Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

CERN cuts ties with 'sexist' scientist Alessandro Strumia

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–299 of 299 posts

Re: CERN cuts ties with 'sexist' scientist Alessandro Strumia

#291

Post by jancsika »

jmole wrote: post #245
jancsika wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be an enormous waste of institutional knowledge and technology (in the form of extant pianos and pianists). If you're going to make such a drastic change to the piano, at least cut the keyboard into two halves at middle c, then invert both halves. Now when the right hand starts at what used to be middle c and plays a chromatic scale upward, it's going from high pitches to low pitches. E.g., middle c is now…

...so your 30 second idea to ruin the keyboard by making it impossible to play a melody that crosses middle C with one hand is better than simply making each key a little more narrow? This reeks of the silicon valley stereotype of "I don't know why you're doing it this way, let me come in with zero experience and tell you how to do it better, with technology™. In this case, it's really clear that you are not a piano…

And this research suggests that a concert pianist who can play the virtuosic repertoire on the modern piano can play that same virtuosic repertior on both types of piano with the same accuracy?

Remember, if you're successful in pushing the 7/8 piano you're going to have both sizes in production for at least a century.

Re: CERN cuts ties with 'sexist' scientist Alessandro Strumia

#292

Post by jancsika »

cat199 wrote: post #172
jancsika wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be an enormous waste of institutional knowledge and technology (in the form of extant pianos and pianists). If you're going to make such a drastic change to the piano, at least cut the keyboard into two halves at middle c, then invert both halves. Now when the right hand starts at what used to be middle c and plays a chromatic scale upward, it's going from high pitches to low pitches. E.g., middle c is now…

> That would be an enormous waste of institutional knowledge and technology (in the form of extant pianos and pianists). taking something built using relatively coarse tolerances by today's standards and scaling it down by 1/8" is a 'enormous waste'? if this is the case, human manufacturing technology is in serious trouble. i don't think anyone is arguing to simply toss out the existing pianos, but to standardize on…

What's the plan for this gradually phase-out? Especially considering that even the heterogenous timbres of pianos of the 1800s are now largely gone with everything standardizing on the Steinway timbre?

How do you make it so that a generation of pianist mustn't learn to master two different sizes of piano?

Re: CERN cuts ties with 'sexist' scientist Alessandro Strumia

#293

Post by anigbrowl »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #204
anigbrowl wrote: post #181

I'm nearly 50 and decided some years ago that life was just too short to bother accommodating people who are assholes. Perhaps he's brilliant, but there's quite a lot of brilliant people around and if there's a discovery just waiting to be made it's more likely that someone else will do than that the opportunity to make it will be lost forever. I'm not arguing that everyone has to hold the same views, but if your nee…

That’s one way to look at things. But keep in mind, in that hypothetical world, we just erased Feynman, Einstein, Oppenheimer, and, well, probably the entire United States. Folks may disagree about whether that’s a net win or a net loss.

No, 'we' didn't. Einstein does not have a reputation for alienating his scientific colleagues or throwing tantrums at the IAS that I'm aware of.

Re: CERN cuts ties with 'sexist' scientist Alessandro Strumia

#294

Post by iguy »

mikekchar wrote: post #234
iguy wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a mathematical comment, if these are two distributions are gaussians, and one has 120k above some cutoff, the other 78k, then the distributions above this cutoff are not the same. They will typically have slightly different means (not far above the cutoff) and quite strongly different tails.

This is a great point and I wish these kinds of discussions always had someone to point out that kind of important detail. I think the parent's idea would be better expressed by saying that we can't say anything about individuals in either population without more information. You don't know where in the tail that individual lies. Assuming a continuous distribution it could be anywhere. So while it might be more likel…

Being that someone appears to be my regular job :)

It's absolutely true that, if all you know about an individual is membership of one of these populations, then you know very little. Any new information about the actual person will quickly swamp this signal. If you've actually met A & B (or seen their work) then group membership is irrelevant. This is the situation in hiring people.

But it's also true that these distributions lead you to make predictions about the tails. While any one individual is vanishingly unlikely to win a Nobel prize, you can predict that (if they are fairly awarded) there should be a huge slant in how many go to each group. And I really mean huge, this ratio (if things are Gaussian, etc) grows exponentially in how far along the tail you go. Seeing such a skew is thus no evidence that hiring/prize-awarding is biased.

Re: CERN cuts ties with 'sexist' scientist Alessandro Strumia

#295

Post by toasterlovin »

rosser wrote: post #237
toasterlovin wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, sure: stipulated. Male h. sapiens sapiens have statistically greater variability, across the population. That in no way whatsoever prevents a woman from being the biggest or smartest, or a man the smallest or weakest, or either the best at one job, or the worst at another. It does not prevent a women from being the most (or the least) anything. But it says a lot about the probability of that being the case.

So, if a woman comes along who is, in point of fact, the smartest person in the room, do we accept that, or do we insist that because the probability is that much smaller, we must assert it over the reality? Because one of those things sure seems to happen a whole lot more than the other.

I've known women who were often the smartest person in the room. My experience is that people accept that and defer to them. I've not commonly encountered situations where intelligence isn't deferred to, though.

Re: CERN cuts ties with 'sexist' scientist Alessandro Strumia

#296

Post by lawnchair_larry »

telotortium wrote: post #246
rosser wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's quite curious to me, since the overwhelming majority of the argument I've seen that cites the Damore memo glosses right over that distinction, or, at best, does an, "I'm not saying the thing, but, you know, the thing ..." with this very question. Maybe that's an inference I'm putting there, in at least some of the cases, but in another nontrivial subset of them, it's a serious exercise in creative interpretati…

Without taking a position on the strength of the arguments in the Damore memo, if most of your news diet comes from the anti-Damore side of the debate, you're more likely to see only the less reasonable people on the pro-Damore side, for the same reason that people on the anti-SJW side mostly encounter the most inflammatory arguments on the pro-SJW side.

How the hell did this guy get flagged? Is SJW a trigger word now?

Re: CERN cuts ties with 'sexist' scientist Alessandro Strumia

#297

Post by rosser »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #296
telotortium wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without taking a position on the strength of the arguments in the Damore memo, if most of your news diet comes from the anti-Damore side of the debate, you're more likely to see only the less reasonable people on the pro-Damore side, for the same reason that people on the anti-SJW side mostly encounter the most inflammatory arguments on the pro-SJW side.

How the hell did this guy get flagged? Is SJW a trigger word now?

No, but it's corrosive to constructive discourse, per my other comment.

I'm legit a little slack-jawed in "did you really go there?" to see this comment adjacent to that, considering.

EDIT: I didn't flag that comment, fwiw.

EDIT 2: "Trigger word" is another great example. That's a dismissive use of the notion, implying the people being "triggered" are irrational, emotional, and, by inference, wrong. It's an ad hominem, and it's destructive discourse.

I don't know when we decided it was cool to conflate people expressing disapproval with people who've been traumatized and are reacting to a stimulus that's evocative of their trauma, but it's not. Speaking as someone who's experienced multiple kinds of the traumas that can legitimately warrant "trigger warnings", it's really, really not.

I truly want to understand how someone thinks they can talk to and about people like that, and then cry foul at blowback.

Re: CERN cuts ties with 'sexist' scientist Alessandro Strumia

#298

Post by cat199 »

jancsika wrote: post #292
cat199 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That would be an enormous waste of institutional knowledge and technology (in the form of extant pianos and pianists). taking something built using relatively coarse tolerances by today's standards and scaling it down by 1/8" is a 'enormous waste'? if this is the case, human manufacturing technology is in serious trouble. i don't think anyone is arguing to simply toss out the existing pianos, but to standardize on…

What's the plan for this gradually phase-out? Especially considering that even the heterogenous timbres of pianos of the 1800s are now largely gone with everything standardizing on the Steinway timbre? How do you make it so that a generation of pianist mustn't learn to master two different sizes of piano?

> How do you make it so that a generation of pianist mustn't learn to master two different sizes of piano?

I've played guitar, I've played drums. Not at the world class level of course, but enough to have a sense of adapting to different layouts/sizes/shapes, etc.

While yes, one has a preference, it's not like this is changing from being a race car driver to a commercial airline pilot - also, plenty of these know how to drive/fly several types. I believe this is a fairly apt analogy.

Re: CERN cuts ties with 'sexist' scientist Alessandro Strumia

#299

Post by jancsika »

cat199 wrote: post #298
jancsika wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the plan for this gradually phase-out? Especially considering that even the heterogenous timbres of pianos of the 1800s are now largely gone with everything standardizing on the Steinway timbre? How do you make it so that a generation of pianist mustn't learn to master two different sizes of piano?

> How do you make it so that a generation of pianist mustn't learn to master two different sizes of piano? I've played guitar, I've played drums. Not at the world class level of course, but enough to have a sense of adapting to different layouts/sizes/shapes, etc. While yes, one has a preference, it's not like this is changing from being a race car driver to a commercial airline pilot - also, plenty of these know how…

> While yes, one has a preference, it's not like this is changing from being a race car driver to a commercial airline pilot - also, plenty of these know how to drive/fly several types.

That isn't true with regard to the virtuoso repertoire.

We're talking about players who make close to 0% mistakes in their daily practice regimen. And when those players perform the most physically demanding pieces-- Chopin etudes, Liszt Transcendental Etudes, Ravel's Gaspard, etc.-- that is still no guarantee they will be able to play with perfect accuracy in a given performance. It's that technically demanding.

There are even some pieces like those Godowsky mashups of Chopin etudes which most players simply cannot perform with any accuracy at all. I think even Jorge Bolet would make a disclaimer before he played them that they could break down at any moment.

Players at that level are indeed as methodical and detail-oriented about their performance regimen as commercial airline pilots are about theirs. The only way to adapt that kind of virtuoso repertoire is to actually practice for hours a day on the 7/8 piano. And given that the current musical world values virtuoso repertoire most highly, there's simply no way around it.

If you don't believe me, try telling a concert pianist the day before the concert that you heard the venue sold the Steinway for a fascinating new piece of technology: a 7/8 piano! I guarantee you they won't mince words about their risk assessment.

I'm not saying that virtuoso pianists aren't able to adapt to different key sizes. But there's an obvious cost to doing so, and current touring pianist would be extremely unlikely to take that on.

Edit: clarification

Post reply on HN