Does anyone know the history of noncompetes? It seems like a case of Tacit Collusion[1]. But if there is no competitive advantage to the noncompete, how did it catch on?
> Do you really not know, or think it's debatable, that how people subjectively view themselves is influenced by their mental state / feelings / emotions?
I'm talking about looking at yourself over a period of time, and not just on any given day. You can look at yourself in the mirror every day for months or years, over the course of many different mental states / feelings / emotions.
Moreover, the fit of your clothes is pretty good objective measure. If your pants start falling down, you can be pretty sure that your stomach has become smaller. (This is actually one of the few annoying aspects of getting into shape, having to buy new clothes.)
It sounds like you want someone to agree with you that your memory plus your subjective view of yourself is a "good measure" of progress, despite the existence of scales and measuring tapes, which dwarf your subjective memories in terms of reliability and accuracy. We'll just have to agree to disagree.
It's really not that complicated. I can tell a lot of things by looking in the mirror. That I need a haircut. That I need a shave. Despite the fact that I've literally never used a measuring tape on my hair. That my hair color changes slightly (lighter or darker) with the seasons. That my hair has gotten grayer with age. (I would prefer to deny that, but eyes can't actually lie that much.) I can tell if I'm sunburned (I never tan, sadly). And yes, I can tell that my stomach has gotten thinner or thicker over time. These are not exact measures, but you can in fact reliably tell when your body changes. Subjectivity is not blindness.
By the way, your previous comment was flagged dead. You might want to reconsider the way you reply in light of that.
You're right, it isn't complicated. The beauty of a true good measure (ie, a scale or other measuring device) is that you can track actual discrete progress over a very short time span. If you didn't know your hair grew, could you track the amount that it grows in 24 hours by looking in a mirror? With a measuring tool, you can. That's a good measure. Compared to it, looking in the mirror is a poor measure. That's why scientists use measuring devices when trying to track quantities, instead of "eyeballing" it and claiming its good enough because they noticed some change.
> If you didn't know your hair grew, could you track the amount that it grows in 24 hours by looking in a mirror?
Why in the world would I want to track that? It's not a good measure; it's a dumb measure. Nobody sane measures their hair in 24 hour increments. I don't know anybody who measures their hair at all. Even hair stylists eyeball it!
> The beauty of a true good measure (ie, a scale or other measuring device) is that you can track actual discrete progress over a very short time span.
This is a mistake, in my opinion. People are too obsessed with measuring their weight weekly, or even daily. That's not a good measure. Health is a marathon, not a sprint. The key is persistence: stick with the exercise, stick with the diet, and the results will come in time. A week is nothing. Even a month is practically nothing. Progress is never magically uniform. Plateaus and even setbacks are inevitable. Impatience just leads to premature doubt and failure. It's really about changing your lifestyle permanently rather than some temporary weight loss gimmick. I've never thought in terms of losing N pounds. I think in terms of becoming a healthier, fitter person, and losing N pounds is simply a side effect of that.
You're changing the subject now. The article wasn't about measuring health in general, it was about weight control. And the line of discussion that we're on is a good measure of weight. A good measure of weight is different from a good measure of health. I'm not interested in discussing the latter.
Also, you seem to have missed the point of me mentioning measuring hair, which wasn't to say it was a good idea, but to say how you could do it if you wanted to. You're getting hung up on why anyone would want to do that, which misses the point.
> You're changing the subject now. The article wasn't about measuring health in general, it was about weight control.
I'm not changing the subject now. Rather, I changed the subject 4 hours ago, in my original post, a comment on the submitted article, which said: In general, weight is not really a great measure. You can lose weight by losing muscle. I "measure" my own body by looking at it in a mirror. [Note that measure was in quotes, implying imprecision.]
> A good measure of weight is different from a good measure of health. I'm not interested in discussing the latter.
Then you shouldn't have replied to me in the first place, because I had already clearly rejected measuring weight.
In any case, scales can lie too. I was actually stunned recently to discover that there was a full 20 pound discrepancy between the scale in my building's exercise room and the scale in my doctor's office. It's fine, though, because I was always a little surprised by how little I weighed according to the exercise room's scale. I just didn't imagine that it could be so far off. I only step on the dumb thing because it's right by the door evilly tempting people to use it.
"weight is not really a great measure" followed by saying you measure yourself by looking in the mirror, on an article about weight control is a pretty confusing way to communicate that you measure your health by looking in the mirror. you've made a few other confusing statements, like "Long term, higher intensity cardio builds muscle", so take this entire thread as another data point that you are not communicating your thoughts clearly or precisely.
>In any case, scales can lie too.
Can you stop with low effort bait please? Is it really worth our combined time to draw people in with silly statements about miscalibrated scales?
> "weight is not really a great measure" followed by saying you measure yourself by looking in the mirror
No, it was "weight is not really a great measure" followed by saying "You can lose weight by losing muscle."
Body weight is everything, the good stuff (such as the aforementioned muscle) as well as the bad. And 50-60% of body weight is water, which you can gain or lose rapidly in various ways.
When people say they want to lose weight, often what they actually mean is that they want to lose their gut. Or maybe their butt. For health, for superficial reasons—i.e., looking good—or both. On men at least, the gut tends to be the last to go, so it's a pretty good indicator of how far you've gone, and how far you have left to go. As far as I'm concerned, body weight is "just a number", and it's unclear what the ultimate goal should be, whereas the appearance of your body is clearer to evaluate in terms of an end point. Moreover, it tends to change more slowly than weight, which is actually a good thing, because it's less random and arbitrary than total body weight.
> you've made a few other confusing statements, like "Long term, higher intensity cardio builds muscle"
I actually said "Long term, higher intensity cardio builds muscle and endurance", but for some reason people keep cutting off an essential part of my statement. It was followed by, "The more strenuously you exercise now, the more strenuously you'll be able to exercise in the future." In other words, building muscle and endurance now helps you to burn even more calories later. I'm not sure why that's confusing.
> Can you stop with low effort bait please? Is it really worth our combined time to draw people in with silly statements about miscalibrated scales?
This whole thread has been a waste of my time, and I should have just let your flagged reply die silently, but I'm kind of a glutton for punishment. I don't know why it's silly, though, to mention the imprecision of scales when you seem to be so focused on instantaneous, scientific precision.
Yes, it's called evolution. Software evolves as well as scales. Scaling is architected growth, evolution is unarchitected growth. (Sometimes scaling results in unarchitected growth, if the architecture was not reasonable.) There are many patterns for handling evolution, but they almost always involve a pattern outside of the existing architecture (a super architecture) to lean on for support. In my opinion, codifying and optimizing these super architecture patterns is one of the highest goals in software engineering because they allow for less error prone evolutions.
Thanks to Titus Winters for the phrase "Software engineering is programming integrated over time". Handling evolution of software is different from just writing it.
>>The study adds to a growing body of knowledge about what anonymizing funding applications can—and can’t—do. The National Institutes of Health (NIH), for example, experimented with concealing information about applicants’ identities from peer reviewers as part of an effort to understand why Black applicants are 35% less likely than white researchers to receive grants. The results were mixed—Black applicants’ scores did not improve, but those for white researchers decreased—and some experts were skeptical about whether the reviewers truly didn’t know the identities of the applicants.
Humans are such amazing pattern matchers. Even with the identities concealed, the reviewers were able to figure out who was black and discriminate against them in favor of white applicants. This level of systemic racism is absolutely dumbfounding.
Isn't it statistically likely that the average black applicant's grant application was actually just worse?
We know blind tryouts for orchestras result in fewer black and disadvantaged students getting accepted for a similar reason. They have, on average fewer resources and less support. So they simply, on average, perform worse than their white and affluent counterparts.
The reviewers needn't be racist to see these results.
>Even with the identities concealed, the reviewers were able to figure out who was black and discriminate against them in favor of white applicants.
That's one possible explanation; another is that the black applicants were just not as good, on average.
The explanation for that, in turn, could be that systemic racism in education in the past has left black applicants less well prepared than other applicants. It doesn't have to be innate group-level differences in intelligence, which is politically unsayable but nevertheless also a possible explanation for the difference.
If they knew that blacks have less resources and are therefore on average worse applicants as a result, then they knew that a bad application statistically meant a black applicant. So by not picking the worse application, they were in effect being statistically racist.
I think you're kidding, because this reasoning means (a) assuming a priori that blacks will do noticeably worse and (b) deliberately choosing worse applications, both of which are crazy. At least, it's the kind of convoluted joke I'd enjoy making to certain friends who know my real thoughts on the matter.
It's not crazy to assume that people with less resources and support will do worse. The logic is sound and its in fact the standard explanation (along with discrimination) as to why marginalized groups do worse.
It's really, really not. You have come to the conclusion that grant deciders should deliberately choose worse applications based on a series of shaky assumptions, including that black applicants have had less support and resources, that this will cause them to produce conspicuously worse applications, and most glaringly of all, that this assumed effect dominates all other considerations!
I hope you're just trolling me and don't seriously believe this.
Honestly I think that you are trolling me, but I am trying to assume good faith. In your first reply to me, you said "[an explanation is that] systemic racism in education in the past has left black applicants less well prepared than other applicants." Now you are saying this is a shaky hypothesis and has minimal impact on the applications?
And people are flabbergasted at the healthy skepticism towards pharmaceutical companies, when they literally treat people like expendable cattle at every chance they get.
As someone who worked in the clinical trial industry, pharmaceutical companies are horrible. Thankfully we have a robust drug approval process, with oversight and audits at every step of the way, to more or less keep them in line. It's nothing like software development where literally anything can sneak into production code.
"insurmountable challenges." That rules out funding and community engagement, since both of those can be improved. The problem must have been systemic...
A lack of funding that the board does not see a viable avenue to correct in a timeframe relevant to continuing operations is an insurmountable challenge.
Were there any warning signs of this decision? I quick look at their blog[1] doesn't raise any red flags. Who knew about this? I'm sure the community would have kept them going if they had known. Is there more to the story?
Update: apparently there had been some notice that funding was tight, and local organizers had been asked to donate, but the degree of criticality was not made explicit.
So if you have Neuralink (or anything similar that gets released in the future) you can be convicted of thoughtcrimes and that's a-ok?
What exactly is "on you" in this scenario? In your world is someone with Neuralink allowed to take their brain images and use that as an outline for a sketch they're drawing or you're not allowed to think of anyone naked ever again?
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_collusion