If I may ask, what was your internal doomsday countdown before reading the article?

About 10-15 years before progress makes some members of my family unemployed.

Depending on how representative your family is of the overall population, that could mean that the doomsday scenario for most people is already here.

Come on dekhn, we want to know

OK, sure. One of the most interesting long-running issues in proteins is how they adopt their 3D structure and remain stable for such long periods.

Most people would say that covalent bonds hold the protein together and they dominate the overall structure- for example, you wouldn't ever see a strained covalent bond, so you can easily eliminate all structures with strained bonds. This was long an assumption. However, work I did at Google using Exacycle demonstrated that, in fact, large collections of hydrogen bonds can in fact work in concert to stabilize proteins with strained covalent bonds (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pro.2389/full), which overturned the assumption, and made a modest contribution to the prediction of protein folds, and protein design.

Interesting, thanks!

Thanks!

>Does this mean I'm incompetent?

>It's possible; I can't ignore the possibility.

Yes you can ignore it, just focus on things that actually matter. While other question their competence, you can actually get stuff done.

>I would guess that Maglor survived, found his Silmaril, lost his Silmaril again, and that Pulp Fiction is an account of him getting it back.

And now I want to rewatch and reread everything again!

I find it funny how you go from

>This whole question really stems from a sad and pervasive tendency for 'intelligent' people to overestimate their general expertise

to

>Within a community, individuals should only be judged based on their contributions and value within that community.

and then justify that with

>Everyone is not expected to be right, or agreeable, about everything, with everyone else. Aiming for this is pointless.

I'm not sure you agree with yourself.

I'm not sure what your point is. Can you clarify what you're trying to get at here?

I think basically he is saying there is a bit of a dichotomy in stating that communities overestimate their abilities to apply value judgements and then at the same time state that they should only judge people based on their contributions and value to that community.

As much as you might like, you can't really separate some specific technical ideal of "value" or "contribution" from a person's actions on the whole. People are people, and communities are collections of people with human interactions and interpersonal relationships.

I'll also add that the false equivalence between excluding Allan Turning because he was gay vs. excluding people who express homophobic attitudes because they want to exclude people who are gay is just another way of stating "in order to embrace tolerance we must be tolerant of intolerance". Can we all finally accept that for the fallacy that it is?

Within a given group value is reasonably correlated to expertise.

As much as I wouldn't give any time to sociologists valuing Alan Turings genius within mathematics, computer science, etc., I'd have equally little time for mathematicians judging his sexuality.

I'm sure this is too raw, to actually works.

Maybe the app contains subliminal messages to convince you it works.

One wonders which humans you surround yourself with to consider that "basic human behavior".

Trying to maximize earnings is basic human behavior, sorry to break it to you. Welfare scams occur regularly, and that's before UBI.

And you're dodging the bigger question: I'm on UBI and my money runs out, can't afford to feed the kids. Multiply that by at least several thousand people every month. Now what?

How can maximising earnings be basic human behaviour when 'earnings' have only existed for a few thousand years, a tiny fraction of the history of our species?

Food banks exist already, why would UBI change that.

Same as now. You don't get more food stamps just because you ran out.

The difference is it's earmarked money today. There's no potential to spend your food money on a phone and then claim you can't buy food at the end of the month.

Most countries just give cash to people without income, they don't bother with a separate food program. That seems to work fine.

But it is detach from location. People can move if land becomes to expensive, unlike now, where land is tied to jobs.

> where land is tied to jobs.

With additional pressure when both parents work and can't survive with one of them unemployed - they lack the freedom to seek better positions elsewhere because they are limited to both having jobs all the time.

I would appreciate the notes. :)

"A Mind for Numbers" is basically the book version of this course (same author). I found it quite good, and I personally found it faster and easier to learn the concepts in book form than on Coursera.

ambivalents posted above.

https://workflowy.com/s/E9HW.jGUYboLrGj

The British (by coming later) learned from the mistakes of the Spanish (who came first).

I think it was more just a matter of replicating their home country economic model in the New World, and being part of developments towards a market economy that were happening around the world, predominantly in the British sphere of influence.

I learned that the abundance of gold and silver in Latin America prevented any kind of market-based economy evolving around here as colonies. Just slave everyone and make people extract the value from earth. Then came other natural resources with similar approach as sugar cane and coffee.

North America had none of it, so the only way it could provide value to the empire was through commerce and a market-based economy.