astazangasta

6 ms·

1.
by astazangasta 7y ago
Actually, would you please ban me? I'm not sure i agree with you about ideology vs. curiosity, I'd say rather that ideology is one of the primary things I am curious about and something I appreciate about HN is that there are smar
2.
by astazangasta 7y ago
It's not a hand wave - my argument is that those things could all be better developed, and indeed have been, by programs that are directly focused on that kind of technology development. Ancillary technologies are nice, but why settle
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by astazangasta 7y ago
Yeah, where would we be without LASIK? I'll also note that that article notably elides things like ICBMs and the other myriad military applications, since it is clearly intended as a puff piece to make us view space technologies as ben
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by astazangasta 7y ago
Most industries get their start in the military because that is where the money always is; however, semiconductors have definitely moved on to other applications, whereas rocketry remains mostly about making missiles.
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by astazangasta 7y ago
Space enthusiasts are always trying to sell their fetish with this line, but the fact is that technology development is not some generic facility; if you develop technology devoted to getting things up into orbit, it will basically give you
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by astazangasta 7y ago
Exactly this; also, as a computational biologist I cringe at the stacking of dubious models that produced this "mapping". First is the "interactome", a terrible way to model biology, which is used to predict drug interac
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by astazangasta 7y ago
I find those terms particularly perplexing because the idea of ridiculing people for their sensitivity to particular political concerns is an exercise in demonstrating your sensitivity to particular political concerns. Cura te ipsum!
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by astazangasta 7y ago
This is in the category of "outrage outrage", where we are outraged that other people are getting outraged about things.
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by astazangasta 7y ago
I'm not sure what to do with this remark. You said my definition of social construction was untenable because the implications were too broad and you seemed to find that frightening. I responded by saying that social construction IS a
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by astazangasta 7y ago
Yes? And? This is one of the most profound and basic observations of twentieth century philosophy. That is what social construction is, it underlies our basic notions of perception and reality. Read this book: https://en.m.wikipe
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by astazangasta 7y ago
>Our definition of intelligence continues to refine itself to be a highly generalizable aptitude for certain abstract skills. This is exactly what social construction is: reifying a set of observations into an abstract notion. Intelligen
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by astazangasta 7y ago
I'm guessing you are not a parent. I have a toddler and a one month old. It is rewarding in many ways, but it is also crushingly boring, repetitive work. It's also overwhelmingly placed on women; men simply don't do as much c
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by astazangasta 7y ago
Claiming success is a social construct seems to me to be trivially true, not a staggering claim. Intelligence is less obvious since there is a vast literature around it, but, again, it is clearly a social construct; we must struggle to agre
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by astazangasta 7y ago
This is garbage. Contrary to popular belief, remission is in fact common in schizophrenia, so n=2 demonstrates precisely nothing. In addition, there is no evidence that schizophrenics have any brain dysfunction other than that caused by tak
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by astazangasta 7y ago
No, this is not right. Most power generation is done by steam in the US (85%). Steam can get much hotter than boiling water, and it is cheap and makes no waste.
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by astazangasta 7y ago
You're right, I didn't read enough or do enough back-of-the-napkin math. I read more; this seems plausible in life cycle terms, but now I have doubts about the economics. At $30/ton, 30Gtons becomes $900 billion a year. For c
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by astazangasta 7y ago
Thanos doesn't understand exponential growth. If you actually want to have an effect, cutting a population in half does nothing, it'll just grow back in whatever the doubling time is, probably on the order of decades; you need to
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by astazangasta 7y ago
This is exactly the kind of logic that led to Silent Spring. "We think we have a viable solution, we haven't really evaluated any of the side effects, but we need to act, and act fast!" We went through this with DDT. It worke
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by astazangasta 7y ago
This seems like it would fail energetically; the amount of energy required to mine and transport a bunch of rock to a beach would surely exceed the amount of CO2 sequestered.
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by astazangasta 7y ago
The problem is that people routinely underestimate the scale of vested interest. Bill McKibben famously quantified the problem as the amount of actual capital (as in, can be used as collateral) in the ground for some companies - trillions o
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by astazangasta 7y ago
Like most grand theories of history most of this is only works as a result of approximation. For example, the Unification stuff appears to me to be pure garbage. There is no moment in history when people went from cleanly separating outside
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by astazangasta 7y ago
Given the gaps in our knowledge of early life, a definite statement in either direction is unlikely to be in the offing. However, terrestrial life is decidedly unlikely. Life is decidedly unlikely, and no one has so far suggested an even re
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by astazangasta 7y ago
This is idiotic. We don't need a recession to clear detritus from the economy, that should be the result of routine investment. We get recessions because the economy as a whole overcommits to speculation because investors have too much
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by astazangasta 7y ago
>the same as the privacy populists who obsess about data, most of whom lived in advanced democracies in which the data isn’t used for serious assaults on people This observation betrays a serious misunderstanding of the way democracy fun
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by astazangasta 7y ago
Saudis buy weapons BECAUSE they are educated in liberal institutions. Elites around the world have been sending their children to be educated in the West for centuries; what they learn here is an affinity for Western elites, because they ar
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by astazangasta 7y ago
No. Plato wanted to present an idealised world ruled by philosophers like himself. He wanted to deny that this world was equivalent to the highly unpopular government that had been imposed on Athens by their nemesis Sparta. That is, he wish
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by astazangasta 7y ago
It could still be an artifact of something else, e.g. differential digestion associated with age produces length and GC artifacts.
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by astazangasta 7y ago
I agree we can learn from studying Riefenstahl, and also that the film is amazing, but i deny that we are learning about "human nature", a concept which I generally abhor and which is used to end sociological arguments at a desire
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by astazangasta 7y ago
Plato was a young man when Socrates died. Imagine a bitter fascist a generation later attempting to keep alive the cult of a noted collaborator put to death for his collaboration. Of course he will say Socrates did not support the tyranny.
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by astazangasta 7y ago
This article is moronic. We are supposed to learn about human nature from Leni Riefenstahl, a propagandist whose films were designed to make the Nazis look as good as possible? You know what is unsustainable? Fascism. Literally. It had no e

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