John BS @johnabs@social.cleverlibre.org

Hi everyone @Science !

I'm in the process of writing (and hopefully aggregating contributions for) short scripts to help academics/researchers do various things more effectively. This is still very much in its infancy, but considering how often I tend to automate things, I expect it to grow at a pretty steady pace.

Current examples include short API wrappers to query different journals for given search terms and date ranges to pull pdfs directly, and a modular RSS helper to redirect to papers directly from your feeds. I'm currently working on scripts for remote cluster execution, traversing and executing code on git experimental branches and more!

I've started a repo here https://github.com/johnabs/ASR, and if anybody has ideas for scripts that researchers could use to help with their workflow, that would be awesome, and it would be great if people are willing to contribute.
#Science #research #coding #automation

@freemo @2ck @swiley

I see, from the original posts it seemed that the argument was "our founding principles were this, thus they should stay that way currently", which I thought was disregarding the progress we've made since the founding. Thank you for the clarification :)

I 100% agree with being committed to helping immigrants and welcoming them rather than shunning/isolating them, and with the rest of your response.

@freemo @2ck @swiley I understand that having 100% open borders under the founding of the "new world", particularly the USA made sense at the time. There was a 3 month minimum journey where you risked scurvy and other forms of malnutrition just to come to "the land of opportunity". The key being "opportunity", in that there was an emphasis on libertarian freedom that people could be self-determined and carve out a niche for themselves so long as they worked hard enough.

However, much has changed in the last 245 years. Journeys to the US take ~18 hours at most from nearly anywhere in the world, and "birth" tourism (from Chinese women for example) has been used to secure citizenship for their children without any of the investment required other than a $600 plane ticket and a week or two in the US. These children are then taken back and raised in China for the first ~7-10 years of their lives, to absorb Chinese values, culture, and norms, until the family decides to cash in on the value of their child's citizenship in the US. In other words, there's no "skin in the game" for people who leverage the system in this way, and I think it creates some perverse incentives which are regularly abused.

I am by no means anti-immigrant, my family immigrated a few generations ago, and my uncle and his family are Chinese immigrants. However, with the current political climate, ease of travel, and many on the left wing of US society willing to allow anyone in at any time for any reason while foregoing naturalization, I can't see how completely open borders will be a benefit to most of the people who choose to immigrate.

I think if we get rid of birthright citizenship, that may be a step in the right direction. In other words, if one parent is a citizen, the children are citizens, or if you stay a certain number of years after the child is born they're a citizen (kind of like a probationary period). However, if the child is going to be whisked back to their parent's home country right after they're born, only to return to cash in on what the US has to offer without going through the naturalization process that occurs from being raised in the region, I think that family is skipping the queue. Worse yet, they're stepping on other families who risk everything to make sure they and their children have a better life in the US than the country they've chosen to flee.

To conclude, I agree that immigration is good (in controlled circumstances nowadays), and can provide people with opportunities and safety that they may not have in their own countries. I think it increases diversity of thought and opinion, and allows for society to flourish as norms and ideas collide to create vibrant new innovations. However, I think there needs to be some semblance of fairness in the process, and skipping the queue on people trying to get in legally or legitimately shouldn't be tolerated. I think there needs to be a way to prioritize people and families who can contribute the most, and who need it the most, so that we can maintain our culture and try to lift everyone who decides to immigrate up in the process. And to be honest, I don't think a completely laissez-faire strategy is the way to accomplish that.

@freemo @justin Not to be a doomer, but I can't see this panning out well, even with the conservative majority court. While I hope freemo and I are wrong, there has been a significant, concerted effort from both the left and the right to erode the rights of private individuals and bolster the privileges of the ruling class and the various limbs of the government. A couple examples include civil asset forfeiture (and the *lovely* conflicts of interest therein) and the qualified immunity doctrine (implemented by the supreme court, not the legislature).

While I understand the constitution and the bill of rights themselves clearly prevent this kind of behavior, quite frankly most people in the government don't care. They buried both of these founding documents in a quagmire of indecipherable legal jargon that has only served to continuously restrict the liberties out of "the people", and they will continue to do so until there isn't a shred of actual freedom left.

Even if it isn't now, or in a decade, the slippery slope has slopped, and without a consistent, concerted effort to push this system back to the point of unstable equilibrium it was founded upon, we don't have a chance. As with all unstable equilibria, you have to put in energy to keep things where they are, or random fluctuations will eventually knock you down to the ground-state (read: authoritarian-state).

@freemo Thanks for the heads up, I was under the impression the server had more a focus on STEM, but I'll keep what you said in mind for future political-related posts!

Also, I hope what I wrote was a good read with some salient points 😄

@freemo (because I saw your boost of @nyvoter 's post)

I know this is a bit off-topic for this particular instance, but I've been thinking a lot about politics lately, and I would seriously love to hear anyone's feedback/opinions. Please let me know what you think below, and I'd be happy to discuss with you.

I am becoming increasingly concerned with the erosion of rights by the various appellate and supreme courts in the United States. I also find it concerning, that many people are increasingly unaware of this information, and are pushing for new rights, while their current rights are already under siege from, at the worst malevolent, and at the best incompetent/impotent, judiciaries/legislature. For any who want to know more, check out the most recent YT video from the Institute for Justice. They regularly attempt to fight clear instances of governmental over-reach, but with limited success due to decades of immoral precedents.

This, along with laws which are clearly not designed to be equally efficacious across the various income strata, makes me increasingly concerned about the necessity of governmental re-structuring, preferably by people who are results oriented, rather than "media" or "re-election" oriented.

AOC is an excellent example of someone who, despite wanting to align with *some* of her policies, I find it nearly impossible to due so with her consistent alarmism. Trump is yet another one of these individuals, both elected due to their ability to "clap-back" and their "anti-establishment" views. However, this clear disdain for the establishment on both sides of the aisle, somehow continues to produce state/local election results of the same incumbents with the same mentality, and accompanying impotency. They create laws based on special interests, and serve platitudes on a silver platter to the rest of their constituents that they're screwing over, all while maintaining the razors edge of getting as many corporate lobbying dollars as possible, yet maintaining re-election potential for the next year.

I realize I've placed myself in the precarious position of "it's easy to smell a rotten egg, but difficult to lay a better one". Thus, I'm hoping to provide some interesting perspectives that may improve the legislative process/precedents. Unfortunately, the judicial system at the moment is much too far gone for me to even comment on.

1. Results based laws. All (non eminently moral) laws must have a specified goal, a way to measure that goal, and must be repealed if satisfactory progress is not made toward this goal within a predetermined amount of time. If it fails and is repealed, it cannot be re-enacted until a sufficient number of election cycles have transpired. Hopefully this will force legislators to be more considerate and careful, and this allows people to see how poor a job these legislators are doing at actually governing the country. E.g. Gun control. Reduce homicides/improve citizen safety by 50% within 3-5 years (10% per year benchmark). If the implementation fails, too bad, you've had your shot until 2 more re-election cycles, do better next time.

Corollary: this same category of laws with no measurable effect, should be removed (no whale fishing on Sunday in Ohio, for example).

2. Laws passed must be of sufficient length to convey the context, and any and all statues passed within a law must be co-related. I.e. no more massive "pork" bills where random legislators shove random crap into the bill, or change a small piece of preexisting law, to scratch the back of their lobby buddies, or divert tax payer dollars to a bailout while saying it's actually for "Covid relief". All issues within the bill MUST be evaluated on merit, individually if necessary, to achieve the necessary result.

3. Principle: Violating the rights of individuals cannot and will not be tolerated, and any and all state, local and federal officers must be able to be held accountable for their actions. There is a massive difference between perpetrators not being held accountable, and victims having zero recourse to begin with. It is incredibly unfortunate that prosecutors are often unable or unwilling to press charges against other governmental officials due to the supreme court sleight of hand that is used to give various agents nigh complete immunity.

Finally, I would like to make a philosophical point here. I think the current philosophy of modern culture lies precariously at the edge of belief in absolute truth. Without this fundamental axiom that truth exists and we can (at least try to) know it, we reach a world-view where interpretation is everything. E.g. the constitution being a living document.To some, this means that it was designed to be changed over time if necessary, but to others means it is up to the will of the interpreter what, if any, of the constitution needs to be considered for a law to remain on the books.

If the latter is the case, then any supreme court majority has the right to usurp power from the legislative branch at any given time, and rule any law unconstitutional just because they don't like it, and can "cite" their own subjective interpretation of the document. Interpretation of any meaning that exists, must be done with the author's intent in mind, or you're simply projecting yourself onto the canvas. It goes from an instruction manual of how to run the country, to modern "art".

To conclude, I think we are losing rights, being fleeced by the government to divert tax-payer dollars to special interests which rarely, if ever, impact the common person, and are having our liberties restricted by people who "know what's best" when, in fact, they barely know anything, other than how to con people into keeping them in power. I understand this is not the case for many individual politicians; however, the composition of the political network seems hell-bent toward this (possibly emergent) reality. I hope that conversations like this one will help to get people thinking about ways we can impact the political climate for the better, and get people in office who actually care about the freedoms of their constituents, even if it makes them somewhat unpopular.

@freemo @Science

Hey Freemo, I'm alive again xD The bisection search method is pretty clever to reduce your current computation time, but wouldn't that need to be repeated regularly?

Have you considered using some dimensionality reduction techniques to help limit your feature space to the most impactful variables to reduce your search space? It would be a rather long up-front computation more than likely to do the initial clustering, but then you could likely ignore/discard some of the variables that have a smaller impact on your prediction (or have relatively high correlation to other variables/combinations of variables) to make it faster in the future.

@namark
Hey namark, I think you brought up some interesting points I'd like to dispute, but as I mentioned to Freemo, I'm feeling rather unwell at the moment, so I'll have to get back to you when I'm more able to. I hope that's alright with you :)
@freemo @General

@freemo
Hey Freemo, I've been feeling not so great so I'll have to get back to you a bit later. I agree we need to straighten out some axioms, but I think the argument goes even further into what can be predetermined and whether anything exists other than the present. I'll get back to you on this when I'm able to. Thanks as always for the discussions, they're great fun to discuss.
@General

@freemo
Well you've sort of answered your own question in the statement of it. You believe we have free will, embedded in the statement of "even if it seems similar to our own"; the point I was making is that evaluation of all possible external and internal state that is apprehendable by our consciousness is what leads to the outward expression of our free will, i.e. decision making, and is the same in both humans in the example.

Additionally, there are logical consequences that may always arise exactly because an individual exercises their free will. If you prefer cookies to cod liver oil and I continually put you in that situation, you will continue to make the same choice. Does that mean the outcome was predetermined and that you have no free will? Or does it mean you're making a choice based on the same set of unchanging information you have access to: the system and your preferences, despite your ability to update your knowledge of the situation?

So if "normal" individuals have free will, I believe we have no way of distinguishing between that and the memory deficient individual, and I would go so far as to say that limitations on cognitive ability (at least within the range of what is exhibited in humanity) does not and cannot impinge upon free will. If it did, we could reason in the opposite direction about a being with a more capable intellect than our own, which would either have "more" free will than us, or would be the only type of being that has free will, since we would be intellectually deficient in comparison.

Thoughts?

@General

@freemo
I'd make the case that their actions only appear predetermined from an outside observer's perspective, as the repetition of the behavior seems to indicate that the actions must continue to happen; however, from the actor's perspective they are weighing and reasoning this "novel" situation and coming to a conclusion they deem appropriate for the situation.

We engage in the same reasoning process every time we are placed in novel situations as well, and the only difference between our situation and the amnesiac's is that we are reasoning based on updated information, and they are reasoning on outdated information, but the reasoning and decision making process that constitutes free will is still in tact for both scenarios.

Thus, we must either conclude that both actors have free will or neither one does.
@General

@freemo

I'll take a crack at it, I've been doing a lot of philosophical work lately. Let me know what you guys think :)

How about we consider an alzheimer patient, or especially people with anterograde amnesia? The latter cannot generate new declarative factual memories, due to damage to the medial temporal lobe, thus fall the closest to this circumstance that you have suggested.

Hypothetically, let's say you place a person who forgets everything they learn when they go to sleep, in a puzzle room. You should be able to see their initial and subsequent daily attempts to solve the puzzles be nearly identical, as what informs their strategy of approaching the problems cannot be updated. However, these people in each instance are still freely reasoning and making decisions, but since their ability to update their model of reality is flawed, we can precisely predict their behavior.

In other words, our pseudo-prescience of their actions does not take away from the fact that these actions were made by a free creature, but only indicates the free creature has a flaw in their ability to sufficiently update their knowledge to make new, freely chosen decisions.
@General

@freemo 100% agree here, this isn't the first time a vaccine has been pushed through without adequate regulatory testing due to political pressure (the HPV vaccine, specifically Gardisil, for example, had particularly shoddy negative controls for determining efficacy). I'm no anti-vaxxer by any stretch, but empirical evidence and proper testing protocol needs to be followed, the FDA needs to actually do it's job, and people need to be aware of the risks before having any prophylactic or treatement administered.

@freemo I'm flattered by the offer and would love to collaborate (though it may be in sparse bursts rather than continuous output due to preexisting commitments). If you'd like to discuss the details regarding this, I'll send you a PM with my email as well as my PGP public key if you'd prefer to keep things encrypted. I can preface this with I am a very trustworthy and ethical individual, considering I had to abandon my first PhD due to unethical practices by the two advisors I tried working under. Fortunately, I've found another advisor in a different department who has taken me in and actually values me, my well-being, and doing things the right way: to advance science and human understanding, rather than his own ego/pocketbook. Unfortunately, I had to throw out my candidacy in the process of switching departments, and effectively start over, but I think my job prospects in this department will be much better anyways.

@freemo I figured as much xD But if I get any other work behind it (unlikely at the moment), I'll send what I find your way. I'm particularly interested in the NLP side of things, especially since my bank provides headlines based on ticker that can be scraped using the API, but it will be a while until I get anything else done on this, unfortunately.

@freemo Like I said, just a handler, nothing fancy, just a few functions to query and post various lists of stocks of interests, get prices for options, get time-series data for stocks of interest with a default resolution of 5-minutes, current balances, execute basic trades, which can be wrapped in more complexity as time goes on. I'll have to upload the code to github and make the repo public, but I can do that super quick if any of that sounds interesting :)

@freemo At the moment it's literally JUST a barebones API handler to exchange data between some (reinforcement, for example) algorithm X and my bank's trading API. With that said, if you're interested in it, I can link it xD

@freemo @icedquinn Right, but I wasn't sure if that level of detail was strictly necessary 😂 And the original point I was trying to make was that they didn't necessarily NEED to use a Morlet wavelet in their implementation to achieve different sounds, as other similar functions would work similarly.

@freemo Oh okay, I understand. My research is in a similar boat of secret, since I'd rather not be scooped XD Well if you don't mind me asking, what trader are you currently using? I do have a pre-existing API handler for my bank to execute automatic trades, but it was written in Julia rather than python, and it's for Ally bank; so if you're not using it, my code would be useless to you xD