Interesting Links for 24-11-2017

[andrewducker]

Tesla completes world's largest lithium ion battery in Australia

(tags: australia batteries power )

How to read reviews

(tags: reviews games )

The Conservatives are the party of high UK borrowing and low debt repayment

(tags: conservatives money fail )

It’s called effective altruism – but is it really the best way to do good?

(tags: altruism effectiveness charity )

SF doesn’t really make you stupid. It’s more that if you’re stupid enough to be biased against SF you will read SF stupidly.

(tags: scifi reading psychology )

The Financial Realities of Going Viral

(tags: money Fame viral )

"My Apology to Naomi Wu and the Make Community"

Good Lord. An _actual_ apology!
(tags: apology sexism Technology china usa )

Why the UK will not be speaking Arabic in a decade.

(tags: language uk arabic immigration )

A History of Music, through the medium of Daft Punk's "Get Lucky"

(tags: music history )

'I'm not going to listen to you any more' - Confronting an avatar on a computer screen helped patients hearing voices to cope better with schizophrenic hallucinations

(tags: schizophrenia avatars hallucinations )

What's going on in Saudi Arabia (an interview with the crown prince)

(tags: saudiarabia )

Call of Duty: WW2's takes a huge step in rendering faces

(tags: faces graphics games )

Medical Marijuana users reduce their opioid consumption dramatically

(tags: marijuana drugs pain )

Observations of an ex pat: The Middle East explained

(tags: middle_east )

Chess, memory training and music just make you better at chess, memory training and music

(tags: games memory music psychology learning )

Why I wish Kez Dugdale well for her jungle stint

(tags: labour tv scotland )

Comments

SF doesn’t really make you stupid. It’s more that if you’re stupid enough to be biased against

[jack]

Huh. Interesting to see that measured. I bet it applies to romance even more.

Re: SF doesn’t really make you stupid. It’s more that if you’re stupid enough to be biased aga

[aldabra]

I'm not convinced that it's "stupid" to read SF stupidly. I think putting the same story in an unfamiliar context increases the amount of work it takes to understand it, and so decreases the expected net reward from reading it. It's rational to put less effort into tasks with lower expected reward, and in this case the study participants are right because the alien setting has no material effect on the story; it's gratuitous unfamiliarity with no telos.

Re: SF doesn’t really make you stupid. It’s more that if you’re stupid enough to be biased aga

[jack]

I think that's true, and I should have qualified that in my answer. I don't think that was the right way to describe the effect (although if they've read some of the thinkpieces about how scifi is shit because it's not litfic, I understand why they were primed to be unfair).

But it's not necessarily the case that a book is less valuable if it's harder; only if the extras are not valuable. I'm not sure how much someone who's never been exposed to scifi would benefit from being exposed to those concepts: I guess being exposed to the concept of a space station or an android is really good in its own right, but absorbing the genre conventions that don't necessarily have anything in common with what's possible, but just happen to be what anglophone scifi has somewhat converged on, isn't.

Re: SF doesn’t really make you stupid. It’s more that if you’re stupid enough to be biased aga

[aldabra]

Yes; I love the scope SF gives for warping time and space and consciousness. I think you can do a lot with that which you can't do with litfic, and those are the kinds of ideas I'm interested in. (But I've actively backed off from the space opera and tech-progress porn, because it annoys me too much.)

On the other hand, I'm quite sure that if someone gave me cat detective fiction, or Elizabethan court intrigue fiction, to read I would read it "stupidly", and I'm not convinced that's a bad strategy *even if it's intrinsically as well-written as anything else I read*. Whereas with my current genre of choice, which is deindustrial SF, I probably read it *less* stupidly than it objectively deserves, because those are the settings and counterfactual possibilities I'm most interested in.

I think having genre-preferences is inevitable, under the current proliferation of books such that you can't possibly read everything you might want to even within a genre, and I can see how one might decide sensibly that aliens aren't one's priority. (Though it's harder to see how one decides sensibly that cat detectives are...)

Re: SF doesn’t really make you stupid. It’s more that if you’re stupid enough to be biased aga

[naath]

ebut cats! I think I read most things equally stupidly, I'm not interested in doing litcrit, I just want to have fun.

Re: SF doesn’t really make you stupid. It’s more that if you’re stupid enough to be biased aga

[aldabra]

Ha, yes, it was exactly you I was expecting to call me out on dissing cats and Elizabethan court intrigue 8-)

I've read the odd self-published thing which switches genre midway through, in a way which no self-respecting publisher would allow. It certainly wakes you up. (Unfortunately they have a tendency also to misuse punctuation in a way which no self-respecting publisher would allow, and I'm irredeemably twitchy about that.)

[jack]

Doh. The Saudi article sounds... really quite positive. But ideally that would not involve arms deals and cosying up to trump. And that Iran, Saudi Arabia and America all ease up a bit and agree to coexist. That's unimaginably hard though :(

[autopope]

The Saudi article is by Thomas Friedman. Who is Wrong about Anything and Everything, All The Fucking Time.

I gave up on it a paragraph in when I registered the by-line, because life is too short to waste brain cells on that intellectually bankrupt hack.

[jack]

Doh, I didn't realise :( OK, I will await a clearer picture of what's going on.

It’s called effective altruism – but is it really the best way to do good?

[jack]

Hm :( I agree with the need for empathy, and for active, personal charity. And that I've heard from people I trust how toxic EA like communities can end up from an ostensibly good aim.

But I'm also disappointed by "Haha! Utilitarianism has these flaws so lets completely dismiss it." If everyone is nice, but only ever helps people they can physically see at the time, does that form a perfect society with no flaw? Really really? Or do ALL ethical systems have flaws, and you need to consider multiple approaches including utilitarianism?

I mean, yes, if someone is saying "utilitarianism is the answer to everything and you never need to consider anything else", then you can prove them wrong by pointing out one (1) case where utilitarianism produces a "wrong" answer. But "not what that pers says" doesn't help anyone decide what TO do. Ideally people would actively help, not just knock down every suggestion that isn't perfect.

Re: It’s called effective altruism – but is it really the best way to do good?

[andrewducker]

Yeah, the perfect is the enemy of the good, and all that.

[danieldwilliam]

I shall be interested to see how the South Australian grid gets on with its new battery support which should reduce the difficulties of managing large drop offs and cut ins of wind.

I'm ever more interested to see how Tesla etc get on on Puerto Rico.

[andrewducker]

Hopefully well. It's appalling how Puerto Rico has been treated.

[danieldwilliam]

I'm not sure I really understand the relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States.

I mean, I understand the constittutional position but not the emotional relationship.

[nojay]

The Australian Tesla battery is not the world's "biggest", not by a long chalk. NGK has had a battery farm with double the capacity (245MWh) of the Tesla battery running alongside a small wind farm in Rokkasho in Japan for nearly a decade now, but it's not a Musk project and not promoted heavily by the tech press so it probably doesn't count.

NGK's battery tech is based on sodium-sulphur electrochemistry rather than lithium and they're more expensive per MWh but they should, I repeat should last decades in operation unlike lithium-based batteries. NGK may have solved the "bursting into flames" problem that bedevilled their first-gen Na-S batteries. Lithium tech is good for mobile operation but its advantage of high capacity per kilogram is not much use in static operations such as backing up intermittent solar and wind generation.

[andrewducker]

Yeah - the coverage of the Tesla battery started being reported accurately as "Biggest Lithium Ion Battery", and then various places just knocked off the "Lithium Ion" bit as being too technical for the audience.

I'm feeling quite hopeful about the various battery solutions being worked on at the moment.

[danieldwilliam]

Elon Musk does have a certain genius for cornering the market in publicity.

I'm not entirely sure all his business ventures are as much of a shoe-in as they are generally considered.

I think where he's going with the industrial scale storage is that he expects to have large volumes of used lithium-ion batteries returned to him as part of his car business which can be refurbished and sold again at a lower spec as part of a static storage array.

You are, or course, entirely correct about industrical scale static storage not benefiting much from very good energy density by volume or mass. Lifespan is a more important consideration.

I think that the cheapest energy supply and storage model might well turn out to be turning excess solar PV in to natural gas and then re-burning that but we'll know more in ten years once the biggest shifts in cost have happened.

Effective altruism

[anef]

I work with charities, and let me assure you, they want your money. They also want whatever else you can give them, in the way of volunteering, campaigning, fund-raising etc. But they could not function without donors. Most of the charities that I work with are not run by fluffy headed idealists but by money focused realists who want to squeeze the best value out of every pound that you give them. So I can't see a contradiction in what this group of donors is doing. At the end of the day charity is all about the best allocation of resources to improve the lives of the beneficiaries. The money is crucial.

Re: Effective altruism

[andrewducker]

Absolutely.

And people have causes they feel emotionally attached to - but even then they mostly want to take the most effective approach to them.