FakeComments

> In the unlikely event that Congress or the Whitehouse take an interest in HN moderation, I'll be happy to share with them how we approach this.

“I’m doing the same things that triggered Congressional and Presidential investigations, and plan to continue until they harass me directly.”

You’re such an upstanding member of society.

I sincerely hope they do investigate you, because I believe your authoritarian censorship has infected other technology websites, and is the place many people at Google et al learned to censor for “civility”.

The exact thing that is under investigation.

And to anyone who feels silenced by dang, I suggest you reach out to your congressional representatives — and report the instances of censorship for narrative control you observe. This is an issue, and dang’s pretenses aside, it is being investigated as a serious social problem.

It’s time to standup to leftwing bullies silencing people who don’t agree as “offensive”, because those same leftwing bullies devolve into angry shouting when confronted by opposing views.

I see you’re still censoring to shape the narrative and silence wrongthink discussions.

Have you considered you’re not in the right, when both Congress and the Whitehouse have investigated social media censorship?

Given your comment about the two words in Finnish, I think the comment about comic cons has it backwards:

> “If someone says we are playing, it strips away everything we made, it strips away the reality,” said Ms. Aarniomaki.

She’s objecting to being compared to comics instead of soccer, hence “the reality” being stripped — you’re accusing what they view as akin to gymnastics as being mere fantasy.

They don’t have to search for it, but they do have to provide any exonerating evidence they discover in the course of their investigation.

That’s part of “discovery”, and cases have been thrown out because prosecutors concealed exculpatory evidence from the defense.

Again, I wish you would admit to ideological censorship:

You’re simply using etiquette as a guise for people who don’t want to have an honest discussion about the relevant philosophy (or in this case, the actual logic involved in the inference) to shut it down in favor of group think.

This problem is so widespread among the tech community, Congress is talking about it.

Just look at how fast this was downvoted and flagged — the point is to silence wrongthink.

Censorship for etiquette has always been used as a tool of political coercion — and I simply don’t take your vague claims I broke decorum, which always target one side of a sensitive issue, seriously.

You can absolutely use your power in your fiefdom; but you can’t use it to make me not talk honestly about issues — only remove me.

You’re just a political thug, who doesn’t like honest, blunt language.

Show me.

Ed:

There’s hundreds of comments like this without a peep, because they’re rightthink:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19763553

You get hired to be the subject matter expert on economic models, then you remind executives who consult with you that their plans don’t get better just by adding computers (or fancy math of any form).

Eventually, even when you get fired because they tired of you being a nag, you write down all the times your nagging was right, and someone else hires you to be the math nag, because corporations have accepted they need them — even if they’ll also eventually fire you for being right.

There’s easier ways to make money with the same skill set.

The return from a REIT is negative when property values collapse due to social breakdown.

I want long term growth on a multi decade scale, ergo, I have to take lower immediate returns to support the ecosystem which generates those returns.

Your view is myopic, not perfectly rational.

And is an example of what goes wrong with hill climbing algorithms: local gradients can lead to globally unwanted outcomes.

I’ve made a career out of going “a bad business plan + computers is still a bad business plan”.

It’s not just Google.

I completely agree that surprising users is always a problem, precisely for the reasons you state.

I just hoped to give a better idea of how it came to be people who (in my biased experience) are thoughtful about user privacy, ended up bringing together a data set users were uncomfortable with:

Of course the team reviewing responses needs to see the user context!

Whoops.

I agree — race and culture are very different things.

That’s why it’s only meaningful to draw these conclusions once you control for cultural variation.

No one has shown that they drew conclusions based on race: they drew conclusions based on written words, which correlated with race. The claim is that this demonstrates racial discrimination.

However, an equally valid explanation is culture as a confounding variable correlated with both race and hiring, and which is the actual causative factor.

My point is that no one has shown this is hiring based on race, because the only things being judged are cultural artifacts. It’s merely presumed that anything correlated with race is inherently racist, when that’s not true.

No one has even remotely tried to address that, including yourself, preferring to merely assume it’s racism or special pleading like “well, there is some correlation — but without doing the math, I know that can’t be it!”

(All these same point apply to sexism.)

The reason a human reviewer needs that information is to troubleshoot the response.

1. Customer makes a request that requires location — “Alexa, what’s the weather?”

2. Alexa gets the response wrong — “A turkey is a flightless bird.”

3. You flag that as incorrect in the application.

4. An Amazon employee reviews that flagged response, and needs to figure out how Alexa misinterpreted — did she mishear you? ...is your location data malformed, so that interpretation was discarded? etc.

I don’t see how Amazon employees can troubleshoot the Alexa application without both reviewing the audio files and the contextual information provided.

Disclaimer: at one point, I reviewed security for Alexa teams. I no longer work there, my opinions are my own, etc.

Sure, my point is why does that matter?

The correlation with ice hockey could be a career relevant detail because of correlation with discipline and pain tolerance. If it tracks all such signals, I don’t see the problem.

That it also has a circumstantial correlation with races isn’t inherently problematic — it could be that different groups of people are differently qualified.

There seems to be a position that culture is uncorrelated to job success, and that’s just nonsense. When people can show me these biases are correlated to race or sex once controlling for culture, then we have a problem.

Nope, I’m suggesting the change in the trend of race relations is due to affirmative action and other instances of modern institutional racism: it was on a 120-140 year upswing, then started crashing.

I also didn’t meant allocate them specifically to women: women should compete for new board seats, and based on the trends prior to sexist policies being implemented, that alone should be enough for discover equilibrium in a few generations — no need to randomly discriminate to force the result you believe should occur.

That static state of your game is purely an artifact of the game and doesn’t correspond to the real world in any meaningful analogy, because there’s other forces on movement than your unhappiness with the racial composition of your neighbors — why would I support you enacting bigoted policies based on what is literally toy fiction?

All that game concludes is if people aren’t biased, they won’t move because of their neighbors; but if they are, they will. Duh, you built that into the model.

That you’re putting that forward as a serious argument is genuinely frightening.

Also, you should be more specific what you mean by “break down power structures”, what specifically would that look like and what specifically do you mean by “power structures”?

Board seats are literally not a zero sum game: we can make more in any of several ways.

It troubles me that you’re factually mistaken on basic things like that — new board seats come into existence literally daily, to which every indication shows women are free to compete — but expect me to take your arguments seriously that we should institute bigotry at the highest levels.

No, get your facts straight first.

You’re also trying to respond to empiric failures in the real world with parables and abstract highly simplified models, which is somewhat silly: the decayed state of gender and race relations in the US and elsewhere is due to the sexist and racist policies enacted to “fix” things, and somewhere between 1990 and 2000 started stepping backwards decades of progress, with the situation the worst it’s been in a generation by 2020. Forcing the final steps of integration has been shown time and again to foster generation-scale resentment and undermine healing, particularly through forcing every interaction to be viewed through the lens of base racial or gender tribes. It literally teaches people to be bigots all over again.

A rotten tree bears rotten fruits: I don’t believe you can cause a good outcome through institutional bigotry, and I challenge you to show me it works. It’s certainly been tried enough it should have produced positive results — show me those, and not a cheap game.

Also, yes, merely removing bias in a dynamic system that shows a strong reversion to the mean on generational scales is enough to remove historical bias within just a few generations — a fact that comes directly from analysis of system dynamics and differential equations. Notice that if you drop the bias below 10%, there’s absolutely no problem — it just sort of wanders over long time periods.

To me, you merely seem a fiddler: someone who knows very well that debiasing works on the 3-4 generation scale, you’re just not willing to wait a century because you believe you’re smart enough to use evil for good, and are willing to risk sure progress based on that belief.

I think that’s reckless and immoral.

Reckless because you’re endangering something important — the fixing of gender and race relations in society; and immoral because you’re knowingly doing harm and discriminating, out of some very strange logic that’s making the world “better”.

Your model also has massive failures as a mechanism to explain social situations: it doesn’t, for instance, explain why Asian immigrants have thrived. Were the interned and destitute Japanese incomparably better off than other groups? If not, how does your model explain their recovery and integration compared to other groups?

What the puzzle actually seems to say is that if people have a preference you don’t like, you feel entitled to overrule them because you know better, and your global vision for society is better than the emergent one from individual choices. (The conclusions really seem oriented around forcing people to integrate when their natural tendencies would have them live in more or less homogeneous clusters.)

It’s tyranny gussied up with math: look at how if people have wrongthink preferences, we need to overrule them via force and targeted discrimination for the greater good!

How about we just don’t pass sexist laws because we’ve somehow told ourselves that this particular instance of institutional sexism is okay?

We’re already having enough trouble getting people to accept Title IX protects male students, after 40 years of females being the majority in student populations.

I’m not nearly as optimistic about the outcome of intentional sexism as you.

There’s other efforts, like the UniMath project by the HoTT people.

https://github.com/UniMath/UniMath

The point is that you might have multiple aspects of valid time:

    SELECT person AS OF t1 FROM upstream AS OF t2

Which reconstructs the view that our upstream source would have constructed for a particular time (t1) from its perspective at a different time (t2).

    JOIN event_feed_1 AS OF t1 AND event_feed_2 AS OF t2

There’s various reasons you need to offset the comparison of two event feeds, such as their clocks not matching.

Yes, but that’s not being realistic.

1% of 1 million people is 10,000 people, who will be roughly half kids and young adults — the heirs.

So you’re talking 0.00008% of the wealth being passed down, roughly. That’s still pretty unequal in a society with a lot of people, but I’m also not sure smashing any granule of accumulated wealth leads to a vibrant society — the inter generational transfer of structures is essential for culture.

Capitalism is fundamentally just highly mobile aristocracy, though — and that may be the best we can do.

In even the classic theory, when the Swartzchild radius of the gravitational wavelet exceeds its width, wouldn’t it naturally form a black hole and end up a cusp?

Like a gravity Kugelblitz.

Isn’t the structural signal of autism often an underconnection in the brain?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21378114

I agree that it’s more likely ADHD would respond, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t use overdriving to show an underconnected brain how to synchronize in a more neurotypical manner.

People aren’t entitled to commit cyber crimes, just because it’s a convenient way to pay the bills.

So far as I can tell, this was Facebook exceeding authorized access to a computer system — at scale. If you or I did this, we’d be looking at felony charges.

Can you point to a solution besides giving them shelter and just sort of tolerating it?

I mean, there’s different mechanisms for shelter — family, public housing, NGOs, etc, and we can talk about how to tweak those knobs as a culture — but I can’t think of what else cultures have done, besides various levels of housing people who just want to float.

That doesn’t require infinite length, just indeterminate length and more than a single round (on average, or with certain rate).

And I’m not sure that it doesn’t apply to the case where:

A) You can’t determine when the game will end, and

B) There’s very often several rounds.

That seems to cover “society”, in a broad sense.

Do you actually need more than the previous round or two of actions to utilize the be-kind-until-crossed strategy?

I’m not sure it requires perfect information, just accurate recent information.

Isn’t penalizing players who breach etiquette what separates games from fights?

I’ve literally never understood that idea, because it’s antithetical to what separates games from genuine conflict: adherence to social norms during contests.

Lying to make a sale is known as fraud, and “against the rules”, so to speak: enforcing that isn’t “hating the player”, it’s “protecting the game”.

Okay — and just to be clear, there’s nothing problematic to me about simplifying assumptions or effective theories.

Both are important tools for making predictions tractable.

But when we lose sight of what are conclusions, what are strongly justified assumptions, and what are simplifying assumptions we don’t have justification for (or even know to be untrue), we begin to create fundamentally inaccurate models or wrongly shut down others’ avenues of inquiry.

This happens in economics and business quite often, but simplifying assumptions become orthodox truth with surprising frequency in hard sciences like physics, as well.

Because the US is engaged in a strategic struggle with China over ideological dominance and influence on world events.

You can see the conflict spanning the South China see to trade relations and economic investment to accusations both directions of misconduct in technology manufacturing.

China has been getting more aggressive due to perceived US weakness, and this kind of PR is part of a multi-pronged US response. As are increased prosecutions for financial crimes and kicking up a fuss over the trade deal.

That’s not what I was asking.

I was asking about the particular usage of the average null energy condition as justification to rule out wormholes: why isn’t that just begging the question by assuming your conclusion? and how does that particular assumption actually lead to the conclusion there can’t be wormholes?

It’s interesting the downvotes for asking someone to support a scientific claim, and be clear where they’re making assumptions versus reaching empirical conclusions.

There’s never been anything like the mass psyops of the past 100 years, and it’s not clear that such toxic memetic behavior can coexist with society. We’ve only seen three generations of impact, but it seems the deleterious effects are outpacing our ability to adapt.

It’s possible PR will trigger a memetic mass extinction event.

I’d encourage people here who work in marketing, public relations, or social media to seriously consider the systemic effects of what they’re doing.

You don’t really explain how the assumption leads to the conclusion — and I’m left with the impression you used many words to say “they just assumed you can’t”.

Could you elaborate?

Edit:

Looking into energy conditions further, they are literally assumed restrictions on the equations because physicists felt some predictions were unphysical.

I’d really like if someone could explain if there’s any justification to what I was responding to beyond “well, because we assumed it should work that way”.

I think it behooves the physics community to be honest which claims are conclusions and which are their assumptions, and the specific reasoning that leads from assumption to conclusion.