"Even if face recognition can match a face with 99% accuracy, the sheer amount of faces available in police databases makes false positives inevitable. (The 1% error rate means that, if 10,000 people who are not wanted by the police undergo face recognition, 100 will be flagged as wanted)."
The author is not being fair.
Usually with technologies like these, developers will not aim for an accuracy of 99%, but a precision of 99% (that is what we do with Congestion Charging in London, where the ramifications of FPs are much lower [I work in Transport for London]). That means that for 10,000,000 people undergoing facial recognition, only 100 may be flagged as wanted, and only 1 will be a false positive. If we were talking about 99% accuracy, that doesn't necessarily mean what the author claims either. Accuracy is (TP + TN)/(P + N), meaning that the decrease in 1% from 100% can be in any of:- a lowering of TP or TN; or an increase of FP or FN. There is no reason to think that the 1% will all mean false positives.
Maybe I should have clarified because it seems obvious. In my country you can't point a camera at anything that isn't your property. Which means you can't point it in a way that you can see your neighbours, or on a public street. You're not being filmed or recorded at all times and if you are, you know exactly who is doing it. This is properly enforced in almost all cases exept highways, some public libraries and entrances of public/gov buildings. Tracking is still pervasive and slowly creeping up.
Isn't 'pointing at' little nebulous. I may have setup my camera to point at my backyard, but some portion of neighbor's yard may showup in the corner. If I adjust the camera to eliminate this neighbor's yard then the other one's creeps into the view from other side.
For the both the situation my camera is squarely 'pointed at' the center of my backyard.
I wonder about the enforcement. I see Ring video doorbells popping up in lotsa places that are clearly filming public streets. Maybe enforcement is slow, or only happens after someone reports a violation.
You aren't addressing the arguments at all here. With the error bars that black6 suggests, we cannot possibly infer anything of meaning over long periods of time.
This answer is more flippant than you can imagine.
#3 Is the worst - if we have learnt anything in the past century, it is that our attempts at behavioural changes rarely work[i], and even when they do they often result in the opposite effect[ii].
[i] - My favourite book that points this out is Behavioural Adaptation and Road Safety. Well worth a read. Examples are many, such as in the case of criminalising texting while driving, which results in "crotching" (texting from a phone on your lap) and has resulted in increased accidents.
[ii] - Plenty of examples of this already on the environmental scene:
- let's use plastic bags to save trees! oh no plastic bags are worse!
- let's use diesel rather than petrol! Here, have subsidies! Oh no, it's making everything worse
- let's improve energy efficiency! oh no, now more energy is used! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
The nice thing about satellite orbits is that they are extremely steady and predictable. Over long time scales, a satellite's orbit drifts due to many effects, such as non-uniformity of Earth's gravity. But over short timescales, its motion is very precisely determined by its orbital parameters.
In particular, there's a precise relationship between a satellite's orbital period and its orbital radius (technically, its semi-major axis). A one-centimeter variation in altitude would result in a timing error of several hundred microseconds per day, which is enough to be detected using precise clocks and Doppler effect measurements.
> A one-centimeter variation in altitude would result in a timing error of several hundred microseconds per day
Source or math for this? Because for any signal in the MHz range, I’m not sure I believe it necessarily.
Several hundred microseconds of a 150Mhz wave is several thousand cycles. That seems... questionable.
I did a check on a decibel calc with a 150Mhz signal and a 1 meter change was approx .01db... which is effectively undetectable to a real world application. Signal strength isn’t the same as propagation delay, I know. But yea...
I look forward to being corrected, but I can’t say that claim seems legitimate on its face.
EDIT: Nope. Did some probably bad math on this on my own, claim is very nonsense. Esp because the delta distance is in space where radio has the speed of light.
I don't understand what you think is nonsense about this claim. Can you elaborate?
The timing numbers I quoted are purely based on the orbital motion of a (hypothetical) satellite, and have nothing to do with radio signals. Kepler's third law states that a body's orbital period varies in proportion to the 1.5th power of its semi-major axis. A 1cm altitude difference for a satellite in LEO corresponds to a change of about 1.5 parts per billion, which translates to a 2.2 ppb change in orbital period. As I said, this amounts to a cumulative difference of a couple hundred microseconds per day.
And it's actually much easier to precisely measure frequency differences than amplitude differences, if you have sufficiently accurate clocks. If you have a 150.000000MHz reference signal and a 150.000001MHz doppler-shifted signal, you can simply multiply them together to get a 1Hz beat frequency. Using this technique, you can measure phase differences that are considerably less than a single cycle of the original signal.
A major limiting factor, of course, is the stability and precision of your reference clocks. Apparently, the Jason-2 satellite that (until recently) was responsible for a lot of these measurements had a high-precision quartz oscillator that was stable to roughly one part per trillion: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30004875
Measuring the absolute position and velocity of a satellite is comparatively a lot more difficult. But with sufficiently precise Doppler relative-velocity measurements from multiple points, you can solve for both the orbital parameters and the slowly-varying perturbations with a high degree of accuracy.
I don't agree with this claim, unless you quantify it. This has already been touched upon before, for example here:
> "It depends upon the orbit and what time scales you are talking about. Satellites are subjected to many perturbations in its orbit. There are effects due to atmospheric drag, which as you'd expect affect lower satellite orbits more than higher orbits, but the atmosphere swells up all the time depending upon the level of solar activity. Gravitationally, the Earth is not a point mass and it has regions where the gravity gradient changes, which causes the satellite to get pulled one way or another (very slightly) as it orbits around."
The link in the top-level comment addresses all of these concerns, among other considerations and carefully calibrated corrections. They clearly know what they are doing.
They have a high quality map of the variations of gravity across the surface of the Earth. They also have a model that accounts for atmospheric drag.
The problem is that every instrument involved in the chain of measurement has its own inaccuracies, and at the end of the day you would need to make sure that once you add each of their inaccuracies it does not compound up to more than what you are actually measuring. This is a very complex subject and I'm not sure it's as "settled" as you seem to portray it.
Oh, sure, I don't mean to minimize the engineering challenges involved. I'm far from an expert in the details of how these particular satellites work; I'm just trying to describe the general principles, to make the point that this level of measurement accuracy shouldn't be viewed as intrinsically unattainable.
>A perfect storm of prescription opioids, government prohibition, and cheap/plentiful Chinese and Mexican fentanyl.
I think it's actually the fact that the war on opioids has translated into a war on prescription pain drugs, in general.
So, when you're a chronic pain sufferer and have gone without and you get ahold of something - anything - to remediate the pain, you're far more likely to take a little extra just to get the pain to STFU for a while so you can do things like sleep through the night for the first time in seemingly forever.
I've heard tales of American veterans (through the VA) being referred to things like yoga to manage their chronic pain, when it's entirely due to neurological damage and things like yoga will do fuck-all to help with that.
Is it any wonder then that people might be more liable to OD when they obtain something to try to manage the pain that otherwise never ceases?
I'd say it is a fundamental issue in American society (the war on opioids translating into no pain management medications whatsoever) with callous indifference - rather than anything else.
I think it is also the lack of sick leave for many Americans so they take a quick pill to recover. Sometimes your body can recover by itself if only given time and physical therapy.
I had some excruciating peroneal tendonitis that made it hard for me to walk on rough surfaces. Foot doctor said the best treatment was a walking cast, rest and daily exercise. Fortunately my employer allows me to work from home as needed so I could give my foot a rest for a few weeks. But not everyone has access to that. Imagine if you are a server at a restaurant on your foot all day.
I used self guided physical therapy to improve a chronic nerve pain issue. I'm glad I had very moderate pain and a moderate accompanying physical issue, and I wouldn't want it to be the only option in a more severe situation, but it's not useless either.
Simple economics: expensive legal prescription drugs drives people to source cheaper alternatives. Unfortunately, the cheaper alternative is also much more lethal.
I think there's a narrative that is the opioid crisis is driven by addiction, when it seems to be, and has historically has been, inefficient drug pricing.
The dirty little secret that no one talks about: Many of the Miracles of Modern Medicine that save lives don't restore you to full functioning. It's often a miserable existence with no hope of really getting your life back.
And it's not a small number. Up to 20% of people identify as handicapped while another 40% of the population has a milder degree of impairment and actively eschews the stigmatizing label of handicapped.
Whats really interesting is you can go to mexico and get tramadol over the counter ( which has almost no side affect i know i take it for chronic nerve pain ) but doctors here want to use narcotics for pain management. demerol percocet vicodin etc etc
Several drug manufacturers flooded the market with pills exposing way too many people to opioids in a casual way. Once folks are addicted it’s very very difficult to break the addiction.
The Washington post has an excellent series on the topic if you are interested.
From what I have read OxyContin was sold as needing only two doses a day. At that level it’s not that addictive. But it soon turned out that two times a day is not enough so people took more to avoid crashing in between. With that amount it became very addictive but companies still kept selling the two doses a day although they knew that people would quickly take more.
The whole point of OxyCotin was that it was a long acting dose. So if they admitted it didn't last that long it would cause loss of business. This cause a lot of patients to be undertreated and seek alternatives.
Pain relief induced by pleasure and physical dependence - constipation too. I am almost off morphine. 15mg a day now.
I have lost 30 lbs over 3 months. Chronic pain sucks but I despise opioids. They are seductive at first until one realizes their body is literally rotting away..
I was lifting 125lb dumbells before I got on morphine. Now I am feeble and haven't worked out in months. It kills your endogenous drive. If you care about your future self, please don't use opiates more than sparingly...
My mom said that, when recovering in the hospital from a certain operation, she was prescribed morphine for pain, and when she had some, "colors looked brighter, the air smelled sweeter, and everything just felt nicer"; when it wore off, she said, "Wooooow. So that's how drugs can be addictive." She refused all morphine after that.
Some people get that joy while others get nauseous upon first introduction to opioids. In any case, it's short lived, the honeymoon phase. Good on your mom - we will eventually get non-opioid, effective pain relievers. I am subbed to /r/drugnerds and there is a bit going on in the R and D of that area.
Thank you. Tapering at _just_ the right dose to not interfere with the grades in the master degree I am doing is quite tough.
Which makes me wonder...there's common regimens like the Ashton scale and whatnot for benzos but it's very boilerplate.
Unicorn Idea:
Quantitative Withdrawal
User enters dosage each time they use. Datetime is auto filled, but can be altered for dosages that are entered belatedly.
ML is used to show charts with sliders based on speed of taper and severity of side effects. A time series showing the reduction in withdrawal effects over time with an ETA and other statistics. With labeled sections for certain parts of the withdrawal that are more severe (think a phase change diagram.) Seizure/epilespy zone would be clearly large on a configuration where the user chooses a ridiculously fast taper. The app would show a color, red in this case, warning of these symptoms and recommending against it. Baseline taper recommendations could be based on the medical literature out there with clinical trials. There is plenty of labeled data especially from the NIH.
The user can log their current symptoms to help the model learn their individual brain chemistry.
And vitals like HR, pulse, and o2 that are easily measured via pleasant APIs like Healthkit on iOS and Android. (Would be by proxy optionally compatible with iWatch, FitBit and other such sensors.)
These vitals are great features that the model can learn from.
The user can answer questions regarding the current state of their withdrawal symptoms, providing the model with labeled data to learn from.
Models can be pretrained on an individual in close proximity to the MLE on the distribution of human neurochemistry. And thus would work out of the box pretty well before the users input and vitals start to vastly improve it until it helps the user maintain AND gain :-)
Without defining what "Progress" and "Good" are, the whole concept that there is some sort of "Progress" is meaningless. If you can define those terms, you can maybe start to study such a topic - but the definition of such terms belongs to philosophy, not science. Technological advancement could certainly studied, but what we do or don't do with it can only be "Good" or "Progressing" to some idealistic goal if we have identified those.
By “progress,” we mean the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives and raised standards of living over the past couple of centuries.
Well I can definitely tear down this definition. “Advancement” doesn’t mean anything. What does it mean to advance culturally or organizationally without already having morality defined?
Also raising standards of living? Is that all we’re after? Slaves in slave societies had rising standards of living, did that make slavery okay?
The scary thing about an article like this is the sheer ignorance and hubris behind it. No credible philosopher will tell you that we can objectify morality, it is a provable logical fallacy. That doesn’t seem to stop people form thinking they can do it. The folks in history who thought they could do it are some of the most reprehensible people in all of human history.
I don’t know if it’s that far off. Our current notions of progress haven't allowed us to avoid our current condition of extreme indebtedness and financial insecurity and I think we're at a point where we need to reexamine these notions. I don't think the author does enough to do that.
One unclear example doesn't negate his/her argument. Even one bad example doesn't do this. And neither does arguing in bad faith (if for some reason they are doing so). The argument still stands. You can't coherently make demands about 'progress' (whatever that could even mean) without having some rational and already worked out framework for what determines 'progress' in the first place.
And the commenter is right that failing this, such talk can be dangerous because by a sleight of hand you can substitute - without argument - what is supposedly rational with whatever you simply desire at that moment in time.
The example was very clear, and although it might not negate it, it certainly undermines it. If contrived examples don't have bearing on the validity of an argument, I don't know how we are supposed to move forward in a debate.
I agree with the spirit of the parent poster, but to claim the OP is arguing slavery is okay because of raising standards of living is just as dangerous to this discussion.
I definitely wasn’t making the argument that anyone was arguing for slavery, just that notional definitions of moral progress are much more complicated than simple economic metrics. There is so much more that goes into what is “right” and “wrong” than pure economic level, at a micro or macro level.
Now you might say I’m making a straw man of their argument, but then what are they even arguing then? I can’t figure it out. What does “advancement” mean? They alluded to social sciences having various measure of human happiness is and that a “Progress Studies” department could synthesize these metrics into... what exactly? Policy proposals? A religion? Metrics of human well being assume an underlying framework of morale agreement to begin with.
You simply cannot philosophically convert an objective metric into an “ought” without making a ton of morale assumptions. You cannot prove that your morality and values are better than anyone else’s because you will infinitely regress into definitions if what “good” means.
I agree with what you are saying, just that the way you originally went about saying it by including a contrived hyperbolic example regarding slavery was a poor way to frame your position, at least in my opinion, and made your argument less likely to be received in good faith.
If an argument is not novel (it's been presented before to many people and there is decent awareness of it), is well-understood, and is valid, then someone can use poor examples to explicate the argument and those examples do nothing to undermine the argument.
This commenter's argument was just such an argument.
If the position was one you didn't agree with, would you still be defending such a hyperbolic example?
Do we agree that how you present an argument is important in how the argument is received by others?
I don't follow why an argument with "decent awareness" (whatever that could even mean) or one that is non-novel has different standards to a novel argument or one that has less awareness.
I've no doubt that the presentation of an argument is important to its reception.
Again, the validity of the argument under discussion doesn't rest on the example that was used to explicate it. The examples are separate from the argument (this isn't always the case).
He’s not saying anyone is trying to argue that slavery is ok. He’s using it as hyperbole that without a specific definition, progress can’t be measured objectively.
I'm curious about the logical fallacy that you can objectify morality. I would like to do more reading on this subject, could you direct me towards the proof for this? I'm genuinely interested.
(I'm not joking, I swear! To objectify morality you have to encode it, eh? So you're sunk before you begin: there will be moral things that can't be encoded, and encode-able things that are not moral, or cannot be proven moral nor immoral. And then you have the problem of deciding whether "objectifing morality" is itself a moral goal, n'est-ce pas? )
Increasing the standard of living for people in your country by lowering the standard of living for people living in Africa doesn't much sound like "progress for everyone",does it?
Don't tell me that increased population doesn't decrease standard of living.
A very valid point. See Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms intro:
Prosperity, however, has not come to all societies. Material consumption in some countries, mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, is now well below the pre-industrial norm. Countries such as Malawi or Tanzania would be better off in material terms had they never had contact with the industrialized world and
instead continued in their preindustrial state. Modern medicine, airplanes, gasoline, computers—the whole technological cornucopia of the past two hundred years—have succeeded there in producing among the lowest material living standards ever experienced. These African societies have remained trapped in the Malthusian era, where technological advances merely produce more people and living standards are driven down to subsistence. But modern
medicine has reduced the material minimum required for subsistence to a level far below that of the Stone Age. Just as the Industrial Revolution reduced income inequalities within societies, it has increased them between societies, in a process recently labeled the Great Divergence.1 The gap in incomes between countries is of the order of 50:1. There walk the earth now both the richest people who ever lived and the poorest.
I was making a similar hypothesis. Didn't know about the data though.
Here's my argument:
I agree that capitalism is such a system that allows for expansion of wealth by means of mass production.
But as America gets rich, there were suppressed workers in China who were doing the "hard work" for Americans.
As China gets rich, the Africans are doing it for them.
So calling the American capitalism as a foolproof system that elevates "everyone" out of poverty is just plain wrong because it helps produce more poor people in other poor countries. And then the market says, more the poor people supply, less the wages.
So they're always creating population booms somewhere to sell their products as well as get cheap labour.
But the Americans have given a positive association to population boom by telling a story called population booms = economic prosperity.
So there is going to be a population boom in Africa soon. With more than 2 bn people.
"Get ready for more cheap labour!" Says the US free markets.
But once everyone is used up and educated, what then?
It's ... complicated. And there's more to the dynamic than that.
One of Clark's observations is that modernity -- not just capitalism, but technology, logistics, healthcare, interventions, etc. -- not only create poverty but make it survivable. A reason that persistant conditions of abject misery are sustained for lifetimes and generations is that they don't simply kill those affected (by disease, starvation, accidents, warfare) in a few weeks or months.
His book is part of a series edited by Joel Mokyr on economic history and progress (much of what Cowan and Collison are calling for), well worth looking at titles. Robert J. Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth is another title, and more generally in 3what I'd consider a larger literature including Polanyi's The Great Transformation and Joseph Needham's work exploring what's come to be known as "the Needham question" -- why China, which developed a phenomenal set of technology and scientific knowledge, catalogued exhaustively in Needham's Science and Civilisation in China, didn't then proceed to have an industrial revolution similar to that which eventually occurred in England.
I think you're also absolutely correct to call out the claims made for capitalism -- that it elevates everyone out of poverty (the poorest billions have actually lost financial wealth in recent years), that it's an engine of creativity (many inventors died broke or broken, many inventions came from uncompensated sources, including famously the one mention of either technology or steam power in Smith's Wealth of Nations -- a boy optimising steam engine function because he wanted to play with his friends), and numerous others.
The contrast between price behaviour of rents vs. wages is very well discussed, going back to Smith, who also discusses the dynamics of poverty in economic growth and decline.
But yes: the orthodox economic theology appears to have several significant gaps with reality. Including though not limited to the behaviour of poverty under market-capitalist-property systems.
Isn’t progress quite simply, evolution? We study it so we can apply it intentionally.
The philosophical part to me is Who is this progress meant to serve? Everyone alive today? The human species as a whole? Our environment? Some greater consciousness?
It depends on how progress is defined. Technically it implies movement towards some end-state wheather it is obtainable or not. Disease outbreaks are a progression technically but in this context it is limited to positive changes.
Evolution itself doesn't neccessarily fit - while it may progress it may also stagnate or get caught in cycles. While a result may eventually dominate it is important to remember evolution has no goals - it is literal survivorship bias manifest.
As for intent I believe the answer is an unsatisfying "it depends" as who it serves and who defines meaning changes and the question becomes originally or currently?
Musket arming of minimally trained recruits may have been meant to serve aristocracy to allow fielding large armies cheaper but if it ends in them being deposed clearly it didn't serve them in the end and the purpose must change or else be abandoned.
"Even if face recognition can match a face with 99% accuracy, the sheer amount of faces available in police databases makes false positives inevitable. (The 1% error rate means that, if 10,000 people who are not wanted by the police undergo face recognition, 100 will be flagged as wanted)."
The author is not being fair.
Usually with technologies like these, developers will not aim for an accuracy of 99%, but a precision of 99% (that is what we do with Congestion Charging in London, where the ramifications of FPs are much lower [I work in Transport for London]). That means that for 10,000,000 people undergoing facial recognition, only 100 may be flagged as wanted, and only 1 will be a false positive. If we were talking about 99% accuracy, that doesn't necessarily mean what the author claims either. Accuracy is (TP + TN)/(P + N), meaning that the decrease in 1% from 100% can be in any of:- a lowering of TP or TN; or an increase of FP or FN. There is no reason to think that the 1% will all mean false positives.