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Your first paragraph adequately summarizes the sequel to this book as well.
In response to
Are Functional languages the future of programming?
I see there are some functional programming buffs here, so I have a question. These functional programs, as pretty as they are, must be compiled into plain old machine code to actually run. Are these compilers really so smart that they can translate pretty idiomatic functional code into high-performing binaries? Or do you have to use ugly techniques based on intimate knowledge of the compiler/interpreter to squeeze out some decent performance out of these languages?
In the end, every programming language, no matter how pure and pretty, gets turns into a bunch of loads, stores, and gotos...
I find that there's a lot of good techniques to be learned from FP, but the supposed mathematical purity of it kind of bores me.
(http://docs.python.org/py3k/howto/functional.html) has some nice tricks in Python.
In response to
Open Thread, April 2011
I used to have a hobby of reading Christian apologetics to get a better understanding of how the other side lives. I got some useful insights from this, e.g. Donald Miler's Blue Like Jazz was eye-opening for me in that it helped me understand better the psychology of religious faith. However, most books were a slog and I eventually found more entertaining uses for my time.
Today I saw that a workmate of mine was reading Lee Strobel's The Case For Faith earlier. My policy is to not discuss politics or religion at work, so I didn't bring it up there.
I hadn't read that particular book before, so I was curious about its arguments. Reading over the summary, I remembered again why I quit reading Christian apologetics - they are really boring.
The subtitle of The Case Against Faith is A Journalist Investigates the Toughest Objections to Christianity, and is quite untrue. I can almost dismiss each chapter in the time it takes to yawn. Even if Strobel had good answers to the Problem of Evil, or proved that religious people historically have been less violent than non-religious people, or somehow found a gap in current understanding of evolution, he would still be leagues away from providing evidence for a god, let alone his particular god.
I remember being similarly bored by a Christian-turned-Atheist's book John Loftus' Why I Became an Atheist. A common criticism of atheist writers is that they don't engage the more sophisticated arguments of theists. This book illustrates why - the sophisticated arguments are stupid. Loftus accepts Christian scholars' ideas, arguing within spaces previously occupied by dancing angels (e.g. he says on p.371 "In a well-argued chapter... Lowder has defended the idea that Jesus' body was hastily buried before the Sabbath day... but that it was relocated on the Sabbath Day to the public graveyard of the condemned...").
Most of us here would probably lose a live debate in front of an audience against someone like Lee Strobel. Even so, it's a little disappointing to me that even the most skilled theist debater's signature attack relies on bits like "This first cause must also be personal because there are only two accepted types of explanations, personal and scientific, and this can't be a scientific explanation." Because winning the debate by refuting that would be a waste of intellect.
In response to
Link: "Health Care Myth Busters: Is There a High Degree of Scientific Certainty in Modern Medicine?"
Would a patient thus do better to research his or her symptoms online before going to the doctor's office, and then insisting on the treatment provided?
If so is there a good place to do this research? Are there good websites that are usually informed with up-to-date research on a variety of topics? I haven't had a health issue that's needed such research in recent memory, but if I did I would probably type my symptoms into Google alongside technical sounding words like "incidence," "epidemiology," and "differential diagnosis."
By default no one does work unless someone explicitly tells them to.
I suspect that this is largely cultural; a response based on expectations, examples and training.
I think Eliezer's point is that it could be evolutionary and not cultural.
The interesting thing is that you can become a leader by just telling people to do stuff, and then they comply.
In response to
Are You a Paralyzed Subordinate Monkey?
I am occasionally appalled by just how easy it is to get people to do things just by telling them to. It took me until about my mid-twenties to realise there might be other useful modes of interaction.
When I was getting ready to graduate from high school, I started applying for scholarships from different organizations and to universities. A large fraction of the applications had a section like "Write an essay on why you want to exercise leadership."
At the time I concluded that "leadership" was a new buzzword that everyone had to make some reference to in order to qualify for anything. I dutifully wrote some meaningless essays about leadership. Then when I went to school and heard more and more about leadership,the more I thought my buzzword analysis was correct.
Then I got into the corporate world. Oh my goodness. Now I understand what all the fuss was about. By default no one does work unless someone explicitly tells them to.
In response to
Research methods
A few thoughts:
- I am continually amazed at the amount of data that should be put and manipulated in a proper database that's mucked about in spreadsheets instead.
- Gene Callahan at ThinkMarkets recently had a post on how health care is especially bad when it comes to technology.
- Eric Falkenstein says there are a lot of "skilled" jobs that could be replaced by computers too.
I agree in some sense, but disagree in another. I am fast at Excel. I don't need to use to mouse, look at the menus, or pause to find anything I'm looking for, because I've internalized the keyboard shortcuts and created quick macros for the things I need to do. People get a little flustered when they see me work in Excel because it looks like it's magically doing stuff, but it just comes from lots and lots of repetition.
Contrast this with a proper database, where I need to figure out some way to load the data in, make sure my query accounts for every place there might be a null value, then make some change that might break my previous queries if I need to add or change a column or something. And then if I need to take a slice of data and present it, I have to load it into Excel anyway.
For very large datasets with fairly static requirements, I use a database as is proper. But for anything less than 100K rows, give me a spreadsheet any day.
How many have you solved so far? I just got to level one the other day.
I started last June and am at 196 solved currently.
I've replaced almost all my casual reading with research into algorithms and math
Where did you start? Did you have a vague idea of algorithms before? If you began with introductory texts which ones would you recommend? Did you know any other programming languages before you started on Python? Could one get a job based solely on knowing Python to your level, do you think?
I'd had a "Computer science for electrical engineers" course in school, which discussed data structures and algorithms from a high level (the usual sorting algorithm discussion, implementing a linked list, that kind of thing), but nothing too in-depth. I've had various experience in programming before PE.
In solving PE problems I've mostly used Wikipedia and Mathworld for research, and sometimes I'll Google for lecture notes on a relevant topic.
I've used the Python skills I've picked up from PE in my job already. I think I could function in a more programming-oriented job now, though solving math problems doesn't give you much help in hooking into existing APIs or writing web services, which are probably pretty important.
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I asked Leah about participating in her test. I think I will find it challenging the emulate a Christian's viewpoint, instead of mocking it.
That is, normally when I've examined Christian thought, I've approached it from the pretense "let me see where this fails."
I'm interested to see if I can construct an argument that I myself as an atheist would find at least superficially compelling - that is, I want to avoid doing what pretty much every popular Christianity book does.