dj-wonk

I don't want to name any particular people or groups, because everyone makes mistakes and has limitations.

I will say this: in my personal experience, I've been a part of groups that struggle in dealing with complex decisions. Many times they get bogged down when they don't find a clear answer that satisfies everyone or all criteria. In many cases, such groups don't have a clear leader or the leader lacks the skills, experience, and character to do what is necessary; namely, choose (and communicate) the least-worst decision that keeps the ball moving forward.

In such cases, it is not necessary (and unrealistic to expect) that everyone agree with every aspect of every decision. A leader needs confidence and persistence to make tough decisions, as opposed to abdicating leadership. Some examples of the latter include (1) ignoring a choice until some default decision is made implicitly or (2) simply choosing the idea from the most vocal person.

Put more broadly, in this context, leaders must balance four aspects: (a) scoping and framing a decision; (b) gathering diverse points of view; (c) building some degree of consensus or buy-in; and (d) making a decision. It appears to me that the Rust language team handled all four comprehensively.

No.

RPN and postfix notation refer to the same core idea. From Wikipedia: "Reverse Polish notation (RPN), also known as Polish postfix notation or simply postfix notation, is a mathematical notation in which operators follow their operands, in contrast to Polish notation (PN), in which operators precede their operands."

Can you please explain why you wrote "Reverse polish notation is an entirely different usage"? With a citation, preferably.

It does not necessarily mean a lack of trust. It could be different incentives or priorities.

For example, some users might desire major redesigns of past work but not bear the cost of the rework. As such, they might perceive some small improvement without any (direct) cost.

Personally, I think some groups have moved so far in the direction of community involvement that they forget the practical implications of diversity. Leadership is hard for many reasons — one big reason is that leading sometimes means making some people unhappy. Still, this is much better than inaction.

I am unfazed by this observation. When it comes to design, sometimes ‘perfection’ isn’t available.

By the way, the idea you mention may also be true for democracy: the quote goes something like “Democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.”

If you have a design option that has not already been considered, I’m all ears.

Can you share the context for the graph?

Do you have a formal definition for how you are using ‘fairness’?

But there is a downside, by your own logic. If you vote for a candidate that you disapprove of (don’t want to elect), you run the risk of increasing their support.

I appreciate your opinion, but I want to point out that our definitions of fairness and simplicity may vary. Much of scholarly work around elections systems strives to ground itself on particular formal criteria.

Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, as I understand it, applies quite broadly to voting systems. To put it simply, you can’t avoid it. You just decide what trade offs you want to live with.

Enlightened morality often means being mindful of tradeoffs.

Not doing an exhaustive search of academic literature because it is prohibitively expensive or time-consuming is a clear negative -- doing so may result in lower-quality research.

I personally see many good reasons to distinguish general intellectual property theft from using SciHub for academic research.

I appreciate some of what you say, but:

1. I'm skeptical of a claim such as "But the actual medium doesn't matter as much as the practice you follow". I recall hearing about studies that show tactile experience (physical writing for example or being physically present during a lecture) forms better memories, at least in many people.

2. I strongly disagree that the best way to store your ideas is to memorize them. First, memorization isn't feasible, information-wise. Second, memorization is not most people's general goal. I would suggest a more general goal is to recall the salient features of your ideas and connect them to your task at hand. This suggests a mix of storage mechanisms: some memorization (i.e. for indexing, summarization, and connecting) with other higher-bandwidth, less-error-prone storages.

To prove my second point with a counterexample: I highly doubt that visual artists can remember every brush stroke on their favorite canvases. It is more important, arguably, that they organize their work in a way that they can refer to it. And, for the purposes of creating future work, I doubt that memorizing exact details of previous work is the most important. Remembering the inspiration and the techniques is probably more important.

To save a some human parsing effort in interpreting the column names:

  CT = compile time
  RT = run time