Crossed Genres published Ants on a Trestle, my first SFWA qualifying short story, in their 2065 themed issue.
SF Comet published For Your Safety, another near future, hard SF short story.
Both are available online in their entirety.
elharo
Karma: 2,376
Rationality Quotes Thread October 2015
In physics general relativity and quantum field theory are applied to different domains and at least one, possibly both, are widely recognized as mere approximations to the ultimate theory that subsumes them.
I’ll defer to Dr. Miller on this if he cares to weigh in, or any other professional economist, but my outsider’s impression is that in economics as discussed by Romer the situation is more that contradictory theories are being applied to the same domain, without a serious effort to determine experimentally which (if either) is correct.
if we want economics to be a science, we have to recognize that it is not ok for macroeconomists to hole up in separate camps, one that supports its version of the geocentric model of the solar system and another that supports the heliocentric model. As scientists, we have to hold ourselves to a standard that requires us to reach a consensus about which model is right, and then to move on to other questions.
The alternative to science is academic politics, where persistent disagreement is encouraged as a way to create distinctive sub-group identities.
--Paul Romer, NYU, “My Paper “Mathiness in the Theory of Economic Growth”
if the Taj Mahal happens to be made of white tiles held to brown granite by tan grotte, there is nothing to prevent you from affirming that the Taj Mahal is white and the Taj Mahal is brown and the Taj Mahal is tan, and claiming both tan and brown to lie in the area of significance space we’ve marked as ‘nonwhite’—”
“Wait a second: Part of the Taj Mahal is white, and part of the Taj Mahal is brown, and part of the Taj Mahal is—”
“The solution’s even simpler than that. You see, just like ‘white,’ the words ‘Taj Mahal’ have a range of significance that extends, on one side, at least as far as the gates have set their boundaries around the same area. Treating soft-edged interpenetrating clouds as though they were hard-edged bricks does not offer much help if you want to build a real discussion of how to build a real house. Ordinary, informal, nonrigorous language overcomes all these problems, however, with a bravura, panache and elegance that leave the formal logician panting and applauding
--Samuel R. Delaney, Trouble on Triton, An Ambiguous Heterophobia, 1976
Our ideal in crafting an argument is a skeptical but friendly audience, suitable to the context. A skeptical audience is questioning of our observations, not swayed by emotional appeals, but not so skeptical as to be dismissive. The ideal audience is curious; humble, but not stupid. It is an idealized version of ourselves at our best,
Max Shron, Thinking with Data, O’Reily 2014
Rationality Quotes Thread September 2015
Only in mathematics is it possible to demonstrate something beyond all doubt. When held to that standard, we find ourselves quickly overwhelmed.
-- Max Shron, Thinking with Data, O’Reilly 2014
Only in mathematics is it possible to demonstrate something beyond all doubt. When held to that standard, we find ourselves quickly overwhelmed.
Max Shron, Thinking with Data, p. 32
I had two new short fiction pieces published in the last month. First, Third Flatiron released their Only Disconnect anthology including my flash humor piece Email Recovered from Genetech Debris, Lt. Jeffrey Abramowitz Investigating
Second T. Gene Davis’s Speculative Blog published The Valediction.
Monthly Bragging Thread July 2015
Rationality Quotes Thread July 2015
Third Flatiron has published my hard SF short story Net War I in their Spring anthology, The Time It Happened. (Also available from amazon for kindle and paper).
This story is deliberately opaque, but I suspect LessWrong members will be more likely than most to figure out what is really going on.
Feynman knew physics but he didn’t know ornithology. When you name a bird, you’ve actually identified a whole lot of important things about it. It doesn’t matter whether we call a Passer domesticus a House Sparrow or an English Sparrow, but it is really useful to be able to know that the male and females are the same species, even though they look and sound quite different; and that these are not all the same thing as a Song Sparrow or a Savannah Sparrow. It is useful to know that Fox Sparrows are all Fox Sparrows, even though they may look extremely different depending on where you find them.
Assigning consistent names to the right groups of things is colossally important to biology and physics. Not being able to name birds for an ornithologist would be like a physicist not being able to say whether an electron and a positron are the same thing or not. Again it doesn’t matter which kind of particle we call electron and which we call positron (arguably Ben Franklin screwed up the names there by guessing wrong about the direction of current flow) but it matters a lot that we always call electrons electrons and positrons positrons. Similarly it’s important for a chemist to know that Helium 3 and Helium 4 are both Helium and not two different things (at least as far as chemistry and not nuclear physics is concerned).
Names are useful placeholders for important classifications and distinctions.
I’ll let you in on a secret: almost everyone hits the limit in Calculus 2. For that matter, most people hit the limit in Calculus 1 so you were ahead of the curve. That doesn’t mean no one understands calculus, or that you can’t learn it. It just means most students need more than one pass through the material. For instance, I don’t think I really understood integration until I learned numerical analysis and the trapezoidal rule in grad school.
There’s a common saying among mathematicians: “No understands Calculus until they teach it.”
In the case of superluminal neutrinos, pretty much nobody including the people who made the announcement believed it; and the real announcement was more along the lines of “we’ve got some problematic data here; and we can’t find our mistake. Does anyone see what we’ve done wrong?”
If you want to use google instead of science to “prove me wrong” then I am happy to call you an imbecile as well as misinformed.
-- Jennifer Hibben-White, “My 15-Day-Old Son May Have Measles”, 02/11/2015
Absent context, I notice I’m confused about which sense of the word “values” she’s using here. Perhaps someone can elucidate? In particular is she talking about moral/ethical type values or is she using it in a broader sense that we might think of as goals?
That’s pretty much exactly what the article, and the quoted selection, said. The improved performance of teams with more women is attributed to from gender disparity on the test for “Reading the Mind in the Eyes, which measures how well people can read complex emotional states from images of faces with only the eyes visible.”
The relative value of a job matters more than the absolute here. When a worker can walk across the street and get the same $15 an hour at McDonalds they do today at Burger King, then Burger King and McDonalds need to compete for employees based on work conditions. Managers get away with abuse only when the salary exceeds the prevailing wage for the skill set, or jobs are hard to find.