Sarah Constantin

> Maybe this little post will whet someone else’s appetite to looking closer at PURL as a web infrastructure. I think it also is a great example of how exposed pipes are useful when building applications that are meant to be infrastructure.

I come away with the opposite reaction: exposed "pipes", in this instance, are undesirable. Their being exposed raw probably contributes to the kind of problem that PURLs were created to cure.

URLs are document identifiers foremost—that's what they're supposed to be. Too often, though, they reflect instead the organizational scheme of the current content hierarchy (apt to change at someone's whim sometime in the future) or expose details of the underlying tech stack. You see this in blogs a lot. Take this post, for example. This document's identifier is <https://inkdroid.org/2021/12/16/purl/>. It could just as easily be <https://inkdroid.org/blog/2021/12/16/purl/> or <https://blog.inkdroid.org/2021/12/16/purl/>, and at some point in the future, after a tech migration, it very well might be. This is a problem. I've seen companies submit blog posts to HN, and then just a month or two later switch something up in their publishing pipeline, so now the link at the top of the discussion doesn't resolve anymore. Nobody seems to care about this. In a concrete example I recall, I reached out to someone involved to say that their link is returning a 404, and the response was basically, "Yep. It is. We switched things up," and not, "Oh…

I want to emphasize that I said "making it so that nobody can take Algebra 'early'", i.e. California education bureaucrats are in the process, moving in that direction. They have not succeeded or completed the process. (In retrospect, I wish I had said "far fewer" rather than "nobody", as I cannot read their minds to determine if they are against anyone in California taking Algebra before 9th grade. However, the possible slight exaggeration does not affect the substance of the claim.)

I insist upon the precise nature of my claim because its precision is what makes it correct. So many in these comments imply that the changes proposed in the California Mathematics Framework (CMF) are hopelessly "complex" and impossible to understand for the layman, and so therefore we should trust the experts and not attempt to make any factual statement whatsoever about what is in the CMF. This is encouraged by the CMF itself, which is 800 pages long and does everything in its power to deny that it is anything in particular, merely generally wonderful [1]. This is smokescreening, obscurantism, credentialism, and most of all elitism. I do not accept it. It is absurd and anti-citizen democracy to insinuate that ordinary citizens are incompetent to understand and opine on math curricula.

All that said, please read this, and links therein: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=6146

Select passages follow. Again, please follow the links in the original for details:

> ...the CMF encourages schools to…

Its very hard to say as no one can really predict when a research drought will come unless you actually do the research. Though I must say that most of the ML researchers I've come across aren't directly concerned with AGI. (either they outright dont care, or they think its a step by step thing) If AI winter comes it's probably because of disappointment of progress due to misunderstanding/misalignment with the general public / rich investors, so now you know who to blame.

The state of cognitive science right now is basically a bunch of scientists saying: "yeah to be honest I have no idea really how the mind does this, but if you ignore the edge cases then this model I have here works pretty well". But it also seems to be that those edge cases are where human cognition truly shines. (ex. naturalized categorization, metaphor in language, novel problem solving) There is some progress, but at this stage its unclear how to import the philosophical discussions to an actual theory.

I'll add that it's very easy to be an "amateur cognitive scientist" because you just need some self-awareness to be able to construct some folk theory of the mind that works most of the time. But a model that "kinda works" isn't going to cut it for AGI because eventually as you push it down the line further your misalignment will get worse and worse. AGI would probably need some massive conceptual breakthrough in cognitive science and not in computational methods (though they are obviously…

Dude, if you'd just asked me a more specific question, you could surely have baited me into commenting on this or that culture war issue. Since you asked a general question, though, I'll simply answer with the generality that I wish we could all make more of an effort to show empathy for each other's problems, and (as I said on the podcast) carefully articulate where we agree and disagree with each other rather than just flinging 140-character excrement.

OK, I'll also give you a few links. Here's my Quora answer about what it felt like to be widely attacked on social media, for trying to host a conversation about gender and teenage nerdery that got past platitudes to the roots of people's feelings:

https://www.quora.com/What-was-it-like-for-you-to-be-widely-attacked-online

Second, here's my friend Sarah Constantin's blog post about the changing nature of social media, the one I mentioned in the podcast:

https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2016/11/27/hiding-in-plain-sight/

Third, here's a recent post called "On Culture War Bubbles," from the blog "Thing of Things":

https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2018/06/27/on-culture-war-bubbles/

This is much easier said than done, but as Ozy writes in that post, may we all be granted the mental strength to ignore culture war bullshit, until and unless we decide with the rational parts of our brains that it's important or worth responding to.

Bagel Health (YC W19)
First employee (Full-stack engineer)
Decent cash salary plus first-employee equity (standard vesting)
REMOTE

Work at a YC startup trying to fix healthcare! Or at least improve a small part of it.

Bagel is a new electronic health record for the growing number of doctors that don't accept insurance, particularly direct primary care (DPC) docs. DPC is trying to cut insurance out of primary care. It makes no sense to use insurance to pay for basic or routine medical services; do you use your car insurance to pay for an oil change? There are some seriously great knock-on benefits of getting rid of insurance too. Here's a good rundown: https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2018/09/25/direct-primary-care/

We're still in the early design phase, and we'll be starting implementation soon. We'll hit the ground running; I'd like to get a usable version out within three months.

Here's the tentative stack: Typescript, React, Apollo Client, backend on Google Cloud (App Engine, probably), GraphQL, Postgres (+ Sequelize or similar). Ideally you'd be awesome at a few of these and competent in the rest.

I'm Colin McDonnell, MIT EECS 2016, the sole founder of Bagel, and all-around nice person. If you're interested in working together, email me at colin(at)bagel(dot)md with a resume and a bit about you and why you're interested! Cheers.

College admissions discussion is as good a time as any to emphasize the algorithmic vs. reflective intelligence distinction, via Stanovich. SATs, grades in high school, and the rest of the college admissions stuff filters very heavily on algorithmic intelligence ("understand the rules and be willing and able to play by them perfectly") and more-or-less not at all on reflective intelligence.

Engineering is also mostly about algorithmic intelligence, which makes the dropouts succeeding in tech thing a little ironic, though success in business (particularly not old entrenched business) is probably more reflective intelligence-loaded. My favorite overview of the subject is https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/do-rationalists-exist/