I left SF before the election, I could tell early on that Trump was going to win and figured free speech clampdowns in SV would follow and I knew my work was going to be affected. I worked in search and I remember the scandal within the industry when Yahoo accepted money from the Chinese government to censor pages on the 2008 tainted milk scandal. They charged $10K per link. At the time Google was seen as a beacon of free speech and 'do no evil' which was a nice contrast to Yahoo which is apparently OK with killing babies for a small buck.
Now Google, Twitter, Facebook etc. are all finding excuses to allow various meddling of the search results. There is too much money in it, it is inevitable.
Free speech is important to me because without it we quite literally end up killing babies for very small amounts of money.
I'm saddened every time I hear the perceived narrative of the "attack on free speech", the false cry of persecution from those who aren't persecuted. Some rally around this belief, even want to believe, their rights are being threatened or taken away from them. Free speech is not under attack. There is no "clampdown." Echo chamber? Sure, probably. Preference for liberal over conservative views? Of course. Some sort of systemic "attack" on "free speech?" Unrealistic at best.
Helicopters are slow, and they probably didn't have the rotor speed needed to yank the collective.
Hitting a 2kg drone would result in expensive repairs, e.g. $30K for replacement rotor blades and you still might crash.
I probably would have taken the hit but I'm much better off than the average R22 pilot who often operate or razor thin margins.
That said; my bet is that there was no drone. My guess is the student made a small mistake, the teacher took over and made a bigger mistake, and both want to keep their jobs/future carers. Drones make an easy target to lie about and are hated anyway. Not to say there are no irresponsible drone pilots, just currently I think it's more likely heli-pilot error at this stage. My hope is the GPS tracking in the phantom well let us know for sure.
I suspect that filing a false report with the NTSB would be a crime, in which case you'd be accusing the crew of breaking the law, perhaps even perjury.
My guess is the student made a small mistake, the teacher took over and made a bigger mistake, and both want to keep their jobs/future carers. Drones make an easy target to lie about and are hated anyway.
Ah, I consider them human with human faults and incentives. One really sad aspect is that a major killer of helicopter pilots is cutting corners on preventative maintenance in order to save money. I feel like we need to be honest on what people are like.
When making such points, it usually helps to talk about the systemic or situational factors pressuring people to do such things and to frame it as one plausible explanation that fits the scenario as presented rather than as an accusation.
You need to be very careful about making public accusations (or sounding like you are). That can seriously harm people's careers and lives.
Drones have harder parts and I would expect hardness to play a big role in damage done. But it doesn't even need to be hard, raindrops can also do a fair amount of expensive damage.
I'm willing to let her insitements for genocide slide, it happens to the best of us, but what really worries me is her plan to "improve Cargo by incorporating best practices from npm".
I'm not really letting it slide, I was extending the premise by pretending to be a sympathetic genocidal nazi, which I hope is still absurd enough to be presumed sarcasm. I'm aware that the joke may not age well so I was happy to get it in while I still can.
The CoC complaint is amazing and has me really worried about Rust and I wonder where the adults are. Usually Meta Language people are meritocracy driven so I'm surprised to see a feminist infiltration. GoLang I could understand...
I don't believe that's true - I think that the Googlers who leaked the memo went to some extent to not name the author publicly, and his name was first posted on Vox Popoli, in fact, by someone sympathetic to him. (Once the name was public, everyone started using it in public.)
Also there's a big difference between "dox" in the sense of "identify a name" and "dox" in the sense of "post lots of personal documents / records about," which is what Kiwi Farms does.
It's common to back channel that information, I have a hard time believing that there was any chance his name would not have come out.
He was also doxed in the regular sense by left wing trolls (which do exist). In one example he was stalked, harassed, and had his photo taken and released from a rather private event.
Yes, I agree, but there's still a humongous difference in scale - backchannels are not public posts, and "trolls" / harassers picking up on public information are different from "trolls" / harassers with direct connections to people with information on their targets.
"Both sides did it" isn't a defense (both sides can be wrong), and it's definitely not a defense if one side is doing it to a much larger and more organized scale than the other, and the other side is generally trying to do the right thing and happens to have some outside trolls who are being misguidedly sympathetic to the cause.
If you mean Samuel Brannan, then you make money by diverting church funds to pay violent gangs to establish and maintain a shovel monopoly. Then you lose it all to a real estate crash and a divorce.
So the real lesson is be immoral, break the law, diversify and don't get married.
It's not like he is the only one who thought of selling shovels with huge markups.
Even if James Damore does not win Google has a number of practices that could be considered embarrassing if they were to be made public. I know a number of Googlers who confide to me privately about their experiences. Traditionally they would not have an outlet to express their grievances because no-one really cares. I'm hoping this lawsuit will give them and others a chance leak some of these practices. I'm interested in what people outside of SV tech bubble will think about it.
If there's any veracity to the lawsuit's claim that Google employees maintained blacklists of employees based on their political affiliations, or boo'd new hires on the basis of their skin tone, Google just handed Fox News an excellent ratings boost.
I used to do research on climate change, specifically on combining land, sea, and air models together and getting them to run on a massive cluster. It was very important to the other researches that the models produce the 'right' predictions which at the time was runaway global warming. When the models didn't show this it was presumed that the models were wrong so hyper-parameters were tuned to try to torture the models to produce the 'right' result. When even that didn't work they went so far as future pollute the data. Disillusioned with academia I left to work in industry.
My question is this; How qualified and experienced do I need to be in order to be able to legitimately and completely distrust the climate change 'experts'? Because I feel like I've earned that right.
> When the models didn't show this it was presumed that the models were wrong so hyper-parameters were tuned to try to torture the models to produce the 'right' result. When even that didn't work they went so far as future pollute the data.
Please name and shame. I've also done work in the field, and this kind of behavior was never acceptable - and should not be.
If you let the bad actors hide in obscurity, they will continue to practice bad science.
Like a #metoo movement for scientists. AFAIK Hyper-parameter tuning is fairly normal and necessary given how easy it is for the models to become unstable on their own and future polluting is often accidental. It can come down to judgement calls and difference of opinions as to what degree of intervention is acceptable which leaves a lot of wiggle room If you removed all future pollution and and left hyperparameters at the initial best guess you often end up with crazy results in backtesting. E.g. if our past predictions were correct then we should be living on Venus right now which obviously we're not so we must need different hyperparameters. My former colleagues were trying their best and even they knew their adjustments were going beyond reasonable. They never signed off on the final results so the project was politically useless and subsequently killed. They've all since left the climate change industry disillusioned as well.
> . if our past predictions were correct then we should be living on Venus right now which obviously we're not so we must need different hyperparameters
I would like to know hat models showed runaway warming and were publishing because I don't remember anything like that.
I was talking about backtesting of the models to see if they would have predicted the past correctly. I.e. You run the model from 1970 to today and measure how close the model prediction is with the actual measurements. If it's too far off then obviously the model is wrong and changes are made to try to improve it.
> It was very important to the other researches that the models produce the 'right' predictions which at the time was runaway global warming. When the models didn't show this it was presumed that the models were wrong
Sorry, you have claimed that the scientists wanted the 'right' predictions, that was runaway warming.
I repeat, can you link to any scientists saying in 2006-2007 that the most probable outcome was runaway warming?
The group leaders were pushed things too far for me to accept as legitimate but not far enough to produce the results needed. We were aware of others that pushed things even further and they got to continue working. This adds a selection criteria bias to those still doing the research which has me trusting them even less. And this was before ClimateGate which made the shenanigans done by other groups public.
Your reference to and unreserved use of the term "ClimateGate" makes me question your agenda here. Wasn't "ClimateGate" determined to be a smear campaign? I'm asking rhetorically as I can see the discussion devolving.
I generally keep my eyes open for climate change news and didn't see this. Do you have any reasonable references that explain that ClimateGate was a smear campaign? I thought it was a small number of committed researchers making some mistakes and straying from strict scientific protocols; I never saw that it was a smear campaign.
Sounds like we have a similar background. How long ago was this? How many models did you work with?
I had access to a few models and it was trivial to cause runaway warming. It was naturally something everyone tried when they were handed the keys to the servers. I recall causing the oceans boil within a few centuries.
I think in order to make the claim that climate change isn't happening, you need to be able to explain how a massive change in CO2 and other greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere will not result in warming.
There is fundamental data that does not depend on climate models that tells us we're in danger. Atmosphere composition in one of them. Ocean ph is another.
If you have specific criticisms against how climate models are being run, then the place for that debate is within the scientific community, with scientific arguments. Apparently you have decided that is not for you, though.
I make no claim that climate change isn't happening. Being between the modeler and the results meant it was my job to explain the result to the modeler. So criticizing climate change models within the scientific community was my job for over a year and a half.
> criticizing climate change models within the scientific community was my job for over a year and a half
So you had a long and glorious career spanning more than 18 months, that makes you feel entitled to criticize those who studied the field for decades and are actually making a living therein.
My answer is - you need to actually understand the thing you're criticizing, not just feel like you do. Another prerequisite is a lack of agenda or bias.
> you need to be able to explain how a massive change in CO2 and other greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere will not result in warming.
It's not so easy to be sure about the warning produced by the CO2 because a very big part is the "Climate Sensibility". And there is no straightforward way to calculate the climate sensibility, you must use climate models. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_sensitivity#Radiative_...
> CO2 climate sensitivity has a component directly due to radiative forcing by CO2, and a further contribution arising from climate feedbacks, both positive and negative. "Without any feedbacks, a doubling of CO2 (which amounts to a forcing of 3.7 W/m2) would result in 1 °C global warming, which is easy to calculate and is undisputed. The remaining uncertainty is due entirely to feedbacks in the system, namely, the water vapor feedback, the ice-albedo feedback, the cloud feedback, and the lapse rate feedback";[14] addition of these feedbacks leads to a value of the sensitivity to CO2 doubling of approximately 3 °C ± 1.5 °C, which corresponds to a value of λ of 0.8 K/(W/m2).
> "Without any feedbacks, a doubling of CO2 (which amounts to a forcing of 3.7 W/m2) would result in 1 °C global warming, which is easy to calculate and is undisputed.
We're going to get warmer, to find out how much warmer, you need more complex models.
No one is making the claim that "change isn't happening". The skeptical view point isn't even "warming isn't happening". The skeptical view is that catastrophic warming isn't an accurate prediction of future temperature trends.
I believe the primary difference between the "consensus crowd" and the "skeptic crowd" is that the consensus crowd is confident in the predictive value of models that have a net positive feedback sensitivity to temperature increase while the skeptics argue that we don't actually know what the feedback mechanisms well enough to be confident in the models and in fact basic physical principles argue for a negative net feedback to temperature increases (to avoid runaway warming).
As for possibile negative feedback loops, increased CO2 might increase clouds, which increases the earth's albedo resulting in less energy input from the sun, which reduces temperature.
Let me clarify. There is a difference between warming and catastrophic warming. Serious skeptics are arguing against catastrophic warming as predicted by the models.
There is another level of debate, less foundational, regarding the quality of our temperature observations and the amount of warming (not catastrophic warming) that is a result of natural variation, human activity, measurement errors, data adjustments and the like.
Observational warming has in general been less than that predicted by the models suggesting that the extrapolation into the future by the models may not be accurate.
> Serious skeptics are arguing against catastrophic warming as predicted by the models.
What catastrophic warming? Or better, define catastrophic warming
And by the way, 90% of skeptics still say that there is no warming.
> Observational warming has in general been less than that predicted by the models suggesting that the extrapolation into the future by the models may not be accurate.
I'm using the phrase 'catastrophic warming' to refer to the warming predicted by climate models as opposed to the warming directly observed today and in the historical record.
Anthropomorphic global warming theory is roughly two connected claims. 1) rising CO2 levels caused by human activity results in a rise in the average global temperature and 2) the climate system has a feedback mechanism (sensitivity) that magnifies this CO2 induced warming.
Basic physics can be used to determine the warming caused by increased CO2. There are no serious skeptics in regards to these physical properties of CO2. My understanding is that the IPCC reports have consistently reported this warming as 1-1.5 degrees for every doubling of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.
But that temperature rise isn't enough to create the catastrophic side effects that you see reported. That rise has to be magnified by the climate system through a variety of feedback mechanisms. This magnification/sensitivity can't be measured. It is the output of the climate models not one of the input parameters. Credible skeptics argue that a positive sensitivity is incorrect and that the climate system (as with most natural systems) has a negative sensitivity.
Here is what seems to be a reasonable review of predictions vs observations using a variety of methodologies most showing observations trending towards the lower half of the predicted ranges of the models (as opposed to trending toward the center line of the predictions): https://judithcurry.com/2017/09/26/are-climate-models-overst...
I'm pretty sure I'm not allowed to have my own suspicions, so thanks for speaking up. If you're not trolling, really do consider writing under your real name and naming others involved. If it's too much of a risk to anyone's career or personal safety right now, you could always wait to publish until you're retired and/or old.
I think you're being too harsh on my former colleagues, they were not evil or even particularly bad people. Hyperparameter tuning is necessary and future pollution is often accidental. The problem is when the tuning is goal seeked and the future pollution is not accidental and these problems are endemic to the industry and science in general. CRU East Anglia of Climategate fame went much further and actually published their results and I'm pretty sure none of them are in jail.
My colleagues left the industry which makes me less optimistic about those who stayed.
> How qualified and experienced do I need to be in order to be able to legitimately and completely distrust the climate change 'experts'? Because I feel like I've earned that right.
Well, distrust of experts is the fuel that powers the anti-vaccination trend, the fluoride scare, etc. There are large hordes of soccer moms out there who feel the same as you do - that they are more qualified than the experts to make decisions on vaccination schedules.
But let's get back on the main topic. The answer to your question, of course, is - you are entitled to distrust experts when you are an expert yourself. Not a semi-dilettante, not someone who has dabbled in related fields, not someone who made coffee for the actual experts.
Sounds like risk management. I presume he wants to stay married but also wants to protect his business ventures by getting her to agree to a maximum payout. I've known many wealthy men who were completely financially destroyed by divorce. There is often no clean way of splitting a business and having to liquidate cash to buy the partner out can often sink the company.
On a related note, I consider Amber Heard as a risk to the whole Mars mission and get a bit nervous when I hear rumors of them getting back together. I wonder if I'm the only one.
Edit: I grew up in farming country and by far the biggest risk to farms there is divorce. This is insane given all of the other risks in farming.
As far as I can tell this is a side effect of optimizing the algorithm to encourage greater usage by discouraging limited usage. Asking FB, Twitter etc. to do any different is the same as asking them to make less money.
You'd think that FB would want to pull "wayward" people in, though. If I haven't posted in a while, and then suddenly post, FB should give that post wider reach, with the hope that I get a lot of engagement, come away with a positive feeling, and then post/engage more.
I just did a sort of impromptu 2.5 month posting hiatus from FB (which also included no commenting or liking), and when I returned I got a ton of likes and comments on my fist couple posts.
The thing is, these places aren't monolithic. Real people work there and are making real decisions. There is more than enough room for Facebook to be reasonable and still have plenty of pie, it's just that employees need to actually make themselves heard or make the right decisions.
Now Google, Twitter, Facebook etc. are all finding excuses to allow various meddling of the search results. There is too much money in it, it is inevitable.
Free speech is important to me because without it we quite literally end up killing babies for very small amounts of money.