> impossible to draw any conclusion from a successful big project abroad
Wait, we can draw conclusions from France building a different reactor (but only its latest ones, which were most expensive) but not from China building an AP1000?
We can independently verify the plant was built. And we can confirm what Westinghouse was paid. We can’t see other costs incurred, which is why I’m solely citing them for time, not cost.
Very helpful reply, thanks. I use it every day and have no issues getting to to generate an appropriate tone for my responses so I want more concrete examples of the issues.
There's also the types that fold like a book with a second screen on the outside. So when folded, it's like a thick normal phone, but when unfolded it's like a small tablet. I've never quite understand the appeal of the flip-style foldable, seems like the only advantage is taking up less space in your pocket.
I find it ironic that "We think too much and feel to little" appears to contradict the conclusion at the end "Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness."
I don’t see the contradiction. Humans can be emotional and at the same use science to make all humans life better! In fact why would we ever develop any technology that makes life better for others if we don’t have any feelings for them?
The contradiction arises because the user "flashback" depicts it as an either-or scenario. It shouldn't be interpreted as an exclusive OR statement; instead, there might be a nuanced interplay between thinking and feeling.
It's weird that we live in a time where my initial reaction upon reading your comment was "this guy is definitely an AI bot". "That" phrasal structure + freshly created account? I'm simultaneously thinking that maybe I'm being unfair to a real human being and that I'm not really sure if I should care at this point... maybe the new machine men with machine hearts will be more humane than the machine men with machine hearts we have today.
Too many policies are based on too little reason, with too much feeling, all while thinking they're scientific, but without taking human feelings into account, they fail harder each time they are tried. But who am I to know better; Surely with the right person in charge, this time it will work…
I think feel isn't precise enough, maybe compassion is better? In the speech, Chaplain opposes the Nazis, yet the main tool the Nazis used to gain and hold power in Germany was by emotion, distributed thru speeches on the radio especially. Hitler was a highly emotional speaker. WWII didn't occur due to a lack of feeling.
Was there more emotional rhetoric than is otherwise used in politics?
Personally the “hitler mind controlled everyone with his speach” theory that I was told in the 90s just isn’t convincing. Facism was in the zeitgeist around the world.
They believed the "stabbed in the back" narrative like the US establishment believed there were weapons of mass destruction in Irak.
It was a motivated belief, thoroughly uninformed by rational thought, and maintaining and spreading that belief took no small amount of blatant lies and cynicism.
I disagree. Science would suggest that separating a human from their emotions (like via emotional suppression) is illogical — a one-way ticket to mental health disorder. Thus, to obey reason, one must feel enough (and regulate vs suppress those feelings).
On the other hand, following the teachings of Surak, which you effectively reference here, would be seen as highly logical by some. Though perhaps hard to practice by humans.
I would say that's a straw vulcan. Emotion are data and drivers of our actions.
A Vulcan would not say "emotions are illogical." They would say "What does this emotion says and does it make sense in this situation?" Or "how would I feel more appropriately for this situation?". Or "this emotion doesn't make sense for this situation."
Sometime, it's more appropriate for us to rely on intuition and instinct and it would be more rational for us to do that instead. Imagine someone's about to be hit by a car. You have only seconds to move them out of the way. You don't have time to ponder so you just do it.
Thinking and logic is a general problem solving tool that's very useful in certain context, but they are very slow to use. By itself it is not a complete toolkit for dealing with emotional issues. Can't exactly make yourself less angry using just logic alone. You need some emotional tools to dial down counterproductive emotions.
It's interesting how statements can sometimes seem contradictory on their own. The first statement may highlight the importance of emotions, while the concluding one emphasizes reason and progress.
Together they might suggest a balance between thoughtful reflection and the hope of a rational and progressive world.
Maybe "reason" means thinking and feeling at the same time. Because if you think hard enough, you start thinking about what is important in bigger and bigger ways, and that eventually leads you to fundamental human values, which involve feelings.
I can’t think of a single fact on its own that presents any danger. If anything, facts through the lens of ideology may become dangerous, but data on its own is like technology. Neutral without application, good or evil depending on situation.
Hypothetically if the world's scientists were to all prove that blacks were inferior to whites, what good would come out of that? I can't think of a single good thing that would come from that- the world would be worse for knowing such a fact.
Right. Humanity is not defined by IQ or knowledge, and it's perfectly okay for people to prefer the company of some without denying the humanity of others.
If this were proven, we would be forced to set a rigorous foundation for our values where all people have the same rights and worth regardless of how smart they are. Instead of saying people are only equally worthy if they are equally smart, and hoping no one proves the latter wrong.
First you would need to define a measure of inferiority.
I'm pretty sure we have measured some very spicific things, and found that different races on average have some genetic advantages and disadvantages. Is saying that Asians are disadvantaged in milk drinking competitions making society worse? Also, because humans are diverse, differences between individuals within any racial group can be far greater than differences between races.
And if you compare men and women, the differences are much much bigger, and the comparisons much more frequent - you can barely turn on the TV or open up any social media without seeing them.
The issue with your hypothetical is that it presupposes a factual metric for superiority and inferiority. They’re all at best reductive to a single metric that likely doesn’t have much power in making a determination or a subjective weighting of many different factors. There is no factual superiority or inferiority, you’re again getting at judging facts through the lens of ideology.
Too much of any of those is bad. Four year olds are driven by feeling only. Psychopaths are driven by thought only. You don't want the world in the hands of any of those.
It's a good mix of both feeling and reason that we should strive for.
It's only a paradox under the widespread myth that reason and feelings are opposites. People who know their science understand that all rational thought is grounded on emotion and deep-rooted feelings.
> Nazi Germany thought their way to the holocaust.
That's bullshit though. You don't think your way to holocaust, you hate and greed and fear your way to it. Those are all feelings. Even indifference to the violence and death of others is a feeling - or at least fear-driven emotional defense mechanism.
The Nazis weren't "machine men, with machine minds and machine hearts", no matter how much it nicely riffs off machine guns being a relatively new experience for most of the world back then. They weren't Vulcans or Skynet. It's important to study how and why they ended up doing what they did, but science and reason is not it, and tarnishing those aspects of being human is not the right lesson to take from that period of history.
Facts and reason mean little to fascists and authoritarians. Any excuse is sufficient to justify the hatred, fear, and greed needed to run such machines of repression. If the facts don't support the narrative then "alternative facts" will be made to. They are populist enterprises arising from how people feel, and continuing because nobody wants to admit they're wrong.
Eugenics and Phrenology were very relevant at the time and used as a scientific basis to justify many attrocities.
It's important to remember that science evolves, and what we "know" to be part of scientific knowledge today might be debunked in the future. Specially with the state of peer review in the social sciences my feeling is many things that are said to be scientific fact today will be proven wrong later, including whole fields.
Easier to trust more fundamental aspects of math and physics, but even in those fields, on the bleeding edge many things can change.
The current zeitgeist is that science is as holy as religion used to be, and because there's so many anti-science people gaining a voice on the internet, it's sometimes easy to forget that we're not perfect at science and we also make wrong turns while we trudge our way through the scientific method.
Well yes, and that is obvious today, at the time they were reputable fields, just look it up.
And if you read that in history, what does that tell you about the present and the possibility of it being the case with some fields today?
My point is obviously not to defend those fields, but to say that pseudoscience maskerading as science isn't a thing that can only happen in the past.
It's a bit strange to learn about the fact that it happened before yet not accept the possibility that some of the things we call science today, aren't.
This depends a lot on what you means by "eugenics". Some people use the word to be a normative word (a statement about what should be) others positive word (a statement about what IS or could be). E.g. "We can use CRISPR and genetic screening to make people resistant to HIV" vs "we should do so".
The former is a question of fact ("is this possible?") though often with a bunch of unspoken subquestions ("can we do this change without causing incidental genetic changes or damaging the egg?") and in the realm of science while the latter is a question of policy and feelings (how much do we want HIV resistance? What is the price we're willing to pay/risk we're willing to take? Does deliberately altering humanity open a can of worms best left unopened?).
Conflation between normative and positive meanings are quite common across a wide variety of domains and can cause substantial confusion as two people can think they're talking about the same thing but actually aren't.
Even in the "should" case there's a bunch of confusion as to what sort of things should count as "eugenics", with some people wanting the term to apply only to coercive measures and others wanting the term to apply to any deliberate changes to a population's gene pool (and theres the grey area in the middle where financial incentives happen).
Note: A lot of politically fraught words will have a number of similar but different meanings as various interest groups fight over them. From "war" and "violence" to "culture" and "science" to "person" and "rights".
> used as a scientific basis to justify many attrocities
That's the operating phrase though. Throughout history, atrocities were justified using whatever was seen as the higher authority at the moment - the will of a deity, the words of a prophet, the decree of a king, appeal to destiny or legacy, and yes, science too. Especially in the early XX century, when science was kicking into gear, and delivering miracles left and right for everyone to see - it was easy tool to abuse to justify whatever the leaders wanted or needed to.
Doesn't mean the science itself is at fault here.
I didn't read up much on phrenology so I won't comment on it, but RE eugenics, I see it as a mix of good and bad ideas that sprouted in an environment full of aforementioned hatred and otherwise devoid of moral and ethical boundaries[0]. I feel it's more of a historical coincidence of fledging science and then-contemporary zeitgeist, rather than an innate feature of science. The resulting effect is that even the word itself - eugenics - casts a long shadow on research in fields like genetics, medicine and economics. There are whole subsections of those fields you can't discuss in polite company, 'lest someone rounds your thinking off to "eugenics" and therefore paint you as "nazi". This is a bad outcome.
> Easier to trust more fundamental aspects of math and physics, but even in those fields, on the bleeding edge many things can change.
That's true. There's this thing though. I can't put my finger on it, so it might be just a benefit of hindsight, but there's a notably different feeling when you reason from current state of knowledge in a correct way, vs. when you abuse it to justify whatever self-serving or atrocious idea you want. The atrocities committed under the label "eugenics" feel very much like the latter. But again, this may be just hindsight, and we may all be vulnerable to a new flavor of that mistake today.
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[0] - Notably, some of which were developed only after those events. E.g. the Nazis weren't the only ones willing to do brutal, lethal scientific experiments on POWs, and, to my understanding, the consensus and principle to not do that was achieved in response to the atrocities of WWII.
Yes I didn't mean to say it was at fault, I was mostly bringing to light that _at the time_ the people doing these things thought they were being scientific about it, or convinced themselves of it. I agree with all your points in the follow up and think about it in very similar ways.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
I'd be interested in whether this meets the bar but once again you've got 5 million other users to see to so if you don't have the time you don't have the time.
"Just asking questions" isn't a low-flamebait strategy for that material. Worse, your account is giving the impression of mostly being interested in promoting it, and that's not an ok use of HN, so please stop.
INFO: I've gone through my last 200 comments on HN[1] trying to figure out what it is I'm trying to promote. Other than the last few comments it seems to be heavily AI and Musk related with nothing related to Nazis, Eugenics or other such things.
I've also done full history searches for various things that could be the "it" you refer to, but my HBD discussion was about three years and several thousand comments ago and I have only a few posts that mention "eugenics" and they're all about word meanings, so I think you are referring to my repeated attempts to lecture people on meanings of words (trying to teach clear thinking about word definitions and ideally teaching people about why Tabooing words[2] is an important rationality technique). But while they are admittedly quite common, they actually seem to get almost no engagement and would be quite ineffective flame bait.
I will still stop as that's what you want though. :(
That's just in the last few months, it just keeps on going with 'What if we didn't call people with Nazijacent ideologies Nazis' and so forth. Just cut it out.
Every single one of those is either a bold-faced lie about the content or shows no reading comprehension on your part. You're behaving like a phrasal affect model that simply checks for the presence of words and whether the surrounding context is more positive or negative rather than actually reading and understanding sentences.
Aside: They are also from the past 12 months out of 1000 comments in that period.
First one is "eugenics is an ill-defined term that means different things to different people, some meanings such as offering free embryo screening are things that have mainstream debate about whether they are good or not".
Second one is "eugenics was not the reason for the Holocaust", which is basically true as far as I know. It was racism, hatred and jealousy.
Third one is a complaint about confusing "AI not embarrassing corporations" with "AI not killing everyone". With an example of an embarrassing thing to say being answering questions about IQ distributions.
Fourth one is using "supremacist" as an example of a general problem where people conflate every form of bad all together with no nuance or understanding.
Fifth one is about the limits of science and whether some research should be banned.
My most important goal in almost every case is teaching people how to think. To substitute in a word for the specific meaning intended in that instance and stop thinking in terms of word affect and tribal signalling. Sure, I could use less contentious examples but then the lessons lose a lot of impact and people shrug and go "Oh, no one would be so stupid as to confuse being in the same superset with the identity function", but people actually do this all the time whenever politics or tribalism comes into play!
That said, I'm sufficiently unsure on what dang's intent is that I'm going to try to come up with other examples... It's just really bloody hard when the main thing that triggers people to stop thinking clearly is strong emotion and politics, so every example that people will recognize as a real example that I can think of has... strong emotions and politics. Probably something about the word "family" is the best I can do.
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I find it very irksome how you seem to have the idea that anyone who has not subordinated every single principle of honesty, specificity and reason in favor of ensuring bad guys are always labelled maximally bad is also bad. If someone says "Hitler really enjoyed kicking puppies!" and someone else said "That's incorrect, Hitler was a dog lover" you'd probably assume the latter person is a Nazi rather than thinking they're an xkcd 386. An assumption which is very likely going to be factually incorrect (and if it wasn't then the local environment's discourse norms would have degenerated sufficiently that they can no longer self correct, with every statement that signals the right direction/allegiance being perpetuated regardless of accuracy in a manner that will purity spiral aggressively as the body of common knowledge distorts).
I don't know if the fact you're still making these same mistakes is because I'm a bad teacher or because you literally aren't reading what I'm writing. Not assessing sentences for meaning/truth but instead trying to understand motivations and allegiances, rounding every statement to the most similar sounding one you recall seeing before and assuming your models of people's personalities and motivations is correct and complete based on your bubbled experience.
People can simply read your comments and make up their own minds whether they are about 'nuance' or simply promotion of a baleful ideology with genocidal consequences. You're a self-described 'race realist', another word for race pseudoscience:
The rest is thoroughly transparent and generic 'just asking questions' schtick. You're not owed nuanced understanding for that - just social opprobrium, an insistent request you keep this shit off HN and the earnest hope you outgrow what is not some secret suppressed truth but garden variety bigotry.
I don't want you to spend another hour stressed and trembling so let's stop here.
For calibration purposes so i can get a better feel for the threshhold for "substantial", could you tell me whether the unsubstantive proportion is more like 1%, 10%, 50% or 90%?
(I'll understand completely if you don't have the time to reply though)
There are even 1D cameras - e.g. scanners, finish line cameras for races, some old barcode scanners (although most can do 2D now and even those that only support 1D barcodes might make use of a 2D camera).
Pixels are a unit of area like an acre or square meter (see [1] if skeptical). So a line of pixels is still 2D, in the same way a 1x5 unit rectangle is a 2D object with an area of 5 units squared. I'm not sure there's an accepted name for a 1 dimensional picture element. Maybe lenxel, working backwards from length like voxels works backwards from volume?
I like the sibling's suggestion about audio; if we were to adopt it, it would make a 1D element a "sample".
[1] People are often confused on this point, because in the course of everyday conversation we don't distinguish between the number of pixels on the side of a rectangle (which is a 1D quantity) and the number of pixels inside that rectangle (a 2D quantity). So if I say I have a 10 pixel by 10 pixel image, what I mean is that I have a grid with an area of 100 pixels, with sides measuring 10 pixel-widths by 10 pixel-heights (each a 1D quantity of length). If that looks awkward and tiresomely pedantic to you, well, that's why we just say pixels and let the details be implied.
If you're still skeptical, consider for instance that voxels are more clearly a unit of volume (think Minecraft blocks), and that pixels are obtained by subdividing a rectangle. Another useful way to think about it might be by replacing "pixels" with "dominos" and imagining making grids out of dominos, pixels can be tricky since you can't see their area yourself.
Still, fixed size pixels arranged in a line, where each pixel's position is described by a single coordinate, could be called a 1-dimensional arrangement of pixels. You could do the same with voxels, or corn fields of 1 ha each, or hypercubes.
Yeah, if you have an array of pixels or hypercubes, you can think of it as a 1D array and leave the details of what's contained below your barrier of abstraction. And that's a useful mental model much of the time.
But I would still argue that an array of pixels doesn't represent a 1D image. If a 2D image associates areas with color or intensity values, a 1D image would associate intervals with color or intensity values (since intervals are the measure of 1D space which is analogous to areas in 2D space). In my mind, those are different data structures, but the difference is pretty nuanced and I would understand if people felt I was splitting hairs.
Given the question, "what's a 1D image?" I'd argue this is the more complete answer. But if we were to ask that question in the context of a real world problem, yours is likely to be the more useful answer.
I've skimmed the article, it's gunnuh take me a while to read it so that I can respond properly. In case I don't get around to it, thanks for the article. It's an interesting perspective.
Am I so out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong!
But in all seriousness, call it what you want, I happen to enjoy this minutia but understand many people see it as an impediment to clear communication. If you're working in the unusual contexts where the difference matters you probably know.
You can render a video file as a volume. I've looked at using that to make a video compression algorithm that operated on the volume rather than on the 2D frame stream. My hunch was that shapes in the 3D volume changed more predictably than surfaces from frame to frame because the frames describe the movement of objects in space. But they're projected onto a two dimensional surface. So you get these interesting 3D shapes that have fairly predictable qualities across larger spans of time than your average 2D encoder sees while encoding a video. But I never could get it to work more efficiently than existing algorithms.
I suspect you'd need your compression to "understand" the object relationships and camera movement to do better than frame sequences, and it'd probably still be incredibly hard because you then add a lot of extra information first in the hope they let you discard more pixel data...
But the more you understand the scene, the more you can potentially outright reconstruct, and in some contexts more loss would be entirely fine if the artifacts are plausible.
That's exactly where I ended with this: I was decomposing the scene and realized that if you had the ability to do that reliably enough you'd be recreating a model rather than an image and then re-rendering that model. But at that point I don't think you are looking at a compression algorithm any more other than in the very broadest sense of the word. Boundaries between objects would start to look fuzzy otherwise. As in: you'd no longer know exactly where the table ended and the hand started unless you modeled it precisely enough and at that point you have an object model. So you might as well use it to render the whole scene.
Note that I did this in '98 or so, when there was less of a computational budget, maybe what I couldn't hack back then is feasible today.
> So, are video-files of 2D images technically 3D then?
Video files are a linked list of 2D images.
> and time-based volumetric recording of 3D video-games are 4D?
Kind of, but it would be an oversimplification. Typically when we refer to the dimensionality of objects, we're referring to physical dimensions. Time is a temporal dimension. I think it would be more specific to say this is a linked list of 3-dimensional images, right?
You don't have to think of it as a dimension if that obfuscates the problem or isn't a useful mental model for you, but "organizing" it is what a dimension does. You can think of an image as colors or intensities "organized by" (I would call it "indexed by") width and height. If you work with videos in machine learning, you generally accept a 6 dimensional tensor (width, height, time, red, green, blue - your order may vary, time often comes first. And you may use grayscale instead of color to reduce the number of dimensions.).
> If you work with videos in machine learning, you generally accept a 6 dimensional tensor (width, height, time, red, green, blue
(Assuming you do work with ML+videos) - it's surprising to hear you say you work with RGB instead of YUV - can you briefly explain how that's the case? I'd have thought that using luma/chroma separation would be much easier to work with (not just with traditional video tooling, but ML/NNs/etc themselves would have an easier time consuming it.
To clarify, I don't work professionally with videos, I've hacked on some projects and read some books about it. My professional experience with ML models is in writing backends to integrate with them, the models I've designed/trained were for my own education (so far, at least). The answer to your question is probably, "I'm a dilettante who doesn't know better, you may well know more than me."
I take the impression that much of the time, color doesn't provide much signal and gives your model things to overfit on, so you collapse it down to grayscale. (Which is to say, most of the time you care about shape, but you don't care about color.) But I bet there are problem spaces where your intuition holds, I'm sure that there's performance the be wrung out of a model by experimenting with different color spaces who's geometry might separate samples nicely.
I did something similarish a few months ago where I used LDA[1] to create a boutique grayscale model where the intensity was correlated to the classification problem at hand, rather than the luminosity of the subject. It worked better than I'd have guessed, just on it's own (though I suspect it wouldn't work very well for most problems). But the idea was to preprocess the frames of the video this way and then feed it into a CNN [2]. (Why not a transformer? Because I was still wrapping my mind around simpler architectures.)
