The Hardening of Consciousness - <AUTHOR> http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/09/11/the-hardening-of-consciousness/ <comment><USER2> > Manzotti: However, the essential underlying idea here is simply that > _neurons produce consciousness._ It's as crude as that. We are simply asking > the brain to do what the soul once did. Of course, what neuroscience has > actually shown is how neurons consume chemicals, absorb other chemicals and > release them, produce and fire off electrical charges, and so on. In many > situations such activities occur in strict relation to certain experiences > we have. But then, so do the activities of many other cells in the body. And > so do the external things we experience.

This strikes me as disingenuous. Consciousness is correlated strongly and solely with the brain. Meaning, if you cut off my hand I can still think and feel and reason. If you remove a fist-sized volume of tissue from my pre- frontal cortex I'll never have another thought again.

I guess I'm missing the point Manzotti is driving at. Experience is something that needs to be accounted for. I can deny many things but I can't deny that I'm experiencing some thoughts and feelings and sense perceptions right now. Even if the self and experience is illusory there must be something causing that illusion to exist. If consciousness exists in this universe then it must be explained by the laws and constants of this universe. If it's not _neurons that produce consciousness_ then there must be some other physical phenomena that generates experience.

<comment><USER3> > If it's not neurons that produce consciousness then there must be some other > physical phenomena that generates experience.

Not necessarily. If you think about it, consciousness is not physical. My thoughts have no mass. My experience of the color red has no height or width. Why should we assume that something that is not physical must come from The physical world? I think the best argument is that neuron functioning correlates with thought. However, as we know, correlation does not necessarily mean causation.

I think one big hurdle for understanding consciousness is that people still have a matter – only mindset. I think people need to recognize that consciousness is not material. Then they will begin to make progress on the fundamental question, which is how something that is not material can arise from matter, or whether it comes from another source.

<comment><USER4> Does a JPEG containing the color red have mass? Are JPEGs non-physical?

<comment><USER3> I may not understand your point correctly, but I would say yes, they do. The JPEG is an arrangement of atoms in an SSD. This is different from my _experience_ of the color red that I see on the screen. The color red is physical. It is a type of photon with a tiny mass and volume. However my experience of it has no mass.

<comment><USER5> No; the JPEG is a pattern.

There are a variety of ways we could recognize the pattern.

\+ The series of bits you start with.

\+ The bitmap on the screen.

\+ the BMP which would also generate that bitmap.

\+ The GIF which results in the same frame.

\+ The emotional impression you take away from it. "That meme I remember so well"

And so on.

The JPEG is closer to qualia than is the arrangement of bits; closer to "your experience".

<comment><USER6> I don't agree with the person you are replying to at all. But I can still respect their point that there's a distinction to be made (or at least argued for) that the kinds of explanations we give for JPEGs are ultimately physicalist explanations. Everything on your list is a different physical medium a JPEG could be realized on (though maybe some would debate the last one).

But the person you are replying to probably wants to argue that qualitative experiences aren't realized on any physical sort of anything, let alone translatable across various physical mediums.

Now, again, I think that argument is wrong- I think these experiences happen in our brain, though it's currently unclear exactly how - but I at least understand their impulse to put those experiences in a different category than a JPEG, and why the ability to translate a JPEG across different mediums wouldn't speak to the concern they are raising.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting that under the Chalmers theory, there's plenty of room for computers as we know them today to be conscious. That "critical point" where quanta become qualia, if it's purely a matter of complex arrangements of bits, could have been reached by now. I'm sure I'm not the first to put this forth, but maybe your laptop undergoes some form of experience like the "phenomenal mind." One where it perceives beauty in complex patterns emerging in sequences of instructions. Or pleasure from a hard computational task executed with low time complexity.

I suppose that we haven't observed any of the effects of consciousness, i.e. expression of choice, could be an argument that there is no such consciousness in a computer. Or, it could just be that computers are conscious but lack any tools to exert free will. Their consciousness is "read only," so to speak.

<comment><USER8> Isn't the idea that we even have free will up for debate?

<comment><USER9> The very definition of Free Will is up for debate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Could it be possible that there are some subjects which, when thought about, bring us further away from the topic at hand?

For example, if we were to start thinking about the state of no thought — just pure awareness — we'd understand less about what we're trying to examine.

Thought is an amazing gift, but it's limited. It would appear we're reaching that limit when we start thinking about consciousness — hence the wildly varying thoughts on it.

<comment><USER11> I think it's more about assumptions. For example, Chalmers in his "p-zombie argument" implicitly assumes that the consciousness in one possible world and the consciousness in a physically identical but different world are separate entities.

Thus his argument are about "separable consciousness", and we don't know if real consciousness is "separable consciousness".

<comment><USER12> Ah, the p-zombies: you know they are there, waiting for it to get murky enough for them to come out (wait a minute... am I mistaking them for p-vampires?)

Has anyone seen a good argument that p-zombies are logically possible, that goes beyond being some form of "I can string these words together, and they form a grammatically-correct sentence?"

<comment><USER13> Chalmers argument is that all physical explanations leave out consciousness, therefore a p-zombie world is logically possible. You just have a physical world that's lacking consciousness.

Keep in mind that Chalmers is a property dualist who thinks there is some additional law of nature binding consciousness with informationally rich physical processes (not necessary brain activity).

<comment><USER12> Yet this article and others seem to be suggesting that the purpose of p-zombies is to argue against physicalism. It looks rather circular to me, though I am sure it isn't that obviously so.

<comment><USER14> Physicalism is also inherently a circular argument. It really gets to the root of philosophy and metaphysics, which is that at some point you reach the firmest axioms and base assumptions that can be reasonably supported by evidence and still there is nothing stopping you from—like a 3-year-old— asking "why?" just one more time.

<comment><USER12> Insofar as either position is an assertion of certainty, that's very plausible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Manzotti makes good points about how Chalmers' dualist / panpsychist view has colored the debate and possibly hindered progress, but I was hoping for more discussion of alternatives. Instead there's only a brief footnote claiming that physicalism is obviously best.

I myself am fond of Bernardo Kastrup's work on Idealism: [https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/41gb0j/bernardo...](https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/41gb0j/bernardo_kastrup_on_why_idealism_is_superior_to/)

<comment><USER16> > I was hoping for more discussion of alternatives

I think the best alternative is Reinforcement Learning. In RL, there is an agent which exists inside an environment. It can perceive the world around, move about and perform actions. The agent has a goal to achieve and receives reward signals from time to time. Such an agent can learn behavior that maximizes rewards.

That's what consciousness is. It is not an experience, it is a whole loop "perception -> judgement -> action -> reward" that defines life moment by moment. This also explains the role of consciousness - it is to choose actions that lead to survival of the individual and of its genes (reproduction). It is all a self replicating loop, in the end. The purpose of life is life, the purpose of consciousness is to guard life.

Consciousness is a set of four functions (perception, evaluating actions, acting, learning from reward signals) that work together to select the next action, to protect the body, on which consciousness depends - yep, full circle.

This whole "RL agent inside environment = consciousness" theory has the advantage that it is concrete and not supernatural in any way, and has promising applications (such as AlphaGo and self driving car).

<comment><USER17> You can choose to select a definition of 'consciousness' that does not depend on experience, yet our experience is still wanting for an explanation.

<comment><USER16> You're making a distinction between "experience" on the one hand, and perception (as in eyes + vision areas + visual representations), that are present in RL agents as well. Another component of inner experience is emotion - which would be analogous to the value function in RL and implemented in the same way, by neural nets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> In the qualia / physical world distinction, I wonder if there are good reasons we see things the way we do.

Take colors: colors map to wavelengths of light. I wonder if there is a good reason for our perceptions of color to have red be lower frequency and indigo be higher frequency. I guess what I'm wondering is if our brain mapped these differently, it would be suboptimal in some way - perhaps the 'mixing' of colors would work out less 'well' (e.g. red+yellow=orange wouldn't work in the new layout as well.) If so, then perhaps one could use evolutionary selection pressures as an explanation to lead us to the qualia we have.

Or have I perhaps just missed the whole point?

<comment><USER19> Indeed! Your visual system has a red-green band and yellow-blue band (cf Hering theory). The colour wheel is a result of the physical structure of your visual system. Purple itself is not a spectral colour but a hallucination caused by red and blue firing simultaneously.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> It's important for people to understand the legacy of the Moderns (in this case, Descartes, though others as well, e.g., Locke) and that legacy's detrimental hold over contemporary thought. However, while dualism is a problem, materialism as it is generally understood doesn't escape that legacy. For example, the problem of qualia (which is basically what this interview circles around in all by name) is a problem materialism is doomed to languish in precisely because it clings to an Cartesian account of matter, and this impoverished view of matter is wholly incapable of accounting for qualia. So simply dispensing with dualism is not going far enough.

<comment><USER21> "this impoverished view of matter is wholly incapable of accounting for qualia"

What approach to accounting for qualia do you prefer?

<comment><USER20> I don't accept the paradigm. The problem of qualia is only an issue if you assume a Cartesian account of matter (CM) while dropping his immaterial account of the mind. Descartes assumes that things like color are not properties of material things but properties of minds. Materialism rejects the notion of an immaterial mind, but does so without rejecting CM, so you're left with a reality made of a kind of matter in which color cannot exist. Materialists are therefore condemned to looking for an impossible solution for as long as they fail to understand the futility of trying to find things like color in CM. Materialism is a halfway house between Cartesian dualism and eliminativism (where the latter denies the existence of things like color because, having accepted CM, it can't account for them -- Procrustean, to be sure).

The solution is not to embrace some version of dualism. Dualism has its own issues. The solution is to embrace a richer metaphysics. Aristotle provides such a metaphysics.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I don't take quite so pessimistic a view on Chalmers, whose exact ideas I'd agree are difficult to nail down. Where I do wholly concur with Manzotti is that "p-zombies" are basically begging the dualist question. I do not believe true p-zombies who outwardly act identical are possible, and if they were consciousness would be truly winnowed down to something almost irrelevant.

That said, a lot of Chalmers acclaim has to be related to the inability of any of the rest of us to truly pose an alternative. The hard problem is hard because it seems something deep in science and reality itself would have to give way to come up with a real solution.

<comment><USER23> > The hard problem is hard because it seems something deep in science and > reality itself would have to give way to come up with a real solution.

An alternative is that qualia doesn't real exist (or doesn't exist beyond being a vague description for emergent properties arising from our cells) and that "consciousness" is a vague term with no clear definition. It's like if someone came up with a "hard problem of ghosts," and said that there wasn't any good alternative to where ghosts come from besides dead people.

It can be difficult to come up with an opposing theory as to why something exist if you don't believe that it actually exists. This isn't because the question is hard, but because you find the premise to be completely flawed.

<comment><USER24> Qualia exist. That's how we know that _anything_ exists.

<comment><USER23> Yes, this usually gets stated as if it were a fact, but never with any proof. In fact, proponents of the idea often claim that qualia's existence can't be detected or proven (the debate here even mentions it).

When a line of argument is based upon the existence of an invisible element that can't be shown or detected, it starts to veer into the territory of religion. If there's no evidence beyond "I feel it must be true," its important to acknowledge that others might feel differently.

<comment><USER13> It's easy to show that qualia exist. You have a red experience in seeing a ripe tomato. That redness is not part of the physical description of the tomatoe's surface, the photons bouncing off it, your eyes, or the neuronal activity in your nervous system as a result of seeing it. If you think it is, then you need to explain what it means for a tomato to be red without anyone seeing it, and how that redness gets into your brain, particularly since the color would have to be transmitted from tomato surface to electrons in your visual cortex. It gets worse for the other sensory modalities.

All of that leaves off the red experience. There is no red experience in the physical world of things anymore than a tomato actually has an objective smell or taste. Those are all mental and creature dependant (carrion likely smells and tastes wonderful to vultures but not humans).

Somehow, this is strongly correlated with perception and the brain, but how is a deep mystery. This isn't to deny the brain or the eye's role in experiencing red, only that we don't have an explanation for how the red experience is present, when none of those things (or processes) are objectively red.

<comment><USER23> I'm not really sure what your point is. Color certainly can exist outside of people seeing it; we can have machines detect it. We also understand how our eyes detect it mechanically (and understand how it can fail, like when people are color blind). We understand that our eyes connect with our nervous system and brain and create signals when we encounter red, and that signal leads to neuronal activity.

You claim that there's some other invisible force at work when this happens, but what evidence is there to back that up? It seems like the mechanical description does a pretty accurate job of describing what's happening. Neuroscientists who have studied this don't seem to be running into any issues. Not only is there no evidence for qualia, but the idea of qualia doesn't seem to even solve any particular problem.

<comment><USER13> > Color certainly can exist outside of people seeing it; we can have machines > detect it.

Machines detect wavelengths of light. That's not what a color experience is. Photons aren't literally colored red or green. That's just how we see objects when the cones in our eyes are excited, sending electrical signals to our visual cortex.

This is more obvious with smell and taste, since that greatly depends on an animal's sensory apparatus. Nothing has an objective smell or taste.

> You claim that there's some other invisible force at work when this happens,

But I made no such claim. I'm only pointing out how the problem is hard. I have no idea what the answer is.

<comment><USER23> > Machines detect wavelengths of light. That's not what a color experience is. > Photons aren't literally colored red or green. That's just how we see > objects when the cones in our eyes are excited, sending electrical signals > to our visual cortex.

Right. We detect certain wavelengths, which activate certain receptors, which send out certain signals, which cause certain neurons to fire. The "color experience" is the neurons firing and how that interacts with other neuronal activity. I'm not seeing where the need for qualia is, or what's particularly hard about this.

<comment><USER13> So you've adopted an identity view of consciousness, where having a red experience is identical to the neuronal activity which results from our eyes detecting light at a certain wavelength.

This is one way to go which possibly solves the problem. But it's not without difficulty. One is that it's hard to see (pun unintended) how the explanation for neuronal activity is the same thing as having a red experience.

Second problem is that it makes the physical system of brain activity special. Searle might be down with that, but it won't help machine detectors have a red experience. Or maybe even aliens, if they're made of something other than meat.

It's also hard to see what makes neuronal activity any more special than the cells in your toes or molecules in a rock. Why can't a rock have a red experience when interacting with light at that wavelength?

<comment><USER23> > One is that it's hard to see (pun unintended) how the explanation for > neuronal activity is the same thing as having a red experience.

I guess I don't understand why that's hard to see. It seems pretty straightforward to me. We know that neuronal activity is necessary for the experience, we know that it coincides with the experience, and we know that changing how neurons operate can effect the experience. It doesn't seem like a stretch to say that they are the experience.

> Second problem is that it makes the physical system of brain activity > special...It's also hard to see what makes neuronal activity any more > special than the cells in your toes or molecules in a rock. Why can't a rock > have a red experience when interacting with light at that wavelength?

If we're defining "red experience" as the neuronal activity that humans have when they see red, your wondering why a rock can't have that? I mean, because it's a rock that doesn't have a single neuron, let alone a human brain?

But beyond that - are there people that actually argue that brain activity isn't special? You're not going to have a "red experience" if you have no brain activity.

<comment><USER13> > If we're defining "red experience" as the neuronal activity that humans have > when they see red, your wondering why a rock can't have that? I mean, > because it's a rock that doesn't have a single neuron, let alone a human > brain?

Because brains are made up of ordinary matter, just like rocks. If it's the behavior of neurons that's special, then consciousness is no longer identical with neurons, it's identical with any physical system that functions the same way. And then you have the possibility of very counterintuitive arrangements, like a billion Chinese instantiating a blue experience, or a meteor shower simulating experiences.

> We know that neuronal activity is necessary for the experience, we know that > it coincides with the experience, and we know that changing how neurons > operate can affect the experience. It doesn't seem like a stretch to say > that they are the experience.

But what is it about neurons that make them experiential? And only some neurons, because a lot of neuronal activity is not conscious.

<comment><USER23> > If it's the behavior of neurons that's special, then consciousness is no > longer identical with neurons, it's identical with any physical system that > functions the same way.

Sure, I don't think brain uploads are impossible. If we were having this conversation in 100 years, I might be saying that "red experience" is the result of neuronal/circuit activity. But functions the same way is the relevant part - a rock does not function the same way. I don't think either of us expect a human to act the same way if their brain is replaced by a rock. On some level, we both know that the brain is fundamentally different from a rock.

> And then you have the possibility of very counterintuitive arrangements, > like a billion Chinese instantiating a blue experience, or a meteor shower > simulating experiences.

I think we can both agree that a computer is merely a physical object. That doesn't mean that surfing the web or playing a video game on "a billion Chinese"/"a meteor shower" is any less counterintuitive. Imagining any incredibly complex system being completely simulated by random physical phenomena is bizarre.

And the human brain is much, much more complex than a laptop. Really, go read up on it - 86 billion neurons, 100 trillion synapses, neurons firing 200 times a second. Consider the work it takes to simulate one second of brain activity (with far fewer neurons and synapses than a human brain)[1]:

> The simulation involved 1.73 billion virtual nerve cells connected by 10.4 > trillion synapses and was run on Japan's K computer, which was ranked the > fastest in the world in 2011.

> It took the Fujitsu-built K about 40 minutes to complete a simulation of one > second of neuronal network activity in real time, according to Japanese > research institute RIKEN, which runs the machine.

> The simulation harnessed the power of 82,944 processors on the K computer, > which is now ranked fourth on the biannual international Top500 > supercomputer standings (China's Tianhe-2 is the fastest now).

You're far more likely to see the dust in the air randomly play Casablanca for you from start to finish than you are for meteor showers to randomly start simulating the human brain. The human brain is complex. Really, really, really complex. So complex that weird emergent stuff like "red experience" happens. People have a hard time conceptualizing things when they become so vast; that's understandable. But there's no need to invent invisible qualia simply because we have a hard time understanding things on this scale.

[1] [https://www.cnet.com/news/fujitsu-supercomputer- simulates-1-...](https://www.cnet.com/news/fujitsu-supercomputer- simulates-1-second-of-brain-activity/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I don't work directly in this field but I have read a lot of the literature. First of all, here is my opinion, as I have written it in comments on similar articles here:

\--- "I don't see any advance in this debate since things that Dennett and Hofstadter wrote 20+ years ago (both independently and in their co-authored book "The Mind's I"). Is it really surprising that we have a first person subjective experience? We know that we are incredibly complex things, constantly integrating and acting on very complicated external stimuli. Such a system should have references to its own body and its own neural states, its train of reasoning should frequently include itself, its focus will drift forward and backwards in time... this is just how a system like this would work. If the system communicates about its state then its language should have referents to these internal states, referents like "experience", and "feels like", and "I understand". Is that surprising? Wouldn't it be surprising if it wasn't like that? I think that Tononi's approach is a good approximation, but it can't be a full solution because the word 'consciousness' is too anthropocentric. One criticism of IIT showed that a seemingly uninteresting complex artificial system could have a very high IIT complexity quotient. The problem is that the things we use to define the term 'consciousness' are things that can be approximated to varying degrees by chimps or dolphins or generative adversarial networks or antfarms or thermometers. But behind our use of the word 'consciousness' there is still almost always a very slightly disguised dualism that uses it as a substitute for the word 'soul'." \---

Therefore, I think I agree with what Manzotti is saying here. Certainly I think he is spot-on with this:

>Essentially, when Chalmers so dramatically announced "the hard problem," insisting that we had no solution to the question of consciousness, he simultaneously assumed that the constraints governing any enquiry into it were already well defined and unassailable.

The most frustrating part of the debate is that most educated laypeople and some professional philosophers will still say with great confidence: "consciousness is a mystery/we don't know what consciousness is/ we don't understand how the brain works".

I don't think these statements stack up against Dennett and Hoftstadter's work, and we have learned an incredible amount about how the brain works in the last 20 years, both through human neuroscience and computational neuroscience, and philosophers of the Chalmers type are wilfully ignorant of it.

<comment><USER13> I very much doubt that Chalmers is ignorant of anything that Dennett and Hofstadter are knowledgeable about, given that he's been debating them and participating in conferences where they give their talks for the past 20 years. What philosophers like Chalmers, Block, McGinn, Searle, and Nagel have argued is that the neuroscientific and computations explanations cannot capture subjective experience, because they are fundamentally abstract, objective explanations. They are abstracted from our collective personal, subjective experiences, to a mathematical idealization of the world which we consider to be objective.

That abstract idealization fails to capture the subjective experiences of color, sound, pain, pleasure, etc, because it's been divorced from them to gain a God's eye view from nowhere, which has no color, sound, feels, etc. The problem is very deep philosophical one, which goes to the heart of objectivity vs subjectivity, and has been around in some form since ancient philosophy, both East and West.

<comment><USER25> I didn't mean to suggest that Chalmers is ignorant of Dennett and Hofstadter, just of computational neuroscience. I don't necessarily think that Dennett and Hofstadters arguments rely on computational neuroscience, but the two components are complementary, and in combination are fatal to proponents of the "hard problem".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> At the end he says that because the idea of consciousness gives man a special status it is anti-Copernican. But apart from consciousness man already has a special status. Humans are the only thing we know of in the universe that are capable of understanding the universe itself.

</comment><comment><USER27> How can people have theories of consciousness and not include learning. The brain is constantly predicting futures, thinking multiple steps ahead, and on surprise, check what past prediction was off, hoping to correct it and learn.

In a way, we are observers, that closely observe ourselves.

</comment><comment><USER28> _Parks: Isn't this pretty much the same divide made by Galileo and Descartes? I mean Galileo's claim that "tastes, smells, colors exist only in the sensitive body" while "quantities, numbers, and relations" exist in the physical world._

 _Manzotti: Of course, and Chalmers on a number of occasions has espoused dualist positions, the idea that the world is divided into separate "realms of reality."_

Has there been any substantive new work on the consciousness question? This feels like someone finding something old and then trying to shoehorn it onto computing.

 _The idea is to develop more and more complex computers with numbers and arrangements of connections similar to those of the brain, until consciousness "emerges."_

It's not even worth discussing this anymore.

</comment><comment><USER29> Conscious thought is far more liable to interpretation than the apparently encrypted nature of unconsciousness, whose contents I'd estimate would elicit great surprisal in me if I could simply magically gain full access. If it was capable of a meaningful representation, and if I could consciously analyze unconsciousness in a way without disturbing the structure of my unconsciousness because of a kind of self-referential paradox, then the relative entropy of learning "no, actually _this_ is a more accurate view of my mind" is something I'd expect to contain a lot of information that could possibly lead to a new approach of me being me.

Some might say "even if you knew what was inside, it would simply be meaningless - in fact, the only part of your unconsciousness that you _could_ understand would end up being exactly the same as your conscious experience". Wittgenstein gave the answer "it would lack any sort of meaningfulness to you whatsoever" to the question "what would we understand if we could listen to a lion speak?" It's not unreasonable to assume that a memdump of unconsciousness would actually provide little insight into itself. If interpretation of unconsciousness is impossible internally because it has a kind of illegible presentation from inside your mind, then there might not be a guarantee you would be able to recast into an internal and understandable grammar just as result of seeing it appear outside of your head.

Maybe consciousness and unconsciousness are the ends of a spectrum that measures something like "the degree of sparsity of error-correction (ie. error-correcting codes) necessary for providing the illusion of singular focus while recovering information from billions of sources". Maybe there is a compressive sensing-like sampling method that allows neurons to recognize a cat through pretty short chains of neurons because of an object recognition approach that greatly reduces the amount of computation necessary for the sparsity of that signal..?

Hell, maybe consciousness is even way trippier than that, and emerges from neural approximations of dynamically reconfigurable circuits that verify zero- knowledge proofs..

Problem is that none of these explain where and why what is felt feels what it does, though!

</comment><comment><USER30> The discussion touches on this a bit near the end. The 'human consciousness is specifically important' meme could be harmful as we proceed as an evolutionary entity.

For those who anticipate an AI singularity: it may be harmful to the universe when we decide on an objective function for our GAI that optimizes specifically for human experience.

Humans were produced by a process: reality. We really should optimize the process, if possible, and not just human or human-biased experience.

<comment><USER31> Be careful what you wish for. It may be that what is good in the world (consciousness) is a mere side effect of what makes us effective survivors. Perhaps we could kick off an evolution of compute-based life, which would easily out maneuver us for resources, but has no value. Maybe start here for an idea about why we shouldn't throw certain values under the bus, merely in order to compete: [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on- moloch/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/)

<comment><USER32> The book Blindsight by Peter Watts explores the idea that consciousness might not be necessary for intelligence, and that it may be a temporary stepping stone in the evolution of an intelligent species if it isn't specifically safe-guarded. The book posits a superintelligent alien race^Wsomething without consciousness that views Earth's many broadcasts (which are only valuable to people with consciousness) as a malicious attack or pollution that only serves to waste the processing time of intelligences like itself. It's a great book exploring consciousness and the vast possibility space of intelligence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> " _Manzotti: ...What matters for us, though, is that in his book The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory (1997), Chalmers laid out the terms of the consciousness debate in a way that simultaneously excited everyone while more or less guaranteeing that no progress would be made._

" _Parks: Quite an achievement...._ "

That's a pretty decent feat, yes.

</comment><comment><USER34> Manzotti has a website exhibiting his "spread mind" theory of consciousness: [http://www.thespreadmind.com/](http://www.thespreadmind.com/)

To be honest I thought it was crackpot-ish nonsense the last time I looked into it, but I'll give it another go.

<comment><USER25> Ooh I hadn't seen this before.

First impression: gimmicky and just playing with language (as in so much of modern philosophy), but I prefer it to Nagel or Searle or Chalmers, at least its fucking consistent:

>Emily sees a red apple floating in the air. However, there is no red apple in front of her. She is hallucinating. Is this a case of experience without an object? No. Emily perceives an apple that she met some time earlier in her life. For instance, she experiences the apple that had been on her table yesterday. Crucially, she perceives it, she does not re-imagine it!

Fine. That's not really how people use the word "perceive", but if that allows you to accept how our "consciousness" can be a real-world thing, then it works. Amusingly, the "spread mind" has a superficial similarity to one of Chalmers' own ideas, the "extended mind". But I prefer Spread Mind because it is physicalist and incorporates the obviously correct notion of embodiment rather than taking the step (which Manzotti correctly diagnoses as insane) of separating the cognitive and the conscious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> [http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/07/20/a-test-for- conscious...](http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2017/07/20/a-test-for- consciousness/)

This, linked from the article, is terrific too.

<comment><USER35> The entire series is great: [http://www.nybooks.com/topics/on- consciousness/](http://www.nybooks.com/topics/on-consciousness/).

If you're interested, there are several high-quality popular philosophy podcasts as well: [https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/11zcba/the_best...](https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/11zcba/the_best_philosophy_podcasts/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> a high level parser which receives sense data and does scheduling. stay alive, avoid pain, seek comfort, exploit opportunities. strain yourself to count 1 to 100 while re-reading this entire text from the beginning and visualise various shades of blue. you are always performing some x number of n-dimensional- matrix operations time-sliced from n+1-dimensional-space. i assume for humans n = 2, and if you attempt to parallelize your thinking you end up doing a type of merge operation to reduce computational complexity, for x = 3: a = 1 = cobalt, high = 2 = prussian... cerulean = 92 = cerulean.</comment>


Outsourcing your development? Ask these 25 questions to avoid expensive mistakes [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.thirstysprout.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Questions-For-Founders_v2.pdf <comment><USER2> I have started an outsourcing company if anyone needs the services just let me know. We can support softwares such as [https://www.coolutils.com/TotalMailConverter](https://www.coolutils.com/TotalMailConverter)</comment>


Leave scrum to rugby, I like getting stuff done - <AUTHOR> https://qvault.io/2020/05/18/leave-scrum-to-rugby-i-like-getting-stuff-done/ <comment><USER3> Scrum is a way to take a below average or poor developer and turn them into an average developer.

It's also great at taking great developers and turning them into average developers.

Everyone just wants to take something easy off the board that you can get done in a day so you have something to report in tomorrows daily scrum. It's just everyone trying to pick the low hanging fruit. THere's no incentive to be smart and to take time to think about solutions, if nothing is moving across what are you even doing? You're letting the team down! The velocity is falling!

I think if you have hard problems to solve you solve them by giving them to smart people then leaving them the fuck alone. You don't constantly harras them everyday demanding to know what they did yesterday and what they plan to do today. With daily updates where is the incentive for the smart people to work on the hard problems? They now have the same incentive as the junior developer, find the easiest tickets to move across the board.

Sometimes I will want to just be alone and think about a solution for a few days. If I do that though I'd have nothing to say at the scrum. So instead I'll pick the user story where the colour on a front end was the wrong shade of green or a spelling mistake! See, I knocked out 2 stories in one day, before lunch! Go me!

And it all looks like progress because stupid cards are moving across a pointless board.

Scrum exists because managers don't trust developers to get things done without constant supervision and an ever present threat of looking bad for your team.

It takes a team of potentially really smart people and turns them into a code production line. It's depressing.

<comment><USER4> > Scrum is a way to take a below average or poor developer and turn them into > an average developer. It's also great at taking great developers and turning > them into average developers.

Given the available pool of poor/average/great developers, this may be the correct decision.

Model: There are a1, a2, a3 developers of poor/average/quality. Poor developers cost p1, have a default productivity of q1. Average developers cost and produce p2, q2 and great developers cost, produce p3, q3. Scrum brings everyone's productivity to q2. Note that no one gets a raise or pay cut.

Without Scrum your total payoff is

         a1*(q1-p1) + a2*(q2-p2) + a3*(q3-p3)

With Scrum it becomes

         a1*(q2-p1) + a2*(q2-p2) + a3*(q2-p3)

So what you need from Scrum to be worthwhile is that

         a1*q2 + a3*q2 > a1*q1 + a3*q3

i.e.

         (a1/a3) > (q3-q2)/(q2-q1)

Now, let's say 60% of programmers are poor; a1/a3 is 1.5.

         q2 - q1 > 3q3 - <USER2>

So even if poor developers improve by 1/3 while great developers are downgraded by 1, we're better off.

          1

<comment><USER5> Or just fire the bad developers.

Reminds me of [https://youtu.be/VAAOnmOlrLU?t=155](https://youtu.be/VAAOnmOlrLU?t=155)

<comment><USER4> But bad developers are cheaper and also more interchangeable.

Of course star developers hate Scrum. But star developer code is often crummy too, and technology advances so fast that I'm glad for every dollar I didn't pay for divine Win32 code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I've yet to find myself in a scrum or agile situation that wasn't dysfunctional.

The most common sin is the standup, where each person talks for 5 minutes about something while everyone else tunes out. It's a complete waste of 30 minutes a day, made worse because you're tired of standing and just want to get back to doing things or meeting with people you actually need to meet with. I understand the theory behind it, but I haven't seen that actually happen in my entire 25 year career.

Next up is the sprint, which I've actually seen work somewhat in some companies. Generally, when they're doing it right, they'll have a "next up" lane for things that someone is serious about, in priority order, and actively maintained by the stakeholders (with an arbiter). And then the "backlog" is a black hole where things go to die (which isn't a bad thing). People grab from the "next up" lane the things they think they can get done in a sprint (keeping in mind the priorities), and off they go. That's the best case. More commonly, it's a morass of crap nobody cares about anymore, complete with questionable tasks, top-down requests (with no pipeline to discuss), or not broken down into manageable chunks.

Generally, when companies adopt "agile", there's a lot of paperwork, meetings and activity, but very little communication and accomplishment. The only worse thing I can think of is peer reviews.

<comment><USER6> Did you work at many different companies, one or a few? It's interesting to me because I don't recognize this at all.

Quite the opposite. Standup take no longer than 15 minutes, we frequently address issues which otherwise would have led to lots of rework. You need some discipline to do it right however.

Lot's of engineers are afraid to ask for help, or too proud. The standup helps people get help sooner. It also often shows where two people are actually doing the same thing, take a wrong path, help prioritize etc. I can't imagine a software project without a standup anymore.

It's funny, if I would pick out the two single most valuable things out of agile I would say standup and peer review.

<comment><USER5> I've worked at many different companies. The first were all waterfall (because XP hadn't been invented yet). My next scrum team sizes were 5 (scrum), 3 (no scrum), 2 (no scrum), 15 (waterfall), 4 (scrum), 4-10 over time (scrum), 5 (scrum), 6 (scrum), 9 (scrum).

I've never seen what you describe actually happen (although I know that this is the theory behind it).

TBH I haven't really noticed much difference in the accomplishments of scrum and non-scrum teams.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm no scrum fanatic, but there's real value in doing estimates at the beginning of work, then reviewing how long it took at the end of work (without revising estimates mid workstream).

The point of separating these from actual time is not to make people feel better about themselves, it's about accounting for how much unplanned work there is in your organization which is different from org to org and even project to project.

By reflecting on how many "story points" some piece of work took, then you get better at estimating how much calendar time something will actually take.

FWIW, I've never seen this work in a team setting. I use it in an individual setting where I estimate work for myself, then gauge how much I can get done in the context of a project or org.

<comment><USER8> I always wondered how it worked in functionnal organizations so perhaps You could tell me.

We were told the base principle was to have a stable team and a stable stack, and at some point we had reference tasks to calibrate our point system.

But then we had team shuffles about every 6 months ~ 1 year, so team velocity was a fantasy.

Then we changed core libraries, introduced services using new stacks, built new API, adapted to other teams' new paradigms.

And all of these changes felt to be for the better to us. Everyone would have left if we kept everything inu place for the sake of point consistency.

Basically, how did you deal with change ?

<comment><USER9> If you read your own post, for you, the answer gives itself. For managers and executives, maybe the answer is different?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Scrum isn't for everybody. I would say it is for organisations or departments whose business is not developing products, but who develop products to service their business needs. For everyone else, there are many better options to choose from.

That said, lets clear up some misinformation:

1) Scrum is vague? It said it right there: "Scrum is a framework" \- Scrum is NOT a process, technique, or definitive method.

2) On delivery windows - "I'm not against management being informed… but at what cost?". Scrum works well for businesses/departments that have a development need, not where the business IS development. It needs to fit into the business, not vice versa, and that means managing stakeholder expectations.

3) On scrum managers - "let the lead developers handle the job." Of course! Or your development team manager, depending on your org setup. The roles in scrum are ROLES - not a new org structure.

4) Estimates - sure, points are stupid. They literally make no sense. They aren't prescribed by scrum in any way, shape, or form. There is nothing wrong with using time as an estimate. Period.

I think the target audience of Scrum could be made a LOT more clear. It would save a lot of heartache and hate. I think successful marketing and certification have become the chief enemy of Scrum - orgs have tried to shoehorn it in everywhere, and thats not what it is for.

</comment><comment><USER11> > An API that could have been completed in 2 months will now take almost 4 > months because I've wasted time putting in artificial stopping points along > the way. My imposter syndrome starts to set in, but at least management will > have pretty burndown charts.

This seems to be a failing of the author.

<comment><USER12> And when he delivers the API in 2 months, it's not what the customer wants and has a bunch of problems that are difficult to fix because he delivered it all at once instead of incrementally.

<comment><USER13> Not all (or even most) software developed is developed in a vacuum for a customer who has no idea what they want. Much software is developed as part of a larger system where functionality is relatively well known in advance and where rapidly iterating on potential UIs and APIs is neither needed nor useful.

There's definitely a time and a place for Agile-derived methodologies but not every project is a nail for this particular hammer.

<comment><USER14> > Much software is developed as part of a larger system where functionality is > relatively well known in advance

Also, however, most software, especially 'enterprise', doesn't actually do what it's users need, and is a nightmare for it's users. That the functionality it would deliver and how it would do so was decided by managers in advance doesn't mean it actually works for those using it.

<comment><USER13> This is true, much 'enterprise' software is awful. And the key to it is that (as you accurately say) the functionality is decided by managers, rather than being determined by business analysts and UI/UX designers based on the actual users' workflows and feedback. No software development methodology is going to fix that.

<comment><USER14> Agreed 100%. But once you have people with the responsibility and authority and skill at determining based on actual users' workflows and feedback... in my opinion and experience, iterative design works -- even "rapidly iterating" ideally -- a _lot lot better_ than assuming "functionality is relatively well known in advance", as the GP taneq suggested. Even experts at UX need iterative feedback to get it right, in fact an expert at UX is likely to know and tell you this, that's what their expertise tells them.

(And note even OP concludes by saying he _does_ like "agile", just not "scrum" \-- so taneq in arguing for avoiding rapid iteration for "functionality relatively well known in advance" is not necessarily making the same evaluation as OP either).

Part of what always happens in these discussions is we all come from our experience. I've seen it work, in such a way that convinces me it was _because_ of it's iterative nature that it worked. taneq above, I would guess, has not.

As a field, we still haven't done great at working out a methodology to extract/abstract from these differing experiences to general consensus principles, when it comes to "how we write software". So we're all just arguing from our experiences, and such arguments show that experiences really differ. Not sure what to do with that. The arguments just go round and round. I don't think attempts to make this "empirical" and "data-driven" have proven satisfactory, they often seem to suffer from artificiality/lack of validity to me too.

(And as far as personal experience -- I think _most_ of us who have been around 10+ years find that our opinions about 'the right way to do it' change over time, as our experiences show us different things; but that doesn't necessarily mean those who have been around longer are more likely to be right and should be defered to; clearly that defering to experience rarely happens anyway).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> yoz-y > Let's also say that in my head I believe the whole task to take two months > if I can work consistently.

Believe it as much as you want but this estimate has a massive chance of being wrong. After that the reasoning falls apart.

Also don't assign time to points, that's completely missing the point.

<comment><USER15> > Also don't assign time to points, that's completely missing the point.

Yeah, yeah. We are not true Scotsmans. In every job for last 10 years there was an implicit points -> time conversion table. And management can walk in and ask why you promise to complete a task in 1 point. It makes no sense at all.

<comment> yoz-y One article I quite liked was the one about Commoditized Excellence. [https://barryhawkins.com/blog/posts/the-myth-of- commoditized...](https://barryhawkins.com/blog/posts/the-myth-of-commoditized- excellence/)

It would be ironic to resume the article but the gist is that when rather complex reasonings get distilled into few bullet points tagged with a catchy name, then they get misused and criticised for things the original idea expressly called out.

In this case you shouldn't be promising management anything because the points only mean something in the context of a team.

<comment><USER15> If you dig deeper then scrum overall is a very complex thing trying to solve non-root problems. It is very ironic that scrum is Commoditized Excellence on its own.

Scrum in a nutshell:

1) We need to periodically check product to cut invalid activity on early stages. Let's do it in sprints with defined goals!

2) Great, now we need to complete a goal to the end of a sprint. How do we know that a team will fulfill a goal? Lets plan a sprint according to team capacity!

3) What is team capacity? It is a historic velocity metric measured in time per task in past sprints. But estimating time in time units is ... ... mambo jambo ... whatever (I did not grok what is TRUE SCRUM explanation is) ... bad, sorta. So we introduce points to estimate task size.

4) How do we estimate? Planning poker every sprint!

5) And let's add formal process to evaluate every sprint to be more serious!

It's an artificial construct to solve point 2) only. Drop a goal completion requirement and scrum will not be needed.

<comment> yoz-y If you remove buzzwords though it makes more sense:

1) It is impossible to have specs for a complete project at the beginning. So let's ship piece by piece and accommodate spec changes as they are discovered.

2) We need at least some visibility on what to do so let's bundle a few short tasks for the (literally) foreseeable future.

3) Since we can't estimate task duration precisely because nobody ever managed to do it, let's find some measure on how much work we can get done.

4) How do we estimate this: empirically by progressive approximation.

5) This is not actually necessary.

Also I think that one of the more interesting parts of the planning poker is discussing the why a task may or may not take a long time. It can give insight into system complexity to people less familiar with a specific part of the project.

I must say though that the goal completion was more of a unicorn where I worked. We always had sprints overspill to the next one but that was not necessarily an issue.

If there is one thing I dislike about the scrum it is the rigidity which is often introduced. I think a laid back approach to it makes it more useful.

<comment><USER15> > 2) We need at least some visibility on what to do so let's bundle a few > short tasks for the (literally) foreseeable future.

Backlog on every level is always non-empty. So sprint filling is not a problem. Planning step is not about visibility. You can have a near roadmap with any process.

But scrum tries to promise that we put only particular amount of tasks to be able to finish it. Sorta, in my experience there were only few finished sprint cases in different jobs with different teams, with and without scrum master. And from this moment scrum goes over the rails. Why we need this restriction at first place?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> jon-wood I've always been quite fiercely against Scrum as a development process, and I still am in the context of constantly evolving cloud based services, but I've recently seen it being done to great effect for mobile app development.

I think this is similar to Pete Hodgson's clarification[1] that gitflow (which he originally documented) isn't suitable in that sort of environment. If you've got a constantly deployed set of artifacts it doesn't make sense to plan in two week blocks, and then freeze a release. In the world of software which has actual discrete releases then you either have a massive gap between releases as you get everything just right, or you say "every two weeks we'll release what's ready", and for that approach Scrum works really well.

When you're working on cloud hosted services the typical approach is more of releasing things as they're ready, possibly sitting behind feature flags or partial rollouts, and for that Kanban has worked much better in my experience. It gives more flexibility around changing priorities, and space for the inevitable production incidents and technical support that can suck up a week of time out of nowhere.

[1] [https://twitter.com/ph1/status/1260702766118232065?s=21](https://twitter.com/ph1/status/1260702766118232065?s=21)

<comment><USER16> I agree scrum is too heavy for a release every two weeks thing, what it's good for in my book is:

You have a very big project to make and you know exactly what it needs to contain, examples:

1\. you have an application that users already use but you need to move off a platform by a particular time or you are screwed. So you know exactly what you need to replicate in the new platform (your current functionality) and you have a set deadline to do it in. For me it was the company got sold and we needed to be off of Thomson Reuters platform within a year or pay over $100,000 a month to use it.

2\. You have entered into a legally binding contract and you know what the application is going to need to contain and what you can drop without getting sued or not getting paid.

If it is your own application you can always stretch timelines out a bit to get to where you need to be, or you can decide to drop features to get to where you want to be. But once there are other people in there you might not be able to stretch timelines of drop features, and then you need something that gives you a way of alerting you beforehand if you're going off the rails.

<comment><USER17> If you know exactly what needs to be done, why do all the extra work to be able to divide it into sprints?

The whole point of sprints is that requirements are allowed to change, just not more frequently than there are sprints.

<comment><USER16> you have it in sprints because you have a deadline so you can see how well you are progressing towards your goal by seeing how many issues are fixed in their sprint, going over to next sprint etc. It's not a lot of extra work to divide it into sprints, especially as you have people whose tasks are to divide things into sprints and keep track of things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Every time another one of those anti-agile or anti-agile-scrum pops up it seems to just be someone having a bad experience.

The point of a methodology isn't to follow the methodology, but to use what is useful. Maybe 1 or 2 weeks per sprint isn't useful. Then maybe don't do that. Or maybe you can't estimate how much time your development might take. In that case, maybe do a little more thinking instead of presenting a black hole of time to the people that pay you. Take apart the problem until you do get a sense of how complex and/or time-consuming it might be.

Same goes for the deliverables or measurable impact; just because something has a name "an endpoint, a button, a page" doesn't mean that that defines a quantity of work or defines what you can or must deliver. Plan for what you know can be made, not for what you don't know. Having 6 months of 'planned' development seems highly unlikely to be successful, why not plan 1 month at most, and re-plan when you are near the end of the run. If people keep planning things they cannot predict it's going to keep failing.

<comment><USER19> > The point of a methodology isn't to follow the methodology,

In scrum, it is. Scrum was developed for managers to distract from the fact that they know nothing about software. So the methodology is all there is. Go ahead, ask a (non developer) scrum master about why there need to be cross functional teams, when 80% of your work never crosses the component boundary. Or go ask them who priorizes bug fixing (do this when PO, Ops, and customer care share the same room, hilarious!).

<comment><USER18> I'm not sure what managers have to do with scrum here. A manager is a person that insulates business from the execution on a non-functional level.

Perhaps this is a difference in where you work (the company, the culture, the country), but here a manager is just someone who has the job of making sure there are no obstructions and people have what they need and don't get shifted around too much.

Priorities are made based in input from owners, users and developers, and cross-functional teams are something that you do in a SIG, not in a development team.

Maybe SCRUM (R) as a commercial idea has a lot of things it wants you do to, but that's not really why you'd even consider something; you consider something because it might help you or clarify something for others, and for novices it can be great if you don't have the experience, skills, insight or level of thinking to come up with a self-improving process by yourself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Sort of a whirlwind tour of all the misconceptions the average dev might have about agile/scrum.

Yet again, here goes.

\- The problem here is dogmatism, both yours and whoever is "doing scrum" to you. There is no Scotsman! He ran away. That is, it's only if you're insisting whether you're doing it right or wrong can you start to have the conversation about what is right or wrong. Your premise is invalid.

\- Confusion over terms. These things are much better represented mentally by the image of a bookstore. You arrive at a bookstore and want to read up on some stuff related to teams and planning. Cool! There's a scrum section, just next to the agile section. Guess what? The books don't all agree with one another, and that's fine. It's a marketing term, a place to go for ideas.

It gets worse after that, with dysfunctions of estimating and so forth, but you start out with your head in the wrong place, whether you love X or hate X, it's not going to end well. Do stuff you like, make stuff people want, and get stuff done. If that's not working for you, here's some titles of sections in the bookstore where you might want to read some other stuff. There are other sections. If you find some sections that have cool stuff, let me know. I might could learn some neat stuff I might use one day.

That's it. It's nothing more complicated than that. You can go to those sections and learn a whole bunch of stuff about various problems you might have. Try some if you like. Or not. What you can't do is go to that section and pull some book out as if it were a recipe and then "implement" it on a team or organization. It doesn't work like that, and it's never going to work like that, whether your view is from the top or bottom of an org. You're doing it backwards. It hurts when you do that? Ok. So stop doing it that way.

</comment><comment><USER21> Estimate the work that comes in, commit to that work for x amount of time +/\- 5-10% variance, evaluate ability to finish it all, and re-balance accordingly, all in all is a pretty effective productivity approach.

When the alternative is a near certainty miss of waterfall and tremendous, tremendous cost overages, then scrum starts to look like the less ugly dance partner.

Consistent challenges I see for anti-Scrum arguments:

1) Their POs are doing a _horrible_ job defining what an MVP is, or the devs aren't following good MVP practices. The MVP solution as something that works outside of Scrum is well proven in numerous other contexts, regardless of what a developer designing an API may think.

2) Their Scrum Masters are allowed to turn into managers, not process governors. The silly SM metrics SMs start to make to increase their job justification suddenly govern teams and paychecks.

3) Their management doesn't understand what POs and SMs are really supposed to do.

4) Ok, present an alternative to Scrum, waterfall, in a way that works with financial reporting and accountability to the people that pay the bills and paychecks. This is the major sticking point. Criticize Scrum :thumbsup: Come up with an alternative that meshes with the reality of software the profit- seeking business :silence:.

</comment><comment><USER22> Good points in the article but I have to mention a scrum master isn't supposed to be telling people what to do, but rather coach on the scrum process.

<comment><USER23> > but I have to mention a scrum master isn't supposed to be...

This is a major problem with Scrum. There's always someone telling you you're doing it wrong. If nobody's able to implement your big idea properly, maybe the problem is with the idea or how you're explaining it, not the people trying to do it.

<comment><USER24> _There 's always someone telling you you're doing it wrong._

Of course there are, and they are probably paid handsomely for their insight. How is a process that wants to implement _individuals and interactions over processes and tools_ not a parody?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> In my experience, the vast majority of developers grousing about scrum and agile are mostly mad they're being made to (a) talk to their coworkers or attend ANY meeting at all or (b) account for their work.

But hey, it's HN, so I'm sure there will be absolutely no other positive comments about the methodology here.

</comment><comment><USER26> I look at it this way: Agile is a bare-minimum project management methodology. That can mean different things for everyone, so look at "traditional Agile practices" as a menu rather than a recipe. If scrums don't work for your team, then either don't do them or find a way to make them more useful.

I've always felt that most companies do "scrums" wrong. It's not supposed to be an hour-long status report; it's supposed to be a 15-minute check-in to identify blockers and connect people so those issues can be addressed _outside of the scrum_. A good scrummaster should be able to clamp down on the "status report" aspect of it, but it's really hard to find a good scrummaster since it's largely seen/compensated as an entry-level position.

</comment><comment><USER27> I think the theory of scrum is great. When you think about it, Scrum does most of everything that we should be doing. Thinking about problems before tackle them. Talking everyday about the problems in case someone needs help. Course correcting when you need to.

The problem is management. Tools (burn down charts) now become executive metrics. Amount of code completed now becomes a review item for advancement. We've applied measures to things that are inappropriate for what they are used for, and because of this honest communication has been replaced with guarded statements to make sure that the team never stumbles with its work. No matter what process an organization uses in those places will fail, because management wants to hear things are running fine.

</comment><comment><USER28> I, too, like getting stuff done.

The way I get the most stuff done is meeting with the rest of my team every two weeks to:

\- Look at what stuff needs to be done next, based on the stuff we want to do, stuff that other people want us to do, and stuff we don't want to do but need to do anyway

\- Figure out between us how much work is involved in doing that stuff

\- Review how much stuff we did in the last two weeks to see if we did what we expected to

\- Use that information to agree between us how much of that stuff we think we can do in the next two weeks

\- Make sure that we have all of the information and prerequisites to do that stuff

\- Based on all that, to estimate how long all the stuff will take, pick which stuff that we expect to be able to reasonably do, and prioritise what's most important

Then every day, we check in for 10 minutes to see if there are any problems doing the stuff, if unexpected stuff needs to be done urgently, or if we want to show the stuff to anyone else.

Once every two weeks, we show everyone else what stuff we did and answer any questions about it; once every couple of months, we all sit down together with other people, look at our list of stuff that we want to do over the next six months, make sure we all agree on what the plans are over that timeframe, and make any adjustments we think we need to.

Someone is in charge of making sure that all those things happen, that everyone has what they need to do their stuff, and that everyone outside the team knows what stuff is being done.

This is just Scrum using words that don't piss engineers off to the same extent. Scrum is nothing particularly special or magic – it just provides a basic set of tools and terms to describe a bunch of interactions and help keep them on track, and they are for the most part pretty reasonably tools.

And here's the reason this is not a good article – it makes the same basic mistake as many others do and assumes that a development framework is somehow supposed to magically fix your broken team. A bad manager is a bad manager, regardless of whether you call them a "scrum master" or something else.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Author here, love the comments. The biggest criticism that makes me want to revisit and edit the article is the 2-month -> 4-month API example. I remain convinced that the Scrum process that I describe is OFTEN responsible for slowing down projects AT LEAST this much. That said, I think I need to come up with a better example. It's honestly hard to explain in words.

</comment><comment><USER29> Scrum is a tool. It can be used well, it can be used poorly. It is good for some situations and bad for others. The author of the article makes some good points with the key for me being Scrum isn't agile. For me Scrum is a place to start an agile transformation but it is often the wrong place to end your transformation.

</comment><comment><USER30> Dont need to see who wrote this, clearly a very junior engineer with a lot of opinions and not a lot of experience.

</comment><comment><USER31> Seriously, you don't plan 14 sprints at once. You plan for one sprint, and you need to synchronize with the rest od the team. Scrum is about teamwork and product iterations, if you start from "i need API with 14 endpoints" and you will do that alone then that's not Scrum.

<comment><USER32> Totally!

\- How do you know you need 14 endpoints? \- What do they do? \- Do you need them all delivered in one go? __Why? __\- Can you make something, useful to the bulk of your users, with three or four endpoints? \- Who uses the endpoints? Can they do some of their work whilst you make your endpoints? \- What goes over these endpoints?

All these, and more, affect how you build and what you build. Scrum, and agile in general, should help you organise the work (where "work" includes planning, design, collaboration, as well as build and release), and gives you space to improve the quality of the work (when it's done well).

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Can't we just create a new methodology called blame game ?

</comment><comment><USER34> I don't really feel the need to read this since I'm currently working from home on Rugby Ave.

</comment><comment><USER35> At my current job, scrum is just a half hour meeting every day where people discuss whatever for however long and the most important is the status update to make sure management knows that you are working. The upside is we don't do sprints, retrospectives, scrum master etc. although estimates are still required. Someone will probably claim this is not scrum, the no true Scotsman fallacy. I wouldn't mind much if it wasn't early in the morning at such a shitty time it messes up the whole day's schedule by interrupting sleep for no reason. Whatever. It's management's loss as contributing meaningfully, by speaking or listening, is simply impossible. The half hour duration is extreme. It's a great argument against such meetings, regardless of what they are called, especially morning meetings. It definitely makes the whole day and especially the morning much less productive due to draining the natural energy one has in the morning. Really, I can't think of a way it could be worse other than it being earlier and longer.</comment>


Jobs That Artificial Intelligence Will Create - <AUTHOR> http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/will-ai-create-as-many-jobs-as-it-eliminates/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sm-direct <comment><USER2> "We identified the emergence of entire categories of new, uniquely human jobs... trainers, explainers, and sustainers."

OK, great, but...

a.) these jobs will only be "uniquely human" until AI becomes self-generating and sustaining. [1]

b.) as these jobs emerge, surely they don't expect all of the millions of displaced laborers, truck drivers for example, to find work in these roles.

AI is increasing overall efficiency (less human work => more productivity), while global population grows. This is a good thing, but I can't buy into the idea that these new jobs will be sustainable. IMO #1, we instead simply need to conciously decide to carve out jobs for humans to do, even though the work could be done (probably better) by a machine. After all, I mow my grass with a push mower (vice a gas mower) because it's clean and I enjoy it. IMO #2, a base living wage without work does not a happy life make.

1\. [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603381/ai-software- learns...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603381/ai-software-learns-to- make-ai-software/)

<comment><USER3> Be realistic about point a).

And for point b), it's always truck drivers brought up in these instances. Yes, think of the poor truck drivers. I'm sure they love doing a dull job.

If a job is replaceable by machines, it's not worth doing.

I get the worry that people will be without livelihood, but it's not as if this world has a shortage of work to be done. If we had no more work to do, sure, bring on the UBI. But we do. Clean litter out of forests, plant new forests, visit the sick. Whatever it is, there will absolutely be more work for humans in the future. People not being forced to drive trucks means they could be doing something else more useful.

And if people lament losing a particular job and having to pick up a new one, well, sorry but that's reality. I could just as soon lament not getting paid to doodle cartoons.

<comment><USER4> Clean litter out of forests... for free? Visit the sick... for free? People don't like being truck drivers because they like driving trucks, they like being truck drivers because they like eating, sleeping, and raising their families. The unemployment rate is currently above 0, despite their being no "shortage of work to be done," because plenty of work that could be done doesn't have anyone paying in exchange for that work.

Who's going to pay people to do the things that are more useful, but don't fit in to the standard capitalist system? You? Some benevolent billionaire? The government, if we raise taxes and increase social spending to an extent that makes plenty of Americans recoil in instinctive horror? Yeah, I do think of the poor truck drivers, because I don't want them to starve.

<comment><USER3> You're missing the point. There's room for social programs to get these things done, but UBI for nothing isn't a good idea.

<comment><USER5> No, he's not, you are. The social programs required to get those things done aren't going to come soon enough due to the cultural rejection of this kind of socialism in America. You're glossing over the hard part, as if "just pass a social program" was an easy thing to do.

UBI has to be worked out "before" these become big problems, not after; now is the time.

<comment><USER3> More money for UBI is necessarily less potentially available money for the forest service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I expect AI-empowered job growth to happen heavily in the medical biology field. We've just barely begun to scratch the immense complexity of the human body. It dwarfs any "big data" system today that you can think of.

Another candidate is environmental management, like environmental reviews, construction permitting, and pollution remediation. Again, there is almost no limit to the complexity you'll encounter when you want to model geological systems to make detailed predictions.

Technology usually leads to job creation when it creates new levels of abstraction upon which new careers will be built. These are most needed in areas where complexity overwhelms current technology. Biology and geology currently fit that bill.

<comment><USER7> AIs dont create new knowledge yet. But may ferret out known things more efficiently.

<comment><USER8> Key difference between your comment, and the parent, is the distinction between now and later (time) along with "knowledge" vs "resources." If ai- driven technology produces new abstractions, or put differently, massively reduces the cost and access to resources that are currently scarce and valuable, then you have a whole layer of newly introduced resource(s) to Build businesses off of. This might not be new knowledge the way I took it in your comment. I also think it's reasonable to assume that as quality engineering time keeps getting poured into these areas, these new abstractions will happen. I also believe this is a great way to look at the world, which is why I felt compelled to clarify.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is why as I look to the future that my two year old son will inherit as an adult, I'm going to make sure that he has a really solid grasp of philosophy. The cutting edge of today's technology and science are all digging deeply into age old philosophical questions that haven't seemed so relevant until recently. Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality in particular are going to beg us to answer questions about Ethics, the nature of Consciousness, and the nature of Reality.

<comment><USER10> Philosophy is a fundamental education in any science.

<comment><USER11> Philosophy jobs are among the first to go [https://www.illinoispolicy.org/mcdonalds-counters-fight- for-...](https://www.illinoispolicy.org/mcdonalds-counters-fight-for-15-with- automation/) #lol

<comment><USER10> This is not about jobs, it's more than that. It's like saying Artists don't have enough jobs these days so there is no purpose in studying or practicing art.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> To read the full article, search for the link on google.

[https://www.google.com/#safe=strict&q=http://sloanreview.mit...](https://www.google.com/#safe=strict&q=http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/will- ai-create-as-many-jobs-as-it-eliminates/)

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't think A.I. is the problem, it is automation that is the great fear. Regular code is as dangerous as A.I. as far as fear-mongering goes.

Automation really got going at the start of the industrial revolution and people have been scared of it ever since.

Today I put together some Google Form that writes to a spreadsheet. This means no more excel spreadsheet email attachments or copying and pasting. It took me an hour to research and prototype. With a few adjustments all was done. In this task there was no A.I. to teach, just a few boxes to move around and ability to listen to requirements.

I handed over the form to be maintained and updated by internal client. So no more work needed. Someone normally spends weeks collating the spreadsheet data. Now they don't have to do that. Now they will do cool stuff in Fusion tables, interpreting the data. Plus the company is growing and therefore that role will not be an idle one.

Whole teams of people can be swept away from back office jobs from the simple non AI changes such as better forms. Or people can be empowered to move their job on to the next level, e.g. data analysis rather than data entry.

I know computers can do amazing A. I. things but the much feared change is already happening and it is mostly based on if statements rather than A.I. Some get swept away and others embrace and effect the change. Attitude of the individual matters and there are winners plus losers with change brought on by automation.

<comment><USER14> > I don't think A.I. is the problem, it is automation that is the great fear. > Regular code is as dangerous as A.I. as far as fear-mongering goes.

I 100% agree. Modern business still organize themselves like firms a century ago but with faster tools to accomplish largely the same set of tasks. We have only begun to realize the productivity gains/decreased labor demand of technology that was boring in the nineties.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The three categories are:

\- "trainers" to train the AIs,

\- "explainers" to investigate the "black box" and get insights and knowledge out of it, and

\- "sustainers" to monitor and make sure that the AI behaves appropriately (think, e.g., Microsoft's Twitter bot-turned-Nazi).

<comment><USER16> This kind of division of labor was shown in the recent Westworld series on HBO I think. They didn't get into the economics of the real world (wisely, I'd add) but there were clearly different tiers of jobs vaguely resembling current ones we recognize.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> _" Customer service chatbots, for example, need to be trained to detect the complexities and subtleties of human communication."_

Yes, but for that to be economically a net win, way fewer man-hours will be spent training systems than now are spent by humans doing customer service. Net result will be a significant job loss.

</comment><comment><USER5> > The Jobs That Artificial Intelligence Will Create

Won't be remotely enough to replace the jobs it destroys leaving us with mass unemployment.

</comment><comment><USER18> Is there a mirror of the article?

</comment><comment><USER19> I tried to create a free account and they want a credit card number.... bummer, I would like to read that.

<comment><USER20> From my university I can read it for free, in one image: [https://i.imgur.com/gzDCT8u.png](https://i.imgur.com/gzDCT8u.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> These uniquely human jobs will be replaced by emulated "standard" humans. A virtual human brain, even if computationally expensive to emulate could be programmed to do rare "human jobs" while AI employs more pragmatic algorithms. Eventually all the brain functions and networks will be extracted and encoded in algorithms and FPGA hardware, so I won't bet on these "uniquely human jobs" existing forever.

</comment><comment><USER22> Trainers tops the list. Seems T800's aren't far behind.

</comment><comment><USER23> Relevant song by Flight of the Conchords:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1BdQcJ2ZYY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1BdQcJ2ZYY)

</comment><comment><USER24> Given the sustaining market for artisanal wine and cheese, I think we can hold off a bit on predicting the future of work.

</comment><comment><USER23> At the point where AI will be functionally equivalent to human, suddenly trillions of jobs will be created....

</comment><comment><USER25> Most of the new jobs will be created by the human resistance. While this includes trainers, I think a majority of the new occupations will be military based.

</comment><comment><USER26> Once AI is sufficiently advanced, your job will be to turn your robot on and ask it to do what you want.

<comment><USER27> Or will your job be to turn your robot on, and ask it what it wants you to do?

<comment><USER2> Or get woken up by your robot and told what to do (probably dance).</comment></comment></comment>


Calculus for the Practical Man - <AUTHOR> http://www.scribd.com/doc/88265940/Calculus-for-the-Practical-Man-1946 <comment><USER2> You can download the book legally and without the scribd BS from here:

[https://archive.org/details/calculusforpract00thom](https://archive.org/details/calculusforpract00thom)

<comment><USER3> The Internet Archive really needs to update its website. It's not 1998 anymore, you know. I couldn't easily find how to view the book. Then I realised you can only "borrow" it and it is already "borrowed", so it is currently unreadable and tells me "this title is currently checked out."

<comment><USER2> Sorry, might be I pasted the wrong link in the end:

[https://archive.org/details/calulusforthepra000526mbp](https://archive.org/details/calulusforthepra000526mbp)

<comment><USER4> Wow, and it is available in multiple formats. Thanks

<comment><USER5> Unfortunately the math figures didn't survive OCR, so the epub and other text versions are not really readable. Luckily the "read online" version is full- page images and works quite well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> @stiff Thx for the better link!

Looks like a nice book, though the writing isn't outstanding. If someone out there is looking for a free calculus textbook, I highly recommend this one: [http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33283](http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/33283) It's old too, but the writing is very entertaining---the author doesn't take the subjects seriously, but keeps joking around about how everyone takes Calc so seriously.

<shamelessplug>Hm... hm... I wrote a modern calculus book. It's not-free, but very affordable + it comes with physics. v4.1 is coming out next week...</shamelessplug>

<comment><USER7> The book is "Calculus Made Easy" by Silvanus P. Thompson. I had a copy of this some years ago. He skips delta epsilon proofs entirely and uses the infinitismal method to describe derivatives and integration. Makes for a very slim volume.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> On a related note, for anybody looking for freely available maths texts:

[http://people.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.ht...](http://people.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.html)

[http://mathbooks.reddit.com](http://mathbooks.reddit.com)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> A better link w/o registration or ads: [https://github.com/da99/my_lib/raw/master/JE_Thompson-- Calcu...](https://github.com/da99/my_lib/raw/master/JE_Thompson--Calculus-for- the-Practical-Man.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER9> Well scribd asks for registration to download. So after a little search, I've found the 2nd Edition here:

longfiles.com/jq5ti168hjsy/MFSS_Clcls_2_Thmpsn_1946.pdf.html

<comment><USER10> Even though there is no materiel difference between the two links, Scribd is a YC company where selling access to copyrighted works is a business model, your link might get you banned.

BTW: The first edition of this book is most certainly out of copyright, Van Nostrad would had to have filed a copyright renewal in 1959 which most did not at the time.

<comment><USER11> Nobody running HN gives a shit about whether links will irritate Scribd, for what it's worth.

<comment><USER10> I meant linking to a download site or torrents will get one banned.

<comment><USER11> Can you find an instance where that's happened? I haven't.

You might get asked to remove the link, and, after refusing, have your post killed. That's unlikely, but could actually happen. But who cares?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The book is very dated. Are there any downsides to learning Calculus from this compared to a modern text?

<comment><USER13> Our college textbook for calculus was Newton's Principia, which I suppose is also somewhat dated. However, I was able to obtain a sound working knowledge of calculus from that. Granted, I updated it a bit with Robinson's 1970s text on nonstandard analysis.

The fundamentals prove to be quite timeless.

I would say that there are advantages and disadvantages to learning from an older text, depending on what you're aiming to learn.

<comment><USER14> That sounds exciting! When you say "I updated it a bit", do you mean that your instructor did it for the whole class, or that you as a student did it independently, or that you were the instructor?

I find Robinson's book pretty hard going, especially for a relatively introductory class, and would be very interested to hear whether or not this impression held for you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is the series of books recommended (or at least referenced) by Richard Feynman.

<comment><USER16> Did Feynman recommend or reference any other books besides this series?

<comment><USER17> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differentiation_under_the_integ...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differentiation_under_the_integral_sign#Popular_culture)

I don't know about recommending the practical-man book; I don't recall him mentioning it elsewhere. He quoted "What one fool can do, another can" (from Calculus Made Easy) I think more than once. I've skimmed Calculus Made Easy and it seems nice, and short.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Anybody know "graph theory for the practical man" or "information theory for the practical man" analogues?

<comment><USER19> Someone ought to do Statistics for the Concerned Citizen with an angle on analytics and 'big data' and how these new _applications_ of statistical inference may form part of decision making in the future.

Having said that I have a soft spot for Thompson's text.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Practical for 1979?

<comment><USER21> intro calc hasnt really changed much in the past 100 years

someone please correct me</comment></comment>


Progressive Signup: A Better User Signup Process - <AUTHOR> http://www.quietwrite.com/writing/7011 <comment><USER2> The standard name for this design pattern is _Lazy Registration_. I admit _Progressive Signup_ is probably a better label as it is more descriptive, but _lazy registration_ is what people have been calling it for some years now...

<http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=lazy+registration+demo>

<comment><USER3> Is there a catalog of Web/conversion optimization patterns like this? That would be pretty interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Naturally the question I was left with at the end of the post was "Does this impact user conversion and retention in a positive way?" thus leading to "Does this impact revenue and thus profit in a positive way?"

</comment><comment><USER5> Just to let you know, the first link in the blog to quietwrite actually points to quitewrite.com

</comment><comment><USER6> For those interested in this. Luke Wroblewski wrote on a similar theme "Gradual Engagement Boosts Twitter Sign-Ups by 29%" - <http://www.lukew.com/ff/entry.asp?1128>

</comment><comment><USER7> Yeah - this would annoy me, but I would class myself as a "power user". I just want to get in, give you my email, password, confirm password and be done. However, as @aeden mentions, what I think doesn't matter if it converts better!

</comment><comment><USER8> Also known as lazy registration.

Also known as a neat trick you can try out on hobby/free apps but are most likely horribly inappropriate for the average startup. As soon as you get even remotely serious, for example spending money on marketing, you're going to wish you captured email addresses up front. When you're spending money on customer acquisition, "cool, 10,000 people tried our app" doesn't mean nearly as much as "cool, we have 2000 email addresses".

<comment><USER9> Is an email address really the mark of an 'acquired customer'?

<comment><USER10> As an example of something better than a larger group of anonymous users, I'd say yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Anything that reduces friction for a user to get started with your product has the potential to be a good thing.

But if your goal is to make money, and not just generate usage, I can see some possible problems with this approach. Not having a way to circle back with a user is bad.

Also, if someone truly needs a solution to the problem you are solving a signup form will usually not stand in their way.

It would be interesting to A/B test the entire user lifecycle to see if this approach has impact on the metrics that actually matter.

</comment><comment><USER12> To me, its not just about lazy registration. It's about the mindset of the user when you ask them to do something.

For example, when they have created some content and want to save it, that is the time to ask for email/password. It works better because of the implication: you are saving their work.

</comment><comment><USER13> Suggested feature: Implement an RSS feed of each user's published writings. (Or post these articles on a blog.) I'd like to receive future updates without having to watch HN. I'm guessing there are at least a couple of others here who would like to do the same.

</comment><comment><USER14> I prefer Costco to Best buy any day. What matters far more is reputation and the quality of the product than the barrier to entry to join/utilize the product.

Facebook could add a ten page signup form and I doubt it'd substantially impact their legitimate signup rate.

<comment><USER15> I suspect that Lazy Registration/Progressive Signup is far more important for lesser known sites. Facebook has the weight of some 500+ million users behind it and there is sufficient motivation for new users.

When working on wedding proofing sites I found that users would be willing to put up with more steps because they were motivated to begin with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> What about openID integration? give the users an option to sign up using their google-id or their facebook-id or any of the other id's the user already has. I would prefer to do that over giving my password to another site.

</comment><comment><USER17> What I appreciate is to be able to try the product without signing up, and then do not bother me anymore when I sign up later on.

</comment><comment><USER18> i like it.

and i like the idea too :)

feature request: a few more monospaced fonts for us coder types</comment>


Ask HN: Suppose that the PRISM slides are made up. Why does the gov play along? - <AUTHOR>

Everyone denied "direct access". They may or may not be lying, but I personally find the "direct access" scenario unlikely, because of the reasons outlined here: http://www.businessinsider.com/ex-microsoft-engineer-prism-is-highly-improbable-for-these-four-reasons-2013-6
The other scenario is passive listening on the backbone, and working from the captured data. Nowadays everyone uses SSL, so they would need to decrypt it. Let's suppose that they have no magic, and they play by the same rules as us. In that case the only feasible way is somehow obtaining the private keys of the companies and using that to decrypt the traffic, however for example in google's case the private keys won't do any good, because (if I understand everything correctly) Google uses the Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm for its SSL connections which makes passive mitm impossible: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5843223
Active mitm is very unlikely, because that could be detected.
And I have ran out of possible scenarios. The only remaining scenario is that all this is made up for some reason. My question is: What could be that reason? <comment><USER2> [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech- companies-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies- bristling-concede-to-government-surveillance-efforts.html?pagewanted=all)

New York Times tries to explain the difference between the Washington Post's report and the companies' denials

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> My theory is that the slides will eventually turn out to be a hoax, and they are just trying to raise the ppls' privacy-invasion tolerance levels, so that they can actually implement it later on.</comment>