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Feynman’s Razor

defenderofthebasic.substack.com

61–70 of 138 posts

Re: Feynman’s Razor

#61
post #50

> My favorite comment was from lisper... Cool! Someone noticed me! :-) (I find this noteworthy because I've been putting all this effort into writing a series of blog posts about the scientific method and I've gotten very little feedback on that. But this little throwaway comment, that gets attention! Life is funny sometimes.)

Your profile link is broken, where can I find out more? If you were advertising yourself what would you ask me to read? (giving you a wildcard here)

http://blog.rongarret.info/2024/03/a-clean-sheet-introductio...

Re: Feynman’s Razor

#62
post #6

I agree this is true if your goal is to inform. If, however, your goal is to increase clicks, decrease support tickets, and get engagement, I'd be surprised if being technically descriptive and accurate is better than dumbing it down to the point of inaccuracy. None of that is to say that I agree with the goal of engagement over conveying information.

Haven’t considered that for reducing the number of support tickets, something to consider

Re: Feynman’s Razor

#63
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Collaborators always have their excuses, and yet freedom fighters always seem to ignore those very excuses. What makes the difference in outlook?

The latter doesn't value human life, even their own.

You think the person building technologies that cause human suffering values human life? Come on now.

Re: Feynman’s Razor

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's important to begin violently opposing, not just disagreeing with, the theory of engagement and revenue creation. It must become dangerous indeed for those who decide to pursue those goals.

Do you realize that you're on the Ycombinator news site? Do you realize that ycomb is an incubator of startups? Ycomb actively engages in the 'engagement and revenue creation' as S.O.P.. It's kind of their whole schtick. It's most people's schtick because that's how we feed ourselves. How else would one frame the 'information age' except through engagement and revenue creation? Engagement = data. Data = money. Money…

You're saying a bunch of nothing

Re: Feynman’s Razor

#65
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's important to begin violently opposing, not just disagreeing with, the theory of engagement and revenue creation. It must become dangerous indeed for those who decide to pursue those goals.

Why bring that up? We all know it's BS, and the people who do it are expletive deleted morons. We're interested in what the smart people do .. and even better smart with a touch of class. The older I get the less and less patience I have with people pushing the "it's all politics", "everybody lies and manages up/down and if you don't you're a fool", or it's all about image. While there's smallish elements of truth to…

The corruption is systematic and automated, so the struggle and response must be systematic and automated as well as forceful. Not knee jerk. But more organized than simple individuals doing the right thing. And much more forceful.

It must become very dangerous to be an exploiter of the human condition. Must become very dangerous for capitalists, executives, marketers, and so on.

Force and systematization/automation are required to gain power. And power is required to end capitalism.

Re: Feynman’s Razor

#66
post #52
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be interesting to see, but my guess is that it would be exploited to death very quickly. There is a constant cat and mouse game between search engine and those who want to "optimize" their results. Going back and staying there would be like having the mouse stand still, not good. It would have to be a different product, developed in parallel, rather than a snapshot of the past.

I don't think it's that simple. It's a cat and mouse game but the cat can't catch two different mice. If the classic Google algorithm is significantly different from the new one, SEO that's targeting the new algorithm wouldn't be as successful with the old one which is also barely used (so no one would bother optimizing for the old algorithm). Then make it so the new algorithm penalizes people abusing the old/simple…

[dead]

Re: Feynman’s Razor

#67
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they pay your bills, it is very dangerous to say anything in fact.

Collaborators always have their excuses, and yet freedom fighters always seem to ignore those very excuses. What makes the difference in outlook?

freedom fighters take calculated risks, they believe there's a prize that they can win.

collaborators think that they are helping minimise harm and using the leverage/finance to help a lot more people than they could otherwise help/contribute to. nobody ever woke up and said, today I will do evil things. Man does not err willingly.

Re: Feynman’s Razor

#68
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The military in general seem to be more rationally grounded than civilians, as far as work is concerned. Promiscuity with death must encourage a different "work culture".

I get the feeling that there’s an inverse correlation between the number of people that think the military is a competent meritocracy and the number of people that actually served in the military. It’s a giant government bureaucracy, with plenty of stupid internal politics, and gross incompetency. No better or worse than any other large organization.

Thinking that people that have trait X in common to also have some admirable trait Y is unfortunately wishful thinking. The military may for some be one of the last areas of such thinking.

Re: Feynman’s Razor

#69
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your profile link is broken, where can I find out more? If you were advertising yourself what would you ask me to read? (giving you a wildcard here)

This seems like a good point to beat my drum: put your email address in your HN profile, people! A website link also wouldn’t hurt. Otherwise if someone wants to follow up with you about a comment, there is no way to do so without spamming a public comment reply. Contact info!

That won't work because many people here post anonymously. They have a throwaway account and make a new one now and then to leave no trace to their real identity. Leaving an email address would mean having to maintain a throwaway email in sync with the HN account.

Nowadays that's even harder to do since HN shadowbans new accounts for a while. You write a comment and you are surprised that nobody replies. It's because nobody but yourself can see it.

Which, ironically, contributes to the issue disussed here.

I'm also using a rather new account, let's see if this msg actually is visible now.

Re: Feynman’s Razor

#70
While there really is a trend to overly dumb down things, I'd just like to speculate that the "message no longer exists" part is simply these when someone adapted the reasonable error for a delete message, and forgot to actually check if that phrasing work anymore.

Small changes creeping up into something stupid is a common thing as well when everyone just does a tiny isolated part.

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