ret2plt (u/ret2plt) - Readit News

ret2plt commented on Why is it so hard to be rational? newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/ubuwaits

SMAAART · 4 years ago

Nobody wants to deal with rational people.

Big business want people to buy things they don't need, with money they don't have to impress people they don't like

Politicians want people who will drink the cool-aid and follow what they (the politicians) say (and not what they do)

Religions... well, same.

And so all messages from advertisement, to movies, TV, narrative is about hijacking people's feelings and suppressing rationality. Common sense is no longer common, and doesn't make much sense.

ret2plt · 4 years ago

It's worse than that. The problem is that being truly rational is hard, unpleasant work that few people want to do. If you read an article that makes your political opponents look bad, you can't just feel smugly superior, you have to take into account that you are predisposed to believe convenient sounding things, so you have to put extra effort into checking the truth of that claim. If you follow the evidence instead of tribal consensus, you will probably end up with some beliefs that your friends and relatives wont like, etc.

ret2plt commented on Why is it so hard to be rational? newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/ubuwaits

AndrewKemendo · 4 years ago

I think this misses the point. Even being "less" wrong requires an amount of work that even the best/smartest etc... cannot consistently apply.

I do believe this is zero-sum in that improving on one set of decisions means no applying the same rigor to others.

This is often seen in the form of very smart people also believing conspiracy theories or throwing their hands up around other massive issues. As an example, the "Rationalist crowd" has de-emphasized work on climate change mitigation in favor of more abstract work on AI safety.

ret2plt · 4 years ago

> This is often seen in the form of very smart people also believing conspiracy theories or throwing their hands up around other massive issues. As an example, the "Rationalist crowd" has de-emphasized work on climate change mitigation in favor of more abstract work on AI safety.

To be clear, the argument (in rationalist circles) is not that climate change is no big deal, it's that there's already a ton of people worrying about it, so it is better to allocate some extra resources to underfunded problems.

ret2plt commented on Linux 5.13 Reverts and Fixes the Problematic University of Minnesota Patches phoronix.com/scan.php?pag... · Posted by u/varbhat

mimimi31 · 4 years ago

Why would the Linux Foundation get to decide on if those researchers are allowed to experiment on and waste the time of volunteer developers?

ret2plt · 4 years ago

I think it depends on how you frame it. If the Linux Foundation thinks this kind of research would generate useful information for the kernel project, then the developers' time wouldn't be wasted, just used in a different, yet productive, way. I concede that this is not an easy question, because the developers may have different opinions about the usefulness of this exercise, but at the end of the day, maintainers can run their projects how they see fit.

ret2plt commented on “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose” lore.kernel.org/linux-nfs... · Posted by u/kdbg

kstenerud · 4 years ago

From their explanation:

(3). We send the incorrect minor patches to the Linux community through email to seek their feedback.

(4). Once any maintainer of the community responds to the email, indicating “looks good”, we immediately point out the introduced bug and request them to not go ahead to apply the patch. At the same time, we point out the correct fixing of the bug and provide our proper patch. In all the three cases, maintainers explicitly acknowledged and confirmed to not move forward with the incorrect patches. This way, we ensure that the incorrect patches will not be adopted or committed into the Git tree of Linux.

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But this shows a distinct lack of understanding of the problem:

> This is not ok, it is wasting our time, and we will have to report this,

> AGAIN, to your university...

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You do not experiment on people without their consent. This is in fact the very FIRST point of the Nuremberg code:

1. The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.

ret2plt · 4 years ago

> You do not experiment on people without their consent. This is in fact the very FIRST point of the Nuremberg code:

> 1. The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.

The Nuremberg code is explicitly about medical research, so it doesn't apply here. More generally, I think that the magnitude of the intervention is also relevant, and that an absolutist demand for informed consent in all - including the most trivial - cases is quite silly.

Now, in this specific case I would agree that wasting people's time is an intervention that's big enough to warrant some scrutiny, but the black-and-white way of some people to phrase this really irks me.

PS: I think people in these kinds of debate tend to talk past one another, so let me try to illustrate where I'm coming from with an experiment I came across recently:

To study how the amount of tips waiters get changes in various circumstances, some psychologists conducted an experiment where the waiter would randomly either give the guests some chocolate with the bill, or not (control condition)[0] This is, of course, perfectly innocuous, but an absolutist claim about research ethics ("You do not experiment on people without their consent.") would make research like this impossible without any benefit.

[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/j.1559-1816...

ret2plt commented on “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose” lore.kernel.org/linux-nfs... · Posted by u/kdbg

DetroitThrow · 4 years ago

>Your message would push maintainers to put even more focus on the patches, thus invalidating the experiment.

The Tuskegee Study wouldn't have happened if its participants were voluntarily, and it's effects still haunt the scientific community today. The attitude of "science by any means, including by harming other people" is reprehensible and has lasting consequences for the entire scientific community.

However, unlike the Tuskegee Study, it's totally possible to have done this ethically by contacting the leadership of the Linux project and having them announce to maintainers that anonymous researchers may experiment with the contribution process, and allowing them to opt out if they do not consent, and to ensure that harmful commits never reach stable from these researchers.

The researchers chose to instead lie to the Linux project and introduce vulnerabilities to stable trees, and this is why their research is particularly deplorable - their ethical transgressions and possibly lies made to their IRB were not done out of any necessity for empirical integrity, but rather seemingly out of convenience or recklessness.

And now the next group of researchers will have a harder time as they may be banned and every maintainer now more closely monitors academics investigating open source security :)

ret2plt · 4 years ago

I don't want to defend what these researchers did, but to equate infecting people with syphilis to wasting a bit of someones time is disingenuous. Informed consent is important, but only if the magnitude of the intervention is big enough to warrant reasonable concerns.

ret2plt commented on “They introduce kernel bugs on purpose” lore.kernel.org/linux-nfs... · Posted by u/kdbg

throwawaybbq1 · 4 years ago

This is a good question. You would recruit actual maintainers, [edit: or whoever is your intended subject pool] (who would provide consent, perhaps be compensated for their time). You could then give them a series of patches to approve (some being bug free and others having vulnerabilities).

[edit: specifying the population of a study is pretty important. Getting random students from the University to approve your security patch doesn't make sense. Picking students who successfully completed a computer security course and got a high grade is better than that but again, may not generalize to the real world. One of the most impressive ways I have seen this being done by grad students was a user study by John Ousterhout and others on Paxos vs. Raft. IIRC, they wanted to claim that Raft was more understandable or led to fewer bugs. Their study design was excellent. See here for an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbZ3zDzDnrw&ab_channel=Diego... ]

ret2plt · 4 years ago

This wouldn't really be representative. If people know they are being tested, they will be much more careful and cautious than when they are doing "business as usual".

ret2plt commented on The internet didn’t kill counterculture – you just won’t find it on Instagram documentjournal.com/2021/... · Posted by u/isanengineer

ret2plt · 4 years ago

This is a minor nitpick, but I think claiming that anarcho-primitivism is less fringe than it seems because the youtube channel "Primitive Technology" is popular is seriously reaching.