Also, bank robbery isn't usually very lucrative, and they've made it harder and less lucrative over time. "According to the FBI a bank robbery averaged a take of $4,000 in 2009, which may not have been sufficient to yield the thieves a positive return on their enterprise. You see, at today's prices, the robbers would need to expend $4,442 for the guns, bullets, and masks used in a typical bank robbery." http://bastiat.mises.org/2014/09/the-basic-economics-of-bank...
Street crime & bank robbery became a terrible business model because as a society we agree that this kind of crime needs to be stopped/deterred and implemented mitigations (such as making it harder to resell stolen goods, requiring extra documentation for large cash-based transactions, etc).
There's no reason the same couldn't apply to advertising. We could implement (and actually enforce - so unlike the GDPR for example) privacy regulations that would make ad tracking more transparent and give consumers a choice, or repealing Section 230 protections for platforms that take on an publisher role by prioritizing certain content to generate "engagement". These would make advertising less lucrative and let other business models take over.
I wonder what we've lost ever since Adam Smith started bemoaning the practice of apprenticeships. 7 years under a master could give a person a very solid understand of the topography of their field, where their weak points are, and how to get better. Most of the incompetence in the Dunning-Kruger Effect comes from unknown unknowns, because without a list of things to improve, it's easy to believe 1) there's little left to improve, 2) the gap between oneself and anyone else is small or zero.
I have a few hypotheses to contribute, for those with appetite for unvalidated speculation.
================Tie in with Circles of Competence=============
I believe this to be a hint that was left in the comments by the original author:
> do they know who they are?
> Alex: good question! The answer is, I think, "not really." The Dunning-Kruger Effect has a fourth principle that I didn't mention, which is that as your competence increases, your self-evaluation diminishes. The most competent people apparently tend to rate themselves below their skill level.
Taken together, if one feels like there's an area where one has a ton to learn and a good understanding of how to begin filling those gaps, that's probably the start of a circle of competence.
A couple of attitudes to avoid at work would be: "it can't be that hard to figure out" and "use the right tool for the job", because that will just lead to using skills that one hasn't developed before. Perhaps the better thing to do would be to finish the task in a way you know will work, rather than ramping up on another way that might be more elegant or general. Use your circle of competence. Make time for filling in the parts of the map where you know you need to improve, but don't be eager to combine learning with getting things done. If you're lucky, you'll know someone who can code review and show you the better way to do it.
It means the stuff you end up doing won't seem special to you because there was nothing to figure out. It probably feels weird and strange to call that your "mastery".
================A Potential Strategy for those in school or early in their career=============
The importance of picking good schools, good classes, and good places to work early in one's career is hard to overstate. (You don't necessarily need to go to the most competitive school, as long as there are good professors to serve as your DGTS role models.) Once you have the opportunity of working with DGTS role models, do these two hard things:
- stop making up reasons for why you aren't incredibly impressed by their ability to deliver solid results consistently
- realize that "if I could just focus, I could crank that out in a weekend" is probably not true, and start to map out the skills you'd have to master from those who actually can and do work at that pace. Realize that pulling all-nighters to make more time doesn't count as mastery, and won't be something you can do later in life.
================Imposter Syndrome=============
I wonder if imposter syndrome hides one's circles of competence, as anything one does well will get downplayed in significance, and papered over by insecurities.
I'm just saying I don't think privacy was a motivation for the exemptions. Would policymakers have considered the possibility of FinCEN leaks? That'd be pretty unusual, since usually they assume it's fine for government agencies to collect as much information as possible.
I appreciate the intentions behind this bill, and I'm sure we'll find far more corruption than we ever expected through this bill.
I'm reminded of the Patriot Act, and the ways the data collected were used (beneficially), and abused (for personal reasons) by people trusted with high-level clearance. How is access being limited and audited to the data collected by this new bill?
I feel the same way about the government grant system relying on the DUNS system (run by a private company) for business registration. I also feel this way about credit agencies like Experian and Equifax being the trusted source of truth on creditworthiness for Fannie Mae loans, and collecting records on essentially all Americans (no consumer choice and limited opt-out) which inevitably gets leaked. The liability of Experian and Equifax should have been their entire businesses, not a few slaps on the wrist and the offer of credit monitoring for just a year.
With all that in mind, I want to know--when this bill is implemented, how is this not inevitably going to result in abuses or harmful massive leaks? Or do you just assume that entities below a certain threshold of activity don't deserve privacy or some level of property obscurity to help people avoid criminal attention?
The kind of info this bill is collecting could be easily be used by identity thieves. Sharing this info with foreign entities makes the problem worse.
Civil forfeiture started off with good intentions, but in many places has a serious lack of recourse and oversight. There have been some reports that it's abused as a quick way for police departments to pad their budgets. Those doing the seizing don't even need to prove guilt of a person, since civil forfeiture is a dispute between police and property, not police and a suspected person. Sure, these policies let police cripple the more clever criminals that they had trouble bringing to justice, but it also gets used all the time in ways against people (I guess against property) that would reasonably argue innocence.
> how is this not inevitably going to result in abuses or harmful massive leaks?
There probably will be abuses and leaks—-I don’t think anyone should trust the government with population-wide data that is catastrophic if compromised. But on the ladder of OPM data and IRS tax records to e.g. potato registries, beneficial ownership data isn’t that sensitive. Many countries make it a matter of public record with few ill effects. (Counterpoint: Sweden makes tax records public record. The IRS being compromised would be a big deal.)
The church, charity and non-profit exemption is the hole of the bulldozer path that had to be left to protect private civic discourse. This will be abused by the wealthy and powerful. But as a result, there will be no comprehensive database of e.g. donors to prison reform or LGBT causes.
> Counterpoint: Sweden makes tax records public record. The IRS being compromised would be a big deal.
It would be a big deal only because it would shatter current expectations. As you've mentioned, society would operate just fine if everyone's tax records were public. The aversion that people feel towards it is largely cultural - if they were brought up in a different western society, they wouldn't feel that way.
Interesting. Why targeting money specifically? If someone claims that people should not have secrets about their wallets, others may claim no one should have secrets about their bedrooms. After all, "It would be a big deal only because it would shatter current expectations. Society would operate just fine if everyone's affairs were public. The aversion that people feel towards it is largely cultural - if they were brought up in a different society, they wouldn't feel that way" right?
For most people, most of their bedroom activities are public in the US. Specifically, they are recorded in public marriage records that anyone can peruse.
> How is access being limited and audited to the data collected by this new bill?
Why should it be? There's no sensible reason why ownership of a company should have to be kept secret, AFAICS. If your company does shit so shady you're ashamed to stand up and admit to it, that shit is probably so shady it already is — or should be — illegal anyway.
In the Bay Area, it’s more like $60-120/sqft/yr, and that’s triple net. Add in 50-100% because you need walkways and such between offices, bathrooms, security, mail room, IT, and other common areas. Then add more for building operating expenses, property taxes, building insurance, and common area maintenance. Yes, in commercial leases the tenant pays the property taxes, because the leases are for multiple years.
If you take the top end, shmancy digs near the VC teat you're still looking at only 10% of your engineers salary. Meanwhile in West Berkeley we signed a lease for $22 sqft/year. I share a 20X30 room with another engineer. Everyone else has a 10X10 office with a door. And we don't have rivers of VC money.
Sometimes I think the way big corps do offices is a legacy of mass production factory stuff. If you have an assembly line making toasters, yeah you need everyone in the same big building on a fixed schedule. But any business where people can work from home it likely means you could in thoery let individual groups decide where they want an office. Give a group of 12 engineers a stipend of $4000/mo to rent office space, see what happens.
Back in 2008, I was fascinated by TeXmacs’ sessions concept. You could mix rich text with Python, or SAGE. This is long before the days of jupyter and I thought it was the coolest thing. Since TeXmacs isn’t TeX, and people weren’t looking for Python notebooks, it was hard to convince others to try this document processor with Emacs bindings. I still ended up using it for some personal classwork as an undergrad, and slowly watched Jupyter overtake it in polish and adoption.
One killer feature that made it possible to take real-time class notes in TeXmacs is that one could type symbols like Greek letters by typing something like “a” then <tab> to get α. For fast and accurate math entry, TeXmacs > LyX > text editors with completion.
I thought we had discovered pacemaker cells over 20 years ago. I'd be very surprised if that didn't already factor into hypotheses of how episodic memory is ordered. Either this article is disingenuous, or neuroscience suffers from deep fragmentation that is hindering progress.
We can be aware of our breathing or not, yawn, and hold our breath. I imagine we can do similar with our sense of time: count seconds, have a sense of time, and lose our sense of time (on purpose or by accident).
The prior probability of you being wrong about facts in another field is fairly high.
The prior probability of the researcher being wrong about facts in their own field is much lower.
Therefore the default assumption one should have when reviewing research from a field that is NOT their own is closer to "I am the idiot" than "The researchers are the idiots".
The years I've gone to SFN, I've been amazed at how fragmented the field is. People get into neuroscience from all sorts of places. Neurosurgery, C. elegans research, optogenetic studies, fmri studies, biochemistry: these approaches to neuroscience are often so different they don't know about the advances of the others.
Should have gone to HBM I guess ;)
I suppose my comment was a bit strong. My Ph.D was on the the hippocampus and the development of binding operations supporting episodic memory using standard MRI and cognitive tasks, and I already know I don't understand half of what they are doing in more basic neuroscience articles.
I have no problem with the paper authors. Most of the authors on the paper come from neurosurgery/neurology, and I don't doubt for one second that they have a strong grasp of "I can mess with the human brain in these ways and I'll get these behaviors". They shouldn't be expected to know everything we've ever looked at for time in the brain.
I am frustrated at one of the ways science journalism tends to report on neuroscience. I think they want to do it like they do physics, and it affects how people outside the field think. Rather than considering the brain as a complex system, we're looking for the Jennifer Anniston neuron, or time cells, or some single component that explains consciousness, much like we looked for the "god particle" (Higgs) or gravitational waves. It's not a great way to look at things.
My original comment on fragmentation is just my own opinion. Maybe it's not as much of a barrier as I think it is.
Did you actually read both studies? If so, I don't see how you could have arrived at the conclusion that the time cell paper is a rehash of what you linked. They are talking about and focusing on entirely different things.
I hadn't read the paper, just the article. Which is primarily what I was commenting on. When I read "now researchers have identified cells in the human brain that make this sort of memory possible", I was lead to believe that NPR was suggesting that there weren't plausible mechanisms of timekeeping for episodic memory before now. Especially since they don't mention any other mechanisms, and Buzsáki (not a study author) and NPR together imply that people with hippocampal lesions who can't order events correctly are simply missing their time cells.
Anyhow, I've now read much more of the two linked papers, and some related papers.
In the 2011 paper linked from the NPR article, under "Neuronal Ensembles Signal Time, as well as Location and Behavior, during the Delay Period" (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089662731...)
"time cells" are defined under their relation to "place cells". As far as I can tell, this paper coined the term. Now, in this paper, they aren't sure if the time cells are scalar time (Gibbon) or non-linear time (Staddon and Higa) or some combination of the two. Well, Gibbon's scalar expectancy theory for timing (SET) uses pacemaker cells in the theory. Now other papers do want to move away from pacemaker cells: Staddon and Higa point out that the "Weber law" that SET depends on doesn't scale well, so they have other theories. However, I could still imagine that pacemaker and timestamping neural circuits would work together, no?
This review article of timing in the brain seems helpful, though I don't have time to read it fully today: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089662731...
It covers oscillators (pacemaker-accumulator/SET), ramping, and population clocks ("time cells" and other names). I find it problematic that the NPR article only focuses on one name for one possible explanation of the observed behavior. It makes for a nice article, and the metaphor of time cells and place cells are attractive. It doesn't leave
Time cells seem to invoke a chain of neurons firing, to encode events along the chain. I can believe that this orders events on the order of tens of seconds (the literature surveys from milliseconds to tens of seconds). But the NPR article suggests that the ordering of an entire tour of UCSD is also encoded in time cells. I doubt that there was one unending chain of ordering for that entire tour. Personally, I find that I have to reason about time on longer time scales, or I might mix up a recollection of how a story goes. (Once I tell a story a few times, I've learned a new skill--how to tell the story--so it becomes easier to recall a sequence I've chosen to highlight.)
To be fair, Dropbox works pretty well as a backup (with the ability to restore deleted files via the web UI), as long as you catch it in the 30 day window.
When I worked there, I was surprised to learn that they also often act as mitigation for ransomware attacks (they could roll back your account in time if you contacted CS and explained your situation).
Also, bank robbery isn't usually very lucrative, and they've made it harder and less lucrative over time. "According to the FBI a bank robbery averaged a take of $4,000 in 2009, which may not have been sufficient to yield the thieves a positive return on their enterprise. You see, at today's prices, the robbers would need to expend $4,442 for the guns, bullets, and masks used in a typical bank robbery." http://bastiat.mises.org/2014/09/the-basic-economics-of-bank...
Some crime has been made pretty unprofitable.