The "backfire effect" is mostly a myth, a broad look at the research suggests - <AUTHOR> https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/03/the-backfire-effect-is-mostly-a-myth-a-broad-look-at-the-research-suggests/ <comment><USER2> This is like one of those Knights and Knaves logic puzzles we used to do at school:

Amy believes the backfire effect is real, whereas Ben believes it is fake. Amy reads an article saying the backfire effect has been disproven, then passes her new opinion on to Ben. What will be Ben's revised opinion of the backfire effect be if 1) the backfire effect actually exists, 2) the backfire effect doesn't exist.

<comment><USER3> I find this premise amusing... I find it amusing because my ex (whose name really is Aimee) often had opinions that my life experiences and education suggested to me were suspect. Aimee used to do a bunch of reading, but the material she read was often from sources or authors I didn't find credible and thus while their arguments seemed plausible, they weren't enough to invalidate my original opinion.

My name really is Ben. My thoughts and opinions on such matters were largely unaffected by hers in many cases, unless she presented credible evidence that led me to re-evaluate my opinion, which did occasionally happy. Often though, it was just "someone else agrees with me, thus I'm right," which does nothing to sway my opinion.

Two people having the same opinion doesn't make them right and doesn't negate my opinion. It just means they both disagree with me. Humanity also believed in the geocentric model of the universe at one point. That doesn't make it right. It took one person to change the entire opinion of the world to the heliocentric model. Now admittedly, I'm not Copernicus, but we're all capable of finding evidence to support or refute our opinions on the world. It's just that very often people use the opinions of others as support for their own instead of exercising critical thinking and forming their own opinions.

<comment><USER4> The thing is, forming your own oppinion is _hard_ and you need a great deal of insight to reach some form of truth.

I, for example, if I lived a couple of hundred years back, would have probably believed the world is flat, since, well, it's the easiest oppinion to have by just looking around. The model we have now is incredibly sophisticated and not at all intuitive, we just think it is because we're used to it. Things that we are used to seem the most obvious and simple in the world.

We are limited with how much we can dig deep into stuff. So many times we have to reffer to other people that know what they are doing. I, sometimes, even reffer to myself at some different point in time. If I know at some time I looked deeply at some problem and reached a conclusion then, I will just take it for granted and not always retrace my thought process. It's a useful mental shortcut, but one that can leave me making oppinions on old or incomplete facts.

<comment><USER5> People did not really believe the world was flat hundreds of years ago.

Similarly the "new" world was in regular contact with the old for the last several thousand years. It's only 53 miles from North America to Asia, even less if you include the two islands between them.

PS: We have a lot of ideas about how wrong people used to be. But, I suspect most people never really formed an option on most of this stuff because they never really considered the question.

<comment><USER6> If they were in regular contact, why did smallpox have such a devastating effect on Americans?

<comment><USER5> Population density. Smallpox dies out with lot's of tiny isolated communities with minimal contact to each other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This link isn't terribly blogspammy or anything, but the original article has more information: [https://fullfact.org/blog/2019/mar/does-backfire-effect- exis...](https://fullfact.org/blog/2019/mar/does-backfire-effect-exist/)

And the original paper: [https://fullfact.org/media/uploads/backfire_report_fullfact....](https://fullfact.org/media/uploads/backfire_report_fullfact.pdf)

<comment><USER8> It's more readable, better organized, and shorter, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> So someone named Amy Sippet who works at a charity called Full Fact decided it's mostly a myth, not after conducting studies or independent research but after reading just 7 previous studies on the backfire effect and noting that some studies didn't seem to her to support it and that most of the studies she read were conducted in the US. The article links to and quotes from her twitter account.

This major breakthrough in the social sciences shares space in the very same article with an observation about how you can use Instagram to find "the internet's darkest corners." and some random stuff about Apple.

Maybe it's just the backfire effect here, but I'm not really convinced.

<comment><USER10> Limiting a literature review to 7 studies based on frequency of citation is pretty understandable, especially for a relatively young research topic. Of the 2 studies which showed a significant backfire effect, the findings of the first were considered "overstated and oversold" by its own authors and the second only found evidence of the effect in one of four situations. The second was also partially replicated in a later study which found no evidence of the backfire effect.

That being said, the author of the review probably would not want you to be convinced by a single pop-sci piece covering her work. This "major breakthrough," as you describe it, does not in fact share space with any tweets or mentions of Instagram, but can be found here: [https://fullfact.org/media/uploads/backfire_report_fullfact....](https://fullfact.org/media/uploads/backfire_report_fullfact.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> In an age when nothing seems to replicate, this wouldn't surprise me. But

1\. There is an obvious conflict of interest in having a fact checking organization claim to "debunk" studies showing that fact checking is ineffective.

2\. This "refutation" is a press briefing, not a peer reviewed study, and doesn't have a lot of facts to back up the claim, other than looking at the N difference in only 7 handpicked studies.

This is an amusing example of what happens when so called authorities are held to account. Let's say someone reports that fact checking organizations are a waste of taxpayer dollars. Then the fact checking organization comes out with a 'Fact Check: False'. It seems there should be some prohibition about being an authority on criticisms of yourself.

<comment><USER12> I've always struggled with the phrase 'replication crisis.' Really we have a 'mindset to approach science crisis.' The replication crisis is a couple of things to me...

1) A problem with how research is published and treated as 'new knowledge' \- some of which is being solved (slowly) by efforts such as the OSF. Other efforts include registered reports, journals for nonsignificant findings, etc. The problem is journals seek to publish a 'contribution' and define contribution in a way that misrepresents science.

2) A problem with the promotion and rewarding of academics...see 1 and also the drive to produce work in academia results in rewarding minuscule steps that don't have larger coherence because the paper not the impact is rewarded. People get tenure for publications not scientific discoveries. This obviously links to 1

3) Often replication failures are a feature not a bug - but fundamentally we think about and talk about science in way to absolutist of a frame. This is especially a problem in social sciences which try and perform 'science' to gain equal treatment to 'hard science.' They aren't worse or better...they are different, their science is harder because context matters - but it is still science. There are myriad studies in psychology performed on white men from Harvard in the 40's (forgive my facetiousness). If I rerun the experiment and it 'fails to replicate' is the theory 'wrong', 'invalid', 'incomplete', or context specific? The choice of term there is critical to a set of philosophical beliefs about science that can actually imperil science by making different experimental results into an _inherently_ bad thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This all depends on how you measure it. Take Roe v Wade for example. Abortion pre-Roe v Wade was really not that big of a political issue. Just yesterday I was listening to the radio on a long drive and a company called "Patriot Network" was advertising a cellphone network for "Patriots". The reason? Verizon and other big phone companies donate to Planned Parenthood.

<comment><USER14> Part of the reason it wasn't a very big issue pre-Roe v Wade is that on-demand abortions were illegal in 46 states prior to it.

<comment><USER15> "In 1971, delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention in St. Louis, Missouri, passed a resolution encouraging "Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such conditions as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother." The convention, hardly a redoubt of liberal values, reaffirmed that position in 1974, one year after Roe, and again in 1976." [https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious- ri...](https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real- origins-107133)

<comment><USER16> There is an enormous amount of nuance in that statement. The real change that occurred was that nuance evaporated from the discussion of the subject.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Meta -- but does anyone else get tired of the word 'myth'?

These days, instead of opinions and arguments being countered, we have 'myths' busted.

It's even weirder when it is 'myth' you've never heard of.

<comment><USER18> Yes, it's tiresome. Not refering to this one in particular, but many internet champions of truth aggrandize their Goliath to post shitty myth busting articles. In a recent post I chose to say "mistaken belief" to avoid sounding like captain fact-checker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> To paraphrase:

> The effect: " _An ideologue believes a (wrong) thing. You tell them, no. > They double down. Your effort to refute has backfired._ " This is actually > rare.

It doesn't matter, because we've all been there. We've all experienced clashes of opinion, and none of us like being wrong, so we resist adjusting.

Lots of us do it. It's a natural part of childhood. Being afraid of the dark. Believing in ghosts. Santa Clause. The Easter Bunny. The Tooth Fairy. How did you cope?

What about other aspects of belief? Religion? What aspects of religion does one regard as history? How many people remain religious in the face of contrary evidence?

Suddenly, this effect seems less rare.

<comment><USER20> The backfire effect is obviously not universal, otherwise it would be impossible to teach for example Newtonian physics. So if you present strong enough proof people will change their minds.

I think the problem is that people don't really learn what a strong proof is, so when two people who each have a weak understanding of the topic tries to argue both will see that the other is ignorant but not that themselves are ignorant. After the discussion both will have correctly refuted a lot of claims from the other side, thus "strengthening" their own views. If this often happen to you then you are likely not as well informed as you think you are.

In short, I believe that "you can't reason someone into a position that you didn't reason yourself into" is true, while the popular "you can't reason someone out of a position that they didn't reason themselves into" is wrong.

<comment><USER21> Not necessary. Science advances when entrenched proponents of the old theory die out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't know. Having read it only makes me believe more strongly in the backfire effect.

</comment><comment><USER23> "Fact finding organization finds that fact finding matters, despite some rumors that facts don't matter."

Right.

</comment><comment><USER24> "Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider." -Francis Bacon

</comment><comment><USER25> The term used for this by philsophers at least after hegel is "the dialectic". I've always thought that many philsophers uncritical acceptance of a dialectical process within the world was absurd. I am happy to see some evidence from science indicating this to be the case.

</comment><comment><USER26> Belief in the backfire effect confirms the bias many people have towards believing their political opponents are idiots, immune to rational thought.

<comment><USER27> That's only true if you believe your own side and yourself aren't just as vulnerable.

<comment><USER26> I didn't say one side experiences this more than another.

There are rational people on all "sides". Rational people may come to disagree with each other if they have different information available to them, or if they simply have different priorities.

Anybody who thinks _all_ of their opponents are irrational, by virtue of being their opponent, are themselves irrational in that respect. However that says nothing about the political distribution of this particular cognitive bias. I have made no claims concerning that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> "I didn't think the backfire effect was real, but now I'm not so sure."

Is there a catchy name to describe the effect of disbelieving social science research?

<comment><USER29> Not sure, but social science research is currently in the midst of a replication crisis. And not necessarily due to anyone acting in bad faith: you can run an experiment twice a few months apart and get opposite results. No idea on how to fix, but probably needs to invest in more robust experiment design, larger samples, and perhaps more advanced statistical methods. Sadly all of those demands cut against the "publish or perish" mentality in academia which often favors quantity over quality. A shame, since most social science researches want to do the best work possible but are constrained by $$$ and the broader culture of expectations in academic research.

<comment><USER30> It's in a replication crisis because pretty much none of it is science ( no replicable testing possible - hypothesis, experiment, theory ). It's why Richard Feynmann associated social science with pseudoscience.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWr39Q9vBgo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWr39Q9vBgo)

Because real science destroyed the credibility of religion and religion in much of the world is no longer a credible social control tool, the elites needed a new form of religion to control society. That new religion is social "science". Whereas religion controlled everything from economics, schooling, family, culture, society, law, etc, now they all fall under the pseudoscience/religion called social "science".

\</comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---

Reply to ziddoap.

Considering you tossed around "illumati-esque", I doubt you are interested.

I consider social science to be a pseudoscience for the same reason richard feynmann did. Did you bother watching what he had to say?

Social "science" is a humanities. It belongs in the category with philosophy, ethics, literature, religion, etc.

Just because I said it is a pseudoscience doesn't mean that I think it is useless or bad necessarily. No more than I think literature, ethics, philosophy or even religion is bad.

I just think social "science" is a "religion" trying to latch onto the good name of real science. Just like creationism "science" or all the other fake "science" trying to gain credibility by associating itself with science.

<comment><USER31> I see this position somewhat often, almost unavoidably accompanied by a reference to Feynman. The position is, of course, pure nonsense if you take a few moments to think it through.

Not only has the world moved on drastically from when Feynman, a non-expert in the area, wrote that essay, but it is also ludicrous to claim that a part of existence is unamenable to scientific study. If it exists and has an effect, it can be studied. There is no reason to believe human behaviour and thought is beyond this.

<comment><USER32> >Not only has the world moved on drastically from when Feynman...

You're right, social science got even less replicable and less scientific.

>If it exists and has an effect, it can be studied.

Yes, you're right. But that doesn't mean that you can ground it in empirical evidence or effectively apply the scientific method of inquiry. Philosophy is a method of studying human behavior -- it is not, however, science. And for substantially the same set of reasons the social sciences are also not science.

<comment><USER31> > You're right, social science got even less replicable and less scientific.

You'll need to substantiate this claim, of course.

> Yes, you're right. But that doesn't mean that you can ground it in empirical > evidence or effectively apply the scientific method of inquiry.

Why not?

> Philosophy is a method of studying human behavior -- it is not, however, > science. And for substantially the same set of reasons the social sciences > are also not science.

You are simply repeating the old misconception I've hinted at: that human behaviour is off-limits to scientific inquiry, even though it is real and physical. I fail to see why this would be the case. We are, after all, talking about measurable, quantifiable things inputs and outputs regarding human behaviour.

<comment><USER33> Because most humans behave sufficiently different from each other. Even if you experiment on a subset of humans and get knowledge about this subset, a different subset of humans could react completely different. It's so bad that even the same subset of humans could react completely different if you do the same test 50 years later.

<comment><USER31> > Even if you experiment on a subset of humans and get knowledge about this > subset, a different subset of humans could react completely different.

They _could_ , but that does not mean they _do_. There are quite obviously rules and patterns to much of human functioning. Denying so seems like human hubris.

Even if each human displays unique behaviour for a particular trait, knowing that it is so for that particular trait is useful and therefore still amenable to scientific exploration. Even if humans reacted randomly in some situation, the random behaviour would be subject to a probability distribution and knowing it would be useful.

It's hard for me to see where exactly the leap to "it's impossible to study human behaviour scientifically" is necessary, particularly when we have so much evidence to the contrary.

<comment><USER33> It's not science if you don't reliably get the same output if you provide the same input. It's useful, sure. But it's not science.

<comment><USER31> Sorry, but this just sounds like a deepity. Science is a _process_ , not a result.

It holds for most of science most of the time that you don't reliably get the same output if you provide the same input (because you don't know all the variables or the entire set of equations). Only when a phenomenon is completely known does this stop being true.

But when is a phenomenon completely known? After all, for a long time we've known classical mechanics to be completely known... Except it wasn't. And during the time we thought it was, you could get into exactly the type of situation you describe above: for the "same" input, you could get a different output, depending on the components of the stress-energy tensor you were not aware were relevant. The effect was subtle there of course, but there are many examples where it's not (e.g. the entirety of biology and medicine).

So I disagree with this description of science.

EDIT: Also, it completely slipped my mind the first time around because it's such a stupidly strong counterargument, but by your definition the entirety of modern physics (quantum mechanics, quantum field theory and beyond) is not science.

<comment><USER33> Science is useful because it has the power to predict. It gains this power from getting the same output when providing the same input. If what you are doing doesn't have the power to predict it's not science. You can still apply the scientific method to what you are doing and if you're applying that method you might as well call yourself a scientist and what your doing science, but then again, a few hundred years ago scientists didn't yet know that things like alchemy weren't science, so they applied the scientific method to it and figured out that it isn't useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> That thing you thought was true all your life is actually false.

1 year later: That thing you thought was false for the last year was actually true.

At every turn trying to make us feel stupid. It's almost like somebody is trying to drive us crazy.

<comment><USER35> Understanding is a process. Believing what we have the best evidence to believe is not stupid. If the evidence changes and you shift your belief you are not stupid.

I think the reality is that humans are very complex, especially how we relate to each other. Studies that try to boil down our behavior and provide actionable results are highly demanded, but are very difficult to prove.

<comment><USER36> Believing the best evidence is not a good idea if the evidence is weak. One thing that many science journalists are not very good at is conveying how strong the evidence is.

<comment><USER37> It's a good idea as long as the belief is proportionately weakly held.

<comment><USER4> But his is not the way most people think about things. For most people it's white or black, it is or it isn't. Speaking of degrees of belief makes you look like an indecisive fool at times.

<comment><USER37> If I were running for office I might be a bit careful about how I expressed such things, but having a degree of belief proportional to the degree of evidence appears the opposite of foolish to me. I hold that belief moderately strongly.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Shifts in Algorithm Design - <AUTHOR> http://rjlipton.wordpress.com/2014/07/21/shifts-in-algorithm-design/ <comment><USER2> > . Allow algorithms that can be wrong

isn't this by definition a heuristic ?

<comment><USER3> I think he meant algorithms with certain guarantee to be "not wrong". Say, "right with high probability" or "within a constant factor from the optimal" etc. Many heuristic does not have any guarantee(unless someone proves it).</comment></comment>


Khasho who? One year after gruesome murder, investors embrace Saudi Arabia again - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/90412231/year-after-khashoggi-murder-investors-embrace-saudi-arabia <comment><USER2> > Larry Fink, who boycotted last year's event. Fink explained his decision in > a post on LinkedIn: "I believe greater economic integration and > diversification will help Saudi Arabia build a more modern and sustainable > economy for all of its citizens," he wrote, adding that "corporate > engagement and public dialogue can help with that evolution."

That's the same reasoning used to justify continuing trade with China and other repressive regimes. I think of it as high-minded rationalization to justify continuing profitable business. Excuse me if I don't believe the people saying things like this really give a shit about anything but getting more money.

<comment><USER3> What else should we do? Did economic isolation help with the case of North Korea? To the extent I see, the rise of tourism has helped / is helping Cuba to become more and more integrated, as it's increasingly hard for the government to keep modern technology etc. from the hands of locals.

<comment><USER4> > _the rise of tourism has helped / is helping Cuba to become more and more > integrated, as it's increasingly hard for the government to keep modern > technology etc. from the hands of locals._

I can't speak to the situation of these other nations, but I've been going to Cuba for a long, long time. (Was at the University of Havana for a bit in the 90's, been visiting since.) Even during the Special Period there were tourists. Lots of them. I can tell you that there is no real "rise" in tourism.

There have been small changes in Cuban government _economic_ policy over time, as well as changes in American policy towards Cuba. But if you ask the average Cuban on the island, I'm sure they'd tell you both of these changes in policy are precipitated more by the North Cuba Basin than they are by tourism. I generally agree with that assessment. Being that most of the movement towards these changes happened post-2004, despite the fact that there was no rise in tourism over the same period.

<comment><USER5> Cuba had 1.8 million tourists in 99, 2.4 million in 04, and 4.7 in 2017. Meanwhile, their population has risen from 11.1 million in 99 to 11.2 million in 2017. And though oil reserves were found, production has stayed roughly the same since 2004.

<comment><USER4> Those are registered numbers. Tourism from the nineties until Obama, especially from the US, was completely unregistered. Not only that, but Cuba facilitated tourism scofflaws by making it policy not to stamp certain Western passports. (I was there legally, and I can tell you that even the legal visitors, did not get stamped. At least as an American they didn't. They went the extra mile to cover your tracks.)

Point being, reported tourist numbers from Cuba are completely unreliable. (Really _any_ reported numbers from Cuba are unreliable but that's a whole other story.) They report whatever serves the government's story in Cuba. Full stop.

<comment><USER5> So what government story prompted the gradual growth of reported tourists?

I looked at the data a bit more in an attempt to find sources skeptical of the reported tourists, and I couldn't find anything. I did find the reported tourism revenue though, and though it still seems like far more tourists are visiting, the expenses per person has dropped a fair amount leading to the % of GNP from tourism dropping since 98.

This would explain why the economy doesn't seem to be benefitting despite the high rise in tourism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Imagine the American response if this recorded state sanctioned murder had happened in an Iranian embassy

<comment><USER7> If Iran murdered an Iranian citizen in their own embassy in third country? No response at all except a shake of the head?

Iran regularly kidnaps dual citizens when they come to Iran and hold them without formal charges, and many disappear/die. The only reason this is a story is because we theoretically hold Saudi Arabia to a higher standard than Iran in the first place.

<comment><USER8> >When they come to Iran.

This is different imo, an American resident was murdered in a third country. I can assure you if this happened nobody would be talking about how important it is to keep selling arms to Iran, the way we did with Saudi Arabia. [https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/opinions...](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global- opinions/saudi-arabia-murdered-a-journalist-trump-doesnt-seem-to- mind/2019/06/24/558dbb5e-969f-11e9-830a-21b9b36b64ad_story.html%3foutputType=amp)

<comment><USER9> An American resident? He wasn't a US "person" under US law. He didn't have a green card--H1 visa, perhaps?- and wasn't eligible for consular protection under the Vienna Convention. Trying to turn him into an American is silly.

<comment><USER10> All people on US soil are protected by the US Constitution and bill of rights. It doesn't matter if you're citizen or immigrant; permanent or temporary resident; illegal or legal. Simply being on US soil means the US must acknowledge the rights that were granted to you by your creator (this is the way it's phrased in our constitution)

<comment><USER11> Mississippi is arguing otherwise, after an undocumented immigrant was mistakenly killed in a raid: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/09/27/ismael- lope...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/09/27/ismael-lopez- southaven-mississippi-police-shooting-constitution/)

<comment><USER12> Howdy cow, if that belief is upheld, the repercussions are chilling. As the article mentions, if illegal immigrants are not protected by the constitution then they can be enslaved or killed without repercussions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Saudi Arabia has money and oil. America likes oil and money. It's been as simple as that since the bitter Lake conference. Why else would a country that claims to have gone to war to create a representative democracy and destroy an unrepresentative monarchy be the best of friends with one of the most unrepresentative monarchies in the modern world? Can you think of another country named after a dude? Or, excuse me, a dude's family? (All respect to Abdulaziz, lord knows the Saudis could strike me down in the banana republic I live in).

<comment><USER14> > Can you think of another country named after a dude?

I mean, I get what you're saying... But isn't America named after Amerigo Vespucci?

<comment><USER13> IIRC that is no longer considered to be a likely hypothesis.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Well frankly the Saudis should have been held accountable do ISIS and the 9/11 operations... and yet they got away with it. If that didn't earn them US retribution, nothing else ever will.

</comment><comment><USER16> What was wrong with US's response to 9/11 attacks?

Tunnel vision, moral and patriotic grandstanding, group think, not thinking about the long term consequences of actions.

Yes, Saddam Hussein was evil, but the consequences of removing him were much more dire and opened up pandora's box.

Yes, what Saudi Arabia did was gruesome, but if you respond by cutting them off totally, they will ally with China. You lose the entire region, your leverage on oil production in the middle east. You make your rivals stronger. Is that reaction proportional with the action?

Is this one incident, which is not like Saudi Arabia didnt get massive blowback for, worth the long term consequences?

Where is the media commentary which is more pragmatic and willing to look at things two steps down, a decade from now?

Which media outlets actually present the question in that format. Nobody has learnt anything from the previous problems. People are still easy to manipulate, and the media still lacks any kind of long term thinking.

<comment><USER17> The US is not dependent on middle eastern oil any more.

Let them ally, tell them "have fun with that"

Same goes to any other middle eastern allies with troubling policies who we have unwavering support for. "We disagree with how you treat some human beings, have fun with Russia!" "Why havent you just been issuing debt on the international markets to fund your defense programs like the rest of us? Have fun destabilizing your whole economy, thats life!"

<comment><USER18> I think the US control over global oil supply in theory has a few big consequences greater than just importing cheap oil:

First, there's the whole petrodollar thing, which in theory is a net positive in global trade (since all this external money is sloshing around in USD, there is more demand and liquidity for USD globally, and at the end of the day that means we get traded things in exchange for printing money).

It also gives us a lot of leverage over other countries the world over. If Russia is acting up, the US can pressure countries to dump oil to lower the price and hurt Russia.

A lot of these countries like SA buy a lot of US weapons which we like for economic and political reasons.

Also, the US wants the region to be stable, since Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Israel are all at varying degrees of being nuclear powers and don't have great relations between each other. If there were a big war over there, it would be bad for business globally and could destabilize countries outside of the region.

Now, I'm not saying I like this state of affairs, but it's complicated and there aren't a lot of good guys over there, so it's hard. At least the current state of affairs is somewhat stable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So this may be interpreted poorly, but why was this murder such a big story in the news? This is a drop in the bucket of Saudi misdeeds.

Is this _not_ in line with the average person's perception of the Saudi government?

<comment><USER20> > _Is this not in line with the average person's perception of the Saudi > government?_

No. The average person thinks we're allies and therefore by definition Saudi Arabia is run by "good guys".

<comment><USER21> That's not what the polls in the US shows; 2/3rds have a mostly or very unfavourable opinion of SA: [https://news.gallup.com/poll/1624/perceptions- foreign-countr...](https://news.gallup.com/poll/1624/perceptions-foreign- countries.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> If investors backed off every time a country's government did something murderous, then not just SA, but all major Western countries would be investment free...

</comment><comment><USER23> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecunia_non_olet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pecunia_non_olet)

</comment><comment><USER24> Did anyone honestly think anything else would happen?

</comment><comment><USER9> [https://medium.com/@al_mu7ami/in-defense-of-mbs-the-need- for...](https://medium.com/@al_mu7ami/in-defense-of-mbs-the-need-for-a-new- law-of-war-4d408f7c96df)

<comment><USER12> Great article and definitely has a point: Someone killed one co-citizen in their own country and on its own soil. At most, Saudi Arabia must open a local investigation to find the responsible person.

Other countries might not like their law, but it is the same as me not liking Death Sentences in the USA, but what can I do? I am not a citizen of that country.

<comment><USER25> Conflating extrajudicial killing with the death penalty? Is it really "the same"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Khashoggi's murder was horrible, but it did not violate international law. [https://medium.com/@al_mu7ami/in-defense-of-mbs-the-need- for...](https://medium.com/@al_mu7ami/in-defense-of-mbs-the-need-for-a-new- law-of-war-4d408f7c96df)

<comment><USER26> I think the criticism is moral, rather than legal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I suppose this is worth saying but "the regime" is different people. Complaining about attending the investment conference because of the terrible murder of JK is like complaining that foreigners should not attend US conferences during Obama's drone strikes.

I know -- you have a strong negative reaction to that statement -- because you don't think they are equivalent. Fine, let's talk about the difference.

<comment><USER21> This is not a conference organized by some SA citizen, it's organized by the sovereign wealth fund of the SA state, whose chairman is the Crown Prince.

<comment><USER27> But the beneficiaries are, in theory, the people of the state.

In the Obama/Trump drone equivalency case -- or pick another president and some other war -- one might argue that the people are more culpable because we have a democracy. Note that given our vantage point, we might be inclined to make fine distinctions: popular vote vs electoral college, or 52% of the support etc.</comment></comment></comment>


Toronto startup is changing how you send money globally - <AUTHOR> https://www.remitr.com/blog/how-does-remittance-work/ <comment><USER2> Here, "you" is a person in Canada, US or UAE (with early access). So it's not really global from one side of this equation! There's plenty of space for such flat fee and low cost disruptions to send money _from other countries_ to countries like Canada, US, UK, etc. But there don't seem to be any good enough players for this (because maybe it's not as easy a thing to setup?). For example, sending money _from India_ to one of these countries is quite expensive even when going through the so called cheapest players (mainly money changers; banks charge an arm and a leg). Taxes aside (which cannot be changed), the exchange rates are quite poor and the additional transaction rates are high.

</comment><comment><USER3> How is this permitted into or out of the U.S. under AML regulations? Remitr doesn't appear to be registered with the Treasury as an MSB.</comment>


Return of the Borg: How Twitter Rebuilt Google's Secret Weapon - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/03/google-borg-twitter-mesos/all/

<comment><USER2> As mentioned in another comment, I managed a Google SRE team that help run Borg for 5 years. I'm good friends with several of the folks who are rebuilding it using Mesos at Twitter. They are all insanely awesome people.

Let's say you have a Rails stack (app server + DB) that you want to deploy for testing in 3 different datacenters. If that works out, you then immediately need to deploy 10,000 instances each to 10 different datacenters. Oh yeah, and the storage needs to be distributed and universally available, in case any of the servers crash. Performance testing reveals that you can't have more than 10 servers per rack, otherwise you saturate the rack switch. You also need to account for power distribution redundancy, shifting traffic loads, etc.

Oh, and you want to do this with a single configuration that's manageable by a team of 3-4 people and have deployment be entirely automated and monitored.

The complexities behind this problem are simply enormous, almost too much to even comprehend. I am proud of the work we did at Google to attempt (yes, attempt) to solve this problem, and I know my friends at Twitter are doing great work as well. I'm mostly just happy that I can finally talk about it and that the badasses that do this work can get some credit.

<comment><USER3> I think that in the end, Google's greatest gift to the world will be all the experience and knowledge that they put into the minds of the world's best engineers that worked on big stuff there over the last ten years or so.

Those people are building truly amazing things now based on that (for lack of a better term) incubator for the wider industry.

The stuff that has been built directly by Google is tremendous, to be sure. But the fundamental understandings that have come out of their R&D to do it will benefit everyone across the entire industry. It's magical to watch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have dreams of working with the Borg team when I was Google, and like Jean- Luc Picard, I sometimes wake screaming from those dreams :-)

I have a huge amount of respect for the folks in SRE who would juggle clusters like you and I might adjust thermostats around the office. It was not a job for the feint of heart, and personally I don't think it was appreciated as much by the people who deployed on it as it should have been, but that is always somewhat true about the operations side of the house, you know you're doing ok when nobody is screaming at you.

<comment><USER5> Speaking of thermostats, that reminds me of one time on my previous team where I started up too many image processing workers and basically saturated a colo's worth of CPU. It got to the point where the datacenter's temperature exceeded some alert threshold and I had SREs phoning me and asking what I had done.

Man, working at Google is just a different kind of experience in some ways. Not necessarily better, though I like it a lot, but definitely different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article is content free for people who are actually interested in resource management. I'm curious about the cluster utilization on these Google and Twitter clusters. I know Yahoo clusters had/have embarrassingly low utilization.

IFAICT, Omega and Mesos (and YARN for what it worths) cannot really handle resource overcommit effectively. I wonder what they'll call it when they reinvent a better DRS :)

<comment><USER7> That depends on how you measure utilization.

A naive approach is to measure idle CPU or RAM not allocated to a process. Then improving utilization metrics is simply a measure of fitting more computation onto one machine until there's not enough CPU time or RAM to fit any more.

This works fine for throughput-oriented workloads, but will cause immediate conflicts when imposed on teams who value low latency (e.g. the Search team at Google). So you end up in a situation where a team is being pressured to improve utilization at the expense of metrics that they care more about, and they refuse, and that's when you get grumbling around the water cooler about "wasteful propellerheads squandering expensive hardware!" / "ignorant beancounters micromanaging things they don't understand!".

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It might not be as obvious, but I think Omega is also a Star Trek reference. <http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Omega_Directive>

<comment><USER9> Must be. It makes sense too. The Omega particle was sort of holy grail for the Borg, as well as known and sought by the Federation.

<comment><USER10> Known sure, but sought is pushing it considering how adamant they were at destroying it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Honestly, everyday I'm continually impressed by posts describing the internal technology powering Google. Having an abstraction layer like this for global deployment couldn't be more convenient. With the news about Facebook the other day, I watched a talk on OpenFlow (<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLHJUfgxEO4>) and the fact that they have a test suite they can plug into continuous integration in order to see if your commit breaks your application in any network situation is incredible. I'd love to sign an NDA and just talk to the teams working on these projects for hours. Truly impressive work.

</comment><comment><USER12> "Then, Hindman and his friends decided they should work on a project together — if only because they liked each other. But they soon realized their two areas of research — which seemed so different — were completely complementary."

I see this as a great example of how innovation happens. You have things that you wouldn't expect to go together working together almost out of sheer chance, and out of that comes something brilliant.

I also love that Hindman joined Twitter as an "Intern" after he was a consultant.

</comment><comment><USER13> I keep thinking about Mesos and I don't get what the big deal is here. With low-overhead virtualization like linux containers combined with configuration management tools like Salstack, Ansible, Chef or Puppet, it isn't a big deal to have multiple properly configured applications running on individual physical machines. And to then distribute out workloads to those machines isn't super hard if you use distributed frameworks or job managers such as gearman, celery or something built on top of ZeroMQ. Am I missing something here?

You could even get all fancy by using openvswitch to configure your own virtual network topology. It just doesn't seem so complicated what they're trying to accomplish.

<comment><USER2> I managed a Google SRE team that helped run Borg for 5 years, so I'm pretty familiar with this. You can certainly run multiple application servers on one machine using virtualization. What isn't easy is automating where the applications are deployed, in an elastic, constantly shifting way that deals with massive numbers of machines and constantly changing hardware.

Cheap hardware crashes. It crashes all the time. Furthermore, the application's needs themselves change all the time, depending on traffic curves and processing needs. The dynamic needs of Google's (and presumably Twitter's) completely heterogeneous application stacks don't lend themselves to simple virtualization and over-the-counter software. This is an incredibly tricky bin packing problem that was never quite solved in my 5 years at Google.

I don't know a lot about the "distributed frameworks" you mentioned, so perhaps they do this too. I kind of doubt it. If it were as easy as you think, I'm sure my friends at Twitter would be using what you mentioned.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you want to get a sense of the scale at which systems like Borg (and presumably Mesos) operate, take a look at the Google cluster dataset that was released a while back: <https://code.google.com/p/googleclusterdata/>

"The trace represents 29 day's worth of cell information from May 2011, on a cluster of about 11k machines"

A sample: over a 7 hour period, just that one cluster executed 3.5 million unique tasks.

</comment><comment><USER15> How do these systems compare to traditional cluster task schedulers like PBS and SGE? Is it that Mesos/Borg/etc have tasks that are managed within the program as opposed to the PBS/SGE model where you write separate programs that can then be scripted to be distributed? (Not counting MPI).

Are these like the next generation of task schedulers, or are we talking about a higher abstraction level?

</comment><comment><USER16> I am not familiar with the Borg or the Omega system in Google and resource allocation optimization is usually NP hard, but would a random allocation approach be a good enough solution? It might not produce the optimal allocation but since things are changing all the time anyway, a simple good enough solution that adapts to the changes is certainly desirable.

<comment><USER17> With random allocation you need good entropy and distribution must be very uniform, otherwise you get the dyno issue we saw with heroku. I think random would still be blind to various jobs, where even the smallest of timing optimization would yield some real improvement. Perhaps with a mixed approach, and a nearly similar priority range (+\\- a priority level) might be useful. Sounds like a good time to find some research about the topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Isn't Microsoft's trying to build something similar with Azure? It'd be best described as an 'operating system for the cloud'.

</comment><comment><USER19> I was expecting Mesos to be written in Java, but its written in C++.</comment>