Would this put concepts from classical philosophy like formal and final causation back on the table?
The article seems to imply that it’s possible, but I’ve learned that journalistic summaries can be low-fidelity.
This is a curious paper, as it seems to come at a time when the philosophical postulate of meliorism has been problematized precisely by the trajectory of historical development, which had previously its own criteria of success.
It might interest the author to know that this was basically the prediction of Vico, one of the most valuable (and misunderstood) philosophers of the not-so-distant past.
I openly love meetings. With a good, well-planned and thoughtful meeting, I can save myself and my team weeks of engineering work.
Just last week, by asking a simple question to the right person, we canned a heavy, ~2dev*sprint story for something a developer was able to achieve after the meeting with no code changes. The customer was thrilled.
The responses here are critical —- some useful, some not so useful.
I’m happy to see this project and would like to see more like it, even if this is not quite ready for show time. The possibility of using advances in technology and open source methods to allow people to make more stuff for themselves and their communities in a way that is efficient and feasible is exciting to me.
I guess the real question is does this actually solve a real problem people are having? An acquaintance of mine recently built a house, and constructing the outer 'shell' was by far the quickest and easiest part of the whole process.
Depends what you mean by “this.” This exact project is, I think, not ready for prime time, as I said in my post.
If by “this” you mean “ways to make more of our own stuff on a smaller scale,” I am currently in my fourth month of waiting for a proprietary part for my tractor, when if I had an economical and legal way to either machine the part myself, or have it machined by a competent neighbor, then I wouldn’t have this problem.
In a time when we are experiencing the consequences of over-specialized, over-connected, over-optimized supply chains, I think that a more fractal, scale-invariant, redundant approach to production has real value.
(It also, in general, makes humans feel good to make and then use something).
Are construction methods the bottleneck though? Habitat For Humanity is an excellent example of communities building things for themselves and others. What problem do you see systems like this solving?
Perhaps when compared to this CAD/CNC approach. In the traditional stick-built house you need wood and other materials, tools of all sorts, and specialized workers who know the steps in order. If some critical material hasn't been delivered yet, workers have to pivot to a different task or simply stop working.
With this other method, 100% of the material is cut/delivered to the site, and the workers need only to follow the instructions. Their tools are fewer, too—hammers, nails, hand-crank lift.
In the future, anyone who likes putting together IKEA furniture may consider an exciting new career in home construction. I say that half in jest, half in hope.
I see how the material presented on the website could lead someone who is unfamiliar with construction to the impression that this system simplifies the process but that is not the case in any meaningful way.
Framing, cladding, and insulating a structure, which is all that is represented here, are the simplest, least tool-intensive tasks involved. Additionally this style of construction can seamlessly cope when a foundation is poured a couple inches out of dimension or a few degrees off square. By comparison I shudder to think what flavor of chaos would kick off on a DIY Ikea house project when the assembly team has to cope with similar issues with only pre-fab components to draw from.
Standard building methods expect all of the material for each phase of construction to be trucked in in one bundle, identical to a pre-fabbed system, but with the added benefit that if any material is found to be sub-standard, or if there are errors with the delivery materials to make up the difference can be trivially sourced from any lumber yard or big box home improvement store.
Long story short, framing a house isn't particularly complicated. Folks that are intimidated by the process don't have enough experience in the industry to know first-hand that there isn't a single task involved that isn't routinely completed by individuals who have little prior experience, are high out of their mind, or both.
A friend of mine has a similar story. Still searching for his good ending. I’m glad you’re better.
I feel like we’re at the beginning of the opioid wave again, and the obvious and foreseeable negative consequences are just being shunted aside. We never learn anything.
I’m going to answer as if you’re arguing in good faith.
In the theology of Antonio Rosmini, God places within humans the principle of universal being, by which we participate in the light of reason, which enobles us with the ability to think about concepts that are beyond our quite limited selves.
Of course, there is also something mysteriously wrong with human beings, such that
our own efforts always betray the infinity of which intuitively conceive. This ought to give us pause as we try to create machines with human-like or super-human-like qualities.
I think this poster has an axe to grind, but there is definitely significant overlap between symptoms of child abuse/neglect and early signs of ASD and other mental disabilities. I am on mobile, and cannot right now give a compact source, but the lists on Mayo etc. have a lot of overlap.
There's also overlap between a stab wound and a heart attack. You may say there's a cardiac related problem, but you don't have a stab wound just because you have some of the overlapping symptoms.
Neglect can cause a host of behavioral and neurological issues but they're not autism. Medical literature consensus is pretty clear on this. It was a popular theory many decades ago. It's not held up to scrutiny.
Medical literature and consensus says autism is one disorder with a spectrum of symptoms and that Aspbergers is not a unique disorder and that is currently wrong. So citing some other very similar research isn't going to do anything for me.
Autistic children are born not caring for faces, or eyes, and social interaction. Feral children do not have eyes or faces or social interaction to look at. So if it's not technically autism, it's not any different than the myriad of disorders currently lumped together as autism.
> What's the point of using the medically accepted definition of a condition when it is wrong?
Since you seem to have no opposition to using personal definitions of things based on personal opinions without feeling the need to clarify, I'm glad you agree with me 100%
Not doubting this, but it seems to cut both ways. I can just as easily justify an overreaction by claiming to have averted some worse outcome. It seems to be a general problem of counterfactuals.
This is why it's often good resource management to wait until something breaks before committing resources to fix it. Especially true in software systems.
One might think that constant firefighting is a waste of resources, and we'd be better off solving problems before they happen. That's true if and only if you know for sure that the problem and eventual breakage is really going to happen AND that it's worth fixing. At least in my experience, it's more often true that people overestimate the risk of calamity and waste resources fixing things that aren't actually going to break catastrophically. Or fix things that we don't actually need, but only figure out that we don't need them when they finally break and we realize that the cost of fixing or replacing it outweighs whatever value it was providing.
The engineer in me hates saying this, but sometimes things don't have to be beautifully designed and perfectly built to handle the worst. Duct tape and superglue often really is good enough.
Of course, this doesn't apply to problems that are truly existential risks. If the potential systemic breakage is so bad that it irreparably collapses the system, then active preparedness can certainly be justified.
This is the no-brainer choice for anything that can be immediately replaced/ordered. Most of us aren’t keeping a stash of computer monitors in case of failure.
On firefighting…huge swaths of burned down land can’t be reordered on Amazon and delivered next day. People quip “just replant the trees” but of course that doesn’t rebuild an ecosystem, we might not even replant the right trees, and the things that lived there are now dead.
On personal scales, waiting for your car to break to fix it isn’t a good strategy either, nor would you wait for you gas pipes to leak, or see if the thunder actually hits your home before preparing for it.
Basically I feel “don‘t fix until it breaks” is a good strategy for day to day small scale decisions, but problematic for most stuff beyond that.
Sources of resilience operate on three different timescales. The first is foresight. The ability to use feedforward to predict potential problems and avoid them. The second is coping. The ability to stop a bad thing from getting worse. The third is recovery. The ability to recover to a normal state once disaster has struck.
>This is the no-brainer choice for anything that can be immediately replaced/ordered.
Well, at least until C-19 hit then you realize that 'immediate replace/reorder' doesn't actually exist any longer, and now your forklift parts are actually going to take 2 months to show up on a delayed boat and nobody in the US has any replacements.
This is why I think most of the 'absolutes' that programmers, software architects, managers etc. talk about are not so.
For example you must never declare 'magic numbers' in code. Or you must always obey S.O.L.I.D. or get 100% TDD. There will be be people who believe in these dogmatically to the point they won't employ anyone who says different (it becomes an interview question).
I am not arguing that these are wrong!
I am arguing that they are not evidence driven (they cannot be, software is to complex, it is not a narrow experiment on a lab mouse). So they must be culture/preference/worldview driven.
When there is no evidence driven approach to 99% of your decisions on software it becomes: an art. And that is fine.
That said it might be possible to show evidence that an approach is good for your code base, for your team, as that is a more limited scope, rather than "in general".
What isn't fine is the number of overly confident global assertions we hear from software people about how to build software.
> There will be be people who believe in these dogmatically to the point they won't employ anyone who says different (it becomes an interview question).
Though when you’re lucky enough to be in a tight labor market it sure is a convenient filter for companies you don’t want to join!
I think it would depend on the context which often depends on what the real risk is. Building 5000 nuclear missiles? Overreaction. Overbuilding flood control systems such that the region has not experienced major flooding in 100 years? Justified preparation. The tell for what is justified and what isn't is through what you can remove from the system and not see any ill effect, like a jenga tower. We've already decommissioned thousands of nukes and the sky didn't fall, so that goes to show all that preparation was useless. Take away flood control systems OTOH and that would probably result in thousands of lives lost before long given the odds of a bad storm in the area. Likewise with pandemic preparations (mentioned in the intro); what are the odds of a pandemic? High, so the preparations are justified.
>The tell for what is justified and what isn't is through what you can remove from the system and not see any ill effect, like a jenga tower. We've already decommissioned thousands of nukes and the sky didn't fall, so that goes to show all that preparation was useless.
Bad example. It absolutely wasn't useless at the time to build those thousands of nukes. The whole concept of mutual assured destruction breaks down if the other side has 20x more nukes.
Wasn't it unclear for most of the cold war how many nukes were even in play? As far as I understand the U.S. early on overbuilt nukes, assuming the soviets had a lot more of them at the time when they had hardly any at all. Then the soviets had to play catch up with the americans as you state, but once again it was all for nothing in the end for those nukes that were built, sat idle in silos, then decommissioned without seeing any use at all. If you have nukes for ten targets that would probably be enough to make a nation nonfunctional. Once the enemy launches their nukes, you launch yours and the world ends in 7 minutes. I can't imagine any nation would rise from the ashes having its 10 largest population centers annihilated. Personally I think the U.S. MAD plans of the 1950s-60s are absolutely horrific. "Mr. Secretary, I hope you don't have any friends or relations in Albania, because we're just going to have to wipe it out." The russians were not thinking along the same terms as the americans in terms of destruction.
Given the disregard for human life that the Russians have typically displayed in war, including the current conflict, what would you propose as a deterrent instead of MAD?
Second question. Let's say you want to negotiate a treaty in the case where neither side trusts the other, and where neither side really has any enforcement power over the other. What mechanism would you propose, to which both parties could agree, and to which both parties could be pretty sure the other side would respect?
MAD is indeed horrific. The authors of the policy thought so as well. Everyone would very much appreciate a better solution. Until now, none has been proposed.
I mean, it’s not some unique problem of counterfactuals, right? It doesn’t seem like counterfactuals have some unique epistemological status. You can use reason to propose and criticize counterfactuals the same as any other kinds of explanations.
Honest question: what is worrying to you? Is it the idea that infectious disease being used as the pretext to create an environment of fear and compliance, such some unwanted social transformation which is actually predicated on ulterior motives can proceed over objections? Is it the idea that people overestimate the degree of control people can actually exert over these diseases, leading to hubristic reactions? Do you object to being alarmed about infectious disease as such?
