I think MOOCs are the future based on my own experience. They allow the best teachers to scale their reach. Instead of aristotle giving a lecture to a room it allows an unlimited audience who can also rewind and pause if they don't understand something.
I've been able to learn machine learning and deep learning from Andrew Ng, one of the best AI researchers in the world, among other world class researchers, for free. It's incredible when you think about it, probably one of the most significant things in human history. I've been able to learn how to code by picking and choosing the best classes from MIT, Stanford, Harvard, etc without spending a penny. Why settle for mediocre teachers at state universities when these options are available?
The major thing we need to do is find some other way to grade people other than using a college degree as a benchmark.
"fat acceptance is deadly" ≠ "obesity has costs to the economy"
Edit to add: 'yjftsjthsd-h points out that this isn't an apples-to-apples comparison. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15224303) In this entire thread a lot of people are unknowingly or willfully talking past each other. That's the tough part about heated issues like this. Actually taking the time to break down and listen to each other to understand where we're coming from first—even if we don't agree with the conclusions on the other side—is fundamental to us having a useful, constructive discussion.
Obesity is a negative for both the individual and society. The fat acceptance movement is terrible because being fat isn't some sort of permanent, genetic condition that's out of people's control. You control what you put in your mouth and how much exercise you get, it's a choice.
Should we have an ignorance acceptance movement, where we don't push people to educate themselves? That's a choice as well.
The fact remains that 95% of people going on diets to lose weight aren't successful in keeping it off long-term and the only method that seems to show significant success is surgery. I find it hard to believe that the only problem here is that fat people aren't aware they're fat. Harping on it in the way you're advocating just discourages people from doing anything healthy, since, you know, if getting slim is all that matters, why bother exercising if you're still fat at the end?
People need to realize we are built on hardware that is hundreds of millions of years old. We share a similar hormonal dominance hierarchy system with fucking lobsters. You can't just say it's </CURRENT YEAR> and expect these things to disappear. Tribalism was important for survival, trusting someone who didn't look like you could mean death and thus was selected for over long periods of time.
And then we became human and started not acting like lobsters.
We have intellects, a sense of morality, and a will. Those allow us to drastically curtail what might otherwise be instinctive behaviors.
I know there are some determinists who say that free will is illusory and we're as much slaves to our genetics and instincts as lobsters are.
But it certainly seems as if, in practice, tribalism (at least the clear-cut type you're describing where we exclude people who don't look like us) is recognizable and avoidable.
> We have intellects, a sense of morality, and a will. Those allow us to drastically curtail what might otherwise be instinctive behaviors.
An excerpt from Julian Jaynes's 'Origin of Consciousness' comes to mind here:
> Consciousness is a much smaller part of our mental life than we are conscious of, because we cannot be conscious of what we are not conscious of. How simple that is to say; how difficult to appreciate! It is like asking a flashlight in a dark room to search around for something that does not have any light shining upon it. The flashlight, since there is light in whatever direction it turns, would have to conclude that there is light everywhere. And so consciousness can seem to pervade all mentality when actually it does not.
There exist a great deal of subconscious processes that effect behavior in ways that an 'individual' cannot necessarily perceive. Often, a person does something, then post-hoc uses narratization to fit those actions within their preexisting belief system and story of themselves. The important thing to note is that your perception of yourself is not you, and the world you perceive around you is not the world itself. Both act as very helpful mental models that help you navigate your world effectively. As with all models, however, they have holes, and the really damaging ones are the ones you're not aware you're not aware of (as you cannot even adjust for those weaknesses).
Even though it's far from precise, I like Jonathan Haidt's suggestion in The Happiness Hypothesis that our conscious mind is like someone riding an elephant: He can nudge it in this direction or that, and a lot of the time that works. But if the elephant wants to go a different direction, it will, and you're just along for the ride. At which point you can acknowledge you're not in control, or decide where the elephant went is where you really wanted to go all along. Often we choose the latter to retain the illusion of control.
That a process is non-conscious does not necessitate that it is primitive or incapable of sophisticated inference and computation. Sophistication and conscious reportability are absolutely not anti-correlated. Indeed, if I were to lean one way, it would be against the things we consciously perceive as difficult, inferring from the Moravec Paradox.
Non-consciously accessible processes play an important role in our ability to reason, predict and control behavior in a manner Evolution could not anticipate. They are no less us.
Sure, of course we curtail these behaviors. It's uncharitable to read the parent comment as suggesting that we ignore our conscious, moral minds. I understood him as simply saying that the dogmatic belief in humans-as-blank-slates is going to keep being belied by the way humans act in practice, even those who have as much a claim to conscious morality as anyone else. Something as subtle as why you get along with someone and choose to keep seeing them isn't fully-specified, and whenever something isnt fully-specified, our lizard brains have a strong chance to fill in the gap.
In case you think I'm arguing against a strawman, the blank slate view is _extremely_ popular, and likely even more so in the circles that this commentariat likely run in.
Tribalism is harder to avoid than just recognizing it, much harder. I think you underappreciate how incredibly emotional irrational creatures we all are, and how much how we behave is informed by cognitive biases.
> But it certainly seems as if, in practice, tribalism (at least the clear-cut type you're describing where we exclude people who don't look like us) is recognizable and avoidable.
No, it doesn't. I don't know anyone that has come even close to escaping tribalism.
You quoted me but I actually didn't say anything about race or genetics. My original response was to the parent which was claiming that "tribalism is avoidable" and I was arguing against that saying that humans will always self-segregate into tribes so it's unavoidable.
Examples:
- I had a friendship which originally started over shared nostalgia for a cantonese children show
- I was excluded from a group because I didn't know enough american pop culture references to get their jokes
- I stopped eating dinner with another group because I felt awkward being the only one not praying before the meal
- In another group, we only ever talked about programming puzzles and non-programmer friends (such as their girlfriends) learned quickly to leave us alone
All of these groups came together and/or left each other due to unwritten emergent social dynamics. You can never stop these clusters from forming. As long as you have groups/tribes, there will be people excluded based on the that tribe's values. Is that really so bad?
Hm, well, I don't know that I'd call those "tribes," and I (reasonably, I thought) interpreted "tribalism" to be ethnic or racial based on it appearing in a discussion of "Friends Are Genetically Similar."
Yeah, of course that is true, but I was making what I thought was a reasonable reading in context. It seems like the OP is describing something more like groups of friends; you can't really be a member of multiple tribes, necessarily.
Drawing your argument to its logical conclusion, those that act on such impulses based on their genetics and instincts are less evolved than those who don't.
Sounds like something a plantation owner from the antebellum south would agree with.
Now obviously anti-racism isn't "the real racism", but I think it's kind of funny that many commentators here seem to think that by defining certain sects of people based on cherry picked attributes will somehow prove that we've moved beyond the biological impulses of discrimination.
It seems 'evolved' means whatever people want it to mean very early on into these types of discussion. Usually there's a notion floating around of 'more- or less-evolved' that's not very well thought-through. And often this kind of muddying is committed alongside wishful thinking in the first place ('Despite science, I am free will incarnate; it is that which separates man from beast, nobles from savages, wealthy from beggars!').
There are no moral imperatives to be found in genes or epigenetics, only moral factors. Hume's observation about is -> ought is as pressing as ever, despite what Sam Harris might have you think. It's particularly dangerous to believe the former is true, since we make such a habit of expanding and distorting the scope of empirical results to ideological fantasy-land near instantly.
Whether we tightly and uniformly prefer genetically similar friends, whether we conversely happen to like genetically diverse mates, or whether all of these are more generally attendant to environmental factors like diet and disease -- it remains that we can collaboratively use reason to decide on our 'oughts', not just pick the interpretation and scope of 'is' that we prefer at the time. Issues of justice and responsibility seem much more interesting than endlessly turning the wheel of sciencey-tribalism. We struggle enough to figure out how best to treat each other already.
Even if we stop all overt biases, there is plenty of sub-conscious bias that is impossible to recognize as the personal level because of how small the effect is verses the sample size (and how poor we are at doing mental statistics). Until we get to the point that we have personal AIs letting us know every time we begin to favor in-groups slightly more than out-groups, there isn't the ability to correct for this.
You are on a cocktail party. Have had a few drinks with friends. You all start talking about spiders. How they are these wonderful tiny creatures to be protected. You know, they got rid of insects and it's actually good to be above this. After all we have intellects, a sense of morality, and a will. We're not some freaking lobsters driven by phobias. And you know what? At this wonderful evening party, we all agree, that this is just the case. And then we all go home. Where, right after opening the door, you see this diguisting, big spider crawling on the floor. Without thinking twice you crash it with your shoe. And then -- using toilet paper perhaps -- pick up its remains and flush it in the toilet. Just to be sure that the motherfucker is really dead. Not to mention your 3 year old and 5 year old living in this house. And then, then, you realize. What happened? Just talked about it an hour ago. And then I got rid of this poor bastard anyway...
In a social setting, with people around having conversations, your brain cortex fires off. It's spinning like crazy. And the cortex is all about logic. It's all about intellect, a sense of morality, about a will, and group hierarchy, and talking, and relaxation. You get the picture. When the phobia kicks in... guess what... the first thing that will happen is that cortisol will turn off your cortex. In the stressful situation, in fight or run situation, your cortex is switched off brother. That's why this spider is dead. That's why after 30 years of perfect marriage you might do stupid things when 23 year old hot blonde is sexually provoking you. That's why live isn't white and black. Even in 2017.
Or, like my father-in-law, you go and grab a paper towel, pick up the spider, and let it go outside on front lawn. I have never seen him kill a spider. And some percentage of the time, more and more with each passing year, even though I am terrified of spiders, I don't kill them because of conversations like the one you describe.
Just because some people react with their emotion doesn't mean everyone does and it doesn't mean we have to.
This depends on your up-rising for the most part. When I was very young, there was this spider that had its house below my small desk. I grew up accustomed to these spiders and didn't allow my mother to clean them up.
Now, I don't fear spiders and also don't mind them as long as they don't wreak the place with their filaments. I was surprised when a cousin of mine was freaked out by one of them and wanted to insta-kill it.
Now if there is a bug... that's a whole different story. Even though, logically thinking, these beasts are the same.
Given how many spiders are only inside or only outside spiders, you basically just said you seen him sending the spiders to their death. The person smashing the spider isn't much different than the person putting it outside.
Most serious people who talk about preserving insects and arachnids do so because these animals provide the feed-stock for other animal populations, similar to plankton in the oceans, and they are an indicator of the health of an ecosystem, not because they are taken with their appearance (although of course some people do genuinely love their appearance).
One can easily espouse something like that while not wanting a big spider scurrying around in your house. Also, plenty of people (myself included) escort such spiders outside alive instead of smashing them, not the least because I don't want to smear their guts everywhere, creating more work.
After the phobia kicks in, after the threat is neutralized, I encourage you to thoughtfully consider not wasting a flush to dispose of the dead spider/toilet paper combo.
My reading of the post above yours, in the context of the conversation it appears in, is that you cannot overcome your instincts so there's no point in even trying to rein them in. If it just means to say we don't live up to our ideals all the time, well, OK, that's true, but I don't see where it's going.
Yes, but its hard work- and maybe that hard work is not always worth the effort.
So instead of doing hard work, we decided to make tools to circumvent the bugs, for example by avoiding buggy routine executing personal communication - and instead discuss that paper online.
Work with the smart, no matter what skin colour, instead of doing the PC-Dance.
You understand genetic similarity does not mean you look similar or come from the same tribe necessarily? Especially since the age of heavier than air flying machines.
You understand genetic similarity does not mean you look similar or come from the same tribe necessarily?
That's exactly what it means. Knowing what we know about sexual reproduction and trait heredity what else could it mean? It's not like half your genome spontaneously arises in a zygote in some random location half way around the world.
You've confused kin selection with kin discrimination. The idea "because friends are genetically similar, an individual with the opposite genotype at a specific allele poses a bigger threat to your survival/fitness than someone with the same genotype at that allele."
Additionally:
> formal analysis has shown that
selection for group adaptations requires special circumstances,
with negligible within group selection (Fig. 4), such
as when (a) the group is composed of genetically identical
individuals (clonal groups, r=1), or (b) there is complete
repression of competition between groups (i.e., no conflict
within groups; Gardner & Grafen, 2009).
It is useful here to distinguish adaptation and design from
dynamics of how selection leads to design. The dynamics of
selection can be examined with either an individual
(inclusive fitness or kin selection) or group selection
approach. However, only the individual level approach
provides a general model of adaptation. The idea that
individuals strive to maximise their inclusive fitness holds
irrespective of the intensity of selection operating within and
between groups (Section 2; Fig. 4). In contrast, as discussed
above, group adaptations or maximization of fitness at the
group level are only expected in the extreme case where
there is no within group selection.
I really doubt your view is consistent with the conditions for selection in the group. If non-tribe-member competition caused significant competition between groups, then it far outweighs the pressure of in-group adaptation. If "friends are genetically similar" is a genetic adaptation from tribalism, then it has to be an enhancement from within the group when it lacks competition - you benefit from the adaptation relative to people within your tribe that don't have it. FYI the paper disagrees with the notion that friend similarity is likely a result of decision.
Personally I think that 1% relative similarity could easily be explained in the ambiguous language they use to explain why it was "mostly" homogenously European - why would it surprise me that the non-Europeans would tend to have less DNA in common with the friends they have while also likely having fewer friends per capita?
Though, possibly, because the most likely to be similar SNPs were related to smell (and therefore taste), and to linoleic acid, maybe it reaffirms that people who break you bread are your companions - and that there is a real difference between butter cultures and olive oil cultures :P
Adultery and murder have happened in just about every human society in the history of time but nobody thinks we shouldn't bother trying to suppress those impulses.
When murdering someone or cheating on your partner, you probably have a lot more time to second-guess your motives. When subconsciously judging a passer-by, you don't. In my case at least, they are long gone before I even realise that I've judged someone.
I don't think you could ever make an argument that murder is good, but tribes have their benefits. For example, we know that homogenous societies have less conflict, a greater sense of community, and higher social trust.
Urbanization doesn't necessarily regress the issues I'm talking about, especially since cities can still have their own neighborhood and block communities.
Urbanization isn't unnatural and it agrees with our tribal instincts.
Look at Tokyo: extremely high density with extremely small social unrest. Paris, now a collection of different tribes, can't say the same.
Is that the only thing that's different about Tokyo and Paris? Beijing is over 95% Han Chinese and yet I don't think things look as harmonious.
On another note, I think Japan ends up with kind of a distorted picture since so much of the crime is associated with organized criminal groups with ties to legitimate business and government operating with a degree of openness that I think would surprise most Western observers. Dubro's Yakuza book is a great primer on the topic.
Adultery has become vastly more socially acceptable. It isn't considered nice, but it doesn't get you killed anymore.
And for murder, that can be a bit of a tautology as socially unacceptable killing is murder and anything else isn't considered on the same level as murder. But if we consider killing that isn't considered murder and if you consider forms of killing that, if not legal, are punished lighter than murder, it becomes clear that our society does allow some forms of killing others.
Does this kind of nitpicking actually invalidate the argument? Use sexual assault if you prefer. The point is that a behavior being natural or instinctual doesn't make it moral or desirable.
>Does this kind of nitpicking actually invalidate the argument?
It does if there are enough nitpicks showing that natural behaviors are becoming more accepted because they are natural. That isn't to say they are acceptable, but they are more accepted. And this doesn't have to be true of all behaviors, because there are many factors at play. It is even possible there could be a trend where behaviors are becoming more acceptable because they are natural even if all behaviors were becoming less acceptable, if there was another stronger force acting to make all behaviors less acceptable.
But if we want to get to the actual argument first presented, we would have to realize that comparing it to murder, adultery, or sexual assault is a strawman to begin with. The OP wasn't defending going around and murdering people who didn't look like you. They were saying that millions of years of evolution will influence our behaviors in small ways. It would be compared to other preferences, such as preferences in intimate partners. So, is wanting to have a specific gender, race, etc. in an intimate partner wrong? Is it socially unacceptable?
This is a philosophical question as much as anything else, but I believe that, whether we are successful in perceiving it or not, there is such a thing as objective right and wrong as distinct from social acceptability. I'm hesitant to say anything about how people should pick romantic partners, but it seems to me as though that is actually rather considerably narrowing the scope of what we're talking about. I do think it is wrong to intentionally seek to form an ethnically homogenous group of friends and associates.
Most of us would agree with you, I think what OP is saying is that it's irrational to say things like "It's 2017, who murders people anymore!?". People still murder, but we should definitely continue to try suppress that behavior.
Usually a post like the OP's is a lead-in to an argument about why discrimination is actually fine and shouldn't be fought, so I guess I let my previous experiences get ahead of what the post actually says.
It's more nuanced than that though. The question is where to draw the line about which behaviors are bad and which ones aren't. Things like murder are obviously bad in most cases and should be suppressed, but social structures are not so clear cut. If there aren't any clear consequences to a instinctual behavior then it's probably better to not suppress it.
Depends on the behavior and even the consequences are not as "clear" as you make it sound because reactions to behavior can be rather subjective. Context actually matters even tho it's too often ignored these days in favor of generating drama.
It's a factor way too often ignored with this issue: If "hurting people's feelings" will become a crime, then we will see no end of regulating "undesired behaviors" because people get their feelings hurt in the most subjective and unintended ways [0].
Redlining. School segregation. Unequal economic opportunity. Disproportionate use of force in encounters with police. You get the picture. These are all negative effects of racism.
there are countless facets to tribalism, and racism doesn't have to be one of them. But in any case my point is more general in nature and not about tribalism.
Well, that isn't really true, since the conception of what races exist and who belongs to which shows wide cultural variation.
More to the point, though, racism is an obvious manifestation of the kind of tribalism I think we are talking about and I don't think it's really controversial to argue that it is harmful at least to the marginalized groups. I'd personally even go further and say it harms all parties involved.
If it is true, as is often claimed, that racism is universal and therefore fighting it is pointless or should not be done, then the same should be true of other universally-occurring antisocial behaviors.
I think AWS is the majority of their profit but not revenue, it basically allows them to subsidize the rest of their business to gain market share off the absurd AWS profit margin.
China already paid people with high intelligence to ship them DNA for research in 2013, they are already doing embryo gene manipulation. They are years ahead of us due to not caring about ethics. Political correctness will be the death of the west.
The BGI project referenced above was hindered by certain suboptimal methodological assumptions. It does not appear that the Chinese are any further than the West in the field, and the most notable replicable advances have occurred in the supposedly-stymied labs of the West.
It is worth remembering that China is a highly ideological society with blinders and "PC" of its own, and is not entirely uninfluenced by Western priorities.
Different ethics != not caring about ethics. And if not caring about ethics were the key to winning the nation-state game, the ethical response would be to tear it all down ASAP, which is usually quite unethical in practice.
I'm not sure I follow your argument. Tearing it all down is or isn't ethical, therefore not caring about ethics is not the key to winning the nation-state game?
Ethics is stuck between a rock and a hard place if nations collapse because they're not disregarding ethics enough, as the previous comment suggests. (I'm disputing the premise.)
I phrased it a bit harshly, more like less inhibited. The US can't even have a discussion about IQ and genetics due to the pushing of BS like blank slate and political correctness, which makes doing research impossible.
Well, there are potential reasons beyond PC for caution.
Keep in mind that eugenics, the "old school" version of genetic manipulation, is widely considered a failure, and has a nasty association with certain unsavory leaders that loom large in European/American history (the most notorious one being, um, Hitler). One can say that eugenics has that nasty issue of raw tribalism clouding any potential good judgement. Personally, I would consider the sordid history of eugenics to be a warning sign to everyone in regards to genetic engineering.
The other angle to bring up regarding genetic manipulation of humans, is that genetic manipulation of animals and crops, whether through the old school "selective breeding" or more modern techniques, have not been without unexpected big problems. At the very least, specific health problems have popped up in certain purebreds, and certain bred crops are far more vulnerable to being wiped out by single parasites (eg: our "perfect bananas" have this nasty tendency to keep getting wiped out by the Panama disease). Biodiversity is also the reason that in-breeding of humans is widely looked down upon.
The other ties with the former: it is not impossible for some unsavory leader to take some research, bastardize the science through blinders of tribal instinct, say "Ah! Gene X is the key to IQ!", and do some nasty tribal things "justified" by science. And in the end, get it quite wrong in the end due to lack of biodiversity.
If by political correctness you mean the basic human rights of the constitution
Of course we could add an exception to the constitution that excludes lab grown children. Well, unfortunately gene manipulation is eugenics unless you are willing to support your "defects" until they die of old age plus their offspring but then china is probably going to win again because they are disposing their defective subjects as soon as they notice the defect.
It doesn't take much imagination to think of this scenario. Creating artifical super children that grow up inside a lab and get killed off when convenient is the most common staple in scifi books and movies involving gene editing.
What's more important? Basic human rights for all humans or competitiveness?
> If by political correctness you mean the basic human rights of the constitution
I think the US constitution is silent on the subject of genetic research.
> What's more important? Basic human rights for all humans or competitiveness?
If a nation is uncompetitive, it won't matter in the long term what it thinks about human rights, as that nation will will be out-competed by other natinos that are more competitive.
I spent hours trying to get setup before finding crestle mentioned in the forums. It's preloaded with everything you need and is billed by the second with 25 hours free
You missed the entire point of fast.ai. They believe that it's better to be able to do basic, practical stuff before diving deeper. Most people will lose motivation if they have to learn an insane amount of stuff before even getting started with the cool stuff.
No value to the user, but all that bloat allows for analytics and tracking for more ad $ and the images make emotional manipulation easier to get more clicks. Not to mention that 99.9% of people don't care or don't even know what bandwidth, CPU, or RAM are.
https://medium.com/swlh/side-product-marketing-is-the-new-ki...