Yeah I don't buy this idea at all. People freaked out over the ability to edit photos in dark rooms decades ago. Trust didn't deplete because pictures got tied to identities which in turn is tied to reputation (or by verifying "hey is that picture of the president k-wording a person with a gun real" with a trusted institution or something), etc.
There's other cool stuff that will come of this but the fact that this is the idea mentioned every single time shows a severe lack of imagination in our sphere.
Faked images are super popular and effective and are used to reinforce biases.
Major outlets like Fox News that traffic in false information have bad reputations and also good reputations among others.
You are right that this is isn't a technical problem though. Why bother faking a video or photo when fake words (misquotes and lies) are 10000 cheaper and just as effective?
I have such trouble trying to figure out which of these many algorithms that are released will end up having a significant impact on a 5 year horizon. But this I have a rare hunch about that it could be quite significant (at least the direction in which it's trying to push).
Curious: why isn't all porn sites sued for this? I don't quite get why they're only going after PH? Is it because it's harder to win a case against 1000 websites? Is it because it's more overhead to go after multiple sites and they expect the biggest return on investment only going after the biggest one? Anyone smarter than me who has a take?
If "doing the right thing" means banning videos from all online platforms except those with the capability to automatically translate sound into subtitles, I'd rather they don't do the "right thing". The end result will be lawsuit money for a few disabled people and the end of most alternative video platforms.
I used to be sceptical that the concept of overtraining was a thing, but it definitely is. Just saying that running every day consistently might not necessarily be good for you in the long run. Listen to your body.
Agreed, "listen to your body." is really important advice. I've been running every day without exception for 1252 days now, and there have been really slow, really short (2k) runs whenever I felt my body needed a bit more leeway for recovery. It takes some practice and it's not for everyone, but daily/streak running can be transformative (and was/is for me).
Pet peeve: when people take phrases intended for one thing and uses them for a slightly modified purpose. I take Branson's "screw it, let's do it" mantra as something entreprenurial, a call to break the rules (and stuff like that). Using it in this purpose feels more like "screw it, let's work even though I'd rather stay in bed", which is different emotionally, and kind of saturates the sayings power.
(Maybe nikes "Just do it" would fit better, but I get that its associations to big corporations isn't as well suited for the startup atmosphere we're surrounded by.)
Especially as the root of that phrase is in really wanting to do something, in the face of overwhelming external pressure to not do it (I think he coined it when launching Virgin Atlantic and noone thought the business plan looked solid).
I'm hearing this advice so often that it's pissing me off.
The book is BS. (I've read it.) There, I said it. It's always "this book is hugely thought provoking" (pointing at you Daniel Gross), and never ever and expansion on why or what insights it actually contains that's interesting. It has mildly interesting sentences that feels deep (mostly because they're confusing). The book has developed into some BS signalling device like Infinite Jest used to be. Everyone has read it, no one understands it. Everyone goes "oh yes, that's such a deep book, nothing has changed my mind like it since sapiens", and then we're all supposed to go silent to independently ponder it's many layered-ness, but in reality that's just what we do because we wouldn't come up anything remotely insightful if pushed into a corner. Frankly, the fact that this book is pushed so much makes me totally reconsider oft-repeated meme that "tech is low virtue signalling" (or low corruption). Clearly not.
(There, rant over. I'm overplaying how mad I actually am, I just feel like we need a few more rants against this book strewn about whenever this book is mentioned. Please, anyone, prove me wrong and a horrific narrow-minded dimwit by writing something more in-depth about what you think it contains and how it's insightful, I would love you infinitely.)
For me, I’ve found the book useful in understanding activities in a way that reduces my stress and helps me interact with people. Specifically, I don’t take things as seriously and try not to get wound up in arbitrary or not important rules. And that I get that some people get into the rules of an activity when I haven’t and that helps me understand where they are coming from.
I suppose there are many ways to learn that, but, for me, it was this book. The lesson helped me a lot.
And it’s really short book so I don’t feel so guilty recommending it. Brothers Karamazov is amazing, but recommending it is like giving someone a job.
I tend to fall in the "disappointed" set about this one.
It is short, but 1/3 into it I realized that the author is basically rephrasing the same concepts over and over and over.
Does it changes abruptly after the second half? I'll probably never know.
Hahaha this is so on-point. Finite and Infinite Games is probably the most intellectually offensive book I've ever read. As much as I hate on the continental philosophy crowd, even those guys are better than Carse. At least their books have tasteful jackets.
It's not "not getting the basics right", it's a simple typo. A thing like that shouldn't invalidate a whole article (unless you have skin in the game for the opponent argument).
Why does HN have a pattern of dismissing whole articles due to simple typos? It's as if we're so habituated to skim and do tldr-reading that our brain is working overdrive to find the slightest excuse not to have to do any type of reading beyond surface level.
Critical and technical literature needs to be held to a standard.
When the rhetor introduces errors in the artifact, the rhetor's ethos with the audience is diminished.
The more fundamental the error (getting a basic equation wrong I guess?) the more trust you lose with a knowledgeable audience. If the author doesn't see that a fundamental issue was introduced, they may not have been expert enough to not introduce additional errors; the reader must spend more time double-checking the components of the argument rather than thinking about the argument itself.
If someone comes to this article as a novice in the topic and stores the error as a fact, they may end up at least confused when approaching it again in the future. HN tends to have an audience representing deep knowledge in many fields, who end up providing a thorough and varied set of quality filters. These quality filters are also really helpful to the novice who may otherwise miss the typo.
> Critical and technical literature needs to be held to a standard.
That's a sloppy statement. You haven't defined what standard. Clearly, everything is held to "a standard"; making that an entirely empty claim.
> When the rhetor introduces errors in the artifact, the rhetor's ethos with the audience is diminished.
A "rhetor" is a teacher of rhetoric. This is not the correct word in this case. In this case, the correct word is the more general "author", since the post was not teaching rhetoric. Further, the entire point of "ethos" in rhetoric is that we shouldn't be so lazy as to allow minor issues cloud our judgement.
> The more fundamental the error (getting a basic equation wrong I guess?) the more trust you lose with a knowledgeable audience.
Quite the opposite. A knowledgeable audience can decide whether to trust something based on the actual content, rather than minor surface issues. Only a lazy or uninformed audience need get distracted by typos.
> That's a sloppy statement. You haven't defined what standard.
Actually, I think I established a basis of discussion then later illustrated this basis with the way HN has grown and tends to enforce its standard.
> A "rhetor" is a teacher of rhetoric. This is not the correct word in this case.
A rhetor is a person practicing rhetoric, or a person delivering persuasive or effective communication. Teachers are indeed a subset of that, but also public speakers, negotiators, and e.g. authors who write to influence their audiences' understanding or perception.
I think you may also misunderstand the function of ethos in rhetoric.
> A knowledgeable audience can decide whether to trust something based on the actual content.
Perhaps we're in agreement? If the content reflects reflects clear understanding it can improve the efficacy of a rhetorical artifact, while sloppiness can reduce its persuasiveness.
Not really, it's one of the most common mistakes I see in bayesian calculations. If the author was basing a lengthy series of calculations on that first step, it would be worse (but in this case the expression is quickly replaced by a corrected version for the classification discussion).
I have a similar experience, but precisely because of this I am very careful to check the formula each time I have to type it. Mistakes in the formulas are not "just typos", they are a very annoying and potentially harmful kind of typos, and we must take great care in order to avoid them.
Like I said above, "typos" in sequences of calculations are obviously problematic, and lead (almost always) to mistakes in the final result. In this case that's not applicable since there's no "second arithmetic manipulation" following the typo:ed one. (The author replaces the incorrect one with the correct bayesian equation in the next section.)
> unless you have skin in the game for the opponent argument
I stated explicitly otherwise (I'm not even in research), something you certainly couldn't miss. I'm not quite sure, if your allegation backfires.
Especially in hot temper, people make errors. But just then they should avoid making an easy target. The authors site also has some problems with rendering math (some does, some shows still dollar signs) and this adds to a first impression of sloppyness. I t is his decision to go public - but then he has to take the consequences.
Author here. Sorry that the typo and the render errors affected you so much. We don't see any rendering issues on our end, if you tell us what browser you are using maybe we can replicate and fix them.
> Sorry that the typo and the render errors affected you so much.
It seems to concern some commentators here to a much greater extent, concluding from the whole downvoting dance. I'm old-school, I received my master in mathematics more than 25 years ago. Being in stochastics, I simply spotted an error and also some dispute, the latter from the context in the article. I want to mention, that in the past people had considered a behavior like mine as helpful, rigour was a value and especially when under fire, people were expected to try even harder.
> what browser you are using maybe we can replicate and fix them
FF 72.0.1 on Win 10 here. If it helps, in the following sequence:
--- snip ---
Bayes’s Rule simply says that for any two non-independent random variables $A$ and $B$, seeing that $B$ took a specific value $b$ changes the distribution of the random variable $A$. In standard lingo, the term Pr(A=a) is called the prior, Pr(B=b∣A=a) is the likelihood, and Pr(A=a∣B=b) is the posterior.
---snap---
all the single capitals (A,B...) appear embraced with dollar signs, all the Pr(...) expression are correct (even after removing uBlock/noScript restrictions)
Thanks! We just fixed an issue. I was able to test it on FF for MacOS but it would be very helpful if you could confirm the problem is fixed in your end.
Also, I'll admit that messing up Bayes rule in a blog post criticizing Bayesian Neural Netowrks is pretty comical. Should have taken the time to proof read the whole thing.
They're not all bad, far from it. But sometimes a few actors poisons the well of a whole label (ehm, shark tank), causing some people to have an allergic reaction to the whole class (even if it isn't true that all of them are bad).
I don't understand the allergy mechanism, though. Can't you just... mute the bad actors? I can't grasp the frame of mind where I'd need to preemptively mute people who are (believed by some guy known only as "Tom" to be) shallow VCs.
I mean the boring answer is that people have patience and energy constraints. They arbitrarily ignore the whole group because VC isn't adjacent enough to their life goals, or something, to warrant the energy necessary to pick out the patience-stealers from the insight-givers.
There's other cool stuff that will come of this but the fact that this is the idea mentioned every single time shows a severe lack of imagination in our sphere.