pierrebai (u/pierrebai)

pierrebai commented on Rossi's Revenge thecausalfallacy.com/p/ro... · Posted by u/exolymph

pierrebai · 4 months ago

Strawman detection activated.

The goal of giving money is not to make those who receive it more educated, better parents or making them politically active. I mean, why did I have to say that?

(The amount of money is also unlikely to enbale to make savings for the future.)

The goal is that their immediate poverty decreases. Why is the author insistent on the measurement of unrelated stats? Because he has an ax to grind.

pierrebai commented on Without the futex, it's futile h4x0r.org/futex/... · Posted by u/eatonphil

jesse__ · 4 months ago

This is exactly the issue, and unordered_map exemplifies it perfectly.

On paper, unordered_map sounds great. It lists all the admirable properties you would theoretically want in a hashtable. Then in practice when you go to implement it, you realize that you've painted yourself into a garbage fire, as the saying goes.

I suppose this is a failing of the design by committee method, where the committee isn't directly responsible for implementation either before or during standard writing.

pierrebai · 4 months ago

OTOH, 99% of use cases don't care about performance and just want a portable implementation.

While it could be useful to have a "fast" variation that offers no guarantee at all, what you would end up with (because people are vain) is that too may people would use those instead "because perf", even though the actual usage is not performance critical, and have code that breaks whenever the compiler or platform changes.

pierrebai commented on Show HN: Jumping Julia Maze jumpingjuliamaze.onrender... · Posted by u/thathoo

pierrebai · a year ago

Knowing that a typical maze will have branching paths at the beginning, but necessarily one good path at the end, I find it easier to start from the goal and work my way backward.

pierrebai commented on Saturated fat: the making and unmaking of a scientific consensus (2022) journals.lww.com/co-endoc... · Posted by u/mgh2

KempyKolibri · a year ago

A null finding in a study does not mean it “doesn’t matter”. Let’s take an extreme example: we want to know if exercise reduces mortality, so we randomise one arm of a cohort of 20 people to an exercise regime, while the other arm does nothing. After four weeks, we compare the death rate in each group. There’s no significant difference.

Does this mean exercise “doesn’t matter” for mortality, or it’s in the “doesn’t affect category”? No, of course not - the finding was null because the timescale was too short and even then, the statistical power from a cohort of 20 is going to be very low.

Likewise, if you look at the study characteristics, most of the studies were too short to find a significant outcome on an insensitive endpoint like CVD mortality or ACM. FWIW, Dayton 1967 had a followup of 8 years and did find significant increases in mortality endpoints in the SFA group, but those results are pulled towards null in the meta summation by the other, shorter studies.

CVD events are more sensitive because they don’t require the participants to die of a heart attack in order to register as a data point.

So no, there’s no lying or cherry picking going on here. In order for that to be the case, you’d have to argue that angina and non-fatal heart attacks are not negative health outcomes. If they are, then it’s demonstrably the case that SFA consumption is associated with negative health outcomes, and Nina is telling porkies.

As for your accusation that I’m lying - what false claim did I make? Be specific.

pierrebai · a year ago

But your example is not reflective of the study. Are you saying that the 17% reduction is for some reason significant but the other ones, all of which would inconveniently disagree with the result you want, are not, even though they are in the same study?

IOW, you're saying that among the study results, all that agree with your POV are valid, all that don't are invalid. That's quite some bias there.

pierrebai commented on Saturated fat: the making and unmaking of a scientific consensus (2022) journals.lww.com/co-endoc... · Posted by u/mgh2

Aurornis · a year ago

> This is a serious problem. How can we trust institutions that are suppose to provide evidence based advice to the general public?

The only serious problem here is that some people immediately trust a random article from someone who denies mainstream science simply because it’s a contrarian take.

I don’t understand the people who will question everything that comes from professionals and institutions, but within minutes of reading an article that is contrarian they think “Yep this all checks out and I have no further questions”. To see it happening in real time in this thread is wild.

pierrebai · a year ago

Well, we read the article, which cites many studies. Maybe she is doing a super selective review of the field, but she does not merely quote one study, but several, all of which indicate that there is no correlation between saturated fat and cardiovascular problems.

IOW, we did not merely "read and trusted one random article" but assessed the presented evidence. You OTOH, merely provided ad-hominem attack on both the author and anyone who dared believe the presented evidence, which smacks of trying to shame people in not voicing their opinion.

pierrebai commented on Advice on Reading Homer in Translation talesoftimesforgotten.com... · Posted by u/Khaine

loughnane · a year ago

I like what Alfred North Whitehead said about translation in "The Place of Classics in Education". Punchline is at the end.

...

I have often noticed that, if in an assembly of great scholars the topic of translations be introduced, they function as to their emotions and sentiments in exactly the same way as do decent people in the presence of a nasty sex-problem. A mathematician has no scholastic respectability to lose, so I will face the question.

It follows from the whole line of thought which I have been developing, that an exact appreciation of the meanings of Latin words, of the ways in which ideas are connected in grammatical constructions, and of the whole hang of a Latin sentence with its distribution of emphasis, forms the very backbone of the merits which I ascribe to the study of Latin. Accordingly any woolly vagueness of teaching, slurring over the niceties of language defeats the whole ideal which I have set before you. The use of a translation to enable the pupils to get away from the Latin as quickly as possible, or to avoid the stretch of mind in grappling with construction, is erroneous. Exactness, definiteness, and independent power of analysis are among the main prizes of the whole study.

But we are still confronted with the inexorable problem of pace, and with the short four or five years of the whole course. Every poem is meant to be read within certain limits of time. The contrasts, and the images, and the transition of moods must correspond with the sway of rhythms in the human spirit. These have their periods, which refuse to be stretched beyond certain limits. You may take the noblest poetry in the world, and, if you stumble through it at snail’s pace, it collapses from a work of art into a rubbish heap. Think of the child’s mind as he pores over his work: he reads “‘as when,” then follows a pause with a reference to the dictionary, then he goes on-‘“an eagle,” then another reference to the dictionary, followed by a period of wonderment over the construction, and so on, and so on. Is that going to help him to the vision of Rome? Surely, surely, common sense dictates that you procure the best literary translation you can, the one which best preserves the charm and vigour of the original, and that you read it aloud at the right pace, and append such comments as will elucidate the comprehension. The attack on the Latin will then be fortified by the sense that it enshrines a living work of art.

But someone objects that a translation is woefully inferior to the original. Of course it is, that is why the boy has to master the Latin original. When the original has been mastered, it can be given its proper pace. I plead for an initial sense of the unity of the whole, to be given by a translation at the right pace, and for a final appreciation of the full value of the whole to be given by the original at the right pace.

pierrebai · a year ago

Ah, the old "if you do not spent your time, effort an interest where I have chosen to spend them, then you are an inferior human being to me."

Everyone judges people who do less about subject X, Y, Z to be criminal, lazy slob, and everyone doing more to be inflexible annoying zealots.

Woe those who are not me and do things differently, for they are worthless.

pierrebai commented on How the Hourglass Won systemsapproach.org/2024/... · Posted by u/zdw

pierrebai · a year ago

Isn't this whole description a lie, both ways?

You can embed/tunnel any network transport into another. There is nothing magical about the internet and IP. It is actually being tunneled when you're using a cable modem. WiFi is a horrible hack that encapsulate IP in a very ugly way to make it onto it's wireless tech.

You could have tunnel ATM over IP, I'm pretty sure of it. The depiction seems to me like a flattering extolment of IP.

pierrebai commented on Crafting formulas: Lambdas all the way down text.marvinborner.de/2024... · Posted by u/marvinborner

mrkeen · a year ago

I suspect it's to exclude a denominator of 0.

pierrebai · a year ago

No, since they use an integer (Z) as the denominator. So their representation support having -1 (i.e 0) as the denominator.

pierrebai commented on Crafting formulas: Lambdas all the way down text.marvinborner.de/2024... · Posted by u/marvinborner

pierrebai · a year ago

I wonder why they chose to represent rationals with subtracting one from the denominator. It makes human parsing of the value harder and in many case makes the implementation code slighter harder; for example the equality op need to increment both denominators before using them. I suspect such increment must be constantly be needed left and right?

pierrebai commented on Types as Interfaces two-wrongs.com/types-as-i... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

pierrebai · a year ago

Some of the ideas in the blog must be speculative, given that it fell through a wormhole, being published September 17, 2024.