Not prepared to advocate professional juries, but off the top of my head, I’d have a professional juror train in law, statistics, demographics, forensic science, and cognitive biases.
Steven_Bukal
Karma: 369
My point is that using violence to silence intellectual adversaries is very different from using violence against a perceived wartime enemy.
“Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.”—Larry Niven
“Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from science!”—Agatha Heterodyne / Cinderella (explaining what Niven meant), Girl Genius
Except that based on videos and letters left behind, the hijackers considered Americans to be not just intellectual adversaries, but wartime ones. I believe the majority of the hijackers cited American military presence in the Middle East and military and economic support of Israel to that effect.
If my tenants paid rent with a piece of paper that said “moneeez” on it, I wouldn’t call it paying rent.
Or they pay you with forged bills. You think you’ll be able to deposit them at the bank and spend them to buy stuff, but what actually happens is the bank freezes your account and the teller at the store calls the police on you.
RA really has moved the goalposts on WA, which is one of those Dark Arts that we’re not supposed to employ, even unintentionally.
It would certainly be annoying and a bit questionable to bring up your points of disagreement one at a time like RA did, but as long as he stops to update after receiving the information from WA, I don’t know if I’d call this moving the goalposts.
Paul Graham said something very similar about figuring out a program:
“I was taught in college that one ought to figure out a program completely on paper before even going near a computer. I found that I did not program this way. I found that I liked to program sitting in front of a computer, not a piece of paper. Worse still, instead of patiently writing out a complete program and assuring myself it was correct, I tended to just spew out code that was hopelessly broken, and gradually beat it into shape. Debugging, I was taught, was a kind of final pass where you caught typos and oversights. The way I worked, it seemed like programming consisted of debugging.
For a long time I felt bad about this, just as I once felt bad that I didn’t hold my pencil the way they taught me to in elementary school. If I had only looked over at the other makers, the painters or the architects, I would have realized that there was a name for what I was doing: sketching. As far as I can tell, the way they taught me to program in college was all wrong. You should figure out programs as you’re writing them, just as writers and painters and architects do.”
As a CS student currently at university, my experience has been identical. I also can’t help but notice a similarity between these ideas and the methods of agile software development, where at each iteration you produce a working approximation of the final software, taking into account new information and new specification changes as you go.
Agreed, they can definitely get a bit absurd. This one is one of my favourites:
The short story “The Road Not Taken” by Harry Turtledove is also a good one if you can find it.
The concept is popular on 4chan’s /tg/ board where they’re called “humanity” stories or “humanity, fuck yeah” stories. Here’s one archive of such threads:
http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?tags=humanity
There is a small genre of sci-fi short stories in which humans turn out to be the scariest species in the galaxy due to our possession of apparently mundane abilities. For example:
Human muscles have the terrifying ability to become increasingly more massive and powerful when placed under a routine of extreme stress. Many humans systematically overload their muscles in this way. For fun.
Humans breathe oxygen, a component of starship fuel!
The brain of a human is protected by an armored skull so powerful that a human fighter is impervious to any simple attack to the brain and can even use its braincase as a weapon to bludgeon enemies.
Humans naturally produce dangerous hormones and stimulants such as epinephrine. In desperate situations these boost a human’s abilities, allowing it to continue functioning even when severely wounded.
Not that the methods here don’t have their place, but it seems to me that this is a point by point list of exactly why the methodology used by this team is not used generally.
The average software project may involve many different products and many different programmers, making it difficult for anyone involved to become intimately knowledgeable with the work or for standardized programming practices to be enforced everywhere. There are usually very tight deadline and budget constraints, and the clients may or may not know exactly what they want so specifications are usually impossible to nail down and getting quick user feedback becomes very important.
The software design classes at my university teach Agile software development methods. The main idea is breaking a project down into small iterations, each one implementing a subset of the complete specification. After each iteration, the software can be handed off to testers and clients/users for evaluation, allowing for requirements to change dynamically during the development process. Agile seems to be the exact opposite of what is advocated in this article (invest money and resources at the beginning of the project and have a concrete specification before you write a single line of code).