knzhou

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571.
by knzhou 7y ago
Scientific figures aren’t designed for public consumption either; the intended audience is the set of other scientists subscribed to that journal.
572.
by knzhou 7y ago
Diagrammatic intuition is good. I use Feynman diagrams every day. But nobody computes with Feynman diagrams, they use them as an intuition aid to tell them what to compute, and that computation is done using standard notation.
573.
by knzhou 7y ago
There’s nothing wrong with using graphical intuition, my point is that nobody ever uses graphical notations to compute . For example, Feynman diagrams are a great way to tell you what to compute, but then the computation itself is always
574.
by knzhou 7y ago
I’ve seen a lot of people enamored with graphical notations like this one, but nobody ever using them for anything nontrivial. In general, people just use them to laboriously reproduce a few results from undergrad courses, nothing more. If
575.
by knzhou 7y ago
It will not change as long as the laws of supply and demand continue to hold. Science funding has been continuously rising at an incredible pace for the last century, causing the field to grow by nearly two orders of magnitude. But we are a
576.
by knzhou 7y ago
Incidentally, some actual number crunching [0] shows that the lead levels in Flint were never that high, being less than the average level in many states, and like everywhere else in America had been declining significantly over decades.
577.
by knzhou 7y ago
Do some order of magnitude calculations. There isn't enough storage space to reasonably collect everybody's video feed continually. It would require a significant chunk of literally all bandwidth that exists. If the NSA were activ
578.
by knzhou 7y ago
Every week or so there's a new theory that some tech company is constantly using your phone's microphone or camera and siphoning all the data back to HQ. Every time the reason is the same: incompetence. Something like this can res
579.
by knzhou 7y ago
It’s an example of Russell conjugation. My country performs enlightened regulation. Your country causes unintended consequences. Their country ruthlessly promotes digital nationalism. Three verb phrases, one meaning.
580.
by knzhou 7y ago
Are you British by any chance? The UK press really is different from the US, in that you guys have newspapers with a variety of slants, from left to right, which most everyone is aware of. But in the US, the common perception is that there
581.
by knzhou 7y ago
> Obama and the Democratic Party are, by no stretch of the imagination, far-left. Indeed. My point is that social media works about equally well for both mainstream left (the Obama campaign) and mainstream right (the Trump campaign). It
582.
by knzhou 7y ago
And I can write a similarly plausible narrative in the opposite direction. "Somebody who is starting to do yoga is definitely going to be affected by a yoga mat ad. But political opinions involve deeply held personal convictions, cultu
583.
by knzhou 7y ago
Indeed. That would be a good argument that social media, circa 2008, was biased towards the left, not against it.
584.
by knzhou 7y ago
And so why is the former consistently portrayed as useless, while the other (targeted in precisely the same way, in fact probably less accurately) is portrayed as literal mind control?
585.
by knzhou 7y ago
You're perfectly correct. The advantage of social media, if it exists at all, is symmetric between right and left. The 2008 Obama campaign was universally celebrated in the press for its deft use of social media [0, 1, 2, 3, 4], which
586.
by knzhou 7y ago
This article, like many many others, dances between two contradictory narratives. On one hand, it's claimed that targeted advertising just doesn't work, and it's a bunch of pointless, flashy tech which advertisers are wasting
587.
by knzhou 7y ago
> Physics is a subject where for almost every topic (be it classical mechanics, optics, quantum physics, etc) there are several different frameworks (which are equivalent but distinct), and none of which can be "falsified" beca
588.
by knzhou 7y ago
> Popper led us astray into a reductive outlook on science that led us directly to the replication crisis in the social sciences, Amy Cuddy and power poses and much more. People act like this is a mathematical problem and it can be fixed
589.
by knzhou 7y ago
I would prefer an empirical approach, as some take in macroeconomics. Just parametrize things you care about in terms of measureable quantities, and go out and measure them. Once you have that, there's no need to slap on some model tha
590.
by knzhou 7y ago
There's nothing wrong with ArXiv. There's a lot of bad stuff on there, but the overall quality there is higher than the average published work, which is dominated by the many many low-tier journals out there.
591.
by knzhou 7y ago
I find the creation of physics-inspired sociological models distasteful. It's often a way of manufacturing certainty and authority through mathematical obsfucation. It always runs the same way. First, you think of some political opinio
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by knzhou 7y ago
No, because blocking people takes one click. You can completely solve the problem in literally two seconds. For that reason, I’m more confident of my privacy when on social media sites than in real life.
593.
by knzhou 7y ago
> Care to name any other place where data like that exists in such an aggregated format? Come on. Both political parties maintain databases of voters containing plenty of personal information. When people canvas door to door they know pr
594.
by knzhou 7y ago
Sure, but do you really think this basic information about general political leanings wasn’t available before social media? 2004 wasn’t the stone age.
595.
by knzhou 7y ago
This is the clearest explanation of this topic I've ever seen -- my sticking point has always been exactly what you just explained. Is there a good place to get more macroeconomic explanations like this?
596.
by knzhou 7y ago
No, there are intelligent people everywhere. But intelligent people are often catastrophically wrong when writing on a topic about which they know nothing.
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by knzhou 7y ago
And blocking social media stalkers is much much easier than stopping real ones. It is indeed a different game, but I don't think it's qualitatively worse.
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by knzhou 7y ago
Obviously there isn't! I don't know what goes into running this site, but personally, if I know I'm guaranteed to get a totally one-sided take, I'd rather have the one from the people who actually know how to code.
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by knzhou 7y ago
I once took a "media and society" class where I was told that critical thinking meant to take all my facts from the New York Times alone, that the NYT was infallible, and that I shouldn't even try to evaluate facts from &quot
600.
by knzhou 7y ago
You could find much much more personal information about your friends before social media, the old fashioned way -- stalking. Both stalking and this kind of data scraping have the same response: get better friends.

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