Stephan Wolfram: 100 Years Since Principia Mathematica - <AUTHOR> http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2010/11/100-years-since-principia-mathematica/

<comment><USER2> I'm impressed it took Wolfram until the third paragraph to mention _A New Kind of Science_.

<comment><USER3> The post by Wolfram is a great discussion of logic and the philosophy of mathematics throughout the 20th century. Yet the top comment on HN is a snark, tribal bashing of the author.

<comment><USER4> These snarks appear because of Wolfram's writing style, he comes off as a kind of Steve Jobs who he himself is the product he is selling. Though at least this one is lighter than usual.

<comment><USER3> _Though at least this one is lighter than usual._

That's the whole point. If you read it without thinking "Wolfram wrote this _therefore_ it will be self-centered", then it sounds _perfectly fine_. The GP's snark was merely appealing to people's confirmation bias. It's a high- level version of that high-school classic: "I'll pick on that kid to show I'm part of the group".

Besides, it's depressingly ironic that a community producing a deluge of "How my startup achieved X in Y months" complains about this post being _self- centered_.

Read it! It's a good essay!

<comment><USER2> I don't particularly object to Wolfram being self-centered. Nor is there anything wrong with advertising one's own achievements.

But Wolfram seems incapable of talking about _any_ subject without shoehorning in some reference to his own works. Even when expected, it's a jarring, unnecessary interruption; a wild swing from a reasonably interesting article on mathematical history to unabashed self-promotion.

The snark wasn't intended as an offering to Hacker New group-think, but rather borne out of a genuine frustration at Wolfram's style of writing. I find it very difficult to read anything he says, because I'm continually awaiting that moment when he will pause, smile cheesily at the proverbial camera, and explain how amazing his products are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's interesting that Wolfram makes a quick foray into computer science to bash type systems. (I think he couldn't be more wrong)

"To resolve this, Russell introduced what is often viewed as his most original contribution to mathematical logic: his theory of types—which in essence tries to distinguish between sets, sets of sets, etc. by considering them to be of different "types", and then restricts how they can be combined. I must say that I consider types to be something of a hack. And indeed I have always felt that the related idea of "data types" has very much served to hold up the long-term development of programming languages. (Mathematica, for example, gets great flexibility precisely from avoiding the use of types.)"

<comment><USER6> It is a strange comment. The type theories used in programming languages, certainly in those based on the λ-cube, descend from simple type theory (via the simply-typed λ-calculus), which Russell discarded in favour of his ramified theory of types. I also wonder why Wolfram, originally a mathematician, doesn't even mention the Curry-Howard correspondence, which seems to me a fairly important result linking mathematics and computation.

No one uses ramified type theory these days, at least not that I am aware, although Russell's predicativism lives on in e.g. Feferman's programme [1] (there are some interesting results in reverse mathematics relating to this; see Simpson's book [2]).

Anyone missing the background I and the parent comment allude to might want to take a look at Thierry Coquand's article on type theory in the SEP [3]. Coquand is the originator of many ideas in this area, including the calculus of constructions [4] and the proof assistant Coq based on it.

[1] <http://math.stanford.edu/~feferman/papers/predicativity.pdf>

[2] <http://www.math.psu.edu/simpson/sosoa/>

[3] <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/type-theory/>

[4] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus_of_constructions>

<comment><USER7> >No one uses ramified type theory these days, at least not that I am aware

In the 1920s Frank Ramsey proved that the theory of ramified types + "The Axiom of Reducibility" is equivalent to the theory of simple types: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_theory#Simple_theory_of_ty...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_theory#Simple_theory_of_types)

The history I've heard is that ramified types were abandoned after this, since simple type theory is easier and has the same expressive power.

<comment><USER6> That's certainly always the way I've heard it, although I did come across an interesting lacuna when I was reading the the SEP article earlier, which is that the effect of the axiom of reducibility was first noticed by Polish logician Leon Chwistek [1]. His article 'The Theory of Constructive Types' was published in 1924, while Ramsey's paper dates from 1926.

José Ferreirós in _The Princeton Companion to Mathematics_ mentions his name as well, albeit without much detail. Chwistek seems a fascinating character: like his contemporary Witkacy, he was an artist as well as a logician, and according to the biography of Alfred Tarski by the Fefermans [2], was appointed to a professorship at Lvov in 1930 which Tarski was also in the running for; apparently a letter of recommendation from Russell was the decisive factor (see p. 67 of the aforementioned).

Bernard Linsky seems to have written a chapter on Chwistek and type theory in _The Golden Age of Polish Philosophy_. You can read the first page [3] but I haven't been able to find the entire thing online.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Chwistek>

[2] [http://www.cambridge.org/uk/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=052...](http://www.cambridge.org/uk/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521802407)

[3] <http://www.springerlink.com/content/v078l3n714589036/>

<comment><USER7> > Bernard Linsky seems to have written a chapter on Chwistek and type theory > in The Golden Age of Polish Philosophy. You can read the first page [3] but > I haven't been able to find the entire thing online.

Try gigapedia.com ;-D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> In case you're interested, about halfway down is the usually quoted result (*110.643) that 1+1=2. I'm often asked why it took so long (it's over 80 pages into volume 2) to prove something so trivially, and obviously true, and recently I've come up with an example that demonstrates the idea.

I'll try to write about it later when I get a bit more time.

<comment><USER8> Please do...

In my freshman year of college, I asked my real analysis professor why 1+1=2 and he failed to provide an edifying explanation. He did, however, commend me for asking -- I think it earned me some brownie points, which I redeemed by asking for extra clarification on more course-related topics later in the quarter.

Anyway, it's always bothered me so if I can learn something about it then I would love to!

<comment><AUTHOR> As a taster ...

What do you mean by "2"?

What do you mean by "1"?

What do you mean by "+"?

What do you mean by "="?

There's more than one way to get to the number 7. You can start at 0 and count upwards, or you can "add" the numbers "3" and "4". Why should it be that you end up in the same place?

Slightly more complex/general ...

Consider the number line, and divide the stretch between 0 and 1 into 9 equal pieces. Start from 0 and move along two of these pieces. Call the place you get to "T".

Now consider the stretch from 0 to 2, and divide that into 9 equal sized pieces. Take just the first one, and call where that gets to "S".

Why are they the same point?

<comment><USER8> >Now consider the stretch from 0 to 2, and divide that into 9 equal sized pieces. Take just the first one, and call where that gets to "S". Why are they the same point?

This seems to me like it's simply rephrasing the question why does 1+1=2. Or, at least, I can't answer it without invoking the field axioms, or perhaps only the ring axioms. Please forgive me if my terminology is awkward.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> There is a nice comic book about the life of Bertrand Russell: Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth

The story is well-written, it's fascinating. Here the link: <http://www.logicomix.com/>

</comment><comment><USER6> There's a Principia Mathematica anniversary symposium at Trinity College, Cambridge this weekend.

<http://www.srcf.ucam.org/principia/>

<comment><USER10> Sorry I miss clicked and downvoted you instead of upvoting; the interface prevents me from rectifying this error.

<comment><USER11> So does -1 + 1 = 0 here?

Is there some book that proves this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wolfram ends the essay on a tantalizing note _...another level of automation.... [I]nventing and developing [systems using other axiomatic systems] to respond to some particular purpose._

I see this _almost_ happening daily on HN with the huge interest in new languages especially functional languages. By _almost_ I mean these are mostly descendants of either Lisp or ML and they are based on the same logic. I'm not sure if you would gain anything by hard-wiring a language into one of the other multitude of axiomatic systems. It would be an intellectual challenge to first select an appropriate system, and then construct a useful language. And it would be hard to recruit people to use it enough to provide useful feedback.

</comment><comment><USER13> First:

      In 1903, he published The Principles of Mathematics: Volume 1 (no volume 2 was ever published) [...]

Later:

      [...] it did not hurt the whole impression that it took until more than 80 pages into volume 2 [...]

<comment><USER5> Volume 2 of Principia Mathematica, not Principles of Mathematics.

<comment><USER13> Sharp reading... sorry!</comment></comment></comment>


JuliaCon 2019 Videos - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLP8iPy9hna6StY9tIJIUN3F_co9A0zh0H <comment><USER2> If anyone is looking for video recommendations to get started: here's a couple that I thought were great and should be interesting and approachable to just about anyone.

Steven G. Johnson's keynote address. It's longer format but really interesting, informative, entertaining and well delivered. The main topic is metaprogramming. [https://youtu.be/mSgXWpvQEHE](https://youtu.be/mSgXWpvQEHE)

Stefan Karpinski's talk on the unreasonable effectiveness of multiple dispatch. He discusses the fact that Julia has such dramatic code re-use and sharing between libraries and he discusses some reasons why he thinks multiple dispatch is uniquely able to offer this. [https://youtu.be/kc9HwsxE1OY](https://youtu.be/kc9HwsxE1OY)

</comment><comment><USER3> It would be great if Julia were to take a page from the Rust playbook and have some focused initiatives around making the language more accessible to its potential audience. I've been impressed with how introspective and constructively self-critical the Rust stewardship has been. I don't get the same sense from Julia, but maybe I'm missing things.

The "time to first plot" issue bothers me far less than the weak documentation and low-friendliness error messages. I'm not sure where this documentation style comes from that the official Julia docs use, where the left side of the page is permanently taken up with a low information density TOC and the detailed discussion in any real content section is either terse or somewhat superficial, but that imbalance is very frustrating. Try for example to find where in the Multi-Dimensional Array section the eachrow() iterator is introduced. There doesn't seem to be an attempt to develop something equivalent to the Klabnik & Nichols Rust book.

There are some awesome packages in the Julia ecosystem, but the "slap something onto GitHub in one night" style of documentation definitely hurts.

Making error messages more approachable will also help driving toward Julia as the technical computing lingua franca for engineering students.

<comment><USER4> The documentation style (permanent TOC on the right) seems to copy python's Sphinx style. And you are quite right about the lack of visible effort in making error messages more useful.

<comment><USER5> Until very recently, there have been higher priority issues such as complete multithreading support. Now that we have that, error messages are now a top priority (see my other comment). Some work has already been done but not yet merged: [https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/31954](https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/31954).

<comment><USER6> Thanks for all the great effort and progress. Better error messages would be awesome, but this composable multi-thread support makes Julia even more absurdly powerful and versatile! The priority makes complete sense.

The Julia team and community are constantly advancing the frontiers of language design while grounding it in real number crunching applications. I wouldn't be too concerned about trying to have the same documentation and content approach as the Rust community as their goals were to usurp the mindshare of systems programmers (C/C++) with a novel ownership paradigm.

Looking forward to the progress on error messages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm glad Julia is continuing to make progress. There's certainly a learning curve but that's how it goes with these powerful languages. I believe it's inherently superior to the competition, and as long as the rough spots continue to get filed down and the community remains engaged and willing to help newcomers, it will meet with ultimate success.

</comment><comment><USER8> Julia: come for the syntax, stay for the speed

[https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02310-3](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02310-3)

<comment><USER9> I came for the speed, and I left because of the speed. It's impressive how the interpreter is slow to start..

<comment><USER10> That's mostly because Julia doesn't have yet an interpreter (outside of the debugger), only a JIT compiler. Thankfully the "time to first plot" is the new priority for the compiler team since the multithreading is already working.

<comment><USER11> Most Common Lisp compilers survive well with incremental compilation. Build- times and development are very fast, with no interpreter in sight.

<comment><USER12> Yea, but common lisp is also missing nearly all the numerical libraries I need like sparse matrices. Yes, I'm sure someone has a wrapper somewhere, but Julia has native support for all of that and is really nice. It also has much better support for a lot of things like plotting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> I was unfortunately unable to attend, but I really appreciate how many talks were recorded for YouTube. Really great to see all the cool stuff people are working on.

</comment><comment><USER13> I hope LibreOffice will consider[1] to support Julia in Calc too, along with the current Python support.

[1] [https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=125728](https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=125728)

</comment><comment><USER14> I have been willing to try Julia for a long time now.

Yesterday I finally put time aside to port some stuff I have been doing in Python to Julia.

1st: install Julia - used a snap on Ubuntu, fine

2nd: get jupyter to work with Julia: a bit complex, but achievable

3rd: install Julia support for vscode: Julia kernel keeps crashing in vscode

4th: Port a routine from Python to Julia: some nice language features, some scary: importing a package exposes all its functions to the all namespace - this seems quite awful! (EDIT: Thank you for pointing out that I should use `import` instead of `use`, in order not to put everything in the same namespace).

5th: Try to read a Parquet file - doesn't work because it was compressed with zstd (something all 3 libraries for parquet in Python support)

6th: realize that there is no package in Julia that even allows to write parquet files

Conclusion: maybe in a few years Julia will be my go-to language, but right now, it's too underdeveloped in order to be able to do real work with it.

<comment><USER15> Use import instead of using if you don't want things in your namespace.

<comment><USER14> Ah, thank you! That was a very rookie mistake from my part then.</comment></comment></comment>


Fast Food – Ads vs. Reality - <AUTHOR> http://www.alphaila.com/articles/failure/fast-food-false-advertising-vs-reality/

<comment><USER2>
      $3.99, to be exact, but that 99 is BS psychology that I think should be illegal.

Is this serious?

<comment><USER3> more to the point, does .99 still work on anyone? I understand that "round number" signals "classy" while "odd number" signals "cheap" but does that signal change behavior?

<comment><USER4> Yeah sadly it does. And it works on products of all price ranges especially at critical price points, the lowest of which is $.99. But it works just as well at $199 ... or $189. A computer for $999 for some reason seems like a much better deal than the same computer for $1010 but in reality represents a difference of 1% which is still much less than the tax you're going to pay on the machine.

Check out the current king of selling "classy" computers and whatnot <http://store.apple.com/us> their site is crawling with this peculiar aspect of human psychology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What? You mean buying a certain type of deodorant won't cause attractive women to swarm me?</comment>


Do you think startups should focus on very small markets? - <AUTHOR> http://www.kilometer.io/blog/why-startups-should-focus-on-a-very-small-market/

<comment><USER2> Not necessarily. All other things being equal, a startup can enter a big market that is 1) fragmented 2) the start-up has few or weak competitors. I think what a start-up is looking for are big untapped markets.</comment>


Stanford's class2go is said to be open source but where is the source? - <AUTHOR> http://engineering.stanford.edu/press/stanford-launches-class2go-open-source-platform-online-classes

<comment><USER2> It's in Github, here ("<https://github.com/Stanford-Online/class2go>). I remember seeing a link in another story about Class2Go (I don't remember exactly which story) but I do agree that the location of the source is not being prominently displayed in any of the stories I've seen so far.</comment>


Myspace is still the place every music artist needs to be. - <AUTHOR> http://www.mynameisned.com/myspace-is-still-the-number-one-place-every-music-artists-needs-to-be

<comment><USER2> It amazes me everytime that nobody made a better alternative for MySpace yet. They can't win because everything new they make is really crappy. Two recent examples: they are the place with more concert listings and still their new "I'm going to this show"-thing is really weak and focused on selling tickets instead of giving a good user experience (can't find shows by venue, etc); the new music player reminds me of old 90's, I believe it's a step back.

The alternative is really easy to create: it's a place where you can upload your songs for free and use open graph from Facebook for comments, etc, because bands are now trying to slowly move to Facebook. That or Facebook gets a better way for artists to customize their pages.

<comment><USER3> Facebook is not an alternative. More and more people refuse to use it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think this is fairly short sighted - they've got a lot of people to lose before they become irrelevant and they're still in a growth curve.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> In the USA you allegedly have last.fm, but that's pretty much useless if you're in the rest of the world; like me (Europe) and the guy who wrote the post (Australia).

I agree, though: MySpace is no longer a social networking site, but rather, a music artists site: I guess over 99.9% of any active artists has a page there as I've only encountered 1 artist (and not a famous one) who didn't have a MySpace home page, in years.

MySpace should focus _only_ on the musical artists, and dump everyone else. I often feel annoyed when I search for an artist on MySpace and I find an ordinary user has taken up his name for a totally uninteresting page about himself.

</comment><comment><USER4> True, sadly. I'd donate money just to see this giant spamhole gone, better: replaced by a successor.

Every bit of value a myspace profile might have is destroyed by a crappy design, misused fields, "thanks for the add" messages and just plain advertisement anywhere else.

We have nice stuff out there already, Soundcloud (nice player), Last.fm (band info), Bandcamp (most awesome sales platform)... I'm unexpressable eager to see someone creating the myspace killer with them.

<comment><AUTHOR> Crappy design + too much irrelevant advertising + incredibly slow load times.

The next version definitely needs to take the best elements of all of those services but initially it needs simplicity and I think the Sixty One guys are almost there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> As a musician myself, I really want someone to do something about this. Soundcloud has some of the important features down (eg. a music player that's not shit, unlike Myspace's), but they really need a customisable/brandable artist landing page to really take over the space. I know its far beyond what they are trying to be, but to me they seem like the closest to actually reaching the critical mass to make a go of it (at least in the electronic/dance music area).</comment>


Mulder and Scully to Re-Open the X-Files - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-32035562 <comment><USER2> Can't decide whether this is a good idea, or a terrible one.

Interesting link I found while googling for more info: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/merrillbarr/2015/03/24/x-files-r...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/merrillbarr/2015/03/24/x-files- reboot/)

<comment><USER3> I question the motive for this .. I believe it'll be a social-engineering effort (propaganda) more than anything. I look forward to seeing what subjects get addressed in the new series, and what relation it will have to contemporary thinking on things like Snowden/NSA, global warming, etc. Lets see if, yet again, people are snookered into thinking what everyone else thinks, just because its popular on TV ..

<comment><USER2> Good point about the potential sources for material. I hadn't thought of it from that angle. I hope the writers don't get too distracted, though, and work events into the X Files world, rather than vice versa. (No shortage of ways to spin things, but if they lack confidence, they might try to update the story line to keep it "relevant".)

As for the propaganda aspect - well, of course, trust no-one :D But since I lived from the UK, and watched the X Files as a teenager, that would probably have passed me by. Older viewers in the US might have had a more sophisticated take on it.

<comment><USER3> I was old enough when X-Files hit the scene to be highly dubious of it as a means of propaganda'izing issues that I thought were being trivialized - secret government programs, psychopharmaceutical experiments, cover-ups, etc. I was also not at all trusting of Fox as a media group, because in the early days of its existence it was pretty clear that it was a propaganda front for the government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You mean Moody and Scully.

It's a bit hard to see him differently now.

<comment><USER5> A friend, born in the early nineties, recently told me that she watched Californication first and, trying to later watch (the original) X-Files simply couldn't take Duchovny-as-Mulder seriously having been primed by Duchovny-as- Moody.

<comment><USER6> It's funny how some actors always seem to be themselves, not matter what role or character they play. E.g. whenever I see Martin Freeman in anything, I see him as Tim Canterbury (The Office UK).

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Canterbury](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Canterbury)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: How do you test your CMS-based website deployments? - <AUTHOR> Enterprise CMSs have a lot of complexity and my small team is looking for tools to improve the efficiency and coverage of QA.
After seeing some unexpected bugs post code deployments, we've started looking into testing tools which would automate the task of spot-checking the site functionality.
This is despite developing on a test server and slotting time for testing.
We have a large number of pages, many of which have content changing over time. A test suite would need to accommodate that.
I'd love to hear about your choice of tools and process. <comment><USER2> I'm curious what enterprise CMS you use. I work in enterprise CMS from last 7 years and would love to know your use case in detail. I can tell you that this is definitely a issue with many organizations face but none of the cms offers an OOTB functionality to cover this.

<comment><AUTHOR> I was not looking for ootb but hoping to hear about a solid process based on selenium or similar system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Visual diff tools that visually compare screenshots of URLs for previous and new deploys are really useful. I can recommend [https://github.com/garris/BackstopJS](https://github.com/garris/BackstopJS)

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm curious to know more about the kinds of bugs you are seeing and if there might be a tool to help. Can you provide your email or email firstname.lastname@example.com? I'd like to ask you some questions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you, I'll get in touch on Monday.</comment></comment>


Why Do Developers Hate LinkedIn? - <AUTHOR> http://kellysutton.com/2016/07/13/why-do-developers-hate-linkedin.html <comment><USER2> I just don't want another thing to fill out about myself and maintain, another "social" website to bother me with emails (which Linkedin already does by the way) and notifications and all that. Endorsing people for skills and all that shit. I want less of that in my life.

A couple years ago a friend was bewildered that I don't use it, saying I was stupid for passing up all the opportunities that originate from there. Well, somehow my career isn't dead yet.

</comment><comment><USER3> I joined a bunch of technical groups on linkedin and have found them to be absolutely useless.</comment>


Sikorsky counterrotating helicopter takes flight - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2008/08/28/sikorsky-counterrotating-helicopter-takes-flight/

<comment><USER2> took them long enough <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamov_Ka-50>

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know what it is, but there's something unbelievably cool about helicopters.

That is all.</comment>


Could school subjects soon be a thing of the past in Finland? - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39889523 <comment><USER2> I've actually done a similar "integrated" program here in the US. I really have to echo what the article says about great students getting it, while some students aren't sure what to take away from each lesson to bring to the next lesson:

> "This way of teaching is great for the brightest children who understand > what knowledge they need to take away from an experiment. It allows them the > freedom to learn at their own pace and take the next steps when they are > ready to," he says.

> "But this is not the case for children who are less able to figure it out > for themselves and need more guidance. The gap between the brightest and the > less able has already begun widening and I am very afraid that this will > only get worse".

I had this integrated science program at IMSA ([http://www.imsa.edu](http://www.imsa.edu)) in the late 90's. It was certainly interesting. We started off talking about the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste storage site. Overall, it was a fun program, and IMSA is meant to try out new teaching strategies, but I'm not sure how much of a success it would be in all public schools.

It is very important to connect various scientific and learning concepts. Sometimes it even makes it easier to learn (physics and calculus are peas and carrots). But there is a certain foundation that also needs to be built up, such as atomic theory and chemistry.

Right now we kind of teach school like a layer cake, where each layer is a grade. There's some stuff, and it vaguely builds on each other, but it's not directly connected. But whatever isn't directly connected on that graph is hard to find a use for. That's why it's important to connect concepts and understand how they interact in the world. I do think there's the possibility of a path that is more winding, connecting concepts along the way, but I'm not sure we know what the best path is. Should we focus earlier on math and reading? More science later after basic reading? Right now we seem to more or less equally divide time over subjects, which seems hugely arbitrary.

<comment><USER3> > "But this is not the case for children who are less able to figure it out > for themselves and need more guidance. The gap between the brightest and the > less able has already begun widening and I am very afraid that this will > only get worse".

It's too bad, but doesn't that just mean that the better students have been held back by the previous system and they're finally getting what they need? The slower students need something else, but I hope that the better ones continue getting better education that they can use.

<comment><USER4> Yeah. I get that modern education seems to have equality as a centerpiece, but the elephant in the room is that yes, some children are brighter than others. Making entire classes wait until everyone reaches a milestone before moving on, is dragging down the quickest learners to the level of the slowest.

When they say "gap between the brightest and the less able has already begun widening", I think they're just starting to see again the gap that has always been there but was 'closed' at the expense of the smart kids. And it is at their expense, I've seen very bright students lose interest or turn to mischief because classes were not sufficiently stimulating for them. The smartest kid from my high school class was constantly getting in trouble and was almost expelled because he was perpetually bored.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As an adjunct professor who also teaches online independently, I find project- based learning more effective for my classes in leadership, entrepreneurship, and sales.

The students seem to agree, sometimes after a transition when they realize the class is about skills more than facts. The students are adults and give reviews like

" _Absolutely. I would recommend this course not just to peers, but anyone interested in leadership. Honestly, even if you don 't care about being a leader, this is the kind of class which can help anyone grow as a person, not only bettering themselves in terms of leadership, but also in terms of self actualization. The social skills you learn in this class have never been taught to me in an academic environment._"

and

" _This course teaches leadership not just by reading theory, but actually putting the theory into practice. In most classes we are forced to regurgitate information back to the professor, in this class we are taught to be self- accountable, which is a skill everyone should have. What I learned in this class will stick with me for life. I can 't say that about every SPS class. This course was refreshing._"

The faculty, on the other hand, have a hard time fitting these courses into their subject-based system, independent of the value to the students.

It's like universities are asking to be disrupted.

<comment><USER6> Schools are built on a theory of mass production and we know from the last hundred years that mass production is expensive, slow, and low in quality. See Ford and GM vs Toyota in the mid 20th century.

Lean is about integration and removing arbitrary walls between types of knowledge. Hopefully today's Fordist mass production is soon replaced by Finland's lean education system. But remember, it will have nothing to do with iPads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> With such a low immigration, the pisa sample tended to be more uniform in Finland which introduced a distortion with other countries having more immigration but a better teaching system. Recent immigration increase has lowered the last Finnish pisa rankings. So, of course, some methods are innovative, but being an example is maybe overrated. Results will be "assessable" only when these kids will have a professional path.

<comment><USER8> You are simply mistaken: The immigration increase is so recent and so small compared to the population size that it can't have lowered the country's rankings.

Pasi Sahlberg is the expert to listen to: "I don't believe that the PISA results in Finland have anything to do with the language or the fact that Finland is more homogenous than others[.] Of course Finland has had fewer non- Finnish speakers or children who were born outside of Finland, but that cannot explain the progress in previous PISA studies or the declining results in maths." [http://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/finlands_school_system_the...](http://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/finlands_school_system_the_new_nokia/6965192)

EDIT: Same misconception propagated by BBC in the article here (for "balance"?): "Success has been attributed to a traditionally high regard for teaching and reading, as well as a small, largely homogenous population" How would population size contribute to the averages? Who has attributed? In the BBC archives I can find that claim by some right-wing British think tank.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I saw the title and assumed this was an attempt to make Finnish grammar even more difficult.

<comment><USER10> As did I! (It turns out to be about replacing individual curriculum topics-- history, mathematics, and so on--with a more integrated learning style.)

<comment><USER11> As for me, I understood it immediately. I understand the grammatical term "subject", but I don't know how to read "school subject" as a grammatical term. I would appreciate some help.

(in case this is regional: I'm Australian)

<comment><USER8> Now fixed at HN, not in the original article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Sure, the best thing to do when you have one of the best education systems in the world is try to fix it. What could possibly go wrong?

<comment><USER13> The reason why Finland has one of the best education system in the world is precisely the experimentation and non-conforming to the conservative education system. They have very good education specialists, I'm sure they will handle this just fine.</comment></comment>


The Fallacy of Human Freedom - <AUTHOR> http://nationalinterest.org/bookreview/the-fallacy-human-freedom-8652?page=show <comment><USER2> The main argument seems fundamentally flawed. It is argued that the idea of progress as a goal for humanity is pointless, because we are ultimately restricted by our nature, and instead of idealizing the concept of progress we should be satisfied with what we are.

However, it is painfully obvious that we are not imprisoned by our nature. We were not born to fly, yet we do fly. We fly gigantic metal heaps, around the world and even farther. We carry oxygen with us to outer space to circumvent our biological limitations. We can already bypass certain built-in elements of our "nature", such as anger, via medicine or surgery. In fact, we have been capable of changing our nature for a long time already, as advances in science have taught us that it is possible to cause physical changes in our brains through conscious effort, such as meditation. In the future, our capabilities for changing our nature will only increase.

Yes, we are still commonly quite foolish, and history has shown that we easily reduce ourselves to beasts in times of crisis, but we can, and have changed our beliefs into ones that represent the world around us more accurately. Using labels like secular humanism, our progress may be painted to look like misdirected religion, but these ideologies do not just represent the idea of progress, they have proven it - we truly have developed a more accurate image of our existence. We have progressed, and we will continue doing so.

<comment><USER3> Another obvious counterpoint is this TED talk, Steven Pinker on "The surprising decline of violence":

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ramBFRt1Uzk](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ramBFRt1Uzk)

<comment><USER4> The irony here is that Pinker then embraces the American prison-industrial complex in The Blank Slate as being a necessary part of this trend, when the US is probably an outlier.

There is a similarity between Pinker (at least in The Blank Slate) and Gray in that they both paint their targets with one big flaw before bashing them. Gray's template straw man is a humanist who didn't read The Selfish Gene.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As Rob Pike would say; mais oui.

I believe in the EU; or rather, I want to believe in the EU, because I want to believe that the European countries can work together and close at that. Politically, economically and so on.

But neither am I naïve to believe that the current implementation of the EU is the _best_ solution, nor do I believe that it will ever form into some sort of 'United States of Europe'. Nation states will never disappear in my view (that's the cynic in me), regardless of how ridiculous the idea may be to keep them.

<comment><USER5> Amusing. Whoever voted my comment down fails to realise that the EU is based on an ideal of humanism. The article in question specifically mentions that Gary has become a Eurosceptic, which falls perfectly in line with his opinion on humanism and progress.

One might think that the ideal of humanism and progress is merely to elevate _all_ countries to Western democracies (if we limit humanism and progress to politics), but in fact, even Western democracies needs step up; such as the European Union.

Edit: When I wrote this blob my parent comment had 0 points.

<comment><USER6> Well, it _was_ based on an ideal of humanism. Now? It's been taken over by people with other beliefs. Have a listen what Vladimir Bukovsky (who spent many years in Russian labour camps and psychiatric prisons for defending human rights) feels about this 'new' EU: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bM2Ql3wOGcU](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bM2Ql3wOGcU)

He draws some frightning comparisons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A couple of thoughts:

1) A hard upper limit on the intellectual capacity of an individual human being does not directly necessitate a corresponding limit to the capacity of humanity as a whole. There are now reliable means of preserving past knowledge and experience, and population growth means more minds are available to ponder difficult problems.

Interestingly, this is somewhat analogous to where we are today in computer hardware - an individual processor's power is limited, but large gains are yet to be made by adding more processors, and storage of information is increasingly exponentially.

These kinds of gains are not linear as you would expect from an increase in processors' speed, but they are gains nonetheless.

2) Even if you do assume that the individual human's finite capacity does imply an upper limit on human progress, it is still possible for progress to increase indefinitely; the gains will merely be increasingly marginal.

I agree that the idea that progress is an inevitable force of nature is completely false. It is a goal, not a natural force. I personally don't know anyone who actually believes this though, so I feel like this is something of a strawman.

<comment><USER8> The capacity to aggregate the capabilities of individual humans is greatly improved, but the way we vote has not been adapted accordingly.

All voting systems currently assume the capability of a voter to aggregate all the knowledge in the world into asingle rational decision. This is impossible, one person can never know enough to rationally vote on anyone or anything.

We need a whole different kind of democracy, one which aggregates individual knowledge instead of reducing it to insignificance. I don't know what it should look like, but i do know i've not seen it yet.

<comment><USER7> Interesting observation. I completely agree that as the amount of information needed to be synthesized to understand any issue multiplies exponentially, the capacity of an individual voter to grasp all of the necessary information is quickly exceeded. So people resort to shortcuts, voting based off of quick proxies for true discernment such as party affiliation or ideology.

I would even say that ideology can be considered as little more than a shortcut, a cache if you will of information and answers to tricky problems. Unfortunately, most people's "cache" never actually expires and they go to their grave still holding to hopelessly outdated data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Whatever one's thoughts on the article _in its entirety_ , the initial implication that the thinkers listed could not account for Herzen's fish is disingenuous.

Helvetius (one of the listed):

 _" The free man is the man who is not in irons, nor imprisoned in a gaol, nor terrorized like a slave by the fear of punishment ... it is not lack of freedom, not to fly like an eagle or swim like a whale."_

If freedom refers not to the biological limitations and fundamental nature of man, as the author repeatedly asserts during the construction of their straw opponent, but refers to whether man is in chains, then it becomes possible to generate empirical measures demonstrating "progress" in terms of freedom:

At the beginning of the 19th century, serfs and slaves made up 3/4s of the world's population.

<comment><USER10> And now beside having more slaves than any other time.in history in absolute numbers without counting prisoners in countries that allow prisoner slavery, like the US, we have people.that would happily.volunteer to.be slave if.they had a guarantee of food, we have sweatshops, we have young people desperately working in jobs they hate to pay student debts Oh, I am not slave, I am free, I am free to work in whatever job I find, or die starved and in debt.

<comment><USER9> There are an estimated 12-27 million people currently in slavery[1]. With a current world population of 7 billion, this proportion is between .0017 and .0038, a dramatic decline, and probably the lowest in history.

Regarding incarceration in the United States, despite a 10X increase in population from 31.4M to 311.8M and mandatory sentencing policies associated with the War on Drugs, the absolute number of Americans incarcerated in 2011 (2.2 million) was still less than the absolute number of Americans in slavery alone in 1860 (3.9 million).[2][3]

If you wish to move on to economic issues and contend there has been no progress in living conditions, a point the author of this article does not argue, I would challenge you to produce some actual metric and numbers for a similar period of time (after the dawn of philosophical liberalism) showing the average worker to be no better off, keeping in mind the enormous increase in life expectancy and GDP per capita which has occurred.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_United_States_Census](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_United_States_Census) [3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_St...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> A great blog on this theme is Mencius Moldbugs "Unqualified Reservations". Which he describes as an 'anti-democracy blog'. (Where 'democracy' includes supposed populist ideologies like fascism and communism.)

Writing from the view that monarchism is a good idea, Moldbug has a strange perspective on just about every topic imaginable. While I'm not sure how much of it I agree with, it's definitely interesting.

[http://moldbuggery.blogspot.com/](http://moldbuggery.blogspot.com/)

<comment><USER12> Yes, I was going to say the same thing. If you found this article interesting, you'll likely find Moldbug's perspective very interesting too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> A fantastic find. If you read the _Federalist Papers_ , it quickly becomes clear that the founders were not so much wide-eyed idealists as many Constitution-thumpers would have it, but a fairly cynical bunch who were as worried about the inability of people to rule themselves as they were about being ruled poorly from afar. Reading the FP made me quite a fan of Alexander Hamilton, hence my sometimes-grumpy statist position.

</comment><comment><USER14> What if this were written in the 1850s? Of course slavery is normal. All cultures have had slavery. So all those loony abolitionists with their progress notions are beating their heads against the fixity of human nature.

Take your is-ought fallacy and... well... this is a family web site.

</comment><comment><USER15> I liked this. A lot. I don't necessarily agree with it, but it brings up some great "deep thinking" conversations. Excellent HN fodder.

It's ironic that this would be on the front page as the same time as "HTML 5 genetic cars" because the two are so related. I think an extended analogy is in order.

Gray's first mistake is to do exactly what he accuses others of doing -- making a value statement about whether one society later in history is better than another, or whether there is some "direction of progress". Gray thinks there is not. Others think there is.

What I've learned from political and systems theory is that small, self- optimizing systems always outperform other systems, because they are able to adapt better.

Does evolution produce "better", "smarter", or "more perfect" creatures? No. It produces creatures better adapted to current conditions.

So when you look at civilizations, you should think about those little cars. Sometimes early adaptations lead to performance problems later on. Many times there is no universal car. Different adaptations work at different times. The best we can hope for is a system where the _cars adapt as they move along_.

Likewise, human systems will not get "better" \-- that's a value judgment, akin to "I like chocolate ice cream". Such statements are impossible to argue one way or another. Human systems will always adapt. The key, critical question here is this: are we encouraging systems of humans in which small units adapt and self-optimize? Or are we trying to create universal rules for all humans, thereby decreasing our ability to adapt to what lies ahead of us?

Moving farther to the right on the HTML5 cars app is not necessarily better or worse than spinning in place. But it does take us to places we haven't seen before. And that's pretty cool.

</comment><comment><USER16> The article opens with an example of someone seeing how life broke down in postwar Italy. But there is an alternate view of how humans behave in crisis, well-articulated by Rebecca Solnit in "A Paradise Built in Hell". She notes that, in actual crises, the expected apocalypse of savagery never arises. Instead there is often an unusual sense of solidarity.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/books/21book.html](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/books/21book.html)

Now, this has no bearing on the claim that humans have a limited capacity for rationality, which is obviously true at some level. But I want to draw your attention to the rhetorical strategy. In order to get you to submit to the idea that domination is normal, they first have to depress your hope in humanity. It then follows that one's choices are between slavery and chaos.

</comment><comment><USER17> What a neat article.

My wife and I have been recently binge-watching the TV show "Jericho." It's not deeply philosophical, but its a nice expression of this quote in the article: "The most basic trait is the instinct for survival, which is placed on hold when humans are able to live under a veneer of civilization. But it is never far from the surface."

</comment><comment><USER18> > Gray rejects it utterly. In doing so, he rejects all of modern liberal > humanism. "The evidence of science and history," he writes, "is that humans > are only ever partly and intermittently rational, but for modern humanists > the solution is simple: human beings must in future be more reasonable. > These enthusiasts for reason have not noticed that the idea that humans may > one day be more rational requires a greater leap of faith than anything in > religion."

This just seems like empty rhetoric.

Some people are more rational than those in the past - and we've learnt a lot about cognitive biases, and about how to have productive conversations. I don't think it requires a particularly great leap of faith to believe that people _may_ one day be more rational.

It's not a sure thing mind. But to go from a prescriptive must, to a may, to then saying that oh it's never going to happen. The evidence of science and history here may as well read 'It's common knowledge that...' a phrase that doesn't really support anything.

> "Technical progress," writes Gray, again in Straw Dogs, "leaves only one > problem unsolved: the frailty of human nature. Unfortunately that problem is > insoluble."

Because, hey, I say it is.

> Humanists believe that humanity improves along with the growth of knowledge, > but the belief that the increase of knowledge goes with advances in > civilization is an act of faith. They see the realization of human potential > as the goal of history, when rational inquiry shows history to have no goal. > They exalt nature, while insisting that humankind—an accident of nature—can > overcome the natural limits that shape the lives of other animals.

Straw man.

#

 _sigh_

I mean, look, I appreciate this is meant to be a book review, but in that role it's really bad. It's just a list of the book's claims along with some talking about what Grey believes. It might be an excellent book, it might be total tosh, but you're never going to know from that review which rapidly dissolves into nothing more than a political rant that takes it as granted that you already agree with Gray.

</comment><comment><USER19> The author is really arguing two things. (1) There is no such thing as moral progress, because human nature is fixed.(2) People are not naturally inclined to be free.

His first claim is demonstrably false. If you look at historical, statistical evidence you can rapidly demolish his position. Start with Stephen Pinker's Ted talk: [http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violen...](http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html)

His second claim is probably true, but irrelevant. Humans do seem to naturally love hierarchies. And in the grand sweep of time and place, freedom is still a tiny blip.

But So. Fucking. What. Humans are naturally inclines to die of infectious diseases, too.

The author admits that science _does_ progress. And more importantly, the capital structure of society progresses along with it, symbiotically. That puts the lie to the rest of his argument, because ideas from science have _demonstrably_ altered human behavior, and science is already on the cusp of altering human nature _directly at the molecular level_.

<comment><USER20> The more you study archaeology and ancient history, the more you realize that humans really aren't apt to change. The outward appearance of human behaviour is different (we work different jobs, eat different food, have different institutions), but we have the same social tendencies we did 7000 years ago.

As for our supposed decline in violence, it's mostly due to technological advancements which have allowed us to have more resources at our disposal, and an efficient international market to trade them. Our nature is no less violent, our circumstances are merely better.

<comment><USER19> > Our nature is no less violent, our circumstances are merely better.

Even if that's true, it has the same effect in the end.

"Put people in a better environment, and they will behave better" is a radical, pro-progress statement that would have been unrecognizable to most societies.

We're so infected with the progress meme that even people here arguing against it keep implicitly granting some of its premises.

<comment><USER20> How about this: take people out of a 'good' environment, and put them in a bad one, and they'll revert to primitive behaviour. This is something that has been observable even in recent times. In recent conflicts people have committed incredibly base behaviour, including cannibalism... [http://documentarystorm.com/the-cannibal-warlords- liberia/](http://documentarystorm.com/the-cannibal-warlords-liberia/)

Technological 'progress' is not really progress, it's just an accumulation of information, just like a snowball is simply an accumulation of snowflakes.

If our technology, accumulated information and institutions were wiped out tomorrow, we'd be back in the stone age, and it would take us another 5000 years to 'progress' back to where we are now.

We've been able to observe it in the past too, many civilizations were destroyed and the result was their descendants were much less sophisticated technologically. 'Progress' does not change people, and people will easily revert to base behaviour.

<comment><USER19> But if all our institutions and capital were wiped out, it would be _appropriate_ for our behaviors to revert. That just proves that humans are extremely adaptable to changes in environment.

Which state shows our "true nature"? I would argue the concept is meaningless. Our current state is _just as natural_ as any other.

To argue otherwise, you need to make theological assertions about humans being supernatural. A city is no less natural than a beehive, which is no less natural than a mountain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Reading the article, France today is more cruel and unfree than under the kings? What argument ist that, comparing France to post-invasion Iraq.

</comment><comment><USER22> Pointing out that neither Russia nor Iraq have evolved into liberal democracies the instant they escaped despotism, is hardly conclusive. The number of democracies in the world is always on the slow rise. When Russia overthrew the tsar, they thought they had a better idea and decided to give it a try. Not every experiment is a success. When South Korea escaped war with half a country, they traded occupation for an authoritarian Democracy that devolved into despotism and eventually evolved into a true liberal democracy. The process took a good 30+ years. Progress isn't linear, but it is steady.

</comment><comment><USER23> What is this, some Ayn Rand fanfic in reverse?

Seriously, it's the kind of book that she had one of her strawmen write within Atlas Shrugged.

Please let's not encourage the randroids.

</comment><comment><USER24> > _their core belief in progress is a superstition, further from the truth > about the human animal than any of the world's religions._

If some someone thinks that the history of humanity has always been one of progress, that's an empirical claim that can be shown to be false. But most of the people who I think promote the idea of progress are actually not like that. The idea of progress is an ideal, not an empirical claim. An ideal is something you aspire to, despite the fact that it does not match reality at this time, nor at any time in the past, and perhaps never even in the future.

Progress is something that you want to spend a lot of time producing, not something you just find in nature. It's something that you want to produce _despite_ the fact that billions of people before you have failed miserably, not _because_ of previous successes. If you want to help the kids in Africa who die of easily preventable diseases, you're a believer in progress. Just because you don't think it has a high chance of success doesn't mean that you don't want it to happen.

Now, people do disagree about what constitutes progress. But only a sophomore philosopher throws away an idea just because people disagree about it. If you throw the baby out with the bathwater every time you find a contamination in the bathwater, there will be hardly any babies left. And guess what, a life without ideals is like a world without babies. Without babies, our species will die out. Without ideals, our intellects will have nothing better to do than contemplate the grim reality. If that's all we're going to use our brains for, why have an advanced brain in the first place?

> _We simply need to accept our fate, as they did in the classical age, before > the Socratic faith in knowledge and the Christian concept of redemption > combined to form the modern idea of progress and the belief in the infinite > malleability of human nature._

It is not true that people simply accepted their fates prior to the invention of Greek philosophy and Christianity. Animals with highly developed brains never simply accept their fates. After all, they understand that if they manipulate nature in certain ways, at least some parts of their fate can be averted! Fruit on a branch that's too high? Get a stick to reach it. Too much weed and not enough grain? Burn the weed and plant some barley. River too deep to wade across? Build a bridge or a boat. Boat is too slow? Add some sails. No wind? Add an internal combustion engine. Anything else too inconvenient for your lazy ass? Find a way to make it easier. It's in our nature.

The paleo-conservative movement, which The National Interest seems to be a part of, is getting ridiculously out of hand. No ideal of progress? That's not even paleolithic. Cavemen lived in caves because they found it warmer and safer than sleeping in an open field or on a tree. They used stone tools because they found them more convenient than ripping things apart with bare hands.

<comment><USER25>
      Animals with highly developed brains never simply accept
      their fates. After all, they understand   that if they
      manipulate nature in certain ways, at least some parts
      of their fate can be averted!

Your argument has the appearance of something that's badly contrived (or derived).

You may have not chanced on arguments surrounding your premise on "highly developed brains" and natural limits imposed on such brains owing to a multitude of things including encephalization quotient (if not exclusively that).

It's verging on the conceited to make such claims without at the very least mooting the points and counterpoints surrounding such assumptions.

The following is a decent one:

Argument for a finite upper limit to human knowledge

      1. The human brain consists of a finite number of particles
         and energy states.
      2. This matrix of particles and energy states is less than
         what exists in the cosmos.

      Ergo: The human brain has insufficient capacity to contain
      a matrix containing the total map of all the particles and
      energy states that exist in the cosmos.

      Ergo: A human's knowledge is limited.

      Further: All of the humans that exist, or will ever exist,
      will always comprise a subset of the cosmos; Ergo, the
      collective knowledge of humanity is also limited.

Argument dismantling the aforementioned

      That isn't convincing. All you have shown is there is not
      a one to one ratio of particles in a  human brain and the
      sum of the universe. This isn't an indication of epistemic
      limitation. Although, I agree we have epistemic  limitations.

If a natural upper limit does exist - that also stunts our ability to rise above certain petty disputes arising out of a set of very human instincts such as ego, vanity and self-preservation - then progress could indeed be an illusory concept.

Source(s):

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

[http://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?s=8e29f5dcbb9c8b27...](http://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?s=8e29f5dcbb9c8b27008495d5e4078636&p=234525&postcount=18)

[http://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?s=8e29f5dcbb9c8b27...](http://www.physicsforums.com/showpost.php?s=8e29f5dcbb9c8b27008495d5e4078636&p=234543&postcount=19)

Edit: Additions

<comment><USER24> I completely agree with you that human knowledge, whether individual or collective, is severely limited compared to all there is to know in the Universe. Part of this has to do with the fact that we as a species has only been observing the Universe scientifically for ~500 years. But it probably also has to do with the physiological limitations of _homo sapiens_. I don't disagree with any of that.

But what does that have to do with the sentences you quoted from me? Is it even relevant? Human knowledge is limited, so what?

        1. Human knowledge is limited.
        2. ???
        3. Ergo, progress is an illusory concept.

You haven't supplied a single proposition that could fill the space of #2.

Meanwhile, the fact that our mental capacities are limited has not prevented us from "rising above certain petty disputes arising out of ... ego, vanity, and self-preservation" at least from time to time, even if it's only .0001% of the time. The idea that progress always happens is a ridiculous proposition, but the idea that progress is always stunted by other factors is just as laughable. Also, even if we did agree that progress never happens in reality, there is still a very large logical gap between that and the (even more preposterous) proposition that the concept of progress itself is an illusion.

If you say "True progress rarely if ever happens", fine, we can talk about that.

If you say "Your definition of progress is wrong", fine, we can talk about that.

If you say "Progress is not one thing but many different things depending on the context", fine, we can talk about that. Cultural relativism is nothing new, there's plenty of good philosophy on that topic, and you're at least a century late to the game if you think waving the flag of cultural relativism will change anything.

But if you say "The concept of progress is an illusion" (or some variation of it), that's just one of those strings of profound-looking words that college freshmen put down in their PHIL 101 essays. If there is any useful content in such catchphrases, I have yet to see any. So I suppose it's just a figure of speech.

> _Your argument has the appearance of something that 's badly contrived (or > derived)._

Arguments don't have the "appearance" of being badly contrived, and even if they do in some sense, it doesn't matter. Either they are badly contrived, or they are not. If they are indeed badly contrived, it should be possible to say why without committing the fallacy of _ignoratio elenchi_.

<comment><USER25> Agreed.

It should have read:

      "The arc of human progress is an illusory one"

or

      "The arc of human progress - as defined by the narrow parameters of decreasing
       number of recorded human conflicts and genocides, declining number of
       incurable devastating medical conditions, improving/degenerating overall
       environmental health of the planet etc - is an illusory one."

or

as you put it

      "true human progress is illusory" (whatever the parameters that determine it)

However what cannot be denied is that "liberal humanism", as Gray puts it, has come to wield the "pervasive power" it has now, in large part due to the advancements made by the West in the fields of science, technology and medicine and not despite of those advancements.

It's hard to make a case for universal "liberal humanism" when your own people are succumbing to famines in the millions.

Eg: The Great Famine in Ireland (1845–1852).

So simply put

      1. Knowledge is an absolute necessary element for the overcoming of
         "cultural backwardness, blindness and folly" and to advance
         "to ever more elevated stages of enlightenment and
         civilization" and thereby the progress of humans.
      2. Human knowledge is said to be limited.
      3. Ergo, human progress will always be stunted by the said natural
         limit of knowledge.
      4. Further: There is no necessary condition that prevents humans from
         reverting to the ways of the past once that limit has been reached.

<comment><USER24> > _It 's hard to make a case for universal "liberal humanism" when your own > people are succumbing to famines in the millions._

I already said that I'm no fan of "universal liberal humanism". If someone thinks the Irish famine was progress because everything progresses all the time, they're wrong. But just because liberal humanism has problems doesn't mean that one must run to the other extreme. "If you hate my enemy, join my side" might be a useful tactic in war, but in philosophy people will just shrug and say "No way, you're both my enemies." My opinion is that humanity sometimes progress, sometimes stagnates, and sometimes regresses.

Anyway, here's my objection:

        1. Agreed.
        2. Agreed.
        3. Nope. Human progress will be limited by the aforementioned
           limit of human knowledge, but this is a very large limit,
           so there's plenty of room for progress before we hit the limit.
           We might have already hit the limit in some areas, but that
           doesn't mean we won't keep making progress in other areas.
        4. Agreed, but there is no necessary condition that says that
           humans MUST revert to an inferior state, either.
           Maybe they'll just stagnate until evolution produces
           a superior species with higher limits of knowledge. Why not?
           Just because X isn't necessary doesn't mean that
           not-X is necessary. Usually, they're both unnecessary.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> A lack of inevitable success is no argument against a moral or cultural ideal. If it was, then the only available ideal would be Entropy.

</comment><comment><USER27> As the Joseph Conrad story implies, there doesn't seem to be a viable alternative and as with all beliefs, all things really - fundamentalism and extremes can become harmful pretty quickly. So my fellow believers in progress, don't give up but be wary.

</comment><comment><USER28> And yet, slavery is now frowned upon in much of the world.</comment>


Analyzing Core I9-9900K performance with Spectre and Meltdown mitigations - <AUTHOR> https://www.anandtech.com/show/13659/analyzing-core-i9-9900k-performance-with-spectre-and-meltdown-hardware-mitigations <comment><USER2> Conclusion at the end is fairly brutal:

 _"The long and short of matters then is that based on the testing we 've done thus far, it doesn't look like Coffee Lake Refresh recovers any of the performance the original Coffee Lake loses from the Meltdown and Spectre fixes. Coffee Lake was always less impacted than older architectures, but whatever performance hit it took remains in the Refresh CPU design."_

<comment><USER3> Forgive me as I'm nowhere near knowledgeable in CPUs or such so my terminology will be way off.

For any CPU designed with the expectation of using the old method of memory access prediction without any protections... can we expect they'll ever show a significant performance recovery?

I guess I always assumed the answer was no.

<comment><USER4> (Someone please correct me if I'm wrong) Without adding additional hardware, likely not significant.

The way you avoid some of the impacted scenarios (at modest performance impact) is with additional hardware or microarchitecture changes.

Basically, the task is 'Ensure processor state, as observed by another process, never changes because of speculative execution branches.'

Which is a high bar to meet, especially if you want to simultaneously optimize your execution unit utilization.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How did they confirm that the mitigations weren't still being used? If you're still using separate page tables for the kernel, well of course it's going to remain slow. The point of the fixed silicon is so you don't need the mitigation, not that the mitigation gets faster.

<comment><USER6> The "fixed silicon" at least so far mostly seems to be hardware implementations of the existing software mitigation techniques with very similar performance characteristics.

<comment><USER5> Can we test this? Can we install an unpatched OS and observe the same performance penalty?

In the case of meltdown, it seems unlikely the CPU is maintaining its own shadow page table. How would it do that?

<comment><USER7> You could compile a Linux kernel with the Spectre defenses disabled. I assume userspace software that includes mitgations could also be patched out in the same way for testing

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Performance is all nice and such. Did anyone validate that the new processors actually mitigate Spectre and Meltdown?

<comment><USER9> They mitigate Spectre specifically but not speculative execution bugs in general, which it seeems will be with us for the foreseeable future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> at least we'll regain some lost spectre-related perf hits once MS ships their retpoline-patched kernel

[https://mspoweruser.com/windows-10-19h1-will-reduce-the- impa...](https://mspoweruser.com/windows-10-19h1-will-reduce-the-impact-of- spectre-mitigation-to-noise-level/)

<comment><USER11> Don't most machines with this kind of CPU in them not run Windows?

<comment><USER12> If you're talking about the i9-9900, it's a very high clock frequency part with "only" 8 cores and part of the consumer line (no ecc support). I'd actually think most people who have it run Windows and use it for things like gaming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder how much Intel knew of this "bug" and went ahead and shipped with it because of the speed increases.

<comment><USER14> This bug was designed around 1993 when security, multicore, and SMT didn't really exist.

<comment><USER15> I suppose the question or insinuation would be whether it was discovered by Intel (or someone else) in the meantime?

<comment><USER16> The CIA and NSA called, they said "Yeah".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> They should make a "miss me yet?" meme for Itanium.

</comment><comment><USER18> What does this mean for developers buying laptops or workstations in the next year - is amd or raptor looking like a better choice, or is Intel still looking good even after the hit?

I'm reading that workstations might not need to worry for the most part for example, unless a package gets compromised or some browser exploit makes it through

<comment><USER19> I built a workstation with a Threadripper earlier this year, and I couldn't be happier so far. The single-core performance advantage of Intel parts isn't that big, and you get a ton of cores and PCIe lanes in exchange.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> How would you write a program to use these exploit? Unless I'm mistaken, I'm under the impression you have to talk directly to the processor through the kernel in order to do any of these exploit. You would have to write the code in assembler or use a special library to do predictive branching?

<comment><USER8> Yes, you'd write some assembly or C. Or your start from existing demos: [https://samsclass.info/123/proj14/spectre.htm](https://samsclass.info/123/proj14/spectre.htm)

<comment><USER21> You don't need to write assembly or C; it is possible to perform an exploit by utilizing any high-resolution clock, like the one JavaScript on most browsers provided until recently.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I would love to see a benchmark for VM performance before and after.

</comment><comment><USER23> TLDR: hardware patch is as slow as the software one.

Except now it's a bit worse since I cannot disable the patch to recuperate lost performance.

<comment><USER24> > I cannot disable the patch to recuperate lost performance.

Knowing the actual, demonstrated risks... why would you do this?

I'm not trying to devalue your position. I'm trying to understand your risk calculation.

\---

Edit: Good catch, humans. The thought of running code in an unexposed, isolated, largely trusted environment didn't cross my mind; I was moreso focused on the environments I'm used to (where everything is connected and nothing is trusted). That said, I'd argue that a database backend to any typical webapp definitely qualifies as exposed.

<comment><USER25> Not everyone is running any untrusted code. If you're running (for example) a physics simulation, the mitigation doesn't gain you much.

<comment><USER26> Fortunately the performance of these kinds of CPU-bound workloads are almost completely unaffected by the mitigations, so you might as well enable them anyway.

<comment><USER27> One of them is "Disable hyperthreading," which absolutely has a severe penalty.

<comment><USER28> For some workloads it is better to have hyperthreading disabled.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> What a horrible test. They tested without hyperthreading turned on. Spectre and Meltdown are risks BECAUSE of hyperthreading. It makes zero sense to test the performance impact of the fixes with the major component of the problem turned off.

<comment><USER30> Neither Spectre nor Meltdown are related to hyperthreading.

<comment><USER31> I will look it up later but i thought hyperthreading increases it.

Perhaps i'm mixing something up but i thought that intel removed smt from the newer generations (is removing it) because of it.

<comment><USER30> There have been other recent vulnerabilities, like the ax/ah thing described in [1] or TLBleed that have relied on SMT, but not Meltdown or the original Spectre variants.

[1] [http://gallium.inria.fr/blog/intel-skylake- bug/](http://gallium.inria.fr/blog/intel-skylake-bug/)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Can't afford Monster Cables?  Use coat hangers.  Audiophiles can't tell the difference. - <AUTHOR> http://consumerist.com/362926/do-coat-hangers-sound-as-good-monster-cables

<comment><USER2> _"Remember folks, just because something performs better spec-wise doesn't mean it actually sounds better. Specs are one thing, psychoacoustics are another."_

This is an important consideration I think many ignore. There can be variability in how ICs, power, and speaker cables sound which does not always correlate to how fancy or expensive they are.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not a big surprise. 12 AWG cable would probably suffice.

I guess some of Monster Cable's success can be credited to information asymmetry. Read their marketing materials and be afraid that you won't get the most out of your $2000 home AV system without their cables.

</comment><comment><USER4> In other news, Fords and BMWs are both said to get from A to B on time.</comment>


Joint NBA and NBPA Statement - <AUTHOR> https://pr.nba.com/joint-nba-and-nbpa-statement/ <comment><USER2> Allow me to play Devil's advocate. Let's say one team decided to protest by refusing to play a game. I'll assume the NBA has rules similar to the NHL in that failure to show up to play a game is forfeiture of that game and therefore a loss.

So the Bucks say they are protesting and not playing a game. If the NBA (had a rule like I mentioned and) decided to enforce the no show = automatic loss rule, what would that look like? What message would that be perceived as sending?

There's only so much money to be made right now in sports, so I would say that there's no point in owners getting involved due to loss of revenue, outside of whatever collective revenue they get from the league. The games are still going to be played, just not when currently scheduled. Fans aren't in attendance, so you don't have people who have spent money to travel to see a team or hundreds of dollars on tickets. From the fan perspective, you just don't get to see the game when you were expecting it. Welcome to 2020!

I argue that the NBA had no choice but to cancel games. There is little to nothing to lose by cancelling, and a lot to lose by not cancelling. In this day of "cancel culture", not cancelling games would be a huge risk/liability.

I'm not saying they didn't have valid reasons for cancelling or that it wasn't the right thing to do, I'm just saying that cancellation is the only course they could take.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hey there's actionable stuff in that. It's very cool to see traction for these groups.</comment>


JRuby & Dynamic Languages on Google AppEngine - technical details - <AUTHOR> http://olabini.com/blog/tag/gae/

<comment><USER2> You linked to a tag, rather than the article itself - which means your link may not point to the same content in a year's time.

The article in question is here: [http://olabini.com/blog/2009/04/dynamic- languages-on-google-...](http://olabini.com/blog/2009/04/dynamic-languages-on- google-app-engine-an-overview/)

<comment><USER2> Hmmm... on second thoughts linking to the tag does make more sense here seeing as there's a series of related entries. It's a shame Ola isn't using a tag that's specific to the series such as "dynamic-languages-on-gae"

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> It seems clojure works as well.

<comment><USER4> yup. Check this out -> [http://fragmental.tw/2009/04/08/clojure-on-google-app- engine...](http://fragmental.tw/2009/04/08/clojure-on-google-app-engine/)</comment></comment>


Off with their header files - <AUTHOR> http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2786 <comment><USER2> I'm just wondering how well this copes with transitive includes, where an included headerfile includes a removed headerfile which then makes the compilation work.

This sounds like it could introduce some pretty tight and confusing coupling between modules due to such transitive includes.</comment>


A Package in a league of its own: Helm - <AUTHOR> http://tuhdo.github.io/helm-intro.html <comment><USER2> Where do you get the nyancat progress bar?

<comment><USER3> [http://nyan-mode.buildsomethingamazing.com/](http://nyan- mode.buildsomethingamazing.com/)</comment></comment>


Systemisers are better at maths - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-30013-8 <comment><USER2> See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathizing%E2%80%93systemizin...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathizing%E2%80%93systemizing_theory#Extreme_male_brain_theory_of_autism) for more information on this concept

<comment> ur-whale Thanks for the link. After reading it, given the current political climate in Universities, I'm genuinely surprised Baron-Cohen has managed to retain his position after publishing a theory like that.

<comment> dan-robertson He has a permanent fellowship. I think it would be quite hard for Trinity to get rid of him even if they wanted to (and they don't really have any desire or pressure to do that anyway)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The empathizing–systemizing theory seems to be on shaky ground:

[http://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/164069138209/in- lieu-o...](http://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/164069138209/in-lieu-of-a- longer-post-ive-been-planning-to)

[http://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/164123186154/baron- coh...](http://nostalgebraist.tumblr.com/post/164123186154/baron-cohen- miscellany)

The weirdest result might be that a pathology that one would ascribe to the empathizing side, borderline personality disorder (BPD), actually _positively_ correlates with measures of systemizing, so there is a strange overlap between BPD and autism, the pathology one associates with systemizing:

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5590952/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5590952/)

What's more, there is no clear sex difference in empathy:

[http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0179336)

\---

More reliable and pronounced sex differences have been found on a similar scale, namely interest in things vs interest in people and that has also been linked to the gender gap in STEM:

[https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0018...](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00189/full)

Interestingly, some sex differences in cognitive processing disappear when one simply changes the domain to be more focused on people (e.g. rotation of dolls vs rotation of abstract shapes):

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104160801...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1041608015001818)

So the underlying difference here might simply be in innate preferences to process information that is in a social context vs an arbitrary context.

Autists have a lower preference for the social context, which is essentially a difference in value function, so value from epistemic/predictive accuracy independent of norms gets more weight.

It looks like systemizing emerges in both extremes of the people vs things dimension (though more likely in the latter), explaining both the NCBI study above and the Nature article linked here. Looking only at interest in people is a cleaner approach IMO (not a cognitive scientist though, so take this with a grain of salt). Systemizing seems to basically capture something like abstract thinking, but, guess what, you can also think abstractly about social problems. The crucial point is rather whether it actually feels pleasurable to delve into extremely obscure worlds of symbols and concepts, far removed from ordinary social experience and norms, and here the sex difference is quite pronounced (about one standard deviation). Notably this sex difference appears to be fully determined by presence of prenatal androgen (a male sex hormone such as testosterone), and a preference for gendered toys (dolls vs cars) also been found in some primate species:

[http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1992.tb0...](http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1992.tb00028.x)

[https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys- pr...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13596-male-monkeys-prefer-boys- toys/)

<comment> s-shellfish This isn't strange at all (at least to me). I've been misdiagnosed as bpd in facilities that were socially chaotic. People who diagnosed me were also selectively biased to what information about me was indicative of past, present and expected behavior. It was a very traumatizing experience and the sad thing is this happens frequently in mental health care across the US to autistic individuals.

I can understand emotions in a systemized way but it requires watching patterns of every individual I interact with to learn. It also is very scary because I don't want to get to know anyone so well I accidentally mistake deep insecurities for topics to attempt polite conversation over. Thus, highly selective with individuals and how many (too many is cognitively overloading, but I've adapted fairly well on my own (somehow)) at my job, which - I'm a software developer, so although I'm not surrounded by people who have autism, I am surrounded by people who have a greater tolerance and higher sensitivity to neourological diversity.

I'm female. My mom dresses me mostly (most of my clothes are her old clothes). She's a beautician. I'm 32. Mental health care is annoying because of course BPD diagnosis has historically been highly likely, due to superficial snap judgements based on appearance. I had a coworker tell me flatly that appearances don't matter and this was very liberating. I continue to work on managing to communicate myself perfectly - great irony anticipating peculiar usage of language. Pedantry, always want to make sure the words I use are internally definitely correctly therefore used correctly (but I've been able to simplify the importance of this down to business logic definitions and computer science / programming languages / software definitions).

I am hoping I find an autism therapist that can actually help me in real life. At least with venturing out outside of working hours to create some semblance of a social life.

Systemizing is pattern matching. It's always hard when 2 people's patterns don't match perfectly. Calling it a willingness to work together or understand one another is so oversimplified with respect to the delicate balance process of developing relationships, it's not even funny.

Preference, socializing. I would say I have high preference to socialize where I have trust for both my expected pattern of behavior and people I trust - that their pattern of behavior will be relatively stable and neither myself nor they will be hurtful in any way. It never matters if it's one person or a group. Emotions run through people in groups in the same systematic way they do in individuals. Being perfectly calm all the time or just flat affect to stabilize groups that have related themselves to me in some unknown variant is really hard, and looping group behavior of 'i have an emotional outburst' \- implies -> the group does generally, this drives me crazy because I can always relate it to myself therefore blame myself internally.

BPD is the same pattern mentality assuming that diagnosis was correct at one point of me (again, relative to social environment), no ability to communicate self because people have their theories they depend on for their survival (hostile healthcare centers) or control it (this is taken as hostile behavior in such places, even though the control element is really only intended to control myself and my emotions, not anyone else). Stuck in between contradictory social environments with established rules (that may contradict or conflict), either deeply ingrained behavior from the past with new context, or multiple conflicting social environments. It's a stigmatized illness. BPD is not being able to keep up with all of them, or not being able to generate/interpret rules quickly enough to manage self behavior in all, possibily unchosen social environments.

I would never want to go back into the hell that gets me labeled as BPD because it's one of the worst labels to carry. There's always the expectation that "I'm the bad one" that gets carried with the diagnosis. But mental illness labels in general, always seem pointless to me in the long term. Can always explain them all (except ASPD, that's intent to cause harm) in terms of individual behavior relative to social environmental expectations and judgements. This can all be systemized. This is probably why I get labeled as a hostile element in so called 'cattle mental health centers' (phrase comes from a PsyD I saw). Intent is never to cause harm. Everything just often turns into patterns, or systems, to me, I'd prefer to see it as a gift, not a curse. Hard rules to not systemize individuals are of supreme importance.

<comment><USER3> It seems to me that BPD means obsessing about the social domain and ASD means obsessing about the non-social domain. Both obsessions are amplified by social exclusion due to being neurodivergent. Obsession leads to systemizing.

Baron-Cohen's theory is a fantastic _near-miss_ IMHO. I mean, he was clearly onto _something_. Women are warmer in temperament, men are more autistic, have better mechanical and spatial reasoning skills. But what Baron-Cohen may have missed is that those are _symptoms_ rather than causes. Symptoms of a difference in innate value function in the degree to which the social domain is valued. But that's value at a very low, instinctive, perceptual level. Autists might still like socializing, but they do not get a kick out of processing social information that neurotypical people do, so their entire thinking apparatus down to low level neuronal circuits will be shaped by different optimization constraints, from birth onward.

<comment> s-shellfish I've personally had both since birth. Obsession with machines and computation, that understanding maps over to understanding social systems.

I don't like it when it maps over to social systems. Everything gets shifted. Easier to be a coder, focus on machines, focus on words, symbols, patterns in symbols.

Math, math is the bridge between both. Isomorphic. Systems are mental graphs of static points of observation anticipated to be stable/ predictable and arrows indicating direction and flow.

As a female I really don't like gender binaries. Women generally, sure, but that's culture - cultural expectations.

<comment><USER3> I stated this in an overly mutual exclusive way. I suspect the difference is that people with BPD actually _enjoy_ obsessing about social domain in a systemizing way, while autists don't. Autists might still engage in such obsession though, but for a different kind of intrinsic interest (interest in people vs what remains if you remove interest in people, namely mere epistemic/predictive interest).

<comment> s-shellfish I read something about autism being processing information removed from 'self'.

I have interest in some people I trust. But 'mind' and 'thought' are generally very fluid. That's just a fact from seeing connections in how minds think - being able to see the connection that creates their connection.

Always have to be delicate with it.

Epistomology is interesting. Predictive, I'm always more comfortable relegating this to machines - is the problem decidable or not. Obviously computer programs implicitly affect people. Cognitive overload because, chaos. Can't predict everything beyond the predefined context.

Math is always perfect. Contained system with rules that define it's behavior.

I understand you are saying things in an overly mutually exclusive way, but for me, if I deeply identify with something, it's hard to understand where you are coming from, because I don't know.

From what I recall, Ramanujan considered math a compulsion. Obsession, it's something that binds everything together. I believe math is discovered, not invented. It has to be, implicitly. Models come from reality.

I can't imagine enjoyment of social systemization. I imagine life long positive experiences would lead to enjoyment. If it's an illness (BPD), suggesting there's enjoyment indicates belief that the intent of the sufferer is malicious. I don't believe this is the case. A disorder comes from negative experiences. BPD is then, always trying to find the right rules to solve the problem. The problem becomes recurrent when the sufferer is identified as the source of the problem, or the sufferer believes they are both cause (and supposed solution) to the problem, but both cause and solution are fundamentally defined in a way the sufferer does not have any control over defining. Therefore, issues predicting, mapping traumatic experiences onto present stable environments.

Problem solving mentality for growth, escape from the negative. It's a compulsion, not an enjoyment to obsess. It's a compulsion to correct everything so everything is stable.

Talking...

<comment><USER3> > If it's an illness (BPD), suggesting there's enjoyment indicates belief that > the intent of the sufferer is malicious. I don't believe this is the case. A > disorder comes from negative experiences.

Well, we are also hardwired to like chocolate, but if we eat too much of it, then it becomes a disorder.

I was imprecise about the word "enjoyment". What I meant was simply attainment of reward signals. But reward signals do not necessarily imply happiness. At minimum they shape what feels like the right thing to do. At maximum they cause euphoria. E.g. a person with obsessive-compulsive disorder will repeat the same sequence of actions, say, 100 times a day, and each time it will feel like the right thing to do, but such a person will not find much enjoyment.

I suspect that in neurotypical people, the processing of social information (dominance relations, social status, norms, nurture, grooming, communication, gossiping etc.), always feels like the right thing to do, from birth onward, so their neuronal circuits are finely attuned to computations in that domain.

In the absence of such reward signals, the circuits are not trained for such things, and what remains is epistemic circuitry: Building models of the world by approximating/predicting how it works based on accumulated information.

(All of this ignores, of course, the entire neuroscience literature on this topic, which identified e.g. differences in synaptic density in people with ASD; though perhaps the increased value of non-social things comes from more circuits doing epistemic computation, but I'm just shooting in the dark really…)

<comment> s-shellfish > All of this ignores, of course, the entire neuroscience literature on this > topic, which identified e.g. differences in synaptic density in people with > ASD; though perhaps the increased value of non-social things comes from more > circuits doing epistemic computation, but I'm just shooting in the dark > really…

Do you have any links to any articles?

From the research I've read, PhD students in the field (was lucky to meet and talk to a few at other mental health care centers), a lot of the research on mental health care is focused on GABA.

[https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1471-4159....](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1471-4159.2010.06858.x)

[http://science.sciencemag.org/content/343/6171/675](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/343/6171/675)

[https://academic.oup.com/ijnp/article/16/6/1309/753308](https://academic.oup.com/ijnp/article/16/6/1309/753308)

This seems relevant, but likewise, shooting in the dark:

[https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fendo.2013.0005...](https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fendo.2013.00059/full)

<comment><USER3> [https://www.google.com/search?btnG=Search&q=synaptic+overcon...](https://www.google.com/search?btnG=Search&q=synaptic+overconnectedness+autism)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2001237/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2001237/)

[https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2007.10.016](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2007.10.016)

The overall picture seems to be local overgrowth/overconnectivity and global/cortico-co-cortical underconnectivity (especially to the frontal lobe). Cortex tissue appears to implement universal epistemic circuits, since they are known to learn arbitrary functions e.g. one can rewire visual input to the auditory cortex in animals and they learn to see. So, too much of those circuits might both imply heightened focus on the details and more intrinsic reward (=reward from pattern prediction/completion for information gain/exploration) which might as well explain the overall difference in value function, deemphasizing reward from social and normative things by relative magnitude. Norms and social stuff is rather processed frontally and subcortically in the insula and amygdala, AFAIK, but there is no reason to believe this is not also partly wired into the cortex too. Evolution has likely encoded most functions all over the place as it likes to do with the genome itself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "The WAIS-R arithmetic score also depended on sex, being higher for men than for women (12.1 vs 11.1, t149 = 2.4, p = 0.02), and on occupation, being higher for participants in biological/physical than in social fields."

Is this allowed?

<comment><USER5> What do you mean by 'allowed'? Why should it not be allowed?

<comment><USER6> Probably the lack of "These results should be interpreted with caution and do not necessarily indicate genetic causes of the differences."

<comment><USER7> I would interpret it as a sarcastic comment on the perception of reporting of sex differences.</comment></comment></comment></comment>