No you have an equal number of options (minor and major are effectively transpositions/rotations...e.g. the chord progressions are "m dim M m m M M" for minor (m-minor, M-major, dim-diminished) chord progression, vs "M m m M M m dim" for major).
The post is likely getting to the point that, for english-speaking/western audiences at least, you are more likely to find songs written in C major, and thus they are more familiar and 'safer'. You _can_ write great songs in Em, but it's just a little less common, so maybe requires more work to 'fit into tastes'.
EPOC only accounts for something like 60 additional calories burned in the next 24 hours...unless there is something unexplained going on, it's _greatly_ overblown how significant this actually is
...but it sounds sciencey and sexy so it's often repeated.
...that's not really an illustration of that. When you actually consider population and land size, the numbers don't seem so strange.
Just looking at wikipedia population and area (and a very simple scaling)
% area housing = area_house * population
So...
aus 0.08%
nz 0.42%
us 1.82%
can 0.08%
uk 2.14%
The UK has comparably _more_ of it's land covered with housing than the other nations mentioned.
When you consider population density, UK >> US >> NZ > Canada > Australia.
You would _expect_ countries with much more wide open space to have bigger homes, and the other nations homes aren't so big _when you consider their countries' size and population_.
it's not only the area of land but the material's used in the housing, as well as when the housing where built.
The stagnation in other countries housing markets like the us is interesting, I don't know the answer but have they ever had social housing on the scale of the uk?
The parent linked to a subsection showing usage for a particular object. If you click back into the root level for the document there is a header specifying ‘syntax’, and other more ‘package-level’ documentation
I think describing it as 'fake' is rather antagonistic. You could just as easily say 'poor quality' or 'unjustified'. I would say that more accurately describes the situation.
It could be...
- unjustified and sloppy (not 'fake', but also not considered reliable evidence)
- unjustified and malicious (this i would consider 'fake')
- unjustified and gamed (again, 'fake')
- ...or just unjustified and under-specified (and would result in 'true' results if the conditions for replication were better studied and defined)
Lots of people like to think themselves smart for following 'first principles'...and then often end up falling in the same ditches. First principles + received wisdom is a bit of a contradiction... if it's 'wisdom' rather than evidence, you are skipping your principles to go with the received starting point...
The problem is, that as soon as a paper is published in a peer reviewed journal, it can be used to justify public policy positions. Then a large number of people will points to the study, or even worse, to press characterizations of what a person thinks the study says, to support their preference on the public policy position. Immediately, anyone who has an alternate position on the public policy will be accused of being a “science denier.”
Almost no one is interested in having an honest discussion about whether or not the original paper actually says what it’s characterized to have said, and whether it was a good study in the first place.
So nowadays, when public policy is concerned, largely I disregard any scientific study that is introduced to support any position on the policy, and just do my own cost – benefit trade-off to determine my policy position.
This is a problem with the journalism and politics, it's not really about science. No scientist would trust a result that depends on a single small sample paper. Those are just stepping stones that may justify further research for more robust evidence. This fact is quite clear to scientist and it's why most would discourage the general public (including smart engineers) from reading academic articles.
But in general, I agree with you. It's ridiculous when someone pretends to shut down a complex issue by citing a random paper. However, an expert can still analyze the whole academic literature on a topic and determine what the scientific consensus is and how confident we are about it.
When I checked how people were citing these useless papers, almost invariably it would be in a sentence like this:
"Computational modelling is a useful technique for predicting the course of epidemics [1][2][3][4][5]"
The cited papers wouldn't actually support the statement because they'd all be unvalidated models, but citing documents that don't support the claim is super common and doesn't seem to bother anyone :( Having demonstrated a "consensus" that publishing unvalidated simulations is "useful", they would then go ahead and do another one, which would then be cited in the same way ad infinitum.
I disagree. A scientist could read a single paper and find out n is small, or identify a flaw.
But there are loads of papers like this.
Then you have some literature studies which look at all these papers together and get result aggregates.
Then you get some “proper” studies which link to these aggregates, and several small studies, and you’re going to read these “proper” studies which are quoted often and deemed decent or good quality.
And at no point will you realise it’s all based on shoddy foundations.
This is for example what recently happened in social psychology
You say you do a cost:benefit...but where do those costs come from? To me, that's just voluntarily doing your own ignorant, sloppy science I was mentioning above. If you only consider the blatantly obvious costs and benefits, you are completely ignorant of any 2nd or 3rd order...or even your own blind spots. You may radically under or overstate, or even calculate in the wrong direction.
I think a better position is that we should have a higher bar of what level of study or replication is required for a given situation...whether that be health, housing, infrastructure or whatever policy is coming in...what kind of monetary outlay and timeline of impact is expected. I don't think most people here would be happy with a 6-person study, unreplicated, deciding policy...so what IS the threshold?
I don’t analyze the papers, I analyze the policies.
Take the climate. Assuming the science is correct (storms worse, oceans rising, etc), let’s do a cost benefit analysis of the proposed policies.
The proposed policies in the US all dramatically increase the cost of energy (and therefore of everything), but only slightly slow the progression of warming, AND the bigger contributing countries in the developing world, esp China and India, will continue or increase their CO2 output.
We already know how to build dikes, and people who buy oceanfront property already know the risks, and over the last century we as a species have gotten really good as reducing deaths due to weather, so I don’t support the draconian carbon reduction proposals, and instead we can just deal with the side effects as they arise.
But how do you analyze the policies without doing science? Nothing in the above is sound to me.
"The proposed policies in the US all dramatically increase the cost of energy" - why? How do you even begin to conclude this without looking at some sort of (economic/scientific) analysis?
"only slightly slow the progression of warming" - again, how are you concluding this?
"we as a species have gotten really good as reducing deaths" - why should this trend continue? Why should it continue in the face of more extreme weather/climate change?
All I see are things you _think_ are true, and so to you your argument seems sound. But as the comment you replied to said, all I see is ignorant, sloppy science, since any meaningful analysis of these policies is by definition science. These cost/benefits you mention are not universal apparent truths.
I’m don’t need to analyze any scientific paper to form an opinion on a matter of policy; what scientific paper should I read to decide whether to support an increase on property tax in my county to support schools? The idea that I have to defer my judgment to someone in a lab coat is insulting.
As to your other questions, the answer to all (which any trivial web search would answer as I did) is “I can read”.
And I didn’t “cherry pick” some particular study or some blog that supports my preconceptions. All of the links I have provided are from sources that assume severe climate change is coming without serious interventions in greenhouse gas emissions; they are all on the “climate activist” side.
And of course now I’m being down voted for my example.
I never challenged a single point of climate orthodoxy; I never questioned whether global warming was occurring, whether it was man-made, whether the studies and models predict warming accurately, or whether the impact will be as stated. I stipulated every single one of those points. But simply my personal conclusion that I don’t believe the policy trade-off is worth it, means that my voice is not worth hearing.
From my perspective, I don't think I ever see "the science" being decided based on a single crap paper, so it seems a bit of a skeptical straw man. Perhaps that's different in your country, state, city, county, continent, island. Perhaps that's true for a particular policy _area_ that you are invested in. In general, I find arguments on scarequotes "science" often overblown and just reinforcing existing biases.
How much 'policy' are you happy with that you've never checked to validate that it was properly replicated beforehand? How much of your skepticism is against "the science" on new policy you start with an initial dislike to...compared to policy that we consider as standard, are probably comfortable with, likely consider to be 'beneficial enough'...and yet haven't adequately scrutinized?
And sometimes the opportunity window for studying a thing is just closed forever. Unique events are unique. That strange meteorite will not return until 300 years, or the species used in the experiment split in two, making impossible to duplicate it.
Fake is a good word. "unjustified and sloppy" is fake to me. We have different definitions of fake and shouldn't get hung up on definitions. My last word on it is I should be antagonistic against people who are deciding what goes in my son's school lunch based off of "unjustified and sloppy" studies.
First principles + received wisdom are counter balancing, not contradicting. Everything in life is a balance.
Definitions matter when it comes discussion, as what you say influences how people feel on a topic. Broad, non-specific definitions leave a lot of space for bias rather than clarity.
If you describe it as 'fake', I consider that to give the impression of 'the answer is NOT' this, and could lead to anti-policy.
If the description is 'unjustified and sloppy', that can lead to additional research to properly invalidate or potentially find something useful, so we don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Nothing is _ever_ certain or completely specified in science (or elsewhere)... and society is going to move forward, so what level of 'evidence' is sufficient for you? This is going to come across as antagonistic, but...what's the alternative? "The argument that science should be trusted is insane..." ... so are we expected to twiddle our thumbs and do nothing for the rest of time?
I'm assuming you trust at some point? Have you ever flown? We have theory, we have evidence, and a high level of _justified true belief_ (to refer to recent HN posts) for how flight works, but perhaps all _these_ replications are just fortuitous and 'fake'? We 'trust' Newtonian physics enough for society to _act_ and _progress_ ... and then we quantum comes along.
>so what level of 'evidence' is sufficient for you?
Enough evidence such that no evidence to the contrary can stand.
We agree that liquid water is wet because we can't find anything (yet) that says liquid water is not wet, it's simple as that and science is ultimately as simple as that.
>Have you ever flown?
Yup, I'm a frequent flyer actually and fly more or less every month or two for business (and pleasure once the business is done, but that part's a secret).
>We agree that liquid water is wet because we can't find anything (yet) that says liquid water is not wet, it's simple as that and science is ultimately as simple as that.
I find this a weird example of something that has "Enough evidence such that no evidence to the contrary can stand."
"Water is wet" is a definition, not a scientific finding/description.
"Water tends to adhere to, and penetrate, materials." That's sort of a scientific finding.
"We call this condition wet" isn't so much.
Science, by Popper's definition, is something that can be falsified but has not yet been so. If no evidence could contradict our current findings then, by definition, our current findings are not falsifiable.
I realize that I'm quibbling about definitions, I guess I just want to point out that your level of evidence is dangerously close to being a self reinforcing tautology. Similar to how any religion justifies itself.
The point is that our agreement is merely the result of there being no other conclusion as far as we are aware, and to expand our awareness we must be skeptical of our conclusions in perpetuity.
This is why trusting science is insane, because if you trust something you stop questioning it and if you stop questioning then you never know if it's true or false.
>Science, by Popper's definition, is something that can be falsified but has not yet been so. If no evidence could contradict our current findings then, by definition, our current findings are not falsifiable.
I'm going to ignore that you just defined "current findings" as not science, since I presume that wasn't what you intended.
...and you seem to have quickly conflated habit with *addiction*.
It could be a valid point to bring up, but being combative/aggressive with it doesn't benefit the conversation. You could word it as something "perhaps some people need to question if something is a bad habit, or if they are addicted...", rather than calling parent 'ridiculously naive'
This seems a semantic carving of the discussion to match the argument though.
> Person 1: Just stop it. Want harder.
> Person 2: I can't.
> Person 1: Well, you have an addiction then, not just a bad habit; my point was about habits.
If we grant this: then the great-grandparent's response fails to inform us of anything beyond merely how we choose to define words. The advice works until it doesn't, which is tautologically true but not useful.
You seem to have taken the message 'want harder' from the original comment.
I took the original comment as question if you actually want the habit or are just doing it out of social or self pressure, or just for the sake of 'that seems like a good thing'.
Emphasising that you are free to drop habits, rather than pressuring yourself to achieve something that you might not really want.
I don't think the parent's advice is anything to do with "just try harder"...I think he's saying that we try to create habits for things we don't really care about...just stuff we think we should do for productivity or health or whatever.
You don't need to 'try harder'; you need to question your motivation for the habit in the first place. Either a thought will click that clarifies why a habit is actually important, or you'll realise you are pressuring yourself to take on a habit that doesn't really matter to you (when you strip away the bullshit)
edit: and if the importance finally clicks for you, you'll generally just start working on the habit. I struggled with weight for years, and then eventually motivation/understanding clicked and I lost 6stone/40kg/90lb in around 18 months (and have lost a little more since, and kept it off for years).
"Just try harder" is not the follow up to "You don't want it bad enough."
Sometimes you just have to accept that you don't want it. And that at some point the time will come when you will want it bad enough, like it did for you.
For vim/neovim users you can use digraphs, where you press `<C-k>` followed by a 2-character code to get a symbol (see `:help digraphs` and `:help digraph-table`).
For example,
<C-k> -> gives →
<C-k> => gives ⇒
<C-k> d* gives δ (greeks are generally all _letter_*)
<C-k> D* gives Δ
Some of the combinations are a little weird to rememeber, but if you use them regularly then it's easy enough (like greek or arrows).
The post is likely getting to the point that, for english-speaking/western audiences at least, you are more likely to find songs written in C major, and thus they are more familiar and 'safer'. You _can_ write great songs in Em, but it's just a little less common, so maybe requires more work to 'fit into tastes'.
edit: changed 'our' to english/western audiences