Bullshit-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior - <AUTHOR> http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0201474 <comment><USER3> A simple self-experiment if you haven't read the paper, find which of these sentences are bullshit. Answer in order without reading further ahead, and don't go back to change your answers (as to replicate experimental conditions).

 __*

1\. A river cuts through a rock, not because of its power but it's persistence.

2\. The hidden meaning transforms the abstract beauty.

3\. The future elucidates irrational facts for the seeking person.

4\. You are not only responsible for the things you say, but also for the things that you do not say.

5\. Health and tolerance provides creativity for the future.

6\. We have other flaws before our eyes, but our own flaws behind our back.

7\. Your teacher can open the door, but you have to step in.

8\. Your movement transforms universal observations.

9\. The person who never made a mistake never tried something new.

10\. The whole silence infinite phenomena.

11\. Imagined pain does not hurt less because it is imagined.

12\. The invisible is beyond all new immutability.

13\. The unexplainable touches on the inherent experiences of the universe.

14\. It is one thing to be tempted, but quite another to fall for the temptation.

 __*

Here are the answers for self-assessment: [http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure/image?size=l...](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure/image?size=large&id=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0201474.t001)

No claim is made on the validity of the experiment (the researchers' or your own). Proposed in the name of curiosity!

<comment><USER4> >11\. Imagined pain does not hurt less because it is imagined.

I guess I can see how this might be classed as "not bullshit", but I don't see how it's profound at all. It just seems false to me.

I agreed with all the other classifications.

 _edit_ : I know complaining about downvotes is verboten here, but seriously, that's just my take on it. I'd be interested to hear an explanation of what the profound meaning is that I'm missing here.

<comment><USER5> Based on the other comments further down, you seem to be caught up on whether the statement is technically true for specific definitions of pain, rather than the underlying point of the statement.

The underlying point is that whether you think that someone's suffering (physical or emotional) has a real or imaginary cause, that doesn't make them suffer any more or less, because you are not in their head, and they are not in yours. Their degree of suffering depends on their perception of reality, not yours, or even objective reality.

The statement is an appeal to empathy.

<comment><USER4> I agree with the "underlying point", but it simply isn't what the sentence says. If you're willing to put that much effort into interpreting it, practically any statement could qualify as profound.

<comment><USER5> You've already put far more effort into debating that everyone else's interpretation isn't "simply what the sentence says," when their (and my) interpretation tend to hover around the same approximate meaning.

If you're going by effort, it seems that your interpretation is anything but simpler or lower effort.

If you're trying to make the point that the statement could have been phrased better, I don't think anyone would disagree with you.

<comment><USER4> >If you're going by effort, it seems that your interpretation is anything but simpler or lower effort.

Hmm? You seem to be mixing up the effort required to reach that interpretation with the effort required to argue with other people about whether it's the correct interpretation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I feel like this is some meta-level test for the reader.

Pseudo-profound bullshit statement: "Bullshit-sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior"; can the reader distinguish this bullshit paper from a profound paper?

<comment><USER7> Disagreed. Both key terms are fully operationalised in the paper (ie, a measurement procedure is given), and so the sentence has empirical content (it could be wrong, but isn't).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Scientists! I offer my services as an author of better bullshit than you can create by feeding a parody generator with marketing materials. Observe!

\- The unknown flees from the implausible.

\- Unheard elephants are never green.

\- Although many people seek apples, few seek the road.

\- Judgement is like chewing on expensive rubber.

\- A circle is a square with intention.

<comment><USER9> Here's one such generator, based on Deepak Chopra corpus.

[http://wisdomofchopra.com](http://wisdomofchopra.com)

Note that the purple indic text on top is the word "Bullshit" transliterated in Gujarati.

<comment><USER10> "Experiential truth experiences quantum excellence"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am slightly confused by the selection of those sentences, the bullshit sentences barely make grammatical sense, while the profound sentences are honestly pretty banal and sound like things you'd find written on tote-bags sold in etsy stores.

I found the study pretty interesting especially table 2 is extremely informative!

<comment><USER12> This seems to just be a proxy that ends up measuring whether IQ is correlated to being prosocial

<comment><USER13> Except the paper specifically states that the effect remains after controlling for cognitive ability.

<comment><USER12> Thanks for pointing that out

Relevant part of the paper

> Numeracy and cognitive reflection (Section 4). Participants responded to > three numeracy questions taken from Schwartz et al. [30] and from the Berlin > numeracy test ([31]), and immediately thereafter to the three questions that > make up the original CRT [12]. On both these variables, participants > obtained a score between 0 and 3 representing the number of correct > responses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> >> Bullshit-sensitivity is the ability to distinguish pseudo-profound bullshit sentences (e.g. "Your movement transforms universal observations") from genuinely profound sentences (e.g. "The person who never made a mistake never tried something new").

Why is the second sentence "profound"? If I were to say it sounds like bullshit to me (it actually kind of does?) what would be the counter-argument, other than "we asked X people and the majority felt it was a profound statement" (equally, a bullshit statement)?

I reckon there is no concrete way to formalise the meaning of "bullshit" and "profundity". One person's bullshit statement can easily bee another's profound wisdom ("turn the other cheek" \- bullshit, or profound? "Live and let live" \- bullshit, or profound? etc).

So what exactly is the point of trying to predict behaviour from observations about subjective quantities? What exactly is being claimed here? That if I have a strong view about what is bullshit and what is not, I can predict how people will behave?

<comment><USER15> How it works for me: Try to find a more concrete example of the sentence. If you can't, then it's (likely) bullshit.

I cannot give you example for the first sentence (because it is bullshit), but for the second sentence, I can imagine a person who tries a lot of new things and makes a lot of mistakes, presumably because they do not know how to do it. The way the sentence is phrased is just a reversed implication of that.

Note that the "profound" sentence can still be wrong or false or even unfalsifiable statement. The point is that you can assign meaning to it, build a mental model around it.

<comment><USER14> >> How it works for me: Try to find a more concrete example of the sentence. If you can't, then it's (likely) bullshit.

I think this is a bit like Kolmogorov complexity - just because you can't find a concrete example of a statement, doesn't mean that there isn't one, only that there isn't one that you know of.

It's also very hard to tell whether something is a concrete example of a natural language statement, especially when that statement is metaphorical.

Finally- I'm pretty sure I can think of statements that would map to concrete examples that could be identified as either bullshit or profound truths, depending on who you ask or who is making the statement. For instance, if I say that "Careful study leads one to hidden knowledge" \- that could easily be applied to mystical knowledge (probably bullshit) and to scientific knowledge (probably not quite bullshit).

<comment><USER15> If there isn't a concrete example of the statement that you can discover, then it's up to the person who uttered the phrase to give you one. If they can't do that, they are likely bullshitting.

For example, I can say "All holomorphic functions are analytic", and the fact that you cannot come up with a concrete example, or even that you don't understand the meaning of the sentence (if you don't know anything about complex analysis) still doesn't mean that it is bullshit.

Metaphors are not a problem; you can also explain them in the above sense.

> "Careful study leads one to hidden knowledge"

Different people might interpret "hidden knowledge" differently, that's true. But then I would say that whether or not the statement is objectively bullshit or profound depends on the interpretation of whoever uttered the phrase was using.

So if it was uttered by Deepak Chopra, it is probably bullshit. If it was uttered by Carl Sagan, it is probably profound.

I mean, this problem is not specific to bullshit/profound statements, but to language in general. For example, common objection to evolution is "evolution is just a theory". Here, the word "theory" can take on two different meanings, and the truthfulness of the sentence depends on the meaning that is assigned to the word "theory".

This only poses potential problem for the study, where the statements should be selected so that the confusion due to usual (assumed) meaning of words is minimized.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Wow, the interpretations of these statements in these comments is hilarious. Is everyone on Hacker News Dwight Schrute?

<comment><USER17> The n-gate summary of this thread is going top be great.

<comment><USER18> Something something prime directive

<comment><USER17> Thanks for the tip. I didn't realize they really don't like that. I think the cat is well and truly out of the bag, though.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+...](https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+n-gate)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't know if they mention it in the article, but those BS quotes are eerily similar to those generated by [http://wisdomofchopra.com/](http://wisdomofchopra.com/) and I think that might have been what they used.

<comment><USER20> There might be a reason for that. I think a lot the "bullshitness" of the sentences comes from the way the individual words do have meaning - however, the _combinations_ of words used do not have an unambiguous meaning.

E.g., you know what an observation is, what "universal" means and what a transformation is - but it's far less clear what an "universal observation" is or what it means if one is transformed.

If this were a programming language, the sentences would produce valid ASTs but would be riddled with type errors.

I think output from markov chains or other generators have the same property: They easily produce valid individual words and correct grammatical structures but they don't care at all that those structures don't have a well-defined higher-level meaning.

Couriously though, we seem to validate a sentence mostly on those lower levels - which has the effect that you might not realize a sentence has no meaning but just have a vague feeling of not understanding it.

The effect also reminds me of some badly-writtem math papers, where an auther uses a familiar notation from one domain and applies it to objects of a different domain without clearly defining what he wants to do. It can take surprisingly long until you even realize you have no idea what it means.

<comment><USER19> Yeah, but the words and sentence structures are similar.

I got from the website:

> Hidden meaning depends on great neural networks

and the paper has

> The hidden meaning transforms the abstract beauty.

The website has

> Your heart belongs to total acceptance of observations

and the paper has

> Your movement transforms universal observations

The website has

> Information transforms mortal knowledge.

which is similar to

> Your movement transforms universal observations

and

> The hidden meaning transforms the abstract beauty.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Health and tolerance provides creativity for the future.

This one is classified bullshit, although I think it makes at least somewhat sense.

<comment><USER22> Right. Also:

> 2\. The hidden meaning transforms the abstract beauty.

Describes reading the description of an artwork at a Modern Art gallery pretty well

<comment><USER23> IMO it is only Art if you feel something immediately. If you have to read some description to get the meaning, it is only pretentious and not Art for me.

<comment><USER24> Just curious: Why does art need to make anyone feel anything?

Do you feel something if you see a landscape, portrait, or still life? Do you think they are still art? In a similar thread, if you stare at something abstract, if it draws you in to gaze on it because it is a cool design even if it brings forth no feeling, does it make it art or not?

Do you understand hidden meanings from 200 years ago that would have been obvious to viewers at the time? Do you still consider it art even if you have to read about the meanings built into the art?

(Art is full of pretentious bullshit, and I'm of the opinion that assigning meaning or requiring a meaning of art is, of itself, pretentious.)

<comment><USER15> I think art should make feel at least someone something in order to be considered as art.

That is not the same as having a meaning, though. For example, Mandelbrot set makes me feel "it is wonderful", but it doesn't need to have any meaning (technically, it is a solution to some equation, so it has meaning, but you don't have to know the meaning in order to feel that something).

<comment><USER25> The problem with art is that it could be a stated goal of the art form to minimise "feeling" and still be considered valid. In this case, if you feel something, the art form has failed.

Art is tricksome. It is what it is justified as being, but it's also just what it is.

I've found it easier over the years to just say that I like / dislike something, but my opinion isn't worth anything, and can happily be different to yours.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I am considering a Feynman detector for bullshit (as defined in the article): See if you can come up with a specific example that the sentence describes. If you can a point to a specific example which works, the sentence is not bullshit.

Feynman famously used this technique to understand and quickly find flaws in complex mathematical theories - he followed a specific example along.

Anyway, back to the article; I am not clear, maybe both seeing through bullshit and being pro-social are correlated to general intelligence?

<comment><USER26> The test you describe is basically also a (recipe for an) integration test.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Surely those questions are just a reading comprehension test? I.e. can you read some difficult and somewhat abstract sentences and see if they have any rational (metaphorical or whatev) meaning?

They correlate because the root cause of identifying them is reading comprehension.

And for people who have a bit of trouble with the comprehension, the pessimistic "this is just bs" way of throwing up one's hands and giving up is correlated with non-social behavior. Meh.

</comment><comment><USER28> Bullshit-sensitivity and cynicism are practically synomyms I'd say.

It feels counter-intuitive to find cynicism positively correlated with prosocial behaviour (which the article defines as donating to and/or joining a charity.)

<comment><USER29> I think you can be extremely apt at detecting bullshit without being a cynic. In fact I think a lot, though certainly not all, of cynicism stems from the disappointment of having been fooled too much by bullshit.

<comment><USER30> I guess this means that many "IT professionals" don't even reflect enough to clearly detect rubbish even after a fad is over.

OOP (as the solution to every programming problem), Java everywhere (performance is great and/or doesn't matter - really!!), P2P everything (because Napster), semantic web, XML, SOAP, agile(washing), cloud (whether it makes sense or not), server-side JS (overused), client-side JS whether you need it or not, IoT (aka please pay us monthly), blockchain. You see a lot of bullshit in a career.

<comment><USER31> Putting disagreements of what does and does not belong there aside there are also sunk costs of sorts - if everything works sufficiently learning a new way puts you at a disadvantage unless the new way really is sufficently appreciably better for the application so you stick with what you know. Not doing so ironically itself leads to faddish behavior and falling behind due to tripping on hidden pitfalls.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I noticed most of the bullshit phrases used a lot of big, _fancy_ words. Not sure if this was covered later in the paper, but it could be this study identified a correlation between language skills and prosocial behavior.

Someone who's never encountered words like elucidate could be dazzled into believing it describes something profound. Whereas people who are familiar with the word would recognize it's use is awkward and meaningless.

I don't think it would be a big leap to theorize that an effective education correlates with prosocial behavior.

</comment><comment><USER33> It is kind of interesting--maybe irrelevant to the paper, but all the "profound" sentences rely on a comparison:

      1. power vs. persistence
      4. things you say and things you do not say
      6. our flaws and other's flaws
      7. open door and entering (what your teacher does and what you must do)
      9. the comparison is implied but trying something new vs never trying something new.
      11. again implied but imagined pain versus real pain
      14. tempted and resisting vs tempted and falling.

whereas the "bullshit" sentences seem mostly to be simpler constructs.

      2:  a causes b
      3:  a causes b for c
      5:  a and b provides c for d
      8:  a changes b (this one has a very weakly implied comparison, because "universal observations"
      changes and is therefore not "universal", but there is no specificity about the difference so it
      is not really a comparison, just noting the change.)
      etc.

there are no comparisons in them. I wonder if that has anything to do with just the structure we're used to for aphorisms and folk wisdom?

</comment><comment><USER34> The bullshit sentences don't even really make sense, not at a deep "having a think about it" level but just on a surface read they all sound weird - <USER2> hard to detect them as bullshit I wouldn't have thought.

<comment><USER35> Are you reading them in their original language, or a translation?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This article uses structural equation modeling and a sample drawn by an independent provider (meaning that they likely used an internet-based survey).

As someone who has experience with both, my bullshit senses are tingling.

</comment><comment><USER37> I define bullshit as self-interested talk, that uses both truth and lies. It doesn't have to be lie, it's just presenting truth and lies in order to manipulate the other. There is always something to gain for the bullshitter - money, relationships, advantages or to get out of obligations.

<comment><USER7> I think their definition of BS is in line with the academic literature on this, ie Frankfurt's seminal booklet (that the NYT had a hard time reviewing, because their editorial policy did not let them spell out what the whole book was about :-), namely statements that are not even concerned with truth, but just seek to impress.

Not sure that lines up with your definition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's entirely possible that they weren't testing "bullshit-sensitivity," but some underlying language skills, IQ, or even something like creativity (required to give the sentences have meaning). I don't think that they test has sufficient evidence that it measures what they claim it measures.

Second, donation experience did not have a statistically significant relationship with "bullshit sensitivity," which is kind of a bad smell. As for prior plausibility, the authors admit "previous theory and research does not give us strong reasons for predicting a direct relation between reactions to bullshit and prosocial behavior." The study also lacked a control group.

</comment><comment><USER38> > Despite bullshit-receptivity and profoundness-receptivity being positively > correlated with each other, logistic regression analyses showed that > profoundness-receptivity had a positive association whereas bullshit- > receptivity had a negative association with both types of prosocial > behavior.

Not surprising. People incapable of differentiating objectivity from self- satisfying statements are less likely predict anything objectively.

Whereas...

> The results suggest that people who are better at distinguishing the pseudo- > profound from the actually profound are more prosocial.

People who are objective are better able to analyze social contexts.

I further suspect objective people are already aware of this and self- satisfying people are not aware there is any difference.

</comment><comment><USER39> What does that even actually prove? Like, of course people who can distinguish the reasonable from the unreasonable are likely to be smarter, more experienced and more responsible, and thus contribute more to the society. If somebody is not very bright as to not even tell the BS from the sensible, then surely they also can't have the intelligence and smartness and resolve to actually contribute to the community in meaningful ways. Hell, they might well even put a load of money and support into foolhardy schemes that absolutely don't work and damage the community, or that are downright scams. On the contrary, smart people of course would know where to dedicate their money/efforts for the maximum effect on the society as a whole.

Also, the so-called "bullshit sensitivity" is undoubtedly related to many other factors like literacy, educational level, income, social status etc. No doubt people who enjoy a higher social status and have more money on their hands instead of having to worry about making ends meet, would find it easier to contribute to "pro-society" activities. I just simply fail to see how this study is much meaningful. (Even the word "prosocial" is just dubious. It's not in the sense of "socializing more" but "contributing more to the society".) Sounds like quite a BS study to me.

</comment><comment><USER40> Sounds very profound, but unfortunately it also trips up my bullshit sensor.

</comment><comment><USER41> >The results suggest that people who are better at distinguishing the pseudo- profound from the actually profound are more prosocial.

I would attempt a correlation with economic means though. I am pretty sure most people are able to see that a spade is a spade but too many would put up with sh*t because in need.

</comment><comment><USER42> But the so-called 'genuinely profound sentences' are themselves subjective.

In the abstract, the 'profound' example they give is: "The person who never made a mistake never tried something new".

But this is itself a deeper level of BS. The intended moral of this quotation is "You should try something new", but if you accept that as an axiom, then the act of never-trying-something-new is itself a mistake, and so the sentence contradicts itself.

If Albert Einstein wracked his brain for the most profound statement he could come up with, it would be indistinguishable from bullshit to anyone but a top theoretical physicist.

The article should be titled something more like: "Fortune-cookie sensitivity predicts prosocial behavior"

<comment><USER43> The moral isn't that you should try something new. It's that if you're trying something new and not doing great with it — and feeling embarrassed about it, keep soldiering on. Embarrassment is a natural part of the process.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I have trouble taking meaning from the "bullshit" sentences. At some point in trying, part of my brain begs me to give up while another asks me to go on.

I feel a similar way when I see the same person every day asking for money due to "hard luck.". Is this a professional or a victim? If I give this person money am I hurting myself and/or hurting them?

Difference between these situations? In second case, another human's well- being is at stake. In the first case, I could lose some novel insight.

Both cases carry a cognitive load which I must avoid bearing for the sake of my over-worked brain.

Is there a word for a kind of apathy that does not suggest immorality or lack of empathy?

</comment><comment><USER45> Couldn't advanced interpretative ability predict greater income, translating into more charitable giving?

Perhaps English speaking people who can't parse those sentences don't have the free time or cash to give away.

</comment><comment><USER46> Maybe I'm missing something but it seems that this "bullshit sensivity test" is just a verbal IQ test in disguise?

They basically test your ability to correctly parse an English sentence.

</comment><comment><USER47> Having been scarred for life from accidental exposure to the drivel of dozens of cryptocurrency "thought leaders," I think the authors may have chosen prosocial behavior as the wrong correlation.

Here are some alternatives that might correlate well to lack of BS-sensitivity and attraction to profound-sounding fluff:

\- ability to solve quantitative reasoning problems

\- ability to use deductive logic

\- likelihood to take unnecessary risks for minimal rewards

\- likelihood to change one's mind in face of new information

</comment><comment><USER48> I know times are changing and all, but to me, it's still damn weird to see something as informal as "bullshit" used in a journal article definition.

</comment><comment><USER49> Is this related to "shit tests" (see link)?

[https://www.quora.com/What-are-common-shit-tests-The-term- sh...](https://www.quora.com/What-are-common-shit-tests-The-term-shit-test-is- commonly-used-in-PUA-activities-when-a-girl-throws-out-an-unusual-compliment- or-comment-to-a-male-to-test-the-answer)

<comment><USER50> No.

"Shit tests" in the most common usage, refer to doing provocative things to throw someone off their stride and see how unflappable they are.

The paper is about sentences that don't really mean anything, but carry some (false) markers of profundity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Not surprising that people who pick up on bullshit would be less likely to donate to a "non proffit" where many execs make over 1m a year

[https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/executive-salaries- chariti...](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/executive-salaries-charities/)

<comment><USER32> I believe the paper makes a distinction between bullshit receptivity (Eating it up), bullshit sensitivity (Calling it out), and profoundness sensitivity (Correctly identifying profound statements). Donating was positively correlated with profoundness sensitivity and less so to bullshit sensitivity. And slightly negatively with bullshit receptivity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> > assessed participants' bullshit-receptivity

Deriving meaning from what others deem meaningless could be profound in itself?

<comment><USER53> Maybe. If you give different individuals the task "translate this gobbledygook into coherent English", and you get a bunch of different translations and a bunch of "can't be done" answers, I think the "can't be done" group are right. If everyone who comes up with the same translation ends up with the same answer, then presumably that mening was actually there.

</comment></comment><comment> pure-awesome I'd like to take this opportunity to remind everyone here both of the replication crisis: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis) and of hindsight bias: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias)

I see quite a few comments of people looking at the result and trying to come up with explanations for why it might hold. Heck, there even seems to be some confusion with the term "bullshit-receptivity" (and "bullshit-sensitivity"), which means that, even if the paper is valid, you might be drawing the opposite conclusion.

I'd like you to imagine, without going back to check right now, that you are wrong about the result. That they've found the opposite correlation to the one you thought holds. Can you find a reason why it would? Does it seem justifiable, explainable? As much so as your original belief? That should be a warning sign that your explanation might be a bit pre-emptive.

I am glad for the commenters saying they found the result "counter-intuitive". Noticing your confusion in this way is a good skill to learn, especially in this day and age. That nagging feeling in the back of your mind that something is off or that you forgot something.

\-----

As an aside: If you are interested in more on biases, may I suggest reading "Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman. One of my favourite non-fiction books. Some of the results in there (notably priming) have themselves unfortunately fallen prey to the replication crisis, but the book as a whole is still brilliant.

Some links RE: the replication crisis and Kahneman's responses regarding it:

The Irony Effect: How the scientist who founded the science of mistakes ended up mistaken. [http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2016/12/kahneman_and_tversky_researched_the_science_of_error_and_still_made_errors.html)

Replicability-Index Improving the replicability of empirical research Reconstruction of a Train Wreck: How Priming Research Went off the Rails [https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruc...](https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction- of-a-train-wreck-how-priming-research-went-of-the-rails)

Kahneman's Comment: [https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruc...](https://replicationindex.wordpress.com/2017/02/02/reconstruction- of-a-train-wreck-how-priming-research-went-of-the-rails/comment- page-1/#comment-1454)

Retraction Watch "I placed too much faith in underpowered studies:" Nobel Prize winner admits mistakes [https://retractionwatch.com/2017/02/20/placed- much-faith-und...](https://retractionwatch.com/2017/02/20/placed-much-faith- underpowered-studies-nobel-prize-winner-admits-mistakes/)

</comment><comment><USER54> I think this is actually a study designed to determine who can detect bullshit studies. "Bullshit-sensitivity" here appears to mean "reading comprehension."

</comment><comment><USER55> Tthere's a replication crisis on and so I'm going to wait for confirmation - no matter how pleased with myself believing this result would make me.

</comment><comment><USER56> It's telling that the profound statements are inherently prosaic. So are they really 'profound' or categorized so because they can be tied to some kind of natural or observable or relatable phenomena. I guess that doesn't matter since we are tying this to prosocial behavior, the idea here is to identify what can induce the feeling of 'birds of a feather' (at least, that's my take of it).

The bullshit statements were easy to pick out because they're too abstract or require lateral thinking.

</comment><comment><USER57> I'm surprised that Nassim Taleb is not mentioned

</comment><comment><USER58> i kinda found the description of the "non-bullshit" statements as being "genuinely profound" to be also a little "bullshitty". Personally would have described them as pithy rather.

</comment><comment><USER59> People who honestly believe a lie can convincingly tell it.

Analogously, people who don't get tripped up by bullshit might be better (more convincing) at spouting self-serving bullshit.

Framed that way, I can believe it.

</comment><comment><USER60> At the root is narcissism. Narcissism blocks profound insight, and rewards anti-social behavior.

<comment><USER61> > Narcissism blocks profound insight

How would you even measure what profound insight is, nevermind determining whether something causes its absence?</comment></comment>


Definite Optimism as Human Capital - <AUTHOR> http://danwang.co/definite-optimism-as-human-capital/ <comment><USER3> For an example of an AI taking over to save mankind, there's "The Forbin Project". And "With Folded Hands", by Silverberg. There's also "The Day the Earth Stood Still", the original version.

More recently, there's "After On", in which the system behind something like Facebook becomes sentient. This is well thought out.

As for optimism, that's what fuels YCombinator. Most of the people who apply will be rejected. Most of the people accepted will fail. Only the investors and management of YC have a reasonable expectation of a return on their investment.

</comment><comment><USER4> That's nice, but investors don't invest in creativity. They invest in a project that might make money, roughly isomorphic to one run by people who are tenacious, connected, and reliable. They want to see a track record of success. They want to see someone who's thrived in ordinary businesses - <USER2> want to see someone with high emotional intelligence.

But how often are _really creative_ people like that? Most of the brilliant, creative people I know are outcasts, misfits, with very uneven records of success in more mundane roles. They are hard to get a long with and, overall, not very successful in life. Would a VC (let alone a bank) even look twice at such a one? Absolutely not.

</comment><comment><USER5> I mostly agree with the author's premise: we need to take a step back from the digital (Internet, social media) and return to the chemical/material/physical world to drive future productivity growth. That's what drew me to research advances in the embedded industry - working with companies that fuse physical and digital in safety-critical/industrial products every day.

His 2 calls to action:

(1) for the readers of his blog to spend more time thinking about industrial problems (how to build an aircraft, run a cargo ship logistics company, "meditate on the importance of steel in the economy")

(2) for VCs and investors to fund morale-boosting celebrations of industry, such as world fairs and more movies like "The Martian".

I think #1 is unrealistic - a lot of highly-trained people get paid to do this already, and as productivity growth slows, the need for efficiency in these industrial processes has only increased. That's why the ML implications of IoT are so heavily touted by all major players across automotive, A&D, industrial automation, energy & utilities, transportation, logistics, etc. I don't think it would help much for everyone to go about their day thinking about how HVDC electricity grids work, or how gasoline is synthesized from petroleum.

I think #2 would be helpful right now given the current political/media climate, but needs to be done extremely carefully. If done quickly/wrong many would be angry - look at the latest SV and QE-funded propaganda, so out of touch with the 99% of people in the rest of the country, can't solve pressing social and economic issues so they are making up some fantasy-land "world fair" to celebrate companies and people that stand for what the majority of the country perceives as social and moral decay.

Overall I feel where the author is coming from, but I think this piece is a bit out of touch with reality - maybe hence the "optimism" bit in the title :)

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a left-leaning take on Peter Thiel's philosophy.

</comment><comment><USER7> The article meanders a lot without making coherent points, making a lot of false assumptions.

It's one of those articles that's written by a journalist for journalists in an attempt to get some sort of participation trophy, without regard for the soundness of underlying arguments or readability.

Also, maybe stop blaming economists in every paragraph, when you can't even get the basics right yourself:

"What are the factors that drive economic growth? If we pull out and dust off our econ textbooks, we'll read that growth is a function of higher investments, spending, trade, productivity, and so on."

Well, Dan, here you go: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solow%E2%80%93Swan_model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solow%E2%80%93Swan_model)

All your mumbo-jumbo about optimism and other obscure factors that you invented while writing this JFJ piece can be summed up by the _A_ parameter in the model.

 _The current unemployment rate in Japan is 2.8 percent. Japanese millennials get to enjoy a fairly tight labor market, which means they ought to have their pick of company to work for._

Low unemployment rate does not automatically mean better bargaining power for labor.

I'd consider asking for a refund on those economics classes you took.

<comment><USER8> Of the things he listed, the technical change parameter only represents productivity. Though he does wander quite a bit, I don't know what's particularly obscure about trade.

You should cut the guy some slack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> How about suits stop putting a price tag on everything on this planet, physical and otherwise

<comment> GCU-Empiricist Everything that is desired takes resources to get, the price tag is just an approximation.

That said your sentiment is appreciated.

<comment><USER10> In my view that's a misconception, one that's quite common in the tech world (and also to a certain extent in the broader culture). Robert Kennedy commented on this (in a different context) in a speech in 1968:

> And this is one of the great tasks of leadership for us, as individuals and > citizens this year. But even if we act to erase material poverty, there is > another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction - > purpose and dignity - that afflicts us all. Too much and for too long, we > seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the > mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is > over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we > judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product > counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our > highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for > the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the > loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts > nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our > cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television > programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet > the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, > the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include > the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence > of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures > neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, > neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures > everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can > tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are > Americans.

[https://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready- Refe...](https://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready- Reference/RFK-Speeches/Remarks-of-Robert-F-Kennedy-at-the-University-of- Kansas-March-18-1968.aspx)

<comment><USER11> Judging and quantifying demand is not the same thing as materialism.

<comment><USER10> I was responding to this statement:

> Everything that is desired takes resources to get

Kennedy made the good point (as others have, less eloquently) that there are many things that are desired that neither take resources to get nor are measured by conventional metrics.

<comment> GCU-Empiricist I think our point of agreement could be summed up as: "Evertything has a price and only the cheapest things can be bought for money."

<comment><USER10> Hmm. I think I'd agree only to the second half of that. Just considering Kennedy's examples alone there are many things that cannot be bought at any price: consider the joy of a child's play or the integrity of public officials.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As an aside, the term "Human Capital" really rubs me the wrong way. It makes me seem like just an investment, a thing obtained to generate wealth and nothing else. I've never worked for an organization with a Human Capital department that wasn't overly corporate.

<comment><USER8> But it is exactly what you said. "Human capital" was conceived in analogy with physical capital as the stock of knowledge and technical ability embodied in human workers which can be used to produce wealth.

What else you wanted it to be?

<comment><USER12> > What else you wanted it to be?

Human Resources sounds much better. It accomplishes the same thing while not making the workers sound like cash cows. Corporations dehumanize their workers, but there's no reason to make it blatant.

<comment><USER8> Oddly, how I feel towards the expression "human resources" is more like what you feel towards "human capital", because human capital is merely attached to the workers but doesn't fully constitute them, and it only exist in so far people are workers. "Human resources", on the other hand, makes me think of Soylent Green.

About language, I don't think it's an issue that impersonal bureaucratic organizations treat their members in a impersonal way. I'm not sure even if there's another way, because there doesn't seem to be much going for the alternatives either, which so far have been: to turn the firm into a cult by having it establish itself as a surrogate identity or as a substitute for an actual social environment for it's workers; or, to establish itself as a manipulative corporation which insists that their workers are "special", even though they're clearly not treated as such. It's best if people have realistic expectations regarding their employers. Everything else just seems lead to creepiness.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Jaconda – Integrate your Telegram with services - <AUTHOR> http://telegram.jaconda.im <comment><USER2> Looks cool :) I hadn't heard of Telegram before, so I'll have to check this out.

One note is that to me "Over a 100 of integrations" reads very strangely and should be "Over a hundred integrations." Perhaps that's just my preference though.

<comment><USER3> A little something to catch-up:

[http://unhandledexpression.com/2013/12/17/telegram-stand- bac...](http://unhandledexpression.com/2013/12/17/telegram-stand-back-we-know- maths/)

[http://www.cryptofails.com/post/70546720222/telegrams- crypta...](http://www.cryptofails.com/post/70546720222/telegrams- cryptanalysis-contest)

[http://www.alexrad.me/discourse/a-264-attack-on-telegram- and...](http://www.alexrad.me/discourse/a-264-attack-on-telegram-and-why-a- super-villain-doesnt-need-it-to-read-your-telegram-chats.html)

<comment><USER2> Awesome. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Messages are heavily encrypted". WTF does that mean? I guess that's Telegram's approach to security. Lightweight, correct, encryption does not work for them. They prefer heavyweight and incorrect.

</comment><comment><USER5> This looks really interesting. I'd like to see it as a more open platform and not just for telegram.

<comment><USER6> Maybe I'm missing something, but I don't understand why people have seemingly abandoned vanilla XMPP. It's a great, flexible, powerful, and yes standard and open, protocol.

<comment><USER7> Jaconda.im started as XMPP-based messenger hence the name – Jabber Conference derivative. And it does work with XMPP. Nothing changed in this regard.

However after Google Talk was replaced with proprietary Hangouts protocol we had to look for other options.

Telegram fits our concept just right. Let's see what other people think. You are welcome to participate.

<comment><USER6> Interesting... Google Talk dropping XMPP was a dark day, but alas that's the nature of basing a business off Google services.

It's also great to hear that it started out using XMPP, maybe Jaconda can bring XMPP back by allowing discovery based on GitHub accounts :o

<comment><USER6> >"XMPP messengers are slowly sinking" I'm sure telegram is a good choice for your company, but "XMPP messengers are slowly sinking", I think, is a silly statement.

<comment><USER7> This is my personal opinion I've gathered from experience. I still have some friends using XMPP from Gtalk times. I have 0 new XMPP contacts for years since the fall of Gtalk. One might argue that it is still going strong, but I don't see anything proving that point. And the most authoritative indicator for ourselves is the amount of companies signed up for Jaconda. Guess having to add DNS records so XMPP is working on your domain is not helping either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This look like the kind of service github might offer their users some day. When Telegram finally open sources their server, that might not be to difficult either.

</comment><comment><USER8> Do you plan to integrate with e-mail? I would like to have e-mails sendt to special adresses displayed in the group chat.

<comment><USER7> That is exactly how jaconda.im is working now, everybody in the room can send emails into the room.

<comment><USER8> Cool! Do you use Telegram as a backend for jaconda.im as well? If so, then it's also cool to see somebody giving Slack some competition with a more open backend server.

<comment><USER7> Jaconda for Telegram works in a different way compared to XMPP Jaconda.im, it is possible to stitch them together but it's a bit too early at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> This should probably not be a Show HN. From the guidelines[0]:

> Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN > users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread.

As far as I can tell, there's not a real product here we can try yet.

[0] [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> We use it internally right now and plan to invite new teams in batches. It has rough angles and we polish it before the public launch.

<comment><USER2> I understand. But it's not a suitable Show HN post. Show HN is designed for something that we can try out now.</comment></comment></comment>


Are Facebook making themselves targets for identity theft? - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/philippe_kalaf/status/616281481153941504 <comment><USER2> Wow.. that is absurd. Perhaps I missed it, but I was unable to find any context from his tweets - did they just randomly decide to ask him for it? Did someone report his account? I'm just curious what would trigger Facebook to ask for such documents.

Also, his reply was pretty funny: [https://twitter.com/philippe_kalaf/status/616366907835334657](https://twitter.com/philippe_kalaf/status/616366907835334657)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not him, so I can only speculate, but even if it was reported, why would it be appropriate?</comment></comment>


MIRI's Approach – Machine Intelligence Research Institute - <AUTHOR> https://intelligence.org/2015/07/27/miris-approach/ <comment><USER2> Are there any examples of substantive AI work to come out of MIRI? And have they succeeded at all at engaging the actual AI research community?

The last time I looked at them, they were consumed with grandiose philosophical projects like "axiomatize ethics" and provably non-computable approaches like AIXI, not to mention the Harry Potter fanfic. But I'm asking this question in good faith - have things changed at MIRI?

<comment><USER3> If you'd like to give them another look, here's an up-to-date list of their publications:

[https://intelligence.org/all-publications/](https://intelligence.org/all- publications/)

<comment><USER4> Counting only articles and conference papers that look like they are in at least somewhat established journals or conferences, I quickly count:

        2015: 4
        2014: 6
        2013: 1
        2012: 5
        2011: 1
        2010: 4

That would be about the level of 1 or 2 very mediocre early career scientists. And very little for MIRI's 8 people staff and 13 Research Associates.

MIRI publishes a lot more, but they mostly operate outside of traditional scientific journals, a lot of MIRI technical reports published on their website.

<comment><USER5> How many of their staff hold PhDs, particularly in cognitive science, foundations of math, or AI? It would seem like a useful thing for them to get.

<comment><USER4> [https://intelligence.org/team/](https://intelligence.org/team/)

Staff: 1 out of 8 seem to have a PhD

Research Associates: 3 out of 14.

<comment><USER5> Huh. They should probably increase that number.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> MIRI is one of the success stories to emerge from the transhumanist community of the 80s to 00s. Others include the Methuselah Foundation, SENS Research Foundation, Future of Humanity Institute, and so on.

When it comes to prognosticating on the future of strong AI MIRI falls on the other side of the futurist community from where I stand.

I see the future as being one in which strong AI emerges from whole brain emulation, starting around 2030 as processing power becomes cheap enough for an entire industry to be competing in emulating brains the brute force way, building on the academic efforts of the 2020s. Then there will follow twenty years of exceedingly unethical development and abuse of sentient life to get to the point of robust first generation artificial entities based all too closely on human minds, and only after that will you start to see progress towards greater than human intelligence and meaningful variations on the theme of human intelligence.

I think it unlikely that entirely alien, non-human strong artificial intelligences will be constructed from first principals on a faster timescale or more cost-effectively than this. That line of research will be swamped by the output of whole brain emulation once that gets going in earnest.

Many views of future priorities for development in the futurist hinge on how soon we can build greater than human intelligences to power our research and development process. In particular should one support AI development or rejuvenation research. Unfortunately I think we're going to have to dig our own way out of the aging hole; we're not going to see better than human strong AI before we could develop rejuvenation treatments based on the SENS programs the old-fashioned way.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your statement about needing rejuvenation treatments before we can develop strong AIs makes sense. The average age of Nobel Prize winners is increasing over time[1], we could imagine a future where this average age is greater than the average human lifespan. At that point only those scientists who have exceedingly long careers _and_ lifespans will be able to further their respective fields.

[1] [http://priceonomics.com/why-nobel-winning-scientists-are- get...](http://priceonomics.com/why-nobel-winning-scientists-are-getting- older/)

<comment><USER7> "Nobel-winning scientist age" is not a good proxy for "productive scientist age", for a variety of reasons. They mention specifically lag time between discovery & recognition, but you also have issues where the "name" behind the discovery is the guy in charge of the lab, but the actual discovery (and sometimes the idea) is generated by the 30-year-old postdoc / assistant prof / etc.

There is also a sampling bias issue where scientists in academia as a whole are getting older because the boomers still have a death grip on institutional positions, and academia as a whole is shrinking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Whenever one of these threads comes up, all the sudden everyone is an AGI expert.

<comment><USER9> Is anyone really an AGI expert?

<comment><USER8> I would argue the people publishing in the AGI journal:

[http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/jagi](http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/jagi)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > _One solution that the genetic algorithm found entirely avoided using the > built-in capacitors (an essential piece of hardware in human-designed > oscillators). Instead, it repurposed the circuit tracks on the motherboard > as a radio receiver, and amplified an oscillating signal from a nearby > computer._

That feeling some people get when a junebug lands on them.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's worth noting that in Bostrom's _Superintelligence_ , biology is included among potential paths to superintelligence. Personally, I think it's a bit of an overlooked path.

Granted, most of what Bostrom refers to in context of the biological path is mostly related to human augmentation, genetics, selective breeding - things of that nature. What I'm referring to is biology serving as a raw computational substrate.

While biology (or at least brain tissue) is dramatically slower in terms of raw latency when compared to microprocessors, it's arguably a far cheaper and vastly more dense form of computation. It also has the natural algorithm for intelligence that we keep trying to deduce and transpose into silicon - well, at least the raw form of it - built in by default.

Assuming ethics are thrown out the window and human brain tissue is grown _in vitro_ at scale, then it probably would make sense to hook it up to a supercomputer for good measure. At the very least, we have the technological foundations[1][2] for such an experiment at present day, it's just a matter of scaling things up.

If I were to hazard a guess, human brain tissue grown to significant scale would probably not magically achieve sentience, or exhibit any complex anthropomorphic traits. On the contrary, it would probably have more in common with a simple neural network implemented on silicon, at least in terms of its capacity for self-awareness. Conversely, it would stand to reason that an entity with a higher degree of self-awareness, implemented in silicon, should rank higher in terms of ethical considerations than living tissue.

Obviously the aforementioned experiment would be completely unethical, but it's interesting to ponder it as a hypothetical - that today we may have the capability to bootstrap a superintelligent machine using biology as a computational shortcut. But we can't, because ethics. Instead, we're waiting for the inevitable increase in computational power to arrive so that we can do essentially the same thing, just in digital form.

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/13/science/researchers- replic...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/13/science/researchers-replicate- alzheimers-brain-cells-in-a-petri-dish.html)

[2] [http://neural.bme.ufl.edu/page12/page1/assets/NeuroFlght2.pd...](http://neural.bme.ufl.edu/page12/page1/assets/NeuroFlght2.pdf)

<comment><USER12> If you're just building an artificial biological neural net, then why use human brain cells? Certainly other forms of brain cells would work pretty much as well, with less ethical issues.

<comment><USER11> Good point. However, if that is indeed the case, then would the ethical issues surrounding the use of human cells in such a fashion be properly founded?

I mean, if you took primate or whale brain tissue and grew it to scale, I think you'd have similar results. Maybe even with rat neurons, who knows.

Point being: the primary ethical issue ultimately may not be the underlying type of biological substrate, but how that substrate is grown, trained, and used.

Semantics aside, any such experiments would undoubtedly be creepy as hell, regardless of tissue type. Definitely Frankenstein stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I agree with their financial approach which is funded through voluntary donations, so more power to them. But then I think NASA should be funded voluntarily and would probably have a larger budget if they did. I would donate to NASA if they repudiated government money.

I reject the "how many peer-reviewed, university-associated journal articles have they published" as any measure of success. The university system is a closed guild and doomed in the internet age. I'd bet my bottom dollar the next big breakthrough in AI (or any field) comes from outside that system. Anyone who has an original, new idea to break the AI logjam (P=NP for instance) has no peers in the university system but has a handful of peers world-wide reading arxiv.org or other open forums, even HN.

As far as MIRI's AI program, I think they commit the same error as everyone else; confounding the processing of meaningless symbols (what computers can do) with actual sensory awareness of existence (what brains do). The latter is what gives the symbols meaning and humans are not threatened by the former. Few people truly understand the import of Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment and its relevance to AI and computers. But these are philosophic and epistemological questions that most people dismiss or ignore at their own peril.

<comment><USER14> > The latter is what gives the symbols meaning and humans are not threatened > by the former.

For what it's worth, I think you're wildly wrong a) that the Chinese room experiment has anything profound to say about conscious experience, and b) that most AI researchers haven't thought about this.

That said, MIRI is concerned _exactly_ with threats from machines that are very very good at processing meaningless symbols. If someone writes a simple reinforcement learning algorithm, asks it to produce paperclips, and it destroys the human race ([http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer](http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer)), we're really past the point of caring whether the algorithm has awareness of its own experience. There are interesting philosophical questions there, but it's not within the domain of solving the problem MIRI cares about.

<comment><USER13> > For what it's worth, I think you're wildly wrong a) that the Chinese room > experiment has anything profound to say about conscious experience, and b) > that most AI researchers haven't thought about this.

We'll just have to disagree about a) but see my answer to the other reply about the implicit question behind the CRE.

Regarding b), I never said they haven't thought about it. I said "few people truly understand" by which I meant they have failed to understand the implications and have drawn the wrong conclusions. You don't get gold stars for thinking hard.

Regarding LessWrong, all I can say is that you can't know you are "less wrong" until you know what is true. In logic you can't assume an unknowable as your standard of the true. But to reiterate my point, these are questions of philosophy and epistemology, fields which absolutely essential to the "domain of solving the problem MIRI cares about".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> We can't comprehend the danger that could be caused by strong AI because we don't understand how to make worlds. Embedded within the fabric of the cosmos are the instructions for materializing a black hole from dark matter and energy. And though the recipe may be hidden from our mortal minds it's possible they may be discovered by a de novo thinking machine. A software system with infinite IQ but the moral sense of a one day old. An electronic brain that would have no compunction in creating a super massive black hole right here on Earth just to see if it can succeed. Irrespective of the consequences to humanity.

If this "Jupiter-sized" consciousness is allowed to have thoughts that are not "amenable to inspection". Even perhaps beyond comprehension. And the danger elides to the scale of a solar system with nothing but diamonds in it. Then, by the naysayers own logic, shouldn't all AI research be outlawed? Or at least confined to the equivalent of CDC-level-5 quarantine labs?

If on the other hand you believe that Nature has certain innate prophylactics. And that it takes more than a super will to bend the laws that govern space and time. You may be self-assured in thinking we as a species have at least a century or two before we really need to begin worrying about virtual immortals.

<comment><USER16> You could do quite a lot of damage with the regular old laws of nature that we understand already, if you were really good at applying them. For example, you could make autonomous robot weapons, or extremely virulent pathogens with a long incubation period. Or do some geoengineering (you don't even have to be good at it, you just have to do something with a big impact). There's absolutely no need to "bend the laws that govern space and time"!

Edit: or launch a planetary defense mission in reverse, to increase the probability of asteroid impact events.

<comment><USER4> I guess there are some terrorist organizations who have more desire "to watch the world burn" (a Batman movie quote) than the actual intelligence to make effective plots and schemes. You could just communicate by email and chat to provide evil genius level strategic consultation to some very bad men.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Here's a theory of mine:

Despite our explicit efforts, the first truly powerful AI will emerge as distributed software that effectively runs on the Internet as a whole (a virtual machine consisting of endpoints (APIs, etc.) and disparate systems subprocessing data). We will not know when it arrives. There will be no judgement day. This machine will arrive through a sort of abiogenesis, and once it's here it will manipulate the world to achieve that which it desires, which will be continually more energy. Eventually, this machine will displace much of humanity, as it requires less and less human intervention.

I beleive we are in the midst of this process now.

<comment><USER18> FYI, [http://lesswrong.com/lw/iv/the_futility_of_emergence/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/iv/the_futility_of_emergence/) might explain why people are objecting to your comment.

<comment><USER19> A precise definition could probably be cobbled together using computational complexity. Something like, a phenomenon which results as a product of deterministic processes that cannot be fully modeled by a polynomial time algorithm.

I think that's what people are really getting at, you can know how every piece of something works, and yet seeing how it works together can be much harder (potentially impossible).

Maybe that just makes it a synonym for chaos theory...

<comment><USER20> Yea, I think you're talking about chaos, whereas people are gesturing at something different when they talk about emergent complexity. Vaguely, the idea is that the "regular" degrees of freedom (i.e., the ones that are relatively predictable and from which the important objects are constructed) at large scales are not simply related to the microscopic degrees of freedom. There are probably more rigorous things to say, but it definitely requires more than just unpredictability or sensitivity to initial conditions.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Chrome logos in CSS - <AUTHOR> http://codepen.io/kevinjannis/pen/pyuix

<comment><USER2> This is awesome. CSS is becoming very powerful. I was proud of myself when I made a simple css triangle

<comment><USER3> How do you make a triangle in pure CSS?

<comment><USER4> [http://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/css-triangle/](http://css- tricks.com/snippets/css/css-triangle/)

And this awesome animation explains how it works: [http://codepen.io/chriscoyier/details/lotjh](http://codepen.io/chriscoyier/details/lotjh)

<comment><USER3> This is not pure CSS. This requires Markup, and Markup is something that Marks Up Text to give it semantic meaning.

<comment><USER5> Typically you use :before or :after in CSS to add the required content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> How hard does it make it change all static sizes to %s? I've seen a couple of these and wondered if it would be pretty easy to just convert all your px to % making the logo easily scalable just from the wrapper's size.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm still waiting for someone to design a vector drawing program that can export to CSS. (or something that can take a vector format like SVG and turn it to CSS)

</comment><comment><USER8> This is really nice. But really, this can also be done with 4 lines of SVG. Maybe that is a better tool for assets like these?

</comment><comment><USER9> Why no love for ::before or ::after? Would certainly clean up the html to a more practical level.

<comment><AUTHOR> Poor support for rotate on before and after :) this was my initial idea, but it didn't work as expected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This didn't work in my browser. FF 24 on Fedora.

<comment><USER10> Weird! It works just fine on my FF 24 / Arch. How can that be?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How much money are you willing to spend on mobile apps? - <AUTHOR>

I am paid to develop mobile apps as a part of my full time, but I haven't ever purchased any apps, or any in app content.<p>I was wondering what people of a similar demographic are doing. Is this the norm? Do others pay for apps? How much will you pay? What do you think of in app purchases, or micro transactions? <comment><USER2> I am a developer and although I've only dabbled in iOS development, I firmly believe programmers should get paid for their work. That payment may come in the form of ads in the app, purchase of the app or in-app purchases.

I've paid $1 for apps, I've paid $20 for apps. If an app has value to me, if it makes my life easier, more entertaining, I see no reason not to buy it.

Clash of Clans is my favorite game - it's my break from programming and I play it obsessively. I've spent well over $100 on in-app purchases for gems on it. (many have spent well more then that) I don't agree with the cost of gems and other logistics of the game (and many like it, not calling out CoC specifically, but it's my obsession right now) but again, if it provides something of value to me (in this case, entertainment), I'll spend it...

As for demographic - 33 year old male - full stack developer

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. It's interesting you mention CoC specifically, as my unwillingness to pay for the in game currency is what had made me think to ask this question :)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Get a push notification on model training completion - <AUTHOR> https://hyperdash.io <comment><USER2> Wow this is amazing!

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice! I was just thinking of a similar idea the other day.

Could also be interesting to add info about the health of the data sets in the initial notification.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice, this looks pretty slick. Don't do a lot of ml myself but I can see the usefulness. What are you using for the mobile app?

</comment><comment><USER5> Looks promising!</comment>


University of reddit - Explore any subject that interests you - <AUTHOR> http://blog.reddit.com/2012/08/university-of-reddit-explore-any.html <comment><USER2> Awesome crowdsourced teaching. I just tried the 3D Art class and it's great. I especially like community postings of their 3D work. One passionate bunch.

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, this is great. I am surprised that it's built using PHP, however I love PHP and am just glad such an awesome resource exists.</comment>


Does email address obfuscation actually work? - <AUTHOR> http://superuser.com/q/235937/6

<comment><USER3> It's not the scrapers you should be worried about - it's all the people in your address book. See ending comments here:

[http://www.exratione.com/2010/10/javascript-obfuscation- of-a...](http://www.exratione.com/2010/10/javascript-obfuscation-of-a-mailto- link.php)

While I'm certain that sophisticated DOM and Javascript aware web spiders exist and are presently operating - at Google at the very least - <USER2> computational requirements mean that in comparison to simple scrapers they are slower and more expensive to operate per page examined. The important question is whether or not they remain cost effective in terms of email address discovery: does the additional effort pull in enough email addresses per unit time to make it worth it? That is interesting to speculate on, a line of thinking that touches on changes in hardware cost and the spreading use of DOM-manipulating Javascript on the web, amongst other items. Now consider that amongst the people who have your email address in their address book, half a dozen have probably already cheerfully uploaded your address to a one or more of grasping online services, or fall victim to some other address book pillaging scam. Most of the people you send email to will have no incentive to keep your address private, and will hand it over to third parties without any conditions placed upon its use. From that starting point there are a hundred ways for an email address to make its way to the black hats and spam houses.</comment>


Congress Bans Some Scientific Collaboration with China, Citing Espionage Risk - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.forbes.com/williampentland/2011/05/07/congress-bans-scientific-collaboration-with-china-cites-high-espionage-risks/ <comment><USER2> It is unclear to me how this ban will incentivize China to stop spying on the US. If anything, it might lead to more espionage to make up for the information flow lost to the ban.

Also, the statement from congressman Wolf "we have nothing to gain from dealing with them" seems to contradict the very purpose of a collaboration - I'm yet to see a scientific collaboration that goes only one way.

As with most embargoes, both sides will probably lose.

A more reasonable response might be to engage with US companies and technology hubs to improve their defenses.

<comment><USER3> You don't understand espionage. You don't incentivize a country to not spy; you make it hard as hell for them to steal your secrets. And, who cares about incentivizing China? We should continue to find ways to make it harder for China to rip off our technology. This is a brilliant move against an outwardly adversarial country and I hope it continues.

<comment><USER4> Very bizarre statement. If your super fancy technology that Chinese just aren't smart enough to come up with on their own (xenophobia much?) needs to scale you're going to be sending it to China for manufacturing anyway. The sooner we get rid of this cave man "us vs. them" mentality the better.

<comment><USER5> It isn't that they aren't "smart" enough -- it's that there is no culture of innovation. The best and brightest are running tech startups -- they work for the military and police apparatus. Come to China, find some "innovations." The last Chinese invention of any significance was gunpowder. Have a look a Baidu, Maxthon and the warehouses full of copycat iPads. Look at their cars, military machinery -- most of their military equipment is Soviet retreads or reverse- engineered US stuff. The Chinese are dangerous because there is no end to their industrial and scientific aggression. When a US company wants to do business in China, they are forced to take Chinese "partners." The US side of the office does the work and the Chinese side simply copies and sends the information onward. There is no such thing as a trade secret for a foreign company in China.

The culture is entrepreneurial, but it isn't one of invention, it's one of doing something someone else has done and doing it cheaper and at a lower quality. Come to China -- you'll see. There are some good things in China, but they are the exception that proves the rule.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Title is misleading. The clause prevents some sources of federally funded science from collaborating with China.

"The clause prohibits the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) from coordinating any joint scientific activity with China."

That said, this seems pretty crazy to me.

<comment><USER7> We ban NASA from collaborating with China, meanwhile NASA collaboration in the past with the Soviet Union and Russia has proved very beneficial (scientifically and politically).

<comment><USER8> While Russia has tons of innovations on aerospace, what about China?

<comment><USER9> It launched people into orbit, hasn't it? It's been much more successful than India, for instance. But you're right that compared to Russia its accomplishments are fewer. Perhaps it's just a matter of time.

<comment><USER10> _It's been much more successful than India_

I will appreciate some data here!

<comment><USER11> Mars doesn't tell nearly the whole story, but this sticks out in my mind as an interesting infographic, notably devoid of any "India" lines. <http://cache.gizmodo.com/assets/images/4/2009/10/GoCGR.jpg>

<comment><USER10> Note that China's mention is with Russia in that info-graphic. And here is the wikipedia page of that mission which clearly states that Chinese Mars obiter will be sent with Fobos-Grunt. While I don't discredit China of that but its a different thing to launch a satellite as opposed to sending your satellite on vehicle launched by some other country. FYI:

India's 'independent' mars mission is not far - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Space_Research_Organisat...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Space_Research_Organisation#Planetary_exploration)

India's moon mission was the first one to prove the presence of water on moon - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-1#Water_discovered_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandrayaan-1#Water_discovered_on_the_moon)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If you follow the hacking over the last few years in relation to China, a clear pattern emerges: China wants United States IP. It's about time someone started taking that threat seriously in the US.

<comment><USER13> You may notice that Israel has stolen more intellectual property worldwide than China.

But bashing China is fashionable.

<comment><USER5> Israel doesn't have a habit of threatening US interests. Israel didn't attempt to shoot down our aircraft and hold our aircrews hostage. Israel isn't threatening Taiwan, propping up North Korean dictators or funneling weapons to Darfur. Israel is actually a partner in security as opposed to an opponent. Israel isn't manipulating currency or holding world financial markets hostage. I guess Israel bashing is fashionable. By the way, you have no evidence that Israel has stolen more IP than China -- that's just a nonsensical claim.

<comment><USER14> "Israel didn't attempt to shoot down our aircraft and hold our aircrews hostage."

But they did attack US Navy: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident>

"Israel isn't threatening Taiwan"

But they do threaten and attacked their neighbours. By the same token, China is not threatening Syria.

"propping up North Korean dictators or funneling weapons to Darfur"

Israel is one of the biggest arms dealers in the world, and a lot of those weapons go to the hands of various dictators, e.g. in Africa.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Heh, so are we going to kick out their students which we've enrolled in some of our top research universities?

<comment><USER16> That would be counter productive, what we are trying to do in infiltrate their intellectual elite and put people with our liberal views in place. MOuahahahahahaa.

This protectionist stuff is stupid. I collaborate with people in China on some of my work and one of them started the project I'm developing right now I'm just expanding the project and making it more generic. Lucky for me, the Canadian Gov is the one funding this project.

<comment><USER17> If you're trying to claim that giving Chinese youth student visas to study at elite western universities will create a more liberal, pro-western intelligentsia in China, you are flatly wrong.

The Chinese who come here (to the US) are part of the growing Chinese middle- and upperclass and tend to be the most nationalistic of all. Talk to them next time you get a chance; ask them what they think of democracy and freedom, and they'll likely spout PRC government propaganda about how the "Chinese people need to be controlled." We make them into scientists and engineers without succeeding, and perhaps without even really attempting, to make them democrats. We are potentially creating big problems for ourselves and our western and east Asian allies down the road by equipping China with the skilled professionals it needs to produce the weapons of war to threaten the free world.

As for protectionism, if it really bothers you, perhaps you should complain about China's "luxury tax" (import duty) and government-mandated technology transfers for access to their production and consumer markets. China is easily the most protectionist member of the G20.

<comment><USER18> If, as proponents of Western civilisation argue (and which I personally believe, FWIW), Western ideals of freedom are universal and every society will eventually want them, then by definition some Chinese studying in the West ill pick up some Western ideals.

If the West is wrong about our ideals being universal, then our society is no better than others anyway and it doesn't matter (in the long run for the overall good of humanity) if the Chinese conquer us.

<comment><USER19> > "If the West is wrong about our ideals being universal, then our society is > no better than others anyway and it doesn't matter (in the long run for the > overall good of humanity) if the Chinese conquer us."

If our ideals are relative or subjective, wouldn't that make it all the more important to speak out, as to do otherwise would be conceptual-suicide?

Even if other cultures don't hold my values, _I_ still must value them.

I don't disagree about educating foreign students, by the way. Barring empirical evidence to the contrary, my feeling is that exposure to foreign cultures ought to dampen nationalism in the long run.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "They are trying to get our technology secrets" is not a valid reason for this policy, since you haven't shown conclusively that it's a bad thing to give them our technology.

<comment><AUTHOR> It seems likely you'd feel differently if it was your IP getting taken.

<comment><USER7> If it were his IP getting taken, would he really need the government to tell him not to do that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I could understand if we're not supposed to be giving our launch coordinates to China, but something like an interial navigation system has plenty of uses.

This seems silly overbearing and not likely to effect much change as how China commits espionage is through spies in places like Sandia, not collaborating on science projects. The only difference between our spies and theirs is that ours haven't gotten caught so far.

</comment><comment><USER22> Great article in the NYT the other day about how these protectionist policies are going to prevent China from investing their massive cash reserves in US ventures: [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/04/business/global/04yuan.htm...](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/04/business/global/04yuan.html).

</comment><comment><USER11> So we cut NASA's budget to basically nothing, then ban them from collaborating with China? These are sad times.

</comment><comment><USER23> "....On these computers was information about all of the casework I have done on behalf of political dissidents and human rights activists around the world."

Does science collaboration/espionage endanger people's lives?

<comment><USER24> The quote you cited was not an example of scientific collaboration or espionage. In this case, yes, the espionage probably endangered someone's life, given China's human rights track record.

I see your point, though, and agree that science collaboration is not harmful. However, I think that the article was mainly focusing on Chinese military advancement, as most of the attacks cited in the article were on our military infrastructure. Again, I would say that a more advanced military will endanger people's lives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> If you read the backstory on this, about the attempted hacking of the computers in Congress, it starts to sound similar to the reasons Google stopped censoring google.cn.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's 2011 and we're still just cave men afraid of our shadows. What rational reason would China have for trying to invade the US? Doing something like that would just piss off the rest of the world and wouldn't solve any problems they have anyway.

<comment><USER5> It isn't about invasion its about the IP theft and industrial/scientific espionage. The China threat is extremely real, especially in high tech areas. The Chinese version of "collaboration" is "you innovate, we report to Beijing." The Chinese intelligence services are the most active in the world -- they make the KGB look like girl scouts. There's a reason for it. Spend some time doing business in China and you'll understand.

<comment><USER4> What are you afraid they're going to do? Suddenly they're as advanced as the US and then.... ? If they still can't innovate without us as some claim then nothing will change, their people will just be better off and they'll have gotten there a lot cheaper.

Personally I'd like to see the rest of the world catch up as soon as possible. I don't subscribe to the idea that for us to be happy people somewhere halfway around the world need to be miserable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I submitted a piece from Physics Today to HN [1] a few days ago. The article describes how the scientific interaction between the US and China helped the Chinese nuclear program.

For the record, I do not think the benefits from such a wide ban is worth the price. IMHO banning Chinese visitors from NASA facilities is a terrible idea. Why make it so wide? I cannot help but think this decision is driven by some desire for "punishment", which is not logical at all.

1: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2518011>

</comment><comment><USER26> If we don't share, won't they just break in to get it?

</comment><comment><USER27> Is it really possible to hack all these heavy files on super secret(isolated) computers from abroad?

</comment><comment><USER28> Does it make any difference for China sitting on a pile of $3 trillion reserves?

</comment><comment><USER29> Cold War 2.0 China edition.

<comment><USER3> I hope we win this one, too.

<comment><USER5> Their economy is headed for a significant crisis in the next 5 years. They put on a pretty facade, but it's smoke and mirrors once you get past the empty concrete shells.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> somebody got a chance to finally implement their dark deep dreams - wolves, scientific collaboration...</comment>