pasabagi

So, I agree that good standards and (to a lesser extent) algorithms come out of practice.

However, the basic point about a standard is not that it's perfect: it's a coordination mechanism. Companies go bust all the time, technology changes all the time, but if you have standard components, large parts of complex systems can be maintained indefinitely. Like, I have a rolling press that was made in 1840, and I can still replace the bolts for it, because the standard thread gauge has not changed.

I guess the nice thing about both algorithms and standards are they are the two places where the software world is not just burning people's lives on relentlessly reinventing the wheel. If you contribute even a fraction to the study of an algorithm, your work will be part of software in a thousand years. If you contribute to a standard, you are producing the conditions for a thousand other programs. Both of these things are basically common goods, and they help everyone. I think a culture of programming where it's less about founding the next over-capitalized unicorn, and more about creating a mutually supportive ecosystem, would produce very good software.

I actually think Germany would be really good at digital infrastructure if they stopped being afraid of friend computer. Germany is immensely proud of its history of creating standards - there's literally a place in berlin called DIN Platz. Germany is also very proud, and rightly so, in its history of mathematical innovation.

Everything that isn't dross in the computer world is either a well designed standard, or a well designed algorithm. If the German government adopted a sensible standard for government documents, for example, and mandated that all documents must be saved in it, that would already make a huge difference.

I'm not sure I can do it justice in an adhoc way, but it's important to keep in mind there are a few layers of irony that the piece is working on. First, Socrates, who does not write, is being presented as a character, in written form, by his disciple. So obviously Plato does not share Socrates' views on writing, even if he finds them interesting and valuable.

Second, in the dialogue, there are a bunch of examples of texts that are presented by the characters: the speech from Lysias, which Phaedrus has hidden in his cloak, then the speech from Socrates, that he disavows, then another speech, taking the opposite position. There's also the (fascinating) recounting of a legend about Thoth, and the invention of writing, which plays on the fact that the greek word for 'medicine' is the same as that for 'poison'.

It's a really rich text - as, I guess, you might expect from a really brilliant writer who was also a disciple of a philosopher who never wrote a word. I tend to think of it as a serious attempt to describe the conceptual differences between speech and writing - something people tend to collapse ('writing is recorded speech', etc).

Pluto? Plotto? Platti?

Seriously though, that's a horrible bowdlerization of the argument in the Phaedrus. It's actually very subtle and interesting, not just reactionary griping.

Trying to prove correlations between race and crime is literally the historical basis of criminology as a discipline. They failed, it's stupid, and now people know better.

You can commission as many studies as you like on astrology, and they'll all be meaningless.

I mean, it's not a very interesting research topic? People who are poor and young commit certain categories of crime more often. That has nothing to do with immigration or race or whatever.

German spelling is ridiculously easy, whereas English spelling is quite hard. I guess the equivalent inverse would be comma use in German.

I've read that big pharma are primarily patent companies: most of the actual research is done by universities, then most of the production is outsourced.

I think even Russia and the US still do intelligence sharing on a lot of stuff - and that's before you consider that the US seems to be in everybody's networks anyhow, so non-sharing is probably just sharing with a bit more skullduggery.

The expectations for hostage-takers are pretty low, whereas the expectations for police are, if not sky-high, at least that they won't kill or injure you.

Disappointment is often proportionate to anger.

There's a second point which is, from a political perspective, police behaviour can be easily changed. Desperate criminal behaviour cannot.

Democracy is not supposed to settle technical questions. It is supposed to settle questions about societal goals and moires.

As such, there's no need for anybody to know about anything technical. And they don't: the president of the US suggested injecting bleach. The prime minister of the UK bragged loudly about shaking hands with absolutely everyone.

The various interventions vis-a-vis night-time strolls were basically technical measures in the end of a widely-agreed upon goal: avoiding mass casualties. You can say you are fine with the casualties. You can become an expert and identify a mistake in the argumentation. You can't vote on what the facts are, and whether or not 'do not leave the house' moves case rates up or down is a fact.

Expertise exists. You can ask a hundred non-mathematicians what a circle is, and get a hundred incoherent answers.

Sometimes, you just have to recognize that you don't have the requisite training to respond to a problem, and just follow advice from people who do.

I think I'm pretty good for a layperson at statistics + public health stuff, and a lot of the precautions we ended up taking in the pandemic were news to me: for instance, the effect of masks on protecting others, the relationship of infection surges to mass casualty events, and so on.

I figure a lot of people are just not used to following rules (they're office workers who don't wear PPE at work, etc) so when they had to follow rules, they freak out.

No need to presume: you can read the article. "dissemination of defamatory fake news and another probe over possible obstruction, incitement and criminal organization."

Which is fair enough, I think.

Do you have the same opinion on Jan 6 rioters?