Josh Haas's Web Log - Latest Comments

Re: The Weirdness of Kentucky Route Zero

oblio333 — Mon, 11 Jan 2021 22:49:33 -0000

woah. my mind is pretty bent by this. very interesting. I never play games... no time. still this seems a different thing. loved the read!

Re: Moral relativism in Scott Pilgrim

Stalker's Stalker — Sat, 05 Aug 2017 03:00:46 -0000

Beautifully explained

Re: New toy… building a meditation feedback loop!

Josh Haas — Fri, 17 Apr 2015 17:24:01 -0000

Sadly, not really... I started to hit diminishing returns after a while and shelved it. I was relying on the built-in "meditation" metric, which is a composite of the raw input, and I decided that while it was definitely tracking something related to relaxation, it wasn't really tracking meditation. So the next step would have been to look at the raw output and do my own signals processing, but I got deterred by the combination of a) that being a lot of work, and b) the likely possibility that the raw signal doesn't contain enough information to begin with.

Re: New toy… building a meditation feedback loop!

Stefan — Fri, 17 Apr 2015 16:06:08 -0000

Sounds interesting, have you progressed this at all?

Re: Marrying Boto to Tornado: Greenlets bring them together

Oleksandr — Sat, 30 Aug 2014 18:35:43 -0000

Hi, thank You for the article it helped me to make pynamodb works asynchronous (using greenlet). While I working on this, I found that we can easily make botocore use tornado AsyncHTTPClient, and I wrote a simple wrapper that doing this: https://github.com/nanvel/t....

Re: What we’re trying to do with Bubble

Josh Haas — Sat, 31 May 2014 23:35:02 -0000

Sadly, sadly true.

Re: What we’re trying to do with Bubble

sflicht — Fri, 30 May 2014 22:22:40 -0000

"Love it or hate it, what would the world look like without Microsoft Word?"

It would have better kerning. :P

Re: So You Say You Want a Revolution

Josh Haas — Tue, 20 May 2014 20:47:02 -0000

Yes, you can still identify people as labor or capital. Take a list of roles:

-U. S. Senator
-School teacher
-Hedge fund founder
-Hedge fund middle manager
-Trust fund kid partying it up
-Associate at a VC firm
-Software developer hopping from job to job for whoever pays the most cash
-Software developer who quits and raises capital for a startup
-HR employee at a fortune 500 company
-Political lobbyist
-Taxi driver
-Young guy working on an oil rig
-Judge in federal court

You could go down that list and mark each role as "labor" or "capital". But is that categorization the most meaningful division you could make to this list? Does that sorting provide insight into how each of those roles is changing over time? How they should change over time?

Likewise, I agree that there are structures -- corporate, economic, legal, social -- that support inequality and environmental destruction. But what does it mean to "overthrow" them? Overthrow implies that someone is in charge, and that you could kick that someone out and put someone else in charge. What does overthrowing Walmart look like? What does overthrowing credentialism look like? What does overthrowing outsourcing look like? What does overthrowing racism look like?

I'm not trying to be pessimistic about change. I just think the old metaphors for talking about it are stale, and that they need to be re-imagined.

Re: So You Say You Want a Revolution

Josh — Tue, 20 May 2014 19:29:06 -0000

If you interpret labor as those who work for their living, and capital as those who own the means of production and live off of their accumulated or inherited earnings and the surplus created by others working for wages, then labor and capital still exist in nearly precisely the same forms as Marx originally posited. There are myriad corporate, economic, legal and social structures that support economic inequality and environmental destruction--each of these is an opportunity to overthrow something very tangible.

Re: A modest proposal to fix science

Josh Haas — Mon, 12 May 2014 11:09:21 -0000

If they start with the summary executions, I'll let you take the credit for it :-)

I agree the ability for researchers to choose which labs to give their business to creates incentive problems, but I think those incentive issues are an order of magnitude easier to manage than incentive problems caused by researchers doing the work in-house. With outsourced labs, you can have a well-defined API between researchers / labs, and have comparative metrics between different labs, so it's easier to see if one lab is always giving researchers the results they want to hear. With credit rating agencies, the customer base was very homogenous -- a few big banks -- whereas there's thousands of different groups doing research across the country, so I don't think it would get as incestuous.

Re: A modest proposal to fix science

Taj — Sat, 10 May 2014 09:47:51 -0000

There's a big incentives problem here, analogous to that of the credits ratings agencies. Researchers are much more likely to carry on doing business with labs that always give them good news. You could legislate it away by requiring researchers to cycle through all the qualified labs, but then think of the inefficiencies.

Also I agree with the anon! It's not a "modest proposal" unless you're suggesting, say, summary execution of scientists whose results aren't reproducible.

Re: Her: the scariest movie of 2013

Paul Torek — Sun, 04 May 2014 14:36:42 -0000

Yes, Samantha is way more intelligent than Theodore. That's deeply disturbing to me, but then I'm an AI worrier. "Maybe some day you'll join" the AI world is scary to me, because I don't think AIs will be structured so as to accommodate all the important aspects of humanity, but that's an obscure worry. Many sci-fi authors and fans never even entertain my worry, and most who do dismiss it as primitive chauvinism, and are enthusiastic about "uploading". So "join me" isn't scary to most.

You're probably right about Samantha's love. Not sure why that's scary, as opposed to just weird or interesting.

Re: Her: the scariest movie of 2013

Josh Haas — Sun, 04 May 2014 14:16:02 -0000

Well, figuring out the director's intent is always a bit of a guessing-game, but a few things make me think it's not just us projecting our own thoughts about this onto the movie:

-The mention of Alan Watts, and the briefly alluded-to exploration of AI personal identity. Theodore might hear "I have other lovers" when Samantha starts talking about her other lovers, but I think the audience is meant to hear "Love, like all aspects of human experience, could be completely reimagined in a transhuman future".

-The way Samantha becomes obviously more intelligent than Theodore in the ending. That's a weird move to make if the audience is supposed to be socially critiquing Theodore's world.

-Samantha's throwaway line near the end, "maybe some day you'll join me".
Anyway, I agree it's subtle...

Re: Her: the scariest movie of 2013

Paul Torek — Sun, 04 May 2014 13:31:33 -0000

"Deeply disturbing" to you and me, sure, but I don't see it coming from the writer/director. Convince me I just missed it. Related: I see the sci fi as part of the frosting. A sheep in sheep's clothing. Social satire is there, sure, no problem with that part.

Re: Her: the scariest movie of 2013

Josh Haas — Sun, 04 May 2014 13:10:19 -0000

Which part don't you buy? I'm proposing a meaning layer cake: romantic tragicomedy as the frosting, covering a layer of social satire, with a sci fi story hidden at the bottom. Would you stack the cake differently? Switch out layers?

Re: Her: the scariest movie of 2013

Paul Torek — Sun, 04 May 2014 13:05:16 -0000

"Her seems conscious of the fact that it’s wrapping a deeply
disturbing science fiction story in the sheep’s clothing of romantic
tragicomedy and social satire."

One of us clearly misunderstood this movie. Convince me that it's me?

Re: Freedom and (Sub)-Culture

Josh Haas — Sat, 03 May 2014 19:11:44 -0000

Hey Sam, thanks for the link. This is a great exploration of some of the factors driving subcultures -- I like the comparison to the tradeoff of being a chess grandmaster. I don't trust either end of the spectrum -- ignoring subcultures, or climbing one subculture's hierarchy. I think there's a creative, interesting space in between, connecting the dots between them...

Re: Her: the scariest movie of 2013

Josh Haas — Sat, 03 May 2014 18:41:36 -0000

Do you identify with Theodore, at least a little bit? If so, that might explain your discomfort. And in that case, it is meaningful -- it's insight into your identity, and where that identity is vulnerable.

If that sounds right to you (it may be totally off base), the next interesting question is, what specifically did I say about Theodore that triggered your discomfort, and why?

Re: Her: the scariest movie of 2013

Kevin — Sat, 03 May 2014 16:58:40 -0000

Were you trying to insult the character Theodore? If so, that is what I suspected and that made me uncomfortable. If not, it is still what I suspected and that made me uncomfortable.

However I do not know whether my discomfort is meaningful in any way.

Re: Freedom and (Sub)-Culture

sflicht — Sat, 03 May 2014 13:57:02 -0000

Josh, when we met at brunch last month you and I were discussing the HPMOR subculture. Anyhow I just found this article on subcultures by someone who (roughly) belongs to that subculture: http://www.gwern.net/The%20...

Pretty interesting!

Re: A modest proposal to fix science

Paul Torek — Fri, 02 May 2014 16:46:34 -0000

How about requiring the submitter (e.g. pharma company, university) to throw in a few phony hypotheses? (And the FDA / another university could act as middleman to blind the CRO as to which hypotheses are wild and crazy.) If too many of the phony hypotheses come out "verified", you know something is wrong.

Re: A modest proposal to fix science

Corey Yanofsky — Fri, 02 May 2014 15:17:21 -0000

Oof. That's not a simple question to answer; I can only really tell you about what I do as a biostatistician doing analyses and writing reports in one CRO: deliverables are set out in the contract, analyses are laid out in analysis plans before the data are in hand (a mutually-approved plan is usually one of the deliverables), and a good deal of care is taken to account for multiple comparisons, in my shop, at least. In any event, I would say that the false-positive/false-negative distinction is symptom of "dichotomitis", a mental disorder that causes researchers and journal editors to put results into one of two bins labelled "discovery" and "non-discovery".

GLP is a very exhaustive standard, and good science can be performed without GLP compliance -- only CROs that want a slice of the regulatory application market bother with it. There's a lot of commercial science prior to the push to get a product to a regulated market. That said, the notion that peer review is a guarantee of good science is indeed laughable.

GLP-style, but less stringent, laboratory record-keeping is a necessity for good science. The problem is that it's time-consuming and doesn't produce immediate scientific "returns", so the temptation to be sloppy in the cause of "getting on with the science" is very strong.

Re: A modest proposal to fix science

Josh Haas — Fri, 02 May 2014 14:12:26 -0000

Cool, so how do you think the results obtained by CROs compare to the results contained by universities, etc. in terms of likelihood of false positives?

Amusingly, the GLP wikipedia article's criticism section says "Some researchers make the argument that since studies that do not meet these quality standards may be published in peer reviewed scientific journals, good science may be performed without GLP compliance." Which is sort of the same point we're talking about, in reverse...

Re: A modest proposal to fix science

Corey Yanofsky — Fri, 02 May 2014 13:15:49 -0000

All CROs want a broad and growing customer base to insulate the business against the risk of losing any particular client, so they devote a fair bit of resources to marketing and sales. If one customer comes to dominate the CRO's bottom line, that could cause a problem with independence -- but that would only happen if there was a larger problem of gross mismanagement of the kind that inclines investors to fire and replace C-level executives.

This being understood, CROs do live and die by their reputation for providing useful data to clients -- and faked data are not useful. For example, the company I work for was audited by a prospective client because the client's previous CRO had been discovered to have provided faked data, and the client was once bitten, twice shy. (We passed.)

The regulatory agencies require data to be collected according with a standard called Good Laboratory Practice (GLP). GLP standards require an audit trail be generated for any data set. No CRO wants to have GLP noncompliance result cause the shitcanning of a client's application -- that would be incredibly bad for business.

Re: A modest proposal to fix science

Josh Haas — Fri, 02 May 2014 12:42:10 -0000

Well, I think I'm joking... I don't honestly think this will ever happen, since currently university research is subsidized by the false hope of grad students and postdocs, so I have to imagine outsourcing it would be much more expensive