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Some relevant context: laser pointers have been being used by HK protesters lately to interfere with facial recognition on security cameras

Referencing three American incidents from decades ago (which, although I consider Chile and Nicaragua to be among America's darkest FP moments, were all officially -- and mostly corroborated by the historical record -- undertook in the name of national security rather than commercial interests) hardly indicates this sort of tit-for-tat commercial relations between nations is the global norm.

Right, and that choice of axiom is how two reasonable people can come to wildly different conclusions about a subject even after spending time resolving reconcilable differences.

But empirically speaking, almost all people would agree at a high-level that minimizing suffering is an agreeable axiom.

The truth value of a given logical proposition is independent of how many people believe either way about it.

You're mistaking ethics as a branch of philosophy for norms dictated by society.

I don't think this is actually true in the vast majority of day-to-day ethical decisions, although there are cases where it's certainly true.

I'm fairly confident that many more unethical actions, even subjectively defined (i.e. from each individual observer's pov), are the result of ignorance and apathy than actual differences of opinion regarding ethics.

Really? What retaliatory action did the US take on behalf of its tech companies following their blocking in China?

I mean they sorta already are? Xi Jinpeng was calling Vladimir Putin his "closest, most dearest friend" just a month or two ago. They already oppose the US (along with Russia) on every major international issue.

One thing that I think is getting lost in this discussion is the role of intent on currency manipulation.

Switzerland has the strongest currency in the world due to the country's reputation for governmental and financial stability. This makes Swiss labor extremely expensive for reasons mostly outside of their control, and the Swiss government has tried (and largely failed) to remedy this. Technically, this is devaluation but given the circumstances and Switzerland's relatively small footprint in the labor market, it's understandable and fairly benign.

The Fed cutting interest rates in 2009 had the effect of weakening the USD relative to what it would have been. But the intent of the policy was not to steal a share of the export market, but rather to provide stimulus during a deep recession.

Japan has been in ultra-low growth and ultra-low inflation for decades. To fend off the threat of deflation and economic contraction, it ran the printing press and cut interest rates. Which, again, devalue the currency but stealing export share is not a major intent.

I'm not sure what the appropriate definition of "currency manipulator" should be but, while China's currency policy history is a strange and variable beast, yesterday's devaluation was clearly a different case than those above. And depending on how far you want to go back in history, there's an argument that the intent of some previous Chinese devaluations were aimed primarily at increasing its relative attractiveness as an exporter.

Its most recent history until yesterday was to prop up the RMB, so it may be fair to argue that now is a strange time to label them a currency manipulator. Given yesterday's events and their history in this area though, it's hard to make the claim that their currency policy is altogether ordinary either.

The USD has risen against pretty much every major currency in the past several years. Its status as the world reserve currency keeps its value artificially high despite running the printing press.

Whether this is good or bad for the US economy is debatable (and unclear), but it's not really a recipe for currency manipulation at all. I have no idea what you're talking about.

>As someone neither American nor Chinese I feel China's far less likely to come along and bother me when I'm minding my own business than America is.

Well no shit, only one of these two countries has had the capability to project power globally for six decades. To say China hasn't intervened in e.g. Ireland's affairs is to say pretty much nothing about its (un)desirability as a global leader.

Within each country's sphere of influence though, I don't agree with the above statement in any sense though. China is far more active/aggressive (and amoral) in the affairs of its people domestically and in its regional sphere of influence than the US generally is.

>But after you setup the dataset definition and defined the schema, the rest can be based on neural search?

Sure, but hyperparameter tuning and architecture selection takes such an insignificant amount of any competent ML practitioner's time so as to be pretty much irrelevant.

At least for me, my time is mostly spent: 1. Understanding (or designing) the process that generated the data. 2. Organizing the training schema. 3. Understanding the customer's business problem so that an appropriate ML system can be designed. 4. Doing an initial design of the ML system based on that understanding and then iteratively designing new components for said system based on customer feedback. 5. Developing or researching how to measure model performance. 6. Searching for alternative data sources. 7. Answering customer and stakeholder questions about the ML system 8. Implementing the ML system in code.

None of these can be automated with current technology, and there's a reason for that: if it was possible to automate a task then our team already would have.

Right! I should clarify that I'm only describing the big management consulting firms that most everyone has heard of. I should have wrote "management" before each time I wrote" consultant" but I didn't want to be repetitive and hoped it would be clear from the context.

Independent consultants are an entirely different group and behave very differently.

>If you show value to the client and you build a trust relationship then you enter into a relational mode that is fruitful for both sides, and you skip/streamline all the tedious commercial topics (RFPs, competitors, beauty contests, the purchasing department demanding a 3% discount...). On the other hand, if you want to milk the cow dry then you end up on a very transactional relationship and you need to start cold selling from scratch after every project, which takes a lot of effort, time and energy.

This is greatly at empirical odds with the near ubiquitous distrust for consultants among almost everyone who has worked with them.

And there is certainly no shortage of willingness to repeatedly cold sell in order to advance one's own career in consulting.

>All companies exist to provide profits to their owners.

Management consultants nearly always have a conflict of interest though (i.e. the preoccupation of consultants is almost always "sell, sell, sell" rather than "help the client make money") due to the nature of their work and their short-term contact-based engagements mean they rarely have to stick around and deal with the messes that they create.

Large management consulting firms IME tend to hire (or develop maybe) people who are smart and ambitious but highly conformist and reluctant to challenge authority. Combined with nature of the work I described above (and ofc existing to make owners /partners rich), this is sort of a perfect storm for lots of "semi-unintentional" unethical behavior and sometimes fully intentional unethical behavior.

Fwiw, from what I observed this dynamic actually makes the consulting work environment terribly exploitative and miserable for non-partner consultants but consultants tend not be the personality types who would leave consulting (and the prestige/"potential to become a partner") over it --unsurprisingly, else the industry wouldn't exist as it does now.

Not exactly. There are varying costs to extracting and transporting oil depending on where it is sourced. It's estimated that American natural gas, for example, would be 20% more expensive than Russian natural gas through the Nordstream 2 pipeline -- even though natural gas is nominally fungible.

Furthermore, the US is net oil exporter in 2019 and Europe is notoriously dependent on imported oil due to lack of resources on the continent. Consequently, adding a large marginal foreign supplier has significantly different impacts on oil prices in the region.

Does Dr. Epstein stake any of his claims on his personal credibility in his article? Why not attack the substance of the article instead of going with the the classic "slander the opposition" play that all kinds of disingenuous actors regularly employ? This post sounds like something I used to hear from Lance Armstrong's camp or from authoritarian propaganda.

For all I know you're part of a FUD campaign from Google. Dr. Epstein's paper may well be nonsense for all I know but this post adds nothing to the discussion.

Their handling of OpenAIFive rubbed me the wrong way as well. The whole operation smelled very PR-ish to me personally -- unnecessarily/unjustifiably HYPE representatives, complaining that the Dota community wanted to see OpenAIFive play a normal Dota match against pros rather a heavily constrained environment to benefit the bots, among other things.

Right, that doesn't mean it went well for them.

The US didn't provide significant aid to Iraq until it feared the Hussein government being overrun altogether.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Ir...

"Supported" in the sense of "not letting being conquered completely by Iran." Who was carrying out its own mass executions of non-Muslims and implementing its own cultural revolution around that time.

America definitely had some self-interest in protecting Iraq, but it's not like the alternative was clearly a better choice either.

This is also a subject of intense interest to me. We're in uncharted territory here, and the most relevant historical example imo is WW1 where all major participants began the war without giving any real thought to oil and left the war knowing oil (and the vehicles it powers) was arguably the single most important strategic factor in wars during that time period (and still today really aside from speculation).

It seems plausible, if not very likely, a similar paradigm shift will occur after the first serious cyberwar occurs. We will learn a lot of lessons.

Mossadegh wasn't exactly a liberal. He nationalized the oil industry and the very justification for Operation Ajax was the fear that Mossadegh would ally Iran with the USSR -- who were certainly socialist and most definitely not liberal.

Moreover, multiple US administrations pressured the Shah on human rights and, more generally, the US has a definite (though certainly not absolute and varying by administration) preference for working with regimes with a decent human rights record.

I would also quibble with the sole attribution of his fall to Ajax (he was already deeply unpopular when it began, albeit arguably unfairly) and note that his extensive use of emergency powers at the time make the "democratically elected" bit somewhat misleading, even if nominally true.

Liberal countries tend to befriend other liberal countries. So yes, even from a purely strategic perspective US foreign policy has a desire to liberalize other countries (in the classical sense of the term).

>Not to get all political but I think it's pretty clear that the US is the only western country not liking Iran, and they use their influence to have the whole world obey US sanctions. You expecting OP to raise against their government? I say odds of succeeding are slimmer than storming Area 51.

This isn't exactly true. The EU is opposed to Iran's aggressive policies in the region (e.g. in Yemen, Syria, and now Hormuz) and its continued development of ballistic missile technology. They're just content with the 2015 nuclear deal as a starting point, whereas current US policy is not.

It's also worth noting that the EU disproportionately benefits from oil purchases from Iran relative to US so they have their own political self-interests factoring into their decision.

>In general openness and cultural/economic exchange help progressive forces within the country, and sanctions help xenophobic hard-liners.

I've read in various places that the opposite is actually true -- sanctions from the liberal US strengthens the liberals in Iran by highlighting how the regime's aggressive policy is resulting in economic pain for Iranians.

This didn't really work with China either. Granted, there are plenty of examples where sanctions have failed/backfired but I'd like to reject any "general" statement on the best way to liberalize a country through foreign policy.

>Anything we might do in space or to try to live on Mars is much-much (much) more difficult than fixing what problems we have on Earth to keep it healthy and habitable.

This sounds true upon first glance, but is it really? Scientifically/technologically speaking you're certainly correct, but fixing Earth is also a political problem.

I have much more faith in humanity's ability to create technology that saves Earth then I do to humanity's ability to put aside vested and/or selfish interests and work together for a common goal. The former is hopefully a matter of several (or more) generations, while the latter I imagine will never be "fixed."

This is nearly a tautology. Economic engagement with the rest of the world is obviously good for any single country (especially when you're essentially cherrypicking the rules you follow while the rest of the world is mostly compliant). But if that country is poised to become the next superpower and its leaders are the modern day analogue of imperial Japan or the USSR, that economic engagement is probably not good for the rest of the world (in the long-term).

Do you have any numbers to back that last sentence up? I suspect the difference between your figure and intuition is less welfare administration bloat and more that most of it is eaten up by exorbitant healthcare costs through Medicare and Medicaid.

The CIA is given a gray-area treatment in Black Panther as well.

I would bet against any unified European action based on recent history and bet on "generally taking no action and leaving China relations to the member countries." This will almost certainly play to China's advantage as e.g. voters in France will ask why they aren't trading from China while Italy and Greece are benefiting from it.

Germany (the most powerful country in the EU) is particularly benefiting from trade with China, which also doesn't bode well.

I would love for it to turn out otherwise though.

Wear a mask :)