If you do it scientifically, meaning by experimentation, you've really only shown that in all observed cases water boils when you add enough heat. It's an inductive process, which unlike deduction is never logically valid - excluding mathematical induction which is really more like deduction, since you can actually test all possible cases that way. It is a philosophical issue, but epistemology is the basis of the validity of science.
Personal anecdote, since there are some comments here by people claiming an early ADHD diagnosis might have changed their life: I was "diagnosed" with ADHD about five years ago, at around age 25, and it was a horrible experience. I'm not sure if I have ADHD, but at the very least was very depressed at the time, and they gave me some self-evaluation asking a bunch of questions like, "Do you have trouble concentrating? Does your mind wander?" Of course being very depressed I tended to be pretty hard on myself answering, they gave me the diagnosis, and at the first sign I gave of skepticism about it they basically ridiculed and humiliated me, telling me I was in denial and nothing in my life would ever change unless I started taking medication. They completely ignored any other problems I was having and other possible explanations once they pinned the ADHD label on me. In a conversation that lasted an hour, I didn't get a single word in after making the comment, "Well I'm not really sure if I have this..."
A few years later I did try taking some Adderall, unofficially acquired from a friend, and in three days it caused me to start having all kinds of mental health problems (OCD and Tourette's type symptoms, fyi) that I'm still not fully recovered from. Admittedly I think I took a bit too high of a dosage, but I'm scared to even try again if only three days of something could basically turn me halfway insane. Maybe if I'd started on only a half dose it wouldn't have happened, but I'm worried about the fact that such people were trying so hard to push a drug that ended up having those kinds of effects in only three days from only a slightly elevated dosage.
So I definitely think this whole thing is a huge pharma scam at this point. I'd be highly skeptical of any ADHD diagnoses, especially when they're all based on self-reporting (notoriously unreliable) and a bunch of therapists, teachers, etc. who are quick to jump to whatever explanation fits with their prejudices about a person. It scares me that they're pushing these drugs on people, especially at such young ages, not to mention how it prevents the real underlying problems from being solved.
I have to take your story with a big ol' bucket of salt, because you ignored medical professionals, and then tried to self-medicate with un-prescribed drugs of unknown dosage.
Point taken - I may have ADHD or I may not, as I implied I don't really know, and the bad reaction to adderall obviously isn't universal. Though I'll also say the dosage wasn't unknown, and the professionals gave me extensive reasons not to trust them. Drugs don't affect you differently depending on who prescribed them, and the main point of the story was that I didn't trust these people to accurately diagnose or prescribe anything. If they won't even let me question them about their diagnosis, I wouldn't trust them to listen to me about my reactions and side effects either.
This is a controversial subject though, so I'm going to step out now. Just wanted to share the story of my negative experience with it.
> the main point of the story was that I didn't trust these people to accurately diagnose or prescribe anything.
Your experience is an indictment of bad psychiatry, which nobody here would defend. But you explicitly say you wouldn't trust them to diagnose you with anything (I wouldn't either), so I'm not sure why you then draw the conclusion you did:
> So I definitely think this whole thing is a huge pharma scam at this point. I'd be highly skeptical of any ADHD diagnoses
(FWIW, your comment is gray as I write this; I didn't downvote you, but I wanted to explain why I think someone might have).
You are describing symptoms of depression and some mild or severe psychotic symptoms, combined with the very risky and assertive decision of self-medicating.
A bipolar disorder would explain these symptoms. Also bipolar is a very common comorbidity of ADHD, with overlapping symptoms. At the very least, the social problems that come with ADHD predispose for bouts of depression.
Taking destabilizing drugs like Ritalin or Amphetamines is also known to trigger manic episodes or other psychosis. Which is one of many reasons why medical professionals won't tell you to start at the final dose for the first few weeks...
My problem with Caplan's arguments on education, which I've admittedly only read a few of, is that he seems to derive them largely from an elitist, Ayn Rand-ian sort of worldview where most people are simply beyond hope and investing in their education isn't worth the resources (as priced by market forces). My view is more that most people have a distaste for learning, education and autodidacticism because they grow up steeped in a culture that discourages these things, while simultaneously rewarding the opposite sorts of behaviors. Though it seems to have gotten better in the past few decades with the rise in popularity of "geek culture." Rather than promoting only the top 5% or 25% of people achieving advanced educations, I'd rather look at the culture and socioeconomic factors that cause the bottom 95%/75% to not be as anxious about advancing their knowledge as the ones at the top.
The whole thing easily leaves him open to accusations of trying to build a world of grunt workers who will serve as cheap labor for those at the top, especially when you consider how much of people's potential isn't determined by their genetic gifts, but by the socioeconomic environment they're raised in, who their parents, teachers and peers are, etc. His suggestions seem like they would create a self-fulling prophecy towards a caste system, where as I'd rather see something more akin to "posthumanism for everyone."
My view is more that most people have a distaste for learning, education and autodidacticism because they grow up steeped in a culture that discourages these things, while simultaneously rewarding the opposite sorts of behaviors.
Caplan has a counterargument to this - twin studies and various observational studies that attempt to do similar things. He goes into detail occasionally on his blog, and also in his book:
(The focus of the book is not on education, but on how variation in parenting strategy does not affect adult outcomes. )
Also, your view is not incompatible with Caplan's "elitist, Ayn Rand-ian worldview". Caplan merely asserts that at the time of entering college, it's pointless for most people. The specific reason at which it became pointless for them is irrelevant - "socioeconomic factors", genetics or whatever, it's still a waste of money.
Interesting, and I'm glad to hear any counterarguments (no idea who downvoted you). I'll have to read the book and/or studies before I could give a good reply, but judging from the Amazon reviews, it looks like even he mitigates it in the book by saying some parental actions can have important effects (for an extreme example, being violently abusive to your kids). Given stuff like that, and a lot of the recent stuff in social influence on epigenetics[1], I'm a bit skeptical where to draw the line between nature and nurture. But I'll really have to read the book and twin studies before I could debate those points.
I had two ideas, not exactly sure how to get them to work though:
1) Replace the pointless hashing with some actually useful calculation or form of work. Trouble is, I'm not sure what kind of asymmetrically difficult function could be used instead of hashing that would have some value for society.
2) Replace the hashing with some kind of genetic algorithm or other AI solution search. So instead of trying to find the proper hash, you're trying to find the proper algorithm to some currently-posed problem. Miners who find the current-best solution can then be rewarded with some form of bitcoin, which can be traded among themselves as currency, or used to decide what the next problem the network searches for a solution to will be. I figure this would make the entire blockchain into a giant sort of AI/brain, with the problems it tackles being more or less democratically chosen by whoever wants to spend the most of their bitcoin for it. The spent bitcoin then goes to the people who find the best solutions, in addition to whatever small amount of new bitcoin is mined. And replace "bitcoin" with whatever the new name would be, of course.
May be possible, maybe not. There's basically no chance I'll be able to implement some version of either any time soon, so feel free to run with it if anyone thinks they can.
This and similar ideas are often passed around. There are a few cryptocurrencies which try to implement something like this (finding series of primes, for example).
There are a few problems with actually implementing your suggestions. You call hashing "pointless", but it is anything but that. Hashing, specifically SHA256 in bitcoin's case, has a well understood and possibly proven (?) level of difficulty. There is no known way to gain an advantage, other than simply throwing more computational power at the problem. Thus, because the problem being solved is arbitrary, random, and difficult, it takes a huge amount of computational power to make an invalid transaction.
Not only do you have to find initial "acceptable" hashes for your faked block, you have to create hashes of all the following blocks up until the present time, and push this version of the blockchain as legitimate until a majority of the network adopts it as the correct branch. The absolutely ridiculous computational power required to do this is what keeps transactions of cryptocurrencies safe. You don't just have to fake one hash, you have to find and fake an entire chain of them!
Many scientific problems don't have the same kind of guarantees about difficulty. And even if they are really, really hard, what happens when you find the answer? You'd essentially have to hard-fork all the clients. SHA256 and other hash functions used have a search space that is astronomically high, and is guaranteed never to be "completed".
Hashing is a way to make transactions safe, permanent, and unmodifiable because of the cryptographic properties which come with the field. There's very little chance of someone stumbling upon sequential solutions, and essentially impossible for someone to "derail" the blockchain due to those properties. The value that hashing provides are those guarantees.
This is why I'm just throwing the idea out there (though, as you say, it's probably not even a very original one). It would take some thought to figure out a way to make it work as well as the current hashing system. Perhaps "pointless" was a careless choice of words, but the incentive is to put all those cycles to a use that had more value for society, apart from the value of creating bitcoin itself. I forget the exact order of magnitude, but iirc it's something like tens of millions of dollars of electricity being used by miners each year, for no other purpose than to verify the blockchain. It'd be convenient if we could still have cryptocurrency, but all the computing power was going into something like BOINC instead. Hashing is used for good reasons, as you point out, but it's a wasteful use of resources, in my opinion. Even if it wasn't the best cryptocurrency, something that would crash and die with new scientific/mathematical advances, I'd still consider it successful if it got all those resources working on more valuable problems for a while.
It's definitely a half-baked idea. I'd like to take a shot at seeing if I could work out those details, but it's not the top priority on my list of projects. Maybe in a few years, if it is possible and no one else has managed it yet.
1) Protein folding, general scientific computing. Though of course there needs to be some coordinate way to agree on what problems to solve. This may require a central authority who would dictate what problems are worth how much, or maybe this would just then branch off into many different cryptocurrencies, each focused around a particular problem, with automated conversion between them so it all looks the same. Who knows!
Great - the HN title is no longer the above one, but now "We Aren't the World (2013)"... a non-descriptive one giving no idea of what the article is about, and furthermore assuming that "we" are all Americans, or at least one of the W.E.I.R.D. cultures described in the article.
I hate to complain, especially when I really do love this site and the community, but if someone is going to edit a headline, at least make it an improvement.
Yeah, I was already wondering how they were going to reconcile that particular speech with whatever nuances of the prize rules would be required to keep people from giving a speech like that one.
It gets weirder when you consider that a) an AI could have plausibly (though not likely) have generated such a speech in answer to a real question (for example, "discuss a flaw in the TED program", and b) no one rejected Watts' talk as unacceptable, though they probably would have if an AI had generated the same talk.
I am actively working on starting stuff I consider important, but the main things holding me back are:
1. Compile-time/linking errors with every C++ serialization library I've tried so far (boost, autoserial and cereal, so far). Half joking here, this has been screwing me up all week.
2. Lack of experience and lack of collaborators means projects that would take others days or weeks take me months or years. I hope I'm at least improving, though.
3. Lack of funding to hire said collaborators, and unwillingness to commit my few savings to something that may not have a guaranteed ROI. I'm not interested in seeking funding or trying something like YCombinator since I don't really want to share ownership in my vision, and figure it wouldn't be enough to last very long anyways.
4. Having to stop to deal with other life stuff, such as classes and moving to a new place.
Especially if you're using your monitors for gaming and such, in addition to work. I was a bit disappointed at first, having just upgraded to 3x 27" 1920x1080 monitors, thinking I could have had 2x 39" 4Ks for about the same price. But 30Hz would basically eliminate gaming on them, much less Eyefinity/Nvidia Surround. With the 3x 27" set up you can easily move them between rooms when you're not using all three, too.
This is just a guess, but I would suspect it's the fans. I remember seeing actual riots at my former school over a football (the American variety) game - the cars flipped, fires started, campus-police-in-full-riot-gear-firing-tear-gas kind. The fans probably just associate it as some brainiac professor declaring war on their culture and insulting their beloved players, and respond with hatemail and death threats.
> The fans probably just associate it as some brainiac professor declaring war on their culture and insulting their beloved players, and respond with hatemail and death threats.
With due respect to the fans... hatemail and death threats just make me think their culture is even more awful. Who's supposed to be convinced here?
You are assuming that the people who make the death threats are rational. They aren't. They are being who they are, which as you say, shows just how awful their culture is.
These are the people who would aid and abet a child molester if they thought it would help their 'team'.
This is highly anecdotal, but when I was younger (from ~5-15 years ago), I noticed I was far more likely to have people start fights* with me when I was in a good mood and enjoying myself. Yet this never seemed to happen when I walked around with a bit of an angry look in my eye, like I had been having a bad day and was just waiting for someone to start something. I even informally experimented with it, sometimes approaching people in a cheerful, happy way, and other times approaching them like I was in a really bad mood. Men seemed to treat me much better when I was faux-pissed, and much worse when I was in a good mood. The authors didn't experiment with this (that I could tell), but I'd hypothesize that males have the same reaction towards happy expressions in other males - they don't like them and it initiates aggressive tendencies.
*You might ask why I was getting into fights in the first place, and all I can say is that high school and college are rough and most of the population doesn't seem to be as sophisticated as the typical HN reader.
This always puzzled me.. when I have a great day, and walk around with a puffed chest smiling at people, women positively seem to ignore me. When have a bad day, or didn't wash my hair or something, it's the opposite, and I get eyed when I don't really want it. Once I walked around sulking, more or less staring at the ground, and a random young woman told me I was "very beautiful". I said thanks, but thought "WTF?! I look like shit."
Maybe people like it when they feel like they have to offer something to a person.
Disliking happy dudes seems natural enough. Imagine the inner monologue: "Oh ho ho, what are you so happy about? You smug bastard... projecting your mirth onto my group and me isn't going to work, see?" A grumpy man presents much less threat of trying to dominate the conversation with nonsense.
