The development of self driving cars has resulted in some very valuable progress in robotic understanding of context (your car’s surroundings while driving), but the organic nature of randomness in our world makes completely autonomous systems too risky to permit. The value of such systems as a supplementary safety tool should not be underestimated, but until they can anticipate a child chasing a baseball running into traffic from a sub grade side of a street (from between two parked SUVs) while the autonomous vehicle is being followed by an overloaded panel truck without causing an accident that an alert human might have anticipated they will never be safe enough.

Can autonomous vehicle technology help make us safer? Absolutely, in fact we should continue to support human drivers by giving them the very best of this tech as backstop against human error, but as a computer scientist I can not imagine risking any child’s life to demonstrate the limits of it’s abilities. Wishful thinking is great for driving innovation, but no human life is worth allowing you to abrogate responsibility for paying attention on your daily commute.

We live in a new and amazing world of information sharing and searching, but that world has magnified the risks of rhetorical deceptions by real-time sharing and feedback to those sharing. Furthermore, the politics of our time have well defined threat words which are intended to shut down the rational thinking parts of the reader or listener’s brain. My intention is to call out visible examples of these triggers, and the associated political agendas, in order to allow people of develop more informed opinions derived from their own understand of the basic facts along with a desire to dig deeper before buying into anyone’s agenda.

Great stuff on tap including:

Environmentalism – What is global warming, and what can be done?

Dating – When apps are so simple why are so many people frustrated?

Skin color & Sex Chromosomes – Is bigotry based on genes still a problem?

Immigration – What are the benefits, risks, and national interests?

But first a word about the elephant in the room: Science

Science is a method to measure the probability of an speculation being consistently quantifiable and verifiable in detail and in part based on the historical body of hard facts painstakingly accumulated and commonly understood based on basic physical evidence.

Science is not a thing or a “belief” or a “truth” or an editorial aggregation of assumptions derived from a compendium of complex hypothesizes to be taken on faith simply by throwing around the terms like “scientists agree”. The reality is that attacking the assumptions behind a hypothesis by reviewing and contesting its basis is the foundation of the modern scientific method. Shouting down informed skepticism regarding a given hypothesis from outside the specific channels of the budgetary and academic pressures including tenure and employment opportunities within the field is a hypocritical attack on science itself consistent with the “scientists agree” attacks leveraged against Copernicus. Furthermore, journalists, including science journalists, have a tendency to go for the most thrilling headline context, proportion, and verifiability be damned.

Anthropogenic Global Warming

Hypothesis: The world’s coastal cities will all be submerged beneath the waves of high tide by 2020 as a result of human caused increases in atmospheric CO2 resulting in complete loss of polar ice from the resulting increase in global atmospheric temperatures.

A very scary hypothesis to be sure, and not one to mess with if the larger scale ideas hold up to skeptical scientific inquiry. Fortunately there is excellent data to consider with respect to these risk factors.

Homework for the reader: 1. Over the past 100 million years has CO2 been a leading or trailing indicator of global temperatures? 2. What is an interglacial cycle, and how do temperatures today compare to the previous 4 cycles in range and degree? 3. How do global CO2 levels today compare to 80 million years ago? 4. How to temperatures today compare to 8 thousand years ago? 5. How might changes in global albedo from any increase in global temperatures affect any warming cycle? 6. What is the cost vs. benefit of investing in specific types of CO2 mitigation at a scale large enough to visibly impact the results on a global scale?

Asking questions is not doubting science… asking questions is science, and everyone should participate in the scientific process… not allowing political bias to intimidate them out of rational inquiry.

Dating

Today’s article – Alert: Orwellian attack on dating apps in progress:
Tinder (OkCupid, Bumble, … etc.) are the foundation for modern dating, and to some extent are based on hoping to see enough to allow for the same judgements we might make in a brief conversation at an in person dating mixer or other opportune meeting context while greatly broadening the field of potential mates. Since these apps are first and foremost about a small number of profile pictures and the associated aesthetic compatibility judgements these picture are the most important “truth” to be offered. There is also an implicit implication of availability for shared dating experiences, but realistically nothing written can account for chemistry nor do any supposed facts represent a factor worthy of consideration in a traditional in person meeting type of context.

Therefore, what is the biggest deception which can be propagated via Tinder? Bogus pictures! If primary pictures are not his/hers, AND/OR are more than 3 years old, AND/OR represent body weight that has changed by more than 15%, AND/OR are all cropped to hide anything above the middle of his/her forehead AND/OR below the center of his/her rib cage, AND/OR his/her face is never visible, AND/OR, he/she is obscured by shadows, AND/OR he/she is too far away from the camera to be properly discerned – then, in addition to being egregiously deceptive, he/she is robbing someone of her/his time… since obviously there would never be a conversation in real life if you look too young, or look too old, or look too far from someones body proportion preferences, or look too far from someones hair type preferences. In fact the one key piece of aesthetic information that can’t be inferred from pictures is height which should therefore also be shared. Beyond that it is reasonable to infer that some type of relationship has the potential to be offered once rapport, conversation, scent, and temperament allow for a more intimate insight into personal connection potential, have the chance to be understood.

Ironically this article doesn’t argue for exposing the people who lie about this very small amount of information that actually matters (honest pictures and height), but rather about things that would make absolutely ZERO difference as to whether or not you might speak to somebody in a bar, supermarket, running club, or anywhere else that you might actually meet someone! In fact it simply gets hung up on details that would be no different if someone were met in person. Furthermore, Tinder and its peers are hookup apps which means that they are used to decide whether or not you might want to be physically intimate with someone potentially as a means to identify romantically compatible mates for an actual dating relationship… at which point one might legitimately be deeply interested in other aspects of a persons life.