Usually you judge whether something is broken when it fails to meet your expectations. In America with it’s individualistic culture I suspect the government is expected to behave differently than in those eastern european countries. A fair amount of people in the US don’t expect it to be a welfare state at all.
Furthermore, measuring people’s happiness says nothing of their satisfaction of the government.
I would posit the alternative theory that perhaps things are going well enough that people don’t have to care and thus they don’t. Government is one of those things most people ignore unless it’s broken and usually pretty badly at that.
The problems you mention are real and worrying to those that understand them but are still pretty far removed from ordinary people’s lives. Perhaps this is the kind of thing that happens when systems work so well we forget they are there. Then stuff breaks down and people start caring again.
I’ve wondered lately how far away we are from automated air travel especially with the impending advent of self-driving cars. I understand that it’s a technological hurdle to get to the level of reliability and robustness required to trust hundreds of lives to a machine. But I wonder if self-driving cars will change people’s perspective on it. I also don’t know what the unsolved problems in the area are.
So there are somethings I don’t quite understand about the pro-diversity argument. My understanding of the claim is that companies should want to have a diverse workforce because people of different backgrounds are fundamentally different. Different to the point that without inclusion of all their viewpoints you will fail to optimally solve some problems. It makes sense that if you don’t have enough women in tech your company, may fail to notice opportunities that cater specifically to women.
Still, if women, men and people of different ethnicities and races all have such fundamentally different backgrounds, why would you expect them all to choose the same fields in the same proportion? Furthermore, is proportional representation necessary to achieve optimal gains from having diverse viewpoints?
I think you are failing to take into account compounded interest and opportunity cost. Efforts you make when you’re young get compounded during the rest of your life time and the time you spend learning the intricacies of human mating is time that you could spend doing so many other things. Especially today when you can’t just start working at a factory at 18 and expect lifetime employment. Not just that, human mating has also gotten a lot more complicated with the advent of the Pill. You probably won’t be marrying your highschool sweetheart either. With the right incentives and a wealth of information I am not surprised to see the population follow a less greedy strategy when it comes to dating and drugs.
I am not sure about your claim that sex doesn’t require money. At least the male side courtship seems to be rather expensive both in terms of time and money. Granted that depends on what side of the pareto distribution you fall under.
I agree with your point that having the breadth of human knowledge at your fingertips helps you make better decisions especially with how inforgiving the internet’s memory is. It does come with a different set of pathologies though. I find that socializing with real people requires a lot more work than it would if I didn’t have an amalgamation of internet people to talk to.
I am probably being naive but I see nothing wrong with the examples you listed. Isn't this how iceland essentially erradicated downs syndrome? Using information about genetics to inform how we steer the populations' gene pool sounds very good to me.
Perhaps this has to do with the increasing heterogeneity of American society. The US probably looked more like Sweden, Denmark and Japan in the past. People may feel more compelled to partake in civil engagement and similar things like helping your neighbors out if you have the same background. At the very least you must trust the members of your community to play fair. Homogeneity comes at a cost but it's definitely useful to be able to assume correctly that you are a reasonable model for other people in your community.
Reading the manifesto felt like going through a less eloquent regurgitation of Jordan Peterson's content. So far I have been unable to disprove Peterson's points and his thoughts process is a very robust way to vet ideas. I a very curious to see if anyone can seriously debunk him.
Edit: Clarified that I meant peterson's points and not the manifesto.
1. I could not find the source stating that gender ratios were identical before the 80's in engineering. I do know that there used be a more even ratio of male/female programmers but I think the field has changed enough from those times that I would be wary of anyone claiming to make an apples to apples comparison.
2.His points about what makes a good engineering manager skips over the fact that to get good at engineering you have to practice it a lot. You have to spend a significant amount of time alone coding/engineering to grasp well enough that understanding the customer starts mattering a lot more. The guy that wrote the post seems to come from a perspective of so much experience and talent that he forgot or perhaps doesn't even know how hard it is go get started in the field.
3. I think the part about alienating women comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of the manifesto and probability in general. Saying that women in general are less interested or less capable to be a google enginner says essentially nothing about the individuals before you. Trying to infer qualities of an individual from a distribution is racism but making statements about distributions shouldn't be. You can only talk about the whole distribution of google employees and perhaps justify(or fail to justify) the imbalance. Obviously, being a google employee is a much more informative prior than the gender of an individual.
When I first read the manifesto, It sounded like a regurgitation of Jordan Peterson's content. After being immersed in his lectures I found it very hard to contradict his points not just because of his eloquence but also because of his method for vetting ideas. I am very glad that his stuff has gained so much popularity because I may finally find counterpoints stick against his arguments.
I think the premise is that you are not entitled to unemployment benefits in the first place. The government provides some aid but you have to be trying to help yourself first. It sounds fair to me that if you are offered a job and you refuse then you have breached that contract. Beggars can't be choosers and all that.
I really don't understand why that would be. In fact, given that most people are not software developers, we can be sure that the people making those high impact things are very non-representative of the population. Moreover, people can provide good services and understand others' problems without having to experience them themselves. Otherwise we wouldn't have male gynecologists for example. Sometimes, the distance is useful or even preferred.
I don't think you are wrong in principle but in practice this simply wouldn't work. We don't have enough sequenced genomes in the world to train such a network and even if we did there is no guarantee that a network-produced genome would stay in the manifold of healthy humans when trying to change an existing defective genome to a healthy one. Either way it would be to expensive to find out if a new genome actually works. Finally with a sequenced genome going for a couple gigabytes I don't see us having a large enough usable data set of these any time soon.
I have been thinking along the same lines lately. Issues like addiction and poverty are complex, multicausal and cannot objectively be blamed solely on the individual. Still, we have to consider what a person needs to believe in order to act in their best interests. I cannot imagine a situation where someone overcomes addiction or poverty with a victim mindset. Ultimately, you have to believe you are still in control to some degree even if it's only enough to accept help. Social mechanisms like shaming seem useful as a reminder that regardless of your state you are still responsible for yourself. I understand vulnerable people like addicts need help but I don't think always seeing them as victims of circumstances is the right approach.
How would genetic editing be a race to the bottom? If anything it would be a race to the top. If every generation got smarter, healthier and more attractive thanks to procedures like this humanity would be better for it. This would probably be true even if only a minority of people can afford it. If we had orders of magnitues more of genius level intellects pushing the boundaries of technology and science, humanity would be better for it. I just don't see where this would be harmful if it works as intended.
So I found this article completely lacking in real information. They could at least misrepresent an inconclusive study or something. This isn't even trying.
It does set the topic for a possibly interesting discussion. In the era of tinder is the dating scene better or worse for your stereotypical HN user (geeky/nerdy). Is there any evidence of a 90/10 rule for promiscuity in humans?
Some people argue that more diverse teams will produce better results but I have yet to see evidence that this happens in Computer Science related tasks.
In addition I remember being taught that you ultimately want teams to "jel" much more than some marginal productivity gain you might get from diversity. Wouldn't homogeneous teams make "jelling" easier? Notice that I mean this in the limited scope of programming I know there is evidence to the contrary at the management level.
I read a couple of comments that say this is a step in the right direction to reverse the demographic trend in most developed countries of decreased fertility.
I don't think that we will ever be able to compensate a couple and mother in particular for the cost of bearing children simply because we have made child rearing so expensive. I am not talking about education or housing costs but rather the opportunity cost.
I don't think there is any way to adequately compensate couples for the loss in career opportunities and wages that they forgoe by choosing to instead spend time raising children. The unfortunate thing is that the more financially capable a couple is to raise children the less likely they are to do so probably because of the increased opportunity cost. I am not sure even the most generous maternity leave policies will be able to fix that.
I think this comes from vastly underestimating the value humans bring to other life. I would argue that without humans there is no life. We are the only species in the planet that has, in the next couple million years, the ability to allow life to expand throughout the universe. We are literally the only species alive that can do this. Without us life is frail and subject to the whims of cosmic events on our planet that could whipe it out. Humans bring a lot of value to the world and I think we play a critical role in the history of life. I find that people who argue against humans using earths resources forget that we have a very important role in the ecosystem. So important in fact, that a the extinction of a couple thousand of species and habitats is probably a small price to pay for us to learn how to use our incredible ability to control the environment.
I absolutely agree with you whenever I can I like to stay in a Paleo Diet because it makes me feel a lot better than any other diet I have tried.
However, whenever I read comments about the environment on HN I always get this Malthusian feeling from them. Their story always revolves around the fact that we are consuming resources today that future generations won't get and that we are essentially dooming the future of humanity by polluting with CO2 and consuming meat. It's essentially Malthus' argument in disguise.
I always approach these kinds of arguments with extreme caution because you are essentially betting against humanity's ability to innovate. And before anyone jumps at me yes, global warming is real and it will have a real cost on society. But before you advocate for one radical policy or another consider whether the actual cost of global warming from that activity actually justifies it economically.
I think the problem is you are giving a money on the table explanation for the missing lower-income housing. If developers could make more profitable lower-income housing (and by lower I mean anything other than high-end) they would and a lack of such housing is probably caused by a lack of demand(not in the sense that poor people don't want housing but rather they can't raise the price sufficiently to make it profitable for a developer).
I would rather argue that government regulation is definitely the problem on multiple levels. For one you probably have to deal with state and federal regulations making it very difficult to get economies of scale. Does every state/city really need to define the bare-minimum requirements for a house differently? Is there really nothing they can agree on so we can have standardized housing rules? That alone should limit housing costs significantly but if you also limit the power of local government to restrict growth and force it to accommodate new citizens rather than try to block them would also be a very good way to reduce a lot of the costs of new housing. I wonder how much developer money is spent litigating in places like New York and San Francisco that should be seeing most of the growth in housing.
Notice that this is not a problem
In most of the US. Most housing in the US is still probably cheap it's just nobody wants to live in the middle of nowhere. Housing is very expensive in a few critically important areas that have largely failed to accommodate the influx of immigrants.
The negative effects of low inflation are well documented. You can see Japan as an example. Low inflation has perverse incentives that hamper employment and econmic growth. Essentially low inflation is good for the consumer until they lose their job.
They already did that for several years with QE. They de facto reduced the outstanding US debt by several trillion. You could argue for more monetary stimulus but it's hard to get away with it now that they are very close to reaching their inflation target. Obviously the US and other advanced economies have suffered through a very long period of low inflation so they are in a unique position in history where they could print quite a bit of money and not end up like Zimbabwe or Venezuela.
I don't think there are mustache twirling landlords that buy buildings only to leave them empty and refuse to let people live in them. Frankly it's appalling that government regulation could get bad enough that a landlord's only choice to minimize his losses is to leave a building unoccupied. I really hope the parent's comment is an exaggeration or a myth. What is even worse is that people actually think it's somehow the landlord's fault.
The point is that you still end up misallocating housing units. The marginal Googler at San Francisco may end up taking a lower paying job elsewhere in the country reducing overall productivity. If the renter moves because they can't afford the rent they may find a place where costs are more favorable to their earnings. It's part of the difficult changes introduced by market-based economies but I thought the consensus was that in the long run everyone benenfits.
I don't understand you try to characterize money printing with runsway inflation. For one I am
Not arguing for unlimited money printing I am talking more about QE style money printing. You don't continue pumping money into the economy if it's already at full capacity and you have reached your inflation target. In fact the United States has printed trillions of dollars through QE but what we experience right now is a very far from runaway inflation. What I am saying is perhaps we need higher inflation to get full employment. I also don't think a 4% target is exactly Venezuela levels of inflation.