dthunt

I've done this for an hour or so on occasion. I don't find it a particular strain. I may be doing something different than what you are doing, though.

When I meditate, I usually notice my feet, for example. I notice my feet if I get a little bit jittery, and for me that's sufficient to cut a lot of the whammy out of strong emotion, agitation, moderate amounts of panic, pain.

I haven't noticed increased concentration skills, except as could be wholly explained by learning the skill "calm down on demand", but I'm not willing to write off that as a possibility without testing (a little late for me to test on myself, anyway!)

Name the next plausible explanation and how likely you think it is relative to 'save money, screw your data'. I think you'll have takers on a bet at those odds, given what you just said.

Retracted then. I hadn't noticed that.

Probably not training "matching", given that there is no place where you indicate what the correct thing was.

It could be gathering data about how people draw shapes in general, but it's not immediately obvious to me how much that can help.

Well, he's ALLEGED to have done that.

People are becoming increasingly interested in the case because it's looking probable that enforcement/prosecution has done something untoward.

Everybody has an interest in law enforcement operating under the rules that supposed to constrain its behavior.

If the prosecution can straight up lie to the court about how evidence is gathered with impunity, then at the very least it may be an effective strategy to raise the cost of effective defense.

More scarily, it may be used to cover up useful lines of defense.

In every case, you should imagine an innocent man accused, and consider whether the tactics used against him are designed to demonstrate the truth, to cast artifacts in a false light, or to raise the odds of conviction regardless of the truth.

We should never convict on the strength of the information that someone has been charged.

It may help to rewrite those in your head to, "as an experienced systems administrator who knows how these particular config files work" or perhaps "how config files work in general".

These are all questions of basic fact and they are all easily testable.

What do courts do when this situation comes up? Do they play warring experts, when (at least) one side definitely wants to perform a test, because they are confident that their interpretation is correct?

(ed: 'questions of basic fact' like, whether a server with this configuration is hittable from non-allowed IPs)

I am a strong advocate of the following principle:

Defeat your enemies.

Rackspace deserves some big props, here. More should follow their example.

It seems really unlikely to me that they would have set up this system the incredibly dumb way.

The end result is that the public doesn't know about the rule, so they see psychologists acting a certain way and frequently think it's actually epistemically bad, or impossible, to reason about the mental states of other humans based on their actions, writings, and other artifacts.

Imagine if computer security experts couldn't talk, in general, about the security of a line of products offered by a company, or about the probable cause of a specific issue that had been observed in a particular product.

The parallels ARE actually there; it's not as strange an analogy as it looks at first glance.

I understand some of the reasons the rule exists. I think this is probably not the best solution, in that it creates a public who have very strange ideas about psychiatry, and that is actually a great harm.

I'm neutral on most of this article, but like, specifically, if public perception is an issue, finding a better way to resolve the ethical dilemma that spawned the Goldwater Rule sounds like a pretty good idea to me.

APA should ditch the Goldwater rule.

If you ask people to estimate the number of protons inside the sun, you might develop a peak around some sorts of numbers, but it's not likely to be a particularly good estimate.

I am going to challenge that belief by asking you to do the following:

Try solving the blue and red pots problem, given only a single observation.

Now try again, this time with two observations.

If you can find that, provide a link. I strongly doubt people are particularly good (without applying some sort of rigor) at estimating beans in jars.

They're hypothetical inferences, but the downside to using actual realistic examples is that even when they're meticulously researched, people nitpick them to a degree that baffles me. Like, asserting "but the probability of the evidence is either 0 or 1, so it's clearly impossible to ever make any inferential reasoning work".

The examples here are well chosen to eliminate the usual attacks on inference. They're ODD. But they're not invalid.