A few weeks ago, I wrote about a paper on online toxicity by @henryfarrell & Cosma Shalizi. Henry had the wonderful generosity to respond and point out where I misunderstood the article.
In this post, I respond with clarifications on the idea of toxicity and the use of models.
I also reflect on the value of having a thoughtful, considered disagreement in public online — something that seems to have largely disappeared from my circles.
https://natematias.medium.com/disagreements-fast-and-slow-d0bc49ac9c3f
Disagreements, Fast And Slow - J. Nathan Matias - Medium
A few weeks ago, I critiqued an article that tried to explain online toxicity. I’m delighted to share that Henry Farrell, one of the article’s authors, has published a post explaining where I’m…
Can someone turn the obscure and cryptic links in my family WhatsApp into a customized narrative that my wife and kids would be slightly more likely to read?
Had enough problems with changing esims and Apple messages that I am trying to migrate my family to a whatsapp community. But I don’t get them yet.
This is so nice to see from Jim Simons. SUNY Stony Brook's honors program and excellent CS/engineering school helped me get a high quality but, possibly more importantly, affordable education.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/01/nyregion/stony-brook-university-gift.html
Stony Brook University Gets $500 Million Gift From Simons Foundation
Gifts of that size are rare for universities. They’re even rarer for a public institution like Stony Brook, part of New York’s state university system.
Exponential growth is so magical (and rare). And the math behind it is weird. One example: the first derivative of y^x is some constant (ln of y) multiplied by... y^x!
The imposter syndrome is very real!
“The military, though, had a self-defeating mechanism built in when it came to moving fast and cheap in space. Going back to the 1960s, the ethos of both NASA and the military had been that every rocket and every satellite had to work and they would pay whatever it cost to ensure that happened. When something did go wrong, people were blamed, new codes and regulations were written, and more procedures were put into place to guarantee that the same mistake would never occur again.”
“The revolution in space that seemed to come out of nowhere had been decades in the making. It had been shepherded along by a genius general who had a tremendous talent for pissing everyone off.”
Not just true of the space industry! “I’ve come, then, to view this current incarnation of the space industry as being powered by a type of shared hallucination. If you ask people during quiet moments if all the rockets and satellites make sense or if their businesses will one day turn a profit, they will sometimes confess that no one really knows if any of this shit will work.”
“From 2020 to 2022, something astonishing happened: the number of satellites doubled to 5,000. Over the next decade, that figure is set to increase to somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 satellites, depending on whose business plans you believe. (It’s perhaps best to take a moment and let those figures rattle around in your brain a bit.) A handful of companies and countries, including SpaceX and Amazon, want to put up tens of thousands of satellites to create space-based internet systems.”
J. Nathan Matias 🦣
Renee DiResta