When I was in college, I once walked down a sidewalk that had been taken over by geese. Twenty or thirty big geese, sat down on the ground, who didn't even bother to get up on their feet I as I passed by. I wondered how they knew I wouldn't kick them, as I easly could have, and I concluded they had figured out that polite humans would just walk around them. Which I did.
I've seen the similar behavior from the ducks and geese in my neighborhood. Not as extreme, but sometimes I'm out for a walk, and they'll keep a wary eye on me, but will be content with the situation at 6-10 feet away, and won't actually take off unless I try to chase them. I don't think it's so much that they're "cutting it close" as that they're justifiably confident that humans are too slow to catch them at that distance and generally don't even try. But on the other hand, different groups of them seem to have different distances they're comfortable with. It's not like they've all solved the same optimization problem to three decimal places - some are confident and some are wary.
Of course, there are lots of stories of animals who got overly familiar with humans right up until the humans surprised them. As a funny example, I remember one time a cat that had grown up around my not-very-athletic family escaped the house and had to be brought back inside. At one point, it made a break for it along the long side of the house and was visibly shocked when my runner of a fiance ran it down and cut it off. This wasn't its first time running from us, but it had never run from him before, and it clearly didn't think humans could be that fast.
I don't think animals optimize as hard for benefit in everything as biology might lead you to believe. They build experience. They make mistakes. They're very cautious in new situations, but they can also be confident to the point of cocky if they think they know what you can't do. There's lots and lots of videos of cocky animals guessing wrong. It makes sense to me that maybe every individual animal isn't prudently optimizing hard for its own survival so much as that the group of them, with different temperaments, try different things and sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't and maybe there's a balance between weeding out dumb ideas and retaining the capacity to try things.
I think the idea that animals are always optimizing for survival and that everything must be for some benefit is misleading anyway. I mean, in an ultimate sense, you could say the same thing about humans, that they must always be optimizing for survival and reproduction, and whether or not that's true, it's definitely not true in a simple and obvious way on the level of day-to-day activities. We do a lot of dangerous and dumb and non-productive stuff. I don't think animals are different.
In fact, it makes sense to me to leave some reserve capacity. If surviving in good times takes all your time and energy, what are you going to do in hard times? Therefore animals typically have a lot of time for goofing off, and that certainly seems to me like what they're doing most of the time. They would similarly have room for trying stupid things and taking unnecessary risks.
> "it made a break for it along the long side of the house and was visibly shocked when my runner of a fiance ran it down and cut it off"
I still remember the look on her face when I got to the corner before her. She looked at me like "what is this terrifying new creature?" as she stumbled backwards looking for a way to escape something faster than her. By the time she'd decided on a course of action, someone else (I think your brother) had grabbed her from behind.
FWIW it's not accidental that I see my wife's HN comments. I joined shortly after her and I have a bookmark for her profile just because I love to see what she writes. But it is fun when occasionally I reply to something she's written and it takes others half of the comment before they figure out that we're connected.
Oh, I don't know. They seem like a lot more "honk" than "bonk". ;)
I get that they have a lot of aggression and deterrence going for them. But in a fight between a goose and a human, the human is mostly risking bites and bruises while the goose is risking death.
I put them in a similar category of threat as scorpions. Of course I don't want to fight -- getting hurt is inconvenient. But if we do fight, I'm not really concerned about which of us is going to win.
Sure, humans should worry about crazy geese. Geese have a lot more reason to worry about crazy humans!
They have a whole lot of violence going for them too, when they decide they need to use it, and invariably also a considerable predominance in numbers. You're thinking about this like you imagine you'd be able to stay on your feet, I can tell. Maybe you're the kickboxer you'd need to be for that. If not, you are dreaming, and as with losing any fight, once they get you down it is "everything to play for."
There's not a wasp on Earth I need to be afraid of, just friends I've met already and those not yet. I've hosted them in my kitchen, on my porch, been in the midst of a hundred drunk baldfaced yellowjackets and not only had nothing to fear but I knew it, not because they could not hurt me - I'm not so foolish as to imagine myself immune to their weapons! - but because I know how easy it is not to make them decide that they need to use those weapons on me.
I am very careful to walk small around geese and swans at all times, lest I inadvertently give cause to treat me as a threat. You'll do what you like, of course. No business of mine what you think of your chances. I hope the birds keep not taking you too seriously, and that you never frighten a gosling or God forbid a cygnet.
To be sure, I agree that wild animals, even small ones, should be treated with respect and given space. I did not mean to imply that humans should go around picking fights with geese. Anything can happen in a fight, and I certainly agree with you that fighting a goose without a compelling reason would be imprudent. And at any rate, it would be unkind. You can be stronger than something without mistreating it. I don't mean my assessment of the danger humans and geese pose to each other as a sort of challenge -- it's just what I frankly think on the topic. Either way, of course we should respect and be kind to geese.
Where we stand on the respective odds of different humans versus different geese in different arenas, it's actually orthogonal to my original point -- that different groups of geese vary in their courage around humans, and that there are extreme outliers who are doing a lot more than "cutting it close" -- they're betting the humans will give them space. Or perhaps I saw something rare and was simply channelling Snow White that day. ;)
The more general point is that animal behavior need not always be thought of as the solution to an optimization problem. Whether you believe that's true or not in an ultimate sense, in an immediate sense, it is obvious that their personalities and experience come into play too, and that sometimes they make bad decisions.
that said, the respective odds of humans vs geese are not even remotely close. People sometimes get mild injuries from geese, and on rare occasions significant injuries, most often from losing their footing and hitting the ground hard. Whereas a human with even the slightest bit of knowledge and who isn't squeamish could easily end the lives of many geese in rapid succession.
Geese aren't confident because of some sort of rational assessment that they can put up a good fight against a human. Geese are confident because as a general rule, humans don't pick fights with them, and it's therefore safe enough for the group to hang around in places where humans are present at short distances.
I meant just what I said, which was neither snarky, nor a swipe, nor insubstantive, nor unkind. There's no getting a word in edgewise with you two, because you treat disagreement as an opportunity for a style of play which in table tennis is called "cutthroat" - two against one, in other words. Find someone else to play that way with.
I realize I made the point in a way neither disingenuous nor passive aggressive, and that this may be uncomfortable for those unaccustomed to directness in interpersonal criticism, or indeed that anyone should dare critique their behavior. Nevertheless.
I would address the remarkably mealy-mouthed, motte-and-bailey version of human chauvinism here on display, but what would be the point? Oh, one of you alone I'm quite confident of being able to pin down; neither of you argues very well in isolation. (No relation to Clarence, one assumes.) This back-and-forth, tag team crap, though, that's not worth the trouble. Go get yourselves an ass kicking from a tribe of pissed-off geese. As I said before, you're welcome.
Your comment was in fact snarky, a swipe, insubstantive, and unkind. I am quite used to directness in interpersonal criticism (I am after all autistic), and I understand the difference between direct and being mean, cheap, mocking, etc. Your latest response is full of pretty much all of that.
For example: the allegation of not getting a word in edgewise, two against one, "tag team crap" -- I made one comment in this subthread about geese (my other comments were in another subthread about chasing down the cat), and it was in reply to my wife's comment in which she had stopped arguing that point. And then I responded to your unjustified insults by pointing out they are a violation of HN's rules. This is hardly an unbalanced conversation in which you have been unfairly targeted and not been given space to argue your position.
And of course declaring that "neither of you argues very well in isolation" is just a gratuitous insult. So is "remarkably mealy-mouthed". And, for that matter, suggesting I must have no relation to my rhetorically-gifted first cousin some number of times removed.
This is the sort of hostile trolling I expect on reddit, not on Hacker News. I kindly request you not reply to me again.
It's normal for achievement in any given genre to have a golden age. It can happen at any time and for mysterious reasons, but I think it is very common to have a golden age right when something new begins to mature and gain cultural momentum. I think that happened with cars and airplanes and movies and TV, to name just a few examples.
Why do video games kinda suck now, compared to the 90's? I mean, same reason as Hip Hop does. Same reason Star Wars does. Lots of passion is poured into things that are new and exciting, and lots less when they become familiar and expected.
Honestly, almost any band follows the same trajectory. They suck but have raw energy for a couple albums. Then they become more polished and have a few awesome albums. Then they get too polished, or they've explored the original concept and have to experiment unsuccessfully, or they just don't know how to recapture the magic while staying fresh, and they kind of start to suck again.
All that analysis about servers and LANs and such, I don't disagree with. But I also think it's a symptom of a much larger phenomenon: the cultural energy has passed the thing by. Love of the thing for its own sake results in generously empowering players. Less power and subtle sucking results from less love.
For an example of something right now moving from "awesome" to "overly expected and starting to suck", I might point at podcasts.
That's not to say you can't make great games now - you clearly can. But a community full of novelty and energy and innovation and inspiration attracts genius and passion in a way that a safe investment never can.
The problem is to try making art/entertainment "professional" and primarily a money making machine.
>Why do video games kinda suck now
Well they don't, just the so called AAA/A studios produce the same shit over and over (like a fast and furious allegory). Just look at "Clair Obscur: Expedition 33" for a recent example why modern games don't suck. The Disney's of gaming are dying and it's a win for every consumer.
Some times are better than others, and I can't tell whether we're in a lull or I just have a case of "getting older" and "kids these days". ;)
I will say that golden ages are typically identified retrospectively. Things get better until they get worse, and then you look back. Like the article, I certainly look back to the 90s as a golden age in gaming in certain ways, but at the time I didn't think that. At the time, I just thought everything was awesome and there was no reason for the party to ever end. What feels like that now?
Hmm good question! I think AI chatbots are pretty awesome right now. There's no ads, they're still dumb enough that you can steer them, they're still mostly used by smart people so they haven't been ablated to appeal to the lowest common denominator. I think we'll look back on this era of chatbots with nostalgia.
Calm down, guys. It's transitional, and it's not unusual.
From the article:
> The hiring freeze is governmentwide, whereas a pause on communications and travel appears to be limited to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), NIH’s parent agency. Such pauses are not unprecedented when a new administration comes in. But some NIH staff suggested these measures, which include pulling job ads and rescinding offers, are more extreme than any previously.
...
> Previous administrations have imposed communications pauses in their first days. And the administration of Barack Obama continued a cap on attendance at scientific meetings first imposed by the George W. Bush administration, which in some cases meant staff canceled trips to meetings.
> But an immediate, blanket ban on travel is unusual, says one longtime researcher in NIH's intramural program. “I don't think we've ever had this and it's pretty devastating for a postdoc or graduate student who needs to present their work and network to move ahead in their career,” the researcher says.
This is not an extraordinary event. It is not an attack on the NIH. It is a transitional pause, which is substantially normal when administrations change hands. The wailing and moaning is silly. Give it a week.
FWIW, I was around (i.e. working on NIH funded grants) for the last transition, and I don't remember this happening. I agree and hope that it might not be an ominous sign, but I don't think it's the norm. We're being asked to pull out of not only conferences, but even out of cross-organizational Zoom chats that involve certain institutions. Where I work, the people who've been doing this longer than me are not saying "relax everybody, this is fine," they seem to be freaking out a little bit too.
>But some NIH staff suggested these measures, which include pulling job ads and rescinding offers, are more extreme than any previously.
> halted midstream a training workshop for junior scientists, called off a workshop on adolescent learning minutes before it was to begin, and canceled meetings of two advisory councils. Panels that were scheduled to review grant proposals also received eleventh-hour word that they wouldn’t be meeting.
> “People are just at a loss because they also don’t know what’s coming next. I have never seen this level of confusion and concern in people that are extremely dedicated to their mission,” the scientist says.
>But an immediate, blanket ban on travel is unusual, says one longtime researcher in NIH's intramural program. “I don't think we've ever had this and it's pretty devastating for a postdoc or graduate student” who needs to present their work and network to move ahead in their career, the researcher says.
"The incestuous relationship between the NIH, CDC, and vaccine makers—with all of the conflict of interest it entails—cannot be allowed to continue, and the revolving door between them must be locked. As Severino writes, “Funding for scientific research should not be controlled by a small group of highly paid andunaccountable insiders at the NIH, many of whom stay in power for decades. The NIH monopoly on directing research should be broken.” What’s more, NIH has long “been at the forefront in pushing junk gender science.” The next HHS secretary should immediately put an end to the department’s foray into woke transgender activism."
This event is entirely extraordinary and politicized. Nothing will be better "in a week". The actions being taken were telegraphed well ahead of time and were widely known to be part of a strategy to destroy the NIH and replace it with some kind of propaganda arm.
Your suggestion that bad behavior by all-male teams would be improved by the addition of women rests on a couple of assumptions that are not true: that women are inherently better behaved than men, and that women naturally see each other as being on the same team.
I have been through some really awful experiences in the workplace in the last few years, and some of the most egregiously abusive behavior came from another woman. Women can be incredibly cruel to each other, and this woman in particular seemed to have it out for other women. Women are not inherently saints, and they are not inherently kind to other women.
On the other hand, I have often, often worked on teams that were (except for me) all men, but by and large they were men who had mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters that they loved, and who therefore had no trouble relating to me with respect and affection. While it is true that some men treat women specifically badly, and that some men treat people generally badly, it is not true that men in general treat women badly. Quite the opposite.
It does take a moment, as a woman, to find your feet socially in an all male space. But does it not always take a moment to find your feet in any new space? I have generally found that what makes it go smoothly is the fact that we are all hackers. If anything, it is all the walking on eggshells about sexism that makes social integration awkward at first. People are trying to figure out how they are "supposed" to behave around me, worried that I will be aggressive socially and legally. When we focus on the work we do together and the love we have in common for the field, we become friends naturally and get along well.
I myself think all the hand-wringing over demographics has been a waste of time at best and counterproductive at worst. I think it makes more sense to focus on developing virtue, civility, and good leadership among the people who find themselves here.
> I have been through some really awful experiences in the workplace in the last few years, and some of the most egregiously abusive behavior came from another woman. Women can be incredibly cruel to each other, and this woman in particular seemed to have it out for other women. Women are not inherently saints, and they are not inherently kind to other women.
In my teens my mom tried to reenter the workforce and got an office job, and she absolutely hated working with other women because of this. She wanted to work with men because in her experience, women were so much worse.
I don't think women are inherently better behaved than men, or that they naturally see themselves as being on the same team. It's that the dynamic where it feels fun or funny to tell a joke that makes a minority in a group feel bad is less likely to arise when there are multiple people who wouldn't be laughing, or perhaps even telling them to give it a rest. Nothing to do with comradery, just the natural tendency of people to not like when their personal identity is threatened in some way.
FWIW, I do think most men with wives and/or daughters are generally thoughtful coworkers, but I'm not sure that's a majority in most tech workplaces, especially the ones that skew young. Thinking back to my own experience, I think, I was blind to a lot of the things I'm speaking about (or perhaps even resistant to the idea of calling it out) until I had a long-term partner.
It is always so refreshing to read this kind of thing.
For a number of years I had the sense that I might be going crazy, because it seemed that throughout my whole working life I'd encountered good and bad people of both sexes, but never witnessed the kind of systematic targeting of women that both mainstream and alternative media sources told me was rife. How could it be that I couldn't see what was apparently right under my nose? So it's reassuring to know that there are also women who have had a similar experience.
I'm not the person you're asking, but I may be able to satisfy your curiosity a little. I have given birth without anesthesia -- in fact, I did so twice. I found it arduous and difficult, and there certainly were moments of pain, but I would not describe the experience overall as exactly painful.
You know how when you've been running for a long time and you really want to stop? That was the primary unpleasant sensation for me. Something between a muscle cramp and a side ache, though quite intense. Really uncomfortable, really hard work. Very distressing if you freak out about it and get frightened, but actually a pretty cool experience if you lean into it. Toward the end of labor there was some significant pain, enough to make me yell, but there was also so much going on that I was very distracted from it. You can experience some pretty significant pain and not be very badly distressed by it if you're super focused on some goal and working hard for it, and boy does childbirth have that effect. ;)
Now, you shouldn't overly generalize from my personal experiences. Every pregnancy is different, and every delivery is different. But I have always thought the characterization of childbirth as the greatest possible pain was overblown. In my experience, it was more like a major athletic event which involved some significant injury - a marathon or a boxing match or something in that neighborhood. You do really injure yourself enough that it takes some weeks to heal, but I honestly think that part of the equation is comparable to a bad sprain. Maybe a bit worse, but much more like an athletic injury than some of the horrible diseases people get.
At any rate, it is not the most significant pain I've personally experienced. That prize goes to an infected gall bladder / passed gall stone. I've also had leg cramps which I thought were more painful than childbirth, though they didn't last as long. To relate it to the original claim, I definitely think it's plausible that dysentary is worse. Internal organs dying is high on the pain scale.
(If you're curious about why I chose to avoid anaesthesia, I hadn't liked it during my first delivery. I had a long and painful labor during which anesthesia was delayed, and when I finally got it, I found it didn't much lift my distress -- I later understood that was because my pain wasn't pain exactly, it was me doing a poor job of working with my body. Aaand I was at a dumb hospital that had put me on my back, which is painful, and I didn't know any better. Anyway. I didn't see it as really relieving my discomfort, but it did confine me to bed for a couple days and robbed me of being my most alert and best self during a very important moment in my life. My second two deliveries were better experiences than my first.)
Yeah, I’m going to say you were pretty lucky. With my first I had pain significant enough to be traumatic, before the stage where I could get an epidural. I used to tell people if I’d gone out and had my husband run over my leg with the car, it would have hurt less and I could have gotten pain relief in the ER. It wasn’t as bad the second time though. It is truly a large range of experiences.
I am a skeptic about the diagnostic criteria for hypertension, and especially about low targets for management. Cochrane did a meta review not long ago that made it sound like the signal was pretty weak below about 160/100 (as you might expect, if the measurement wasn't very accurate, which I don't think it is). I'm not saying it's not dangerous at much higher levels, but if you're freaking out at 140/90 because a chart says STAGE TWO, imo you can take a chill pill.
Not surprised to hear about Cochrane's results. The science does smell funny. I read a bunch of hypertension papers this last year (I have a home machine and wanted to know how to interpret the results). Beyond the fact that inter-reading repeatability is very poor and a lot of the explanations are very ad-hoc ("fear of doctors" etc), there are other issues.
First problem: natural variance across healthy people is huge. Doctors have a target they think everyone should hit but it's just a gross average, they don't seem to take into account the possibility of genetic variance at all.
Second related problem: it's common to be told what a healthy BP is for an "adult" although BP averages for men and women are quite different, and BP is also heavily affected by age (controlling for health).
Third problem: correlation is not causation. It's a cliché because it's a real issue. The public health community is prone to blurring the line between "two variables are found to be related in a study" and "one therefore causes the other" without doing the work to prove causality, and when I went looking for what studies established BP->cardiovascular disease causality it was remarkably hard to locate firm evidence. It could easily be the other way around. Indeed in most hydraulic systems it's understood that pressure is the result of other mechanisms and under/over pressure is the result of malfunction in pumps or piping. In healthcare they argue it's the reverse: that over/under pressure is the cause of malfunction elsewhere. There's probably a circular relationship but all the material targeted at regular people makes strong claims of causality when the underlying literature seems far less certain.
Fourth problem: perhaps unsurprisingly given the third problem I found studies where people were put on anti-hypertensives and there was no improvement. Actually I read one study where the treatment outcome was purely negative: there was no effect on heart disease or other outcomes of interest but there were lots of patients who fainted due to excessively low BP. This study seemed reasonable well constructed but the negative outcome didn't seem to reduce the field's certainty in anything (a super common problem in public health). Doing trials like this is hard because any time anti-hypertension drugs fail to work it's interpreted as evidence that the damage was already done earlier in life thus requiring ever longer studies to detect.
Fifth problem: a lot of the underlying scientific claims trace back to one longitudinal study in a single village in Japan, done decades ago. It's remarkable how often you follow citations and end up back at this dataset. When you look at what the study did it's kinda sketchy and not particularly convincing, but because the BP->CVD link is hypothesized to be a very slow acting effect it takes a huge effort to collect data. The field seems to be caught in a loop where they exaggerated their confidence early, so now there is not seen to be much point in doing better studies because it'd take years (bad for your career) and why study something that's already "known".
I've seen the similar behavior from the ducks and geese in my neighborhood. Not as extreme, but sometimes I'm out for a walk, and they'll keep a wary eye on me, but will be content with the situation at 6-10 feet away, and won't actually take off unless I try to chase them. I don't think it's so much that they're "cutting it close" as that they're justifiably confident that humans are too slow to catch them at that distance and generally don't even try. But on the other hand, different groups of them seem to have different distances they're comfortable with. It's not like they've all solved the same optimization problem to three decimal places - some are confident and some are wary.
Of course, there are lots of stories of animals who got overly familiar with humans right up until the humans surprised them. As a funny example, I remember one time a cat that had grown up around my not-very-athletic family escaped the house and had to be brought back inside. At one point, it made a break for it along the long side of the house and was visibly shocked when my runner of a fiance ran it down and cut it off. This wasn't its first time running from us, but it had never run from him before, and it clearly didn't think humans could be that fast.
I don't think animals optimize as hard for benefit in everything as biology might lead you to believe. They build experience. They make mistakes. They're very cautious in new situations, but they can also be confident to the point of cocky if they think they know what you can't do. There's lots and lots of videos of cocky animals guessing wrong. It makes sense to me that maybe every individual animal isn't prudently optimizing hard for its own survival so much as that the group of them, with different temperaments, try different things and sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn't and maybe there's a balance between weeding out dumb ideas and retaining the capacity to try things.
I think the idea that animals are always optimizing for survival and that everything must be for some benefit is misleading anyway. I mean, in an ultimate sense, you could say the same thing about humans, that they must always be optimizing for survival and reproduction, and whether or not that's true, it's definitely not true in a simple and obvious way on the level of day-to-day activities. We do a lot of dangerous and dumb and non-productive stuff. I don't think animals are different.
In fact, it makes sense to me to leave some reserve capacity. If surviving in good times takes all your time and energy, what are you going to do in hard times? Therefore animals typically have a lot of time for goofing off, and that certainly seems to me like what they're doing most of the time. They would similarly have room for trying stupid things and taking unnecessary risks.
A favorite video on the topic: https://youtu.be/UezzQSUwIgo