Today’s misread: “irreversible adverse death issues” for “irreversible adverse health issues”

A passive raccoon/squirrel hybrid can command the earth to swallow its foes? Right.

Crucially, they never lose sight of the sense of community and sonic pleasure to be experienced in the distorted, pounding sounds of local metal scenes.

The really frustrating thing about Jonathan Haidt is that he needs metaethics to say that kinds of things he wants to say, but he ignores it.  He thinks his descriptive work on moral psychology has ethical implications – he’s always talking about them or insinuating them – but he doesn’t tell you how that implication is supposed to work.  Indeed he does not seem to recognize that this is a subject about which people make rigorous arguments, or that people might expect one from him.

This isn’t just a pedantic accusation about the is-ought gap (of the sort that could be thrown at anyone who makes any ethical recommendations at all).  The accusation is that his is-to-ought inferences are a key part of his work and yet he doesn’t talk about how he comes up with those inferences, much less justify them.  And although he challenges WEIRD attitudes in ethics, I suspect that his attitude to metaethics is distinctively WEIRD in ways that ought to be addressed.  (He motivates “more ethical dimensions = better” by appealing to diversity/variety, like it’s an irreducible core value!)

(If he does talk about this somewhere, well, this is one of those cases where I’d be glad to be wrong)

Almost overnight, denizens of the bulletin boards switched from .arc compression to .zip in what became known as the arc wars.

He approaches the problem with me and with himself quite intellectually, but he is indeed, in spite of intellect, feeling in much emotional turmoil over this. Support was given to him to move towards a middle ground, which, in his style, is very hard for him.

How, therefore, can we learn what our fellow humans are really thinking and doing? Big data.

anaisnein:

balioc:

balioc:

When you’re writing your posts about the anomie of modern individualistic atomized existence, and talking about how we need to find some more-communitarian more-interconnected more-tribal-level mode of life…please remember what tribes are actually like.

Tribes are, basically, big families.  You know how families work, probably.  You were probably raised in one.

And – don’t get me wrong – there are many great things about families.  It is cool that, due to the power of collective identity, resources can be distributed in a literally final-stage-communist fashion with very little friction.  It is cool that you can get to know everyone super well, and keep an accurate map of all the relationships.  It is cool that people care about you, no fooling, they really care about you, they are not going to drop you just because you’ve become inconvenient or whatever. 

Nonetheless.  Somehow, I’m betting that most of you fled from the bosom of your families in order to go live out in the big cold atomized impersonal individualistic world, and you’re not exactly champing at the bit to go back. 

Because there are costs, and they are crushing.  Families do not understand, cannot understand, personal boundaries.  The counterbalance to “your family will always care about you” is “your family will feel free to use and remake every part of your existence.”  Families are places where every point of incompatibility or tension will be rubbed raw until it bleeds and festers, because people can’t just agree to leave each other alone.  Families subordinate your dreams to their own collective ambitions and values.  Families run Every. Single. Thing. through a system of manipulative personal politics. 

Different people have different levels of tolerance for such things, and so the individualism / tribalism tradeoff plays out differently in every case.  But if you’re reading this, I am prepared to bet money that you really really really benefit from the advantages of social individualism, no matter how much loneliness and anomie you might be feeling. 

Squaring this circle is super hard.  It is one of my major long-term intellectual projects.  Finding a system that combines “people really care about each other in a reliable fashion” and “resources get shared in a non-stupid way” with “people will respect your individual preferences/ambitions” and “people have the space not to impinge upon each other intolerably” is…well, it may be impossible, and if it’s possible I’m pretty sure no one’s figured it out yet.  But I’m betting that, at such time as we do figure it out, it’s not going to look anything like segmentary communitarianism. 

OK, I’m rereading this, and I should add an addendum, because this is important and I feel bad about eliding it earlier.

For those of you who are, e.g., raising children or planning to do so: my point is definitely not that all (nuclear) family environments are psychologically horrible.  It is not even that it is impossible to have a (nuclear) family that shows respect for its members’ individual autonomy, etc.  You can definitely do those things.  I have seen people who do.  Those people are heroes.

But it is so costly!  It is so difficult!  God, it is one of the hardest and most expensive projects ever undertaken by man.  It basically entails saying “we are going to pour all our resources into one or two or three children, we are going to give them claims on every part of us, and we are going to ask nothing in return.  We are going to strip our souls and our bank accounts bare for people whom we fully expect may up and leave us because they will want to live their own lives and pursue their own dreams.”

Most families are not capable of this.  Most families aren’t trying for this.  Most families expect payment in devotion for their care, according to the ancient tribal logic.  And the bigger and more extended your family is, the stronger the pull of that tribal logic will be.

(referring to the original post but keeping the addendum) I know it’s a Tumblr cliche, but: someone finally said it.

Also, local communities will inevitably be crushing to some in the same way as nuclear families are, even though both are net good things. Any system in which you have to rely on the personal favor of the people immediately around you for basic resources is going to be capable of thoroughly screwing anyone who deviates from the local norm. I have a very strong leave-me-alone-and-get-out-of-my-business drive and for most people with that temperament libertarianism has obvious appeal, and I get that, but ultimately this isexactly why I favor centralized distribution of essential survival needs on a universal entitlement basis. Large-scale centralized systems need to be impersonal, they need to apply to everyone, and that means that in the worst-case scenario, where you drew a bad card in the birth lotto and your family or the local elders are terrible and toxic and abusive and hate you for your nature etc, you as a member of the greater society still have recourse. I’m as suspicious of left-anarchist models that rely solely on mutual aid and solidarity as I am of these tribal utopias [sic as hell] you see proposed by ethnotraditionalists.

(via anosognosic)

selfreplicatingquinian:

nostalgebraist:

eka-mark:

The fact that fluid systems can behave in a large number of qualitatively different ways is reflected in the large number of dimensionless quantities used to characterize them.

And they’re all* named after people instead of what the mean

I’ve always wondered why this was the case, since it seems so bad for communication/understanding.  Maybe a trend got started and then kept going once fluid dynamicists noticed this was a promising way to make their mark on the field’s history?

*(almost)

Reynolds number is the only non-trivial quantity on that list I know of that provides a good heuristic of a system without context. Knowing the Reynolds number of your system and nothing else still tells me a *lot* about what you’re likely working on (eg biophysics vs. plasma vs. everyday hydrodynamics) or at least what it’s similar to.

They all seem to mostly fall in two categories pretty simply to me: simple ratios named mostly for convenience (2 words instead of 5 each of 20 times you’re talking about it in your paper), and those mostly applicable to narrow circumstances- whose names will only be used in high context communications among those naturally selected to care about those narrow circumstances. I suspect that most of these don’t get used in ways that are overly likely to disrupt communication except by those who are otherwise overusing jargon *anyway*. And there are even ones in the first group like the Mach number, which are well known enough they get used in common parlance to save a few syllables- “mach 3” vs. “three times the speed of sound”.

I think it’s so common in part because fluid dynamics is one of the only fields complicated and general enough to have so many explanatory coefficients fall out of the equations. Now that I think on it, you can practically break physics down into “fields where fluid dynamics sometimes applies” and “mechanics of only solid objects” and not leave much out (the former includes E&M and Quantum in case that’s non-obvious). With the former being so broad it’s no wonder there’s so many named quantities, it has such a large portion of the quantities period.

FWIW, I did fluid mechanics in grad school, and I found the naming scheme frustrating then.  It wasn’t that I had trouble literally remembering which was which – the ones that were relevant to me became second nature because I was immersed (no pun) in the subject – but I still found that the uninformative names added a slight but significant overhead when thinking about the subject.

The best way to convey this might be to look at some more informative names, and imagine the alternative.  An ideal example of an informative name might be “limit” – more or less the colloquial word for the idea formalized by the analysis concept.  Imagine if we called limits something like “Bolzano numbers.”  We’d all get used to it, of course, but something would be lost.  A description of a theorem using the “limit” terminology has a certain intuitive transparency, which would require a mental translation step with the “Bolzano number” terminology (”and what that means is … ”).

Or imagine if we always called the “stress tensor” the “Cauchy tensor” instead.  “Stress tensor” reminds you that you’re talking about stress without you having to do anything; with “Cauchy tensor,” we’d need to make the connection to stress inside our heads every single time, and although this process would become fast over time it would still add a certain extra opacity to things (especially when thinking while tired, etc.)

Admittedly, I think I’m a relatively “verbal” thinker as people who do math go, so this may be more of an issue for me than for others.

I think your point about “narrow circumstances” is partially true, but because – as you note – fluid mechanics is so broad, “narrow circumstances” within it can still be quite broad in other senses.

I did a lot of geophysical fluid mechanics, where two body forces were very important (the Coriolis force and gravity).  So some of the numbers that came up everywhere were the Rossby number (roughly, how important Coriolis is), the Froude number (roughly, the analogue of the Mach number for gravity-based waves), and the Richardson number (roughly, how strongly gravity is suppressing shear instability).  All of these are “specialized” in the sense that there are many fluids/flows of interest where they won’t be relevant – but the ones where they are relevant are not some esoteric sub-category, they’re “the earth’s atmosphere and ocean,” which are a pretty big deal.  More precisely, these are numbers that come up constantly when you work in this subfield, not just when you are studying a particular phenomenon.