> storing facial [and other data] data in a database.
as long as they are only allowed to use this data to secure flights, and nothing else (including selling it).
Laws against tracking and selling of private data needs to step up in the USA (i would imagine this falls under GDPR, and you'd have to give consent in europe for this to happen).
I don't understand how the author can come to this conclusion after describing almost every mentioned paper as unreliable for one reason or another.
As far as I know there is still very little in the way of consistent and/or rigorous evidence that even moderate recreational doses are harmful.
I would argue that if it is this uncertain as to whether or not the drug is harmful, then it is unlikely to have significant detrimental effects. Subcultures tend to build stigma toward obviously dangerous substances - most drug users would caution you to stay away from heroin or meth, for example, because the damage is obvious. If harmful MDMA effects are so subtle as to be effectively undetectable in the collective anecdote of millions of recreational users, then at the very least occasional use must not be so risky.
How do we know that the universe isn't sitting on the back of a giant turtle?
Most of the math that we use is self-consistent, and our proof system is, as far as we can tell, relatively consistent with the known properties of the universe.
What I'm getting at is that no, we don't actually KNOW with 100% certainty that, for example, certain proven divergent series continue to diverge at infinity, if your standard for proof requires trial of an infinite span of numbers; but such speculation is so far out of the realm of what is known and "proven" according to our [mostly] self and externally consistent set of knowledge[1] that it is more or less in the realm of pseudoscience/metaphysics.
As someone who leans libertarian, I tend to shy away from rigid legislative solutions to social problems and corporate overreach.
However, articles like this make me wonder if it isn't time for the government to step in and implement privacy regulations of some sort. I did not consent to have my movements tracked and ads sold to me by privately owned kiosks all over my city of residence.
OTOH, I don't know if I would trust the current government to implement such protections in a way that isn't self serving and possibly counterproductive. Shitshow all around.
I could see the current government implementing strong privacy controls to protect your personal data from bad actors who doesn't donate enough to reelection campaigns.
Not a right or left thing either; I believe both sides sell themselves shamelessly.
Perhaps I accept that there are more than 2-5 dimensions in the sphere of politics, and that occasionally one must compromise because no singular philosophy is perfect in all circumstances. That doesn't mean that an entire political ideology is at fault.
The modern political system would be far better off without this kind of (engineered?) rigid thinking.
Taleb has an interesting take on why a person might state their position this way. He states he is:
Libertarian at the global and national level.
Republican at the state level.
Democrat at the city level.
Socialist at the club/neighborhood level.
Communist at the family level.
Makes quite a bit of sense to me. And if one does not realize one has this hierarchy of beliefs, it is hard to talk about ones politics. What do you call yourself if you hold such beliefs?
That "hierarchy" of beliefs just sounds selfish, with an interest in disproportionately consolidating resources in your proximity, but then demanding permissive access to them once they're at arms length.
Of course, policies must be crafted differently to create a benefit at different levels, but that doesn't mean you can't have consistent philosophies.
> that doesn't mean you can't have consistent philosophies
Social structures and politics are not philosophically or logically consistent! Philosophies are, at best, a useful set of guide, but it isn't hard to find pathological examples for any philosophy.
I don't necessarily think that's true. You can allow policies that are more open to abuse at more local levels because you have more control to avoid those abuses. For instance, I think communism at the national level would be a disaster because it implies a level of government control that can and would be abused. At the family level, it _might_ be workable.
Liberalism at the global and national level. I have no choice about choosing the world I live in and limited choice in the country without a lot of red tape.
I have a choice when it comes to the state, even though it would be inconvenient.
I have a lot of choices which city I live in. Semi officially, the metro area where I live is made up of over a dozen counties and 40+ municipalities.
I can definitely choose which social clubs I belong to.
It seems like that world view maximizes your practical choice on where you live.
Besides, the more local the politics the more it has to be in line with what the people want.
It was interesting in an earlier time. Today, that's just fancy clothes on a reactionary/right-wing philosophy, a really cynical worldview that creates nasty outcomes.
Translation:
- "Communist at the family level": I like total control.
- "Socialist at the club level.": I like my religious denomination/tribe
- "Democrat at the city level.": Bread and circus for the plebes, but no money or power.
- "Republican at the state level.": Make sure my friends can make money.
- "Libertarian at the national level": Keep government out of our lives, except when I want it in your life.
- "Libertarian at the global level": These barbarians won't subscribe to our ideals of liberty. But, we have tanks to help deliver liberty to them. <enter fascism>
Yes, if you rewrite the meaning of every single word that someone uses, you can completely rewrite their original statement. That's not a terribly meaningful outcome.
Are you sure you want to go with calling someone "reactionary", which generally labels you as fairly far left, but then just agreeing that "communism" is "total control"? I can imagine a person who can make all the statements you made and be self-consistent, but it's an awfully narrow window with a complicated shape.
I think most ex-libertarians eventually realized that (most of the time) a smaller government just means a power vacuum that gets filled by other organizations that have the means but not the peoples' interests.
>“It never made sense to me that it was possible to have a battery-powered car that could drive more than 300 miles but not have a battery-powered drone that could fly more than about 20 minutes,” he says.
I don't see why...drone flight requires substantial power output to counteract gravity, which increases in proportion to the battery mass. Unlike a rolling vehicle
Having to constantly counteract gravity is just a limitation of this form of aircraft. If it was able to glide, then it would only need to spend energy to maintain height. Some birds can stay in the air for days without landing and they aren't exactly flying batteries.
Unless you use updrafts. Check out dynamic soaring. I have often thought about using updrafts above lava lakes and custom ESCs that can charge batteries to do quadcopter DS.
I don't actually know if it's possible to autorotate a quadcopter. I imagine you would have very little control during the transition. Quadcopters don't fly very high anyway, so there's probably little to gain from it.
It certainly does in helicopters, which have large, relatively heavy blades you really don’t want to stop turning.
In a quadcopter the blades a small and light, so you could conceivably stop them and let them turn them in reverse as the airflow changes direction (from downwards to up through the blades). I think there would be real problem with control during the transition, and you’d need a lot of height to make it worthwhile.
The entire premise behind so called scientific experimentation is reproducibility. It is what allowed humans to move past superstitions, demonstration of consistent causes and effects.
This is why economics, psychology, etc. are called "soft" sciences. This absolutely is a crisis, because by definition ALL of these experiments are supposed to be replicatable and reproduced before they can scientifically be taken as truths of any certainty, and we're seeing that many modern fields, particularly medical, are operating based on potentially dangerously misleading experimental results.
And, since this is HN, possibly even maliciously misleading.
The crisis, then, is that people take results as truth before they've been replicated.
The more reasonable expectation is not that the results will be successfully replicated, but that the experiment can be replicated. In other words: That there is enough detail that someone else can try to confirm the results.
The problem is we've come to rely on first publication of results far too much. A first publication of a result should be seen as "here's an interesting result; someone please confirm." Not as "here are some new facts for you."
I’m no academic but I’ve read a few papers specifically because I wanted to implement what they talk about. None have been useful for this purpose. I don’t know how you can possibly replicate them if there is insufficient detail on the “apparatus”.
Or maybe, human psychology is too complicated with too many factors influencing results to be easily reproducible. The crisis is then more in the expectation you have and about initial small scale experiments being treated as "truth" and expected to work across cultures, social groups and social situations. Apple always falls down, but how people respond is sensitive to a lot of context.
Some of crisis are frauds or shaddy science (prison experiment). Some of it is the simplistic expectation that since experiments in basic physics are simple, psychology and sociology should be equally simple.
Lastly, these science are call soft, because they use less math and deal with fuzzy issues.
>AI is not good at subjective decisions of qualitative data
That's exactly the core strength of AI. It is what differentiates AI from hard coded solutions. Estimations(subjective decisions) based on correlations in fuzzy (qualitative) data.
In your example, you could take a set of data containing the net worths and other characteristics, e.g. birth zip code, spending habits, affiliations, and if there are any trends related to net worth, a properly architected neural network trained on the appropriate data could easily estimate subjectively on what amounts to qualitative data.
Manipulating data to "hit you in the gut" amounts to propaganda, of which people can be (rightly) wary, regardless of the veracity of the ultimate message.
A lot of things are propaganda. Showing a crying immigrant child is propaganda. Showing a picture of mourning fireman on the day of 9/11/2001 is propaganda. In each case we may want to debate what the picture is trying to say and whether it is appealing more to the emotions than rational debate. Or not. It depends.
On the other hand, when someone sees the firefighter and says "What a propaganda. These pictures never bother to present a concrete evidence that two planes hit WTC," then we kind of know rational discourse is over, which is what's happening with climate denialism.
> “On the other hand, when someone sees the firefighter and says "What a propaganda. These pictures never bother to present a concrete evidence that two planes hit WTC," then we kind of know rational discourse is over, which is what's happening with climate denialism.”
Let me state first that I do believe climate change is real and urgently needs to be given increased attention to find a solution.
But, secondly, your comment falls completely flat, and in my personal view, you are espousing something that is truly far, far more dangerous than even climate denial.
You’re attempting to say that a rational analysis of entire patterns of propaganda is equivalent to no longer participating in the rational debate. You’re trying to say that anyone who does not agree there is intrinsic credibility to the data-eliding emotional appeals must themselves no longer have credibility in the discussion.
This essentially lobotomizes our best and only chance to solve problems like climate change long-term, which is to use science as a constraint on political gamesmanship.
When you say, “... then we know rational discourse is over” you’re just falling right into politicians’ hands, who want to continue politicizing the issue while not actually doing anything about it that doesn’t happen to also serve their short-term profit interests, and figuring that if younger generations have to inherit a wasteland and figure out how to live in it, that’s not their problem, and they’ll happily consume now, while the getting is good.
Your type of meta-comment is the most frustrating to me in this whole debate, because you seem self-aware enough to know better.
Who says it’s manipulated? The complaint was that there wasn’t sufficient detail. Are we just assuming that any chart that doesn’t live up to the standards of a scientific paper must be manipulated?
Omitting sufficient detail to understand the scale and significance of a result is one of the most common types of manipulation in statistical data presentation. Not saying that this post was specifically trying to be manipulative, but it is very reasonable to presume the goal is manipulation and work back from there, since it is so, so common in published academic literature, newspaper infographics, etc.
Why is it contradictory? I don’t have special knowledge to confirm if this was manipulative. But since manipulating the presentation of data is so common in academic papers, newspaper infographics, etc., it’s a reasonable prior belief. Generally being skeptical of data presentations is reasonable.
I don't think it's so much the tolerance that leads one to abuse Adderall, but rather the confidence Adderall gives you. Can't speak for other amphetamine formulations though, just Adderall IR generic brand.
I think abuse can come in two forms; intentional abuse, which is what we think of as abuse, and unintentional abuse, where during the titration period, when you first get on the medication, you titrate it too high, but this feels like the right amount. I think the latter situation happened to me due to life circumstances. The Adderall I was taking was too much in combination with the lack of sleep, because I took too many credit hours and was staying up in the library or bar studying. Diet probably was less than stellar as well.
The too much level for me as 30mg / day split into 2x 15mg morning and later afternoon / early evening. If I ever go back on Adderall (assuming I can ever find a doctor that takes new patients on medicaid and doesn't make you wait months to see them), I would take 15mg / day split into 2x 7.5mg
On a side note, recently I read something about adderall and neurotoxicity caused by some oxidation reaction, which apparently has been exhibited in very high doses in experiments. Apparently Ritalin doesn't have such neurotoxic effects according to that article. I think there was also something in there about combining ritalin with adderall, which causes the ritalin to counteract the neurotoxic effects of the adderall or something. I think it said that Adderall causes more neurotransmitter to be produced, while ritalin limits uptake of said neurotransmitter.
Tolerance levels off pretty quick, and goes back down with short breaks.
I’m pretty sure addiction is very rare, and not comparable with other prescription narcotics.
I’m not sure what you consider abuse. I guess college kids use it to help them get homework done, which sounds like a congruent context to me; only without the doctor approval. Taking too much has direct and uncomfortable side effects, at least for me. Whenever a I took adderall, I was extra careful to never accidentally taking an extra dose after doing so once on accident.
Having gone to the Internet for advice (and I don't mean just Googling symptoms and taking a guess, I mean those actual pay for medical advice sites), I have a handle on what your GP is for - they provide some sort of accountability and responsibility.
Once, at my wits end with a problem with my child I went to one such site even though I knew it was a bad idea - it's basically a stackoverflow but staffed by real doctors (apparently) and you pay per answer. It's not terribly expensive, but literally any advice you have will be totally vague and contain the instruction to "see your GP". No reputable professional would put their nuts on the line for a remote diagnosis.
