So many of the difficulties in reading many papers (well, disciplines) boil down to adding links to things the first time you mention them. Good academic writers do this, bad ones don’t. The gist of this paper is that assuming all knowledge prior to your development is very limiting, not only because far fewer people can read it, but because every time you don’t introduce knowledge you also skip over part of a story. Very well, but I think you are correct that CS’ problem is pretty much isolated to the first point, because nearly all papers get to talk about real world applications of the research and that’s the story covered.
A big problem for CS papers, particularly in PL (programming language research), seems to be heavy reliance on assumed knowledge of Greek letters and notation in the very field-specific way you like to use them. People would understand your paper if only they had read your previous three, which alluded to what you might have meant by these Greek letters, but only by figuring out the two citations they each have in common. If you are bad at pronouncing Greek letters and it’s a PDF so you can’t copy them, you can’t even google what you see. Even if you could, it wouldn’t help. Notation is ten times harder to search for.
(I have never, ever had this problem reading a law paper, not even slightly, not even once.)
Wittgenstein had this effect on me too. But not the Tractatus. What calmed me down was the Philosophical Investigations and Kripkes Naming and Necessity.
This was the case with my advisor as well. In his course on Wittgenstein, we read the Tractatus, but the focus was on The Philsophical Investigations as response to the Tractatus.
"stress and anxiety release" is strictly bs. Smoking raises your baseline anxiety and stress. Those only continue to increase as the time it takes for you to start withdrawal shrinks as you become more tolerant. A quick google will confirm this or I can do it and provide sources.
I also know this empirically because I was a half a pack a day smoker for a few years and I have never been more anxious, it was what drove me to quit.
You feel relief shortly because you're satisfying the addiction but at the general level you have more stress.
TIL and it's actually the fact that causes the seeking behavior which eventually forms the addiction. Epinephrine causes the kick and beta-endorphin the drop. Neat. I went and searched it up because I was curious and you surely are correct. Not sure why they're dumb categories though
How can something stimulate and sedate at the same time? It's legacy nomenclature that has become counterintuitive. Like how electrons are negative and holes are positive.
I mean it effects two separate systems that produce chemicals that cause different effects, one stimulates, and one sedates/depresses. It's not like the nicotine itself is doing both.
The worst part is the carcinogenic chemical soup they add to cigarettes is to make it more palatable to smoke several times a day. Self-medicating is big business.
"According to the U.S. National Cancer Institute: "Of the more than 7,000 chemicals in tobacco smoke, at least 250 are known to be harmful, including hydrogen cyanide, carbon monoxide, and ammonia. Among the 250 known harmful chemicals in tobacco smoke, at least 69 can cause cancer."
Sadly the lies, skewed narratives and new kinds of ideologies are abundant in media, politics and counter-culture this day.
Here are a couple of key concerns that I have with the data and the anti-covid measures :
1) There is no baseline. How many people die with a postive PCR-test for influenza or other coronaviruses each year? Did we ever test millions of sick people?
2) How did the morbidity actually change after the spread of Sars-CoV-2? If you want to measure this you need to compute some age-adjusted probability that people will die in a given year. Data from germany suggests that although ~100k people died, the probability to die didn't change much or at least changed around a typical baseline for the last 10 years.
3) If age-adjusted morbidity didn't change then PCR-tests measure natural morbidity to a large extend.
4) Nobody is talking about the negative impact of the lockdown. To name a few : less births in several countries in the EU, inflation, +60% cases of anorexia in german youth, +10% increased tabacco usage in germany, no proper schooling for 2 years, social cooling in general, ... I could go on endlessly.
5) The language changed. There are hundrets of new words invented around a common frame of reality in the last year. Everybody uses these words that nobody would understand nor use <=2019. This is very worrysome in my opinion because it shows a radical change in ideology of the population that goes way beyond a pandemic and shows changes in mass psychology.
1-3: Have you heard of "excess mortality"? (Genuine question, not snark). That's commonly used as a measure to understand the underlying mortality rather than "death within X days of a positive PCR test". E.g. https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
4: People are absolutely talking about the negative impact of the lockdowns. I'm not sure why you think otherwise - there have been robust debates about this, at least in the UK media. Perhaps what you mean is that you think it hasn't been taken into account in a way that you'd like?
5: This is a once-in-a-century event. Of course there's new language around it.
As mentioned in the article Sweden is part of EUROMOMO that tracks excess mortality which doesn't measure if someone died from covid or from negative effects of a lockdown but simply that they died.
Even though it's downplayed in the article Sweden had significant excess mortality in the spring of 2020 and at the turn of 2020-2021 compared to other countries like Norway and Finland that are used as benchmarks in the article.
1: This has nothing to do with excess mortality per se but rather with proper data analysis.
2-3: That's exactly what I mean but you should not measure excess mortality as absolute deaths / million people but you should adjust for demographics. Because if you have older population, you will have more expected deaths. And if you adjust for age the excess mortality vanishes for germany.
4: Yes, it is talked about but not to the extend that would be necessary. In reality most people experience the various negative consequences of the lockdown policies but very few the negative consequences of the virus.
5: This is certainly debatable. If you compare this to the HIV-pandemic (still ~1mio Deaths / yr), then Covid has a factor of 10^5 more public attention (but 2x the death toll). A similar number of people die of tuberculosis. Nobody knows how many people die of influenza or coronavirus each year. We suspect there are 100 Mio dengue virus infections each year. Nobody knows what a once-in-a-century pandemic is. It seems to be a matter of public attention and newness instead of careful data analysis.
Necessary for what? To convince everyone to stop with masks and restrictions?
It's not just about mortality rates. The other problem is hospitalizations. If you get in a bad car accident, get a bad infection, or have a pregnancy go bad you want an ICU bed not occupied by someone drowning from COVID. I expect most of these mortality rates are from places that didn't have their hospital systems collapse and have to ration care. I think US is heading there in some states, then mortality will get closer to that hospitalization rate.
Excess mortality has to somehow account for reduced commuting, reduced regular medical visits, more domestic violence, etc it's a mixed bag when you are dealing with pandemic behavioral changes do they have real models for all that?
The same baseline problem holds for hospitalizations as well. Nobody knows how many hospital beds were occupied in the last 10 years. Evidence points to a strong decrease in hospital capacity in germany at least in the last 20 years. Talking about "collapse of hospital system" is very bad in my opinion. No data shows that this actually happened in the EU at least. Also keep in mind that there is always (year does not matter) some place on earth where a hospital may collapse. So bergamo (italy) for example is just anecdotal evidence.
On possibly reduced mortality by lockdown : OK, fair enough. I think you can see it in decreased car accidents in germany and also in seemingly low influenza associated deaths. But my theory is that influenza and sars2 are evolutionary competing for vulnerable individuals and sars2 seems to be winning right now. I saw a nice study showing this for several flu-like viruses a couple of years ago. But getting enough and clean data for problems like this is very hard.
I think the lockdown has almost nothing to do with the virus but is a strange reaction to increased pressure of globalization and digitalization on the societies as well as a global economic crisis. Maybe lockdown policies will stay for a long time. But not to protect us from a dangerous virus but to ease some kind of mass anxiety and to make us ready for a new kind of governance focused on ai, big data and techocracy.
Here in Buenos Aires, 2 months ago, we a big covid19 wave an we had more than 90% of occupation of the ICU beds, after delaying all the medical procedures that was possible to delay. It was not normal, because during the rest of the pandemic it was much smaller, and the government of the city, and the government of the province that controls most of the area of the extended metropolitan area were worried. (They also had different opinions about how strict should be the lockdown, so they blamed each other.)
In Austria there were multiple times that all planned operations have been postponed. This has never happened previously. I would present that as a clear case of this being a different situation.
I'm talking from the point of view that the lockdown measures managed to keep ICU capacity open which reduced our current excess mortality observed. As far as I've read ICU capacity dropped greatly in many countries over the past decades, but my thinking is that we can't easily argue the various lockdown measures were bad using figures like national excess mortality because our current measures don't share the same baseline as an unrestricted pandemic free society.
Everyone has had vastly different experiences with the virus which affects views of the lockdown and behaviors.
Within the first few months of it in the US lost 3 coworkers to it, 1 known personally all around the same time. No clear mortality rate at the time, lockdowns made sense to us, it was real, we stayed masked up and crazy isolated.
By comparison to my father who knew no one affected at all for the first year or longer.
So to everyone outside of NY and California or wherever it started it was a whole lot of nothing. Either anxiety of virus that wasn't nearby for the vulnerable or another media hype like Swine flu or Avian flu or MERS that never really hit.
I'm sure there are still plenty of people who haven't been directly affected by the actual virus just the restrictions, only know people who maybe had a positive test or a short fever with their kids.
When people only get news loosely from posts on the internet I'm sure many ignore or miss the semi-regular pleas from doctors and nurses to take it seriously and keep the F out of the hospitals. Like one I recently saw from Florida.
I consider COVID a new killer in addition to flu, I assume flu vaccines actually work (imperfectly) to lessen symptoms and everyone's annual clichè claims that the vaccine makes them sick or does nothing is just repeating the same old shtick. To be fair I have no data to back that up that the influenza vaccine does anything but I think it just underscores the vague distrust of medicine floating about. I'm almost a scientist and optimistically drink the koolaid and get my flu shot annual and trust that government fda, cdc, whatever generally does want medicines to actually work to keep people working.
"to ease some kind of mass anxiety and to make us ready for a new kind of governance focused on ai, big data and techocracy."
I don't usually go along with these things that sound like grand control conspiracies.
The anxiety about globalization and digitization is probably part of all the conspiracy thinking. Globalization is moving what used to be semi livable jobs out and replacing livable wage work with software engineering and advanced degree jobs or rent seeking almost exclusively. Everyone else is getting squeezed by big corps, franchise contracts vs minimum wage, high tech gear with no right to repair, etc. Grand control conspiracies in my mind are a weird commiserating hope that the world sucks on purpose because some elite levers of power are making it that way when really the world sucks because a bunch of simple systems chasing money or power are making a big complicated mess the crushed the unlucky under the cruel invisible hand of the market.
On the other hand hearing vaguely about Turing being part of a team successfully handling details from the cracked enigma machine to steer WWII without letting Nazis realize the code was broken seems to give credit to the idea that the knowledge collected by agencies like the NSA could be used by geniuses around the world to manipulate things. But if they exist they do a great job making governments look dumb...
Mass anxiety is not a conspiracy theory but rather a measurable social effect. See social cooling.
I didn't say there is somebody controlling or forcing the population into technocracy. What I meant is that it is inevitable to some degree that tech will continue to shape our society in unexpected and unintended ways.
Even if I did. Nothing is wrong with good conspiracy theories. Sometimes they turn out to be true.
> There are hundrets of new words invented around a common frame of reality in the last year. Everybody uses these words that nobody would understand nor use <=2019.
You're probably right of course. But I've had the same impression recently (along with an increase in "everything is made-up nonsense" type articles), so I'd love to see if there's actually anything to my/their perceived up-tick in things like this. I wonder what's the easiest way to query front page Hacker News submissions over time...
I've seen junk drawer directories in repos full of similar files and usually the scripts don't get updated over time (perhaps the authors don't want to have their updates to the scripts reviewed). Having it with the file it manages commented out indicates it's intended as a purpose-built tool or historical artifact just for this file.
Beyond this it's just personal/team preference though.
I don't know why people are throwing around percentages so much in these replies. Percentage of what? Plus, the body of work of mathematics continues to grow all the time.
The core of the original comment that started this chain was:
> Applications of pure math happen downstream decades or centuries later.
My argument was that history shows that a surprising amount of mathematics does eventually trickle down into applications. I don't think anyone is arguing all of mathematics eventually sees an application.
Again, my point was that history does indeed seem to show that "applications of pure math happen downstream decades or centuries later". As the original commenter said, it's hard to predict what will be the next thing to be applied.
Also, WWII accelerated many discoveries in several areas of mathematics (in America, at least): statistics, optimization, control, numerical analysis. To such an extent, that many of those discoveries are still the main object of study in their respective areas and are being extended to more general versions.
What most ppl don't notice is that Gödels incompleteness theorems are themselves expressible only in a logic system capable of expressing Peano arithmetic. Now this means that they apply to themselves which means that we cannot know if they are made up from a axiomatic system that can prove anything.
This is not quite true, Gödel's incompleteness theorems can luckily be formalized in extremely weak fragments of Peano arithmetic such as primitive recursive arithmetic (PRA) with its very limited induction principle. :-)
The only position on the philosophy of mathematics I know which does not accept PRA is ultrafinitism.
It's ok to use logic to prove theorems in logic. We also use thinking to deduce some facts about our thinking. Self-reference is not always paradoxical. In a higher-order logic some self-referential definitions are legitimate.
Yes and then you can do self-referential statements again which leads you to the conclusion that Gödels theorems are provable only in a system that cannot prove its own consistency.
True, but it's not a logical paradox. The fact that a system can't prove its own consistency doesn't imply that this system is inconsistent. The fact that Godel's theorems are provable only in such systems also doesn't imply that they are wrong.
From the common sense the whole situation looks paradoxical, indeed. To prove consistency of some theory we have to use some stronger theory, to prove consistency of that theory we need even stronger theory and so on.
Perhaps, the best way to realize why there is no paradox is the following:
Our memory is finite. As well as our thinking. But the total number of true facts about mathematics is infinite. By constructing theories we are trying to compress the infinite number of true facts into some finite form. Godel's theorem says it's impossible. And it looks quite natural from this perspective.
I never said it is a paradox. I never said that PA or Q is inconsistent. I said that they cannot prove their own consistency by Gödels theorem. Hence we don't know if Gödels theorem was formalized in an inconsistent system.
Honestly it would be weird if the incompleteness theorems don't apply to themselves.
It's not Peano arithmetic, it is basically 'enough of' arithmetic for Goedel's methods to apply. Robinson arithmetic is weaker than PA but Goedel still applies. Goedel's argument is basically a meta-argument about any mathematical system which is rich enough to describe useful mathematics, it does not rely on any particular axiomatisation, rather it applies to all axiomatisations with a few simple features.
While it is true that Goedel's theorem applies to weak systems such as Robinson Arithmetic (and any decidable extensions there of), The proof of Goedel's result itself requires at least some amount of induction.
As a consequence the minimum system that Goedel's second incompleteness applies to is stronger than the minimum system that the first incompleteness theorem applies to.
Q cannot prove its own consistency. Which means there is no way of telling that Gödels theorems are proved in a theory that is inconsistent (where everything is true).
I’m not too knowledgeable on the topic, but Gödel’s proof uses a smaller logic system — on which a meta-language can be used to prove consistency/completeness. It is precisely about not being able to prove these properties “from within”.
Not the case for most CS papers.