Not really. (a) People hate responding to surveys and hate emails, you're more likely to lose users than to get data (b) there's no way you're surveying people's in a way that gets you information like "time spent on a page" or "time between commits" or whatever.
This is just nonsense tbh. Surveys and customer outreach solve completely different problems from analytics.
I agree you can't practically get the same information as you could with telemetry.
Survey data is still real data that can be used for "analytics".
Some people also hate telemetry. It feels invasive. I have a guess about what direction the percentage of consumers who hate telemetry is moving toward.
I'm not taking a side on whether a product should add telemetry. I'm rejecting the absurd notion that these suggestions are at all giving the same information.
Side comment: |> and %>% aren't the same btw! The newish base pipe (|>) is faster but doesn't support using the dot (.) placeholder to pipe into something other than the first argument of a function, which can sometimes make things a little cleaner.
The base pipe has an underscore as a placeholder. From the docs:
Usage:
lhs |> rhs
Arguments:
lhs: expression producing a value.
rhs: a call expression.
Details:
[...]
It is also possible to use a named argument with the placeholder
‘_’ in the ‘rhs’ call to specify where the ‘lhs’ is to be
inserted. The placeholder can only appear once on the ‘rhs’.
I believe this wasn't added in the initial implementation of the base pipe so some didn't realize it got included later, and still does not let you use constructs like e.g. combining multiple transformations of the input on the rhs. But for most purposes it's certainly sufficient
If you force something major and permanent on somebody without their consent for no good reason, of course it would be evil. It would be evil to force somebody gay to be straight and it would be evil to force somebody straight to be gay, that has nothing to do with the goodness or badness of being straight or gay. Hair dye is temporary.
All of the arguments in this thread seem to be treating this research's outcome as deleting a person, and applying a corresponding moral judgement thereto. But it is not!
I personally find that choosing to not have a child with Down Syndrome by engineering away the possibility in advance is no worse than choosing not to have a child at all, and better than aborting a viable but affected fetus, because no life is ended. I am not a murderer for choosing not to have any child at all because I feel that my genes should not be imposed on another generation, and I am not a Nazi for saying that if I had a child, I would take any available humane steps to ensure it received the best subset of genetic material from the set available to it. I would, in fact, argue that leaving the creation of a whole person who will have to experience life for 80 years to a series of genetic coin flips is morally reprehensible. Just because we've always done it that way doesn't make it desirable or humane. I welcome this development.
All analogies are flawed and I think you’re taking the wrong message here.
If doctors gave mothers a vaccine that prevented down syndrome, at a high level, that would be the same as putting an anti-down syndrome drug in the water supply.
The point of the example is not about whether putting things in the water supply is good or bad.
It could be true because their surrounding/family... would take care better of them than the average person, that I might understand, but still, it's really a stretch.
can you really say you're happy with something when you don't know what life without it looks like? You adapt. You make peace with it. That's human nature. Doesn't mean it's the best option.
People with legs are objectively superior to people born without legs. This doesn't imply those without have no value but it would be pretty silly to deliberately bring people into the world without legs if you could easily prevent or fix the problem
If you start with hypothetical demographic groups A and B that are for all intents and purposes exactly identical, but you implement a system such that if A commits a crime they have a 10% chance of being caught and if B commits a crime they have a 50% chance of being caught, you will achieve the following:
1. More short-term crime prevention than a system catching 10% of A's crimes and 10% of B's crimes (good!)
2. Enforce a societal belief that A is intrinsically better than B (bad!)
3. Disproportionately burden children, families, and communities in B than A, causing them to indeed perform worse in everything than those in A (bad!)
4. As a result of 2 & 3 it is not a stretch to say simply causing B to do more actual crime (potentially negating point 1 entirely)
If you believe that crime enforcement is not for the sake of vengeance but instead something done to improve the well-being, safety, and happiness of citizens, you may see that inequality=bad just as crime=bad. How to best solve this trolley problem is complicated but it's important that people are aware that it is complicated before firing off an answer.
Most crime is intra-racial. Group A will do better over time, with fewer people becoming victims of crime, if it is subject to better policing, because more of the malevolent actors within it will be incarcerated or deterred from engaging in (mostly intra-racial) predatory behavior.
That is only part of the equation. You may be removing more malevolent actors in the immediate short term, but depending on how that policing is done, you might also be creating more malevolent actors too. Overpolicing a group can create distrust between the community and the police. Once you feel the system does not care about you or treats you unfairly, there is little reason for why you should care about it. And if P(Caught|Group X) != P(Caught), the system is treating you unfairly.
I would argue we as society don't want crime to stop simply for the sake of crime stopping (or for prison labor), but ultimately because we want to feel happy and safe from harm and unjust treatment. The systems we design need to factor in the humanness of the police and their communities and make sure they are not set up in a way that loses sight of that bigger picture.
I am about to complete my PhD focused on unsupervised learning method development and application to large biological data. I have an MSc in experimental neurology and a BSc in chemistry (specialized in quantum/computational chemistry). I am very proficient with R and maintain a package on CRAN used by multiple research groups for clustering clinical patient data. I have a strong foundation in math and statistical learning theory. I'm open to applying my data analysis / statistics / technical writing skills just about anything (in Canada).
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