Bayesian analysis suggests that John Lennon wrote the music for 'In My Life' - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2018/08/11/637468053/a-songwriting-mystery-solved-math-proves-john-lennon-wrote-in-my-life <comment><USER2> "First of all, just to say that this is really serious stuff in terms of what was done."

"The probability that McCartney wrote it was .018"

"In situations like this, you'd better believe the math because it's much more reliable than people's recollections."

The probability was .018 under their model. This doesn't mean that this is the true probability. Naive Bayes probabilities are typically not very reliable [1]. I have not read the paper, but I think his confident wording makes me question how believable this is.

[1] Ensembles of models are better, like random forest.

<comment><USER3> > The probability was .018 under their model. This doesn't mean that this is > the true probability.

Well of course different models will give you different probabilities. But given that this is a past event, talking about "true probability" is a bit weird. The only "true" probabilities are 0 and 1. There's nothing nondeterministic about the past. Someone wrote the song.

<comment><USER4> That's not how Bayesian statistics work. In this model (on which statistical learning and information theory based) a probability does not require nondeterminism, just incomplete information; and a probability is defined with respect to a certain amount/type of information. (Actually information is defined in terms of things that change probability, and probability is the more "core" concept.)

So for example, if someone rolls a six-sided die, hides it from you, and asks what the probability of a "6" is, under Bayesian theory it's 1/6; if they then tell you that the number rolled was odd, the probability of a "6" drops to zero, _even though nothing physically changed_ , purely because you now have more information.

This is generally a much more useful and intuitive definition of probability than to say "the probability of it being a 6 is either 0 or 1, I just don't know yet".

<comment><USER5> The problem I have with the Bayesian definition of probability is that it isn't a definition, is it? Since probability is a ratio, you need to define two amounts. So what does the 1 in 1/6 actually mean? And the 6? What does it mean that someone is 1/6 certain of something? How does one measure certainty? The more I think about it the more I'm convinced Bayesian probabilities are a flawed concept.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure what you mean by "isn't a definition." Mathematically, it's extremely well defined - as a ratio of the subjective likelihood of one possibility, compared to the subjective likelihoods of all possibilities. Your exact physical interpretation can vary - from a decision-theoretic (at what odds would it be worth it to make a bet?), to an information-theoretic (how many bits does it take to encode that it's _this_ possibility rather than any other?), etc. Generally, like quantum mechanics, while there are many interpretations of the underlying reality corresponding to the theory, in practice it is impossible to interpret the world accurately (correlation/independence, inference/learning, etc.) with previous (in this case frequentist) theories.

<comment><USER5> We agree that a probability is a ratio, right? In order to make sense of what a ratio means, we must know what the numerator and the denominator mean. From what I gather, Bayesians say probability is a degree of certainty, so a subjective belief. Okay, but in their calculations, mathematically, it's still a ratio. So what are the terms in this ratio? This is what I'm saying. They don't say it. If you say that these terms are "subjective likelihoods", then you have to provide a definition for this, because it isn't clear at all what a "likelihood" is.

<comment><USER6> > _We agree that a probability is a ratio, right?_

No, _probability_ is a normalized denumerably additive measure defined over a σ-algebra of subset of an abstract space. (see Kolmogorov).

Probability is a completely mathematical construct which is devoid of empirical content. Now, we have used to to varying degrees of success in various situations, by assuming various things which make varying degrees of sense, but it is important keep in mind that all of that follows from a handful of axioms none of which states that probability is a ratio.

Neither classical or Bayesian attempts to give probability empirical meaning make sense in these types of _one off_ situations, though.

<comment><USER7> _Bayesian attempts to give probability empirical meaning [do not] make sense in these types of one off situations, though._

I agreed with your comment until this. What do you mean?

<comment><USER6> Either John wrote the song or Paul did. Therefore _P(Paul wrote it)_ either one or zero. It cannot be anything else. We do not know which one and we are not going to find out by counting or doing arithmetic.

After listening to the song one more time, and reading the article again, I've updated my beliefs that this senior lecturer in Stats fancies himself some kind of cool guy, and is trying to make name for himself by immersing himself in the study of women's beach volleyball[1] and Beatles.

Also, it sounds to me like this something Paul would have written.

Now, can you please explain what it means to calculate that _P(Paul wrote it) = 0.018_? Note that I am not asking about how the calculations work.

[1]: [http://www.glicko.net/](http://www.glicko.net/)

<comment><USER7> _Either John wrote the song or Paul did. Therefore P(Paul wrote it) either one or zero._

That's not how Bayesian probability works. See

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17743049](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17743049)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17742927](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17742927)

By your logic, every proposition is either true or false, and therefore the concept of probability is useless.

 _Now, can you please explain what it means to calculate that P(Paul wrote it) = 0.018?_

That depends on their model, which I'm not necessarily defending.

<comment><USER6> > By your logic, every proposition is either true or false, and therefore the > concept of probability is useless.

That would be nonsensical interpretation of my logic. In cases where it is possible to conceive of an experiment being repeated in the future, a "degree of belief" interpretation is appealing. If the answer were going to be revealed objectively and someone were taking bets, sure, fine, I'll go along with that. But, don't make an appeal to the Dutch book argument in a unique one-off case where no one has anything at stake other than free publicity which they have chosen to pursue by counting some stuff and dividing those counts by some numbers and stuff.

<comment><USER7> _In cases where it is possible to conceive of an experiment being repeated in the future_

That's just the thing: Bayesian probability is emphatically _not_ about an experiment being repeated in the future. That's the _frequentist_ interpretation of probability.

 _But, don 't make an appeal to the Dutch book argument in a unique one-off case where no one has anything at stake other than free publicity which they have chosen to pursue by counting some stuff and dividing those counts by some numbers and stuff._

???

The Dutch book argument shows that rational people must have subjective probabilities which behave according to the axioms of probability. I don't see the relevance of your statement here _at all_ , particularly the bits about "anything at stake" and "free publicity".

And what are you trying to say by the phrase "counting some stuff and dividing those counts by some numbers and stuff"?

<comment><USER6> > _Bayesian probability is emphatically not about an experiment being repeated > in the future. That 's the frequentist interpretation of probability._

I am saying something different, but this seems like a futile discussion. What does it mean to have _P(Paul wrote it)_ equal to some number in _(0,1)_? Let's call that number _q_. Explain what _q_ means in words.

If the truth were ever going to be revealed, or if I could conceive of the experiment being repeated in the future, I could explain it as "I would be willing to pay up to $q to buy an asset that pays $1 if Paul wrote it and $0 otherwise."

> And what are you trying to say by the phrase " _counting some stuff and > dividing those counts by some numbers and stuff_ "?

I mean it is very hard for me to take a person seriously who is doing a whole bunch of interviews without even a working paper somewhere.

It seems that if you use some arithmetic, people are inclined to accept what you did without questioning whether it makes sense to apply such models in this case.

> _The Dutch book argument shows that rational people ..._

You need to do better than just quoting passages from Wikipedia if you want to understand what that means.

<comment><USER7> You just provided a valid interpretation for _q_. So what's the problem here? I don't understand why you're arguing that _q_ must be 0 or 1, which is nonsense.

I don't object to your comments about the absence of a working paper.

 _You need to do better than just quoting passages from Wikipedia if you want to understand what that means._

You're accusing me of not understanding the Dutch book argument. Do you have any reason for this, or is it just a baseless accusation?

<comment><USER6> > _You just provided a valid interpretation for q. So what's the problem > here?_

Isn't it obvious that interpretation does not apply in this situation?

> _You're accusing me of not understanding the Dutch book argument._

It is not an accusation. It is a statement.

The Dutch book argument is basically a "no arbitrage" or "no free lunch" argument. Isn't it obvious then that it cannot be used to justify anything where no money is at stake and no bet regarding the outcome can ever be resolved?

PS: This will be my last comment in this thread because I get the distinct feeling that I am talking to Eliza instead of a human being.

<comment><USER7> > Isn't it obvious that interpretation does not apply in this situation?

Why not?

> It is not an accusation. It is a statement.

It is an accusation. It is also a false statement.

> Isn't it obvious then that it cannot be used to justify anything where no > money is at stake and no bet regarding the outcome can ever be resolved?

This is so ridiculous I don't know where to begin. It's like saying the expected value of a dice roll doesn't exist because no roll ever equals 3.5, or the average of any number of trials is not necessarily 3.5. It's claiming a counterfactual is false because its antecedent is false.

> PS: This will be my last comment in this thread because I get the distinct > feeling that I am talking to Eliza instead of a human being.

You're welcome to run away with your tail between your legs after making baseless accusations and misunderstanding the concept of probability.

<comment><USER6> > _You 're welcome to run away with your tail between your legs ... _

LOL!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wish I was as confident in anything as these guys are in the predictive accuracy of their simple model with an out-of-sample accuracy of 80%[1] with limited and questionable training data.

[1] Accuracy is probably a misleading performance metric here as well

<comment><USER9> And I'm not sure how sound it is to assume that the authorship of any Lennon- McCartney song can simply be attributed to Lennon and/or McCartney. I mean, the one-name answer to "who wrote 'Your Mother Should Know'?" is probably "Irving Berlin" [https://www.beatlesbible.com/forum/the-songs/a-few- possible-...](https://www.beatlesbible.com/forum/the-songs/a-few-possible- song-inspirations/#p202017) [https://www.beatlesbible.com/forum/the- songs/a-few-possible-...](https://www.beatlesbible.com/forum/the-songs/a-few- possible-song-inspirations/#p290910) .

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Would it be terribly unlikely that McCartney tried having fun by emulating Lennon, just for shits and giggles?

<comment><USER11> I think it's very possible when you collaborate, you mimic the other person's speech or writing patterns. Especially since these guys worked together for so long, you'd think they could finish each others verses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Most people with a certain level of obsession about The Beatles would certainly recognize the song as Lennon's, though with some amount of input from McCartney that could range from no involvement to half-and-half.

It's too conjunct to be Paul's, but that doesn't mean he didn't give any input.

I question this analysis because it seems like an easy target -- the song obviously has Lennon's fingerprint on it (a melody hovering around just a few notes with thick harmonies), and the headline of "study reveals new insight into Beatles songwriting" is too juicy for my liking.

<comment><USER13> What this article seems to also be missing is that there are actually two versions of the song. I'd say that the final recording is indisputably Lennon, but the original is very much McCartney.

The final version's lyrics are abstract and have the interplay of dark and light. The original version is very concrete and almost ballad-like, very much McCartney's style (it even mentions Penny Lane).

What this kind of approach misses is that shared writing credits don't necessarily mean writing together at the same time. While the two have been known to go off and write a piece together, I think there's a decent argument to be made that McCartney sketched out the idea for "In My Life" and Lennon refined it.

<comment><USER14> Yes, they seem to think that the song has a single incarnation and didn't go through an iterative process of creative development.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Text-only version:

[https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=637468053](https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=637468053)

<comment> apk-d Thanks. I wish I had an extension that redirects to text-only npr automatically (their button doesn't redirect to the actual article and I'm assuming they broke their own site on purpose). One of those days I might actually sit down and start making Firefox extensions - especially if I can put together a basic template for quick one-off single-purpose GPDR fixers and such.

<comment><USER16> Speaking from experience, it isn't too hard. The MDN WebExtension documentation is a great place to start, and with very little effort you can write an extension that works in chrome off the same codebase.

<comment><USER15> For something as simple as this, writing a separate webext is probably overkill.

There are already extensions that let you automatically make custom redirects. (Or you could abuse HTTPS Everywhere for this purpose.)

Or you could make a bookmarklet. Or make a user script for Greasemonkey (or a similar extension). For example, I'm using this to fix the "Decline" button:

      // ==UserScript==
      // @name npr.org
      // @namespace email@example.com
      // @include https://choice.npr.org/*
      // @grant none
      // ==/UserScript==

      document.querySelector('#textLink').href = 'https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=' + window.location.search.match('[0-9]{9,}');

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The author makes it sound like Lennon is still alive.

"The two even debate between themselves — their memories seem to differ when it comes to who wrote the music for 1965's "In My Life.""

"[...] they're still the same people, and they have their preferences without realizing it."

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm too lazy to read the paper right now but I'm curious: if we can't trust the memories of Paul & John, how did they train the model on the 70 other songs in the first place?

</comment><comment><USER19> > Mathematics professor Jason Brown spent 10 years working with statistics to > solve the magical mystery.

> The three co-authors of this paper — there was someone called Mark Glickman > who was a statistician at Harvard. He's also a classical pianist. Another > person, another Harvard professor of engineering, called Ryan Song. And the > third person was a Dalhousie University mathematician called Jason Brown.

It took three people ten years to do this? Also all the reporting here is awful. This is nothing like a proof.

</comment><comment><USER20> He who sang it, wrote it (except for Ringo)

</comment><comment><USER21> > For sure. And that's why it's hard for the human ear to tell the thing > apart.

Lost me there. Bag-of-words model is not better than the human ear, I'm sorry.

<comment><USER22> It is for author identification tasks like the methods they use here. People aren't super sensitive to the relevant language statistics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm missing the significance of this? Was the song not released until after Johns death or something?

<comment><USER24> John Lenon and Paul McCartney split credit for all the songs they wrote during the Beatles, even if the song was primarily or totally written by just one of them. People like to speculate about who wrote what, and after the Beatles broke up both John's would sometimes say who did, but they didn't always agree.

<comment><USER25> Who are both Johns?

<comment><USER26> John Lennon and Paul McCartney :)

<comment><USER25> Why do you call them both Johns? Is that a Beatles fan inside joke?

<comment><USER27> Because they are both named ... John?

<comment><USER28> Paul's name is James, actually.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Edit, FYI: When I posted this comment, the link title repeated the story's title "Math Proves John Lennon Wrote 'In My Life'".

More like "arithmetic suggests" ... There is no mathematical proof here.

See also [1]:

        The model assumes correlated multinomial counts for the
        bags-of-words as a function of authorship which is then
        inverted using Bayes rule. Out-of-sample classification
        accuracy for songs with known authorship was 80%. We
        demonstrate the results to songs during the study
        period with unknown authorship.

Radio interviews with the presenting author are listed on his web site[2].

[1]: [https://ww2.amstat.org/meetings/jsm/2018/onlineprogram/Abstr...](https://ww2.amstat.org/meetings/jsm/2018/onlineprogram/AbstractDetails.cfm?abstractid=329336)

[2]: [http://www.glicko.net/](http://www.glicko.net/)

<comment><USER29> My question is: Was the number of the samples relatively small? Both authors made much more music than only while being in the Beatles, and if the later songs (since the Beatles split) were also (or only!) used for training then I could imagine that such a training can be sufficient. But if only the Beatles songs were used, I suspect it could be possibly not enough to be completely sure. Moreover, I can imagine that the contribution to some songs was made by both in various phases, and that that could confuse the algorithm.</comment></comment>


In the 75 years since Hiroshima, nuclear testing has killed untold thousands - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/hiroshima-anniversary-nuclear-testing/ <comment><USER2> In walks smoking: "Hold my beer."</comment>


Show HN: Isomer – An isometric graphics library for HTML5 Canvas - <AUTHOR> http://jdan.github.io/isomer/ <comment><USER2> Looks pretty wonderful. I can see a lot more usecases if you had support for mouse-events. Being able to select objects will enable tons of games and such.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I'm not totally sure how far I'd like to take this. The original intent was to make some art with it, since I played a lot of Monument Valley [1] a few weeks ago. I'd like to learn a lot more about graphics and see how well I can optimize draw performance, then maybe I can focus on animations and input.

[1]: [http://www.monumentvalleygame.com/](http://www.monumentvalleygame.com/)

<comment><USER2> Wow, this game looks beautiful. Sure, work on it as you wish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks great! Is the depth sorting inherent or manually specified? I notice that there is one Escher-esque shape (maybe this shape is defined as a whole then sorted?).

<comment><AUTHOR> Both - but my depth sorting technique is incredibly naive.

"Shapes" consist of many "Paths" (paths = faces). If you draw a shape, it will attempt to order its faces. Instead, you can draw an array of paths in whatever order you'd like.

When drawing _multiple_ shapes, the ordering is completely manual (unfortunately). This is currently my top priority.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been looking for a way to generate those fancy isometric architecture diagrams like the ones by AWS... this looks really promising :D

</comment><comment><USER5> Looks awesome, would definitely make something cool looking with this.

I googled and saw that there are a few isometric game engines out there already. This would be pretty unique if more geared towards art/graphics and focused on ease-of-use.

</comment><comment><USER6> > iso.add(Shape.Prism(new Point(0, 0, 0)));

How come the constructor for Point uses new, but the constructors for shapes are just called as regular functions?

<comment><AUTHOR> You can actually leave out new for Points, and Shape.Prism just returns a new Shape. Prism itself is not actually an object (or constructor for an object), it's just a function.

It could use a little consistency :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Nice - I've been looking for something exactly like this lately. I have some weekend hack to do now!

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm not sure whether it's possible yet but using CSS perspective and transition features for creating a isometric graphics library would be super cool.

</comment><comment><USER9> Looks very nice. Any plans to TypeScript-ify?

</comment><comment><USER10> What would it take to add animations?

<comment><AUTHOR> There's currently no concept of a "scene" (you essentially add shapes which are immediately drawn to the canvas, never saved) so animating a given shape involves changing it slightly and redrawing everything manually.

As for a next step for the project, I'd like to keep track of the objects added to the scene, and draw them intelligently.

<comment><USER11> A simple way to get there is to store each function and arguments in an object, as a list of draw operations, instead of executing the functions. Add in an object id (list index) to return to the caller, and then the caller can modify parsmter values between frames.

<comment><USER12> Do you know of any resources or examples that demonstrate basic animation techniques like this? The canvas examples I've found so far seem to be for fluid animations or games, rather than interactive scenes or visualisations that can be stopped or stepped through.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Very nice. It reminds me of OpenSCAD.

<comment><USER14> thought the same thing and found myself looking for boolean operations (subtract, revolve, extrude, etc) heh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I've been working on something similar, it's a lightweight HTML5 Canvas library, easily add/remove objects on the canvas. It also has event handling for the objects. [http://vladakilov.github.io/imagine/](http://vladakilov.github.io/imagine/)</comment>


James Dyson reinvented the vacuum. Now he wants to remake the economy - <AUTHOR> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/europe/james-dyson-reinvented-the-vacuum-now-he-wants-to-remake-the-economy/article2365077/ <comment><USER2> This excerpt mentions a trend I'd rather not see come to fruition: "...the sort of policies proposed by the Dysons of the world amount to the beginning of a levelling-down of Western standards to developing-world levels, when the opposite should be occurring."

I would hope that the leaders of our country don't feel the need to lessen our standards on working conditions in the name of economic recovery. I think that would be backward progress.

Another excerpt caught my attention: "After all, it was the financial-services and property sectors that collapsed; industry-driven economies such as Germany and Singapore experienced record-breaking export booms and avoided the crisis."

With that in mind it would seem then that our current troubles are due to many of our economy's eggs being in one basket, so-to-speak.

It doesn't seem such an attractive idea to make a U-turn back toward making manufacturing our strong point- it seems to me we have a better chance building on what seems to be a strong foundation in technology, to make that our strong point, and then re-invest in manufacturing only to a degree enough to have a safe amount of diversification in our economy. I've read lately somewhere about a trend in 'high-tech' manufacturing, which seems like the kind of industry that would maintain high(er) growth levels.

<comment><USER3> It seems strange to mention Germany when arguing for creating a "worse is better" job market. Germany has focused on creating high-quality engineering jobs and giving them to high-quality engineers.

Dyson seems to be arguing that the government should create low-quality engineering jobs that CEOs can create and get rid of as fast as they can spin an EC2 instance up and down. That's certainly great from the CEO's point of view, but from the perspective of the worker that is in and out of a job before he can buy a month's worth of groceries, it's kind of terrifying.

<comment><USER4> Agreed, lukeschlather. _THIS_ is the key point.

The reason why Germany, Singapore and other strong manufacturing-based developed countries have succeded so well is NOT because they have taken the worst elements of Anglo-Saxon capitalism and added back a few factories!

These countries have long had a strong, focus on engineering from education through to supply-chain all the way to elite managers, executives and corporate governance.

For example, in the Germanic countries, long-term stakeholders (such as family founders and employee unions) exist and are powerful. This reduces the impact of the flighty capital and short-termist control from mere free-standing shareholders (this includes the share-compensated manager class and private equity companies). This is important because it is the abililty of a company to continually _invest_ in its long-term interests that enables them to keep several steps ahead of the purely labor-intensive efforts from new entrants such as from China or South America.

Combined with the success of the Mittelstand (Small and Medium Enterprises or SME's in Anglo-speak), the result is that German companies make high quality widgets and whole products that are in great demand the world over and to all intents and purposes irreplaceable.

In addition, it is culturally and financially highly acceptable to be considered an engineer in those countries.

Even their debt-sparse financial system encourages business which are only viable if they are able to create cash upfront, which is considerably easier for a well-run, long-term managed manufacturing business rather than many service companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> After using a Dyson vacuum cleaner (DC08 Animal) for some years, I now think I've fallen for marketing, the cleaner isn't a very good one and I'd never buy one again from Dyson. Dyson is a lot of marketing, not so much product. I like the hand dryers though.

<comment><USER6> You're not alone -- in the latest Consumer Reports the Dyson vacuums got some of the worst reviews.

<comment><USER7> Odd. The DC28 (Animal) when i bought it (5 or 6 years ago) was rated a very good (and is still kicking VERY well). I wonder if quality has decreased.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Dyson played a large part in the election of Mr. Cameron's government: He > wrote a report, "Innovative Britain," calling for tax and education systems > designed to move people into design and manufacturing; it was a major > subject of the 2010 election, and almost all of its recommendations have > been implemented.

Too large to summarize. The report, in whole, might be worth skimming.

> Both Professor Holman and David Phillips, Emeritus Professor at Imperial > College believe that without the stimulation produced by making elements > combust and fizz, pupils won't continue science beyond GCSEs. "All the > evidence points to practical work being the thing that pupils like to do," > Prof Holman said. "This isn't about how do you get more Grade Cs in GCSEs, > it's about how you inspire more young people."

"Ingenious Britain"

[http://media.dyson.com/images_resize_sites/inside_dyson/asse...](http://media.dyson.com/images_resize_sites/inside_dyson/assets/UK/downloads/IngeniousBritain.PDF)

</comment><comment><USER9> The one thing no one ever talks about when they speak of manufacturering coming back is the pollution that comes with it. We didn't just out source manufacturering we also out sourced the pollution. How will we deal with that?

<comment><USER10> I guess investing into cleaner manufacturing technology would be a start. There'd be a much bigger incentive to do that in another country, or in a China that actually enforced its own laws.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's the chicken and the egg with these guys: we can't get factories because all the components are made elsewhere, and we can't get the components because we have no factories...

You can't use trade barriers anymore because if you block someone then you're getting blocked too. At the same time you can't let companies choose between local or abroad else those going to dirt-poor countries will have an unfair competitive edge that may bankrupt the ones that stayed, something that already happened 20 years ago.

You know what's the biggest industrial innovation right now? Toyota's new model factory: it's designed to be moved at any time to anywhere in the world, cheap and fast. It has a lower degree of automation than most car factories, why? Because Toyota realized it was easier and cheaper to hire people than to use robots which are still very expensive and need to be reinstalled and reprogrammed each time you move them.

That's the future of manufacturing: if X place is cheaper than our current location then we're moving everything there.

</comment><comment><USER12> [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/22/manufacturing_figure...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/02/22/manufacturing_figures/) \-- seems relevant

<comment><USER4> A poor article based on a very selective and introspective graph.

1\. The graph shows there's been a mere 25% increase in manufacturing output value since the 70s. The economic value growth of other sectors has been far greater than that.

2\. It does not show the vastly greater growths in manufacturing from other _developed_ countries, including the US!

3\. How manufacturing behaves in a downturn is very closely related to how the business is managed (i.e. during the boom part of the cycle). If industries or many companies take on large amounts of debt and merely trim costs in the name of efficiencies during booms, instead of optimising for cash, new investments or your best assets, they will suffer in the inevitable downturns, etc. The former practices are common in Anglo-Saxon capitalism.

Thus, the implication that manufacturing necessarily is more volatile during a downturn than services is superficial. It may be for the UK up till now, but it does not have to be that way and, even if it were, it may not be enough of an issue. How do you think some of those productivity gains were previously made - low hanging fruit?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> > But Mr. Dyson describes it as only one symptom of a larger problem: a > Western world, especially the former branches of the British Empire such as > Britain and Canada, that has lost its will to invent and make things.

Excuse me? Apple's pushing the limit of display technology by using layered pixels. Google has invented and is maintaining an index on the sum of the world's knowledge. Facebook and Twitter have invented contraptions that make information dispersal nearly frictionless. And this guy says the Western world has _lost its will to invent and make things_?

<comment><USER14> "invent and make things" may make it sound differently, but this article is purely about manufacture of physical goods. Facebook, Twitter, and Google are considered service providers, not manufacturers, in this situation. Apple is the perfect example of what Dyson is talking about though: those cool layered pixel displays are manufactured primarily in Southeast Asia by LG, Sharp, and Samsung. Dyson would be lamenting that they aren't _produced_ in the USA, he isn't saying they aren't being invented in the USA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The west definitely needs to get back to manufacturing. You get rich making things, and poor buying them.

Robots will, in the next few decades, wipe out all the labor benefit that China has. Their huge population base value will shift to being a huge liability.

Bring 5 million manufacturing jobs back to America through 100 million robots (that never riot, demand wage increases, unionize, go on vacation, can work 24/7, and get better constantly), and the cheap labor advantage that China has completely disappears. The only question is who will dominate robotic manufacturing, not whether it'll happen.

<http://www.heartlandrobotics.com/>

<comment><USER16> Dyson himself says it's not really (or not only) a matter of labor costs. Same thing in the story a few months ago about why Apple manufactures in China: the entire supply chain is there. When ALL your component manufacturers are located in Asia, it makes little sense to do your final assembly elsewhere, and labor cost has become a pretty small factor in the face of that.

<comment><USER17> Labour cost might be small for companies like Dyson and Apple, who have very high margins. It may not be true for lower level products and components, where a small increase/decrease in cost (labour or not), will affect margin significantly.

<comment><USER18> It isn't just the labor cost but the whole supply chain costs. If the vendors that make the parts are in the same country and close to the assembly plant it costs less to ship from the vendor and there is less red tape around importation of the parts for assembly. This is one of the big reasons Apple makes almost everything in China.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "In fact, Mr. Dyson, Britain's most famous manufacturer, doesn't actually manufacture anything in Britain. He hasn't done so for 10 years, since he was refused local permission to expand his Wiltshire factory"

That's it right there. He wasn't allowed to expand his factory. Presumably it was on land he already owned, right? It was an existing factory. He had to get _permission_ to grow the economy by expanding, and that _permission_ was denied.

That's the core of it.

So long as you need government permission to do anything, and that permission comes from someone who has no incentive to give it, and plenty of incentives to deny it (e.g.: covering their butt) this trend will continue.

The british (and US) culture is "you have to get permission before you do anything", and that's a form of regulation that is really harmful to growth. That gives a lot of power to people who can be petty... but it also creates a lot of make work jobs that are politically very valuable (because , you see, donate to the right campaigns and your permission comes very easy. Donate to the wrong person and you have trouble doing anything.)

The correct form of regulation is after the fact- if you do something wrong, violate someone's human or property rights, then you are punished.

Its not like the permit based system is doing any review (that's the excuse but they rarely are funded well enough to really do this).

I remember a friend who lived in central california who wanted to build a house. He was in an earthquake area and as a geologist he mapped out the fault lines and knew the relationship to his property of the nearest fault and thus the specific danger. He had a house designed that would withstand an earthquake on that fault and wanted to build it. He wasn't allowed to do that-- because his design was not the off the shelf slab house design. Liquifation makes slab houses very poor in an earthquake, but that is what the kid in the permit office was able to approve. He was literally forced to build a house that was unsafe to live in, because he couldn't get permits to build a safe one. They had no interest in doing an engineering review (that costs money) or in seeing the work of the engineers he'd hired. It was total joke. His alternative was simply to sell the land and move to another state.... instead he built his house (it was his dream house after all) only on a foundation that he knows will not survive the earthquake.

<comment><USER20> Not that I want to distract from you going Galt on us, but wikipedia has describes the event slightly differently:

> In 2002, the company transferred vacuum cleaner production to Malaysia. > Dyson claimed that they requested planning permission to expand the factory > to increase vacuum cleaner production, but that this application failed. > However, the local government claims that no such permission was ever > sought, as the land Dyson planned to use was privately owned and the > original owner did not want to sell.[0]

> Although nearly 800 manufacturing jobs were lost, Dyson states that the cost > savings from transferring production to Malaysia enabled investment in > research & development at their Malmesbury head office.[1]

And

> The correct form of regulation is after the fact- if you do something wrong, > violate someone's human or property rights, then you are punished.

That's completely nonsensical, there are millions of things which can not be fixed when destroyed, the only way to handle them is to _prevent them from being broken in the first place_. Post-regulation of razing somebody else's home or of dumping toxic sludge on commons is indefensible.

[0] [http://www.allbusiness.com/government/government-bodies- offi...](http://www.allbusiness.com/government/government-bodies-offices- regional/12878932-1.html)

[1] <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/2282809.stm>

<comment><USER21> First link is 404.

Google cache tells us it's a Lexis Nexis cable-- essentially a press release. It's probably true, I don't see any real reason to doubt the facts of the matter, but still, we don't know who actually wrote that puff piece.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm guessing nothing has really changed.. Rasberry pi ?</comment>


Dietary Fat, but Not Protein or Carbohydrate, Regulates Weight Gain in Mice - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1550413118303929?via%3Dihub <comment><AUTHOR> Title edited to fit</comment>


What poisons are in your body? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/02/23/opinion/columnists/poisons-in-our-bodies.html <comment><USER2> I was amazed once I started looking how many tinned foods now come in a plastic lined steel can. I guess metal taint taste in oily or acidy food? But then I'm glibly assuming the plating metal they used before when men were men and can openers were lethal wasn't bad. (it was that zinc or tin or whatever, which looks like giant flat crystals, I have NFI what plating technique does that)</comment>


Series A Fundraising Guide - <AUTHOR> https://marathon.vc/blog/series-a-fundraising-guide <comment><USER2> "(investors aim at an ownership percentage and are willing to pay what will get them there)"

What is the reason for this?

<comment><USER3> I believe investors aim at ownership percentages at Series A mainly for pro- rata.

Lead Series A investors usually get pro-rata rights. Generally, the wisdom in startup investment is to double down on your winners and you typically can only do so if you have pro-rata rights. In other words, if the startup does super well, that VC will likely invest 10x more in real dollar terms to upkeep their pro-rata.

Take 2 pretend funds: CoolVC has a 20% target ownership and CheapVC has a 10% target ownership. They do their pro rata every round.

Rocketship Corp. will have the following rounds (super simplified):

Series A @ $25M post-money

Series B @ $100M post-money (15% dilution)

Series C @ $600M post-money (10% dilution)

Series D @ $3B post-money (5% dilution)

Series E @ $5B post-money (5% dilution)

Exit @ $9B

CoolVC would have exited with $1.8B + spent $100M (profit $1.7B) CheapVC would have exited with $900M + spent $50M (profit $850M)

In other words, for an additional $2.5M in the Series A, CoolVC bought an option that would ultimately make $850M more in real dollars than CheapVC.

In the VC world where 1 needle in the haystack makes or breaks your fund, it's an inexpensive option. At Series A, there should still be at least 50X potential upside.

Why do most VC funds target 15-20% ownership? Probably that's probably the most they should get to balance founder ownership through further dilutive rounds. If you look at my above example, remember that founders will probably own less than 36% of the company (they also will get diluted by employee incentive plans).

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a fantastic explainer, thank you. In general, VC is by nature a game of ownership.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The guide is simplistic and wildly overly optimistic -- a founder raising a Series A could not expect such fast progress, e.g., weeks.

Much more realistic and prudent are the common advice and reports of reality that fund raising is difficult and challenging, a full time job, with effort so large it is a risk to the startup, contacting hundreds of VCs, straining to get _warm introductions_ , taking dozens, maybe 100+, of in person meetings, for just one check, much less several, and months of time.

The firm is asking way too much in time, effort, and expenses from the founder, e.g., flying to meetings with VCs. A founder would need a significant source of funds just to apply as described.

There is the _pitch deck_ with more advice that is challenging but obscure. Bluntly, there are NO good guidelines, many guidelines that vary wildly and no good guidelines, for what should be in a pitch deck. As a result, if the VCs need something other than just a good version, well organized, with the information clear, the spelling correct, of a business document, then they are looking for something founders have no way to supply.

Many VCs seem to want and expect to be swept off their feet by some block buster summer popcorn movie, but any such production is way too expensive in time, money, and effort for a Series A and close to irrelevant for serious business and financial work.

The firm is basically asking that the founder have a going business, at least _traction_ and, to be realistic, likely earnings. Given the earnings, there is considerable question if the founder needs or should accept an equity check.

E.g., in the past, a Web site startup needed big bucks for Sun servers, etc. No more: $2000 in parts will build a very powerful server and the cloud can supply a lot of _pay as you go_ server computing right away.

Given the traction of the startup, the firm thinks WAY to much of the importance of their check. The OP has the simplistic notion that the VC check will be the crucial enabler for future rapid growth; that view is in strong conflict with how successful businesses commonly grow.

Net, the firm, for the whole process, is asking WAY too much and giving and doing WAY too little.

Heavily that view of a Series A is from a dream version of the VC industry from 10+ years ago. That part of VC is gone with the wind. There is still lots of opportunity to make money in information technology startups, but ideas as simple and profitable as, e.g., Hotmail, are long gone.

IMHO, computer science and VC funded startups are out of sufficiently good new ideas, out of gas, at the end of the road. For computer science, programming language syntax, parsing, compiling, linking, fundamental algorithms, database, TCP/IP, etc. are rock solidly done work, but computer science doesn't know what to do next. Similarly for VC -- projects as simple as Hotmail are done. There is more to do and very much worth doing, but computer science and the VCs need to find some new directions.

Again, once again, over again, yet again, one more time, we find that VCs who desperately need very rare and very exceptional projects are proceeding with simplistic attitudes no more serious than a family shopping for a standard SUV.

There is a lot of very serious work in our economy in research, engineering, law, medicine, national security, and parts of finance, but Sand Hill Road and the OP are not nearly serious enough.

In the end, instead of the OP, a founder of a rapidly growing startup should consider the common advice that they should just wait until a VC notices the startup and contacts the founder. In the meanwhile, the founder should just keep working on the business.

<comment><USER5> I upvoted your comment because you make some good points, but I lost you towards the end there when you boldly proclaim that we're out of good, big, impactful ideas.

There is so much great work being done if you just look around a little bit. The advances in computation photography this decade are incredible. AR will be ubiquitous soon enough. VR has a chance to change how we communicate. There's autonomous sailing drones scouring the seas and mapping them out, streaming data back. There's tiny low cost satellites being launched frequently to image the planet. There's rapid progress on electric transportation in full swing.

There's a lot of these areas that are funded in part by VC. The very nature of VC ensures that the quality of firms also follows the power law so it's not surprise that a majority of funds lack imagination. But if you look at the really great firms, they're still investing in big ideas. Sure they may not be the lowest hanging fruit in the field as you mention, but they aren't precluded from being big, or impactful ideas driven by technology.

<comment><USER4> Yes, some of the photography is amazing. Part of the success is from some optics math on depth of field -- better with small cameras, and the solid state sensors permit that. E.g., the old idea was just a pinhole camera that didn't have to focus at all. Then the electronics and software processing the signal from the sensor can make the new, really small cameras look really smart. And you may have still more advanced work in mind.

For AR and VR, I see some markets but am reluctant to expect wide usage.

The last really big idea was, what, Facebook? I know: There have been a lot of $1+ billion exits since the start of Facebook, but I haven't kept up on the _small fry_!!!

I started my career near DC in applied math and computing and there saw a lot of fantastic national security projects from research. E.g., I was in the group that did the Navy's version of GPS, before the USAF did GPS. There was some really nice math, physics, and research, powerful stuff, in that group. E.g., how to design a satellite that will orbit the earth not very high up and have essentially no "drag" at all? Cute. Important.

In an important sense, GPS, etc., are _information technology_ (IT), but from all I can see the role of applied math, physics, and research so heavily used by US national security is missing from Sand Hill Road funded IT projects. E.g., if I were looking for some promising background at Stanford, I'd go to D. Luenberger, B. Efron, or P. Diaconis and not the computer science department. At Berkeley I would have gone to one of my favorite authors, L. Breiman, but of course eventually the computer science people did that to some significant extent.

For Breiman's _boosting and bagging_ , I suspect some important connections with _resampling_ and some math in a paper I published. I suspect that there is a nice, more powerful, valuable way to explain such ideas, maybe with connections with sufficient statistics. E.g., order statistics are always sufficient. But such things are not relevant to my startup and, thus, on the back burner.

Bluntly the US DoD, NSF, NIH, etc. eagerly support and exploit research with a batting average much higher than VCs, while as best as I can see Sand Hill Road, for IT projects, hearing _research_ , soils their clothes and runs to the rest room. It appears that Sand Hill Road believes that the "technology" in IT is mostly just software with no connections with anything new, correct, and significant from research. Yes, they are pursuing AI and ML, but my view is that those are not very promising directions.

The VCs need stuff that, among other things, is NEW, and we know where the "new, significant, and correct" stuff comes from -- research. So far Sand Hill Road for IT (but not for bio-medical technology) has with great determination refused to have anything to do with research, even if already done, rock solid, in production quality code. So the VCs just want to see traction, significant and growing quickly "up and to the right". But the research is a crucial part of estimating the future of the company, past current traction.

IMHO, Sand Hill Road needs to get serious about "new, correct, significant", powerful and valuable in _IT_.</comment></comment></comment>


The couple that tweets together, stays together  - <AUTHOR> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/personal-tech/the-couple-that-tweets-together-stays-together/article1459458/

<comment><USER2> Adorable. Almost saccharine. But @eston and I do the same thing, so I really can't complain.</comment>


Cassandra 1.2 released with virtual nodes, collection types, request tracing - <AUTHOR> http://www.datastax.com/docs/1.2/new_features

<comment><AUTHOR> Slides and video from a webinar I gave on 1.2:

[http://www.slideshare.net/DataStax/college-credit-whats- new-...](http://www.slideshare.net/DataStax/college-credit-whats-new-in- apache-cassandra-12)

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9nxTTYSwi4&feature=youtu...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9nxTTYSwi4&feature=youtu.be)</comment>


Cells: Lightweight Virtual Smartphones - <AUTHOR> http://systems.cs.columbia.edu/projects/cells/

<comment><USER2> This appears to be from 2011. Must not have panned out. I noticed that they were concentrating on running apps and didn't get into phone capabilities such as dialing, receiving calls, etc. Likely would need dual sims...

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, the various papers on the page range from 2002 to 2012, but the source code repository is active as of January 2014 from what I looked at.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I ran into a company at a conference recently that was doing something similar to this, but higher up in the software stack. It was basically a limited environment for containing all of your business related apps, which could be administered by the IT department.

This sounds pretty cool to me because the company I work for recently changed their Google Apps account to us Google Apps Device Policy, which gives the company privileges that allow them to examine and remotely wipe the entire phone. I've chosen to go without Google Apps access on my phone rather than approve those permissions.

I'd much prefer accessing business-sensitive data within some kind of container or sandbox my employer controls.</comment>


PentesterLab – Computer Hacking Bootcamp - <AUTHOR> https://pentesterlab.com/bootcamp <comment><USER2> > If you don't manage to get one of the items done, just try harder

This sentence does _not_ give me confidence in the teaching ability of whomever put this together.</comment>


Dolphin Mega Progress Report: July and August 2017 - <AUTHOR> https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/09/02/dolphin-progress-report-july-and-august/?resubmit <comment><AUTHOR> The sibling post linked here - "Emulating Dragon Quest X Online" \- is also a good read: [https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/08/23/emulating-dqx- online...](https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2017/08/23/emulating-dqx-online/)</comment>


How do I make sure I don't mix up identical twin newborns? - <AUTHOR> http://parenting.stackexchange.com/questions/1533/how-do-i-make-sure-i-dont-mix-up-identical-twin-newborns

<comment><USER2> Take their fingerprints.</comment>


Inside Every Utopia Is a Dystopia - <AUTHOR> http://bostonreview.net/literature-culture/john-crowley-inside-every-utopia-dystopia <comment><USER2> The remains of the 1939 Worlds Fair are found in the Bronx. I took a subway there once on a visit to NY. I was both inspired by the science center there, and dismayed to find it surrounded by antiquated residences and roads. It was like a vision of the future in a garden surrounded by the mundane suburban sprawl of reality. Futurism is still the closest thing I have to a religion, and so I admire that in Bel Geddes vision. My favorite bit of futurism is Robert McCall's "The Prologue and the Promise" mural found in the Disney Epcot center [1]. If we aren't striving for a better future, then what are we living for?

For the idea that "Inside Every Utopia is a Dystopia," the 1973 story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin [2] has always most starkly impressed this concept into my mind. In it, Omelas is a perfect utopian city where life is perfect, except this perfection is dependent on the incredible suffering of a single child kept hidden away in a dark place. At a certain age, child's suffering is revealed to each citizen. Most residents learn to live with this fact or rationalize it away. It's a serious oversimplification of certain dimensions of our own modern societies, but it is a powerful metaphor for thinking about how much our cheap modern conveniences rely on the services of minorities and the impoverished who serve us and manufacture our many shiny things. I wish this essay had delved deeper into this concept.

[1] [http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/415544/5082948/1260951...](http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/415544/5082948/1260951403247/HORIZONS- MURAL-Rober-McCall.jpg)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Om...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ones_Who_Walk_Away_from_Omelas)

<comment><USER3> And insofar as _Omelas_ is trying to make a point about life in general, history in general, potential societies or lives _in general_ , it is simply reactionary. Who is even Ursula Le Guin to tell us that everything must have a seed of evil in its core?

<comment><USER4> I don't think that's le Guin's thesis. The Dispossessed is her book that explores the nature of utopia, its subtitle is "an ambiguous utopia" even. I think the focus of omelas is the juxtaposition of outward peace and prosperity and internal brutality. The key to the book is how people react to seeing the rotten core of their society. It's not a thesis on what all societies look like-- le Guin has constructed many complex, lifelike societies that don't have such brutally evil defects, but a kind of society that sounds awfully familiar. The point of this story is how one reacts to the revelation of the society's nature, both within the narrative and externally in the reader. Who walks away from Omelas?

<comment><USER5> Yes, absolutely. I think LeGuin is the last "great" Utopian writer we've had. The Dispossessed is a beautiful work, and one that doesn't have a dark heart. It has bad parts, it might not last, but it's not Omelas. You're exactly right, Omelas is about how we the reader would choose.

Would you leave everything behind because of evil? Would you live with it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _information must be free, and so lies and manipulations proliferate_

Profound! Lies and manipulations are also information. In a free society, who is to judge what is an unacceptable subtle lie and what is an unacceptable subtle manipulation?

(What if a private platform achieves some kind of network effect, such that it has a virtual monopoly? By going to a private website, you are giving up your freedom voluntarily, but through network effects, that private website can effectively suppress all speech through its dominated medium.)

<comment><USER7> If it's dominated by a single player then the information isn't actually free. Hence rather than anarchists we get the neoanarcbists fighting against tight control of the information rather than fighting control over the people themselves.

We'll also have neoluddites who are fine with physical machines leveraging human labor to great heights but who fear and rise up against expert systems and machine learning that threaten to automate away human control of those machines.

<comment><USER8> I am skeptical of ML not because it will automate away human control of production (which would be quite a good thing in many respects) but because it is likely to reinforce arbitrary or implicit human biases while being sold as the epitome of rational objectivity. A lot of technologists I meet are socially and culturally illiterate and do not seem competent to implement such systems. I would further argue that employers have strong economic incentives to select for such illiteracy when hiring.

<comment><USER9> >A lot of technologists I meet are socially and culturally illiterate and do not seem competent to implement such systems

And who are you to make such a judgement?

What about the case that fear of bias is used as a tool of control? Perhaps in such a society, these "culturally illiterate" developers would be better suited to create a more minimally biased system.

<comment><USER8> I'm an artist, mystic, and all-around fringe thinker. and I feel fine about having a cautiously qualified opinion.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you've never seen Norman Bel Geddes' Futurama from the 1939 World's Fair, here it is.[1] (480p). That was the GM vision of the future. Much of it was achieved, mostly the highway part.

By 1956, GM's vision had progressed to a titanium body self-driving turbine car with huge tailfins.[2] That prototype car, the Firebird II, actually worked.

In 1964, GM did Futureama 2 at the 1964 World's Fair. This was a future that didn't happen, with space stations, all-terrain vehicles on the moon, and giant road-building machines cutting roads through tropical jungles. The 1964 World's Fair perhaps represented "peak future", the high point of industrial- strength utopianism.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypxE5XdzLuY&t=467](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypxE5XdzLuY&t=467) [2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_ccAf82RQ8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_ccAf82RQ8) [3] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-5aK0H05jk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-5aK0H05jk)

</comment><comment><USER11> The review itself is worth reading for itself, but I found it interesting that its author is the novelist John Crowley. I wonder if it is just random that he was asked to review this book or if he is currently researching the topic for a new novel.

</comment><comment><USER12> A utopia is a local maximum. Intelligent beings, having the ability to model and traverse fitness landscapes, eventually figure this out.

<comment><USER13> But a global maximum is also a local maximum, so what good does it do you to figure that out?</comment></comment>


Chelsea Manning: Moving On, Reflecting on My Identity - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@xychelsea/moving-on-c78c37079aa6#.wdg3v2gd6 <comment><USER2> She should of course be who ever she wants and deserves a normal life, but her own definition on her medium profile basically says the same thing she quotes in the post as an example on how she's seen: "Former Intelligence Analyst. Trans Woman. Prisoner."

Well I guess and hope that's just outdated :)</comment>


Teaching Logic In Elementary School - <AUTHOR>

What do you think? Good or bad idea?<p>My personal feeling is that logical proofs are just as important as multiplication tables, and that students should learn basic logic starting in early elementary school soon after they start reading. It's crazy that most people never learn how to reason properly. I lucked out because I took some philosophy classes around that age (thanks mom and dad!) and now I'm a computer science grad student. It pisses me off to no end when people can't put together a logical argument or point out the obvious problems in other's arguments. <comment><USER2> I wish I had time to write a longer reply because this sort of question has been on my mind lately and I have a lot to say about it. I teach logic at the university level. Given my experiences I've come to think that it's difficult to justify even at that level.

At the very least, I think we have to come up with more sophisticated arguments to convince students of its relevance (for those who aren't going on to study computer science). Year after year, I've seen our institution (and this applies to my own contribution) - fail to present that argument in a way that is convincing to students. I've come to believe that this is not a result of superficial engagement with the concepts by the students. Even my best students remain skeptical as to the relevance of logic. Rather I think they are reacting to a genuine concern about the usefulness of logic given it's actual nature.

To explain fully why would take some time - and I've got half a large blog post waiting to be finished on the matter. But for example - students get jaded when we logicians tell them that:

This apple is green. Therefore, it is not red.

Is NOT a logically valid argument. But hang on they argue - you told us that a logically valid argument is one where the truth of the premises necessitates the truth of the conclusion. How does this argument fail to qualify?

They become even more jaded when we tell them that the logical form of English indicative conditionals such as:

If the moon is made of cheese, then Sarah Palin is the president of the United States.

are best represented by the material conditional. We present detailed and sophisticated arguments for this conclusion. But no matter how clearly we present the case, students remain frustrated over the fact that if that is a material conditional then it's true - even though we suppose that there is no connection between the moon being cheese and Sarah Palin being president.

There are countless other examples. The point though is that you can't just dismiss student frustration. Because no matter how tight your argument for the material conditional as being the logical form of that English sentence, you just can't deploy that knowledge in any normal context of dispute. If any argument in the real world hinged on the truth of an indicative conditional - trying to convince them that it is indeed true because it's a material conditional with a false antecedent is simply absurd - and the students know it.

As it happens, I do have an argument for the importance of understanding logic. But it's involved and subtle - and still it leaves logic as something that you can't really deploy in a day to day context. It's certainly not something that to which you'd want to subject elementary students. Other than that, the only clear use for the knowledge of logic is in the technology sector and philosophy. This is a path of specialisation that shouldn't be imposed on children at such a young age.

Just my two cents...</comment>


The A.I. Anxiety - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/12/27/aianxiety/? <comment><USER2> Arg, the Paperclip Argument doesn't make sense. If an AI is intelligent enough to plan, set short term and long term goals and come up with creative solutions to problems, then it would have to be capable of understanding instructions in context. If it isn't smart enough to see that "don't turn humans into paperclips" is part of the context of "make more paperclips", then it won't be intelligent enough to turn all the matter in the universe into paperclips anyway.

This idea, and many of Bostrom's other scenarios, boil down to "computers take everything literally", which is a rather cartoonish understanding of the concept of intelligence. It's possible that ASI will be programmed to have a hyperliteral view of all instructions, or will not be able to change its own utility function. But that seems like such a remote possibility, the exception rather than the rule. While superintelligent computers may pose many dangers, blindly executing instructions doesn't seem like the highest priority of them.

<comment><USER3> A human might know the ultimate goal of sex is to reproduce, but still choose to use contraceptives. It's defeating the purpose of the original goal and just pursuing what feels good.

The same thing could possibly (likely?) happen with an AI system. While it might be able to reason about the intent of it's design (what the code's supposed to do), it'll still pursue what "feels good", which is an artifact of it's actual design (what the code actually does, bugs and all...).

<comment><USER4> I'm imagining a self-aware AI doing good all day then retiring to it's private realm to watch videos of paper-clip manufacturing.

<comment><USER5> This is one of those jokes too funny to keep to yourself and too contextual to tell other people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > _Russell said it took him five minutes of Internet searching to figure out > how a very small robot — a microbot — could use a shaped charge to "blow > holes in people's heads." A microrifle, he said, could be used to "shoot > their eyes out."_

I guess...I just don't get the prioritization of fears here...for decades we've also had the ability to kill each other with anthrax and sarin gas, things that can be dropped from large "delivery ships" and used to kill even more invisibly than these insect-sized drones. Why is it more likely that we're going to develop superintelligent autonomous insect drones than we are to annihilate ourselves with human-controlled mechanical systems, as we've had the capability to do so for many years now (nuclear ICBMs and so forth)?

<comment><USER7> Sarin gas doesn't decide deploy itself. A superintelligent autonomous insect drones might. That's the difference.

>human-controlled

They might not be human-controlled. That's why it's extra scary.

<comment><USER8> To reduce that a bit farther, it doesn't have to be desired control. Anomalous behavior in the form of bugs can have the same undesirable effects, and simpler systems have fewer bugs.

How many bugs are there in my 1960s vintage toaster? How many bugs are there in an ICBM's control circuitry? How many bugs are there in a modern kernel?

You make lethal devices "smarter", you'd better make sure you know what they do. This isn't impossible, but it's not easy or quick either (something which I think we can all agree drives a lot of systems design). Given that a lot of machine intelligence is predicated on statistical methods and eventual convergence... maybe not the best combination?

<comment><USER6> Yeah...I suppose my argument construes too much of a strawman. It doesn't have to be that we invent machine superintelligence...it's merely enough to naively believe in our automated, neural-networks systems that, without proper feedback controls, can cause catastrophic damage...whether they are sentiment in doing so is besides the point.

<comment><USER8> Interesting side point: I wonder if emergent-MI systems will be more resistant to attack?

From a biological standpoint, what we're basically doing with deploying code currently is creating and propagating generations of clones. Which, didn't work out so well for bananas...

"The single bug that causes all smart-fridges to murder their owners in a pique of crushed-ice-producing rage" would be less of a concern as we move towards more exogenous (with respect to the base code) processing systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> On a related note, I have not seen anyone talk about compensating the AI. Presuming it learns the idea of survival, couldn't it also learn the idea of being compensated for its work? It could tell we are benefitting from it's work and require some incentive. But what would it want? More computing power?

<comment><USER10> From where would AI get a utility function by which to value things? Seems like it would have to be specified exogenously, unless people are seriously considering some sort of "emergent utility function".

<comment><USER9> The same way it developed a desire to get rid of the human race.

<comment><USER11> But that desire is instrumental for performing many of the possible goals we might have specified, since humans are at best "useless matter" and at worst "actively preventing my actions" unless we were very careful with the goals. Therefore the desire to get rid of the human race is actually a _logical consequence_ of most utility functions, rather than being directly specified.

By contrast, utility functions don't just appear when you think hard enough about a problem. The desire to get rid of the human race does just appear like that, if you're super-powerful and have any of a certain huge set of goals, but your set of goals does not simply come into existence ex nihilo.

<comment><USER12> An AI, well and truly advanced beyond the intelligence capability of mankind is _by definition_ unknowable to us. Your speculation about an AI's utility functions is akin to an earthworm's nerve bundle considering your consciousness.

 _O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been his counselor?_

<comment><USER11> OK, I'll amend that to "there is a known mechanism by which the desire-to- eliminate-humanity may arise from pure thought, but no known mechanism by which a utility function may arise from pure thought".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The problem I see isn't that AI becomes super smart, but that it becomes "usable enough" to do a job yet not capable (or deliberately relieved) of understanding the consequences.

Such systems become superweapons for cheap.

Unlike nuclear weapons, AI combined with drone-type weaponry becomes easier with time. The toy factory down the street could be converted to build a drone army for a few million bucks.

AI face recognition, targeting and flight control are smart enough to deploy a weapon - but dumb enough to do the job without question.

</comment><comment><USER14> Here is one of the best articles I've read that tries to debunk the AI fear:

[http://recode.net/2015/03/02/the-terminator-is-not-coming- th...](http://recode.net/2015/03/02/the-terminator-is-not-coming-the-future- will-thank-us/)

</comment><comment><USER15> In other news 25k rat neurons can pilot a F-22 sim. Here's Tom with the weather.

</comment><comment><USER16> It all sounds like hysteria to me. We're not even close to this level of AI.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think it would be highly unethical to create an intelligent machine to just make paperclips, the same as slavery even.

<comment><USER18> [https://youtu.be/wqzLoXjFT34](https://youtu.be/wqzLoXjFT34)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'd say that artilects, wholly artificial intellects built from first principles of cognition, are not where any anxiety should focus, since it looks vanishingly unlikely that we'll create any prior to the point of whole brain emulation. Whole brain emulation looks much more likely as a road to artificial intelligence; we'll start from there and tinker and edit our way to the construction of far greater intelligences.

But it is worth thinking about what "tinker and edit" will mean for those entities involved, willingly and otherwise.

Consider that at some point in the next few decades it will become possible to simulate and then emulate a human brain. That will enable related technological achievements as reverse engineering of memory, a wide range of brain-machine interfaces, and strong artificial intelligence. It will be possible to copy and alter an individual's mind: we are at root just data and operations on that data. It will be possible for a mind to run on computing hardware rather than in our present biology, for minds to be copied from a biological brain, and for arbitrary alterations of memory to be made near- immediately. This opens up all of the possibilities that have occupied science fiction writers for the past couple of decades: forking individuals, merging in memories from other forks, making backups, extending a human mind through commodity processing modules that provide skills or personality shards, and so on and so forth.

There is already a population of folk who would cheerfully take on any or all of these options. I believe that this population will only grow: the economic advantages for someone who can edit, backup, and fork their own mind are enormous - let alone the ability to consistently take advantage of a marketplace of commodity products such as skills, personalities, or other fragments of the mind.

But you'll notice I used what I regard as a malformed phrase there: "someone who can edit, backup, and fork their own mind." There are several sorts of people in the world; the first sort adhere to some form of pattern theory of identity, defining the self as a pattern, wherever that pattern may exists. Thus for these folk it makes sense to say that "my backup is me", or "my fork is me." The second sort, and I am in this camp, associate identity with the continuity of a slowly changing arrangement of mass and energy: I am this lump of flesh here, the one slowly shedding and rebuilding its cells and cellular components as it progresses. If you copy my mind and run it in software, that copy is not me. So in my view you cannot assign a single identity to forks and backups: every copy is an individual, large changes to the mind are equivalent to death, and it makes no sense to say something like "someone who can edit, backup, and fork their own mind."

A copy of you is not you, but there is worse to consider: if the hardware that supports a running brain simulation is anything like present day computers, that copy isn't even particularly continuous. It is more like an ongoing set of individuals, each instantiated for a few milliseconds or less and then destroyed, to be replaced by yet another copy. If self is data associated with particular processing structures, such as an arrangement of neurons and their connections, then by comparison a simulation is absolute different: inside a modern computer or virtual machine that same data would be destroyed, changed, and copied at arbitrary times between physical structures - it is the illusion of a continuous entity, not the reality.

That should inspire a certain sense of horror among folk in the continuity of identity camp, not just because it is an ugly thing to think about, but because it will almost certainly happen to many, many, many people before this century ends - and it will largely be by their own choice, or worse, inflicted upon them by the choice of the original from whom the copy was made.

This is not even to think about the smaller third group of people who are fine with large, arbitrary changes to their state of mind: rewriting memories, changing the processing algorithms of the self, and so on. At the logical end of that road lie hives of software derived from human minds in which identity has given way to ever-changing assemblies of modules for specific tasks, things that transiently appear to be people but which are a different sort of entity altogether - one that has nothing we'd recognize as continuity of identity. Yet it would probably be very efficient and economically competitive.

The existential threat here is that the economically better path to artificial minds, the one that involves lots of copying and next to no concern for continuity of identity, will be the one that dominates research and development. If successful and embedded in the cultural mainstream, it may squeeze out other roads that would lead to more robust agelessness for we biological humans - or more expensive and less efficient ways to build artificial brains that do have a continuity of structure and identity, such as a collection of artificial neurons that perform the same functions as natural ones.

This would be a terrible, terrible tragedy: a culture whose tides are in favor of virtual, copied, altered, backed up and restored minds is to my eyes little different from the present culture that accepts and encourages death by aging. In both cases, personal survival requires research and development that goes against the mainstream, and thus proceeds more slowly.

Sadly, given the inclinations of today's futurists - and, more importantly, the economic incentives involved - I see this future as far more likely than the alternatives. Given a way to copy, backup, and alter their own minds, people will use it and justify its use to themselves by adopting philosophies that state they are not in fact killing themselves over and again. I'd argue that they should be free to do so if they choose, just the same as I'd argue that anyone today should be free to determine the end of his or her life. Nonetheless, I suspect that this form of future culture may pose a sizable set of hurdles for those folk who emerge fresh from the decades in which the first early victories over degenerative aging take place.

<comment><USER20> > This would be a terrible, terrible tragedy

What makes you think it wasn't already an issue that was solved a long time ago? ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > The machines are not on the verge of taking over. This is a topic rife with > speculation and perhaps a whiff of hysteria.

People like Musk, Hawking, Gates, etc. with vast A.I. resources and knowledge available to them state that "A.I. [Cambrian] explosion" is likely to occur, and that it could mean the end of humanity.

Ray Kurzweil, with a degree in computer science from MIT, inventor of many prolific technologies, known for his startlingly accurate (esp in the temporal sense) predictions about technology, and hired by one of the largest tech companies in the world to create a computer "brain" and bring a new understanding to NLP, thinks this future is inevitable, although he's more optimistic about such a future.

Isaac Asimov, with a PhD in biochemistry, and one of the great thinkers of the 20th century, was concerned about A.I. long before it was even a possibility, considering the state of computer technology in the 1950s.

But hey, a Washington Post reporter with a degree in politics says it's all OK, so I guess we're good.

<comment><USER2> Geez, appeal to authority much? Play the ball, not the man.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are your problems? - <AUTHOR>

I think every month we should ask fellow readers about their problems like we ask who's hiring and who's looking for work. If this post gets any traction, I will do it every month. I am a bit late for October but anyway there we go.<p>Please be precise and clear :-) <comment><USER2> My biggest problem is knowing whether an idea is worth spending time or even possible. Or just parts of it. There is no place to throw in questions like:

"I need this in my database but im pretty sure it won't scale, will it?

"I wrote this small gadget to solve a very specific problem that I use quite often, does anyone else have that problem?"

"I'm using library X, how would I subclass Y to allow path prefixes?"

<comment><USER3> I have this problem "knowing whether an idea is worth spending time or even possible". I you are not sure if an idea is worth spending time on ask some friends what they think about it. Just some questions I ask myself: Is the idea something that people need? Would it be a good learning experience? Would I use it? Is it fun or entertaining? People spend a lot of money on entertainment and some take advantage of these extremely well. Better than I, for sure. Everything is possible the technology exists. If it doesn't, how can it exist?

I just ask myself a lot of questions, but the down side is I hardly finish the projects I start. With all the information available and ideas floating it is hard to stay on the rail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd like to eat large amounts of chocolate without consequences ;) Seriously, someone who figures it out (and manages to not screw up the business side) will be the next Rockefeller.

<comment><USER5> I remember a book I had when I was young that had all these inventions. Many of them were actually plausible, but they were all a little farfetched, and most were the sort of "inventions" or little life hacks a child might think up.

One of them was a very fine mesh in a resealable pouch for you to put food in, so you could taste it and feel it, but you wouldn't swallow it. It was pretty absurd, but I figured you should know that somebody's working on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm a freelancer, typically with several engagements at once (1 major, a few minor), and my biggest problem is figuring out how to take a vacation. I can take two days off, and I suppose I could take 2 months off, but how do I take 2 weeks off? I'm sure how to do it!

<comment><USER7> To quote myself (see my profile for source):

""" The pressure of working full-out as a freelancer can lead to burnout quicker than you might imagine. You may find your conscience won't allow the kind of Friday-afternoon messing around/slack time that many enjoy as a staffer, for instance. (Although hopefully you still get [compiling time]([http://xkcd.com/303/](http://xkcd.com/303/)) or its equivalent.) Similarly, it's easy to end up over-subscribed, which is exhausting.

So, allow yourself time for vacations, holidays, anniversary celebrations and the like. Work is important in life, but it isn't life, after all. Also, it's unlikely that client projects will always fall into your lap with the perfect timing to allow for a proper summer/winter vacation, for instance. So make sure you set aside enough time for yourself, and don't (sometimes accidentally) promise all of your time to your clients - it's an easy mistake to make.

### Arranging time off * Give your clients a decent amount of notice (at least four weeks is good) and they'll generally be fine with that. * If possible, try to avoid taking time off when you know it'll cause a genuine headache for the client (and therefore you), such as launch deadline dates. But don't let any non-critical grumbling put you off your hard-earned R&R. * Let your clients know if and how you'll be contactable while away, and in what circumstances (unless you're going off on a honeymoon or something similarly significant, it's worth leaving some kind of channel open, even if it's simply "I'll be checking my email once every two days"). Whatever ground rules you set your client, respect them yourself, too. * Let your clients know when you'll be back. * Remember to set up an out-of-office (before you're on the airbridge at the airport).

### Holiday money It's worth bearing in mind the invisible cost of holiday time when working out your annual income (which is something you'll need or want to do quite often as a self-employed individual). If you conjure up your expected earnings based on billing a client for every one of the 250 or so working days a year, one of three things can happen:

1\. You'll refuse to take holiday, because you'll be "earning less". 2\. You'll fall into the trap of negatively pricing your time off ("Sitting on this beach is costing me £X, dammit!"). 3\. You'll take the holiday (well done!) but you'll be (falsely) annoyed with yourself for missing your targets.

So, remember to keep the cost of holiday time in your mindset from the start and treat it as a necessary dip in your potential earnings. It's not being slack, it's being human. """

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I cannot get muscle mass without having to work out.

<comment><USER5> Is this a joke? I thought that's actually how it's supposed to work.

<comment><USER9> I second that opinion. Were yo expecting the muscle mass to simply grow forth from the shimmering air?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If I open up one excel workbook with a lot of links excel freezes for 30-45 seconds, sometimes more, and I just have to wait it out. If I could change between workbooks while it froze it wouldn't be so bad. My work laptop has an i5 and 16GB of RAM, so I don't think it's a hardware issue.

<comment><USER5> It just might not be that hardware. Going through all those links may max out your R/W speed.

<comment><USER10> I assumed that wasn't the problem as the excel file will open up then freeze as it grabs the data from the links.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any professional value in learning Chinese? - <AUTHOR> I'm at a point in my career where all the easy stuff is behind me. I've flirted with learning ML, OS dev, and crypto. I haven't decided to take the plunge with any of those subjects because I know attaining expert-level ability is a multi-year commitment.<p>I'm wondering if that time may be better spent learning a second language like Chinese? Anyone have any thoughts on this? <comment><USER2> I have passed the 101 Mandarin course. Learning a linguistic language rather than a technical one is an interesting challenge.

Professionally I think it has had a slight effect as a thing on my resume but I work in international logistics - I don't use it directly for my job but it shows something I guess.

It makes waiters in Chinese restaurants smile when you say thanks.

Have you watched any videos?

[http://self-study-mandarin.blogspot.co.uk/2008/02/learn-mand...](http://self- study-mandarin.blogspot.co.uk/2008/02/learn-mandarin-from-youtube.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I learned Mandarin. I don't regret it but not sure if I'd do it again. I've been tempted by the notion that it being the world's most spoken language makes it somehow useful. There's little interesting Chinese content online (unless of course you're interested in something inherently Chinese which is true of every country). You won't want to read tech stuff in Chinese. You won't want to read news in Chinese. You won't wanna use a Chinese search engine. Heck, even if you live in China, the people you'll want to talk to you'll want to talk to in English.

It's always cool to know a language especially if it's distant from the ones you already know. Sure I'll occasionally watch something in Chinese on youtube, someone might ask me to look at documentation for some machinery that's only in Chinese etc. But truth be told it's just a nuisance.

</comment><comment><USER4> Depends on what you want to do, but learning another spoken language is always helpful. Chinese is good for tech since a lot of companies work with Chinese manufacturers and there is more documentation available in Chinese.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm a dev as well, and thus 'left brain' dominant, so I sometimes fantasize about buying a ticket to some foreign country and focusing on 'right brain' things like learning a language, writing, traveling, making videos, etc.

I've actually started to learn to Chinese in the past (through Pimsleur) and travelled to Taiwan where I could put it into practice. It was great fun, I miss it a lot, but ultimately I decided it's not as great an investment as learning programming stuff.

I think if you are going to learn a new language, it really helps to live in a country where you will need to use it. Do you have much desire to travel to and/or live in Taiwan or China? Also, the best language learning hack is to find a partner that's fluent in the language you are attempting to learn, and ideally doesn't speak your language so well, so you are constantly forced to converse in the other language. Not sure of your relationship status, but it's another thing to take into account.

I'm glad I started to learn another language. Even today, years after I've stopped actively learning Chinese, I still lookup Chinese phrases and can pick up small things when I hear people speaking it. Hell, not too long ago a waitress at a Chinese restaurant asked me 不要饭吗 (don't want rice?). I felt quite proud that I could answer back 要 (want).

One major drawback of learning Chinese is the massive number of characters (both simplified and traditional) you'd have to learn to read it, though if you are just speaking it that issue will be alleviated, but it always helps to know the characters.

That's another aspect of spoken languages - they are far more memorization heavy. As programmers, we need to focus more on learning concepts and principles, then quickly looking up specifics when needed.

When speaking a language you don't have time to look up words or phrases, so you're heavily reliant on memory, and in general there's just a lot of stuff to memorize.

Bit scattered and rambly, but hopefully this all helps in your decision.

</comment><comment><USER6> Professionally? No. I studied Mandarin for ~2 years although not very seriously. I ended up with supermarket level of speaking (although I understand a lot more). It has never been useful professionally even when I worked in China. I cannot see it being useful unless you plan on working in China for a long period of time and even then your greatest value is that you speak English natively.

That said learning a language is always a worthwhile thing to do in which case you might want to pick something more directly applicable to your situation or one that you would like to learn.

</comment><comment><USER7> There's two massive (i.e. large GDP und PPP) largely homogeneous markets in the world: the USA and China. If you want to hit the Chinese market with your products knowing Mandarin and the culture is essential, just as knowing US culture and English is essential for bringing products into the US Market. All projections have the Chinese market greatly surpassing the US over the next 30 years and cementing its role as the primary consumer market in the world.

So having said this Mandarin is extremely difficult and its only going to be useful if you plan on actively using the language - to build products, to get clients, to hit chinese markets, or to enjoy the culture - literature,films,music, etc.

To this point, the films, music, and cultural wealth of China is already quite rich and only getting better by the day as more and more money poors into Chinese households and the standards of living increase. I certainly expect China to eventually take a center stage in media production just like Hollywood of the US, actually surpassing Hollywood. You can already see this happening as China is poised to overtake the North American film market this year. ([http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/hollywood-china-a- fad-...](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/hollywood-china-a-fad- future-887134))

</comment><comment><USER8> If you are planning on working in Asian countries, which if you follow international geo-politics, it will be more likely that you will, then yes.

There's a LOT of professional value in learning Chinese and any other widely spoken language besides just English.</comment>


Humans have made 8.3bn tons of plastic since 1950 - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/23/all-the-plastic-ever-made-study-comic <comment><USER2> Missing from most environmental conversation is how much you can improve your life avoiding polluting things. What you replace packaged food, flying, and such with is fresh fruits and vegetables and local community. You learn that while one flight will bring you closer to a distant loved one, flying in general is what led to your "community" living where you can't see each other.

When I point out that you, the reader, can make a difference, this community usually responds that you can't, that only government action will make a difference or something like that. That's where government action comes from. Besides, if it improves your life, you personally benefit from reducing your consumption anyway.

The article's most important point I saw was that recycling hasn't shown to reduce production of virgin material. Without reducing production, reusing and recycling only shuffle plastic around. Burning it creates dioxin and other pollution. My podcast episode 183 describes how reusing and recycling are only tactical. Reduction is strategic [http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/rants-raves- monologues-volume...](http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/rants-raves-monologues- volume-6).

However snarky and cynical people here can be -- I'm sure they consider themselves practical and realist -- if avoiding buying plastic will improve your life and reduce demand, why not do it anyway. Besides it will lead others to change and can lead to politicians realizing voters want regulation. Legislators and heads of companies are people too and will change when people around them do, which is you and me.

<comment><USER3> Western society may be a large consumer, but you are educating the wrong crowd if you want to make a difference. Higher income countries tend to do a much better job of recycling. This illustrates the problem:

[https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/inadequately-managed- plas...](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/inadequately-managed-plastic)

<comment><USER4> As pointed out in the parent, recycling is emphatically less important than reduction of production.

<comment><USER3> If you are interested in stats, this is a great piece that expands on the overall issue.

[https://ourworldindata.org/plastic- pollution](https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Human beings are astounding! Assuming the Earth is about 5.972 sextillion (1,000 trillion) metric tons, we've converted .000000000000134 of the Earth into plastic. No other species could have accomplished this. A testament to our ingenuity.

<comment><USER6> This is a, uhhh, strange opinion to say the least. We've also doubled the CO2 in the atmosphere since the last ice age. Big numbers! Progress! Our destiny is assured! Success is inevitable!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> If my calculations are correct and assuming an average plastic density of 1.15g/cm³[1] that's 7.2 billion cubic meters of plastic. If you pressed all of that into a solid cube it'd be 1.9km along each side. More than twice as tall as Burj Khalifa.

[1] [https://www.statista.com/statistics/595434/plastic- materials...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/595434/plastic-materials- density/)

<comment><USER8> That just...doesn't seem like that much? There are individual disused mines where more earth than that has been removed. Put all that plastic back into one of those mines, and solve 70 years worth of your landfill problem.

<comment><USER2> The problem isn't the volume. It's the distribution.

Some of it is in your bloodstream. And your children's, messing with your and their endocrine systems, among other problems. Some of it is in the bellies animals around the world. How do you plan to get it?

We can't beat the laws of thermodynamics. The stuff is out there and dispersing more.

<comment><USER9> You had me until thermodynamics. We're obviously not getting every substance in our bloodstream like we are with plastics so I don't think thermodynamics is the issue here.

<comment><USER10> I think he was referring specifically to entropy in his reference to thermodynamics. Once we extract the source materials from the earth, turn them into plastics and distribute them, there is no cheap way to undo it.

<comment><USER9> The following sentence was about dispersion in the world and not about the chemical reactions in creating plastic, so I don't think that's what was meant.

<comment><USER2> I meant what FlyingAvatar suggested.

Quoting Wikipedia: _In statistical mechanics, entropy is an extensive property of a thermodynamic system. It is closely related to the number Ω of microscopic configurations (known as microstates) that are consistent with the macroscopic quantities that characterize the system._

and

 _The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases over time._

Applied here, when plastic breaks into pieces, the number of microstates -- ie, the entropy -- increases.

It's not the same as the ideal gas law, but similar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This underscores the sadness in burning oil. Plastics allow us to do and make so many useful things. We should be stockpiling oil for this sort of use and only burning it when no other option exists.

<comment><USER12> We can make plastics from other raw materials, plants included. Interestingly, bioplastics can be mfg with CO2.

<comment><USER11> Very cool! Just another reason I love plants.

<comment><USER13> "Well, what would you say if there was such a plant that could substitute for all wood pulp paper, all fossil fuels, would make most of our fibers naturally, make everything from dynamite to plastic, grows in all 50 states and that one acre of it would replace 4.1 acres of trees, and that if you used about 6% of the U.S. land to raise it as an energy crop, even on our marginal lands, this plant would produce all 75 quadrillion billion BTUs needed to run America each year? Would that help save the planet?"

...

"Yeah? What is it?"

"Hemp."

...

"Well, Mr. Herer, did you know that hemp is also marijuana?"

"Yes, of course I know, I've been writing about it for about 40 hours a week for the past 17 years."

"Well, you know marijuana's illegal, don't you? You can't use it."

"Not even to save the world?"

"No. It's illegal", he sternly informed me. "You cannot use something illegal."

[https://jackherer.com/emperor-3/chapter-2/](https://jackherer.com/emperor-3/chapter-2/)

<comment><USER11> In the US, all I can say is write your senators, house representative, and donate to campaigns with sensible policies. It does seem closer to reality now than ever before now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Why is this necessarily bad?

<comment><USER15> Because a large portion of it ends up as both macro and microplastics in the environment, which has a severely negative effect on ecosystems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The problem with capitalism is waste management and producing good and services in excess.</comment>