If they actually made that policy, that they will buy any <500k widget that promises the world, then I bet the market could churn out pseudoscience at astonishing rates.
The market already churns out an astonishing amount of pseudoscience. You don't need any special policies from big corporations for that. Magical thinking is one of those human things that seems to be deeply ingrained and requires sustained effort, practice, and training to avoid. Science and scientific thinking does not happen on its own. No one is born a scientist.
>The classical problem is more or less designed to be a utilitarian thought experiment. Are you willing to be actively unethical for a greater ethical action?
That may be what it is designed to do. But maybe the design is flawed, and it doesn't actually test that? Maybe when you ask random people on the street (or undergrads or whatever) this question, all those details that you don't want to matter, turn out to have a big effect.
From what it looks like, basically full control of the browser by anyone that can manage to I personate the addons.mozilla.org. and that the fix wasn't expected or understood in the sept 4th nightly release. there's probably going to be a bigger investigation of this problem from what I'd expect because of that.
Rather than resizing to 320x240, pick that number of pixels randomly. For even better results use some method of variance reduction e.g. divide the screen into n squarish rectangles and pick N/n pixels from every rectangle.
> Moreover, there are only two algorithms you can't game - one that perfectly addresses and solves explicit and implicit aspects of the problem (impossible in practice), and one that is perfectly random.
The first one is ungameable by definition. Also practically impossible to make by the very same definition - for one, we always work with imperfect information, but moreover, humans are damn good at redefining the rules of the game on the fly.
The second one follows the principle of American Army - "If we don't know what we are doing, the enemy certainly can't anticipate our future actions". A purely random selection cannot be gamed directly because it doesn't change its behavior in response to external input. However, it certainly can be meta-gamed; e.g. some people could take advantage from the very fact such algorithm is used in the first place. This circles back to the same point I made about the "perfect" algorithm - humans are just too damn good at metagaming.
Still - my primary point was that a) humans are a gameable algorithm too, and b) humans are pretty low-hanging fruit as algorithms go. We can, and should, do better.
I believe the two cases are provided (perfect algorithm and random algorithm) exhaust the list of ungameable ones (though they're still meta-gameable).
Sure, and if the quorum consists of 6 members, and you managed to undermind 3 of them by making sure they're fed the same custom shadow content, you'll have a split.
