On the Nature of Wine - <AUTHOR> https://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/no.-8-winter-2018/on-the-nature-of-wine <comment><USER3> This is a pretty good article, though it might be hard for people to grasp who aren't already keen observers of the wine industry.,

I personally like the so-called "natural" wines mostly because they are _different_ in a world of same-same. I don't buy the 'natural' designator so much, but I've made wines from my own vineyard in this 'orange wine' style; they are difficult wines to consume but rewarding in their own way. But I use sulfites, so they're not "natural".

The "international style" of wines that has taken over everything since the success of California and Australia on the world market (and the ossification of European wines behind ridiculous regulations) becomes boring to some after a few years of consumption. I have no interest in drinking yet another Cabernet Sauvignon, And as an amateur wine maker in a difficult climate, I can't grow that anyways.

Frankly, if these wine makers in Europe were truly concerned with going eco/natural, they'd eschew the use of the pure Vitis vinifera species and the classic clonal varieties which are sometimes over a 1000 years old (the actual individual plant! cloned millions of times!) and require a continual chemical cocktail of intensive fungicides to merely survive. They're horribly mal- adapted to the actual 'natural' world and die horribly if not constantly coddled. No, instead they'd grow modern hybrids with North American species which have superior fungal resistance and better cold hardiness to boot. In the dry European climate North American hybrids would require almost no spraying. But the EU has made them illegal. For basically awful essentialist quasi-"racist" (to abuse the term) reasons.

But as this article points out, the contradiction here is that "natural" is by no means natural -- there is a peculiar European obsession with a 'pure tradition' which manifests in wine in this constant obsession with traditional varieties and techniques -- when in fact wine as we know it is an entirely Modernist invention. Sure, wine was consumed in the middle ages and Roman times -- but we'd hate those wines, even the natural wine lovers would.

<comment><USER4> Hybrids are not illegal at the EU, those hybrids (say Hibernal or hundreds of other) which are created by cross polination of vitis vinifera with another specie within vitis familly are fine. What is banned is growing non-vinifera vines. Fungal resistance of those grapes are much better than old varietals, but you still need couple of sprays most of the years. The problem with those varietals lay in quality of wine, which is usually not on the par of traditional varietal.

Anyway: being Bio/Eco/Natural certified has nothing to do with spraying or adding sulfites (which are created during fermentation anyway). It can mean anything, most of the winemakers go with use just little amount of SO2 and bentonite or egg whites for clarification. No selected yeasts or artifical additive. In vineyard there are many different kind of inputs you have to use, you usually go with sulphur and copper, but there are many other allowed preparations (from herbal teas, seaweed based stuff, yeast derivative kind of stuff).

<comment><USER3> What you're talking about (vinifera-vinifera crosses) is not typically called a hybrid but a cross. Though I'm confused because you mention Hibernal, which is an inter-specific hybrid. Except the Germans have done this sneaky trick of calling interspecific hybrids vinifera in certain circumstances to get around their own stupid laws.

Staying high vinifera content is pointless because the vitis vinifera species is the problem. It has basically no resistance to the fungal problems that are out there in the real world, which are mostly introduced from North America.

But regardless, when I start seeing appellation wines with hybrids in them, I'll be flabergasted.

The perception of 'quality' you're speaking of is a subjective/cultural thing.

I grow about an acre of modern hybrids. And I do my own hybrid crosses. So I know quite a bit about this.

(EDITED for clarity on Hibernal and some grammar)

<comment><USER5> Thanks for that explanation.

What area do you grow in?

<comment><USER3> Southern Ontario, hobby farm just above the Niagara Escarpment. About USDA hardiness zone 5. Just a hobby, grow a smattering of different things, mostly hybrids bred by the University of Minnesota ("Marquette" chiefly)

<comment><USER5> Intersting. Just did some reading on that grape. I am going to have to try to find a bottle of it try. My wife and I have a large wine collection and we always love finding new varieties we have never tried.

<comment><USER3> Shelburne Winery in Vermont makes a reasonable one. With hybrids, you're always fighting acidity and low tannins, so the wine maker really needs to be excellent. They are not forgiving grapes, and because they are often pitched as cheaper bulk grapes (because they are easier to grow) they are often made into low quality cheap country wines, sweet wines, etc. Which gives them an even worse reputation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I admit that I do not get at all why people make such a fuss about wine. At the end of the day its purpose is to get people drunk and not taste too bad along the way. Turning it into a sorta-science seems silly to me, as the endgame is getting wasted. ;-)

OTOH, I used to be like that with tea, especially Green Tea and Oolong. When it comes to tea, I can be a real snob, and with good reason. With tea there really _are_ so many subtle nuances it boggles my mind to this very day. If you are in the position to do some research, spend some money on fine teas, you can experience tasty pleasures that are beyond what words can describe. And I can go on and on and on about that, without noticing that people who do not care about tea that much get bored really fast.

So to some other people, wine is what tea is for me. And in fairness, I have not much experience drinking fancy wines. But I have no desire to, either. When I want sophisticated nuanced sensual pleasure, I drink Tea. When I want to get blotto, I drink wine.

These days, I am more pragmatic about it, but I still shiver at the sight of teabags.

<comment><USER7> _> I admit that I do not get at all why people make such a fuss about wine. At the end of the day its purpose is to get people drunk and not taste too bad along the way._

"I admit that I do not get at all why people make such a fuss about sex. At the end of the day its purpose is to make babies and not be too unpleasant along the way."

<comment><USER8> We're pleasure-seeking animals with an incredibly strong sex drive. I don't see how that's remotely comparable to drinking one of a vast array of tasty intoxicants.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I see natural as good term that can be used to describe the idea of vinifying fruit with the minimal intervention. My issue is that wine that anyone would ever want to drink has to involve an artificial process to some degree. Even in most serious "natural wine" there is care taken to tend the vines before during and after the growing season. There is a picking decision made by the winemaker. I am not too well versed in specific producers but I am pretty sure at least one is fermenting the wines in barrels or some other vessel in the vineyard in which they grew. Every year or so a small segment of natural wine producers seem to create another breakthrough that makes their wines more natural than the last.

All of this is to say that the natural wine moving taken to its extreme conclusion would end with an untended vineyard where fruit falls on the ground after raisining and the juice ferments into the dirt. While this is the most natural process, it is not something anyone would ever consider drinking. I can show you a few places in my town where they have been unwittingly on the cutting edge of the natural wine movement without ever giving a single thought to the fact there is a vine on their property in years.

What I personally feel is the the spirit of natural winemaking style is to produce a wine of distinction with minimal intervention. This is an interesting style but I still believe it to be a fad no greater (or worse) than the international style mentioned by cmrdporcupine.

What I see as the ideal winemaking style is to produce a wine from a specific vineyard that most accurately conveys its sense of place and the vintage in which it was produced. It takes a winemaker with a wide range of experience, one familiar with all of the possible tools they may use to intervene, but extremely hesitant about using them. They can be byodynamic, they can be organic, and they can even use conventional pesticides and fertilizers provided the winemaker has selected them specifically to express what he or she feels is the essence of the vineyard.

</comment><comment><USER10> I don't expect this article to give rise to insightful commentary; articles on wine invariably have two kinds of commenters, the dismissives and the aesthetes, and they usually talk past one another.

The dismissives mention things like blind taste testers not being able to distinguish red from white or blind tasters preferring cheap wine to expensive. Look into this a bit further, and you find that the first study was actually about phrases used to describe wine falling into two categories, one associated with reds and another associated with whites, and the colour of the wine appeared to be the distinguishing factor in which set of phraseology was chosen; while the second has curious echoes of Coke vs Pepsi leading to New Coke. Small samples don't give the full effect of a wine, wine will taste different when you have it with different food, or in a different order compared with other wines, on a cold palate vs a warm palate (i.e. is this your first taste of alcohol of the evening - first is usually harshest), or straight out of the bottle vs aerated, and indeed it'll taste different depending on what you think the relative price is - especially so if you have fewer other criteria to judge it with.

I'm on the aesthetes' side. I'm far from an expert, and only drink about 20 bottles a year, but when I do it's either in a taste test situation, or as paired wines in a tasting menu, or vintages selected from appellations and grapes chosen for their typical character. I wish I could find whites that taste like reds, but I dislike almost all unaccompanied whites, with some exceptions around sauternes, some Rieslings, Gewürztraminer, etc.; and I wish I could find cheap reds that taste like intense Cote Rotie syrah or savoury Burgundy pinot noir, but the same grapes grown elsewhere come nowhere close. Most New World syrah / shiraz is too alcoholic, while pinot noir is a completely different beast when it's grown in too sunny a climate. Slovenia has come closest to making some decent Burgundy-style pinot noir to my taste.

My point being that the "hierarchy" in wine is, to my mind, at least a local optimum or close to it. Within the appellations that I prefer most, I've observed a reasonably strong correlation between price and my preferences. I think winemakers have been doing a kind of local gradient ascent as technology improves their product - it would be unusual for them to do otherwise - <USER2> the argument that preservatives etc. improve ageing ability as well as transport is fairly strong to my mind, as my preferred vintages are usually not younger than 4 years. I'm not big on fresh fruit flavours.

I would expect "natural" wines to have higher variance (though unblended wine has a fairly high variance between vintages already). If the winemaker is good, and the product is good in spite of less ability to control the end product, great; whether such wine could survive hanging around Amazon's warehouses and reaching customers in good condition, I'm less convinced - I've had bad tawny port from Amazon, it takes some effort to make such a hardy product go bad.

So all in, I think this article is mostly a marketing effort for the few winemakers who think they can create a decent product following the schtick; I don't think it's likely to actually produce a significantly better product; I don't buy that the existing hierarchy is particularly wrong (but it is warped by big money in things like Bordeaux, for sure); and I don't think I'll be inclined to buy more natural wine since I think the probability it turns out mediocre is much higher.

<comment><USER11> > My point being that the "hierarchy" in wine is, to my mind, at least a local > optimum or close to it.

The problem I have is with the implication (not made by you, but made by the wine industry in general) that if your tastes don't align with this hierarchy that there is something wrong with _you_. There isn't. My wife and I are semi- serious oenophiles. We drink about 100 bottles/year. We have a 200+ bottle cellar, which tops out around $150 (I refuse to pay more than that for a bottle of fermented fruit juice on general principle). We've tried wine from all over the world, and we keep coming back to California reds. We like jammy, fruity deep dark reds, and California does them better than anywhere else.

One of our favorite wines is Barefoot cabernet, which retails for about $6 a bottle. We discovered it in a blind horizontal tasting of California cabs, where the Barefoot was put in as kind of a joke. But among 12 people participating in the tasting, _all_ of them (including us) picked the Barefoot as their #1 or #2 favorite of the lineup. The top-end wine, a Silver Oak, came in dead last. 20 years later, we still like it. (We had a similar experience years later with a delicious white that was served to us and six other people at a B&B that turned out to be Gallo Rhine Wine in a box.)

Despite this, we would still be a little embarrassed to serve Barefoot to guests. To some extent, wine is a Veblen good. It really is more than just fermented fruit juice. It's steeped in history and ceremony. There's value in the sound of a popping cork and in the joy of exploration and discovery. But the most important thing is to never ever let someone else tell you what you're supposed to like.

<comment><USER12> > _My point being that the "hierarchy" in wine is, to my mind, at least a > local optimum or close to it. The problem I have is with the implication > (not made by you, but made by the wine industry in general) that if your > tastes don't align with this hierarchy that there is something wrong with > you._

It's very democratic and individualistic (and fashionable) to say that there isn't, but I like to entertain the idea that many times, there is.

Even in matters of taste, people can be crude and ignorant -- and oftentimes, they have little familiarity with a field to be anything else anyway.

This is not the same as them saying 2+2=5, they are not wrong in the absolute sense, but they're still wrong in a similar way within their country's or global culture -- they same as someone that openly farts during a first date diner is doing something wrong.

<comment><USER11> > Even in matters of taste, people can be crude and ignorant

That is certainly true. But it does not follow that there is a universal quality metric for everyone. Whatever your tastes are, you can get there from a position of ignorance, or you can get there from a position of knowledge. But just because you got where you are with knowledge doesn't mean you're going to end up in the same place as everyone else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Thought it is about WINE [https://www.winehq.org/](https://www.winehq.org/) :)</comment>


Tech Needs More Conscientious Objectors - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/opinion/google-privacy-china.html <comment><USER2> I think the imposition of this burden on engineers is the result of our belief that our legislators are too incompetent or unwilling to act in the fact of clear moral hazards.

Tech has a very strong history of conscientious objectors. They're not the problem. Other institutions need to do their part.

<comment><USER3> What is the problem again?

You used google while signed in and now the world knows you like barbies?

Serious question, because I do not feel violated.

<comment><USER4> Assume that a hypothetical future government that you find yourself living under is not good.

Assume furthermore that a future hypothetical company is equally not good and the two collude to do not good things together.

Now assume you're motivated to do something about it. Sucks for you, they have already predicted that and cleansed you because they know everything you've ever read and it was a high probability that you'd be against them.

Consider another situation where hypothetical evil overlords know exactly what buttons press in order to influence you to act a certain way. They press them regularly. You dance as expected.

Both circumstances undermine your personal autonomy and right to self determination. Furthermore they undermine the humanity that we share where our society is no longer controlled by the needs of humans, but instead arbitrary algorithms coded for whatever mundanely evil purpose.

And that's the point (that you've more or less hit on), this is evil, but also so boring that it is actually a threat to society because no one will care enough to do anything.

<comment><USER5> Does increased government authority over the tech industry make abusive access to its data and eyeballs less likely, or more likely? How would such a collaboration start? My money's on "It sure would be a shame if we audited the shit out of your infrastructure and hit you with everything we can find in the 500,000 page rulebook... or you could do me this one favor."

Doing something about a bad government is called terrorism. Rooting out such people before they act is called preventing radicalization, stemming the flow of hatred and bigotry (the #1 talking point in calls to regulate tech).

Knowing what buttons to press to influence populations to act a certain way is called called campaigning. Belief in democracy is exactly equal to belief that whoever is best at that each election cycle should have the most power.

<comment><USER4> Abuses are just that. If a corrupt person is using the law corruptly in order to achieve something illegal, and getting away with it, that is something we should root out. Including your hypothetical racket.

Creating laws to prevent the population from being abused and manipulated via big data is somewhat orthogonal to that, as it would be a separate set of laws. we can't _not_ do something just because it might be abused by those implementing it. We have to include reasonable limits to the powers we grant.

We don't do away with all rule of law because it is occasionally abused, we prosecute the abusers under said laws and create new laws when loopholes are inevitably found.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've long thought that tech needs like.. a guild or trade union, or a professional association of some kind. The problem though, is that it's so easy to get into, so there's no easy way to "police" ourselves, because tech has been democratized so well-- Anyone can do a code boot-camp and be up and running within weeks. Not that that's a bad thing, it just makes it harder to hold developers to a code of ethics or anything like that...

Maybe we just, as a society, need to adopt morality and ethics more deeply into our cultural DNA.

<comment><USER7> Canada has a professional software engineering organization, at least in some provinces. That said, they talk a lot about ethics but then award first place at a local engineering competition to a team that tracks people's position and movements without them knowing using their cell signals (for use in airports), so maybe it doesn't do any good. Great technical work by them mind you.

<comment><USER8> I'm a Canadian coder ... and my first thought, reading your comment, was, "We do?"

<comment><USER9> I think Canada has had a professional, and pretty serious, association of engineers (in the traditional sense) for a long, long time. Maybe the software thing is a spin-off of that.

<comment><USER6> In Ontario, at least, "engineer" is a protected designation.

[http://www.peo.on.ca/](http://www.peo.on.ca/)

<comment><USER7> Alberta too.

The regulation is coming on very gradually since they're confused about how to define and regulate the title/practice.

The regulation won't necessarily help anything but to outlaw a lot of smart people from being able to write certain software. It will put us further behind the USA in our ability to create tech companies that matter (or that can compete with offshoring) and lead to higher unemployment as computers take away more jobs.

Luckily the restriction is barely enforced at this point, though it is getting stricter. I guess it will benefit me in the future when somebody will be forced to hire me because there weren't enough other applicants with professional membership... sort of a depressing thought

<comment><USER10> > The regulation won't necessarily help anything but to outlaw a lot of smart > people from being able to write certain software. It will put us further > behind the USA in our ability to create tech companies that matter (or that > can compete with offshoring)

Has any of that happened with engineers in Canada? We still have plenty of engineers.

A lot of this comes off as any industry wanting to hold onto the engineer title without any of the accountability that should come along with it, or really any accountability at all.

I don't want a random self taught engineer involved in building my house or a local highway overpass. So why would I also want a random self taught software engineer working on vital computer systems or on autonomous vehicles or on the software that controls the pitch controls on a Boeing 737? Software is not just some shit-tier SaaS app. It being hard to get official credation means accepting holding oneself to high (legal) standards. If that means lots of people have to go around calling themselves a developer instead of an engineer then I'm fine with that.

It might seem depressing that we hold engineers to high standards and expect legal accountability for the things they sign off on or create or approve, but I think more accountability in the tech industry is a good thing. The modern tech industry and software engineers hold themselves to ludicrously low standards because they basically operate on the idea that innovation = good and if-it-makes-money it must also be good. I know fast food workers who are held to higher standards than software engineers. That many continue to call themselves engineers is mainly just a hold over from a metaphor that describes computer systems as "architecture".

Software is a big deal and it effects every fabric of daily life in 2019. We shouldn't treat it like it's ephemeral stuff that has no consequences beyond the next VC exit or going public.

<comment><USER11> > Software is not just some shit-tier SaaS app.

I think the fear is that the same restrictions _will_ affect shit-tier apps as well as aeronautic control software. After all, it's not like you can't already say "to work on aeronautic software you must have credential X or Y". So what's the point of restricting the word "engineer" as a whole?

<comment><USER10> The problem with that argument is that they can just call themselves developers and nothing would change. Currently, "software engineer" doesn't _mean_ anything. There is _no_ credential that obligates software engineers to the same standards as other engineers or more than developers. Right now it's just an empty title in the tech industry.

It's not a restricted word. It's a restricted accredation that, should one carry it, obligates them to a certain set of standards and accountability.

The people making those apps don't need to call themselves engineers. They can call themselves developers. And the world will keep spinning. But a developer calling themselves an engineer is like a local contractor calling themselves a "residential engineer". An engineer can be a local contractor, but a local contractor can't simply call themselves an engineer, of any sort, unless they're accredited. That distinction matters because engineers have obligations that they are held to that a local contractor doesn't. That's the point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "We are a small - as-of-yet unincorporated - nonprofit providing pro bono consulting on algorithmic and policy issues arising from the proliferation of: Statistical inference / Automated decision making - often called 'AI', ..."

From the author's website, listed at the bottom.

Imagine if journalists and other people posting to the www called "AI" what it actually is, instead of constantly portraying it as something futuristic to capture people's imaginations.

Even terms like "statistical inference" and "automated decision-making" could probably be explained using more common language to be comprehensible to the general public.

<comment><USER13> How would you rewrite that short passage in a way you think is optimal?

<comment><USER14> Your parent comment was praising that passage and wishing more journalists and others would take that as an example of how to describe about AI.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Compensation, including perks, is usually very good in tech in comparison to many other industries. Most people rationalize and convince themselves that they're not really doing bad things, and that it's someone else who's the problem.

In some companies, the culture is also that of being oblivious (or acting oblivious) to the harm caused by the work. Facebook is the best example of this. Has there been any conscientious objector in that company? People like the WhatsApp and Instagram founders, who grew a conscience after getting billions in their pockets, don't count (even if one or two left some money on the table when quitting).

Money tells many a true tale of what goes in in people's minds.

The article, sadly, does not mention Facebook and all the surveillance that it enables and grows, along with oppressing people by forcing them to use "real names".

<comment><USER16> > Has there been any conscientious objector in that company?

No it's a cult. They wouldn't hire you unless you drank the koolaid.

<comment><USER17> Usually in articles with a lot of facebook bashing, some facebook employee comes out of the woodwork and tries to spin it as "haters" being the problem somehow (for not doing anything, for (potentially) using the service?)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> While I agree that individuals should consider the ethics of the projects that they work on, I think it's unfair to place the entire burden on them. Those in management who make the product requirements in order to sell the software are in the best position to evaluate the ethics of how software will be used. Why haven't I read a story about management conscientiously objecting to something?

<comment><USER19> I'm in management (at a company that doesn't make anything where conscientious objection could be relevant). When we make other ethics-based judgment calls, we don't go crowing about them generally. They're simply "how things are done around here."

<comment><USER20> Maybe you should tell the world about it. More people need inspiration to stand up to morally bankrupt leaders. Your story might just push them in the right direction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I think this is s bit naive. Americans and EU citizens could conceivably follow some protocol such that what they produce will not go against certain principles (if we even presume no such thing as dual use tech), but that would do little to stifle and control developers outside this sphere. Vladimir, Jinping, Jeong-Un, Narendra, etc., aren't about to handicap themselves and have some realization, oh, you know what guys, we should be respecting human rights, we gotta stop.

<comment><USER22> At least they won't be handed solutions to make their dictatorship more effective and harder to avoid. Much less to combat.

<comment><USER23> You're right, soon we'll be using their solutions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> A conscientious objector is an "individual who has claimed the right to refuse to perform military service" [0]

I believe that it is dangerous to conflate job choice with conscientious objection.

Everyone should be held accountable for what they spend their day contributing to - this shouldn't be a special case.

Comparing this to a situation in which someone doesn't want to participate in compulsory murder, and in some cases risks being killed themselves, is not helpful.

[0]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscientious_objector#cite_no...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscientious_objector#cite_note-1)

<comment><USER25> On the one hand, I agree with you that it isn't helpful.

But on the other hand, there is a plausible parallel. The _reason_ for strong controls on privacy is because every couple of generations governments tend to do a lot of damage to their own citizens.

If I thought the worst that was going to happen was the risk of being wrongly accused, public shaming or something, then privacy isn't really worth it. I trust law enforcement to be generally correct in assessing the situation, and if you are doing something shameful you may as well be shamed.

Privacy is important because it is one layer of protection against institutions participating in the murder of citizens, seen in Germany, China, Russia in the last generation and China + others this generation. Who knows for next generation? Change is very quick - there is no law of nature that says it won't be an Anglophone country. We can get thingy about whether a conscientious objector has to be the last person pulling the trigger or not, but in practice that distinction is not an important one.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Tech has had many conscientious objectors, I've watched them come and go over the decades.

Most of them drive trucks now. A few lucky ones became artists or writers, but mostly a lot of bad outcomes.

One of these failed truck drivers even makes deliveries to the house of the person who forced him out sometimes, a fact which he loves laughing about.

<comment><USER27> >> the person who forced him out

Worth noting that probably everyone here has seen something like this happen. Not sure if it is specific to tech, but some of the egos and pathologies are extreme.

<comment><USER28> I have never seen up close someone risking and losing their livelihood over moral issues with a business. It clearly does happen, but I would have assumed it to be rare, maybe more so in IT. So if you or GP have some details they can share about cases you witnessed, I'd love to hear.

<comment><USER27> Oh, I meant more generally seeing someone getting forced out by a single other person in the organization.

I think taking a moral stance usually leads people to move on of their own volition, as they tend to know the rules (and want them followed) and don't want to be associated with the fall out or with an organization that enforces them selectively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This article is premised on the idea that basically everything the Chinese government does is unethical, which is debatable. For one, the Chinese government is largely supported by its population. There might actually be engineers working on Dragonfly who do not believe the project is unethical. It's not that black and white...

<comment><USER13> How would one know if the Chinese government was supported by the population or not, given that anyone expressing a contrary opinion is likely to be a thorn in the eye that is China's surveillance state?

<comment><USER29> It's quite apparent to anyone who has lived there for a while and talked to people. Some large scale anonymous surveys done by not particularly sympathetic outsiders also confirm it (e.g. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey- cage/wp/2016/10/0...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey- cage/wp/2016/10/04/read-this-book-if-you-want-to-know-what-chinas-citizens- really-think-about-their-government/)).

<comment><USER30> That's what happens when the party controls information to paint a very specific picture. You'll find that anonymous surveys in DPRK will also show that most support the Kim regime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> 1e-9 Encouraging dissent is a small piece of what is needed. Developers must certainly consider the moral and ethical consequences of their work, but most situations are not going to be black and white, and no matter how diabolical a project might be, there is always a way to rationalize it. What is most needed is widespread public debate among those who understand the technologies in order to form consensus on appropriate directions of development. Any consensus then needs to be effectively communicated to the public and to policy makers. This helps everyone, including developers, make better decisions about what they should or should not support. Forums such as HN and various blogs can foster debate, but there seems to be a need for a more consolidated approach that someone needs to establish. As far as communicating consensus goes, I think that nonprofit organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation can be a good conduit, but they need more widespread support from the technical community.

</comment><comment><USER31> I wrote an article on why this kind of thinking is naive a while back. I still think it is naive.

[https://ctsp.berkeley.edu/ethical-pledges-for-individuals- an...](https://ctsp.berkeley.edu/ethical-pledges-for-individuals-and- collectives/)

<comment><USER32> Yea I frequently see sentiments like "if only everyone would stop working for X". It's true but when we're all locked in a game of the prisoners dilemma, moralizing isn't going to get us to move, laws and changed incentives will. I think americans finally figured that out about climate change, which is why we're looking at carbon taxes instead of just public pressure.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's worth remembering that most of the directly attributable harm we associate with tech was created by small entities like the NSO Group and Cambridge Analytica. Instead of conscientious objectors applying pressure to large companies, it might be better for tech employees who come across small companies doing shady activities to report them. Many times, these smaller firms are more susceptible to pressure anyways, so this is a double benefit.

<comment><USER34> Being smaller, though, those companies can simply be up front about what they do during recruiting and people who don't like it won't sign up for them. Succinctly, prudes don't work in porn.

<comment><USER35> Is there a name for this phenomenon in general? Your phrasing is quite clear but apparently novel, and I think it happens a lot - anti-war clergy don't apply to be military chaplains, so soldiers and commanders hear biased opinions of whether their work is incompatible with their religion compared to civilians of the same faith; people who don't think self-driving cars are a good goal tend not to apply for self-driving car companies; people who think on-prem is better than public cloud tend not to apply for companies that are all public cloud; a company that is known for a certain work culture will tend to get applications who don't think that culture is hostile; etc.

<comment><USER20> Selection bias, filter bubble, self-selection -- all these could apply to a varying degree.

<comment><USER35> "Filter bubble" is almost right but some of those seem somewhat intentional - the phenomenon here is that even if a porn studio _wants_ to have its employees' prudishness reflect the general population, it can't. Even if the military wants to hire chaplains whose views on just war reflect the general population, it can't. You can usually turn off a filter bubble and you can usually actively avoid self-selection because you're doing it yourself: the phenomenon here is that the selectees are doing the filtering for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> As someone who has worked in sf tech for 5-6 years I feel like I've gotten to the point where I've become too critical of the industry to continue working in it.

</comment><comment><USER37> I know plenty of conscientious objectors in tech, they just /don't work in tech any more/.

</comment><comment><USER38> I've always ended up with, and still reach the conclusion that there are only two tenable options which will work against a corrupt and unethical system.

1\. Infiltrate, subvert, and implode the system from within (that's meant to be as Tzu-esque as it sounds).

2\. Using parallel propaganda to get the public to realize that they have the ability to disable the system if they can collectively wield a moral, objective, and ethical compass (with all the McLuhan-esque difficulties that come with it).

I prefer the former. As dangerous as it is, I think it's strategically easier to wield covert action as a tool for effecting change than it is to attempt a unification of the masses. But, maybe a combination of both these approaches would be ideal.

<comment><USER39> It's tricky. It's really easy for "I'll change things from within" to be a convenient rationalization for $400K total comp.

I considered it once again myself last year, when I talked with a big-name company, and my version that time was "I can do good work on good stuff, promote that over the not-as-good stuff, and generally be a positive citizen of the company".

Of course, I was also thinking I could really use the big-corp money. But when they insisted that I'd have to do the new-grad hazing rituals, I decided I was kidding myself that I was being considered for any position where I'd have any input into goodness, and they were really only considering me as a junior frat pledge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> For my part, I'm just not interested in working at facebook or google or certain other companies because I disagree with their practices. Luckily, I'm far enough along in my career that I don't need to take just any job, even if it is limiting to be a privacy conscious data scientist.

I do worry that people like me just staying out of these places leads to an echo chamber, and change from within is great. I wonder whether my individual impact on social good is greater trying to be moral at a moral company, or trying to be moral at an immoral company.

Luckily I don't have to twist my logic around to justify staying and vesting.

<comment><USER41> Yeah, it's hard to be a conscientious objector when you never put yourself into the position of working for a company whose goals you need to object to.

<comment><USER40> Huh, I would have said it's easy to. Would you mind expanding on that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I respect the choices of tech sector workers who choose to protest against certain company policies and even refuse to perform certain types of work that enhance mass personalised surveillance and the enhancement of military lethality.

It's a different world from 30 and 70 years ago.

70 years ago nearly all R&D spent was specifically military in nature. So it was pretty clear from the point of hire that you were(or weren't working on military or related(surveillance) projects.

30 years ago military and commercial R&D hit parity and it was still quite easy to known going into an employment contract what side of the fence one was on.

Today, almost all R&D is commercial in nature, but with vast duel use military/surveillance potential.

So it's much more convoluted and nebulous to delineate project output, perhaps a major contributing factor to recent decisions and actions.

Combined with the long standing low supply, high demand for talent enhancing leverage.

I agree that tech talent conscience is critical.

I only hope we see the same from Chinese software engineers working at Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei, etc.

I wonder if the future will see a convoluted analog to the Manhattan Project, the Rosenbergs, and apex talent migration out of 1930's fascist countries.

</comment><comment><USER43> I remember drafting up a blog post a decade ago where I theorized/ranted that tech workers would end up being the bad guys in history. I didn't post it because it seemed so unrealistic at the time (and because I don't really know what I'll do when tech is killed... maybe some kind of appliance repair?).

It's quite amazing the difference 10 years makes!

</comment><comment><USER44> What I object to is mass media and political activists trying to shame or force me to agree with their idea of "ethics" and political positions. I'll decide that for myself thank you very much. When you see activists making noise you can bet there are plenty of people who disagree with them. Unfortunately when you have outlets like the New York Times and mobs of Twitter journalists adding fuel to the fire (for one side of the debate only), speaking out for what you believe becomes incredibly dangerous if you don't go with the mainstream message.

So yeah, I object to everything this article says and stands for. Sadly I can't do that under my real name because I need to keep my job.

</comment><comment><USER45> Discussions about ethical, privacy, surveillance issues often get hand waved and diluted here. See yesterday's thread on Google's retaliation as an example.

We need a diversity of communities that can represent the the software industry in more dimensions than the VC funded side of things, growth hacking and the singular focus on success that are often in heavy conflict with any kind of value dimension and ultimately greed and opportunism crowds out every other concern.

There is also often a extremely selfish mercenary view of the world this is disturbing and can jade most of us and needs some maturity to handle without letting it poison ones worldview.

<comment><USER46> > Discussions about ethical, privacy, surveillance issues get hand waved and > diluted here.

Do they? I tend to find that Hacker News often has a lot of discussion of ethics, especially with respect to technology.

<comment><USER47> Entirely one-sided discussion (to put it kindly), with dissenters finding their comments invisible. For as good as the discussion around here usually is, there are some topics that even HN cannot have an open discussion on, and that happens to be one of them.

Try an experiment: Argue in a thread that Facebook/Google/etc. are anything less than mustache-twirling-villian levels of evil, or that the people that work for those companies sometimes make actual human mistakes.

<comment><USER48> Arguing against the mainstream position can even get your comment flagged. Doing it a few times (even about unrelated topics) will get your account banned for being "incendiary". HN is an echo chamber. But that's not surprising, all Internet communities are an echo chamber to some point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Tech needs fewer conscientious objectors, not more. These people rarely know anything about what they're protesting, and resort fearmongering and populism to get what they want without even attempting to resolve things civilly.

The most recent example is Google's AI ethics council debacle. Activist employees were so stubborn that they can't won't even let people have a discussion about AI ethics because one of them held views they disagree with. Half the authors of the American Constitution thought that slavery should be legal, but they managed draft the foundation of modern day democracy anyways.

<comment><USER35> > _Half the authors of the American Constitution thought that slavery should > be legal, but they managed draft the foundation of modern day democracy > anyways._

This is a story of democracy happening _in spite of_ the founding fathers, not _because of_ the founding fathers. It was, as you may know, a long (multiple centuries) and bloody (a pretty big war, plus lots of extrajudicial lynchings etc.) road from what they drafted to universal suffrage. It's still in progress in many ways, and a lot of people were hurt in the progress. So this seems like a pretty good argument that we should not let people who have views that are contrary to the long-term goal be setting the direction of how to get to the long-term goal.

<comment><USER49> It's easy to criticize someone when you're not the doing the work. The world was a lot more racist a few centuries ago, so considering what they had to work with, the founding fathers did well. The alternative is that there still would have been civil war, and slavery could have continued to this day.

<comment><USER35> This counterfactual would be more convincing if the UK did not ban slavery before the US did, and did not need a civil war to do it.

And it is just as easy to praise someone when you're not the one they're hurting.

<comment><USER49> Even if the Great British Empire was "better" than the early US (I'm sure some of their former colonies would say otherwise), it bears no relevance to the discussion of whether the American Constitution was a success or failure. The US isn't Great Britain, so it can't be compared as such. I also don't understand why you would hold the founding fathers responsible for things that happened several decades in the future.

<comment><USER50> > I also don't understand why you would hold the founding fathers responsible > for things that happened several decades in the future.

The Constitutional explicit protections for both slavery and the slave trade were written in by the framers, they did not occur several decades later. The concrete divergence between UK and US policy on slavery began no later than the UK 1807 ban on the slave trade, which was less than two decades after the adoption of the Constitution while the framers were still politically active in many cases (Jefferson was President, for instance).

<comment><USER49> The US actually banned the slave trade the same year. Slaves didn't become fully emancipated in Britain until 1838 or so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> The educational Youtube channel SmarterEveryDay made a video about his day job as a military rocket engineer. It's an insightful how-and-why explanation for those wondering why there aren't more conscientious objectors: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOTYgcdNrXE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOTYgcdNrXE)

</comment><comment><USER52> There are plenty of people who don't work at these companies for these reasons. There could be more of those people. But there will still be enough who are willing to do it for the right price or who actually support the morality and ethics of doing it, that it will still get built even if the vast majority of the tech industry conscientiously objected.

</comment><comment><USER53> I worked at Google and frequently found myself acting in this capacity. I think I did well at it and was explicitly promoted for doing so. At the time I admired the way the company walked the walk in that regard.

</comment><comment><USER54> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener)

</comment><comment><USER55> Disheartening to see so many apathetic or downright hostile responses on here. I applaud this article for taking a stand.

<comment><USER56> There's no point in taking a stand if it means relinquishing responsibility.

You'd rather have weapons in the hands of pacifists than warmongers, but that won't happen if pacifists "conscientiously object" and throw down their arms; police brutality isn't eliminated by making it a job that appeals only to bullies; and software development doesn't become ethical by asking everyone with a sense of ethics to quit.

What you need is for people to communicate and understand the world well enough that they can find solutions that are as ethical as they are effective.

<comment><USER57> I don't see "asking everyone with a sense of ethics to quit" _software development_ , though. I'm seeing a call to refuse working on things that are unethical. Most software engineering does not involve working on projects that have immediate side effects that significantly impact human rights and freedoms. To build on your police analogy, this is about asking police officers to refuse to enforce policies such as "stop and frisk".

<comment><USER56> You can't ask individuals to make that decision; they'll just be replaced with ones who are willing. Leadership needs to agree with you. You can't ask people to work at a place while undermining their companies' business plans.

<comment><USER57> Of course you can ask individuals directly working on such stuff to make that decision. Implementers (who are aware what they're implementing) are just as much responsible for it as the people who gave them directions. In fact, this is just a rehash of the "just following orders" defense, except in this case it's not even orders, since you can walk out on them.

Not only that, I seriously doubt that Google would punish anybody who would simply request to not work on that particular project, instead of accommodating them by reassigning to a different team. So this is a very low bar to clear.

Does it mean that somebody else will do it? Probably, but responsibility matters. If you're the one who assists in illegal or unethical activities, then you're personally responsible for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> I'm very uncomfortable with how we are importing Chinese censorship into our lives, due in part to tech companies needing to build services that can operate in both regions.

At an object level, it's an important point to make and re-iterate.

On a meta-level, I am annoyed at how much special pleading I see from the NYtimes about the evils of tech, while it's simply par for the course for -- say -- Finance to act with near impunity when managing, fund raising, and dealing with autocratic and communist regimes.

</comment><comment><USER59> When Google's internal turmoil surfaced about the work on Project Jedi, it did not ultimately kill the project[0].

As long as there's someone else still willing to compromise their moral grounds for the value returned, it's still going to get made. That's just how capitalist societies work: People need to make money and someone is going to fulfill that objectional need because they have a need to fill their own coffers.

One need only look at the fervor against Facebook and realise that they still employ over 35k people to understand that, at the end of the day, people are either _willing_ to do the task or they're in a position that they have no other choice (considering that the US doesn't have much of a social safety net).

So, while "conscientious objectors" might be good for a single business direction, it - sadly - does nothing for the overall scheme of things.

...but even _if_ all of the engineers organised in North America to create manifestos, under psuedo or actual unions, which dictated what the future of tech should be used for, this does nothing to dissuade the partners (e.g.: 5Is) from doing the same and then sharing that technology _back_ to their own government.

I concede that maybe I'm misunderstanding the author's intent but to me, the posit seems too idyllic to be fruitful (overall) in modern society.

[0] - [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-23/pentagon-...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-23/pentagon- s-designer-of-10-billion-jedi-cloud-is-stepping-down)

</comment><comment><USER60> It really does, if you look at different engineering companies like Rolls Royce whilst the military takeover in Chile, a group of engineers in Scotland stopped working because they knew where their product was being sold too. HN seems to think that Programmers can and should get away with everything. Disturbing to say the least.

</comment><comment><USER61> I am honestly surprised that Dragon Fly is the last straw for people at Google. The company is the embodiment of surveillance capitalism. Why is there no talk about changing that model? It just seems the activists there are piling on the "China Scary" bandwagon (see: Huawei and ZTE losing hella business due to US pressure) rather than changing the revenue source in order to improve privacy and reduce data collection.

<comment><USER62> Do people actually care about privacy or data collection these days, though? It's not clear that most do - see the amount of people who freely interact on Facebook, even though they surely must be aware that everything on that site will ultimately be something that Facebook knows about. Google just doesn't seem very different by that standard.

<comment><USER63> No, the only place I see the kind of rabid hatred of Google and Facebook for their data collection practices are here on HN. Of course these people want their services, actually expect them for free, continuously at the same standard. They just don't want to be tracked, don't want to pay for them, don't want to be advertised too and don't have any real solutions on how they would be paid for other than some handwaving about breaking Google/Facebook up which apparently will solve everything.

Everytime I've pointed out that most people simply don't care about the level of tracking Facebook and Google do I'm endlessly shouted down with words to the effect of "No! If they understand how much they were tracked they'd care!", but I don't believe that's the case, I think most people simply don't care based on the value they get from these companies.

<comment><USER27> >> don't want to be advertised too

Most people probably don't mind seeing advertisements. It's just completely ridiculous that Google or FB think they need to track individuals in order to provide targeted advertising.

If someone searches for 'football', then just show a fucking ad that is relevant to 'football' along with the search results.

<comment> spaced-out What makes companies like Google valuable is that they can tell whether the user searching "football" should be shown an ad for "American football" or soccer.

For that, you need tracking.

<comment><USER64> How are you (any everyone else in this conversation) defining "tracking", and how does it differ from profiling? I can't seem to tell what people mean by "tracking" anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Coding is a craft. I wouldn't work on something I had moral issues with. There are grey areas for sure, but for me, work for the defense industry or a local gun shop.. nope.. go find someone else.

There will always be someone that doesn't have any moral compass about their work or income. That person is simply not me.

<comment><USER66> Do you feel defense contractors should go out of business and that the work they do is immoral? Or is it just not for you?

I don't know what country you're from but would you prefer you had no military or weapons or defense? Like it or not there will always be other countries with weapons and they may not always be friendly towards you or your interests.

I wouldn't want my work to have anything to do with killing people either, but I also think the defense industry (while unfortunate) is probably here to stay, for good reasons too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Perhaps one day, we'll see lists like this [0] for companies that helped the Chinese government detain entire ethnic populations, or for those that provided assistance to the Turkish regime during its purges and disappearances of opponents, or those that facilitated states, such as Russia, to politically interfere in the democratic functioning of their rivals, and the extra- judicial killing of their opponents.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_involved_in_the_Holocaust)

</comment><comment><USER68> Tech has plenty, but tech also has censorship.

</comment><comment><USER69> The NY Times and other media companies need more conscientious objectors too.</comment>


Paperfold CSS - <AUTHOR> https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/demos/detail/paperfold-css

<comment><USER3> Woah, this is freaky. I just posted a similar experiment to my personal collection minutes apart. There are some fundamental limitations to CSS3 animation at the moment, like not being able to animate gradient backgrounds. You can read about it here: [http://taitems.tumblr.com/post/20267547479/3d-accordion- effe...](http://taitems.tumblr.com/post/20267547479/3d-accordion-effect-ux- lab-006) \- apologies for the self-promotion.

<comment><USER4> While the Mozilla one worked, your example did not work on FF 11.

<comment><USER5> Likewise fx13 ah the beauty of the "open" web. I bet it works on Chrome - <USER2> nothing else.

<comment><USER6> I'm on Chrome and it didn't work for me.

My prediction: the only person it works for will end up being on IE 6.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm interested in what happened when I only partially folded the items.

What's intriguing about using 3D this way is that, like a zoomable user interface, it can reduce the visual space that lower priority visual items take up but still hint at their semantic meaning.

However, I also noticed the supposedly less important information actually looks more interesting than the top-level content (which is flat on the screen), and so it became a distraction and backfired.

<comment><USER8> If you like that idea, you might like the Perspective Wall (CHI '91) by Mackinlay, Robertson and Card. Abstract:

""" Tasks that involve large information spaces overwhelm workspaces that do not support efficient use of space and time. For example, case studies indicate that information often contains linear components, which can result in 2D layouts with wide, inefficient aspect rations. This paper describes a technique called Perspective Wall for visualizing linear information by smoothly integrating detailed and contextual views. It uses hardware support for 3D interactive animation to fold wide 2D layouts into intuitive 3D visualizations that have a center panel for detail and two perspective panels for context. The resulting visualization supports efficient use of space and time. """

PDF: [http://www2.parc.com/istl/projects/uir/publications/items/UI...](http://www2.parc.com/istl/projects/uir/publications/items/UIR-1991-03-Mackinlay- CHI91-PerspectiveWall.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just like the feature in OSX Mail. It's nice to see how web UI is keeping par with native development.

</comment><comment><USER10> For reference, this is very similar to the animation OS X Mail.app uses to expand hidden quoted text.

<comment><USER11> This was also the inspiration. Well spotted.

<comment><USER12> Sad to say you may be in violation of an Apple patent, then.

<comment><USER13> Prior art from Palm, 2009: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTqa-0uea1w>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great stuff. I goes crazy on an iPhone iOS 4.2.1, the post spins in 3d space as you scroll.

<http://i41.tinypic.com/wv48rr.png>

</comment><comment><USER15> I'm not sure what I did but while messing with the settings at one point the top slider was bouncing back and forth like a pendulum. Chrome 17

</comment><comment><USER16> Isn't this a 3d object and not straight HTML? Therefore I would think it can't be used on basically any website.

<comment><USER17> Just CSS3 3D transforms on plain 'ole DOM objects connected by CSS3 animations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Very interesting piece of work. How far is its cross-browser support?

<comment><USER19> Works in every browser that supports 3d transforms, namely the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari (+ Mobile)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Got this weirdness after a while without touching any settings: <http://i.imgur.com/ebmc0.png>

Chrome 18 osx

<comment><USER11> It's a depth-clipping bug in chrome

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Hmm. It looks awesome, and I'm all for the physical metaphors approach of Apple, but how does this enhance usability versus say a standard accordion?

</comment><comment><USER22> Amazing effect! Here's hoping it's still cool to me after I see it after every blog's "more posts" link.

<comment><USER23> If history is any indication, I would expect it to play out like this:

       1. A few awesome sites adopt it first.
       2. Eventually everyone catches on.
       3. People take it *way* overboard.
       4. Users become thoroughly annoyed.
       5. Eventually return to sanity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Web 3.0? Seriously, CSS like this makes me think web interface development is entering a new era.

</comment><comment><USER25> This looks a lot like the Clear app's animation for creating a new task.

<comment><USER26> The same animation is used in Apple's Mail 5 which shipped in Mac OS X Lion.

(Mail hides quoted text at the end of a message by default, and revealing the text will show this "folded paper" animation.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Something interesting happens if you set all the variables to 0.

<comment><USER28> Spoiler alert: I hacked the slider min values to zero with the inspector. The tab's CPU usage goes off the charts & locks up; infinite loop.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Text aliasing is horrible on Chrome 18/Win8.

<comment><USER30> Chrome's text aliasing for CSS transforms is horrendous. It's because they don't use hardware acceleration (something Safari does by default, quite beautifully), meaning they render things in software poorly for greater performance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is just awesome! Great work!

</comment><comment><USER31> why doesn't this work in the latest Opera?

</comment><comment><USER32> It's great, but I wish I didn't have to do this in CSS. When you look at the source code, it doesn't look like styling at all, it looks like programming. As soon as your start calling bezier functions in a static styling language, you know something's not right. This type of coding would be much easier to do in JavaScript.

<comment><USER30> True, but I like being able to do this declaratively. You don't incrementally change it with code, you define a mathematical function against time for the transformation.

<comment><USER33> can we call that pure and functional?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Is this real? This looks kinda cool, but I don't trust anything on this day of all days!</comment>


Show HN: Jackpotbuddy.Com online lottery pool - <AUTHOR>

Hello HN,
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How LinkedIn Just Got Screwed Out Of $130 Million - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/linked-in-ipo-2011-5-b

<comment><USER2> People said this same thing about Zipcar. But, won't the stock price stabilize in the near future to around the IPO price?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it will likely stabilize in the mid-eighties over the next few weeks. However Blodget's main argument here is that the underwriters left a lot of money on the table. Assuming a more proper price for the stock of around $60 (instead of the $45) means that LinkedIn left about $130 million on the table.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you know when you're ready to move into a senior role? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> When you have the balls to just go and do it, and then to own and fix your inevitable mistakes.

EDIT: Part of being senior is knowing that you don't ask permission for certain things.

</comment><comment><USER3> When at the end of most meetings people go off and work on your half baked ideas. And I'm only being half facetious.

</comment><comment><USER4> When you can snatch the pebble from my hand, grasshopper

</comment><comment><USER5> when you're also mentoring</comment>


How to Learn Efficiently - <AUTHOR> http://lemire.me/blog/archives/2014/12/30/how-to-learn-efficiently/ <comment><USER2> > _As an undergraduate student, I found that writing a summary of everything I > had learned in a class was one of the best ways to study for an exam. I > would just sit down with a blank piece of paper and try to summarize > everything as precisely as possible. Ultimately, writing your own textbook > would be a very effective way to learn the material._

Amen.

Back when I was tutoring a lot, I used to ask the students to keep a "master formula sheet" and continuously add formulas to it. In the final review session, I asked them to explain each math formula in plain English, e.g F=ma --> forces cause acceleration (and the acceleration produced by a force is inversely proportional to the mass of the object). I could immediately tell who understood the material and who was trying to get by on memorization.

Another useful exercise is to pretend you forgot your "formula sheet" and try to reproduce it from scratch. If you can't it means you're not solving enough problems---after solving 5-10 problems using a given formula, you start to remember it, and not as a string, but as an idea. You can forget a string; you can't forget an idea.

<comment><USER3> I used a similar technique. In undergrad and grad school my studying consisted of typing up the notes from class and summarizing the book chapters. I was always amused when people would ask me for the notes without realizing that the act of creating them was the study part. I rarely looked at them after the fact.

<comment><USER4> That's right. You train to recall, by recalling. This was a big revelation for me when I studied mnemonics.

Information can flow in two directions: into your brain, and out from your brain. It is the act of repeatedly retrieving the info from your brain that strengthens your memory of that info, not the repeated input of that info into the brain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There is a coursera course called "Learning How to Learn"[1] by Barbara Oakley that is starting soon. I took the previous session and it was very interesting. I liked the science[2] behind each part of the course (procrastination, memory, modes of thinking etc). The weekly interviews were certainly a big plus (however they were usually long at ~40 minutes).

It's a fun four week course with very little work and I recommend it.

[1] [https://www.coursera.org/course/learning](https://www.coursera.org/course/learning)

[2] After each lecture there was a list of references to check out for more info.

<comment><USER6> If I were to pick one part of that course to share it would be the explanation of how long term memories are formed through practice (1-6 Introduction to Memory).

Knowing how something actually works, and knowing precisely how my actions achieve the desired result is important to me. I'm very skeptical of study techniques, and more interested in the underlying physiology that I am trying to manipulate.

Long-term potentiation (LTP) "is widely considered one of the major cellular mechanisms that underlies learning and memory."[1]

Spaced Repetition[2] and Spaced Learning[3] at techniques directly designed around LTP.

The course content is locked, but there is a fantastic paper that gives a thorough overview of what we know about the behavior of memory[4], as well as a video series by the principle author[5] linked below.

This is kind of my thing. Please let me know if you are interested in learning more, or if you know of additional sources you'd recommend I check out.

[1][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long- term_potentiation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-term_potentiation)

[2][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition)

[3][http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_learning](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_learning)

[4][http://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/pubs/RBjork_EBjork_1992.pdf](http://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/pubs/RBjork_EBjork_1992.pdf)

[5][http://www.gocognitive.net/interviews/spacing-improves- long-...](http://www.gocognitive.net/interviews/spacing-improves-long-term- retention)

<comment><USER7> I have found Part II of Luc Beaudoin's book "Cognitive Productivity"[1] to be very interesting. It presents a theory of learning using a "mindware" model in which learning is the purposeful instilling of mindware[2]. His core strategies for "instilling mindware" include deliberate practice and repetition. I'm no expert in this field, but I've found Beaudoin's model to be helpful in understanding _why_ deliberate practice works--it helps develop the "monitors" we need to recognize when knowledge is applicable, the "motivators" to push us to do something about it, and the knowledge itself. I don't know how widely accepted his theories are, or if there are other accessible sources, but I've found the book to be very useful in thinking about how I learn.

[1] [https://leanpub.com/cognitiveproductivity/](https://leanpub.com/cognitiveproductivity/)

[2] a term coined by David Perkins, who provides some of the foundation upon which Beaudoin builds his theories: [http://www.gse.harvard.edu/faculty/david- perkins](http://www.gse.harvard.edu/faculty/david-perkins) (see also [http://amzn.com/089859863X](http://amzn.com/089859863X))

Other sources commonly cited by Beaudoin include Carl Bereiter, K. Anders Ericsson, Keith Stanovich, Phillip Ackerman, and Aaron Sloman. I hope this provides as much fodder for you as it has for me :).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I like this article in large, but sometimes it really is appropriate to blame the instructor/textbook if you feel confused.

Everyone wants to believe that the harder and more painful an experience is, the more you got out of it, but that's not the case.

Imagine if you took a math textbook and then removed every fifth sentence. It'd be way more confusing, way harder, and require much more struggle, and that struggle would be a waste of time.

Struggle matters, but you need to struggle on the right things.

<comment><USER9> You intuitively know a bad teacher from a good one.

When I learned programming both my teachers left me confused.

But I rapidly understood that the first was hard to understand because he was a sort of genius and you had to get to speed if you wanted to follow him, the other was just an incompetent lazy bastard that was there just for the pay (I remember asking him once a simple question on his domain specialty, he just resorted to Google and didn't even find the answer !).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would absolutely recommend the book that's mentioned at the end of the article: "Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning by Peter C. Brown et al."

It's a great read for anybody who wants to continue learning new material. I'm one of the people who had very poor studying practices beforehand...

<comment><USER11> Marked to read, thanks for the recommendation! Moonwalking With Einstein is also a good read, albeit more for pleasure and insight into our brains than any practical applications.

<comment><USER12> Ditto on Moonwalking. I listened to the audio book and found its practical advice incredibly helpful.

<comment><USER13> Out of curiosity, what new practices did you adopt after reading Moonwalking?

<comment><USER12> I've found the "Memory Palace" technique useful (tying items to memorize to specific places in familiar locations).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The Learning Style theory is junk with the flimsiest evidence, but tell that to any teaching institute in this arena so obsessed with constructivist ideals. The reason I did not continue on to teach physics was partially due to an insistence that it was teachers who needed to expend more effort to make classes "fit" a student's preferences so that their learning would be a gradual climb. You learn material by flailing, not by floating.

<comment><USER15> Beep beep. Back the truck up.

I am a dyed-in-the-wool constructivist and I think the theory of "Learning Styles" as it's used today is rubbish. It's a mistake to think they're attached at the hip.

By "the theory of Learning Styles", I specifically mean the idea that some people are "auditory learners", "visual learners", "kinesthetic learners", etc. and that part of a teacher's job is to figure out which "learning style" best fits a given student and present them material in a manner consistent with that style.

I'll add that in the "literature" these things are called "learning modalities" and "learning style" refers to something else, but I've never heard someone use "learning style" and not mean learning modality.

It's also ironic that you use the phrase "constructivist ideals."

Constructivism has deep roots in the American philosophical tradition of Pragmatism[1]. C.S. Peirce coined the term "pragmatism" to contrast _specifically_ with the Kant's transcendental idealism. One of it's core epistemological tenets is that the only thing we can be sure of is that certainty is impossible.

In _The Quest for Certainty_[2], JohnDewey himself called out the "fallacy" of philosophers in taking abstract categories (e.g., "Visual Learners") for granted and not seeing them as conceptual tools invented to solve specific problems in a specific context.

Like you, I find it frustrating that many educational thinkers take these concepts for granted and deploy them in a classroom environment as if it would be absurd to ever do anything else. However, if you read any early Pragmatist thinkers like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., C.S. Peirce, William James, or John Dewey, it's clear that rejection of this maneuver is one of the central themes in everything they write.

        [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatism

        [2]: https://archive.org/details/questforcertaint032529mbp

<comment><USER14> Perhaps I should clarify. I am not claiming that there is a superior educational philosophy. I am only claiming that in most modern educational institutions, constructivism is the practiced philosophy of education and is taught to all teachers. These institutes often also hold a belief in the idea of learning modalities and, contrary to the foundations of constructivism, preach these ideas quite blindly without regard to their flimsy evidence or poor performance when put into practice.

<comment><USER15> I was agreeing with you while simultaneously pointing out that you, like the folks you're criticizing, are conflating a constructivist model of learning with a handful of specific approach to teaching derived (mistakenly, IMO) from that model.

Just don't throw the constructivist baby out with the bathwater. :)

As a counterpoint, the Logo programming language[1] is an example of a well- executed pedagogical approach informed by constructivist thinking.

        [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_%28programming_language%29

<comment><USER14> Yes, exactly. One can criticize a consequence of a thing without criticizing the thing itself. I did not actually criticize constructivism anywhere. One might criticize, for instance, certain aspects of US economic practice which are derived from capitalism without actually criticizing the economic theory of capitalism. It is possible (probable) that educational institutes, like governments, are merely misusing theory. I don't know why there needs to be any counterpoints, I did not criticize constructivism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm one of those people who failed as an undergraduate. You know what's not pleasant? Being under constant stress to perform and "progress". Maybe, just maybe, that has something to do with learning in school. By the way, that's entirely a product of the academic system.

"The opposite is true: a good course is one where you always feel that you will barely make it."

Because making people stress necessarily means they're learning more? How do we know that? My experience suggests the opposite.

"It might not be a pleasant course, but it is one where you are learning. It is by struggling that we learn."

Yes: struggling with the _material_.

<comment><USER17> "Drive" by Dan Pink sort of talks about that. Your purpose should be something that you provide, not external factors, like grades and fears from what comes from them.

<comment><USER16> It's entirely possible to be internally driven and to still not function well in a school. (Unless you think the only purpose students should pursue is "succeeding in school".)

<comment><USER18> I think my story is a decent anecdote to support your statement. I spent half of college on academic probation with the main contribution to my terrible GPA being default failing status from skipping too much class.

I dropped out of school, got a job that was supposed to teach me something. It turned into answering the phone, but I used that time and title to land a Jr. software dev position and within just a few months I was being assigned solo projects and completing them ahead of schedule because I actually enjoyed learning the material outside of a structured environment.

I'm not a genius. I'd bet I'm not even that special. I think many people are just too conditioned to follow the wide beaten path, that even when they see a more appealing path they are scared to take it, and no one is actually encouraging them to take that path.

<comment><USER19> I'm in the same boat. I struggled through college because I had to in order to keep my parents' health insurance (!), but my heart wasn't in it. Eventually I learned to do the minimum and coast through, but I had other things going on in my life that were so much more interesting and I just couldn't muster the motivation to "study".

Enter the real world, and guess what? Critical thinking skills and a tenacity to solve real problems are in tremendously short supply. You've got high-GPA graduates galore who can't tie their own bloody shoes. Motivation is everything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > _Interleaved practice feels much harder (e.g., "you feel confused"), and it > feels discouraging because progress appears to be slow. However, this > confusion you feel… that is your brain learning._

I'm sorry to be a grouch, but is this based on any scientific evidence or just the OP's opinion?

<comment><USER21> "Desirable difficulties" were originally suggested by Robert Bjork, a psychology professor at UCLA. For a short overview, see his website: [http://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/research.html#idd](http://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/research.html#idd)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Most of the techniques mentioned in this article relate directly to the way our brain makes associations and forms memory. Learning something is a two step process: retaining the new information in the brain and then forming association between that and the things that we already know.

I have observed that trying to recall something that I have learnt ensures I retain the information instead of simply getting the illusion of learning something.

Mixing topics essentially allows you to create new associations in the brain about the topic. The stronger the association about a topic, the more you retain the information. Another technique that works really well is trying to apply a new topic to your own life. By relating new information to things you already remember, you create the pathways to remember and retrieve certain information. Edit: link - how long term memory works: [http://education.purduecal.edu/Vockell/EdPsyBook/Edpsy6/edps...](http://education.purduecal.edu/Vockell/EdPsyBook/Edpsy6/edpsy6_long.htm)

</comment><comment><USER23> Something my high school Computer Science teacher told me was that I wasn't learning effectively if I didn't have to try to understand something at least three times before it clicked.

Roughly 15 years later, I've found his advice to at least smell true.

Stated more generally, learning is to some significant extent about gaining understanding[1]. When you don't understand something, it is confusing.

In my experience, if you are not experiencing confusion -- more specifically the removal of confusion through effort of some sort --the "learning" you are participating in would more accurately be called memorization..

[1] at least in this context

</comment><comment><USER24> I like the essence of this blog post. I have applied similar strategies and although I am not a 100% sure about them being the 'right thing' to do, I am fairly convinced that they are a 'way to go' about learning new things. One thing is clear though (like Malkiel says in his book 'Random Walk Down the Wall Street' \-- you become rich slowly, you only become poor fast), you have to learn to be patient -- you are going to get better at things only gradually.

Sometimes however, you need a more direct feedback if you are 'making progress'. I have seen that maintaining a blog or two is very effective in getting that feedback in two different ways. Making video lectures of your own is also an attractive option, but requires more effort. If you just write down something you think you understand as succinctly as you can, it helps to solidify your understanding. And if your (understanding of the matter and hence) writing is any good (of course, you should actively promote it), the magic of Internet will make your writing visible to many. People will flock to your blog and will ask you all kinds of questions, sometimes they will point out your mistakes and then you learn more what you thought you had already learned.

</comment><comment><USER25> Side note: It's useless to have a disclaimer to spammers on a comment form. The vast majority of spammers use bots to fill out these forms.

</comment><comment><USER26> I always really liked this article which I think breaks down more precisely a lot of what this author is getting at.

[http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest- blog/2011/03/07/yo...](http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest- blog/2011/03/07/you-can-increase-your-intelligence-5-ways-to-maximize-your- cognitive-potential/)

</comment><comment><USER27> Any thoughts on learning to code in an 'interleaved' manner? I.e. studying more than one language or concept at once?

<comment><USER28> My current quest is to take something from the business domain I work in and implement the bizarre math stuff (which I don't get all of) in a backend in F# with a frontend in Javascript (I'm fluent in neither).

I've tried it before (with different technologies), and although it didn't make me an expert in either field, I've found it neatly ties most things together.

Oh, and it's usually fun, especially if you put somewhat bizarre obstacles in your way (remember, it's a learning experience, not production code). It could be something elaborate like [http://www.xpteam.com/jeff/writings/objectcalisthenics.rtf](http://www.xpteam.com/jeff/writings/objectcalisthenics.rtf) or just a concious decision to implement a part of the design in a part of the system where it isn't most obviously at home.

<comment><USER15> If your goal is to learn those two languages, I'd instead pick a problem/domain you understand very well and then express the various aspects of that problem in both F# and JavaScript rather than implementing some aspects in F# and some aspects in JavaScript.

This will help you develop a better sense of how F# and JavaScript differ as languages, what ideas are natural in one but unnatural in another, the conventions and idioms around tackling certain problems, and so on.

<comment><USER29> I once worked with an engineer who implemented the card game hearts in every language he learned. After the first implementation, you don't have to spend so much time thinking about the problem domain and can focus on finding the most idiomatic solution in the new language. The other benefit is that the project always has a clear endpoint.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I enjoyed this essay and he makes some good points. There is this feeling though so much isn't said about context and results. The audience seems to be college students.

I have been an avid learner since I left high school but my college experience was more understanding closed systems of teacher/professor goals and requirements (3.8 computer science graduate). I really didn't learn anything except to be exposed to ideas. The real learning always starts after school. What I find is we as human beings are incredible learning machines and learn efficiently already. What the OP seems to really be saying is a watered down approach to making another person happy with what they think you need to learn. AKA, express results within that system.

Goals, curiosity and discovery are tools to learning.

</comment><comment><USER31> Thanks for the awesome piece, I never knew about these stuff, but I have always realized that when I'm a little confused that means am almost learning about the topic.

Also! I can say I agree about the school part %100!

My professor who use to make us feel like we are failing the course every quiz, taught us the best of Web Protocols and advanced topics, however %3 passed the class. Literally me and 2 other students out of 10, so I guess it's just the matter of who really wants learn and whom just going in to get a degree.

</comment><comment><USER32> I was very lucky, from an early age, to be told that I should focus on learning how I learnt. I figured out how I learnt best in high school and never looked back. Now I have no problems learning any skill becase I know how my brain learns things and thus can cater specifically to it.

Unfortunately there is no catch-all method to learning and it is something you have to discover for yourself through exploration and good old trial-and- error.

</comment><comment><USER17> This is why I always make an active effort to participate in my classes. It generally all sticks better in my brain if there's something I can remember with it - I'll remember the four stages of the 30 Years' War if I can remember my teacher lecturing and me asking questions and my classmates joking around. It has worked so far, so I guess there's something to that.

</comment><comment><USER33> For people still in school, I have found that nothing beats flash cards for learning. It takes a bit of time, effort and discipline to write and use them, but in the long run, it's going to be easier and faster to study for exams.

<comment><USER34> I never found flash cards effective. The card became a visual trigger and the answer was tied to the appearance of the card, not the question on it. I found that, for me, regurgitating _all_ the card's questions (and subsequent answers with reasoning) in my head, with a reference sheet nearby to glance at to spur my recollection of all the questions, was most effective.

<comment><USER33> I should have mentioned: you have to say the questions out loud, and give out the answers out loud. And yes, your answers should be elaborate (e.g. explain how to do row elimination in a matrix).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I've found that the things I taught to others are the things that I learned the most completely. Not sure if it is the most efficient way but having to explain it to someone else always seemed to crystalize the details for me.

<comment><USER36> There is a joke about that: geometry teacher in the teaching room complains, how dumb her class was: "I explain it once—they do not understand. I explain it second time: they do not understand. I explain it third time: I myself understood, they still don't."

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Reading this, I couldn't help but draw the parallel with body building. The pain means new muscle is filling the micro-tears made during effort, and you train an other group the next day while the one you did today recovers.

<comment><USER38> Pain is a terrible word to use when describing that it's much too intense/broad of a word.

Soreness is acceptable (most likely not ideal either though, if your work to soreness let alone DOMS you will need extra recovery time that could slow your overall progress), but pain should never be tolerated.

Body sense is one of the most important things beginners have trouble learning. Whats' the differences between discomfort, soreness, pain, etc? Body position part of that difficult for beginners, what's it feel like to have a straight back?

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I would highly recommend looking into Cal Newport's blog (Study Hacks), he has published a significant number of posts on how to learn better.

www.calnewport.com/blog/

</comment><comment><USER40> I like the idea that whether you're creating product, solving problem or acquiring skill, the underlying dynamics are very much the same.

Perseverance, reaching positive failure and resilience.

For example, the parallel between muscle building and learning (as well, creativity and problem solving).

In the context of muscle growth, you're looking to balance two states - anabolic (protein synthesis) and catabolic (protein breakdown). During your exercises, you're training your [1] nervous system, which is responsible for signalling and transmission of impulses to your muscles, triggering hormonal responses and adaptations. The load you try to lift is proportional to the stress you place on your nervous system. Accordingly, [2] hypertrophy (from Greek, excess + nourishment) occurs post-workout during your resting periods and muscle tissue is [3] formed when you're not weight training.

Protein synthesis > Protein breakdown = Muscle mass increases

Protein synthesis = Protein breakdown = No change in muscle mass

Protein synthesis < Protein breakdown = Muscle mass decreases

On the other hand, your [4] neurocognitive functioning and [5] mental resources are no different. You're looking to balance state of intense conscious efforts with unconscious state of incubation. During your conscious efforts, you're collecting data and confronting with the elements of the problem. The effort you put into solving the problem is proportional to the decline of your cognitive capacity, leading to a decision to put the problem aside. The unconscious incubation state takes place (ex. sleep, mindfulness, meditation), where the memory is being repaired, information is consolidated and new associations are formed, accordingly leading to creative insights and problem solving.

1\. Conscious, intense and focused state of confrontation w/ the problem;

2\. Decision to put the problem aside;

3\. Unconscious incubation state;

The quality of your recovery is crucial and directly correlative to the amount of your output.

\--

[1] - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V77oaboEmY&feature=youtu.be...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3V77oaboEmY&feature=youtu.be&t=7m42s)

[2] - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_hypertrophy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muscle_hypertrophy)

[3] - [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11255140](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11255140)

[4] - [http://www.med.upenn.edu/uep/user_documents/VanDongen_etal_S...](http://www.med.upenn.edu/uep/user_documents/VanDongen_etal_Sleep_26_2_2003.pdf)

[5] - [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25275517](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25275517)</comment>


Proposed new schedule for JDK 8 - <AUTHOR> http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/jdk8-dev/2013-April/002336.html

<comment><USER2> My proposed security fix: kill the Java Browser Plugin.

<comment><USER3> I agree. All the bad rep Java gets is from the Applet 0-day hacks.

Java 8 to deprecate the Browser Plugin, Applets and all related stuff to it, and for those who need this technology can use Java 7 and other previous releases.

<comment><USER4> Then you're going to have all kind of apps stuck on older Java versions forever. While I'd love to see it happen, it would be Oracle shooting themselves in the foot with their enterprise customers, which - let's face it - is who they actually care about.

<comment><USER5> Although I don't have numbers, I'm not aware of very many enterprises with extensive fleets of java applets. Java in the enterprise tends to be either stand alone programs (i.e. Swing), or EJB driven middleware with JSP on the front end.

<comment><USER6> Big chunks of dealing with the government (taxes, etc.) in Portugal are in the form of Java applets. I think this is repeated across Europe.

Most of the apps are little more than forms - there's a lot of logic in the way the different fields are filled out and the validation and business logic is probably quite complex. Since everything must be checked on the server anyway there's nothing stopping it from being migrated to pure HTML.

<comment> iso8859-1 There is nothing stopping any web app from not using applets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Kill the Java browser plugin. Also, delay by another year and use the opportunity to bring in Jigsaw. Lambdas are nice, but in the big picture, Jigsaw is huge.

<comment><USER8> what does jigsaw bring to the table? what does its existence imply?

<comment><USER9> Read about it and ask more specific questions: <http://openjdk.java.net/projects/jigsaw/>

<comment><USER10> I had no idea this existed. This would be nice. I used to like Java's packaging, until I was introduced to better methods of packaging, like Ruby, Python, etc... Glad to see that this is on the table.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> We can wait till 03/2014 for JDK 8. I don't want to jump on buggy code. Good idea by Oracle not to scope creep by delaying but fixing security bugs and making the code base more stable.

</comment><comment> iso8859-1 I am happy about the renewed focus on security. As far as I remember, people were pretty skeptical and didn't think Oracle would fix the JRE once the exploits started getting discovered so frequently.

</comment><comment><USER11> Versioned jarballs with versioned dependencies PLEASE. Seriously, Ruby is laughing at you.

<comment><USER3> Jarballs? I don't know why Ruby would be laughing. Maven and Gradle are doing their job fine of handling project dependencies.

<comment><USER11> Build dependencies, yes.

Runtime dependencies for upgrade in situ, not so much.</comment></comment></comment>