This is difficult for me to understand. Are you suggesting that if nuclear power were completely unregulated, Tepco's behavior would've been more virtuous (as I read it, totally virtuous)?
Or is the claim that regulation made the problem somewhat worse, and this margin (between how bad the problem would've been without regulation and how bad it was with regulation) is the only part that would even be humanly possible to rectify?
Because if I owned the plant and I didn't have any regulators to deal with, I would think it in my interest to behave even worse: to lie more, to hide more, to be even less concerned about doing a thorough job of preventing the public's exposure to regulation.
You should look up "regulatory capture" it means something very different than how you are taking it.
Just so it's not a low-content post, a company can lobby the government to change, weaken or not enforce existing regulations, and often they compound this with bribery of the regulator. Many large companies in the United States go further and lobby to extend or re-word regulations specifically to give themselves a monopoly over the regulated market. All of these actions are forms of regulatory capture.
Other examples of it: the present state of the us patent and copyright system, especially if you include enforceable work-for-hire clauses and the language in various treaties referring to copyrights. Elon Musk's difficulties selling his electric cars online in Texas and other states are due to regulatory capture by car dealerships in that state. In general, most government-backed monopolies or "public-private partnerships" can safely be expected to involve a significant amount of regulatory capture.
Still though you should look it up because both the term and the actual process are really useful at figuring out the hows-and-whys of US government domestic actions.
Regulatory capture is when the people tasked with keeping an industry on its best behavior have too close ties to the industry, through personal connections or financial incentives, and are no longer able to do their jobs.
I would agree that we have a problem with inadequate or corrupt regulators in several industries.
Regulatory capture can take the form of outright corruption, but the more insidious form is cognitive capture. That's where the regulators simply don't have a sufficiently detached perspective from those they are regulating. They internalize the needs and thought patterns of the industry as there own.
A related phenomenon in foreign affairs circles is called "going native".
That's very interesting. It's easy to imagine how, as a regulator, going out to dinner with the regulated (or their representatives) on a regular basis would influence your thinking. It doesn't require a conspiracy theory, so it gives us a great jumping-off point for a rational discussion about how to limit the opportunity for this phenomenon to manifest. Thanks for the new viewpoint!
> This is difficult for me to understand. Are you suggesting that if nuclear power were completely unregulated, Tepco's behavior would've been more virtuous (as I read it, totally virtuous)?
If it were unregulated by government, then yes. It's a bit misleading to say there would be absolutely nothing regulating the industry if government wasn't.
I don't quite follow. It's not like there is some naturally occurring flow of newspapers, radio and television broadcasts that discuss with the correct, important issues in an intelligent way, and some sort of cabal (the media) has come in and suppressed all that so they could force toddlers and tiaras down their throats.
There are plenty of news outlets that are spending their money to broadcast the details of the NSA scandal as accurately as possible, and if people happen to find those outlets on their TVs, they change the channel to toddlers and tiaras as quickly as possible. Which goes back to the original (I think correct) point that most people don't find this particular issue as dire as many people think they should.
I knew that comment would open a can of worms. One might also argue that the shabby quality of education has a bit to do with it as well.
>I don't quite follow. It's not like there is some naturally occurring flow of newspapers, radio and television broadcasts that discuss with the correct, important issues in an intelligent way,
The ownership of media in the US is not as diverse as you might think. The content is also not (at least IMO) as diverse as it would be absent improper influence.
>and some sort of cabal (the media) has come in and suppressed all that
Would you believe Carl Bernstein if he told you that the CIA had operatives at all levels of major news media outlets within the US, and a history of manipulating the news? http://carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php
If not him, have a look at the Church Committee reports on intelligence activities along the same theme.
Neither is proof that the activities were continued after being caught red-handed, but, it is enough that I would consider naive the notion that the gov't/intel community had completely ceased such activities, as opposed to just being more careful. As far as I am concerned, given the past (the part that is public record) the possibility that the gov't/intel community aren't still successfully manipulating domestic media coverage can't be dismissed without a credible investigation, or credible oversight, or something to that effect. To put it another way, public exposure of NSA activities is being treated by NSA as a threat to their continued operations; and they will use the tools in their arsenal to fight that threat.
> so they could force toddlers and tiaras down their throats.
If you have a monopoly/oligopoly/cartel in a market, you can feed your customers pretty much anything, and still make a living.
The author said it himself, these errors were caused by humans, not excel. I don't think making excel "smart" enough to prevent people from making dumb mistakes is a good idea. In fact I think that would transform excel into microsoft word, which is the only thing that could make life worse for your typical competent office worker.
Excel already has a lot of this crap. It already requires an act of god to prevent excel from changing your string of digits into a number or date. It already shows you little exclamation point icons when your formulas omit adjacent rows or are different from other formulas in the same row/column.
A tool will never make it possible for dumb people to solve hard problems easily. It's like trying to design a knife that makes it impossible to cut yourself. Nobody with any kind of a clue would want that knife.
A tool should be straightforward and intuitive, but it shouldn't aim to be smarter than it's user.
Making Excel "smart" is not exactly what he's talking about. He's playing with ideas. It's high level, but you can do high level sometimes. You need to.
Your analysis is too low-level and nitpicky for this high level idea playground.
Excel is still a dumb tool. He's absolutely right.
We have ways of making smart tools. It's called "programming" and "database engineering." That part's a little too hard right now, and part of why it's hard is because if you try to make it easy to mould a flexible program to try to define what your data means and how it should work, it becomes so generic as to be as unusable and amorphic as a cloud of smoke.
I've tried this, moving from a space where Excel was predominantly used, and trying to capture the process into an application. We tried to keep all the customizability and malleability as Excel: but I'm now convinced that was a huge mistake. It led us into genericland.
It is possible to build applications that work for these processes, using the tools of programming and good data design. But that's why we have thousands of different applications all trying to solve these different problems, all of which you could probably represent in Excel in some way. The fact that all those applications exist means that people want something smarter than Excel. It proves the case.
But we haven't yet bridged the gap between Excel's extreme flexibility and an Application's intelligence and process fit. That's because it's really difficult to make that work; to fit all the pieces together into something that makes sense in both realms. It's really hard!
The solution will be a user interface masterpiece. I'm convinced of that. And it will be layered, like an onion, allowing people to build any application they need just by telling the computer about their data and how it fits together and what it should allow them to do. Someday we'll have a system—some sort of super-Rails—that makes this so easy that anyone can do it. Someday Programming will be an ancient art, something that only your Grandfather did, like crafting your own tools or woodworking or making jams and jellies.
Someday that will be true. But the way we get there is by thinking about the difference between Dumb Flexible Excel and Smart Rigid Applications and how we bridge that gap, because it's difficult and it's possible. We have to think at this high level, way up in the clouds—and more people should, and there's no reason to shoot them down.
You can have adaptation or adaptiveness, but not both. Either a system is well-fitted to a purpose and needs professional intervention to change, or it is permissive and undemanding and can be turned to any purpose and do it poorly.
Life is full of tradeoffs. Sometimes the general, permissive loosey-goosey system is what you want. Sometimes it isn't. It takes judgement to decide which is which and when to switch.
Every time I point out that there are irreducible tradeoffs in life, somebody tells me in a hand-wavy way that some genius is all that is required to overcome it.
Einstein can't travel faster than light, Maxwell can't reverse entropy and I can't change that different people are good at different things.
Optimism is the grease of evolution and economics. Without lots of people exploring fruitless plains of minima we'd never find unexpected maxima. But almost all who try will fail and those who work with the known good maxima will probably succeed.
Convergence vs coverage -- another irreducible tradeoff.
Hey man, I'm a zen buddhist, I know about the balance and the tradeoffs.
I'm also a realistic optimist, and you're right, it's necessary but often fruitless. But the way I see it, we're headed in that direction pretty surely. Ten years ago we couldn't imagine software doing anything different from Excel, and Excel (or, er, Lotus 123) was the most powerful way to solve any problem, and they were indeed amazing. But they have this problem of being unstructured. Now we have Rails and other frameworks that make it easier to make custom logic to solve problems in specific controlled ways. They're making it easy to let programmers specify how a tool works. We're in the woodworking and craftsman stage of software: we need people who can build the tools and painstakingly design every detail.
We may always need that, and we may always value it. But I can envision a future where there's some in-between: some way to let the computer be extremely smart about the problems we're trying to solve with these tools. I think frameworks like Rails are one giant leap away from being usable not by programmers, but by people just illustrating rules and relationships.
Would it be too generic? Would the tradeoffs be too great? Maybe. But I am optimistic these are problems we can solve and not great unsurmountable rules of the universe.
I know because I did it once. I made something that worked for everyone and allowed you to define complex multi-dimensional relationships between data. It would cover almost any business need, and in a stricter smarter way than excel. There were details that we missed and my business partner was an asshole; those were the problems. The software and the idea were sound and, in fact, incredible. I think the trivial problems are solvable. So, forgive me my optimism, but it's based on experience.
There is low hanging fruit in the problems to solve though. For example, finding and highlighting outliers in a column. It's a relatively simple feature but yields big benefits to users.
Except it isn't that simple. Your definition of an outlier may be completely different from some one else's (95th percentile, median/regression method, or simple max/min, some of these are already possible in excel). Then, how is the information displayed? Highlighting cells? Well if you have +10k rows of data, than that won't be too useful. Creating a summary in another column/sheet will add to the already cluttered 'results' spreadsheet, etc...
This is why I recommend using programming based tools for data analysis. Any non-programming tool has to find a balance between the number of features offered and the complexity/ease-of-use of the tool. With programming tools, you merely have to find the right package (or build your own) which essentially results in getting the exact set of features that you need to solve your problem.
I know people bag on VBA, but I'm a big advocate of effectively utilizing Excels tools along side using VBA to customize where necessary. This solves the problem in your first comment (users can define their own statistical limits and methods), while keeping the simplicity of excel and its tools for other users.
The problem is that not everyone is a programmer. A "programming" tool might be great for you, but when you show it to co-workers for them to work with, they'll inevitably ask "Can I get this in Excel?". Excel+VBA allows for customization when the "complexity/ease-of-use" balance is out of sync with your needs, but to everyone else it's still just Excel.
With this, those that can program have the option to solve the problem their way, while allowing those that don't program the means to solve the problem the way their used to.
I have used VBA here and there, and try not to bag on it too much. There are some cases where using it can make sense, but in general, it seems to be a compromise.
I get a little confused about the programmer/non-programmer dichotomy. If you are capable of implementing a complex model in excel, you are probably more than capable of learning a programming language. If you are just tallying up a few numbers to throw into a report or presentation, then yeah, no need to switch. As I mentioned in another post, it probably has to do with exposure and motivation.
Excel is a tool, and it's a really good tool for what it does, which is for applications that require:
- very fast iteration cycles
- a particular data model: grid of numbers which is very common in business world
- support for everything under the sun: persistence (just hit save :), dialog UI, math formula, stats models, string functions, date/time functions (better than even Java's Joda), internationalization, localization, utf 8, and plenty more
Excel already does this to a degree. If a cell has a formula that is inconsistent with its neighbors, it will be flagged. If a formula omits cells adjacent to the range it is working with, it will be flagged.
Check out Options: Formulas: Error checking rules. It's almost as if Microsoft has been continually developing this software for years and years and they have seen many common mistakes. ;)
When politicians say "small government" they really mean "low taxes", and when they say "liberty" that is measured as 100% minus the top marginal tax rate. Restrictions on people's behavior or privacy aren't really part of the discussion. When they say "spending" you can safely suffix that with "on someone other than me".
Seriously though, the Republican party isn't a libertarian organization and never has been. They've been marketing themselves that way lately, since they are a bit closer to the libertarian ideal than the Democrats (I guess not in this case though!).
If you're talking about the "old Republicans" who may pretend right now that they are also libertarians (like Glenn Beck is doing for example), then I agree. But since the "Ron Paul movement" a lot of true libertarian people entered the Republican party and are still trying to take over it. The "real" Republicans are actually fighting them, though, because besides lower taxes they have almost nothing in common.
Also if you were thinking about Rand Paul, in a way he's his father's son, and unlike others who just pay lip service for liberty and such, he's actually fought hard against the Patriot Act, FISA, NDAA, drones and so on. He filibustered them for many hours, introduced amendments (which obviously got rejected), etc. However, he also seems to play way too much towards the overly religious base in the Republican party, and in that way he's also much like the "old" Republicans, which is a shame, and I think it makes even libertarians have second thoughts about him. The "always lower taxes" attitude at least could work on most libertarians, but the very religious side of him, kind of ruins it for libertarians, too.
Rand Paul is nothing like his father. While Ron Paul fought hard against FISA, NDAA, PATRIOT, and Drones, his son follows the party line, but gives enough lip service to not turn off his father's supporters.
I didn't say Rand Paul fought against the bill when it was up for a vote. He has, however, been fighting hard against the expansion of the Patriot Act's provisions.
Historically the Republican party has been libertarianish, at least in the sense that the guiding principles were minimizing the size and reach of government, keeping the government out of people's lives, and legislating at the most local levels possible (don't make a state law if a local law will do, and don't make a federal law if a state law will do).
This changed in the '60s- Democratic support for the civil rights movement caused a massive shift in the south, in which a huge number of voters (evangelical, socially conservative voters who had supported the Democrats since the end of the Civil War) switched allegiances from Democrats to Republicans. That period also saw the rise of Barry Goldwater, who also wasn't a traditional Republican- he was more of a demagogue who engaged in a lot of flag waving and and emotional oratory to get people riled up.
Ever since then there's been a cognitive dissonance within the GOP- the old-school libertarianesque beliefs wedded to the social conservatives and demagogues of the Religious Right (who aren't traditionally right-wing (or left-wing) at all, they've just latched on to the Republican party as being more amenable to being bent to their will).
This cognitive dissonance has reached epic proportions in the last 10 years, in some cases leading to polarization in the party (fiscal conservative/social liberals vs. those who are completely driven by religion and social conservatism). In other cases it leads to politicians who somehow try to appeal to both the libertarians and the Religious Right (Ron Paul being a prime example), and I just don't know what to make of that. The views of the world embodied by those two groups could not be more different, and seems impossible to reconcile in any intellectually honest way.
Anecdotally I've seen a notable upswing in the self-identification of republicans as "libertarian" in the last 6 months (when that's clearly not the reality).
Republicans view Libertarians as closer to Democrats. That's a fairly unbiased sign that they don't correlate very well with either the so-called "left" or "right" designations.
It's not clear what your second "they" referred to.
The left-right divide is best described as a tendency to support established power versus a tendency to support those who seek to overturn established power. Hence "conservative" (meaning "preserve the existing social order, or return to the social order of the recent past"). Republicans on the whole are, without a doubt, right-wing, since the best way to predict what cause they will support is to look at the causes of the already wealthy and privileged.
The left roots for the underdogs, the right roots for the top dog. This explains why, today, the left more sides with Palestine and the right with Israel. Why rightwing-types are more likely to defend the rich (low taxes helps most those who pay the most) and leftwing-types to defend the poor. Why in Soviet Russia, the "right" were those who supported the ruling party, and the "left" were those who supported the opposition.
Yes, the more-left(/less right) party currently controls the White House and 1/2 of Congress. This doesn't mean that they have become the established order that the left should now oppose, since the established order is much bigger than mere politics.
Interestingly, the right hand is the strong one for ~90% of people.
The terms "right wing" and "left wing" date back to the French Revolution and the preferred seating positions of the nobility and the reformists in the Estates General. I'm really stretching my powers of speculation, but given that the nobility would have received training in arms, is it coincidence that they would have preferred a seating position that allowed the easier use of their sword-arm when directed toward the center of mass of the opposition party?
To be clear, my second "they" referred to Libertarians. They're not on the "left-to-right" axis but on the "you're-both-missing-the-point" axis. (That is of course, my own opinion - I'm just saying that "hipster Republicans" is far from accurate).
I disagree with this. Closer to Democrats than what? Republicans view their party as an amalgamation of a number of distinct ideologies. To say that any given one is "closer to Democrats" means nothing except in respect to your own vantage point within the coalition. When your average Republican hears "libertarian" he's much more likely to think "Ron Paul," with all the connotations that includes, than "Democrat."
(Source: Until recently I served on the State Central Committee of a major swing state's GOP.)
Fair point. My statement was based on the typical experience I have where my republican friends see me (a libertarian) as the pro-marijuana, anti-war, pro-gay-marriage guy, and my democrat friends see me as the anti-tax, anti-welfare guy. They tend to (quite naturally) see the philosophical differences between themselves and equate me with their primary opposition.
Closer to Democrats than your average "modern" Republican who believes in morals-based law, huge military, aggressive military actions, continuation of victimless crime, etc. It's the mouth breathing idiot Republicans that only listen to Rush Limbaugh and such. They view anyone who is their enemy as affiliated with "liberals," whatever that means, not the ones that actually have a clue about government.
That might not be the majority but it's certainly the loudest group.
I think what happens is that the deeper you go into the left, if you are of a generally radical anti-mainstream bent like I was entering school, you're attracted to leftist ideology because of the fairness aspect of the politics. It's a great time to read Howard Zinn and get pissed off about government, but I think as people who still hold that anti-government bent get older, they do tend to lean Libertarian. I know lots of ex-punks that are hard paleoconservatives now.
I went to all the left-wing anticapitalist protests and was routinely mistreated and violated by police and government. While my politics have moved center, I still maintain that distrust of the system because I know when you are outside of it, you're going to get mowed down. As I've gotten older, I care less about unfairness and more about interference. I've found unfairness can be overcome while interference cannot.
In short, I've found that while I've pretty much abandoned any desire to become a communist hobo, I still have a starting point of extreme suspicion and distaste for central authority.
Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned. (Credit goes to the Ayn Rand Lexicon for this particular wording of the definition)
No form of anarchism can protect individual rights, therefore, anarcho-capitalism is not capitalism.
Except the scenario that _my_ gang, also known at the U.S. government, happens to expand its territory to cover the entire United States, which is the goal, and enforces a monopoly on government.
many of us were Libertarians before it was cool, so, yeah, I guess you make a strong point. does this mean I have to give up my hacker card and start wearing skinny jeans and ironic facial hair?
I prefer we not go back to any oversimplistic analogies. That's part of what makes these debates so insufferable. A nation's economy isn't a household budget. A company isn't a person. A nation isn't a person.
I don't really see much value in someone's axiomatic understanding of all of economics premised on the belief that they are smarter than people who study economics (even if they are; probably they are!). I'd much prefer to hear from someone who is less smart, but who admits the subject is too complex for them to fully understand and who can be bothered to go out and actually attempt to measure something (rather than telling me what it must be).
I guess I'm saying I think I can learn more from an honest person than a smart one. Now I'm questioning why I am wasting my time reading hacker news again.
2009 and the internet? This has been the dominant conventional wisdom in all fitness media for at least a decade. If you open any fitness or "men's" magazine in any given month you will find at least one article telling you that: strength training is better than cardio, free weights are better than machines, and lifts that use multiple major muscle groups in coordination are best. The funny thing is that every one of these articles acts like it is the first time any of this has ever been written down.
It's the exact same way with articles advocating diets relatively higher in protein and fat. An assertion of novelty seems to be a mandatory element of any attempt to market anything fitness related.
Agree, but you know who hasn't gotten on board? The people that design/fit out gyms. It's still all machines in the middle and a couple benches near the edges. I'd love to walk into a gym that is all or nearly all free weights.
On one hand I think this comment makes a fair point that this isn't a very useful app. The app's creator himself admits that. He didn't expect it to be downloaded much.
On the other hand, I think this comment and Apple's rejection have both made the app creator's point very well. Not only do people want to ignore drone strikes, they actually resent the idea that other people would want to know about them. In Apple's case they state that customers would find it "objectionable." In this comment's case, the only conceivable reason anyone would want to know about drone strikes is so they could feign interest in order to feel enlightened or worldly.
This is fascinating to me. If we'd had a referendum at some point about whether to grant the U.S. military the power to kill anyone, anytime, anywhere with no checks & balances, no oversight, and no due process, according to it's judgement about what best serves the interest of national security, who do you think would've voted for it? I can't think of any significant political coalition that would've thought that was a good idea. Yet now that it is a reality, you're crazy or a traitor or insincere if you want to make it an issue.
I feel that it's related to peoples' perceived inability to do anything about it. If somebody powerful does something bad, blame the messenger for troubling your mind with it, since there is nothing you can do about somebody powerful.
"I feel that it's related to peoples' perceived inability to do anything about it. If somebody powerful does something bad, blame the messenger for troubling your mind with it, since there is nothing you can do about somebody powerful."
I'll meet you halfway. It's a terrible comment about a terrible article. I agree that it's laudable to try to invent an improved version of online ratings, but this article wasn't effective in convicing me that they've succeeded.
Their argument that historgrams are just.awful. (I didn't care for the extra periods) seems to have two components:
1. asserting that historgrams are bad
2. showing us 3 histograms and saying they tell you the same thing about all 3 movies, when in fact there is a very clear and important difference between the histograms.
Its completely obvious from inspection ("people are really good at seeing patterns") that Starship Troopers has a much lower percentage of 5 star ratings than the other two, and a much higher fraction of 0 star ratings. It also appears to me that the Fifth Element has a higher fraction of 4 or 5 star ratings, and is probably the most apprciated of the 3 films, although Blade Runner is fairly close.
If you are going to cherry a set of 3 specific films to make your point, you should be sure to at least pick 3 films that support your point instead of refuting it.
We then learn about their hypothesis that while 5-star rating system sucks, a system that relies on two correlated 5-star ratings is great. They demonstrate this by using the two question system to draw the exact same conclusion I drew from the histograms of the 1 question ratings.
I would've liked some sort of objective attempt to compare the two rating systems. Perhaps it would be possible to measure how frequently the two question system leads people to make a better choice than the one question system, or at least some sort of statistical wonkery that would purport to show me that the two question system in practice draws more distinctions than the one question system. Unfortunatley we only get this one rather uninspired example ("watch this if you’re in the mood for something really good").
They also didn't address why "would you re-watch this film" is a better choice than any other second question. There are attempts to justify it being a good question, but no real evidence that other questions were tried and didn't perform.
Finally, the thing that really irked me was that this proposed system doesn't seem to do anything to address most of the actual problems with the regular 5 star system, namely that people who feel really strongly about something are more likely to rate so that most ratings tend towards the extremes, and that without context we have no idea why someone rated something a 5 instead of a 1. Those problems now exist along two dimensions instead of one.
I see this less as an article and more as an advertisement hitching a ride on an xkcd comic.
Well the three reasons that the author is hating on FB comments are bulleted in his 16 sentence blog post, so it should be relatively easy to figure out why he is hating FB comments.
Your counterpoint only addresses the first of his three reasons.
This statement makes no sense to me. "Being sexist" encompases an absolutely huge range of behaviors. It could mean something as small as making a dumb assumption about what type of aesthetic preferences someone has, to something as large as making hiring decisions that can permanently stunt someone's career growth. It could even mean promulgating laws that legitimize violence against people.
Sexism is thus a category of bad behaviors, some of which are worse than anything I could imagine stemming from being accused of sexism. I am not saying that being falsely accused of sexism is nothing. It certainly would make me angry and frustrated to be so attacked. I just think false accusation of sexism is worse than the least severe forms of sexist behavior, and better than the most severe forms of sexists behavior.
Asserting that false accusations of sexism are always worse than sexism seems obviously false.
Mostly, I agree. Except with the part about (laws that legitimize) violence against people. In this case, the problem, IMO, is not sexism/discrimination, but violence as such.
I wrote the above mostly because I wanted to make a statement, and I wasn't in the mood for writing lengthy arguments. Also, from a purely philosophical point of view, where we analyze not the actions, but the motivations and principles behind them, the statement holds true, because accusing someone of being sexist is both sexism (belief that people of different sex differ in more than their most basic biology (which they maybe do, but that shouldn't be generalized)), and ad-hominem, which is (philosophically) worse than being just sexist.
This is difficult for me to understand. Are you suggesting that if nuclear power were completely unregulated, Tepco's behavior would've been more virtuous (as I read it, totally virtuous)?
Or is the claim that regulation made the problem somewhat worse, and this margin (between how bad the problem would've been without regulation and how bad it was with regulation) is the only part that would even be humanly possible to rectify?
Because if I owned the plant and I didn't have any regulators to deal with, I would think it in my interest to behave even worse: to lie more, to hide more, to be even less concerned about doing a thorough job of preventing the public's exposure to regulation.