CAIR is an American organization established to protect the rights of Muslims in America. The people who work at this organization are, presumably, Americans by and large. So why would an American civil rights group divert its limited resources to something squarely outside its scope, especially when such advocacy would require entirely different, non-overlapping expertise in Moroccan/Turkish/whatever law?
They have a funny way of showing it. Almost all those people will be immigrants, either themselves, or they'll at the very least have family living in muslim countries. Family who'll get arrested when they're protesting their governments or religion.
Yet they really care about free speech ... in America. THAT is where the free speech problem is according to them. Am I really the only one having trouble believing that this is a genuine attitude? Oh and they only defend their version of free speech, with limits on "hate speech" (but not Sami Hamdi's kind of hate speech of course), limits on criticism of religion, and limits on criticizing middle eastern governments. You know, THAT kind of free speech. CAIR, in the US, is really arguing for limits on free speech, "against hate speech", against "islamophobia", against criticism of middle eastern governments, you know limits on the very thing free speech was created for (ie. to protect all criticism of religion and governments, especially foreign ones, but all governments, including the US one)
And who do they invite? Sami Hamdi.
Please go read his twitter stream and tell me if you believe people who hire this guy have any problem with hate speech. Oh and maybe it's just one issue, so filter out the Gaza conflict, and ... nope still hate speech, mostly about the UK. Okay, filter out the UK too. He's defending people who went "on a Jew hunt" in the Netherlands ... This guy is not a moderate in any way shape or form.
I'm sure he'll have made 5 new posts by the time this is read and they'll be another 5 posts inciting at the very least more hatred of Israeli. You may hate Trump, but let's be blunt here: this guy is thankfully powerless, but is easily a LOT worse than Trump.
If you take CAIR's attitude at face value, limits on free speech against hate speech, they'd help deport Sami Hamdi. But clearly this kind of hate speech they don't just want to allow, but protect and nurture.
What I mean is, CAIR really make themselves look really bad here. Really, really, really bad.
Unfortunately, addressing those issues would do little to address the underlying cause: We have many more ways to amuse ourselves compared to a generation ago, most of which require less "reach" for a dopamine hit (social media, netflix, video games, etc).
Just to add some more motivation: in a typical physics undergraduate curriculum, you will spend roughly as much time doing homework as attending lectures. If you skip the exercises, you are quite literally skipping half of the education.
Essentially all of the theory research (specifically, lattice QCD calculations) since the previous white paper in 2020 have been conducted blinded, and at any rate, the deadline to be included in the theory average has already passed. It would take an act of extraordinary brashness to fudge the numbers now.
Since the article doesn't mention it: Ian Tregillis (the first author of the paper and staff scientist at Los Alamos) also moonlights as a sci-fi/fantasy author. Personally I found The Milkweed Triptych a more compelling read than A Song of Ice and Fire, and it also has the benefit of being finished! (Here's a one sentence hook: WWII, except with English wizards fighting Nazi X-Men.)
Well, then don't read it! While that's the most campy distillation of the premise, the writing is anything but. George R.R. Martin himself declared Tregillis "a major new talent".
> If it's 11:55, you would usually mentally subtract and conclude: the meeting is in 5 minutes. But the most probable estimate given the available information is actually 4'30"!
Admittedly I'm being a bit pedantic, but this isn't true. The expectation value might be 4'30", but the time is as likely to be 4'59" as 4'30"; assuming it's 4'30" will simply minimize your expected error.
You might as well have written that mathematicians should stop doing mathematics. If every mathematician were to work full time on formalizing theorems in proof assistants, then no living mathematician would ever do original research again -- there is simply too much that would need to be translated to software. And to what end? It's not as if people suspect that the foundations of mathematics are on the verge of toppling.
> Code is easy to share, easy to collaborate on [...] collaboration is so easy that publishing your 1/2 done work will often prompt others to do some of the tedious stuff
Here's an experiment anyone can try at home: pick a random article from the mathematics arxiv [1]. Now rewrite the main theorem from that paper in Lean [2]. Did you find this task "easy"? Would you go out of your way to finish the "tedious" stuff?
> even horrible code is far better at documenting what it does than what you are describing
The "documentation" is provided by talking to other researchers in the field. If you don't understand some portion of a proof, you talk to someone about it. That is a far more efficient use of time than writing code for things that are (relatively) obviously true. (No shade on anyone who wants to write proofs in Lean, though.)
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