Open Thread, Aug. 1 - Aug 7. 2016

You might be when compared to Eugine.

What would you say your political views are?

I would imagine a lot of political activism is entirely counter productive

I think that people usually take the way that allows them to display their personal "virtue" (i.e. loyalty to the cause) rather than the one that optimizes for what the group is trying to achieve. Which is why movements that originally tried to achieve something meaningful gradually mutate into their own strawpersons.

For example, you can start with "people should be treated equally, even if they are X", but soon you realize that saying positive things about X and negative things about non-X is what gets you perceived as a true believer -- and pointing out exceptions gets you labeled as a heretic, -- so the movement gradually changes into de facto X-supremacism.

Or you can realize that trying to be politically correct at all costs sometimes makes people say stupid things, so you start signalling your intelligence by saying politically incorrect things... and continue doing so even in situations where saying the politically incorrect things makes you stupid.

I guess most people are not aware of participating in this process; they simply do more of what is socially rewarded in their group, and less of what is socially punished, without realizing they are being pushed somewhere they originally didn't aim to be.

Sociopathy is basically absence of empathy. I'm not sure that mass downvoting (that is, manipulation of pretty meaningless numbers in a database about a web forum) qualifies as evidence pro.

With respect to making the source available, the consequences depend on the target market and the price. For a multi-thousand-dollar product aimed at STEM professionals, yeah, people will bother to recompile without the offending bits. For a mass-market app priced at $0.99 no one will bother.

But I agree that some plugin API looks like the most natural way to proceed.

I agree that creating an API is probably the smartest way to go about it. The "disadvantage" to that approach is that I have to build and maintain an API.

The app architecture as it exists is also somewhat conducive to being "split" into an open and extensible part and a closed engine. However, I might wish I had just gone to the full effort of building an API, so that I don't have to constantly mentally track what parts of the code can reside in the be public modules.

Having the app run on a server is also possible, but I have no familiarity with doing that.

Thanks for your thoughts.

That doesn't mean that this happens to be an equilibrium. An equilibrium suggests that a system is stable.

Trump realized a huge number of voters were in (a)

After reading the article of his ghostwriter I'm not sure that's true. It seems more likely to me that Trump is a psychopath in the clinical sense who actually lies all the time and couldn't simply switch to being truthful.

The suggestion that Clinton lied in the email scandal is also illustrative that lying isn't something she does all the time but only when she thinks she needs to. With Trump that's very different. Take the lie about him opposing the Lybia invasion. Would have any other Republican that was running.

Trump tells that lie so convincingly that even Peter Thiel alluded that differences in handling Lybia were a reason for supporting Trump in his speech.

I think that climate change is a situation where we should directly go to plan B. Plan A here is cutting emissions. It is not working, because it is very expensive and require cooperation of all sides. It also will have immediate results and the temperature will still grow by many reasons.

The plan B in climate change prevention is changing opacity of earth atmosphere. It could be surprisingly cheap and local. There are suggestions to put something as simple as sulfuric acid in the upper atmosphere to rise it reflection ability.

"According to Keith’s calculations, if operations were begun in 2020, it would take 25,000 metric tons of sulfuric acid to cut global warming in half after one year. Once under way, the injection of sulfuric acid would proceed continuously. By 2040, 11 or so jets delivering roughly 250,000 metric tons of it each year, at an annual cost of $700 million, would be required to compensate for the increased warming caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide. By 2070, he estimates, the program would need to be injecting a bit more than a million tons per year using a fleet of a hundred aircraft." https://www.technologyreview.com/s/511016/a-cheap-and-easy-plan-to-stop-global-warming/

The problem with that approach is that it can't be stopped. As Seth Baum wrote smaller catastrophe could result in disruption of such engineering and immediate return of global warming with vengeance.

There are other ways to prevent global warming. Plan C is creating artificial nuclear winter by volcanic explossion or starting large scale forest fires with nukes.

There are also ideas to recapture CO2 using genetically modified organisms, iron seeding in ocean and dispersing carbon capturing mineral olivine.

So we are not even closed to be doomed from global warming - but we may have to change the way we react on them. We must agree that cutting emission is not working in next 10-20 years perspective.

Well, we could look at other planets that show any sign of ever having had an Earthlike atmosphere. Here's (I think) the list of such planets we know about and are able to observe: {Venus}.

That might be a pretty bad sign, but I'm not sure Venus's history is similar enough to earth's. (E.g., whatever got its atmosphere the way it is, it probably wasn't overproduction of CO2 by burning fossil fuels. Though, actually, I'm not sure how we'd know.)

I think that we strongly underestimate not only probability of runaway global warming but also fragility of our environment because of anthropic bias.

May be runaway global warming is long overdue in our planet and small human actions could trigger it.

I wrote an article about it several years ago, but I want to rewrite it completely. The current version is here: "Why anthropic principle stops to defend us: observation selection, future rate of natural disasters and fragility of our environment" http://www.slideshare.net/avturchin/why-anthropic-principle-stopped-to-defend-us-observation-selection-and-fragility-of-our-environment

"Computer program fixes old code faster than expert engineers:

Fixing old code isn't a job that most computer programmers want to do. In this particular example it's simply code that works as a better compiler. It's similar to how using Amazons S3 is easier then configuring your own server. Computer programmers get empowered by tools.