(I confess I have no idea how to interpret the agree-votes on this.)

Yeah, I was wrong to suggest/assume that the definition is original to you and not the way it's defined in other communities that I just am not familiar with.

It still seems like you're making the core mistake I was trying to point at, which is asserting that a word means something different than what other people mean by it; rather than acknowledging that sometimes words have different meanings in different contexts.

Like, people are talking about what sort of toppings should be on a donut and how large the hole should be, and you're chiming in to say you came around on donuts when you realized that instead of being ring-shaped with toppings they're ball-shaped with fillings. You didn't come around on donuts. You just discovered that even though you don't like ring donuts, you do like filled donuts, a related but different baked good.

I only came around on faith once I realized it was just Latin for trust, and specifically trust in the world to be just as it is.

This really just seems to me like you're asserting that what a word "really means" is some weird new definition that ~no one else means when they say the word.

(I don't know Latin. Nevertheless I am extremely confident that the word "faith" in Latin does not specifically refer to the concept of "trust in the world to be just as it is".)

Also now running as an in-progress youtube short series. (I haven't read the original.)

"It seems a lot of our pills cause vomiting as a side-effect?"

"Yeah, the company knows about it but it's tricky to fix."

"How so? Our competitors don't have this problem, and we make basically the same products, right?"

"Right, no, it's a corporate structure issue."

"?"

"If a pill does too much or too little of something, we have a group of clever people whose job it is to care about that and to reformulate it slightly to improve it. If it doesn't kill enough pain, the analgesic division will step in. If it causes clotting, the anticoagulant folks have a look. If it makes your bones brittle, it'll be the antiosteoporosises. You see? But if it causes vomiting-"

"Right, yeah. There's no one to take ownership of the problem, because-"

"There is no antiemetics division."

Oh, huh. Searle's original Chinese room paper (first eight pages) doesn't say machines can't think.

"OK, but could a digital computer think?"

If by "digital computer" we mean anything at all that has a level of description where it can correctly be described as the instantiation of a computer program, then again the answer is, of course, yes, since we are the instantiations of any number of computer programs, and we can think.

"But could something think, understand, and so on solely in virtue of being a computer with the right sort of program? Could instantiating a program, the right program of course, by itself be a sufficient condition of understanding?"

This I think is the right question to ask, though it is usually confused with one or more of the earlier questions, and the answer to it is no.

"Why not?"

Because the formal symbol manipulations by themselves don't have any intentionality; they are quite meaningless; they aren't even symbol manipulations, since the symbols don't symbolize anything. In the linguistic jargon, they have only a syntax but no semantics. Such intentionality as computers appear to have is solely in the minds of those who program them and those who use them, those who send in the input and those who interpret the output.

I can't say I really understand what he's trying to say, but it's different from what I thought it was.

Yeah. It's still possible to program in such a way that that works, and it's always been possible to program in such a way that it doesn't work. But prepared statements make it easier to program in such a way that it doesn't work, by allowing the programmer to pass executable code (which is probably directly embedded as a literal in their application language) separately from the parameters (which may be user-supplied).

(I could imagine a SQL implementation forbidding all strings directly embedded in queries, and requiring them to be passed through prepared statements or a similar mechanism. That still wouldn't make these attacks outright impossible, but it would be an added layer of security.)

A large majority of empirical evidence reported in leading economics journals is potentially misleading. Results reported to be statistically significant are about as likely to be misleading as not (falsely positive) and statistically nonsignificant results are much more likely to be misleading (falsely negative). We also compare observational to experimental research and find that the quality of experimental economic evidence is notably higher.

I'm confused by this "falsely negative". Like, without that, that part sounds like it's saying something like

when a result is reported as "we observed a small effect here, but it wasn't statistically significant", then more often than not, there's no real effect there

but that's a false positive. If they're saying it's a false negative, it suggests something like

when a result is reported as statistically insignificant, that makes it sound like there's no effect there, but more often than not there actually is an effect

...but that's (a) not a natural reading of that part and (b) surely not true.

Were SQL a better language this wouldn’t be possible, all the command strings would separated somehow

SQL does support prepared statements which forbid injection. Maybe you're thinking of something stronger than this? I'm not sure how long they've been around for, but wikipedia's list of SQL injection examples only has two since 2015 which hints that SQL injection is much less common than it used to be.

(Pedantic clarification: dunno if this is in any SQL standard, but it looks like every SQL implementation I can think of supports them.)

Planet Money #902 (28 Mar 2019): The Phoebus Cartel

Listened to this one a few weeks ago and don't remember most of it. But half the episode was about the phoebus cartel, a case of planned obsolesence when lightbulb manufacturers decided that no light bulb should be allowed to last more than 1000 hours.

Writing this for Gell-Mann amnesia reasons: in the episode someone says there was no benefit to consumers from this, but I'd recently seen a technology connections episode on the subject saying that longer lasting incandescent light bulbs are less energy efficient (i.e. more heat less light) for physics reasons, to the extent that they could easily be more expensive over their lifetime. Seems like an important caveat that PM missed!

The other half was about psychological obsolesence, where manufacturers make long-lasting goods like cars cosmetically different to convince you you need a new one.