­tor the spaghetti might use such tools.

  The last (ac­tu­ally first but...) thought I had was “Hello Gor­dian Knot.”

• jmh 25 Jan 2019 13:27 UTC

  2 points

  on: The 3 Books Tech­nique for Learn­ing a New Skilll

  I will sec­ond Hazard’s com­ments on the way to ap­proach the re­views. Seems so ob­vi­ous af­ter you said it.

  I am won­der­ing what you were con­sid­ered in terms of skills.

  I think the gen­eral ap­proach should work re­ally well in some set­tings. I do won­der what the limits might be. For in­stance, I could prob­a­bly use this ap­proach well to learn how to write in a pro­gram­ming lan­guage, or how to weld or how to ma­chine parts. I’m not sure it’s as helpful for, say, learn­ing a new lan­guage.

  Per­haps the dis­tinc­tion is be­tween skill and knowl­edge?

• jmh 14 Jan 2019 14:22 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: JacobKopczynski's comment on: What are the open prob­lems in Hu­man Ra­tion­al­ity?

  My com­ment must nec­es­sary be some­thing of an aside since I don’t know the Ham­ming prob­lem. How­ever, your state­ment “We are not de­signed to be ra­tio­nal” jumped out for me.

  Is that to say some­thing along the lines of ra­tio­nal­ity is not one of the char­ac­ter­is­tics that pro­vided an evolu­tion­ary ad­van­tage for us ? Or would it mean ra­tio­nal­ity was a mu­ta­tion of some “de­sign” (and pos­si­bly one that was a good sur­vival trait)?

  Or is the cor­rect un­der­stand­ing there some­thing en­tirely differ­ent?

• jmh 14 Jan 2019 14:14 UTC

  1 point

  on: What are the open prob­lems in Hu­man Ra­tion­al­ity?

  I had a could of thought, to fol­low, but in think­ing on them the is­sue of sep­a­ra­bil­ity seemed to come up. If we think of ra­tio­nal­ity as ei­ther a men­tal skill to de­velop or some type of trait that can be de­vel­oped re­lated to our de­ci­sion mak­ing, and there­fore ac­tions can that truly be sep­a­rated from all the other things that make up be­ing hu­man.

  Are emo­tions and any part of our emo­tional re­sponses part or ra­tio­nal­ity? The en­emy of ra­tio­nal­ity (I think many peo­ple would con­sider emo­tional and ra­tio­nal as op­po­sites—not sure about a more so­phis­ti­cated view that is found here. Are there cer­tain com­ple­men­tary as­pects/​el­e­ments?

  In­tu­itive ra­tio­nal­ity (maybe some­thing like Hayek’s idea of inar­tic­u­late knowl­edge)? Where does that fit?

  Last is the is­sue of sub­jec­tive val­ues and rec­og­niz­ing other’s ra­tio­nal­ity. What limits would that place on ob­serv­ing ra­tio­nal­ity in oth­ers as well as as­sess­ing our own ra­tio­nal­ity.