The Case Against Reality - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/04/the-illusion-of-reality/479559/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> I get really suspicious when I see quantum physics used in this way. It seems like a misdirection. Given the information in the article, it's impossible to evaluate his claims--we don't have access to the computer models he uses, or the expertise to evaluate his proofs.

But there are a lot of gigantic red flags all throughout. Like when he says he's mathematically proved that "an organism that sees reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness." But what it means to "see reality as it is" is exactly what's in question! How could he possibly create a mathematical proof of a concept that lacks a definition?

This gets even more blatant when he suggests, toward the end, that he's "postulating conscious experiences as ontological primitives." But that would mean that "seeing reality as it is" isn't even a coherent concept! If experience itself makes up reality, how could one's experiences _not_ correspond to reality?

The guy is a crank. What he's arguing is a shoddy version of vitalism, dressed up in jargon.

<comment><USER3> It's an article edited for lay audiences. It is for people who don't have the expertise to evaluate his proofs.

You can look up his research, though, if you want. If you have an expert friend you can have that friend explain it to you.

You can find a list of his publications here: [http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/publications/](http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/publications/)

This is one of his papers that quantifies the ideas he talks about in the article: [http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/HoffmanSinghMarr.pdf](http://cogsci.uci.edu/~ddhoff/HoffmanSinghMarr.pdf)

In the paper, he does define what he means by "see reality as it is".

<comment><USER4> I get suspicious when some proof is so complex it must be mediated by an expert. I think the burden is on the prover to make their case, rather than on the audience to understand the case.

<comment><USER5> Most modern math proofs are incomprehensible to anyone but experts. Is modern math suspicious?

<comment><USER6> I don't doubt that modern math proofs have been created by experts and checked by computers. Where I have a hard time is when the claim is made that these complicated proofs have any basis in the real world. _That_ can't be checked by computer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've read this article twice now, and both times the same thought struck me. How much, really, are his "insights" much different from Plato's Allegory of Cave philosophy?

 _Plato has Socrates describe a gathering of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all of their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from things passing in front of a fire behind them, and they begin to give names to these shadows_ [1]

Yes of course the details differ and the physics have drastically changed (invoking QM's probability wave functions as the the basis of the "shadows on the cave wall."), but the idea that all we observe isn't a true representation of reality is one of the oldest ideas in all of western philosophy.

It reminds of that old quote from Alfred North Whitehead, a preeminent 20th century figure..."All philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato"

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave)

<comment><USER8> Thank you for the link!

I found 'Return to the Cave' particularly interesting.

 _The prisoners, according to Socrates, would infer from the returning man 's blindness that the journey out of the cave had harmed him and that they should not undertake a similar journey. Socrates concludes that the prisoners, if they were able, would therefore reach out and kill anyone who attempted to drag them out of the cave._

That's the sort of quote that inspires one to study philosophy. It illustrates perfectly the difficulty we have as humans in informing each other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Neurons, brains, space … these are just symbols we use, they're not real."

Such bullshit. Yes, they are symbols, but "just" symbols? They don't approximate reality at all? If so, how would he even know?

Edit: Let me elaborate. Yes, it's possible the world is just one big movie set, and nothing is remotely what it seems to be. It's possible everything is just a dream. But this is among the most banal of ideas. We have only made progress as a species by identifying deep, universal consistencies that have proven more reliable than anything else we know. Various scientific revolutions do not change the fact that the game is the same: to account for our observations parsimoniously. Now this guys says, it's all "just" symbols. Such bullshit.

<comment><USER10> No, they're symbols which accurately represent information to us in a useful fashion.

Consider a supercomputer simulation of a brain - a completely accurate human mind (ignore the feasibility, this is a gedankenexperiment), which has completely accurate eyes, ears, etc. - a full sensorium. Consider that you place a completely accurate simulated beach ball in front of that mind.

You, the external observer, know that this is all just code running on silicon.

The mind within the simulation, however, has no concept of outside, however knows itself to be real, that beach ball to be real. This mind could ultimately reason that perhaps it is merely perceiving representations of information in a way that is useful to it. Perhaps this "space" is just information. Perhaps _I_ am just information. I express this to another mind I just met in the simulation, it tells me I'm nuts, such bullshit.

The thing is, it's a testable theory, and it doesn't require a simulation, either. A holographic universe (totally testable and being tested now) would fulfil the condition he posits, and a simulation, natural or artificial, could too. The simulation argument also applies - if we ever manage to accurately simulate even a small section of a universe even at massive time dilation, it becomes rather likely that this is a simulation too.

For all we know our universe exists on the surface of a black hole.

So yeah, what we perceive is not "real", but you can pick at that thread ad infinitum, and it's turtles all the way down, so it all becomes a bit epistemologial.

That said, there could be useful applications. If it turns out that there's another spatial dimension with which our reality is better described (and it appears there is if you like susy, brane/M theory, strings) that we can access but only with difficulty so our sensorium excludes it that's big news - hyperspace.

Edit: just remembered a JBS Haldane quote that applies nicely -

 _" Nature is not only queerer than we suppose -- it is queerer than we _can _suppose. "_

<comment><USER11> Unprovable, unable to generate predictions on nature: not science.

<comment><USER10> Eh? One can test every theory I've mentioned in there, and many, such as the holographic universe principle, currently are: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle#Experime...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_principle#Experimental_tests)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If I may make a shitty analogy...

Most humans see reality through the lens of high-level languages. A hyper- defined DSL of Ruby. Our everyday interactions and understanding of the world are both informed by that DSL. However, as people specialize into various areas they realize that there exists something deeper, something closer to the metal.

Eventually, Julie the scientist discovers that our language can be broken down into more discrete operations than our Ruby DSL would lead us to believe. After much study and experimentation she finds heaps of cryptic-looking code dedicated to memory management, CPU optimization, fault tolerance, etc. The more she studies, the more she finds. By now she's uncovered machine code and developed an instrument to compile it down to an even more fundamental entity: binary. You can take this analogy down to the hardware level -- I'll spare you.

But as human beings we cannot process the world in binary and still function normally. We can certainly think about it and after much effort place our experiences in that context. But we need the aforementioned abstractions to quickly and easily process that we need to run from tigers. Although we know the Ruby DSL hides many details of reality from us by its very nature, we ignore that out of pragmatism.

<comment><USER13> Computer languages are much more precise and deterministic than natural language. The machine is actually quite simple compared to our biology.

People once believed the world was flat, that the Earth orbited the sun. Today some think the universe is at least 13 billion years old, others only 10,000. People on both sides think the other side is misguided, ignorant or just plain stupid.

Think we're in a simulation? Put down your fucking bong hippie. Also get a job. Those are important for some reason and determine your self worth. Also self worth is a thing .. that you should have.

Evolutionary fitness has led humanity to believe powerful myths. Even you, yes you the rational atheist computer scientist on hacker news, believe many many myths right now. Many which don't matter, many you will never know are myths.

In a million years, we will either be able to create computer simulations powerful enough to simulate part of our universe, or we'll go extinct. Humanity will be a spec on our 13 billion year+ universe. Either that or someone will press the reset switch and start us over with some other parameters.

It's not a lot of comfort to people who die in Chinese factories to give us cell phones, or to Chesley Manning sitting in prison.

<comment><USER4> "Even you, yes you the rational atheist computer scientist on hacker news, believe many many myths right now. Many which don't matter, many you will never know are myths."

Who actually replicates experiments to determine what they should accept and reject? Sure, you've learned not to touch a hot stove, or that ice cream is delicious, but how do you know the age of the earth, or what the employment rate is? You know what you trust when it comes to abstract things. Scientists have a track record of delivering results, so you trust what scientists say. Fair enough - time is short and we all can't be empiricists, and scientists themselves need to divide their labor and trust each other. But still there is a medium delivering the good news to you, rather than you finding it for yourself. There are better safeguards against lying than there were in the past, but I see this more as a difference of degree rather than kind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Okay, after thinking about this a bit longer, I would like to critique his argument.

He asserts that we can prove that it is better for so-and-so to perceive according to "fitness" rather than according to "truth", and maintains this is true with mathematical rigor; fine.

This is observably true (allowing me the possibility of observation for the space of this conversation) - predators, for example, usually have forward- facing eyes and vertically-slitted pupils, which allows them to focus and react to motion of prey in front of them; prey often have widely-spaced eyes allowing a greater field of view. Fitness literally makes you see the world differently.

However, there is an important dimension that I think he missed (or several), which is that the fitness function governing a trait is a vast, multi- dimensional space.

For example, using color we may distinguish between unripe, hard-to-eat fruit (green) and ripe, healthy fruit (reddish-orange). According to his argument, we should therefore only need to see these two colors. Of course this is incorrect, because if our vision were so limited we'd just be running into trees all the time. Now our fitness function is spread across two, completely unrelated goals - suddenly, it becomes much more attractive (and simpler) to come close to apprehending reality accurately, thereby killing two birds with one stone. It only gets worse as the number of goals we add to our fitness function for perception increases.

Furthermore: the space of "goals" is itself a function of the genetic diversity in your population. A species with a lot of spare genetic diversity lying around will be able to refine traits with selection much more efficiently. This means we can develop all sorts of wonderful toys (like a face-matcher) that can augment our perception of reality.

Of course, in the end, we're just modeling reality, we can't Know it in some Buddhist sense; but there is good reason to believe that perception should lean heavily towards a simple objective representation of reality, and that fitness is not such a close rein on it all the time.

<comment><USER15> This is a very nice argument!

Our senses are still only tuned in to detect portions of "reality" that are relevant to life on earth. For example, our eyes detect the band of EM radiation most useful during daytime on Earth. But even though are eyes are narrow band and highly non-linear sensors, they (+our other equally flawed senses) have served us pretty well as far as understanding the true nature of EM waves.

I guess my point is that our senses still aren't evolving to detect reality in some sort of true pure mathematical sense.

<comment><USER14> >evolving to detect reality in some sort of true pure mathematical sense.

I don't think this exists; a perfect description of reality IS reality. Let us contemplate our finitude and be humbled.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> John Searle was interviewed in the latest episode of _The Partially Examined Life_ about his new book, _Seeing Things As They Are_.

He says that the fallacious argument that we only see mental representations and not reality is "so bad I call it The Bad Argument."

The interview is quite amusing, and it might be interesting to read both his book and Hoffman's.

<comment><USER17> Interesting, because Searle is the a famous advocate for an argument essentially equivalent to the Bad Argument:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room)

<comment><USER18> The Chinese Room is my favourite proof that thought is physically impossible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Imagine two neutral networks trained on different data. Their internal data is likely completely different yet, for the most part, they can still agree on the classification of new observations when they both observe a common external reality regardless of how they model that reality internally.

This completely destroys the evolution argument in the article that concludes that reality is subjective. An organism may learn to perceive more or less water as a color rather than a quantity because the internal representation does not matter a bit.

To me it was already obvious that your red is not the same as mine. If your internal model which represents red is more like my internal model for quantity of water it does not matter at all as long as we can still make the same distinctions of little water vs a lot of water that allow is to survive. The article's conclusion that this means reality is observer dependent does not follow.

</comment><comment><USER20> The idea that the world is _" nothing like"_ the one you experience through your senses is completely ... stupid.

What you experience through the senses is a valid _aspect_ of the world, which is incomplete, but accurate within its limitations, and largely non- conflicting with other ways of observing which reveal other aspects.

Physics, quantum or otherwise, doesn't flat-out invalidate what you see around you.

Besides, all scientific instruments translate deeper observations which we _cannot_ make with our senses into a representation available to our senses. (In some cases, just numbers which can be visualized, and often direct visualizations). A scientific instrument is in the world, and I can experience its output with my senses.

> _Suppose there's a blue rectangular icon on the lower right corner of your > computer's desktop — does that mean that the file itself is blue and > rectangular and lives in the lower right corner of your computer? Of course > not._

Of course not, because the file is blue, rectangular and lives in the lower right corner of your _desktop_. (The desktop isn't to be confused with the computer).

This is real; the aggregate digital object which includes the icon position and color, as well as other information such as a name, modification time stamp and content, does in fact have among its undeniable attributes that it's in the lower right corner of a virtual graphically visualized space known as a desktop and that its color is blue. The position, shape and color are merely not a _complete_ set of its attributes.

</comment><comment><USER8> Is there a logical concept or some sort of 'phrase' that describes the 'inside and outside of box' problem? My vocabulary is lacking.

In computing, we know quite well that a system's inputs and outputs don't have to be coupled as well as they seem.

I can produce a program '/bin/sha256sum' which drops the sha256sum of a file onto stdout, unless said file is a JPEG image depicting a Shiba Inu, in which case it puts 'such file'.

In computing this is really kind of an obvious result. If we have a debugger or a disassembler we might be able to find that behaviour without actually encountering it. But if it's a HTTP API, we really have no way of knowing what's going to happen.

We can gather lots of empirical evidence, but we have no reason to believe that 5M results or 25M results or 50M results increase our certainty that it 'always does X'. (Simply, it's not provable).

It seems to me to be tautological to say that 'reality may not be what it seems', in that sense, because we know that we cannot be certain that it even acts the same way at t=t and t=t+1.

Even if we found some sort of 'higher state' \- if we found the source code to the program that actually runs all there is - what's above that? Turtles all the way down!

</comment><comment><USER21> Some of the ideas in here echo Huxley's theories of mind as expressed in The Doors of Perception — that of the mind as a "filter" for true reality.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_at_Large](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_at_Large)

"Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful. According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large."

Cursory reading of texts in timeless traditions like Zen, Advaita Vedanta, Hinduism, and other mystic philosophical systems will reveal similar concepts — as will self-inquiry.

That we're beginning to approach a scientific/mathematical explanation of these metaphysical principles is no surprise to me.

</comment><comment><USER22> "Professor Does LSD for the First Time"

</comment><comment><USER23> Two things: 1.- It's very interesting that the brain+eye can't fix some perceptions, that's why it's impossible to _correctly_ see optical illusions like these: [http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01121/same- color...](http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/01121/same-color- illusio_1121075i.jpg)

2.- ...it's fine as long as the future doesn't make us live in here: [http://imgur.com/gallery/hD2Tm1O](http://imgur.com/gallery/hD2Tm1O) (Safe for work: it's a picture of Mark Zuckerberg and about 200 people using VR headsets, with the Matrix pods as background)

</comment><comment><USER24> Well, I think the main flaw is that reasonable people could think that survival fitness and perception reflecting reality and very closely related. The argument that there could be a better survivability fitness than reflecting reality is overblown by Professor Hoffman. It's not like we don't already know that our perceptions can be misguided, optical illusion thrives on it. It's also extremely hard to believe we could come up with such a successful device as science if our perception of the universe was so off. If there is a divergence, it's in fringe effects (like optical illusions) and low percent or sub-percent, not a major shift and distorsion.

It's a fun idea to entertain, but I'm worried that someone with a PhD could hold that our perceptions are so far off.

</comment><comment><USER25> A quick scroll through the comments here revealed that most of you missed the point.

He's not saying we are quantum hand-waving. He's describing a BIV situation[1]. He's saying that things look weird when we look closely _because reality isn 't there_.

We're neural networks. We always have been. Reality is a layer, one that appears to me to be designed to constrain growth through resource limitations and "garbage collection" (death).

Hello, World!

1\. [http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism-content- externa...](http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism-content-externalism/)

</comment><comment><USER26> The article is either really profound or a giant wankathon, and I still can't tell which after reading it twice.

<comment><USER27> I'm going to start using the Profound vs. Wankathon dichotomy as much as possible from here on out.

<comment><USER26> I'm glad that you found the distinction to be profound, and I'd also rather not hear about it in the case that you found it to be otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Reading the comment throughout this thread it's no wonder progress is so slow in this field. Anyone attempting to approach it from a new direction is a fraud, apparently.

I found it to be a very fascinating read.

</comment><comment><USER29> Your perception is reality; different observers may perceive the same thing in different ways, but their perceptions are no less valid because of not corresponding to another observer's "truth". In a sense, even if people perceive falsehood, that perception, in and of itself, is real

</comment><comment><USER30> This reminded me of a fascinating TED talk[1] by Vilayanur Ramachandran where he talks about three unusual neurological conditions. In particular, a case of Capgras Syndrome where the person had an injury that severed the connection between the visual processing and emotional processing parts of the brain. When he saw a loved one, he would be convinced it was an imposter because of this.

What struck me was how complex our perception of the world around us is. How the way our brains perceive reality can be so different to each other, and to actual reality. Pretty amazing.

[1] [https://www.ted.com/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_min...](https://www.ted.com/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_mind)

</comment><comment><USER31> "I can talk to you about my headache and believe that I am communicating effectively with you, because you've had your own headaches. The same thing is true as apples and the moon and the sun and the universe. Just like you have your own headache, you have your own moon. But I assume it's relevantly similar to mine. That's an assumption that could be false, but that's the source of my communication, and that's the best we can do in terms of public physical objects and objective science."

So, in other words, he drew the same conclusion that Wittgenstein did over half a century ago (approaching it from the vantage point of language), but dressed up in more up-to-date accoutrements in analytic philosophy?

</comment><comment><USER32> I don't think philosophy is capable of surviving a summary article with choice quotes.

</comment><comment><USER33> > If it's conscious agents all the way down, all first-person points of view, > what happens to science? Science has always been a third-person description > of the world.

It seems to me that the logical conclusion is that science is some kind of introspection.

</comment><comment><USER34> > an organism tuned to fitness might see small and large quantities of some > resource as, say, red, to indicate low fitness, whereas they might see > intermediate quantities as green, to indicate high fitness. Its perceptions > will be tuned to fitness, but not to truth. It won't see any distinction > between small and large—it only sees red—even though such a distinction > exists in reality.

But, what about the fact that, we, as human thinkers, are _aware_ that this is what's going on in our own perception?

Doesn't that give us an ability to both imagine a model of reality beyond our perception and also to test that model?

</comment><comment><USER14> Great interview, but he spent his life studying this shit to get to where this book was, written in 1966: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Construction_of_Rea...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Construction_of_Reality)

Many of the ideas he's talking about are discussed therein; perception and "reality" is an assemblage of ideas, not an objective "truth" waiting to be discovered.

<comment><USER35> It's not just about the ideas -- it's about how they are explained and with what rigor.

The same way that 19th chemistry didn't "got where Democritus was" when he formulated his atomic theory -- it came to the same concept, yes, but what for him was just an idea put out there, for them it was a solid theory, with experiments, deductions made of it, etc.

<comment><USER14> Nah - these are just the same ideas in a different intellectual framework, the level of rigor is only apparent because we're attuned to mathematical models as the best means of reasoning. It's just about what you accept as valid proof (math rather than sociology), I don't think they're actually more profound understandings of the underlying concept.

<comment><USER35> Funny, because (from what I've seen around here) you actually chanced upon a rare person on HN (me) that doesn't consider math/hard science automatically "more profound" than sociology and informal argumentation/reasoning on a subject.

That said, though, having it in math enables ways to re-use and test that knowledge that having it in sociological reasoning does not -- even if the understanding both methods reached is comparable.

<comment><USER14> I disagree that math is that great. A mathematical model is a formal description of some sort, but a mental model is just a different kind of ontological descriptor; both are merely machines to process inputs and produce some sort of output. You might argue that it's better to be able to observe and tweak the mathematical model than to use one built on purely human semantics, but, mathematical models, by virtue of their simplicity, are generally poor at dealing with complexity (see my other comment in this thread for a critique of his model). This is why we're tending these days towards more complex, harder-to-understand learning systems like neural networks; you get an answer composed of primitives you don't really understand very well. This is basically the same as sociology.

<comment><USER35> > _I disagree that math is that great. A mathematical model is a formal > description of some sort, but a mental model is just a different kind of > ontological descriptor; both are merely machines to process inputs and > produce some sort of output._

That doesn't say much though.

A cheap numeric calculator (not turing complete, the plain type) and a high end PC are both "merely machines to process inputs and produce some sort of output".

It's the precise kind of machines that each is and the exact kind of processing that it can do that's important -- not just their general similarities.

> _You might argue that it 's better to be able to observe and tweak the > mathematical model than to use one built on purely human semantics, but, > mathematical models, by virtue of their simplicity, are generally poor at > dealing with complexity_

Yes, but they're very good at dealing with very precise formulations. It's not necessary when doing an analysis of field X to deal with the whole of X's extend and complexity at all times. A very specific answer to a small non- complex part of X can be very worthy itself.

(The same way Newton's theory is very good to determine the angle of cannon shots with even if it's a bad model for anything really complex speed and mass wise -- only in this case, the "less complex" theory gives more precise answers for its subdomain, whereas with Newton vs Einstein it's the inverse).

<comment><USER14> Newton's theory is a simple three-variable model that describes a simple power law relationship between them. Holy fuck, would it be fantastic if ANY ASPECT of biochemistry or biology could be modeled with such a simple description. As a biologist I can tell you this is very far from the case. This is a huge problem with the field of biology, actually, that the models (and ideas of complexity) we have to bring to bear were developed in physics where the parametrizations are simple and clean and provide high predictive value.

This math simply doesn't work when you throw it against a biology problem. Precise formulations don't exist when you're dealing with, say, the interactions between two 100-amino acid folded proteins. Physics operates on simple rules that work everywhere; biology operates on complex rule sets that are often broken. The math is just not up to snuff, here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Yes I think this guy goes too far. But to take a more moderate stance, I think it's really interesting that while we can perceive EM waves and sound, we can do so only within limited frequency bands. The reality we perceive is a subset of the available data. And we are also much more sensitive to motion, for example, than gradual change. So I think a much weaker version of the article's point is true and interesting.

</comment><comment><USER37> If we can't trust our senses, then there isn't much point trying to prove what we can't see. These models _themselves_ and their predictions are subject to the meta-problem that we can't trust that our evolutionary adaptations aren't transmogrifying them in some way.

</comment><comment><USER35> There's a very interesting insight in the interview:

> _Hoffman: Right. The classic argument is that those of our ancestors who saw > more accurately had a competitive advantage over those who saw less > accurately and thus were more likely to pass on their genes that coded for > those more accurate perceptions, so after thousands of generations we can be > quite confident that we're the offspring of those who saw accurately, and so > we see accurately. That sounds very plausible. But I think it is utterly > false. It misunderstands the fundamental fact about evolution, which is that > it's about fitness functions—mathematical functions that describe how well a > given strategy achieves the goals of survival and reproduction. The > mathematical physicist Chetan Prakash proved a theorem that I devised that > says: According to evolution by natural selection, an organism that sees > reality as it is will never be more fit than an organism of equal complexity > that sees none of reality but is just tuned to fitness. Never._

Which reminds me of this:

 _Origin of the Logical. — Where has logic originated in men 's heads? Undoubtedly out of the illogical, the domain of which must originally lave been immense. But numberless beings who reasoned otherwise than we do at present, perished; albeit that they may have come nearer to truth than we!

Whoever, for example, could not discern the "like" often enough with regard to food, and with regard to animals dangerous to him, whoever, therefore, deduced too slowly, or was too circumspect in his deductions, had smaller probability of survival than he who in all similar cases immediately divined the equality.

The preponderating inclination, however, to deal with the similar as the equal — an illogical inclination, for there is nothing [100%] equal to another — created the whole basis of logic. It was just so (in order that the conception of [a shared] substance should originate, this being indispensable to logic, although in the strictest sense nothing actual corresponds to it) that for a long period the changing process in things had to be overlooked, and remain unperceived.

The beings not seeing correctly [and saw similar things as "same" and static] had an advantage over those who saw everything "in flux".

In itself every high degree of circumspection in conclusions, every sceptical inclination, is a great danger to life. No living being might have been preserved unless the contrary inclination — to affirm rather than suspend judgment, to mistake and fabricate rather than wait, to assent rather than deny, to decide rather than be in the right — had been cultivated with extraordinary assiduity.

The course of logical thought and reasoning in our modern brain corresponds to a process and struggle of impulses, which singly and in themselves are all very illogical and unjust ; we experience usually only the result of the struggle, so rapidly and secretly does this primitive mechanism now operate in us._

Friedrich Nietzsche, Gaya Scienza (with small edits in [] to make the passage clearer)

</comment><comment><USER38> I posted this two/three days ago and it didn't get any traction, glad it's gotten more today.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11567365](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11567365)

</comment><comment><USER39> _But when you do a split-brain operation, a complete transection of the corpus callosum, you get clear evidence of two separate consciousnesses._

Is there any evidence supporting that claim?

<comment><USER40> That there is a strong effect is fairly well documented:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split- brain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain)

Whether there are two full consciousnesses I think is not established.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> "There are many degrees of sight and many degrees of blindness. What senses do we lack that we cannot see another world all around us?" -- Frank Herbert

</comment><comment><USER42> The guy on lsd still gets eaten by the tiger.

</comment><comment><USER43> "All Cretans are liars" said Epimenides...a Cretan.

</comment><comment><USER44> What is this guy smoking?

<comment><USER13> Probably something that's legal in Washington, Oregon, Alaska and Colorado.

<comment><USER45> Tobacco?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> It isn't necessarily necessary to invoke QM to make sense of this, though QM and GR have their place in the detailed formulation of various functions.

With a good read and a little work, one finds that one's experience of the "world" (whatever that is; fortunately, we don't need to know; cf below) can be summarized as:

      Xi = ΣPjiIj
      Ai = Di(Xi)
      Iij = ΣPijAi

Your experience (Xi) is the probability-weighted sum of the impacts (Ij) of all actions, yours and others, aka, "the world", which we model as a space of actions; this includes your digestion, my writing this, your reading this, the temperature in your surroundings, what happened to each of us yesterday, etc.

Your actions, Ai, result from a decision function (Di) that takes your experience-space as its only input; the decision function is arbitrarily complex, but has order likely less than O(n __c), since you make decisions in real time (dithering is still a decision, in this sense; you are choosing to continue to attempt to choose to act)... ...unless we are a tightly coupled simulation in NP space and achieve momentary "consciousness" (whatever that means) whenever the simulation reaches "consensus" (but that's overly complicated, so let's use Occam's Razor and stick with the simpler model... ...at least until it fails).

In this case, the limit on "c" would be set by your wetware: Evolutionarily, we are optimized for decisions with order less than

      O(n**c)

Any other decisions get us eaten by tigers (because we took too long). The better our wetware, the more complex and thorough can be Di and still produce result(s) in time to keep us alive.

This means our basic decision-making apparatus is short-term optimized, suggesting that many of our decisions for long-term effects will be "bad", i.e., sub-optimal, because we decide for survival and fitness, not optimal - or even good - long-term consequences.

Your impact on anything, including yourself (i) and everything else (Σj), Iij, is the probability-weighted sum of your actions.

This is an even simpler view than the article expresses: He suggests it when discussing that positing the existence of a world, W, is unnecessary, but then digresses to a theory of conscious agents... ...which is also unnecessary, but which may be illuminating.

In the above formulation, a world, W, is replaced with probability-weighted mappings of actions (of one's self and of others) as impacts (on one's self and on others). These probability-mappings may be arbitrarily complex; determining their order is a real poser....

At the very least, any Ij that takes more than time T to "reach" you does not impact your current Xi (though it may impact future Xi).

Interesting. The probability mapping could have a time-based (light cone?) component, or the simple formulation could be replaced with one involving Xif(Xic, Ijic).

</comment><comment><USER47> There's so much misinformation in the article. The two major errors are:

> _quantum systems don't seem to be definite objects localized in space until > we come along to observe them_

No, that's not how it works. When physicists say "observation" in quantum mechanics, they really mean "any interaction, including molecular, photon, electron, etc".

> _or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a > jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our > brain's best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation > of an external reality_

Again, no. We built tons of devices that are independent of our senses. If they return consistent results, it means that's what reality is. And it doesn't matter if it's simulated or not, we have to deal with it, and we call it "reality".

</comment><comment><USER48> > A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the > one we experience through our senses.

Actually the world -is- the world we experience through our senses. There's no "other" world. This article is full of shit. Whatever it is he calls "reality as it is" is the same reality we perceive through our cognitive functions, there is no other way to apprehend reality.

</comment><comment><USER42> The tiger don't care if you're on LSD. It will still eat you. And the universe don't need an observer for shit to happen. In 10 years I bet the current quantum theories /interpretations will make us laugh our asses off

<comment><USER49> Which is based on your reality and your assumption that a tiger WILL eat you and has nothing better to do.</comment></comment>


100 CEOs Have as Much Retirement Savings as 116M Americans - <AUTHOR> http://monetarywatch.com/2016/12/100-ceos-much-retirement-savings-116-million-americans/?doing_wp_cron=1481930387.8412010669708251953125 <comment><USER2> >Trump's 17 cabinet-level picks have more money than a third of American households combined

[http://qz.com/862412/trumps-16-cabinet-level-picks-have- more...](http://qz.com/862412/trumps-16-cabinet-level-picks-have-more-money- than-a-third-of-american-households-combined/)

<comment><USER3> I have more money than every person in the US who has $0 to their name combined.

This metric isn't useful for anything other than shocking headlines.

<comment><USER4> Could whoever downvoted this explain why this is wrong? This seems like a great point.

From the main article "The report also notes that 37 percent of U.S. families have no retirement wealth at all." So I could claim "100 McDonald's employees have as much retirement savings as 104M Americans". That doesn't really say much.

<comment><USER5> Yes, the grandparent post is being unfairly downvoted. It's an entirely valid criticism of the meaninglessness of a sensational headline.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> There ought to be 2 tax rates: 10% if you risk your own money to build a business, and 50% if you pile up huge amounts risk free.

<comment><USER6> How would you define risk free investments? Buying Walmart stock and holding it for a decade? Buying a house and renting it out? Lobbying for preferential treatment for a business/sector you have a large stake in?

The latter is obvious a problem, but if you can define that process legally then you could just outlaw it outright instead of trying to penalize it with taxes. Any investment I can imagine that is close to risk free is either already illegal or technically illegal but hard enough to define that people can skirt around the edges of the law.

<comment><AUTHOR> I define risk free as an employee with no skin in the game/no downside.</comment></comment></comment>


Startup Incorporation Checklist - <AUTHOR> http://goforlaunch.io/incorporation-checklist/

<comment><USER2> its just a checklist, why does this site need my email to show me the content? :/

</comment><comment><USER3> it says "Researching your name to ensure it is available", but how?</comment>


Writing Maintainable Code Considered Harmful - <AUTHOR> http://itscommonsensestupid.blogspot.com/2007/11/smelly-code.html

<comment><USER2> The conclusion doesn't match the story. XYZ wasn't hurt because he wrote maintainable code, but because ABC didn't. XYZ's problem was that he/she wasn't able to maintain poor code. Believe it or not, folks, that's an _important_ _skill_ , and something employers in the corporate/IT world pay big money for. XYZ doesn't have it. ABC may or may not, it's not clear.

But the moral here isn't that the market doesn't value good software. It's that the market places more value on the ability to make bad software work. Well, duh.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is awesome. My mind replaced XYZ and ABC with names I know. And...

Normally, I can't bear to read such poor English, but this time it was just the perfect touch.

</comment><comment><USER4> Any good developer should just work for him/herself. In reality, the good one will go to start his/her company but street sweeping.

</comment><comment><USER5> Don't blame ABC. Blame the company.

1\. The product is software, yet there appear to be no standards for source code. Imagine that happening in autos or pharmeceuticals.

2\. Even if there were standards, how could they be enforced without code reviews?

3\. Five years to market? The plug needed to be pulled four years ago.</comment>


Systems of Logic Based on Ordinals (1938) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://webspace.princeton.edu/users/jedwards/Turing%20Centennial%202012/Mudd%20Archive%20files/12285_AC100_Turing_1938.pdf

<comment><USER2> I took a picture of the original dissertation once. They should've scanned it in color:

[http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m654saPHnT1qdr8fn.jpg](http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m654saPHnT1qdr8fn.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER3> I guess I've never looked at an historical mathematical document pre-TeX. Kinda awesome with the handwritten symbols.

<comment><USER4> You might be in interested in looking at Dijkstra's manuscripts, which are all handwritten. Here's an example [0], and an index is available here [1].

[0]: [https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd10xx/EWD1001.PDF](https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/ewd10xx/EWD1001.PDF) [1]: [http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/](http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Wow! all those hand-written symbols. And he had to do it on every copy.

</comment><comment><USER6> Looks very interesting, but it is rather long. Can anyone familiar with this paper provide a summary?

<comment><USER7> I'd love that, I'm also curious to know where this line of work headed to (in the present)!

<comment><USER8> There is a Wikipedia page: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_of_Logic_Based_on_Ordin...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_of_Logic_Based_on_Ordinals)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What do you like most about your job? - <AUTHOR> The recent "Who wants to be fired?" thread kind of bummed me out.<p>Can we share something a little more positive? <comment><USER2> I love the people that I work with. Competent, hard working, individuals that are a pleasure to be around.

I love working on the problems that I do... we do ML/ NLP work with some standard issue (fun) web development using good tech... but we get to focus on things that will actually move the company forward, and the barrier to implement good ideas is low.

I DEFINITELY like being far away from all the shitty jobs I used to do, both financially and the work. Aside from a fluke emergency, I will never professionally do landscaping, dishwashing, bathroom cleaning... etc again (I know most devs come from comp sci... I did not)

I like that I get to work from home when it makes sense too. I live at the beach and its great to have the time to go for a surf before you kick off your day.

theres more... but I need to get back to work!

<comment><USER3> Where do you live? I'm in based in London but on the look out for a place with decent surf and interesting jobs.

<comment><USER2> Orange County, CA. I would actually prefer San Diego if you are looking but my folks live close by.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I recently joined a biotech/hw startup after working at much larger companies.

I love the trust that everyone puts in me. I feel like I'm my own director, of a team of 1, and that I can work on whatever I want, but people trust me to be working on important stuff.

There are so few barriers between having an idea and actually shipping it. And everything I ship improves the experience for our customers and our internal team by so much!

As a programmer it's also been a ton of fun working with hardware and in the biology domain... not sure if I can ever go back to pure programming!

Also everyone is so nice and kind and smart and curious. Honestly sometimes I look around and wonder if everyone is just messing with me.

Since joining I've felt excited about going to work, in contrast to the past when I was just excited about what was going to be for lunch at work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome that you're not just allowed to work on ideas but can also ship them. A lot of times there are deployment barriers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Number one thing is not having my time tracked by management. That always sucks and leads to stress. In theory having time tracked could be good if the powers that be know how to process the information, but usually it's used as an interrogation / scalding device. So no logging time is a huge positive.

Next is working in a small company where you can make architectural decisions as a regular developer due to hat swapping and not too much legacy code compared to a bigger company.

Finally working in a non office building, nice colleagues, flexible hours etc.

</comment><comment><USER6> I like not being broke, sick, hungry, and homeless. I like not being seen as "poor white trash". I like not being hassled by Johnny Law because I look out of place.

Sorry, but there are no positives to being employed. Just an absence of negatives.

</comment><comment><USER7> I get to travel to exotic places and have been on a lot of interesting ships. Plus the tech I work on is really unique and I learn something from my colleagues almost every day.

</comment><comment><USER8> I work on a software suite to optimize the dosing/infusion of various drugs. The software helps people recover more quickly, so I feel like I am contributing to someone's well being.

</comment><comment><USER9> The only upside is I only need to spend ~2 hours per day on work. So called work life balance. Pay is decent with regarding to the workload. I won't elaborate on downsides, there's a lot.

</comment><comment><USER10> The money.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> For me, I love that my job allows/requires me to do and try a lot of things.

Needing a broad set of skills keeps me energized, whereas I would personally feel stuck being a specialist.

</comment><comment><USER11> competitive salary, good tech stack and especially the people in my office. I have some friends with whom I can talk about whatever I am interested in such as arthouse movies, books, coffee, etc.

</comment><comment><USER12> I like destroying startups.

<comment><USER13> What's your job and are you (or similar companies) hiring?</comment></comment>


"Why don't we just buy you for $15 billion?" - Zuckerberg to Ballmer - <AUTHOR> http://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-tried-to-aquire-facebook-for-15-billion

<comment><USER2> The Telegraph article neowin links to says that Ballmer says that line to Zuckerberg, not the other way around. Just checked and other sites seem to be saying that same thing. That does make more sense, right?

<comment><USER3> [quote src="[http://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-tried-to-aquire- faceboo...](http://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-tried-to-aquire-facebook- for-15-billion\]Zuckerberg) reportedly replied to Ballmer by saying "Why don't we just buy you for $15 billion?"[/quote]

if I read your comment correctly, you are saying it was Ballmer that said that line to Zuckerberg, which would make the neowin article line a misquote. Do you have alternative sources you can link?

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> EDIT: I should read more... :)

<comment><USER5> _Zuckerberg reportedly replied to Ballmer by saying "Why don't we just buy you for $15 billion?"_

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The headline makes it sound like Facebook is now planning to buy Microsoft.

I suppose that might be an interesting scenario at some point...

</comment><comment><USER7> No, you're a towel!

</comment><comment><USER8> Facebook would have withered if acquired by MS because Ballmer wouldn't be able to shutup about it.

</comment><comment><USER9> He doesn't have the balls to say that. Sorry.</comment>


Henry Kissinger: 'We Are in a Very, Very Grave Period' - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/financial-times/henry-kissinger-we-are-in-a-very-very-grave-period-ac3512d4d704 <comment><USER2> Would love to read it but it is behind a join/login wall.

<comment><USER3> [https://www.ft.com/content/926a66b0-8b49-11e8-bf9e-8771d5404...](https://www.ft.com/content/926a66b0-8b49-11e8-bf9e-8771d5404543)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why do FAANG help you prepare for interviews? - <AUTHOR> Every company designs its interview process to understand whether the candidate fits the role and can do the work the company needs.<p>What is the point in teaching candidates how to solve interview problems if it positively skews their interview performance? Doesn't it make the interview process more biased? <comment><USER2> If you are capable of learning to do the kind of problems they want you do and willing to put in the effort to learn how to do them, you've answered the two questions that kind of interview is supposed to answer.

Not helping candidates would (further) bias the process towards savvy people that had the connections necessary to get the inside scoop some other way.</comment>


Schmidt: If Google Gets It Right, There Will Be An Android In Every Pocket - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/28/googles-schmidt-if-google-gets-it-right-there-will-be-an-android-in-every-pocket/

<comment><USER2> The sentence is mathematically true and also completely useless. Either there will be an Android in every pocket, or not.

<comment><USER3> The sentence is excluding the possibility of Google getting it right while leaving some pockets empty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't know how idiomatic that phrase is, but Schmidt's statement is a direct rip off of Micro-Soft's mission statement [https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=microsoft+computer+in+...](https://encrypted.google.com/search?q=microsoft+computer+in+every+home)

Google is the new Microsoft, indeed.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is ridiculous. I frequently have 6+ pockets when I leave the apartment, and there is no possible use-case for an android in every one.

<comment><USER5> I hope they are small phones. I dont want 6 Galaxy Note's in my pockets.</comment></comment>


Wikipedia redesign - <AUTHOR> http://jgthms.com/wikipedia-redesign.html <comment><USER2> Wikipedia seems like it would be one of the very hardest challenges for a portfolio project. That's because Wikipedia is almost certain to be around 50 years from now. We don't think about it all that often, because we live our lives in its presence, sort of like the people in Rome who live near the Colosseum probably spend most of their days seeing it as just another big stone building.

I wouldn't want to be the architect proposing gleaming flowing metal facades and LED screens for the Colosseum, either.

Whatever you do to Wikipedia has to make sense not just today, in the way a magazine cover design might need to work as a valid UX and an on-trend design, but also 10, 20, 40 years from now. Wikipedia is conservative in a way that very few Internet sites are; they're the caretakers of something --- I feel weird writing this, and maybe I'm wrong, but here goes --- world-historically important.

<comment><USER3> This seems especially true considering (a) how much web design has changed in the last few years due to mobile devices and the responsive web and (b) how unprepared we were for that change.

I'm frequently reminded that the most readable _and accessible_ (albeit, admittedly, boring) websites out there are ones that are just plain old-school HTML–no javascript, no CSS, or anything like that.

<comment><USER4> > I'm frequently reminded that the most readable [...] no CSS

I doubt it.

CSS can be a whole lot less than just fancy floats and parallax scrolling.

<comment><USER5> Yep. Namely: typeface, font size, line height, margins, font color, background color. Those are some pretty basic properties you'll want to set for even the most minimal design. CSS is how you set them. (I suspect that almost nobody would want to use the browser defaults for all these values.)

<comment><USER3> I'm not saying I disagree, but there is a benefit to default values, and that's a unified design throughout the web. For the technically inclined, we can always use custom CSS, but often the people who would benefit the most from it are the people who would have the least idea how to do it. Edit: To put it another way, and bring it back on topic, it's no surprise Wikipedia uses black text on a white background with blue hyperlinks, and I doubt that will change any time soon.

I do realise I'm basically describing Gopher here, and there's possibly a reason it didn't take off...

<comment><USER5> > there is a benefit to default values, and that's a unified design throughout > the web.

If only browsers provided better defaults. As it stands, very few people would consider the browser defaults acceptable.

> it's no surprise Wikipedia uses black text on a white background with blue > hyperlinks

Yes, Wikipedia does use black text, a white background, and blue links. But they do not merely rely upon the default browser stylesheets. They use custom font-face, font-size, line-height, and margin properties even for the basic <p> tag. And that's saying nothing about all the other elements that often have borders, padding, backgrounds, and so on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Standard reference:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unsolicited_redesign...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unsolicited_redesigns)

tl;dr ideas are always welcome, but most redesigns ignore that the site is not US-only, English-only or Latin-only.

<comment><USER7> [http://wikipediaredefined.com/](http://wikipediaredefined.com/)

Step 1: Toss out the globe covered in runes from languages from all around the world and just use the Latin W.

Step 2: Remove or hide all languages except English from the home page, and hide the means to access those other languages under options and accessors written in English.

Step 3: Replace or supplement menu items with graphic symbols likely only recognized or used in Western cultures.

Step 4: Throw in a Share button because Social or whatever. Also include a Print button that likely only works in certain browsers because nobody knows how to use their browser's built-in Print button.

Step 5: Install Frontpage on Wikipedia.

Step 6: More colors and graphics.

It's as if the article was written about this very redesign.

<comment><USER8> You forgot the metastep of "designer choses to use a weird, ugly, font on their web page that reduces readability"

<comment><USER9> I so concur! Thought they were writing "Jmagine" and "Jt" instead of "Imagine" and "It" to look cool or something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This feels unnecessary. Everyone gets it: you can't actually redesign a website with a few random mock-ups and visual updates. That so often is not the point of an unsolicited redesign.

Most of these people are young designers looking to practice, have fun or create something tangible to demonstrate some of their skills. Its clear that changing a button or making a visual change doesn't equate to UX expertise. However, for a lot of designers this material gets them attention and gives potential employers common context to evaluate them and maybe they are a UI designer who wants to display their visual skills. There are a lot of reasons to take it too seriously but I encourage young designers to do it. A redesign can help me evaluate certain skills in a junior candidate and they are fun to look at. Redesigning stuff is fun, who cares if you want enjoy yourself.

So, I'm not sure who this for. Convincing a designer not to do a redesign of a website and post it on their blog? What's the harm? These redesigns don't actually change the industry understanding or perception enough to matter. We need to calm down and just enjoy these redesigns for what they are.

<comment><USER2> There's no real harm, except potentially to the up-and-coming designer, who is signaling something about their design process by writing something like this. Wikipedia has a lot of design constraints that other sites don't have. A _big_ part of the job of being a professional designer is discovering and navigating design constraints. So when you pick Wikipedia as your "bucket list" portfolio spec design example, you might want to be careful that you're not communicating something about your process (specifically: obliviousness) that you don't mean to communicate.

Spec designs are fun to read and while I'm not a designer and have no business offering career advice to one, I'm happy to encourage people to keep doing them so I can keep reading and snipping at them. But there are safer targets to pick than Wikipedia.

<comment><USER10> I have to agree that Wikipedia is not a good target for a redesign. Also, I don't think its on every designer's bucket list. But, Its fair to assume that a lot of people select Wikipedia specifically because it has such an uncommon set of constraints.

To make assumptions about design process based on something like the choice to do a "redesign" of Wikipedia sounds generally useless : Especially coming from a junior designer who I guarantee is not thinking that hard about it.

I am just saying : Everyone is getting way too serious about unsolicited redesigns. I think the article makes valid points about what design is and what defines user experience but It feels mean-spirited and the targeting at redesigns is mis-directed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I agree strongly with this message. There is _a lot_ more to web design than making a page "pretty".

Wikipedias design is good; and certainly too good to justify a complete design overhaul.

The biggest problem I have with it is the unclear visual hierarchy: there are links which are context dependent (changes depending on which article you're viewing) next to links which always link to the same page.

And the list of languages the article is available in would benefit from listing the most viewed (or last used) versions before the full alphabetical listing.

</comment><comment><USER12> Actually it seems they DID a redesign recently. The article title appears in Times instead of helvetica. (Edit: it's Georgia)

<comment><USER13> Relevant link: [https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Typography_refresh](https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Typography_refresh)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I agree with the spirit of the article, and would like to add that the thing that bugs me about these Wikipedia re-designs is that none of these designers seem to know that it's quite easy to add your own CSS and restyle Wikipedia.

I've been rocking my own Wikipedia theme for over a year now:

[https://github.com/geetotes/wikipedia- theme](https://github.com/geetotes/wikipedia-theme)

<comment><USER6> There's some work going on in MediaWiki to try to separate out theming stuff so that it's actually feasible to write a good theme. A big problem is that Vector, the default skin for MediaWiki and Wikipedia, half lives in an extension and not in the skins directory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> The comment about design features working only in the designer's context definitely rang a bell for me. The most common one for me is the section containing just enough space for the designer's sample text, which is conveniently very small. Fast-forward to the moment the design gets actually coded up, and we've got ellipsified text all over the place.

</comment><comment><USER8> > The thing is, there is in the long run no incentive to alter Wikipedia's > content and degrade its integrity. The collaborative authority will prevent > it anyway.

People don't need much incentive to do stupid things. There's not much incentive to toss trash out a car window rather than into a bin, but people do that every day.

There's a bunch of mindless minor vandalism that happens on WP because of that.

Some parts of WP are really horrible. Ignore all the obvious places (anything to do with Ireland or Northern Ireland; Israel and Palestine; Abortion; etc). But quiet gnomic uncontroversial edits can get mired up. Someone makes some good faith (and valid) changes to punctuation and spelling. They are quickly reverted by an overzealous twinkle user on "vandal patrol" (wikipedia has done a lot to stop this problem and that needs to be recognised) who also leaves a warning template. The newbie gnomic editor removes the template and reverts the article reversion, and is then receives multiple templates. I don't know how many people have a first experience of WP like that, or find it repeated if they try again, and it would be good to know. But the point of mentioning this is that the toxic parts of WP are a strong incentive to some people to "stick one over" to the WP community. Long term sleeper accounts making a variety of good edits with a few known bad edits; concern trolling; wiki- lawyering; etc. There are plenty of meta-wikipedia places where very long threads can draw in many users to spend a long time talking about stuff which is, at its core, nonsense.

I suspect the future-people may find the meta stuff, especially comparing the meta stuff across different wikipedias, more interesting than actual WP.

<comment><USER16> Its not about incentive for people who litter and vandalize, its about what the majority of people want.

Otherwise, there would be more trash outside the bins than inside them. Thankfully, most places aren't like this.

<comment><USER8> I live in England. There is plenty of trash outside wastebins. Especially if you see the streets before the streetsweepers have been through.

The fact that there exist specially designed and built vehicles to sweep pavements to clean them of litter, and these are supplemented by workers with hand push carts and litter picking sticks, shows some need for litter collection. Litter costs about £1bn per year and we're still a pretty dirty country. (I did notice on my visits to California that they were _much_ cleaner. Partly that's about lack of rain, but also it's because people just don't drop as much litter.). Californians are usually surprised at just how dirty London is.

David Sedaris hates litter.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01r11wc](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01r11wc)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> the best website design principles: [http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/](http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/)

<comment><USER18> Only I have to resize my window to actually read the text.

People always say just plain is great, but we live in a world in which many people now have bigger widescreen monitors.

Sites like this work great on smaller screen and even mobile. But they are bad UX for big screen users.

<comment><USER19> > I have to resize my window to actually read the text [...] we live in a > world in which many people now have bigger widescreen monitors

I'm sorry, I just don't understand this whole "people have widescreen monitors, so designers need to decide how wide something should be" idea. "Because people have wider monitors than they used to" seems like a meaningless excuse to me, since windows have been resizable since Douglas Engelbart's Mother of All Demos in 1968 (more than 40 years ago).

In my opinion, when you choose a size for your web browser, you are signaling to the webpage which region of your screen you would like to have filled with content. If your screen is too wide to read full-width text comfortably, you should just keep the web browser resized to 83% of your screen width (or whatever) instead of having it maximized all the time. Most web browsers will even remember your preference from one time to the next. Plus, if you do want something to fill your screen (and you don't use Mac OS) it's one click to maximize the window temporarily.

Nothing's ever stopped designers from over-designing webpages (many people would point to scroll-to-animate webpages), but I really don't think that maximum width (or, worse, minimum width!) is some necessary thing for designers to dictate, since it's so easy for users to choose a width that's comfortable for them.

<comment><USER20> You say that but your average user isn't going to make sure they keep their browser window to some arbitrary amount. People just tend to makes it fullscreen, myself included.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Totally agree. Good design sense appears to be incredibly rare, and it's unfortunate that major sites simply copy each other's designs resulting in UI trends not based on sound design, but fashion. See the pervasive fixed position header for a good example.

</comment><comment><USER22> Off-topic, but what happened to "www."? More and more sites recently seem to be going without a www subdomain.

In this case, "www.jgthms.com" goes to a Gandi parking page. (!) In other cases, the connection simply times out or the server returns an error page.

<comment><USER23> My understanding is that the number of people who like leaving off the www exceeds the number who remember to redirect all requests correctly. I believe the nginx server block would read something like:

      server_name www.website.tld;
      rewrite     ^ http://website.tld$request_uri? permanent;

<comment><USER24> Use return instead of rewrite.

        server {
            listen 80;
            server_name www.website.tld;
            return 301 http://website.tld$request_uri;
        }

<comment><USER16> Please back up your claims with a reason - all you're giving us is a different way to do things here.

<comment><USER25> SEO. And it's just one reason.

<comment><USER16> What does SEO have to do with this?

<comment><USER25> It counts as duplicated content.

A 301 is a redirect. It sends to the client the instruction to reload the page in the given Address.

A rewrite happens only on the server side. So for the client it's like two different sites with the same content, and this hurts your ranking.

Now... Ok that I didn't explained that on the parent post (didn't thought it was needed), but is it enough reason to a downvote? :P

edit: fixed grammar.

<comment><USER16> Rewrites in nginx are redirects.

<comment><USER26> Only a subset of rewrites are redirects. A common usecase for rewrites is to change the request URI to make it match another location block in your config, but without returning 301 or 302 or any other redirect code to the client.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> the last paragraph should be a required reading for all designers.

</comment><comment><USER28> I really don't see the problem here. Why shouldn't people try their hand with a wikipedia redesign? It's a great (and admittedly very hard) challenge. Which doesn't mean that people shouldn't keep trying.

But maybe people should indeed hit for easier targets first - maybe they could offer bbx a redesign for his own blog?

Looking at his copy text running all to the bottom of the page without any bottom space or even a footer [https://imgur.com/bC3RuHv](https://imgur.com/bC3RuHv) I feel physical pain looking at his site. But what do I know? I'm just a designer...

<comment><USER29> Did you purposefully cut the bottom white space off to prove a point. IE, FF, and Chrome all render the space at the bottom.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Aspiring artists don't paint bowls of fruit because the world needs another painting of a bowl of fruit.

Let people practice and show off their evolving craft.

</comment><comment><USER31> Whew. I was fearing this was yet another [http://www.wikipediaredefined.com/](http://www.wikipediaredefined.com/) but fortunately I was wrong.

<comment><USER32> While I 100% agree with the original article, this redesign actually isn't bad. They actually did a good job staying faithful to what makes Wikipedia important.

That being said, I think sites like HN, Wikipedia, Craigslist, Reddit, etc are iconically ugly rather than generically pretty -- and that's good.

<comment><USER6> No, it failed a pile of really obvious client requirements: [http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2012-August...](http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2012-August/121650.html)

This is the page where we try to be polite about designers' crappy redesigns: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unsolicited_redesign...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Unsolicited_redesigns)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Does anyone actually use the main page of Wikipedia? I just look it up on Google and a relevant article shows up. It's the same way I view stackoverflow.

<comment><USER34> It's sometimes interesting to check to see recently added articles which are highlighted, "this day in history" items, as well as recent major news items which I might have missed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I agree with the author's thesis, that many designers design for aesthetics and not for usability, but I couldn't help but think that he did with this article exactly what he was shunning as useless, which is to address the design of Wikipedia to gain prominence, and all this without even the effort of opening Photoshop... the irony is terrific.

</comment><comment><USER36> A very good example of website design [0]:

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

<comment><USER20> No way, HN is shockingly bad. It's the only site where I feel like an extra stylesheet is necessary. Text is too small and hard to read.

<comment><USER36> > _Text is too small and hard to read._

I would totally agree on that point, but I just use zoom.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> It took me a while to "get it" mostly b/c I've been conditioned to think this was going to actually be yet another Wikipedia redesign haha. In typically web scanning mode, I skipped over (what I thought was the image caption) _I didn't change anything because there is nothing to change. Or at least, not enough to prompt a complete graphical overhaul._ Kudos - well played.

I suppose we won't have to wait long for the "HN redesign" or "reddit redesign" variants either.

<comment><USER8> There are plenty of HN redesign attempts.

It seems that people like attempts to increase the size or spacing of the vote buttons which makes accidental downvotes harder.

It seems lots of people dislike the reduced information density. Some of the redesigns use a lot of whitespace which can be nice but means you only have 10 stories on the front page.

Currently the only thing I'd really like to see is some 80 character indicator for the title box on the submission page. That would mean that people could remove small unimportant parts to fit in the limit, ratherthan just chopping out perhaps important words.</comment></comment>


SCMP: US Dollar Risk of a Sudden Collapse - jules-jules https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3094416/us-dollar-risk-sudden-collapse-ex-imf-official-warns-blow <comment><AUTHOR> Just FYI: SCMP stands for "South China Morning Post" and is owned by Alibaba. It has been known to be very favorable to Chinese propaganda over the years.

</comment><comment><USER2> I'm not educated in the economics of reserve currencies [1] so would be interested to hear what informed minds think. If we look at the top 5 reserve currencies in the world today (USD 62%, EUR 20%, JPY 6%, GBP 4%, CNY 2%), the USD is entirely dominant but it also means that any perturbations to it might destabilize the global economy.

What is the alternative?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_currency](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_currency)

<comment><USER3> There is none and that's the only reason the dollar is still a reserve.

The only two competing currencies who have large enough economies are Euro and Yuan.

Euro can't be reserve because they are not an industrial powerhouse any longer and also a vessel of US for the most part.

Yuan can't be reserve because of lack of faith in Chinese government and currency controls.

The yuan still has the best shot though as many developing countries are in agony and the US has decidedly receded from the world stage, which means it's status as reserve currency is questionable at best.

<comment><USER4> I keep hearing people mention the Yuan as a reserve currency, but why would any country do that? China's economic and financial data reporting seems to be spotty at best.

Also would you put your faith in the rule of law in a communist country? I'm not saying the United States or European Union are perfect, but I think their courts are more balanced and independent than in China.

<comment><USER3> > I keep hearing people mention the Yuan as a reserve currency, but why would > any country do that? China's economic and financial data reporting seems to > be spotty at best.

Good question. And the answer to that is no serious country accepts Yuan as a reserve even after 10 years of China's GDP being number 2 in the world. People really don't trust Chinese government and it shows.

The only reason the Yuan has a chance is because America chooses to not be a world leader in matters that affect the world (Paris agreement, UN, WHO etc). This leaves a power and money vacuum which disproportionately affects poorer countries. Think Sri Lanka or poorer African countries or sanctioned countries like Iran, Russia.

These countries have only one country offering them development or aid or help. And that country's currency is Yuan and are happy to trade in Yuan. So slowly and steadily, yuan gets a place in their reserve mix and then becomes dominant because that's the only major country trading anything with them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The Yuan has got quite a few reasons why it isn't a great reserve currency. The main one to my thinking is it is hard to get hold of. This is due to China running a trade surplus and having restrictive currency controls. This doesn't create a stock of freely tradeable currency to trade.

</comment><comment> huy-nguyen The argument seems to be that the Fed's massive QE and Congress' large deficit spending will lead to instability but other candidates for the reserve currency status have their own problems too. The euro zone just announced a large stimulus program for the whole continent. China's monetary system is opaque and is not run according to the rule of law. With a new Biden administration, we probably will return to a more sane decision making process. Probably won't be as China friendly as before but rational thinking will prevail.

<comment><USER6> Even more basic than Chinese rule of law, CNY is not easy to get ahold of outside of China because of capital controls. If you can't get ahold of it easily, or move it around easily, it's not very useful as a reserve currency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why can't the reserve currency be a crypto one? One that has a very clean genisis and is not controlled by any single entity.

<comment><USER8> What military will go to war to maintain stability of this non-existant mythical cryptocurrency that you just created?

Reserve currencies are not _just_ a currency that has a large volume and plentiful liquidity (so the value doesn't swing significantly when demand changes). They are backed by trusted and stable institutions. In the USA, that includes the banking system, the legal system, the political system, and even the military.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> According to former deputy managing director of IMF.</comment>


Ex-Microsoft Bug Bounty dev forced to decrypt laptop for Paris airport official - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/06/former_ms_bug_bounty_program_developer_forced_into_paris_laptop_decryption/

<comment><USER2> This is why I have a scratch laptop for when I travel internationally. I load a fresh OS install and only put on it what I need for the trip. Not the right answer for everyone (I'm not, for example, a journalist who might have to take interview notes), but it tends to short circuit lengthy interrogations.

</comment><comment><USER3> Use TrueCrypt for deniable encryption!</comment>


Telcos gouging on SMS by up to 90,000%, says consumer group - <AUTHOR> http://www.theage.com.au/digital-life/mobiles/telcos-gouging-on-sms-by-up-to-90000-says-consumer-group-20140225-33ez4.html

<comment><USER2> I've been ranting like a lunatic about this for at least 7 years. It is well documented the cost of a text is equivalent to that of a uncompleted phone call. A consumer group has finally noticed? The timing is perfect as phone providers switch profit centers from texting to data plans. Don't be surprised if telecoms start offering free texting in the near future. Now when is a consumer group going to notice that inkjet printer ink is $8,000.00 per gallon?!

</comment><comment><USER3> This was one of the reasons WhatsApp was a big success, at least in Europe, and I suspect it's a reason it's not as well known in USA (they usually have hundreds or unlimited texts included in their plans).

You can't expect to get away forever with charging 15 cent + tax per SMS.

</comment><comment><USER4> No news here, except for the issue of it not having already been reported on in the country of origin, as far as I know.</comment>


A hand drawn map based on OpenStreetMap data - <AUTHOR> http://dessine-moi-une-ville.makina-corpus.net/

<comment><USER2> Glad to see it's not actually hand drawn.</comment>