ok, i get that, and now is a bacteria considered more agentic than a virus then ? (that's a bit of a side-question sorry). bacterias at least reproduce on their own so they check all the boxes.
i've wondered for a long time why this isn't a more common solution to these services that are almost inevitably monopolous. power, water, and internet kind of things.
tldr: one town in the US did it and it became an economic miracle, big telcos noticed and have set up lobbying and advertising infra to ensure it never happens.
The video doesn't explain much. At the end, it says this:
> "The average voter doesn't understand how these systems work so there is little risk for [state] lawmakers in siding with these companies."
The million-dollar question is why those lawmakers are siding with these companies when the economic miracle case exists right in front of their eyes. The answer to that question is the real explainer.
In Europe these were largely publicly-owned, but the neoliberal tendency to privatise everything has slowly dismantled the public corporation.
My home country's formerly public energy provider has a weird share structure: a Chinese company and BlackRock add up to a fourth of the stock. No foreign investor should really be buying up stock in critical infrastructure.
the thing about being human is you internalize cultural values as your own.
if you lived in a society that valued, i dunno, tracking and hunting down giraffes in small groups, would you have the same struggles? what if just participating in society required ~20 hours of athletic activity a week? i'm not entirely convinced you would have this problem, based on the anthropology i've read.
the signal of a maladaptive culture is not 'i feel like the people around me have a moral failing'. It is 'i, and many others, feel like we've all got basically the same moral failing.'
personally, this has been a very helpful reframing. If I simply can't bring myself to do something, that means not that I am bad and my willpower is bad, it just means that something is materially wrong and I should consider addressing it by doing things that my body will let me do.
My desire to work on said projects is intrinsic; no one around me expects me to do so. In fact, quite a few of my projects add no value to broader society and exist only because I found doing them interesting. I don't imagine the surrounding culture valuing the hunting of giraffes would particularly affect this one way or the other. (Except if said culture doesn't have computers, I guess.)
> personally, this has been a very helpful reframing. If I simply can't bring myself to do something, that means not that I am bad and my willpower is bad, it just means that something is materially wrong and I should consider addressing it by doing things that my body will let me do.
To be clear, I don't think I'm "bad" or that I have a moral failing just because I can't bring myself to do some things. (If anything, that sounds like an internalization of some unfortunate cultural norms...) In my case, it's a contradiction: I want to do a thing for intrinsic reasons, but I can't bring myself to do the thing due to insufficient motivation/focus (for lack of a better term). It can be maddening at times.
But if we take a more typical example that many ADHD people struggle with like, say, doing the dishes or cleaning the house... I guess I don't really understand what might be "materially wrong" here, or how doing something else addresses whatever that is or, more to the point, actually gets those chores done...? This sounds a bit hand-wavy to me.
> But if we take a more typical example that many ADHD people struggle with like, say, doing the dishes or cleaning the house... I guess I don't really understand what might be "materially wrong" here, or how doing something else addresses whatever that is or, more to the point, actually gets those chores done...? This sounds a bit hand-wavy to me.
We can go a lot more fundamental than this, too. What about brushing your teeth? Showering? Eating? I can keep going.
There are some things you can handwave away as being society's fault, but there are far, far more things that, no matter how much society changes, will still negatively affect me.
I used to be like this back when I chronically under-exercised, it was the only thing that would help me sleep. And even then, I struggled with insomnia.
Personally I need 10-20 hours of real sport a week to function really well, which seems to put me in some very high percentiles on HN. I need so much sport that I barely have time to do anything besides work and exercise, which means I don't do many non-athletic hobbies anymore.
I mean, for like, some ML research, sure. For certain, even most, aspects of electrical engineering, absolutely. But for biology? Absolutely not.
And even in more computer-adjacent fields, this is still ridiculously reductive. Geoff Hinton is an academic through-and-through, and he changed the world even for computer scientists. What about someone like Don Knuth? I mean, even google's pagerank started as an academic project.
Engineering firms do great research too, but this is not the only way.
i'm well aware of how medications are developed. i'm talking about biology, not medicine. there is a world of difference. pharma companies combine tech that gets developed in academic labs in clever ways to treat diseases. but make no mistake, most of these techniques come out of academia.
if you think CRISPR or P1 transduction were discovered outside academia, you are wrong. and this isn't even discussing stuff with no immediate clinical applications that is nonetheless important (jumbo phages, asgard archaea are hot rn)
This is crazy to me because when I've run labs in the past, there were equipment failures literally all of the time. When you teach lots of people, shit breaks. Quite often if something didn't work, I'd just have one student swap equipment with another student to help diagnose this sort of thing.
Major bummer that others have had differing experiences from me, here.
'flunked everyone who claimed they got the supposed "correct" answer to three significant digits because that was impossible.' while I've never seen anyone flunked for this, I certainly have taken off substantial amounts of points, and seen others do the same, for 3 significant figures when 2 is the absolute highest reasonably possible (and realistically, one sig fig was what we actually wanted).
I've run the exact lab you're describing, and I think we gave full credit for anything between 5m/s^2 and 20 m/s^2 provided there was some acknowledgement that this was at odds with what was expected. We very often would check in halfway through class and either tell the kids what they were doing wrong, or even tell them to write something 'this is at odds with literally all known science and I think I don't trust this'. For this particular lab, I've never seen errors as large as the ones you've described, so your lab was likely very poorly set up.
In other cases, I've made extra time (and allow students to come in) in case their numbers were so weird as to be problematic; just depends on the lab. Any teacher worth their salt will do this. It's a shame the teachers you had were terrible and incentivized bad stuff.
If being in a lab has taught me anything, it's that doing good science is often morally difficult. Sticking by your guns is hard.
But you are right in some sense: there are definitely incentives to... misreport. The best we can do as teachers is to reduce those as much as possible and reward kids/students for being honest.
I think my favorite point to this effect is that there's plenty of medical literature (in the Lancet, and others) suggesting hypnosis is as effective as certain drugs for killing pain in certain contexts. And hypnosis is nothing more than talking someone, in a very directed way. There's caveats of course, but that's true of all drugs... Not to mention all this stuff on gut microbiota, and even the truly 'woo-woo' stuff like acupuncture. Personally, I don't think it's crazy at all to imagine that sticking a needle near the right neuron can cause some kind of occasionally helpful physiological response... in fact, it would be almost more surprising to me if this wasn't possible. Modern medicine works wonders for infectious diseases & physical issues, but I'm not entirely convinced we have a handle on the more subtle stuff.
I've been a lot more attentive to this kind of stuff lately due to some chronic health stuff that came up in the family. I think there's probably some framework in modern medicine that makes it less prone to adopting these kinds of methods. Maybe it's just historical baggage, who knows...
The problem with acupuncture is that the relative effectiveness compared to placebos has gotten worse and worse as better placebos have been developed for trials.
I.e. you mentioned "sticking a needle next to the right nerve" - that's a valid research question...and it was studied. Turns out sticking needles where an acupuncture specialist thinks they should go, versus just randomly has the same reported effect in trials.
Oh huh. Just quickly glancing, it seems that indeed you may be right, at least for a lot of the standard things it's used to treat. The exception seems to be allergies?
I'm not sure that invalidates my broader point in any case, but good to know!
