What has happened down here is the winds have changed • Hacker News Board

Re: What has happened down here is the winds have changed

#171

Post by Kalium » Sun, Oct 16, 2016, 4:19 AM UTC

hackuser wrote: post #150

mafribe wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree; What do you disagree with? The factual claim? It's not relevant that some manage to discuss sexuality respectfully and productively. Most can't, as of October 2016. Claims of scientific misconduct (in a general sense) ought to be taken seriously by scientists. There is nothing else to say. What alternative do you suggest? Somebody said mean things on Twitter, hence psychologists like Fiske should continue…

> Claims of scientific misconduct (in a general sense) ought to be taken seriously by scientists. I disagree. Not all claims should be taken seriously; most should be ignored. Claims accompanied by abuse seriously and rightly damage their own credibility; if I see abuse anywhere, I just stop reading and move on. There are not nearly enough resources to address every random person's claim about every issue in the worl…

When reasonable criticism by highly qualified statisticians is dismissed as terrorism, perhaps it is possible that abusive behavior by critics is not the issue at hand.

Re: What has happened down here is the winds have changed

#172

Post by Animats » Sun, Oct 16, 2016, 6:52 AM UTC

nickpsecurity wrote: post #162

Animats wrote: post #116

Psychology as a science has far fewer reliable results than it claimed it did. It's not that the winds have changed. It's that the field was broken. Realizing this is a good thing. It's going to set back careers and reduce funding, though. Next, economics? "Science is prediction, not explanation." - Fred Hoyle

"Next, economics?" I vote for that field's BS to be thoroughly dismantled next. Like psychology, they often stray too far from the real world almost as if the goal is just citations, funding, and academic prestige. Common in general in academia but the connection to reality is thinner with a lot of economics. The amount that try to understand what's going on in U.S. economy without factoring in bribes to politicians…

It matters more for economics, because economics influences policy. This despite the demonstrated lack of predictive power.

Re: What has happened down here is the winds have changed

#173

Post by jsprogrammer » Sun, Oct 16, 2016, 7:07 AM UTC

nickpsecurity wrote: post #169

jsprogrammer wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wyager actually introduced the word. You then said that Fiske used the term. I don't see the term anywhere in Gelman's article. In fact, Gelman uses the term in a comment on the linked page: >Frederic: >I’m as bothered by anyone by trolls etc., and I’d’ve had no problem if Fiske had written an article about trolls, abuse of communication channels, etc. (ideally with some examples). But this has nothing to do with rep…

"I just didn't see any real discussion on abuse...anywhere...and was wondering what was being discussed in regards to using and redefining the word." "[We are in the thread about people just making shit up and publishing it, right?]" I already corrected that and you're still focused on the use of the word instead of the tactics we're saying Fiske (and others) used. The word was a tiny point in that which I already ow…

I think people should be able to publish whatever they'd like. Honestly, I don't fully follow Fiske's argument. There are too many undefined phrases and an explicit unwillingness to use any examples.

I'd believe many engage in ad hominem arguments and abuse. I'd also believe that many engage in arguments of authority. I'd even believe that possibly most people who call themselves scientists make those arguments from time to time.

The thing about ad hominem and arguments from authority is that they are extremely easy to defeat. One simply needs to point out what is happening and continue going.

Re: What has happened down here is the winds have changed

#174

Post by jsprogrammer » Sun, Oct 16, 2016, 7:08 AM UTC

wyager wrote: post #170

jsprogrammer wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

wyager actually introduced the word. You then said that Fiske used the term. I don't see the term anywhere in Gelman's article. In fact, Gelman uses the term in a comment on the linked page: >Frederic: >I’m as bothered by anyone by trolls etc., and I’d’ve had no problem if Fiske had written an article about trolls, abuse of communication channels, etc. (ideally with some examples). But this has nothing to do with rep…

> wyager actually introduced the word. No I didn't, the person above me did. But it's true, Fisk didn't redefine this particular word, just some other ones (like "terrorism"). My mistake, I shouldn't have assumed the guy above me was correct.

Yep, you're right.

Re: What has happened down here is the winds have changed

#175

Post by cvwright » Sun, Oct 16, 2016, 7:58 AM UTC

bjterry wrote: post #166

vitno wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm somewhat confused about how they would be doing that. Do you have any references to blogs/papers on this technique?

One typical strategy for spam detection is to convert text to a "bag of words" representation[0]. If you take this bag of words representation and hash all the values, then rather than training words like ED, you are training on word number 19213123. The number of these hashed values is smaller than the number of words, just like a hash table, and this generally doesn't harm the accuracy of the machine learning. When…

This is actually a really tricky topic. Things that sound like they should give very good security, often don't in practice. The "hashed bag of words" technique that you describe here sounds an awful lot like some recent attempts at letting legacy systems search on encrypted data [1,2].

We took at look at this recently [3], and it turns out that mapping the word numbers back to the original words is actually a lot more doable than you'd think.

[1] ShadowCrypt: Encrypted Web Applications for Everyone http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2660267.2660326

[2] Mimesis Aegis: A Mimicry Privacy Shield–A System’s Approach to Data Privacy on Public Cloud https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity14/technical...

[3] The Shadow Nemesis: Inference Attacks on Efficiently Deployable, Efficiently Searchable Encryption https://www.sigsac.org/ccs/CCS2016/agenda/

Re: What has happened down here is the winds have changed

#176

Post by nickpsecurity » Sun, Oct 16, 2016, 11:32 AM UTC

jsprogrammer wrote: post #173

nickpsecurity wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I just didn't see any real discussion on abuse...anywhere...and was wondering what was being discussed in regards to using and redefining the word." "[We are in the thread about people just making shit up and publishing it, right?]" I already corrected that and you're still focused on the use of the word instead of the tactics we're saying Fiske (and others) used. The word was a tiny point in that which I already ow…

I think people should be able to publish whatever they'd like. Honestly, I don't fully follow Fiske's argument. There are too many undefined phrases and an explicit unwillingness to use any examples. I'd believe many engage in ad hominem arguments and abuse. I'd also believe that many engage in arguments of authority. I'd even believe that possibly most people who call themselves scientists make those arguments from…

Good answer!

Re: What has happened down here is the winds have changed

#177

Post by Someone » Sun, Oct 16, 2016, 1:20 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #157

Someone wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"sunlight all of their data and code in a repository" Good idea where possible, but "all their data" will be problematic in many social science studies, and also in medicine, because of privacy laws.

In the USA the federal government has established clear rules for anonymizing (de-identifying) healthcare data. So it's clearly possible to do so. http://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/privacy/special-t...

You can only conclude it is clearly possible from that if you assume the USA federal government is infallible. I don't think that's the case.

The way I read it, the "Safe Harbor" part of that standard allows keeping around part of the zip code if that designates over 20,000 people.

For such a group of just over 20,000, add in birth year and sex (both allowed), and you're down to smallest groups of around 200 people. For the topic at hand (publish the data set so that critics can draw their own conclusions), often general health, education level and race, maybe even line of work (blue collar/white collar/agriculture) must be added, so that critics can check that your sample is representative.

I bet that gets you down to a single person in quite a few of those groups.

Yes, they end with "The covered entity does not have actual knowledge that the information could be used alone or in combination with other information to identify an individual who is a subject of the information.", but the earlier list doesn't make me confident that the USA federal government can make that judgment.

Re: What has happened down here is the winds have changed

#178

Post by botw » Sun, Oct 16, 2016, 1:39 PM UTC

Someone wrote: post #91

wyager wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anonymize the data then, if plausible. We ought not to trust studies that are inherently irreproducible.

It's practically impossible to anonymize data without throwing away the information contained in it, doubly so if you don't know at the time what questions critics will want to see answered on that data.

Don't you remember that crowd-sourced stock predication website that publish the anonymized data and let crowd build model without knowing which specific stock/portfolio is used?

Re: What has happened down here is the winds have changed

#179

Post by botw » Sun, Oct 16, 2016, 1:52 PM UTC

vacri wrote: post #147

mwfunk wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about "earnest, blunt, non-sugar-coated feedback" that is useless, uninformed, and counterproductive to researchers? I was under the impression that that was the concern here. Just because someone says something non-sugar-coated doesn't mean it has any truth or value to it. In my experience, a lot of the people who publicly congratulate themselves on never pulling any punches and telling it like it is and keepin…

> Linus Torvalds-style "I'm just telling it like it is, you idiot" feedback Torvalds never starts out that way, and if you look at any given episode where he's shown to have done this, the historical commentary will show Torvalds trying to politely educate the other party, and the other party just not getting it (often wilfully). As for fetishising it, I've never seen anyone here on HN laud Torvalds for doing that; q…

That caused a lot of pshycological damage.

Re: What has happened down here is the winds have changed

#180

Post by botw » Sun, Oct 16, 2016, 2:18 PM UTC

It reminds me the other day I read a 2012 NLP PhD paper where there is no contact information(email, etc) all over. Frustrating. And recent news about a new genetic editing technology claimed by a seemingly 'nobody' unrecognized in bioinformatics community before is causing great controversy that the research could not be replicated, lacking critical detail about process and data. When asked why he does not want to disclose who indeed replicated, the author said it would let them down. I just don't understand the reasoning. All about social pshycology in science?