SEEKING VOLUNTEERS: Musopen.org - Non-profit providing free, public domain music resources.
Looking for front and back end developers, as well as mobile developers to improve the stability, design and functionality of the Musopen.org website.
Musopen is a registered 501(c)3 non-profit charity, and all of the music and pdf files we host are free to the public without added copyrights/restrictions.
If interested, please tell us about yourself, your area of expertise, and if there is something in particular you'd like to help with: https://musopen.org/contact/ or aaron {at} musopen dot org
What if we could make every car $5-10k more expensive instead?
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I once thought that using AI to make all cars self driving might be the key to making pedestrians and cyclists safe. Self driving cars are playing a game of Russian Roulette. The systems will get it wrong occasionally, with LIDAR or without. Not if, but when. Whether or not someone dies depends on the situation.
I work on self driving vehicles. I would also like more walkable, bikeable cities.
But I've also sat in those city council meetings and seen the inane opposition people have to any sort of positive reform in that direction. Self driving vehicles have the potential to actually improve road safety because local governments won't be involved.
> I work on self driving vehicles. I would also like more walkable, bikeable cities.
Two questions, then. Firstly, do you think that self-driving vehicles will ever get even close to human standards of driving? And second, what do you see as the big challenges to getting them to be acceptably safe?
I obviously can't talk specific numbers, but there are reasonable arguments to be made that in certain limited scenarios, we may already be hovering around or exceeding equivalent human metrics. Turning that into "unequivocally safer than humans all the time, everywhere" is still an open problem.
As for safety, that's both a big topic and a "I have explicitly told not talk about this in public by legal" topic. The teams and organizations I've worked for take it very seriously, but things can always be improved. Phil Koopman puts out some excellent information about where we are currently and where industry could broadly improve.
> we may already be hovering around or exceeding equivalent human metrics.
Okay, bearing in mind your second paragraph, what are the conditions under which they're safer? I've been in a few self-driving cars and I'd struggle to see how they would ever get to an acceptable standard - like, pass UK driving test kind of standard.
That's fine actually. We (American cities) should adopt systems like they have in Singapore where the certificate of entitlement to purchase a car costs, buy itself, $70k-120k, on top of the cost of the car. The externalized costs of private cars are extremely high and it's completely insane that we have what amounts to welfare for drivers.
The article references a meta-analysis, which is hardly a smoking gun.
The analysis suggests variation between afib occurrence/risk and the brand or omega-3 supplement or dose.
Additional points from the article:
* despite finding a link between afib and omega-3 supplementation, the meta-analysis didn’t find increased heart or stroke risk
* although the analysis linked a prescription-strength omega-3 supplement with higher afib risk, the analysis indicated that omega-3 appeared to reduce heart attack and stroke risk
Existing evidence and analysis find that omega-3 can impact various medical conditions and health factors.
I think that, as with any medication, one should consult their doctor and weigh the cost-benefit / risk-reward of taking omega-3 supplements/prescriptions.
Sure, it could be. For those that want to really know what's going on it's better to actually get the data. Fortunately, it's not that hard to do. A couple times a year I track all my dietary intake for a week using an app. I'm not just interested in the macro-nutrients (protein, fat & carbs) but also all the micronutrients. There are apps that are more focused on micronutrients.
I can track just a couple of typical one-week samples a year and get a decent ballpark approximation because my normal diet isn't super varied. Vacations and a few special occasions aside, I typically eat mostly the same types things in about the same amounts because I like those things and it's convenient. I decided to spot check micronutrients because for the last five years I've been on a very low carb diet that's working great for me health wise and I've also had significant improvements in cognitive sharpness and emotional stability vs eating a 'normal' diet that made me obese for decades.
Because what I eat is fairly limited, I was concerned that over a long time period I might be missing out on some important nutrients. After getting a few data points, I was pleased to learn I was already covering everything my body needs. The only thing I was a little low on was DHA/EPA. While I can eat lots of fish on a VLC diet, I just don't particularly like fish, so I don't choose to eat much. For that reason I've added a high-quality supplement. Except for special cases like mine, I do agree it's entirely possible (and preferable) to cover all your body's nutritional needs with real foods. The challenge is that individual metabolisms can vary. General dietary advice is based on large-scale averages across many individuals. I'd also caution that the typical FDA "Food Pyramid" that is still widely promoted isn't ideal for every individual. My metabolism was certainly an outlier and the recommended 'balanced' diet wasn't working optimally over the long run for me.
Musopen.org is designing a free, open-source app to learn how to read music and play an instrument. Think codecademy.com or duolingo.com but for music.
We would love help bringing this to life. Write us if you want to join, and how you might be able to help: aaron [at] musopen.org
“ There is no cure for tetanus, and no definitive proof that you will have lifelong immunity with childhood vaccinations alone. So for now, the CDC continues to recommend booster vaccines every 10 years to help your immune system protect against these infections.”
At least on the surface of the moon, you're going to be in darkness for 14 days every 28. This not only means you won't be generating solar power, but your battery efficiency will probably also take a hit due to the cold temperatures (not to mention, you'll have to heat things too). So you'd have to have enough batteries for 14 days.
If you try a terraforming experiment on Mars and it fails, nobody's life/house/country/etc is ruined, which isn't true of geoengineering on Earth. I agree with the sentiment that there really is no Plan B to fixing climate change but that doesn't mean the goals of space colonization and fixing climate change are contrary.
Terraforming on Mars would take millennia, and over that long amount of time, settlement would presumably continue and the amount of colonists would grow. Thus, eventually flaws in the terraforming effort would eventually impact on local people.
Precious? The primary elements "wasted" in space exploration are aluminum, silicon, hydrogen, and oxygen. All of those things Earth is just lousy with. Even launching a rocket a day wouldn't put any sort of dent in the availability of any of those elements. A rocket a day also wouldn't meaningfully add to levels of harmful pollution. The Earth is really big. It has lots of pretty much everything.
Doing stuff in space is expensive in an economic sense but it's not really all that resource intensive. Most of the cost is paying people to design, test, fabricate, and operate the hardware.
Ok, but to put a rocket in space you need a surrounding economy on a specific technological level which is costly resourcewise. Could SpaceX or NASA happen in e.g. Congo, Nepal or Papua New Guinea alone?
It’s because the people interested in exploring and settling Mars are private citizens. Nuclear power is the domain of governments and/or highly regulated entities.
> the people interested in exploring and settling Mars are private citizens
which is what I argued against.
Also I'm pretty sure the national space agencies would like "colony of 1M people on Mars with solar power" too, and looking at the progress made they seem closer.
Or plonk three clusters of solar cells at 120 degree gaps and lay cable to connect them? No storms or weather to worry about damaging the cable and you'll always have power.
Getting 7,000 km of cabling on or below the moon’s surface and maintaining it (no storms or weather, but meteorites and radiation) may be the better choice, long-term, but I doubt it’s doable short-term.
Edit: it also won’t completely solve the power outage problem. The moon doesn’t receive direct sunlight at all during lunar eclipses, which can be over an hour.
Quote from Wikipedia : "the Moon's axis of rotation is sufficiently close to being perpendicular to the ecliptic plane that the radius of the Moon's polar circles is less than 50 km. Power collection stations could therefore be plausibly located so that at least one is exposed to sunlight at all times, thus making it possible to power polar colonies almost exclusively with solar energy. Solar power would be unavailable only during a lunar eclipse, but these events are relatively brief and absolutely predictable."
Calculate watts/kg for the total system, and be sure to include cost of heating, which comes nearly free with nukes, and you'll lean back to nuclear. The barrier to nukes is usually programmatic, not cost or technical.
I think this is referring to a nickel-iron battery, or NiFe for short. It's old tech, but is pretty indestructible. I have 20 of them in my off-grid system.
If building stuff is an option, 14 days might not be so bad.
You can store heat as heat, cooling as ice. They already need a huge water supply, why not freeze it for cooling?
Another option, unique to the moon. Why not just run wires to the sunny side. You could probably use uninsulated wire at a pretty high voltage. Nothing to disturb it or get electrocuted up there. You could do like 5 kilovolt on a hair thin wire to get usable amount of power across the moon with maybe 200lb of it
The short answer is reliability per watt. Solar's got lots of ups and downs which means designing bigger than you need. Batteries need replacing because they don't last forever. Solar panels have to be kept clean of dust on planets like Mars. Solar panels have to be deployed, which requires additional mechanisms that may fail or require human intervention, and so on.
The way they want to design reactors for next generation space exploration, they're set-it-and-forget-it designs. They have extremely few moving parts, and basically as soon as they're uninhibited, they'll run until something fails and their service life ends - likely several decades after construction. They're extremely reliable and are basically black-box sources of electrical power. Once they put it on the moon or Mars, they can just bury it under the regolith and run the cables back to where the habs are and forget about it. When it eventually fails, they can just leave it in the ground.
The biggest draw for nuclear power is continuous, autonomous processes, like thawing Mars permafrost for water, electrolyzing some of it for breathable oxygen and hydrogen, and using the hydrogen and carbon dioxide to make methane for return mission fuel for the complete in-situ resource utilization mission profile. These processes would run as soon as they were setup on Mars, without human intervention, and could run for months or years before humans even arrive, requiring no human intervention. Doing the same thing with solar would mean contesting with intermittency and having to actually assemble and maintain an enormous solar farm on Mars autonomously... We can't even manage that on Earth.
If a society tells a woman she's not likely as interested in something, guess what profession she is more likely to choose?
Not the one she's being told she won't be happy with.
Is there any evidence that would convince you that interests can diverge, independent of society (nurture)? Your argument relies on the assumption (yes, an assumption, not evidence) that society exclusively determines our interests. You do not admit a role for biology. There is little scientific evidence that supports this view.
I didn't say "society exclusively determines our interests"
my point was pretty simple. If society at large, in ways small and big, encourage women from joining a field, I think it's likely fewer will participate.
This is the argument behind Sheryl Sandberg creating stock photos that demonstrate more inclusion. If all I see are white men with grey hair in photos as doctors, don't you think that might bias women to think that's who doctors are? That's not 100% of what influences an interest, but it's an important one.
Current research generally does not find evidence that variations in preferences, psychology, or personality stem from genetic or biological factors. Rather, they’re primarily attributed to culture and socialization.
Actually the abstract points out that this hypothesis is one going against the largely held scientific view of biological factors and gender differences...
A rebuttal a year later in the related section points out omissions from this paper and offers a deeper perspective on the differences
You mean like that in more gender equal societies, women are less likely to pursue a degree in STEM. Its a well known phenomenon called the gender-paradox[1]
Is there any evidence (say, the numerous studies on this very topic) that would convince you that the pipeline of many careers has systemic discriminatory effects driving particular genders and races out of those fields?
In fact, quite a bit! I am already convinced. If tribal associations would clarify, then I am more than likely "on your side."
Can you direct me to where I suggested there is no systematic career discrimination towards minorities? If that's how you interpreted my comment, then I apologize for that. There is absolutely substantial structural discrimination; I don't intend to minimize that.
The comment I was replying to did in fact specify as an assumption (the antecedent of the conditional) that "society tells a woman she's not likely as interested in something." This framing excludes the possibility that something else (namely biology) may affect a person's preferences.
I don't think that's a reasonable assumption - again, little scientific evidence supports that view. (Even intuition does not support that view: I don't think most people would argue that men for the most part are "brainwashed" by society to have sexual preferences for women. Likely some of this is biological; in fact, there is a good evolutionary reason for it!)
20 years ago there was a lot less of a push for women in tech and you actually did hear lots of people espouse this view, now the programmes and encouragement is everywhere and the social cost of a different view is your job.
What is being argued and and what is happening don't seem to correlate.
I don't think having a few programs or pr campaigns solves systemic bias. I guess to answer your question, ask women who are in tech or considered it if they experience bias.
I have, and I regularly hear depressing and disturbing examples.
Wouldn't that apply to both sexes? Can you really tell someone what their interests are?
"happy with" is not the same as "interested in" however it seems like the last 2 decades have had a lot of focus on letting people follow their passion.
He shared a manifesto about gender differences in the workplace. In it, he calls women neurotic.
Whether people's read on the manifesto is reductive of his overall argument isn't the point.
He showed a serious lack of judgement writing and posting that in his workplace. He should not have played the part of expert gender/psychology expert. A researcher he cites specifically disagrees with his takeaways.
There are productive ways to have these kinds of conversations, he chose to go to the opposite wrong end of that spectrum.
Women have enough BS to deal with in tech, the last thing they need is a tech bro mis-using uncertain psych research to justify telling them they should find more appropriate roles.
He interviewed with Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan. Also who on the left would interview him? That's the issue with claiming that he only talked to one side.
As he said in his interview with Peterson, he declined interviews with any centrist media. He filed an NLRB complaint before posting, hired Charles Johnson (who is a professional conspiracy dude and claims to know where MH370 is) to run PR and made a bee-line directly for maximum exposure with people like Molyneaux.
That's a very deliberate choice. He's no martyr of rational thought.
Rogan was labelled alt-right after he interviewed Gavin McInness and Alex Jones again (a comical interview btw). That may have been cancelled out by him interviewing Bernie Sanders though.
Rogan is aesthetically a bro, that's all this comes down to.
If he were more 'soy' and less 'bro', while having the same mostly-liberal opinions, he'd get an entirely different reaction from the elite cultural left.
And I'm too American to give you a good analogy :) In England I think they'd say 'chav'?
Think culturally lowbrow vs cultural elite. Rogan came up as a cage fighting commentator. In Europe there would be a lot more techno blasted out of a much smaller car.
A stereotypical bro is someone who says "bro" a lot, like to do chest bumps with their others bros, scream about sports while shotgunning a beer, and talks with his bros about women as sex objects.
He also tweeted during the middle of this, "The KKK is horrible and I don't support them in any way, but can we admit that their internal title names are cool, e.g. 'Grand Wizard'?"
He sounds like he may be on the autistic spectrum, which if treated as a form of social disability would (or should, IMO) grant him some leeway.
If his intent wasn’t sexist then his failure to perfectly negotiate the complex social way those points have to be expressed isn’t a moral failing on his part.
Edit: I’d rather posters took the time to argue against rather than downvote. My point is just that ‘socially colourblind’ people probably shouldn’t be punished for lacking perceptual and expressive subtlety. It doesn’t mean they can’t be corrected or educated, of-course.
Why shouldn't people get punished for lacking perceptual and expressive subtlety? I doubt you would have a problem with rewarding people for possessing such skills (e.g. well-paid actors, or clever detectives).
> He sounds like he may be on the autistic spectrum, which if treated as a form of social disability would (or should, IMO) grant him some leeway.
This attitude leaves me almost speechless. When someone makes an argument that at least tries to be well reasoned, and people attack him based on misunderstandings and how it makes them feel, maybe the problem is not that he's autistic. Maybe it's those who are offended and refuse to engage in a civilized debate that have some form of disability.
It used to be that dispassionate reason was the highest form of discourse (the only one on which it's possible to reach agreements). What happened to that standard, when the responses boil down to "how does it make you feel"?
Neurotic, as he uses it, is not the same way it is used in everyday parlance.
Neurotic is part of the Big 5 personality traits, for which there is substantial academic evidence. The traits are: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.
He is using "neurotic" in the psychological and clinical sense. I believe he specifies as much in his actual paper.
"A study of gender differences in 55 nations using the Big Five Inventory found that women tended to be somewhat higher than men in neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. The difference in neuroticism was the most prominent and consistent, with significant differences found in 49 of the 55 nations surveyed."
> He is using "neurotic" in the psychological and clinical sense. I believe he specifies as much in his actual paper.
Eh. He's using the psychological/clinical definition, but then draws conclusions on no scientific basis.
This is what he said in the memo:
> [Women, on average, have more] neuroticism (higher anxiety, lower stress tolerance): This may contribute to the higher levels of anxiety women report on Googlegeist
and to the lower number of women in high stress jobs.
And this is a quote from the person who actually did the meta-analysis which Damore cites (emphasis is mine):
> These sex differences in neuroticism are not very large, with biological sex perhaps accounting for only 10 percent of the variance.
> It is unclear to me that this sex difference would play a role in success within the Google workplace (in particular, not being able to handle stresses of leadership in the workplace. That’s a huge stretch to me),
Regardless of the correctness of his overall argument, he wasn't saying "women are neurotic" in the colloquial sense, which was a common condemnation against him.
Also, and fact check me on this, does accounting for 10% of variance (aka 0.1 * sig^2) mean accounting for sqrt(0.1) * sig, aka 32% of the standard deviation?
Google has always had a very open culture with lots of political discussion and encouraged these kinds of internal debates. This was a memo written specifically for a private internal forum that was focused on that specific discussion. The widely shared version was leaked and edited, but never meant for a public audience.
Saying that men and women tend to have different preferences doesn't make a statement about their capabilities, nor is it really that controversial. The pursuit of a 50/50 ratio is counter-productive to free and open choice. Encouragement and opportunity should be the goal, not a forced ratio outcome.
The research the post cites strongly implies women would be better qualified for other roles. That suggestion was (and is) both inaccurate and inappropriate to send in a workplace.
Less interested/"qualified" compared on average to males by virtue of their interests and biology not their intelligence. Ignoring this is like sticking your fingers in your ears to the argument
How is the statement in a general population inaccurate? I agree it can make people uncomfortable but it looks pretty accurate to me
Actually it's pretty basic biology and psychology.
What "conclusions" are disagreed?
Can you really not see how this would apply in real life with personality differences? It seems obvious and intuitive not even mentioning the science, women are more social on average, men more into things that make a whirring noise. What data am I missing?
"...men more into things that make a whirring noise."
You are proving my argument. Nonsense like this has prevented women from feeling like equal participants (and equally capable) in many fields for decades.
How is it nonsense though? You just saying it doesn't make it so sorry... It's a pretty obvious observation made over and over you are going to need to give some data or reasoning why this is wrong, because science and logic both say these are the gender norms in a general population
How does that prove anything for you? You haven't shown anything except that you disagree, that doesn't give us anything except your opinion and definitely won't convince people who know the science also... The personality differences between men and women are not edgy science. I have a degree in psychology and I'm pretty confident you have no legit science (and haven't even give logical reasons) to back your claims but feel free to post something different
You also seem to have a lot of misinformation in this thread. Calling his memo a manifesto... Mixing neurotic with neuroticism... Basic facts you are smearing... You aren't giving people a reason to believe any of what you say so maybe you should think about why you have such an extreme view
No, he says that on average they score higher on "neuroticism", one of the Big Five personality traits. [1] And it is an empirical fact. [2]
If you say "he said women are neurotics" it means you didn't understand neither the language nor the logic of what you were reading, something that should give you pause.
It was a draft. Have the conversation. Address the flaws. Find a common ground, you don't have to be a conservative Manchurian candidate infiltrating the bay area to acknowledge where tech companies are failing on inclusivity goals in ways that stretch the imagination of being out of touch.
Big Tech's contrived and readjusted and out of touch practices have been written about in NY Times, Wapo, even freaking SFGate ad nauseum.
Adding some points that overlap with misogynist communities means address the misogyny in isolation, and also factor in the points.
What is a productive way to have this discussion? I can't think of any plausible way to have a discussion in this realm without serious risk of being ostracized.
I don't have any beef in this discussion, and am not educated in this field, but out of curiosity I had a quick look at what Wikipedia says, and it seems to at least somewhat agree with this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroticism
Looking for front and back end developers, as well as mobile developers to improve the stability, design and functionality of the Musopen.org website.
Musopen is a registered 501(c)3 non-profit charity, and all of the music and pdf files we host are free to the public without added copyrights/restrictions.
For more info, please see past press coverage of our work: https://musopen.org/press/
If interested, please tell us about yourself, your area of expertise, and if there is something in particular you'd like to help with: https://musopen.org/contact/ or aaron {at} musopen dot org