Is there not a way to shield combat drones from EMP weapons? I wouldn't be surprised if they are already doing that.

When killer robots are outlawed, only rogue nations will have massive drone armies.

An ideal outcome here would be if counter-drones have an advantage over drones, but it's hard to see how this could obtain when counter-counter-drones should be in a symmetrical position over counter-drones. A second-best outcome would be no asymmetrical advantage of guerilla drone warfare, where the wealthiest nation clearly wins via numerical drone superiority combined with excellent enemy drone detection.

...you know, at some point the U.S. military is going to pay someone $10 million to conclude what I just wrote and they're going to get it half-wrong. Sigh.

From off site:

Energy and Focus is more scarce than Time (at least for me), Be Specific (somewhat on site, but whatever),

From on the site:

Mind Projection Fallacy, Illusion of Transparency, Trivial Inconveniences, Goals vs. Roles,

Beware using status as a universal explanation.

As a result, working on something "outside of your league" will often sound to a person like you're claiming more status than they would necessarily give you.

Are you sure? How can you easily tell that something is out of someones league? I can imagine that if you talk to someone at a party it is more impressive to say that you work in rocket surgery than it is to say that you work as a carpenter. Even though you might be lousy at the first and great at the second.

I entirely agree with this point, but suspect that actually following this advice would make people uncomfortable.

Since different occupations/goals have some amount of status associated with them (nonprofits, skilled trades, professions) many people seem to take statements about what you're working on to be status claims in addition to their denotational content.

As a result, working on something "outside of your league" will often sound to a person like you're claiming more status than they would necessarily give you.

I think a core problem is the way scientists cite papers. There no real reason why one should always cite the first paper that makes a given claim.

You could change that habit and instead cite the paper that does the first replication.

If I were in London, or even within an hour or two of it, I would try to go to this.

"May your plans come to fruition"

I used to say that more when leaving megameetups or going on a trip or something. It has the disadvantage that you can't say it very fast.

I also want a word/phrase that expresses sympathy but isn't "sorry".

In my last post, when discussing some research by Singer et al (2006), I mentioned as an aside that their use of fMRI data didn’t seem to add a whole lot to their experiment. Yes, they found that brain regions associated with empathy appear to be less active in men watching a confederate who behaved unfairly towards them receive pain; they also found that areas associated with reward seemed slightly more active. Neat; but what did that add beyond what a pencil and paper or behavioral measure might?

It means you don't have to rely on the honesty of their self reporting, which is pretty important since human self-analysis is frankly pretty shitty, and it doesn't take much to persuade them to lie.

To use an example from this book which I recently finished reading, one experiment tested whether people who were allowed to electronically view an art display rated paintings higher when they had marks showing they were owned by a gallery which they were told had sponsored their viewing experience. They did, and they disavowed the sponsorship having anything to do with their ratings. The researchers could have concluded from this that the subjects viewed the paintings more favorably out of an unconscious sense of reciprocity, but that would have been pretty lousy science, because they could easily have been lying and acting on conscious reciprocity and then denying it, as social niceties demand that they do. They did the experiment with brain scans and confirmed that the subjects' pleasure centers showed more activity for the paintings associated with the sponsor gallery. Had they not, we could infer that they were acting out of conscious reciprocity.

Another route might be to suggest that our knowledge of what areas of the brain are associated with empathy and pleasure is somehow off: maybe increased activation means less empathy, or maybe empathy is processed elsewhere in the brain, or some other cognitive process is interfering. Hell; maybe it’s possible that the technology employed by fMRIs just isn’t sensitive to what you’re trying to look at. Though the brain scan might have highlighted our ignorance as to how the brain is working in that case, it didn’t help us to resolve it.

Knowing that your model has flaws is a necessary step to correcting it. If a research tool gives you information you wouldn't otherwise have had, it's done you a valuable service, even if it doesn't by itself provide sufficient information to build you a new model.

A whole lot of psychology's poor reputation as a field relative to harder sciences like physics or chemistry comes from overinterpretation of open-ended results like surveys or behavioral studies, where the observations could be explained under multiple models. Brain scanning and other neuroscientific research options provide a useful mechanism for distinguishing between models and helping to avoid that half-assed state.

If we stalled physics research when we reached a point where we couldn't distinguish between hypotheses easily and cheaply, we wouldn't know that much about physics today.