aqsalose

Many of the issues sound like issues coming from using improvised civilian hobbyist tech and doctrine being in its infancy.

If current FPV drones are bit lackluster, it doesn't preclude 'next generation' that are purposefully developed for military use won't be useful. Also it sounds like the designation of "FPV drone" is specific to particular family of drones specific in current day and time, which may be something quite else next year. Like, obviously the next stage is a FPV drone with some capabilities of "reusable" drone or loitering munition author complains of (capability to hover easily)? Or "reusable" drone with FPV camera?

I think Third Republic France is a more apt comparison. Political fights about religion and content of education, check. Diverging media landscape aligned with party political identity and ideology, check. Major changes to civil service personnel after consequential elections (1879-1884), check.

Sounds sensible, bu the major unasked question it avoids is, was the current funding and organization structure of science in place when the past scientific achievements were achieved.

the impression I get from anecdotes and remarks is that pre-1990s, university departments used to be the major scientific social institution, providing organization where the science was done, with feedback cycle measured in careers. Faculty members would socialize and collaborate or compete with other members. Most of the scientific norms were social, possible because the stakes were low (measured in citations, influence and prestige only).

It is quite unlike current system centered on research groups formed around PIs and their research groups, an machine optimized for gathering temporary funding for non-tenured staff so that they can produce publications and 'network', using all that to gather more funding before the previous runs out. No wonder the social norms like "don't falsify evidence; publish when you have true and correct results; write and publish your true opinions; don't participate in citation laundering circles" can't last. Possibility of failure is much frequent (every grant cycle), environment is highly competitive in a way that you get only few shots at scientific career or you are out.

Yeah, the title is a bit hyperbolic. I have not used selection methods that much, but not too surprising they would have similar results to LASSO as selection or predictive method for people who think of it in terms of "feature development".

The distaste for step-wise selection comes from its typical use. If one reads Harrell's complaints quoted in the blog post carefully, quite many of them are less about the selection method but what analyst does with it, namely, interpretation of inferential statistics. When you see step-wise in the wild, practitioner often has used step-wise or other selection method and then reports the usual test-statistics and p-values for the final fitted model ... that are derived with assumptions that don't usually take into account the selection steps. It is quite unfortunate in fields where people put lot of faith in coefficient estimates, p-values and Wald confidence intervals when writing conclusions of their paper.

With LASSO and its cousins, the standard packages and literature strongly encourage the user to focus on predictions and run cross-validation right from the beginning.

From abstract (article is paywalled)

>Although modest bivariate associations were detected with educational attainment (r = .17) and body mass index (r = −.17), almost all regression-adjusted coefficients were nonsignificant. No clear pattern of moderation was detected between delay of gratification and either socioeconomic status or sex. Results indicate that Marshmallow Test performance does not reliably predict adult outcomes.

I guess the question is whether the covariates that were adjusted for in the regression are true confounders and not, say, something caused by ability to delay gratification.

>Well. You have to exist, which means you compete, which might mean you grow.

Why growth? At some point you would eventually hit perfect saturation anyway, the steady state where everyone already is buying your product to the extent anyone can buy it. I get that losing business is bad, and it's better to "overcorrect" to growth, but as long as you compete enough to keep approximately same market share against other competitors, selling inflation adjusted $30 buckets of bricks to each generation of kids with profit sounds like perfectly good business. Owner of the business would receive steady income selling the inflation adjusted $30 buckets.

I'd imagine you'd hit problems when the buckets of bricks you are selling are ~eternal and number of kids is no longer growing, so nobody needs new ones.

"it honestly comes from a place of ignorance, and I say that as basically a layman myself"

Here is an added complication: succinct technical communication can be efficient when communicating to peers who work on the exactly same domain, similar problems as you, and want digest your main ideas quickly.

On the other hand, for any particular paper, the size of the audience to whom it is directly relevant and addressed to can be small. The size of the audience who got to reading it anyway may be vast. (Maybe I am reading your paper because someone cited a method paper that in lieu of a proof or explanation writes just two words and citation to your paper. Maybe I am a freshly minted new student reading it for my first seminar. Maybe I am from a neighboring field and trying to understand what is happening in yours. Maybe I tried to find what people have already done with particular idea I just had and search engine gave your paper. And so on.)

During my (admittedly lackluster) academic career I recall spending much more time trying to read and understand papers that were not addressed to me than papers that were and where I enjoyed the succinct style that avoids details and present the results. (Maybe it is just an idiosyncratic trust issue on my part, because I am often skeptical of stated results and their interpretation, finding the methods more interesting). But that is not all.

I also noticed that genuine misunderstandings coming from "brief" communication of technical "details" were quite common; two different researches would state they "applied method X to avoid Y/seek Z[citation]" in exactly so many and almost exactly same words, where X,Y and Z were complicated technical terms, yet the authors would have quite different opinion what the meaning of those words were and what would be the intended reading and how and why X should be implemented.

In conclusion, I think many a scientific field would benefit from a style where authors were expected to clearly explain what they did and why (as clearly as possible).

However, I wouldn't then use version control software like Git for versioning analysis objects, as it is designed for text file source control and diffs.

(How one does a diff of a data object look like? If there is a natural text format to save it in, it still is usually quite messy, and Git doesn't really like Gb sized csvs.)

My preferred workflow is to version the source files in Git and store the associated data objects in a separate archive directory with meaningful name and the hash of commit of generating code as metadata attribute.

Now if you had a version control "IDE" software that would render changes in figures and other blobs nicely, then it would make sense to build a workflow around it.

In my experience, the trick is to move them without disassembly or with minimal disassembly (removing only moving parts like shelves that are planned to be removed) like any other furniture. Nothing weird with that: Most traditional furniture items made by a carpenter would be equally incompatible with disassembly.

> I guess it's referencing the fact that education today is largely about having textbooks shoved in front of you until you're able to recite enough of it.

I would argue contrariwise, the education today is bad because the textbooks are devoid of content and nobody can recite any of the little they have. For my parents' generation it was not unexceptional for people to cite poems from memory. I have bunch of their middle school books, and it appears they read more and longer texts for middle school than some university students today. During my grandfather's time kids were expected to recite a chapters of textbooks aloud in front of class, and he also remembered good bunch chunks from the Bible.

Compared to that, fill-in textbooks we used when I was in school seem a bit underwhelming -- and I am in my 30s. Kids today use e-learning environment (makes direct comparisons difficult).

Today, very few people appear to read anything, let alone books, even fewer remembers anything. Thus conversations about anything factual seem often pointless. But it is not like one can blame anyone for that, it only makes sense: Why truly should I remember anything when I can flip out a smartphone and hit query to a search engine? But people reading the same Wikipedia article or repeating the same news cycle talking points at each other makes for a boring conversation.

I suspect interacting with the real physical world and its realities and to realize one can affect it would be good, no matter what career they'd pick later. Picking a career in software development has been a good choice for bright kids for several decades now. In the long term view, the past is full of "good career choices for bright kids" that at some point no longer were not.

The physical world is not going anywhere.

>But I'm also a musician/artist and so I find some of these conversations odd. The problem with them I see is that they are oversimplified. To get better at drawing I often copy other works. Or I'll play a piece exactly as intended. Then I get more advanced and learn a style of someone I admire and appreciate. Then after that comes my own flair.

>So I ask, what is different between me doing it and a machine?

You are a human. If you practice art as a hobby you can feel pleasure doing it, or you can get informal value out of the practice (there is social value in showing and sharing hobbies and works with friends). One could try to formalize that value and make a profession out of it, get livelihood selling it.

When all that "machinery" to (learn to) produce artistic works was sitting inside human skulls and difficult to train, the benefits befell on the humans.

When it is a machine that can easily and cheaply automate ... the benefits are due to the owner of machine.

Now, I don't personally know if the genie can be put back into bottle with any legal framework that wouldn't be monstrous in some other way. However, ethically it is quite clear to me there is a possibility the artists / illustrators are going to get a very bad deal out of this, which could be a moral wrong. This would be a reason to think up the legal and conceptual framework that tries to make it not ... as wrong as it could be.

It could be that we end up with human art as a prestige good (which it already is). That wouldn't be nice, because of power law dynamics of popularity already benefit very few prestige artists. So it could get worse. But could we end up with a Wall-E world where there are no reason for anyone to learn to draw any well? When a kid asks "draw me a rabbit", they won't ask any of the humans around, they ask the machine. The machine can produce a much more prettier rabbit, immediately and tailored to their taste.

> But if I train my own neural network inside my skull using some artist's style, that's ok?

How well the network inside your skull can manipulate your limbs to reproduce good-quality work in some artist's style?

Our current framework for thinking about "fair use", "copyright", "trademark" and similar were thought about into existence during an era when the options for "network inside the skull" were to laboriously learn a skill to draw or learn how to use a machine like printing press/photocopier that produces exact copies.

Availability of a machine that automates previously hand-made things much more cheaply or is much more powerful often requires rethinking those concepts.

If I copy a book putting ink on paper letter by letter manually, that's ok, think of those monks in monasteries who do that all the time. And Mr Gutenberg's machine just makes that ink-on-paper process more efficient...

Sure, extroverted students have some advantage.

On the other hand, extroverted people have similar advantage in the real life. I myself am quite happy for every lesson where I was pushed to practice people-facing skills (presentations, demonstrations, etc). Even an introverted person can learn to talk about topic knowledgeably if they know it -- which often is valuable confidence-building experience to have. Despite the introversion, one can do it!

If the professor - lecturer administering the test is any good, empty rhetoric won't help too much. If they are lazy, students one can try to give "answers" without showing what they don't know in written exams, too.

Hereditary monarchy is only one kind of monarchy.

Early on, the Swedish king was elected at the Stones of Mora. The Holy Roman Emperor was nominally elected by prince-electors (who most of the time elected a Habsburg).

And even withing a hereditary framework, there are other alternatives to retirement in addition to outright abdication. An elderly monarch could for all intents and purposes retire and a let the crown prince (and I suppose in current British succession order, crown princess) rule, appointing them as a co-ruler.