Futurebot

Something about the platform-centric world we're in now is that this sort of attack doesn't have the blocking power it once did: you can mirror your content on Twitter, FB, G+, etc. and cross-link so people can still read your stuff. This makes the "denial" part pretty watered down; it's a wonder people even bother with these sorts of attacks anymore for non-services (i.e., for regular media material like text, photos, etc.)

Of course, maybe the goal is to deny someone ad revenue, but that seems awfully low-status for such a high-profile attack: "Yeah, we really got 'em! Denied 'em AD REVENUE for a whole week!"

Great piece. It's a great example of the dark sides of results-orientation, accountability, transparency, and the fear of punishment from spending "Other People's Money." These things are good, but when they take over the entire process, we've got problems; things need to swing back and settle into a new equilibrium that's more tolerant.

These are exactly the kind of things that governments and universities with large endowments were good at funding. Right now, we're dependent on large corporations like Alphabet subsidizing moonshots to do this kind of basic research (and as some recent articles indicate, investors are already getting antsy about these.)

Short-termism discourages deep thinking and deep working. VCs already understand that one winner subsidizes all the losers; so too is it with basic / speculative research. Until we're will to culturally accept, openly and without reservation, that there will be waste and that fact is OK, we're not going to get anywhere.

The book "The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-first Century" by Jacqueline Olds explores this topic at length. I recommend it to anyone interested in a thorough (and at times, heart-wrenching) treatment of the topic.

Why has cheating become so pervasive? The book "The Cheating Culture" explores this question at length. If you don't want to read the whole book, try this short work by the author: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/p/pod/dod-idx/on-campus-author...

Excerpt:

"It’s also not surprising that winner‐take‐all competition would breed cheating in another area ‐‐ in the classrooms of elite high schools and colleges. These days, even the smart kids who already have everything going for them often cheat to guarantee their success. When I was writing my book, I spent some time looking into the cheating problem at Horace Mann, which is one of the top prep schools in New York City.

Students there are from extremely well off families. In the grand scheme of things, if you’re a student at Horace Mann, you’ve already won the game of life. Paying $20,000 per year for their children to attend, parents of these kids are loaded. And yet cheating is common at the school. Why are the most privileged kids cheating?

There is no single reason why students cheat. But in this case, certainly one reason is the intense desire to be a winner, to get the rewards at the top. The Horace Mann kids are remarkably worldly.

They know what partners at big name investment firms make. They understand just how just big the rewards are if you’re a winner and make it to the very top of American society. Many feel entitled to those rewards. And these students come to believe from early on that a key to being a winner – perhaps the key – is a degree from a prestigious university, the ivy leagues. And some of them will cut whatever corners are necessary to attain that goal.

Now, of course, the obsession with winning is not the only reason people cheat. A lot of people aren’t out to strike it rich or become a big shot. They just want to lead a comfortable and secure life. But increasingly, that is not something one can take for granted, and more people are afraid of falling behind, and not being able to lead that comfortable, secure life. This brings me to a second reason people cheat, which is fear.

Things are tough out there. Jobs are less secure, and even the best white collar jobs are now getting outsourced to China or India, disappearing just like that. 45 million Americans lack health insurance, which makes us unique among advanced nations. We just don’t look out for our fellow citizens like we once did. And a lot of middle class Americans who should be feeling secure are instead feeling anxious. And their kids are growing up around this anxiety. I think there are a lot of young people who go through life, thinking “I better not screw things up. One lost scholarship, one flunked exam, if I take one wrong step, get one blot on my permanent record, I’ll end up living at home for the rest of my life.”

When you make the rewards for being a winner and the concomitant punishments for being a loser so large, don't be surprised when people start cheating en masse.

If you enjoyed this piece, you should read "Planet Loser":

"If you actually want to know why people persist in going to grad school, or trying to be screenwriters or musicians or professional athletes or actors — or, if we’re getting really real about it, journalists and writers, the kind that write for The Atlantic — it’s because our culture insists relentlessly that certain kinds of work have intellectual and aesthetic value, that they are a way to be a Somebody, and also that you never, ever give up on your dreams. There is no message that we deliver to children and adolescents more relentlessly than that they should pursue their dreams with manic focus and unflagging persistence, no matter how hard and often they fail, and that they will be assured of eventual victory. Never, never, never give up. Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right! If you believe it, you can achieve it. Go to a middle school sometime. Look at the posters on the wall. It’s like a one-party state, propaganda of the most ubiquitous and intense variety. When I was a long-term sub at my local junior high I was amazed; it was like some sort of totalitarian reeducation camp, with the purpose being to indoctrinate in all who passed through the doors that failure stems always and only from a lack of nerve."

http://fredrikdeboer.com/2016/04/24/planet-loser/

Lots of good advice so far. I'd add two things:

1) You're already at a top company, so you're way ahead of the game already. You could step down to a less stressful / lower pressure culture company and see if that fits you better. They do exist, and they can be fine if you care about the work and environment more than the prestige. Just having a top four on your resume will may it considerably easier for you to get hired.

2) As above, there are plenty of companies that skip brain teaser type tests (advertising and broadly-defined "digital media" companies are two I have experience with.) Hard technology companies aren't the only option out there; now that software is in every industry, so too are the jobs.

HTH

Gwern has written a good piece on this idea here: http://www.gwern.net/Mistakes?cx=009114923999563836576%3Adv0...

"The Luddite Fallacy Fallacy"

The tragedy of the anti-commons, which is part of what drives all this, necessitates government action over the desires of stakeholders, so while we could avoid "catastrophe," we're unlikely to make every stakeholder involved happy. Things like eminent domain, actual public housing (need to repeal QWHRA), and new policies that support renting (Germany, Singapore, and Austria are great examples of quite varied housing policy that manage to give renters relatively cheap housing.)

Check out the Vienna system:

http://www.governing.com/topics/economic-dev/gov-affordable-...

We'd need a radical cultural change to allow that kind of thing here, but considering how things are going with prices, this is a good time for a real change.

Different sources and countries use different ranges, so where you fall depends on which you consult (for Millenials, some use 1976 as a starting year, others use 1978, and still others use 1980 or 1981.) Some also carve out additional generations (MTV generation / Doom Generation / XY Cusp Generation along with Echo Boomers / Generation McGuire) for people born in the edge years. Here's more:

http://www.esds1.pt/site/images/stories/isacosta/secondary_p...

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2008/04/fin...

The old Wikipedia article on XY Cusp before it got edited:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JCDenton2052/mh5

Excerpt: "The XY Cusp includes those people born in the mid-to-late 1970s and early 1980s. The word XY is used because their generational identity is mixed, uncertain, or deviant from X or Y or both, but do not constitute a separate generational group in themselves. Some place the years between: 1976-1983 [3] [4][5] [6] People born within this group are in parallel situations with people born in between previous generations: Generation Jones between Boomer and X - late 50s, early 60s, (teens of the 70s); between Silents and Boomers - late 30s, early 40s (teens of the 50s); and the Beat generation between G.I. and Silents - late 10s, early 20s (teens of the 30s). They are referred to as Cusper Groups, Transitional Times, or Buffer Zones. John Losey states "If you couldn't neatly place yourself in any of the [generations], then you're probably a Cusper. 1943-1947, 1962-1967 and 1976-1983 are each considered transition times. Many people born during these cusp periods identify with the generations on either side."

There's definitely no single standard.

Also worth read is the Economist's article "An hereditary meritocracy":

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21640316-children-ric...

"Not only do graduate couples tend to value education; they also tend to have money to spend on it. And though the best predictor of an American child’s success in school has long been the parents’ educational level—a factor which graduates are already ahead on, by definition—money is an increasingly important factor. According to Sean Reardon of Stanford the past decades have seen a growing correlation between parental income and children’s test scores. Sort the students who took the SAT, a test for college applicants, in 2014 by parental income and the results get steadily better the further up the ladder you climb."

"And on top of spending on school, there is spending outside it: the gap between what rich and poor parents shell out for museum trips, music lessons, books and so on has been widening (see chart 2). In a world where lots of people do well on SATs, cultivating extra skills matters.

The opportunities for parental investment continue in higher education, which is ever more costly (see chart 3) but offers ever greater returns. Between 1979 and 2012 the income gap between the median family with college-educated parents and one with high-school educated parents grew four times greater than the headline-grabbing income gap between the top 1% of earners and the rest, according to David Autor of MIT, rising from $30,000 to $58,000."

The person who wrote this is a member of the socialist Left. This is a critique of the style among establishment Liberals (who support right-of-center Neoliberal economics / very weak social democracy and social liberalism), not the Left (who support the spectrum of leftist policy from strong social democracy to socialism to communism as well as social liberalism): Mother Jones and Slate, not Jacobin and Dissent. The distinction is extremely important now that the rift between the two is as large as it is.

If you're disgusted with the smugness and support Nordic or Euro style taxation and proper redistribution, then it'd be toward, not away from the Left (not to say there are no smug Actual Leftists, just that they have no voice in our current media.)

The ability to get the best jobs, go to the best schools, live where you want to live, retire while others cannot, and bend the government to your will are all forms of power. The last, in particular, is political power.

From the Princeton study (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/15/government-wealthy-...):

U.S. government policies reflect the desires of the wealthy and interest groups more than the average citizen, according to researchers at Princeton University and Northwestern University.

“[W]e believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened,” write Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page in an April 9 article posted on the Princeton website and scheduled for fall publication in the journal Perspectives on Politics.

“Not only do ordinary citizens not have uniquely substantial power over policy decisions; they have little or no independent influence on policy at all,” the researchers write in the article titled, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens.”

Affluent Americans, however, “have a quite substantial, highly significant, independent impact on policy,” Gilens and Page write. Organized interest groups also “have a large, positive, highly significant impact upon public policy.”

Start with these:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_inequality#Effects

http://rooseveltinstitute.org/stiglitz-why-inequality-matter...

http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21640316-children-ric...

Also read "Twilight of the Elites" to learn about how inequality leads to greater "vertical social distance" and how the government now largely reflects the interests of those at the top (http://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/is-america-an-oli...)

This is hilariously good. Great work

The Left has been calling it out non-stop. In the US, it's establishment liberals (in Europe, they'd mostly qualify as right-of-center) that have been defenders of the status quo.

Take a look at:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/ http://fredrikdeboer.com/published-writing/ https://www.dissentmagazine.org/ http://coreyrobin.com/

Just to start with. There's a huge rift between what's called the Left, and what actually is the Left right now.

Sure, that's probably true. They don't need to listen to him, though; elites do. Then elites, through various mechanisms, need to a) communicate effectively to do those who are now disaffected and more importantly b) create conditions where bigotry (and other forms of exclusion) do not overtake good sense because of economic pressures / scarcity / perceived scarcity.

It certainly won't be overnight, but the sooner they start, the sooner we can start fixing things.

This is probably the best thing Greenwald has ever written. Everyone in (or interested in) media, politics, government, academia, etc. should read it carefully and with a wide open mind. Grappling with this piece, its linked pieces, and Twilight of the Elites should be something that is now done in earnest; this is a chance for elites in other troubled western countries to work on getting ahead of the problem, as they failed to do previously, before it really gets out of hand.

The status quo is a failure, and continued denial will only lead us down an ever-darker road. We need a new way.

It is enormous, no question. If governments and people were serious about it, it could be done, though. I don't think anyone is arguing it would be easy.

You chase everyone out it means:

- Service workers (everything from baristas to cops to teachers) either disappear or have to deal with punishing commutes

- Brain drain. When even people making a decent salary get pushed out, it's bad for cities (http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/05/26/silicon-valley-e...)

- Many people believe living in the place one was born/grew up in should be a right. That's a value difference. Markets do not get to dictate everything if we don't allow that.

Luckily, the market does have a solution to the housing problem itself: build a lot more of it, and prices will drop.

A compromise solution is to give people fully-paid relocation / temporary housing (e.g., putting them up in a hotel room), then guaranteeing them an apartment in the new housing development at their old price. Very small price to pay for a potentially massive number of units.

Some of us believe living in a place, especially a place one was born/grew up, should be a right, not a privilege. Here's Polanyi (with comments from Brad Delong) on land:

"Land could not, in Polanyi's view, be allowed to be the plaything of the self-regulating market for essentially sociological reasons: where people lived determined who they were, and a self-regulating market that told people they could no longer afford to live in the community where they thought they belonged would trigger such a strong sense of communal injustice to spark the chaos of revolution:

Commercialization of the soil was only another name for the liquidation of feudalism which started in Western urban centers as well as in England in the fourteenth century and was concluded some five hundred years later in the course of the European revolutions, when the remnants of villeinage were abolished. To detach man from the soil meant the dissolution of the body economic into its elements so that each element could fit into that part of the system where it was most useful....

Some of this was achieved by individual force and violence, some by revolution from above or below, some by war and conquest, some by legislative action, some by administrative pressure, some by spontaneous small-scale action of private persons over long stretches of time. Whether the dislocation was swiftly healed or whether it caused an open wound in the body social depended primarily on the measures taken to regulate the process....

The inertia of the common law was now deliberately enhanced by statutes expressly passed in order to protect the habitations and occupations of the rural classes against the effects of freedom of contract. A comprehensive effort was launched to ensure some degree of health and salubrity in the housing of the poor, providing them with allotments, giving them a chance to escape from the slums and to breathe the fresh air of nature, the “gentleman’s park.” Wretched Irish tenants and London slum-dwellers were rescued from the grip of the laws of the market by legislative acts designed to protect their habitation against the juggernaut, improvement. On the Continent it was mainly statute law and administrative action that saved the tenant, the peasant, the agricultural laborer from the most violent effects of urbanization."

http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/05/highlighted-for-march...

Different values.

It shouldn't be a privilege, but that's how things worked out. History made it a privilege. If we ever reach a place in societal development where everyone starts at the same place, we can, and perhaps will, stop calling it that. Until then, it is a privilege, and people will continue calling it that.

No one should feel guilty for having it, and others shouldn't being trying to make others feel guilty for having it (both of those things obviously happen, and people should speak against that, too. Some in the social justice world do exactly that.) Social Justice language is sometimes used as a cudgel, used opportunistically, used cynically, and abused in half a dozen ways (non-identarian left vs identarian liberal fights are often over these issues.) That doesn't mean the language is all wrong, or the meaning is wrong, it means bad people can use tools just like good ones can.

Those with some privileges, but without economic privilege or other similar power can help by speaking out, and may change some minds; those with all kinds of privileges can help even more. When Sam Altman talks about diversity hiring, for example, he does the work of potentially thousands of non-Sam Altmans. It's not about guilt, it's about using power for purposes of a more equitable society.

Exactly. This is a frequently misunderstood set of points. Having non-economic privileges does not automatically make you wealthy or even non-poor, and it doesn't automatically give you the best jobs or even any job. Some non-econ privileges are also relative not just to each other, but to each other in a geographic sense (skin color privilege helps you a lot more in Atlanta than in a town in Appalachia, for example.)

What it can do, for example, is help keep you from getting shot by the police on the way to your interview.

The goal of hiring diversity is to reach Proportional Representation; you want your workforce to resemble the demographics of the nation as a whole. If you accept that anyone, regardless of their genetic heritage, gender identity, sexual identity, skin color, etc. can do the job just as well as anyone else can, then you should be supportive of, or at least not oppose, efforts like these. If you don't think so (with regards to genetic heritage especially), there's really no discussion to be had, as that's a likely irreconcilable conflicting understanding of the science, especially at the individual level (intra-haplogroup potential ability swamps any supposed inter-haplogroup potential ability) or just plain, old-fashioned prejudice.

What are the benefits to PR? Two major ones:

- Countering structural biases in society. There has not historically been anything like a level playing field with regards to inherent attributes in this country. Many of those attributes cause people to get discriminated against, and this gets perpetuated across time. It's a "market" solution to a societal problem, which means that it can't magically counter much larger structural forces all by itself, but it can help.

- Producing better results. Many studies claim that diverse teams operate better, and potentially produce superior products and services. A major part of the reason is the introduction of diversity in perspectives, which can allow a company to understand different potential markets better and can make a company potentially more welcoming, which can improve hiring (i.e., a great candidate who might feel out of place in an environment with non-diverse demographics might decide to join if the demographics were more diverse. This can become a virtuous cycle.) Whether this is true or not, or how much it's true, is not that relevant. It certainly can't hurt.

There are valid criticisms of hiring diversity methods, but I'm not seeing many of them in the comments here:

- Can PR be achieved? Getting PR at a place with 10 employees is going to be very tough, so coming down on companies this small who can't do so should not be done, IMO. 100? Easier. 1000. Much easier. The larger the organization is, the more possible it becomes. So no, it's not always possible, and some perhaps well-intentioned activists beat up on companies they shouldn't, but that does not mean it should not be a goal that is pursued as a general principle for hiring.

- Do the people who get hired necessarily represent who those hiring them think they represent? Not always, no. If you're hiring a perfect rainbow coalition of identities, but all of them come from wealthy backgrounds or elite schools, for example, you may be getting less diversity than you think. It's not tokenism, but it's definitely not PR. Many Left criticisms of our current version elite liberal meritocratic culture center around this. The antidote is to include things like educational background, economic class/upbringing circumstances, etc. when considering a candidate vis a vis diverse hiring; that's what intersectionality is all about. You do not consider advantaging/disadvantaging attributes in isolation. Many companies have do a very poor job of the latter, but in this case, GH has explicitly said they are more open to non-traditionally educated candidates.

PR and hiring diversity is not going to fix all society's problems; for that, we need major reforms like free higher ed, federal, rather than local, funding of K-12 education, GBI, UHC, ending the drug war and a dozen other things. Can it help, especially by helping push American culture towards greater acceptance of diversity and pluralism? Yes, so companies should strive for it.

If this app supports seeing the chosen user's public messages from their perspective, it'd be a great way to experience what it's like for certain high-profile accounts that get trolled and dogpiled all the time.

Yeah, even other Voxers (like Ezra Klein) commented on the headline. 15 percent seems like quite a lot.

Having the "living and supportive family safety net" is definitely under-appreciated as an advantage here in the US. Many who have it don't even realize what an advantage it is.

The article debunks this:

"The claim that increased student aid causes tuition to rise was originated by William Bennett, the secretary of education under Ronald Reagan, in a 1987 New York Times opinion piece.19 Numerous academic studies since have tested the Bennett hypothesis, and though a few have found some link between rising aid and tuition in at most one sector of higher education,20 the vast majority have “…found not a shred of evidence of an empirical relationship,” as David Warren wrote in the Washington Post.21 As Warren notes, three major federal reports in the last fifteen years have each surveyed the existing academic literature, and each concluded that no such relationship exists.

The most recent, conducted by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in 2011, took advantage of a unique “natural experiment” to test the Bennett hypothesis: the substantial increases in Stafford Loan limits between 2007 and 2009.22 In 2007, the yearly loan limits, adjusted for inflation, ranged from $2,925 for freshmen to $6,125 for upper classmen. By 2009, they had risen to $5,750 and $7,825, respectively. All told, the yearly borrowing limit for all undergraduates increased by an average of $2,340. However, average tuition at public 4-year universities rose by just $540 over the same two years, in line with recent historical averages, leading the GAO to reject the possibility of a relationship between the two. Additionally, these increases in borrowing limits were the first since 1993, meaning that the inflation-adjusted value of the limit had declined for more than a decade during which tuitions rose steadily. All told, both the empirical evidence and academic consensus deem the Bennett hypothesis false."

It's true that Sweden/Finland don't do quite as well in this area as places like Denmark (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_loans_in_Denmark), Germany, or France, all of which supply are fairly generous with living cost grants for students.

Compared to US students, though, they're doing great.

1) Not everyone can do that, physically or mentally 2) Costs have increased so much, wages have not kept up to allow that to be possible for most people: http://www.vox.com/2015/8/28/9220705/college-working-map