field: A particular field is a particular subject of study or type of activity.
So the authors are using 'field' to mean area of study which has standard usage in English I think so probably didn't need to be explained further.
When the authors wrote:
"Nonetheless we think cataloguing these risks is important if we’re going to be serious about having an impact in important but ‘fragile’ fields like reducing extinction risk."
They are talking about 'reducing extinction risk' being a field of study. And the risks of doing damage to a that new field with early research.
'risk X' is a risk, and 'reducing risk X' is a field.
There is the (meta-)risk that you harm a field (the 'harming field Y' risk).
They're studying that (meta-)risk here, in an attempt to reduce it. The article is thus squarely in the 'reducing risk Z (of harming field Y (of reducing risk X)))' field.
Your misunderstanding of it poses certain risks, that this comment attempts to reduce, with a concomitant risk of failure, but that gets a bit complicated.
Was halfway through an almost identical reply when you posted this haha (also enjoyed Sapiens!).
I think the level of absorption is as high if not higher than reading but I have been wondering if it 'counts' (and wondering what I mean by that).
With audiobooks we're not practicing the physical scanning of words (assuming that's a skill which can deteriorate) and difficult sentences are definitely easier to follow when stressed by a good voice actor. That said I think we're still picking up vocabulary, empathizing and learning which feel like the biggest wins of reading a variety of books.
That doesn’t mean that their ideas weren’t generated by a deterministic machine inside their skulls. GGP doesn’t explain why he thinks these individuals had free will and the rest of us don’t. Seems to me even in “random” yet deterministic systems, you’ll still get “anomalous” behavior that others within the system catagorize as “somehow different” - still doesn’t mean their will is freer than others’.
Yeah absolutely. I don't agree with his 'examples', but I'll defend to the death his right to use them in the same breath. It seems absurd to claim a handful of humans to have free will and others not, not really sure what that would even mean.
In Buddhism there is a notion that the human conscious experience is a largely automatic state of "waking sleep" where the individual navigates life reactively, subject to the karmic law of "cause and effect". (Determinism)
The metaphor of "waking up" is about practicing a present state of mind, such that one recognizes how they are living life with about the same amount of awareness as a dream, with the aim to cultivate the same agency of a lucid dream in waking life. (Free Will)
A Gnostic reading of the New Testament reveals a similar allegorical prescription to awakening in Jesus' teachings, whereby adherents strive to attain "Christ Consciousness" and achieve liberation.
Many contemplative traditions hold that human suffering is caused by our baseline instinctual unconscious tendencies (a feedback loop from hell), and that it takes sustained practice to become present enough to "take the car off autopilot" permanently.
A cursory survey of the brutishness of human history is a testament to how rare this mental state is, and explains the high regard by those who attempt to emulate the characters (historical or fictional) claimed to have mastered it.
I'm no fan of May and this is probably giving her too much credit (and oversimplifying) but is it possible she's nailing this?
Her "Brexit means brexit" and "No deal is better than a bad deal" rhetoric has kept the hardline Brexiteer tories from throwing her overboard. But maybe after a 'long, hard fight' she gives a theatrical sigh and accepts the Norway deal. Everyone gives a resigned shrug and we don't have country-wide riots.
As I said in another post here, since people who voted Leave had different ideas of what they meant by Leave, there is no possible way to do this that will satisfy even the majority of people. A compromise that leaves most people feeling not too dis-satisfied may be the best possible outcome.
But let's say the 48% that voted to remain in the EU had grown to say 55% that didn't like the sound of the Brexit deal being hashed out and would prefer the status quo. Would it be reasonable for our politicians to try and use the levers of government to reverse course to represent the new will of the people?
At the end of the day I don't think the public were qualified to answer the question as it was posed. There were too many unknowns and too much false information. We elect people to represent us because we believe they are qualified to do so.
There's a reason we'd never see this in a referendum:
What should the income tax rate be for UK citizens?
[ ] 0%
[ ] 10%
[ ] 20%
[ ] 40%
> But let's say the 48% that voted to remain in the EU had grown to say 55% that didn't like the sound of the Brexit deal being hashed out and would prefer the status quo. Would it be reasonable for our politicians to try and use the levers of government to reverse course to represent the new will of the people?
You can't keep asking the people until they give the answer you want and then seize on that. Holding another referendum after say 10 years have passed seems reasonable.
> At the end of the day I don't think the public were qualified to answer the question as it was posed. There were too many unknowns and too much false information. We elect people to represent us because we believe they are qualified to do so.
I agree. But, Cameron having chosen to hold the referendum, his party is duty-bound to implement its results.
> And what are the results? To leave with no deal?
To leave the European Union one way or another, since that was the question they asked and the answer they got. With whatever deal they believe best for the country and its people, which may or may not end up being no deal.
> In any case it is NOT legally bound. But it acts as it was.
The government's legal obligations come from its duty to the people, not the other way around.
Until the 1973 Northern Ireland referendum they generally were seen as unconstitutional throughout our history. Thatcher famously agreed with Atlee that referenda were a device of dictators and demagogues[0].
There is nothing to prevent any government, or any future government going against a referendum result. Parliamentary sovereignty means no restriction can be placed on any future administration changing the law.
Again, though, the law is a formalisation - an abstraction, a simplification - of people's relationships and behaviours. The Queen signs the laws written by the people's representatives not because she's legally obliged to but because she realises that it's her duty as head of state on a level far more fundamental than the written code of laws (and, ultimately, because if she didn't we'd have a second civil war).
I think the analogy may still be useful/interesting. It's just that with financial debt you have borrowed money, with technical debt you have borrowed time. Financial debt reduces the efficiency of future available money (interest payments), technical debt reduces the efficiency of future dev time.
I agree with your point that technical debt is a lot harder to identify, the way to pay some of it off may not be obvious and taking on that debt is not usually a conscious decision.
Sometimes you'll cut a corner to get a prototype done or hit an important deadline and there it seems more of a clear trade off, time now for pain later. But, as you say, the creeping (and inevitable?) technical debt of aging projects is less obvious. More like maintenance costs for assets and investment in rust proofing?
An individual engineer can know whether this cut corner is nicety, something with mild impact or something that will stand in away. CTO does not and should not make these low level decisions. Managing fuzzy information is the key to managing technical debt.
Not all technical debt is result of time pressure. A lot of it is lack of knowledge/experience (doing something new), organizational mess, maverick coder, competing visions among coders over architecture, confident senior with influence that is forcing others to produce bad code, demotivated coders, incentives etc etc.
Deciding whether this specific cut corner is not so much CTO job, big picture is CTO job.
So the authors are using 'field' to mean area of study which has standard usage in English I think so probably didn't need to be explained further.
When the authors wrote: "Nonetheless we think cataloguing these risks is important if we’re going to be serious about having an impact in important but ‘fragile’ fields like reducing extinction risk."
They are talking about 'reducing extinction risk' being a field of study. And the risks of doing damage to a that new field with early research.