astazangasta

Actually, would you please ban me? I'm not sure i agree with you about ideology vs. curiosity, I'd say rather that ideology is one of the primary things I am curious about and something I appreciate about HN is that there are smart people here willing to discuss it.

But I do think my comments suffer from a meanness I'd like to avoid, and that my use of this site is something like a nicotine habit; I'd appreciate the nudge towards quitting.

It's not a hand wave - my argument is that those things could all be better developed, and indeed have been, by programs that are directly focused on that kind of technology development. Ancillary technologies are nice, but why settle for ancillary development that MIGHT yield things that are useful, instead of directly focusing your technology development on those useful things in the first place?

Yeah, where would we be without LASIK? I'll also note that that article notably elides things like ICBMs and the other myriad military applications, since it is clearly intended as a puff piece to make us view space technologies as benevolent and positive.

As for my tone, perhaps you are right that I don't need to employ ridicule; but I wish to, because I feel contempt for this position so strongly I want to make it known. Space fetishism is a diversion that exists to bilk engineers into careers and positions that are in aid of the military.

Most industries get their start in the military because that is where the money always is; however, semiconductors have definitely moved on to other applications, whereas rocketry remains mostly about making missiles.

Space enthusiasts are always trying to sell their fetish with this line, but the fact is that technology development is not some generic facility; if you develop technology devoted to getting things up into orbit, it will basically give you the expertise to do that. It doesn't, say, develop your semiconductor design, biochemistry, medicine, agriculture, or whatever else your country might need. It basically helps you build weapons, the main reason people get so excited about rocketry. This is the last thing India needs.

Exactly this; also, as a computational biologist I cringe at the stacking of dubious models that produced this "mapping". First is the "interactome", a terrible way to model biology, which is used to predict drug interactions, a highly dubious proposition, which is used to identify similarly-acting molecules in foods, again highly dubious - this isn't even GIGO, it's GIGIGIGO. And at the end of the day, none of this crummy methodology is going to result in any wisdom superior to "eat more kale". It's unfortunate that this is the prism certain investigators have trapped themselves in.

I find those terms particularly perplexing because the idea of ridiculing people for their sensitivity to particular political concerns is an exercise in demonstrating your sensitivity to particular political concerns. Cura te ipsum!

This is in the category of "outrage outrage", where we are outraged that other people are getting outraged about things.

I'm not sure what to do with this remark. You said my definition of social construction was untenable because the implications were too broad and you seemed to find that frightening. I responded by saying that social construction IS a theory with broad implications and gave you a reference to read, since you seem to be unfamiliar with these concepts. Your response seems a non sequitur.

>Our definition of intelligence continues to refine itself to be a highly generalizable aptitude for certain abstract skills.

This is exactly what social construction is: reifying a set of observations into an abstract notion. Intelligence is a social construction.

I'm guessing you are not a parent. I have a toddler and a one month old. It is rewarding in many ways, but it is also crushingly boring, repetitive work. It's also overwhelmingly placed on women; men simply don't do as much child care by a factor of probably ten. I'm pretty sure no woman is trying to have her cake here, and every single one would choose to have help so they could do anything else on occasion.

Claiming success is a social construct seems to me to be trivially true, not a staggering claim. Intelligence is less obvious since there is a vast literature around it, but, again, it is clearly a social construct; we must struggle to agree on a useful definition of intelligence, therefore it is a social construct.

I'm also not sure what "scientific evidence" would look like here. You seem to have had some sort of allergic reaction to the assertion of social construction and retreated instinctively to familiar but hollow epistemic grounds.

This is garbage. Contrary to popular belief, remission is in fact common in schizophrenia, so n=2 demonstrates precisely nothing. In addition, there is no evidence that schizophrenics have any brain dysfunction other than that caused by taking neuroleptics for decades.

No, this is not right. Most power generation is done by steam in the US (85%). Steam can get much hotter than boiling water, and it is cheap and makes no waste.