But they are different skills, and more powerful tools necessarily imply that what used to be highly skilled jobs are now not so skilled.

Automation isn't making programers dumber, it's allowing dumber people to be programmers, or dumber programmers to do harder things. It's been this way forever. 99% of programers working today couldn't have toggled firmware into a 6502 and made it run. Fortunately, they don't have to.

I'm old enough to have known programmers who still were kind of suspicious of these new-fangled "compilers", and I've actually programmed on punch cards, and collected data on a machine that booted from paper tape (there were no working tape punches left, so the lifetime of the machine was dependent on taking really good care of the few remaining tapes...)

All of that has gone away, and the skills programmers needed in those days have gone with it. That's a good thing, although it kind of sucks for people who put in thousands of hours honing skills that are now irrelevant.

Part of expertise is knowing when to ignore fads. This may require faking it well enough to get along for a while.

Cool-hunting has been around forever and is done by all kinds of people, not just hipsters. Were hipsters in at the start with glam rock? Disco? New Country?

Yet all those things were "cool" (for a certain value of "cool") once upon a time.

So hipsters are at best a subset of cool-hunters, and not a very interesting set, because they differ from other cool-hunters in their stupidity, insularity and arrogance. Many cool-hunters want to find the cool and share it with others. Hipsters want to find the cool and keep it to themselves, to the point of denying that anything that has become popular is cool any more.

Furthermore, you don't understand futures trading, even a little bit. Futures trading is about hedging, not discovery. They literally have nothing to do with each other. Futures markets are not predictive, they simply represent the mean of trader's expectations. They are an essentially homogenizing force. So if you think hipsters are like futures traders you are saying they are trying to make everyone the same bland and boring type.

Another clue that hipsters have nothing interesting to say is their proclivity for using unconventional typography--such as eschewing capitalization--to draw attention away from the vacuity and falsehood of so much of what they say.

Hipsterism is the practice of misdirection. Hipsters are lame people who have learned that attention is the scarcest human resource, so they can hide behind a few attention-grabbing quirks. It saves them from having to do anything actually interesting, useful or productive.

It's kind of sad, really, but the hate they get is well-deserved, because they are socially useless people who are deliberating soaking up our precious, limited attention on completely pointless self-aggrandizement.

All of which makes the article's breathless touting of this "innovation" pretty funny.

Two of the most basic moves in engineering are:

1) Take two functions that used to be separate and integrate them into a single component. This increases efficiency.

2) Take two functions that are performed by a single component and split them apart. This increases robustness.

Which move is a good idea at any time depends heavily on technology. Wing-warping (lift and control both done by the same component) was a poor fit for wood-and-fabric technology, so ailerons (lift and control done by separate components) was a good move. Metal frames and skins were not much different from wood and fabric in this regard, but now we are making aircraft mostly out of plastic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_787_Dreamliner) it may be time to reconsider the problem (which I guess has been done for some military aircraft already).

But it's not like this is a super-innovative work of genius. It's a pretty standard move that any good engineer is likely to consider when faced with a problem of efficiency (although exactly why integrated flaps are supposed to be such a huge improvement is not at all clear from TFA).

What makes horses simple and zebras complex?

Answer: nothing.

The issue is not simplicity, but prior probability. All else being equal, horses are more likely in most locales than zebras. When you hear hoofbeats, the plausibility of "There is a horse nearby" and "There is a zebra nearby" go up by the same factor. Since horses were already more likely, horses are still more likely.

Ockham's razor works, in the very few cases it does, as a consequence of Bayes' rule, and invoking some ill-defined notion of "simplicity" rather than prior plausibility is misleading.
 

Science is the discipline of publicly testing ideas by systematic observation, controlled experiment, and Bayesian inference.

Because science is at heart applied Bayesian reasoning it is not in the business of certainty of any kind: theories become more plausible or less plausible, and are never "true" or "false", which would imply that they are immune to any further evidence whatsoever. This state simply cannot be achieved within the Bayesian formalism.

The quest for certainty is science's equivalent of alchemy: alchemists weren't wrong because of their investigative techniques (which were often quite good) but because they were pursuing the wrong goal (transmutation of the elements). The proper goal of science is not certainty but knowledge, which is inherently uncertain. Philosophers don't understand this, and will no-doubt continue to promulgate the model of Poperian method for generations to come.

Massive generalization has been good to the sciences.

In physics, we have used invariance principles to expand our definitions to the most general possible. This was the argument behind General Relativity, for example: Einstein wanted equations of motion that would be invariant under any smooth second-order transformation whatsoever, and when he put that constraint, and only that constraint on, he found the most general form of the equations of motion were uniquely determined (up to a constant of integration, which is the Cosmological Constant).

Biologists have generally shied away from this kind of approach to their field, but there is an argument to be made that there is an equally general definition of "life" as "anything that participates in a process of evolution by imperfectly heritable traits that result in differential reproductive success". It need not be tied to any particular concrete mechanisms like DNA and RNA.

This idea may turn out to be silly (which is why I wrote a novel about it rather than a scientific paper: http://www.amazon.com/Darwins-...) but well into the 1800's there was no general view of "energy" that unified all the disparate forms, to the extent that the fact that light had energy that was in any way related to mechanical energy was not really appreciated. The kind of unified view of energy we have today would have seemed bizarrely speculative at that time, in the same way that the notion of a unified, generalized view of life is purely speculative today, but it turned out to be amazingly useful, so it's worth considering the possibility in biology today (anti-science people will likely attack it as a waste of money, using computer technology that would not exist without a similar "waste" on ridiculous fantasies like quantum theory and "obviously useless" research into the basic physics of semi-conductors in the past.)

There's a joke attributed to Abraham Lincoln: Q: If you call a tail a leg, how many legs does a dog have? A: Four. Calling a tail a leg does not make it one.

Nothing in ordinary parlance (headlines, say) means an absolute absence, which is an empty concept, like the Philosopher's Stone or an honest politician. You don't get to decide for the sake a headline that it means something else. Only grasping little scumbag shills do that, people who are so fundamentally and thoroughly debased that they turn everything they touch--even language--into garbage.

"Pretty much nothing" is not "nothing". "In terms of mass and energy" is not a relevant restriction. The quantum vacuum is rich in properties. There is absolutely no basis to ignore those properties for the sake of a dishonest, misleading and confusing headline. It's like people who say "Before Europeans arrived North America had no people in it!" Which is true, for a certain value of "people". This is why precision in language matters, because there are people who actually say things like that to the considerable detriment of their fellow-humans.

"From a sufficient distance" would mean "infinity" if you want to talk about asymptotically vanishing properties of the vacuum, which would still leave all the other properties, so again: it isn't clear why anyone would dishonestly and stupidly restrict the discussion to one particular set of properties unless they wanted to dishonestly and stupidly made a false, dishonest and stupid claim that "the universe came from nothing!"

So other than being dishonest, stupid and wrong, there is nothing at all dishonest, stupid and wrong abut the claim "the universe came from nothing."

That's a really nice description. I wish this was better known. But...

The algorithm only works (in the sense of leaving the parties psychologically satisfied) if their preferences are transitive (that is, if they are not insane).

In reality, even sane people's preferences change in pseudo-non-transitive ways as possibilities become actualities. So when Caleb gets the car, Adam is going to wish he'd valued it more highly, and so on. Our inner monkey won't be happy until it gets more than everyone else.

There is also a considerable body of data showing that our ability to judge the value of stuff is very poor. Happiness research has been big on this, showing that most of what people think will make them happy is radically inferior to easily predictable things that will actually make them happy.

So while the algorithm is beautiful and general and ought to be used wherever appropriate, it is not going to satisfy people, and it will then fall out of use because no one is going to say, "I am broken" when they can say "The algorithm is broken" instead.

All kinds of people responding to this very story right here apparently have a problem with investigating credible death threats, which this very story is about. Some of those people are arbitrarily and without evidence claiming that death threats (which for some reason they designate as "random") over the Internet are not credible.

I'm not sure why anyone would consider a death threat against a controversial and apparently rather abrasive public figure "random" rather than, say, "motivated". If someone threatened me or you it would be "random", because we're just not very special or interesting (well, I'm not, anyway). But a public figure near the centre of the amazingly childish fit of anger known as "gamergate"? That's not random. It's motivated.

It's easy to dismiss credible, motivated threats when they are not against you. Stupid people lack the imagination to understand how unsettling it can be to get direct, specific threats against themselves that include details of where they live.

To declare an entire class of threats non-credible because of the medium used to deliver them is not reasonable. It's like the cops say, "Well, this note is written in crayon, so even though it says they're going to kill you it's not credible! Who ever took a note written in crayon seriously!" Ridiculous.

It isn't clear what your point is here.

She gets actual threats. You agree with that. So in response to actual threats she is offering a bounty to catch the people who have actually threatened her. You must also agree with that (if you aren't a sociopath) since a) actual threats are illegal and b) offering rewards to capture perpetrators of illegal behaviour is completely ordinary.

So beyond agreeing that she gets actual threats and is responding in a completely appropriate way, what's your point? That she's not a nice person? Who cares? Why is that remotely relevant to this story or this discussion?

"Not nice person gets actual threats and responds in a completely conventional and widely acceptable way". What is your problem with that? And why bring in some long list of irrelevancies that have nothing at all to do with it?

But it doesn't go directly into my brain!

Where "directly" apparently means "via millions of dollars of highly specialized equipment", which is a use that only is only found in headlines on stories like this one.

"Humans can now transport themselves directly to the store in an automobile!"

Why is it that when we cut out the use of one organ--our feet in the case of automobiles--we all recognize that only a gibbering idiot would describe the resulting walking-free transportation process as "direct", but in the case of cutting out the use of the mouth almost everyone buys into this idiotic claim that its replacement by millions of dollars of gear is "direct"?

I'm not sure why this was modded "Insightful" but it suggests that others share your questionable views, so I'll reply to them.

1) Scientists are not certain that dark matter is exotic particles, which is why scientists write papers like the one under discussion here. What seems misguided to me is people who are apparently ignorant of how science--which is the discipline of publicly testing ideas by systematic observation, controlled experiment, and/or Bayesian inference--works commenting negatively on how science works. It's a bit like Creationists critiquing their own bizarre views of "evolution" while ignoring the actual theory of evolution.

There has never been a time in the past several decades when any actual scientist has been even remotely certain about the nature of dark matter. Various ideas have been put forward, including ideas that modify gravity, and none of them have stood up to the routine tests applied to them. This has driven research toward exotic particles.

In particular: Big Bang Nucleosynthesis puts very tight constraints on the density of baryonic matter in the universe, and it's only about 5% of the amount needed to explain the large-scale cosmological observations that imply dark matter. So it isn't like scientists are just saying, "Yay! Evidence of new particles!" Rather we are saying, "Damn, there's a problem we can't solve with baryonic matter."

2) Occam's razor is stupid. You know, of course, that Occam himself used it to "prove" that nothing existed other than God, since to invoke other entities (matter, the Earth, shoes, cats...) to "explain" the phenomenology of experience would be to "multiply entities above necessity".

In the cases when it works or makes sense, Occam's razor is "Bayes' Rule for Dummies". The prior plausibility of a horse being around is higher than the prior plausibility of a zebra being around. Since both horses and zebras create hoofbeats with equal probability, hearing hoofbeats increases the plausibility of the propositions "There is a horse around" and "There is zebra around" by the same factor. Since horses were more plausible before, they are more plausible after.

That is:

p(zebra|hoofbeats) = P(hoofbeats|zebra)*p(zebra)/P(hoofbeats)

p(horse|hoofbeats) = P(hoofbeats|horse)*p(horse)/P(hoofbeats)

Since P(hoofbeats|zebra) ~ P(hoofbeats|horse) and p(zebra) < p(horse) and P(hoofbeats) = P(hoofbeats), it is trivially true that p(zebra|hoofbeats) < p(horse|hoofbeats).

No notions of "simplicity" are required.

So: your comment is quite badly mistaken.

The interesting bit of the paper is pointing out that observational limits excluding Standard Model-ish dark matter are incomplete. This is significant, as the new physics required to make stable "macros" of the kind discussed (nuclear-dense objects in the range of a few hundred grams to around the mass of the Earth, with a gap in the middle) is quite a bit less substantial than that required for physics beyond the Standard Model.

It it not-inconceivable that the strong force could have some weird metastable minimum for objects on this scale, and not being able to rule out such objects by observation is a problem, so we really should spend a bit of time closing those gaps.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised by all the non-sequitur hate this comment is getting from anonymous cowards. I don't generally reply to comments, but the ones here are so hateful and stupid it seems worth putting a word in.

No one asked anyone to do gay porn, for the illiterate amongst you. No one was asked to make out with anyone. You're going to have to address what I wrote rather than your fevered imaginations to get any traction, I'm afraid.

We frequently do films that cast actors as psychopaths, murderers, clowns, and worse, and no one ever objects, so any suggestion that playing a gay person is exceptionally offensive against the morals of the actor requires that it be more morally repugnant for them to play a gay person than a murderer. That is... odd.

Seriously, in one film there were half a dozen murders on screen. No one objected. Yet someone objected when given the option to play a gay person. If you don't see a problem with that, you're kind of screwed up.