spruciefic399

To be consistent, you'd have to leverage your arguments against other fields with replication crises, which include neuroscience and oncology. It's really true of the biomedical sciences in general.

Psychology has a history of being sort of self-analytical (which makes sense if you're a field studying human behavior). Meta-analysis, for example, was largely incubated in psychology before it started expanding into other disciplines.

The criticism I'm aware of is really being leveled at the idea that this is somehow unique to psychology. It's like killing the messenger, or someone who is trying to fix the problem.

I was sort of on board with the two-paper rule until I got to the arguments about the reviews. Maybe in his mind integrating literature into a cohesive summary (ala meta-analysis) is a novel contribution, but if not, the attitude behind the two-paper rule is part of why science is in such crisis. The author is right, that the interpretation of the literature should be based on an accumulated read, and not one or two papers (unless they're reviews or meta-analyses).

Honestly, I might just jump in and learn Rust.

I think it's a good place to start with memory management issues because you have to deal with it but good practice is enforced. C/C++ is the obvious alternative for that level of programming, but it's less constrained, which is better in some ways but bad in others. If you're wanting to learn Rust eventually, you might as well start there.

If you're wanting to not start with the low-level memory management stuff, and want an introduction to programming per se, there's lots of options.

One thing to think about is OCaml. It's a nice language, similar to Rust in some regards, and in fact Rust was originally written at least partially in OCaml, and for awhile was kind of discussed as a derivative of OCaml in some places. You'll get a mixed imperative-functional kind of introduction without going to quite as low of a level.

Another approach is to to just learn a language. In that case I'd probably recommend Python (probably Python 3) or javascript, because there will be a ton of resources and the skills will directly transfer. If you're looking for something that's maybe more niche but "clean" you could try Julia or Nim. Julia's very numerics focused and is getting used in that area, but doesn't get used out of that, at least so far. Nim is very very niche but a good language, similar to Python but faster and cleaner and some ways. Another thing to think about is Scala, which might transfer to Rust in some ways better than the others (except OCaml).

Honestly, though, I might just start with Rust. It will be heavy going at first, but I think learning the memory stuff is very very useful later. It depends, though. I think you have lots of good options. What's most important is to just dive into something that's interesting to you and start creating stuff, regardless of how small it is. A lot of concepts will transfer across languages.

Unfortunately, I think you're right. From my perspective, this is exactly the sort of government-sanctioned monopoly / rent-seeking that's causing so much income inequality and economic pathology. The government should be encouraging competition, not destroying it.

I think the idea of intellectual property per se is fundamentally flawed, but I can see patents as incentives. This just shifts too much power to trolls and undeserving patents.

Reading through that paper I'm not sure exactly what's new about it above and beyond what has been in a lot of the evolutionary algorithm literature, other than maybe formal proofs (which would be important). I'm sure I'm missing something though because this isn't my area.

I think the problem with that argument is that the reasons an individual might be good allocating their own capital are distinct from the reasons they have capital, or what is justified, in the sense of ethical or societally defensible.

A successful white-collar criminal can be said to be good at capital allocation, to make an extreme example.

My argument is not that wealth means someone is criminal (although I do think criminality has as a goal wealth rather than poverty, which is the inverse but relevant). However I do think there are lots of hidden costs that people advertently or inadvertently manage to get out of paying for, and taxes are meant to recognize that fact.

The bailouts of the great recession are good examples of this to me in some sense. The government saved certain businesses, or ameliorated their crash. Whether or not this was the right decision is one thing, but given that they did get bailouts (or outs), suggests that what we should expect is taxes and regulation to support these kinds of things. There are lots of other things like this that conveniently get glossed over, like hidden environmental costs, education and infrastructure, research, etc.

I find it incredibly manipulative, for example, for arguments to be made against net neutrality on the grounds that telecom companies somehow bootstrapped their way up from nothing, when the internet itself was a government invention, and much of their infrastructure is made possible by public right-of-way laws or other privileges given by municipalities.

I think the fundamental problem with US society today is an extreme form of survivorship or fundamental attribution bias, where we grossly overattribute success to individual characteristics and not other factors. Then we get locked into these strawman debates that pit extreme capitalism against communism, as if there's no moderated grey area, that our only choices are complete equality of wages etc. or winner-takes all gross inequality.

What I increasingly see in the US are the haves and the have nots, and I no longer believe that the haves, by in the large, deserve what they have in a way that the have nots do not. Income inequality, to me, is bad not just because of the disparity itself, but because it tends to exaggerate market errors in valuation.

We tend to have these conversations and HN and elsewhere where we look at these examples of downward mobility and point to everything someone did wrong, but then do not turn to management, administration, business, etc. and ask "did they really do everything right"? We also tend to act as if, if they really made an error, that is really worth the downward mobility they accrued.

People drink bleach to cure autism. Should we ban bleach?

First, there's a difference between allowing the sale and distribution of a substance at all and selling it with a claim. All I would say is that [almost?] no substance's sale should be banned. Maybe taxed or something.

Second, this is going to sound harsh to some, but I think at some point, if someone buys arsenic to cure baldness, it's their responsibility.

It's fairly common for people to seek expert advice on something not because it's legally mandated, but because there is a culture and individual understanding that something is outside of your ability/skill to do without severe negative consequences. I have someone else do my taxes because I don't want to screw something up. You can represent yourself in a court of law, but in most/many cases it's inadvisable. If I need to have certain things done on my house, I hire an expert because I don't want to cause damage and/or injury. I think a similar cultural norm needs to exist regarding substances and health care more broadly.

To me there's something fundamentally illogical about the current approach to drugs, because if taken to its logical conclusion, it involves banning people from purchasing any substance unless they have appropriate credentials. The government just allows exceptions to the logic (e.g, alcohol, household chemicals, etc.) because to enforce it would lead to a lot of uproar. That seems really legally unsound to me. The more sound approach would look totally different.

My thoughts:

1. In general I don't see the government's role being to police snake oil salespersons. Fraud in the form of inaccurate ingredient lists, etc. but not the snake oil itself (people should be able to sell snake oil, but it should actually be snake oil). I mean, when you have people drinking bleach for various conditions, can you really say the current regime is working? What about physicians overprescribing opioids or other drugs? It's pretty clear it doesn't work, IMHO. People need to be educated, not policed.

2. However, I can see regulating claims at the point of sale without regulating substances. For all the criticisms and controversy over vitamins, I think that's the regulatory regime that should be applied to all substances. Prevent use claims on product, regulate accuracy of ingredient lists but not sale of product per se.

3. We currently have a process for determining ability to consent due to neurodegenerative disease, genetic disorders, psychiatric disorders, etc. This could easily be applied to substance use. It seems to me the better way to approach substances is to assume people know what they're doing, and if their use gets problematic enough, approach it as a loss-of-ability-to-consent issue just like if someone had severe Alzheimer's. Get them assessed by psychiatrists or psychologists, and require it to go through a legal proceeding. That's imperfect, but better to me than just assuming everyone is a criminal.

4. I wish all the money that was going into drug enforcement and FDA regulations would go into research, education, prevention, and treatment. I think we'd have far fewer problems if the FDA were focused on drug use as a public health problem rather than a criminal/regulation problem. Educate, prevent, treat.

The current drug regulation regime strikes me as backwards--it seems that the more appropriate assumption should be to not regulate a substance, until it can be shown to be harmful (I'm not talking about label accuracy; I see that as more of a truth-in-labeling issue).

To me, cannabis illustrates how absurd the current drug regulation paradigm is. The idea that it would be classified as a Schedule I substance is ridiculous. But to get the FDA to change anything, you have to have people engaging in illegal behavior, to create a demand for specific legislative action about a specific substance, to drive a market for a derivative chemical, to petition to the FDA, to begrudgingly change the scheduling.

I've come to the conclusion that drug scheduling and the war on drugs is an economic failure, leads to police abuse and socioeconomic injustices, and acts to reinforce monopolies in the health care market, by ceding power over access to specific providers.

Meta-analysis as we know it today is largely as it is because of psychologists using it to study therapy effects.

Referring to Zimbardo and the Stanford Prison Experiment as the "emblem of its field" is a bit strange in my opinion. It's like referring to Snapchat as the emblem of computer science.