It's true that upvote count and comment counts are the best way we have to quantify the quality of a submission. That's why I still browse the top posts page and will still upvote a post that I think is high quality.
But for me, upvote and comment counts bias my perception of a post. I'm choosing to hide these counts so I can read articles uninfluenced by the number of points they have relative to other posts on the front page.
Thats why I read the title first, decide whether it is important or relevant to me, if so I check it out. If I like it, I upvote it and if I have something to throw into the discussion I add a comment. Personally, I use the numbers to indentify "quality" and "valid facts". Invalid posts have a large number of comments and less upvotes.
For me, the problem was more that the highly upvoted posts were obviously good, so my time and attention were spent scrolling through HN looking for posts with more than ~50 upvotes or more than 10 comments.
After hiding upvote and comment counts, I've found myself reading more of those high-quality niche articles that I wouldn't have clicked on previously. I've also found myself reading post titles more thoroughly and reading articles first instead of immediately jumping into the comment section to get summary/judgement.
Perhaps this extension is unnecessary if you have more self control that I do ;).
> After hiding upvote and comment counts, I've found myself reading more of those high-quality niche articles that I wouldn't have clicked on previously.
That's also the reason I create a newsletter to list all the creative content of the day which didn't get visibility https://hnblogs.substack.com/
lobste.rs is a site similar to HN where users must be invited by another user and the public tree of invites is kept as a sort of reputation map. Might be similar to what you’re envisioning.
Another data point: I was an intern at Google last year and they gave most of the interns Pixelbooks. It worked fine for development (granted, development consisted of SSHing into a dev box and using a web-based IDE).
This story is in the same vein as that of the CloudFlare cofounder[1] who suffers from a rare neurodegenerative disease and has had his life pretty much taken from him at far too young an age.
This quote in particular gnaws at me: "We had promised each other that in a few years, when the girls headed off to college, we’d work less and travel more. Amy didn’t deserve to lose those dreams, or her companion, just as we were on the brink." I, presumably like many others here, have spent a lot of time on my career, perhaps to the detriment of other aspects of my life. Is it worth it? That seems like an impossible question to answer.
It is common to have a rare disease: 7-8% of the general population has some sort of a condition that is classifiable as a rare disease
I personally have 2, both of which affect my peripheral nervous system.
Getting diagnosed is basically like having a bomb dropped on you. Nothing can prepare you for it, and it takes a long time to heal from the news, if you ever do.
The vast majority of rare diseases have no government health regulatory system approved treatment. I believe 95% do not.
Treatment is often for symptom relief, and typically modification of the disease process itself is not possible. However, in some cases, drugs can be repurposed.
My attitude to stories like this is simply that you can't live under the assumption that you'll die early from some freak cause. It would be a non-functional state of life, sacrificing all long term objectives.
At the end of the day all any of us can do is play the odds, and sometimes while playing X-Com that 99% chance-to-hit point blank shot by your most experienced soldier with the best equipment simply misses.
> It would be a non-functional state of life, sacrificing all long term objectives.
If your long-term objectives mean sacrificing (or delaying) happiness in the now, then I think you're doing the wrong thing.
It's all well and good to have long-term objectives, and we all hope we beat our life expectancy numbers, but you have to make every effort to be happy now, and not wait for some distant and uncertain future that may or may not become reality.
Sacrificing present happiness for the future is the definition of a long term goal. Today I sacrificed alcohol I would have enjoyed so as to continue losing weight. If I thought I wouldn't be alive months from now to experience the benefits from said weight loss, why do it? Ironically that attitude would actually increase the odds of early-onset nastiness.
Why put money into my 401k that I can't touch without penalty for 40 years when I could enjoy it now?
Being content and at peace with oneself in the moment is possible, and should be striven for. But for my part I'd have a hard time being content with myself if I wasn't striving for better for both myself and my family.
In my experience the only lasting satisfaction in life comes from discharging meaningful responsibilities, that requires some sacrifice of momentary happiness. Happiness is great when it's around but has no staying power, and too many people get sucked into miserable hedonism while trying to turn it into a constant.
Providing for an assumed future requires sacrifice and is the right bet. While doing that, understand that the journey is the destination. It's a tall order but somewhere in there is the answer to a lot of life's questions.
A key detail here is you can't predict the future. We can all imagine situations where the long term bet pays better. We can even make that sort of prediction in a way that works a good amount of the time, even most of the time. Except sometimes it won't work out. We don't know in advance when that sometimes will be. Be prepared for either outcome I guess.
Such a difficult question. My thoughts: we're all trying to strike a balance between work and family. Whatever balance you manage, be present wherever you are. For whatever time you are with your family put away your phone, and be present mentally. Your children will be thrilled if they get 30 minutes a day of you uninterrupted even if you are working much of the rest of the time.
This resource[1] linked by Gates in the article says
> "Most of the active projects are in exploratory or preclinical stages. However, 5 candidates have recently moved into clinical development, including mRNA-1273 (Moderna), Ad5-nCoV (CanSino Biologicals), INO-4800 (Inovio), LV-SMENP-DC and pathogen-specific aAPC (Shenzhen Geno-Immune Medical Institute). Notably, Moderna was able to start clinical testing of its mRNA-based vaccine just 63 days after sequence identification."
Presumably, those are 5 out of the 8-10 that Gates thinks is promising
Because it's one that's been aggressively pushed by the institution itself and the only one that I know of that seeks partnerships with many companies / institutions without any royalty involved (that I know of, at least).
Also because they were quickly able to get 1000+ people for the Phase 1 study, and they're starting the Phase 2/3 study next month (objective: 6000 people recruited).
They want (assuming that it is effective, of course, which is absolutely not guaranteed) to have something ready for emergency use by early autumn.
Perhaps it's just better communication on their part, mind you.
The NY Times story is a bit of storytelling but it's kind of fascinating how they got there.
For now I'm placing my bets on this one because they do not want royalties out of it and they're seeking deals with many companies to manufacture as much as possible (at risk, because at this point it is not known if it works).
The other promising factor is that their work is a continuation of a 10 year project to develop a coronavirus vaccine. They are just modifying it to work with sars-cov2. So it already had a lot of work out into it.
Add Turing to the list, having him around during the naissance of molecular genetics and the flowering of computation would have made those fields all the more lively.
I rather think making arguably the biggest individual contribution to winning the biggest war in history is a pretty big contributor to his game. His role in the founding of computer science also doesn't hurt.
In terms of a metric akin to "mathematical DALYs", Galois was perhaps the most impactful early death of all, followed by Abel. Both Galois and Abel founded entire branches of mathematics before the age of 25.
Good question, maybe he shouldn't be on that list. I'd read a long biography about him in German ("Wer ist Alexander Grothendieck?"), and was left with the impression that he was unfulfilled and unhappy at the end of his career; of course he lived to old age and there were certainly worse fates on that list, so perhaps its inclusion is not so appropriate.
And doubtless several more. By the way, not only are Scholze and Tao outstanding talents, but very nice and humble, as in ACTUAL nice and humble, and they (especially Tao) write in a crystal clear way so they are wonderful as expositors and academic writers. Makes one chuckle comparing that to so much unrestrained ego online.
Yes, my favorite thing about Tao is how well he explains concepts on his blog [0] and on mathoverflow[1]. He does not put on airs of being an unapproachable genius. I guess he knows he has nothing to prove
This is much more satisfying way to think of these concepts. The idea of thinking of convolution as a 'fuzzy' optical phenomena, the idea of thinking of n-dimensional space as a probability distribution.
It's interesting the way he grounds his intuition in practical applications. For convolution for example, a common application is to convolve a 2d image with a gaussian kernel to fuzz the image. I know that, but always still had a not-very intuitive, but very dry and technical understanding of convolution as a sort of dot product of two vectors representing the underlying image and the kernel. Terence Tao in contrast exploits the practical intuition of 'fuzziness' in this process to suggest thinking of convolution as a fuzzy (probablistic) addition of functions. It's a subtle step, but giving some sort of physical, or visual intuition for mathethematics like this is so helpful.
Yep being a lowly engineer who loves math I always wanted to learn a more rigorous approach, but then again I am lazy, so for example I started with Rudin, but gave up as soon as I couldnt grasp something, same with other analysis books and lecture notes. Then comes Terry with his 2 jewels of books on Analysis, but I thought to myself, no way I am going to understand anything from arguably the best mathematician in the last decades. But not only the prose is clear and unpretentious the motivation of why analysis is "needed" is presented perfectly, the books are self-contained and the progression is very smooth,no pun intended. Highly, highly recommended.
He thinks in a very expository way, it seems. There's aother guy, Gromov, who is the opposite. He is famously mysterious (people sometimes joke about "speaking Gromovian").
I'm so curious what it must be like to have that kind of mind. Just did a quick Google and his IQ is around 230. I mean, it's hard enough to really understand what anyone else's subjective experience is like, but I think it's literally impossible to get a true sense of what it would be like to be that intelligent (for those of us who are nowhere close). With that great a difference it's got to really be a difference in kind, not just degree.
Owing to the way IQ is defined, nobody has an IQ over 200.
IQ doesn’t measure absolute intelligence, but rather assumes it is a normal curve and maps that to human friendly numbers: mean 100, standard deviation 15 or 16 depending who you ask.
The same thing has the curious side effect that if the number of people in comas at any given time is greater than 1, then coma patients must have an IQ > 0.
OK, so if all IQs could be mapped accurately onto a normal curve with a SD of 15-16 you wouldn't expect anyone over 200. But standardized IQ tests can most definitely give results over 200, and do. And presumably someone who scores 250 on an IQ test is likely to be more intelligent^ than someone who scores 200 on the same test.
^in the sense that it measured by IQ tests, anyway. Point being it shows a real difference; deltas over 200 aren't meaningless.
Terence Tao's intelligence is not predicted by IQ. Plenty have higher IQ and achieve less. Some lower and achieve more.
IQ is total pseudoscience nonsense of zero value to anyone or anything.
It's one genuine use is as a fig leaf for the very worst kind of racism. Treat it and anyone touting IQ an indicator of anything with extreme suspicion. Nazis love IQ. Goodwin's. /Thread
Why do you consider IQ to be pseudoscience? It's the bedrock of psychometrics. Just because some people use some IQ data to justify racism doesn't mean the measure is unscientific. Nazis loved nuclear physics too, it doesn't mean the field is pseudoscience.
Take any large multivariate problem and look for a regressor against some dimension. Say, car speed. You will find that there is a good variable that links that. But that variable won't be explanatory or even correct.
I know this isn’t your main point, and I might just be remembering British wartime propaganda (my parents told me several things that later turned out to have been that), but…
Wasn’t the Nazi nuclear program severely delayed by their race-based hatred of Einstein for being Jewish?
This is an argument against doing physics the way the Nazis did (ie deriding certain theoretical paths as "Jewish physics"), not an argument against doing nuclear physics at all because the Nazis did.
The latter is what this thread is talking about: it's obvious that we shouldn't be studying psychometrics the way the Nazis did, but it's not obvious that we shouldn't be doing it at all because they did (as with nuclear physics).
Hilariously, even harry8's complaint that the Nazis loved IQ is precisely backwards: Hitler banned IQ testing for being "Jewish" too.
EDIT: I actually was curious about this last claim, so I checked the source that the Wikipedia article points to. While this text was written by one of the most-cited psychologists in history, there's little else out there to concretely corroborate or refute that IQ testing was _banned_ by the Nazis. The evidence indicates that their attitude was somewhere between apathy and hostility towards the tests.
No you're a bit too literal. Nazis sadly are not dead and gone, not limited to 1930-45 Germany.
IQ is loved by Nazis as proof of master race bullshit. Really.
Treat IQ with contempt. It's an indicator of idiocy in a discussion. (All of us are capable of idiocy in discussions, including me, don't fall for the IQ trap. You're above it. We all are).
Environmentalism is an important part of neo-Nazism (and other strains of fascism) too. Do you think that automatically tars anybody who thinks we should pollute less? I appreciate the point you're trying to make, but you're letting labels do the thinking for you (or as I've heard it put recently, "engaging in idiocy").
I don't personally believe that racial IQ differences are significant or salient to differences in population outcomes, nor am I convinced that claims are well-founded that IQ determines individual outcomes to a significant degree. But I don't advise treating it like a magic word that shuts off the thought centers of your brain. If you think it's a useless concept, you should be able to articulate why by pointing to the science (or lack thereof), not by letting Nazis tell you what you're allowed to think critically about.
This is getting closer to making a reasonable claim, but unfortunately, an unsupported assertion is the _beginning_ of making an argument, not the end.
Most of the relevant scientific community disagrees with your assertion that IQ is purely pseudoscience. From Wikipedia:
> Clinical psychologists generally regard IQ scores as having sufficient statistical validity for many clinical purposes.[25][68][69] ... "On the whole, scholars with any expertise in the area of intelligence and intelligence testing (defined very broadly) share a common view of the most important components of intelligence, and are convinced that it can be measured with some degree of accuracy." Almost all respondents picked out abstract reasoning, ability to solve problems and ability to acquire knowledge as the most important elements.
There's plenty more on the topic, and as always, Wikipedia is a great place to start your search for sources.
In what way is your blanket dismissal of the scientific consensus different from anti-vaxxers ("the only use of vaccines is support for Illuminati mind-control!!) or flat-earthers ("the only use for a round earth theory is support for, uh, the globe industry!")? Or for that matter, what makes you different from IQ essentialists like neo-Nazis, that take a nuanced scientific concept and flatten it into an all-or-nothing perfect predictor of outcomes? Hell, at least they're _directionally_ in agreement with the scientific establishment about the validity of the concept.
The onus is on those making the claim to provide the evidence. A claim without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
There is no evidence. Dig into anything that is claimed as evidence and it's clearly invalid, at best. As a statement of the overwhelimingly obvious: the field of Psychology has issues. It knows this. You've heard of the "replication crisis." There are those trying to right it and treat it like it is actually science and rip out all the pseudo-bs that psych is redolent with. Good luck to them. Maybe they'll even remove the utterly discredited stanford prison experiment from every single first year psych textbook? Or keep it as yet another example of collective delusion in the discpline caused by faked research? Yet another one. But in every textbook. Credibility?
"On the whole, scholars with any expertise in the area of intelligence and intelligence testing (defined very broadly) share a common view of the most important components of intelligence, and are convinced that it can be measured with some degree of accuracy." - Anyone who disagrees and asks for the evidence is defined as lacking expertise. It's frigging comical. But it does screw up lives and justify racism so, there's that. Get told you're stupid as a child, there's a good chance that's self-fulfilling.
There is ovewhelming evidence that vaccines work. Seen a polio case, well, ever? There is none that IQ is a useful scientific metric. See Egas Moniz's Nobel prize for how psychology can move as a discipline on mass without evidence. Or maybe butchering brains and getting nobel prizes for it isn't clear enough evidence that you can't take anything in psychology "on trust" anymore than you can physics.
IQ is a disgrace. It is already and will continue to be increasingly sighted as how bad the discpiline of psychology has been for the past 100 years. May they own their shame and do better. Your IQ score being higher than mine means absolutely nothing. My IQ score being higher than yours means nothing. Absolutely nothing. Zero. But yeah, you can convince people it's has meaning and use it mess up lives - even if you don't intend to do that. Like the altruistic motives behind lobotomy and the success they had with the Nobel committee.
I wonder if you constantly challenged yourself to see and feel from others perspectives, all the time. Perhaps one day you may understand what it’s like to have that kind of mind. At that point, would your IQ also be around 230?
I think challenging yourself to see from other people's perspectives is probably a great thing to do. But no, it's not going to somehow increase your innate intelligence to super-genius level.
Why does it need to be replaced? Get rid of it entirely. Intelligence comes in myriad forms and trying to reduce it to a single three digit number is such a naive, ignorant idea to begin with.
So how do we measure whether someone has an intellectual disability and needs special schooling? How do we decide who we can draft into the military? (It used to be an IQ of at least 83)
But would the tests be measuring something that a generalized IQ test wouldn’t? It seems better to have one standardized way to measure whatever it is IQ tests are measuring and then use applicable thresholds for your domain.
Is the test for a driver’s license the same as the test for a calculus exam? Of course not. I see no reason why the educational system or military draft is any different. As I said before, intelligence comes in a variety of forms, so the focus should be on fixing the system to account for this, not categorizing certain students with so-called learning disabilities because they don’t fit into the institutionalized definition of intelligence, which is measured on this extremely oversimplified scale known as an IQ test.
IQ tests are perfectly reliable for predicting learning disabilities. If someone scores very low on an IQ test, they will not function well in a normal school. Neither will the function well if they score very high. They’d be bored out of their minds.
I’m struggling to understand your problem with IQ tests. If you have an IQ of between 90 and 110 as per a standard test no one really cares. You’re “normal”. Score higher maybe a bit more intelligent at spacio-temporal problems and it’s probably a good predicator that you’ll do well at mathematics.
If you score below 75 you almost certainly have an intellectual disability and need help. You can give these people any other test you like, it will make no difference. They won’t “function” in a society where the mean IQ is 100 (which it is).
As a previous commenter said Terence Tao is a living genius currently. But also, some people that (somewhat) recently rose to fame in the field of mathematics are:
Andrew Wiles, for providing a proof to Fermat's Last Theorem.
Grigori Perelman (and Richard Hamilton), solver and winner of the Millenium Prize Problem: Poincare's Conjecture.
But for me, upvote and comment counts bias my perception of a post. I'm choosing to hide these counts so I can read articles uninfluenced by the number of points they have relative to other posts on the front page.