So there were three deaths for who knows how many rides. How does this compare with bikes and cars? Surely some people die using those or any other means of transport, including walking.
So you also need to get rid of drug databases, PubMed, protein databases, etc.
This makes no sense. If your government is in such bad shape you have far bigger problems than keeping track of drug trials.
"Blockchain" just stores the same stuff lots and lots of times in as many places as possible. Extremely wasteful and expensive, with all the overhead of doing that (and updating hat "database"), plus the consensus algorithm which may or may not be reliable/crackable.
Is it a sign of the times, and maybe in some countries more than in others, that there is a hype around mistrust? Trying to build a world where trust is not necessary? I bet that won't work. I think you need to fix the trust issue more directly, working around the trust requirement won't work. It just creates huge complexity and even more points of failure. Especially since you would have to go "all in": What's the point in taking just one thing into the trust-free solution? All those things depend on one another, you would have to do it with all or most of them to get the benefit you are looking for. It may look manageable if you only look at one particular thing, but imagine everything had to be stored in such a way, the incredible effort required, and the more distribution there is the harder it is to understand what's going on.
You really think storing all kinds of data in as many places as possible and then trusting an algorithm to sort it all out, the "truth", works better than trust in a credible entity? At scale (in more than one dimension)?
> "Blockchain" just stores the same stuff lots and lots of times in as many places as possible. Extremely wasteful and expensive, with all the overhead of doing that (and updating hat "database"), plus the consensus algorithm which may or may not be reliable/crackable.
No. Blockchain doesn’t have to be wasteful. In general is enough to store the hash of the data in the blockchain and the data itself somewhere where it can be accessed. This prevents manipulation. If at least one trusted party has access to the data it also would not just vanished. If you had an permissioned blockchain signed by the top universities of the world it could be done for very little money.
There seems little upside between what this paper proposes and everybody just sending all data to all stakeholders of figure 1. The blockchain itself does not conserve confidentiality of placebo placements outside of this process and "Regulatory agency" and "Data safety monitoring board" are presumably two trusted parties that could, post hoc, compare their two databases and draw the same conclusions.
Adding a semi-public blockchain seems like a neat little tidbit but it mostly adds a formalization of the process (which would of course be a good thing) and buzzword-worthiness, thus warranting the "wasteful" label.
> permissioned blockchain [...] for very little money
Is that a solved problem yet?
> If your government is in such bad shape you have far bigger problems than keeping track of drug trials.
I agree with the parent but I also agree with this, at the very least with the US government. If you think it's not in bad shape then you're living in a fantasy. All it takes is somebody with an agenda to start changing facts from being science based to being what you personally believe in or what corporations want. One such example of this is Pruitt at the EPA.
For the current clinical trial mechanism to work at all, you are relying on a deep level of trust and professionalism. If you don't have that, you're going to have to imagine a radical, nearly complete transformation of how this sort of science is being done. If you do have that, I don't see what tracking a small piece of it with a blockchain really buys you.
There is no "double spend" possibility. There is necessarily a trusted source. Why not get the benefit of that centralized source and have the government host a plain database?
You seem to assume that extreme inequality in society is to be fought against only if it leads to an overall degradation of material prosperity. That is nonsense. People always wanted more equality for the same reason they wanted democracy, no matter what the level of material prosperity in a country. People have a deep-seated need to be engaged and to have a say in the unfolding of their own destiny at the scale of society, to have meaningful lives. Indeed, the average person in the US, EU, Japan, Australia, etc. has food, clothes, transportation, health-care (perhaps not US), technology and so on that would make the kings of 100 years ago envious. But they also know that their influence on society through conventional democratic means has decreased dramatically in the last 50 years, as the super-wealthy amassed the material and political means to control the decision-making process. And guess what? Many people hate that. Many people will not be bribed into political submission by knick-knacks, amusement and delicious snacks. There is deep resentment brewing.
Your argument is not bad. However there is also a stability issue you missed. The fundamental reason why democracy is proposed or the american dream is proposed is pacification, just like welfare. A calm population who think there is a defined set of fair rules and a path for success don't revolt. Its vitally important for societal stability that the general public doesn't notice they have no chance for improved conditions, in fact things only get worse for them, and they have no input on leadership because they get to vote, but only for almost identical hand picked candidates. If you can't have actual fairness, or actual progress, or actual democracy, it becomes very important to make sure no one notices. The next few decades are going to be very interesting to watch. Can enough riots be prevented by reality TV shows and football games and iDevice releases, or will the cities and gated subdivisions burn from lack of distraction from the fundamental problems?
We'll go with this definition of irony provided by the Google: "a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result."
Class warriors wanting to decrease inequality by getting the 1% to pay their fair share, not enter into global trade agreements, and keep jobs in America end up increasing inequality globally by focusing only on efforts to prop up the global 1%, the majority of whom live in the U.S. Sounds pretty ironic to me.
I do not see how this is a bad thing. It seems incorrect at some level, but claiming that things that compute are somehow categorically different is an appeal to magical thinking.
I would agree that claiming that a rock computes by not simply vanishing from one plank time to the next is not satisfying. This leads me to think that computation has much more to do with whether a particular being has reach a thermodynamic local minimum than anything else (lava does not compute since, despite being far more active than a rock, its behaviour can be explained by the fact that it is a couple thousand degrees hotter than a normal rock). Energy dissipation also does not fit the bill since stars dissipate energy but do not compute.
Unfortunately the thinking surrounding things like proteins look incredibly similar, their behavior changes as a function of ph and temperature, and most arguments that a protein computes are based on defining a function for that protein. This gets us nowhere, but it does suggest that it may not be possible to define computation in a way that excludes systems dissipating energy to reach thermodynamic local minima.
Re: "claiming that things that compute are somehow categorically different is an appeal to magical thinking" - This is not the case. The distinction that's being made is one of perspective and purpose, i.e. implementing method to get result. Or am I getting this wrong?
You are getting it correct, but the idea that computation is defined based on some purpose or from a limited subset of all perspectives is exactly what I take issue with. If your notion of computation is dependent on purpose and thus some teleological notion of function then saying something computes doesn't tell us anything about that being, only about how human beings perceive that being and its function. Again, this undermines the usefulness of having a perspective/function independent notion of computation. The magical thinking arises because we project our notations of function onto the being itself and conflate our uses for that being with the intrinsic properties of that being. Purposes/uses/functions are not intrinsic properties. Computation may not be an intrinsic property, it may only be a relational property, which would be an interesting result itself, but probably quite irritating to people who want to make arguments that there is something intrinsically different about certain kinds of systems.
Which is good, as that is indeed an unsatisfying explanation. You can, however talk about _what_ it computes and _how_ it computes, which might be interesting or useful explanations.
Yes, but they merely spell out Chalmers's implementation relation without even acknowledging it properly:
"The question of when a physical system is computing is fundamentally a question about the relationship of abstract mathematical/logical entities to physical ones [22]."
I suppose you refer to section 6 in his paper which attacks a particular critique of computationalism. I think the particular point he is making is valid. However, the argument this blog post is making is a different one.
