Perhaps not, but I have found his popular books like The Selfish Gene and The Ancestor's Tale very informative.
Unfortunately, when he ventures outside the domain of his professional expertise, he doesn't do as well. For example, in The God Delusion, which is basically a book-length diatribe against orthodox religious belief, he comes out at one point with this:
Let me sum up Einsteinian religion in one more quotation from Einstein himself: “To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.”
If we grant for the sake of argument that typical orthodox religious cant is BS, this is just as much BS. The phrase "let him who is without sin cast the first stone" comes to mind.
> The entire point of the exercise is to establish that certain things are true
And any domain where you can do that is not the real world. The real world is messy and you can't prove things the way you can in nice, tidy, theoretical domains like math. And the kind of logic where you have fundamental axioms of reasoning and you can prove theorems is just a subset of math. In the real world, things don't exactly satisfy the axioms, and boundaries are fuzzy, not sharp. Trying to pretend otherwise, while it might not strictly be "dogma" in the usual religious sense, is just as counterproductive.
In the real world, we can study and predict things. We can study the weather and predict if it will rain tomorrow. We can asses how accurate our predictions have been in the past.
We can evaluate if it is true that smoking increases lung cancer, or that aspirin increases autism.
Sometimes we dont have good answers or predictions, and that too can be studied.
> We can evaluate if it is true that smoking increases lung cancer, or that aspirin increases autism.
We can use real-world data to see if there are correlations. We can sometimes run controlled studies to get a better understanding of causal mechanisms. But we can't prove by logical argument based on "fundamental axioms of reasoning" that these things are "true".
I see. I agree that there are major limitations to purely logical arguments.
This is why unlike the rationists of the 17th century, modern "rationalists" predominately focus on empiricism (ironic i know). They are practically obsessed with Bayesian reasoning and probability of truth. This has the knock on effect of interest in prediction markets.
> They are practically obsessed with Bayesian reasoning and probability of truth.
Which is still math, not the real world. Bayesian reasoning is useful, but it's not a drop-in replacement for your brain. "Rationalists" often seem to talk as though they think it is--just follow this recipe and your thinking will automatically give the right answer. And anyone who tries to talk about limitations of this is obviously a crackpot.
> Is your impression otherwise?
Not with respect to obsession with Bayesian reasoning, no. But I seem to have a different take on that than you do. See above.
It's not that the model can't be fixed, but that it won't create and fix itself, unlike how people iterate on their own mental models.
You can build a more elaborate model that can, but then that's still structurally constrained in terms of how it can adapt.
You can build a maximally general model that automatically captures arbitrary patterns, and estimates using them, but:
- that's not what people do and mean when using Bayesian inference in argumentation; they're the ones capturing and maintaining the patterns instead, manually and arbitrarily
- it kind of renders the whole thing meaningless; you basically get a machine learning model out of that, and introspectibility is not really their thing + it becomes quite literally arbitrarily adapting (and thus arbitrarily inferring)
One may also recognize that to be resembling a human, with whom you get the same issues. Kind of how one gets to arguing about empiricals and logic in the first place. This is what I describe in my other comment that I linked to, that debates using these instruments are basically just long winded coordination processes between people in the best of times, not some sort of divination tools.
I'm not the guy from above btw, but I am the guy who had their comment turn dead. I don't know why it did though, I doubt this subthread sees that much traffic, and I did not see it being flagged since I posted it. I'd assume it was automatically or manually moderated out.
Inventing the hypotheses and the model in the first place. Bayesian inference updates probabilities over hypotheses already admitted by a model. If reality requires a structure that the model doesn't assign a prior probability to, such as an omitted variable, mechanism, or failure mode, ordinary Bayesian updating cannot recover it, no matter how much data is observed.
For example:
A forecasting model estimates restaurant demand from years of bookings. Then a major concert is announced next door. A local manager immediately expects a packed evening, while the model predicts an ordinary Tuesday because it has never encountered that situation, and was not prepared for it. To do so would have not been reasonable based on the data available to begin with, after all.
So you can have someone opine about how well some argument is supported through Bayesian inference, and how another isn't, but that's only going to keep them honest in a limited sense. They can still miss the bigger picture by e.g. simply not knowing about it, and not knowing to check for it. If you don't either, they done misled you.
- why would BAND have a concert here? no concerts in this area, ever
- doesn't BAND have ties to this place? no sufficient evidence in the way of that
- BAND lead singer has hung out here once and liked THING, decided to have a concert here for sure one day on a whim
Individually, these have low local attributing info available, so you'd never be able to justify the inference. But not being able to justify the inference didn't make the claims wrong, just unfounded. Those are not the same thing. And so chasing probabilities like this, while maximizes how much your position is defensible, also boxes you in. You'll be reasonable in why you thought what you did, but that won't make you necessarily right, despite the suggestions otherwise.
> n any system of mathematics with enough complexity to be interesting, there are statements that cannot be proven true or false.
Note that the article itself is not as careful as you are here about correctly stating what Godel's Incompleteness Theorem actually says. The article states it this way: "any set of rules powerful enough to handle basic arithmetic will contain true statements it cannot prove". But that's wrong, because, when you take into account Godel's Completeness Theorem, you realize that, for any formal system complex enough for the proof of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem to go through, there must be a semantic model of that system in which the Godel sentence for that system is false! The article's misstatement is unfortunately very common, but it's still a misstatement.
Lewis Black once said that swearing has a point--it is how we express a sufficient level of rage and anger against something extremely dysfunctional. What should we say, he asked: Oh, pussyfeathers?
Lewis Black’s shtick is tired and old and yet he manages to put a lot more humor and wit into his rants than anything in this article.
It’s essentially “My car’s infotainment system fucking sucks! Fuck fuck fuck fuck fucking fuck! Fuck my life and fuck all this shit! Did you notice I used the word fuck? FUCK!” Such great writing, so original, so millennial.
I'm no fan of the government trying to regulate such things, but I won't shed any tears if infinite scroll is forced to go away. It's one of the things I hate the most about the so-called "modern" web.
"Earth is moving beyond the range within which modern human civilisation developed."
Way, way, way, way overstated. The graph shows a comparison to an average over a few decades. Human civilization is thousands of years old. Does anyone have a graph of what all the El Ninos since the last Ice Age ended have looked like? Of course not. Nobody has that kind of temperature data.
There is not a graph of prehistoric ocean surface temperatures (doesn’t seem possible to obtain this data other than collecting it as it happens as far as I can tell) but there is global historical temperature data. Here is an XKCD comic, scroll to the bottom and pay attention to the rate of change since 1850 vs the prior 20,000 years: https://xkcd.com/1732/
And yes, I am aware that earth has possibly been covered in ice/slush and also that the avg global temp has been 10C (or more) higher than it is now, but humans were not around for either scenario.
You are an engineer or programmer? Why are you working in this industry if you can't take the time to learn about how this system works. We are supposed to be systems thinkers with a scientific mindset. How can you make a statement like "Nobody has that kind of temperature data" without researching first?
I'm embarrassed for my industry. I'm shocked how many climate denialists there are among engineers and programmers.
> If you think about it, they must have a lot of protons to generate a field so strong
Not necessarily. Neutrons have a magnetic moment. As I understand it, there is a magnetohydrodynamic model of how a magnetar's field gets generated, which would require protons, but it's not the only model and we don't have enough data to be able to rule out other models.
Aside: Carbon-13 has one more neutron than Carbon-12, so the unpaired neutron gives it a magnetic moment which is what is used for C13 Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy.
> I thought neutron stars generally had a shell or crust of iron, which generates a magnetic field (as metals do) if the neutron star is spinning.
They do, but the neutrons themselves also have magnetic properties. (The simplest heuristic way to think of it is that neutrons are made of three quarks, and the magnetic moment is due to the quarks moving around inside the neutron. But that's a highly heuristic picture and leaves out a lot of complications.)
> This means the atomic clock is behind the solar clock by 37 seconds?
If anything, it's the other way around.
A UTC day is defined as exactly 86400 SI seconds. But an actual mean solar day is a few milliseconds longer (although the difference is not constant due to irregularities in the Earth's rotation--but the average difference is expected to slowly increase over time). SI seconds are counted by atomic clocks, so UTC advances its day by one every 86400 atomic clock seconds.
But a solar clock that advances its day by one every time the mean sun reaches noon (it has to be the mean sun because the rate at which the actual sun moves across the sky varies over the course of a year, we need to look at the average) will advance its day a few milliseconds later than UTC does. Or, to put it another way, each time period that the solar clock says is exactly 86400 seconds, is a few milliseconds longer according to the atomic clock.
As this happens day after day, the difference accumulates, and when it gets close to being a full second, a leap second gets inserted into UTC, so that one of its days is 86401 seconds long instead of 86400. The reason for this is that UTC is not just counting atomic clock time; it also has to stay in sync with where the sun is in the sky since so many human activities are tied to that. And we humans have defined "in sync with the sun" to be "within a second of the average sun". In other words, we want UTC noon to be within a second of mean solar noon on the prime meridian.
So the 37 seconds is how far mean solar noon would be behind UTC noon, if we didn't use leap seconds--at UTC noon, the mean sun would be 37 seconds short of actually crossing the prime meridian in the sky.
"In other words, we want UTC noon to be within a second of mean solar noon on the prime meridian."
Why?
If I travel 1 mile east or west of the prime meridian, my solar noon now comes 2-3 seconds earlier/later. It's nearly impossible to have your local time match your local solar noon. For most of the population, solar noon is, on average, 30 minutes off of 12:00 noon.
Um, because it's the prime meridian and that's how UTC is defined?
> It's nearly impossible to have your local time match your local solar noon.
Which is why I specified on the prime meridian, which is the particular local meridian that UTC is defined as corresponding to.
> solar noon varies from day to day by 10-20 seconds.
Which is why I was careful to specify mean solar noon.
I'm not quite sure what your issue is. Yes, we have time zones tied to specific meridians, and the actual sun's speed in the sky varies (which I mentioned in my post, so I'm not sure why you seem to think I'm unaware of it) so in most places local time by the clock doesn't match local time by the sun. Yes, a leap second adjustment to UTC is quite a bit smaller, taken in isolation, than the annual variation in actual solar time vs. mean solar time.
But over time, if we didn't have leap seconds, the difference would accumulate. The accumulated difference now between UTC and TAI is 37 seconds--which is almost twice the maximum variation in actual solar noon from mean solar noon that you refer to. We humans have collectively decided that we don't want that, and that it's better to do the adjustments a little at a time rather than in bigger lumps.
"But over time, if we didn't have leap seconds, the difference would accumulate. The accumulated difference now between UTC and TAI is 37 seconds--which is almost twice the maximum variation in actual solar noon from mean solar noon that you refer to."
No, the 10-15 seconds I mentioned is the daily variation in solar noon.
From the link I posted, in NYC, solar noon on 2026-01-01 is at 11:59am. On 2026-01-31, solar noon is at 12:09pm. In one month, it has drifted 10 minutes. That's much greater than the 37 leap seconds we have added in 60 years.
"We humans have collectively decided that we don't want that, and that it's better to do the adjustments a little at a time rather than in bigger lumps."
Yet we just reversed that decision. No more leap seconds after 2035. After trying it, we decided it was terrible.
> the 10-15 seconds I mentioned is the daily variation in solar noon.
Yes, but averaged over an entire year, it still comes out to zero. The difference between mean solar and atomic time does not. It accumulates over the years.
> we just reversed that decision
We paused it for 100 years after 2035. That doesn't change the physical fact that the Earth's rotation will continue to slow over the long term. We might eventually decide to just not care about that when it comes to civil timekeeping, but that's not what the decision you're referring to did. It just said we can afford to let the difference between UTC and TAI accumulate from 2035 to 2135 (by which time it is predicted to be about a minute) while we figure out what we want to do over the longer term.
> Um, because it's the prime meridian and that's how UTC is defined?
That's an explanation of how it is, not why we should care to preserve it.
The definitions of hours minutes and seconds have changed before, and in recent history.
> Which is why I was careful to specify mean solar noon.
And "mean solar noon" is meaningless to people's lives. Even in the areas where time zones do follow meridians and not country borders that are many minutes off.
> The definitions of hours minutes and seconds have changed before, and in recent history.
In terms of what physical process we use to set the standard, yes. But those very changes were made to try to preserve the same time periods that were important to humans. In other words, to not change what hours, minutes, and seconds mean intuitively to us humans as we go about our daily lives.
I completely disagree. The intuitive meaning is that a day is 24 hours and you can divide that by 60 twice. But that makes the second vary by some parts per billion, so we nailed down the second to make the technical side easier at the expense of relatability.
> The intuitive meaning is that a day is 24 hours and you can divide that by 60 twice.
And that's exactly why the SI second has the length that it has--to be as close as possible in terms of how atomic clocks work to 1/86400 of an Earth mean solar day at a chosen epoch. (Note that the actual definition before the atomic clock one was adopted was in terms of the Earth's tropical year at that epoch--but the fraction of the tropical year that was chosen was to line up the second with 1/86400 of an epoch day.) If we didn't care about "relatability", nobody would have gone to all the trouble of trying to determine how many cesium clock oscillations there were in 1/86400 of an epoch day.
I'm not so sure. The concept of 24 hours in a day originates in civil timekeeping, yes, but not minutes and seconds. Those originally came from astronomy, and corresponded to angles, not times, and those angles are constants; they don't change as the Earth's rotation slows down or as its speed in orbit around the Sun changes over the course of a year. I don't think people's intuitive concept of minutes and seconds is that they vary according to the time of year or the tidal effects on the Earth.
> I don't think people's intuitive concept of minutes and seconds is that they vary according to the time of year or the tidal effects on the Earth.
But if you asked people to choose between "seconds vary by an imperceptible amount, less than your clocks naturally drift" and "an hour doesn't have 3600 seconds" I bet most will pick the former.
And it doesn't have to drift day by day, you can average it over a multi-year period.
It's going to be weird once the earth slows down enough that we'd need a leap second every day or two. Once you can't ignore the drift anymore, the system we chose is significantly unintuitive.
> If we didn't care about "relatability", nobody would have gone to all the trouble of trying to determine how many cesium clock oscillations there were in 1/86400 of an epoch day.
I'm not saying we didn't care about it, I'm saying we didn't put it as top priority. We went with a nice clean fixed-length second that will drift away from the Earth over time. And it wasn't/isn't that hard to determine the number of oscillations since "matching" the Earth's unstable speed has a huge margin you can land within.
> Would you also say that getting rid of leap seconds and allowing UTC to gradually drift away from the sun is making the technical side easier at the expense of relatability?
Yes.
I'm in favor of both, to be honest. But it's a tradeoff, and it's a tradeoff that weakens the layman's definition of a second.
> we nailed down the second to make the technical side easier at the expense of relatability.
Would you also say that getting rid of leap seconds and allowing UTC to gradually drift away from the sun is making the technical side easier at the expense of relatability?
For things that need much more precusion than my lunch, ±1 second probably still isn't good enough, so they need another layer of correction anyway. Given that exists, might as well push leap seconds into that layer too.
Would this website (HN) be a "covered platform" according to the bill?
As far as I can tell, the answer is no, because it doesn't do what's described in Section 201 (E):
"Uses the personal information of the user to advertise, market, or make content recommendations."
Neither does, for example, my bank's website, or someone's personal blog, or many other discussion sites like this one. So from what I can see, while the set of covered platforms is certainly not negligible, it's still a lot smaller than "basically every website on the Internet that anyone cares about". So the title of the EFF article is overstating the case; the thing the bill would require age checks for (in effect, if not by the explicit language of the bill) is not "get online" but something more like "get on social media".
That's true, but the bank also already knows my age.
Also, a bank would not satisfy section 201 (B), (C), or (D), so it wouldn't be a covered platform anyway. (I should have left "bank" out of my original post, I was really thinking more about discussion sites like this one, blogs, etc.)
"Uses the personal information of the user to advertise"
Is 99.9% of all websites. So long as websites don't sell things, they will be having ads.
This includes Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Imgur, TikTok, Twitch, Youtube, etc. I think even Steam and other game platforms would fall into this category despite the fact they make money selling products. Naturally search engines also fall into this category.
Websites like HN are the exception, not the norm.
It's also disingenuous to say "a personal blog" would be exempt from this when most people don't have blogs in first place since they start microblogging instead. In fact, most people don't want to go through the trouble of maintaining their own blog, dealing with spam, hosting, hacking attempts, software updates, etc., when they can just use tumblr and pin the responsibility on the platform anytime something bad happens.
Not at all. You named eleven. Even if I'm generous and raise that by a couple of orders of magnitude, it's still a miniscule fraction of all websites.
Of course it's close to all big tech platforms, but that's not the same thing. And if one of the results of this whole kerfluffle is to make more people realize that the big tech platforms are not the same as "the Internet" or "the Web", that would be a good thing.
> Websites like HN are the exception, not the norm.
Which makes it even more important to ask the question of whether "exception" websites like this one can continue to survive if this bill becomes law. Sure, HN users are a tiny fraction of all Internet users. But that's supposed to be one of the things the Internet is for--to give even very small communities a place where they can be a community, and not have to worry about all the other crap that's out there, and not have to be micromanaged by politicians and lobbyists and tech giants.
> It's also disingenuous to say "a personal blog" would be exempt from this when most people don't have blogs in first place since they start microblogging instead
Not all blogging platforms use targeted ads. And if this gives more of them an incentive not to, that would be a good thing.
with respect to which more than one-third of the material made available thereon is sexual material harmful to minors; and (C) with respect to which the provider of such platform knowingly makes available the sexual material harmful to minors described in subparagraph (B).
(look for line 19 to see the covered platform)
Of course, it's a delicious web they're trying to weave - pass it now by casting the think of the children spell, amend and reinterpret later to soften the guardrails until everything is in scope and demands commercial ID checks, driving ID check industry software and adoption, until psuedo-anonymity on the web is virtually gone. Or do it with any combination of other bills.
You're looking at section 102 of the bill, which is a different part than the one I was looking at (and that the EFF article is referring to). The bill is a mismash of several different proposed bills all squashed together into one. Title I, which is what you're looking at, is more restrictive about what platforms it applies to than Title II, which contains the section I quoted.
But there are also other requirements in section 201 for a "covered platform", which advertising-funded sites that aren't "social media" most likely don't meet. For example, a typical personal blog, even if it shows ads, doesn't meet subsection (C), because its primary purpose is not to share user-generated content (e.g., comments by readers)--it's to share the blog author's content.
(HN itself doesn't meet at least one other requirement besides subsection (E): subsection (D), "Uses a design feature to promote user engagement on the platform".)
True, but in practice, the vast majority of advertising-funded sites use targeted advertising, because they use standard ad networks. There are very few ads networks that don’t do targeted ads.
You're assuming that platforms that tried age verification in order to show people targeted ads would lose enough users to make that business model no longer viable. While I would fervently like to believe that's true, I'm not so sure it is. I think there might well be enough people who will hand over their personal identifying info without a second thought in order to continue to use targeted ad-supported platforms, to keep them in business. I hope I'm wrong.
I don't think it'll come down to people being too principled to participate. I think I'll come down to them being too lazy to bother completing the auth ritual.
Perhaps not, but I have found his popular books like The Selfish Gene and The Ancestor's Tale very informative.
Unfortunately, when he ventures outside the domain of his professional expertise, he doesn't do as well. For example, in The God Delusion, which is basically a book-length diatribe against orthodox religious belief, he comes out at one point with this:
Let me sum up Einsteinian religion in one more quotation from Einstein himself: “To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.”
If we grant for the sake of argument that typical orthodox religious cant is BS, this is just as much BS. The phrase "let him who is without sin cast the first stone" comes to mind.
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