cgiles

You are right about how change comes about. It is just that there is a time and place for it. I said that the role of the ideologue is to introduce new ideas to society, not to harp on them constantly when and where they want without restriction.

A line is crossed when they come into the workplace and make wrongthink a fireable offense. The proper place for these things to be worked out is, for the most part, in the media and on discussion boards like these. Or in private conversations like the bar. The key to understanding this is in the word "workplace": it isn't the "socialjusticeplace" or the "inclusionplace".

Conservatives have their place too. The role of progressives is to introduce new ideas. The role of conservatives is to present the argument about why these new ideas might not work. "Change" is not an automatic good. For example, all of us will undergo the change from "alive" to "dead". Personally, if it were within my power, I'd prefer not to undergo that particular change.

If I could wave a magic wand and create a space for conservative and liberal ideologues to beat each other senseless, and leave the rest of us out of it until the winner is decided, I would certainly do so.

Of course. Every old idea was new once, and that is the role of the activist and ideologue: to introduce new ideas for public assessment.

But these people would do well to remember that the bulk of the public they are trying to convince are not ideologues as well.

The well mannered majority may not know best but it is what is ultimately making the decisions.

All true. But additionally, it is not quite right to say that morality and legality have nothing to do with each other. Legality, generally speaking, is the subset of morality that a sustainable majority has codified into objective laws.

In other words, legality is basically the subset of morality that Republicans and Democrats can agree on. Which is why going beyond legality into subjective morality so often becomes polarizing.

> it’s unfortunate that these type of issues are so divisive.

The reason they are so divisive is because the loud people fall into two categories: 1) people who loudly and constantly complain about these issues and for whom no amount of improvement is enough, and 2) people who think all these problems are greatly exaggerated, part of the liberal culture wars, and find it extremely annoying that anyone would bring it up.

The "silent majority" in these issues are people who say "yeah, sure, it seems fair to allow gay marriage, why not" and "let's see what we can do to improve female and minority representation but let's not jump to the conclusion that anyone in particular is to blame".

The hallmarks of being in this silent majority are:

- being generally well-intentioned

- supportive of incremental, common-sense solutions that are not zero-sum

- dislikes intense conflict and blame games

- does not take a view of the issue that makes one group of people the "heroes/victims" and another the "villains"

So, if you hear the proposal "let's allow politics at work", who do you think is actually going to speak up? That's right, the loud and annoying people that you can hear anytime by turning on the news. Ideologues for whom compromise and assuming good faith in your opponents is anathema. No thanks.

> I agree with the progressive arguments - that you can't just say "no politics in X", that politics are inherent to what you do.

I would push back on this. In a trivial sense, politics is in everything, because everything is somehow related to everything else.

For most work-related purposes, an LGBT issue, to take a random example, is relevant in the same way it is relevant to include the gravitational influence of Neptune when calculating the trajectory of a thrown object on Earth: technically there is an influence, but it is minute. This would be true unless, perhaps, you work in HR and dealing with this stuff is part of the job description. Naturally, strongly committed activists won't see it that way because they see literally everything through the lens of their hobbyhorse.

But I agree very much with your second paragraph. I work in medical research. The important thing about it is to find cures for diseases. If some allegedly or actually marginalized person comes in and attempts to derail this important work with their own issues, it is incredibly self-centered. I don't care how bad you think your group has it, it isn't as bad as "the group of people with metastatic cancer". Privileged as I may or may not be, it isn't me such a person would be harming, it's the patients.

I think most people in my field recognize this and political issues generally aren't a problem there. I wonder if there is an inverse correlation between the importance of the work and the likelihood that people will bring up political issues.

I love how many people in the UK talk about fundamental changes of the voting system like PR. In the US such a thing would require a constitutional amendment and would therefore be utterly impossible, particularly since the Republicans and Democrats would stand to lose from it. But you don't have a written constitution, so...

But still, even if you got PR, then you'd have a substantial percentage of Brexit Party people in Parliament, making the UK even more of a laughingstock. Doing the same sorts of shit they do in the EU Parliament. And Greens and so forth. Sure that's what you want? I can see pros and cons to it, it is just interesting there is such desire for reform.

> the part where Labor has said they will end freedom of movement

Yes, and it is still in their manifesto, live today. That is completely incompatible with the SM. In fact, that is precisely the issue that led TM to the WA that is currently on offer. Barnier's slides, linked above, show exactly what tier of EU association is on offer without FoM. Hint: it is a very, very low tier.

So the idea that JC will eliminate FoM and achieve any agreement substantially different than what TM already got is utter pixie dust.

> Antisemitism

The antisemitism stuff is utter hogwash, as in these days it is 95% of the time. Labour says, maybe Israel possibly isn't treating Palestinians in the most ideal way, and maybe annexing large swathes of territory and building settlements could be less than the greatest possible good. Result: they're antisemitic, want the destruction of Israel, and are basically Nazis. Just like in the US. Heaven help anyone who supports BDS. At bare minimum they won't be allowed to visit the free and democratic country of Israel.

> "Jeremy Corbyn generally voted for more EU integration". If you're wondering who gave you the impression that the exact opposite of the truth was true

To get a neutral source on this before I posted my last post, I went to Wikipedia, where it says JC voted against:

- The 1975 EC referendum

- Maastrict treaty

- Lisbon treaty

In addition to these very important votes, there are an awful lot of absences and no votes on the link you sent. I am really not sure how that site drew the conclusion it did. If it was simply by tallying votes without weighing their importance, that is a bad way to do it.

I am well aware British media is awful, possibly even worse than US media, so I don't really get most of my information from there. When I do read it, I take it with a huge grain of salt. Most of my opinions about Corbyn himself come from watching him in PMQs and in Parliament debates.

> If you divorce personality and ask people about policies... most people agree with Labour's

Entirely possible and I take no issue with any of Labour's positions except on Brexit. If Brexit weren't happening and I were a UK citizen, I could easily see myself voting Labour. As it is, I would probably vote LD.

As for Corbyn, I was merely saying he was on the left side even within his own party in the current day. You are not wrong about the Overton window but it does not change this reality.

> Cameron originally offered and called the referendum expecting a win for remain, to put the Tory lunatic fringe back in the box for a generation. They campaigned terribly, remain lost...

All true, but even then there was the opportunity for spin, especially because Cameron resigned. TM could have said, "I respect the need to leave the EU, but we can't just ignore the needs of Scotland and NI (not to mention business, in the days before fuck business). So we'll do a compromise soft Brexit reflecting the 52/48 vote. It was made clear that Leave didn't mean leaving the SM. Also, David Cameron is an idiot." She didn't.

> Labour? Bizarre. They have been unable to take a stand, or we wouldn't be in this mess. Most of the party are remain. They could have voted through any deal at any time. Yet their official stance is "it depends, maybe".

Tell that to pytester below. I have no idea how anyone could be watching Labour and think that they have ever taken a clear stand this entire time, but apparently, some people do buy into this "kinda-sorta SM and CU but not the actual thing" and "second referendum? uh, no, maybe, yes but we'll be neutral" stuff of Corbyn's.

Labour may well have some good policies, and my wife and her far left American friends think Corbyn walks on water, but they have been punished severely in the polls for this lack of clarity. How could anyone think Corbyn is a good leader when his party is doing so horribly in the polls despite ongoing Tory fuckups is also beyond me.

If the thought process in the UK is anything like the US, presumably staunch Labour supporters simply chalk it up to the 40+% of Tory voters being ignorant, bigoted rednecks. Just as an honest person has to ask some hard questions of Hillary Clinton for losing to Donald Trump, anyone who can lose to BORIS JOHNSON needs to find another job.

> They made it perfectly clear that they wanted a deal with the customs union and single market.

I see. How does this square with whipping against the SM and CU in 2017? How is declaring an intention to "keep the benefits" of SM and CU without being in them anything but unicorns in light of Barnier's very clear explanations on the matter?

I am trying to find a clear timeline of Labour's ever-changing positions on these matters. [1] is the best I've found so far. What I can say is that after watching PMQs almost every week I found his position anything but clear.

But possibly I can agree with you so far as to say that it is not so much that Labour has had NO position whatsoever, as that their position has changed every 3-6 months and none of those positions were ever very fleshed out with detail.

> What Barnier has been less clear about is whether they are prepared to negotiate a new deal at all after May's deal. The EU actually has flip flopped on that issue and its mind probably still isn't made up even now.

I agree with this. In my reading, Barnier wants the WA to be accepted as is if possible, but would probably reopen negotiations if Labour took power. But it is indeed unclear.

> I suppose you have seen an indication that he doesn't?

Yes, for the longest time he was talking about a CU (THE CU? or something else, unclear...) and not mentioning the SM. Numerous public statements which I can find if requested. As in, for example, Clarke's proposal during indicative votes. This is nonsensical because a CU without the SM does virtually nothing.

[1] https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-corbyns-ch...

> People being convinced by reasoned argument, and perhaps by skilled oratory is how the political process works.

In utopia. But in reality, it is possible to simultaneously hold that many people vote for very stupid reasons, and that their votes should be respected anyway.

Personally I am convinced that there never has been an election anywhere where the majority of voters on all sides were properly informed by facts and not motivated by ideology or outright lies.

Some in the UK imply that the referendum should be re-run because of those lies, just like some in the US imply the 2016 election was illegitimate because of Russian interference. That way lies madness, since every side in every election lies and manipulates, and every election would have to be re-run ad infinitum.

OK, I confess that no one really knows what is going on in the mind of Jeremy Corbyn, possibly not even the man himself. What is unquestioned fact is that the party is split on Brexit. Known facts about Corbyn are:

- He has opposed expansion of the EU throughout his political career

- After the referendum, he urged rules on state aid to be jettisoned on the grounds they would no longer be valid after Brexit anyway

- He is a self-identified socialist and is far left, even by Labour standards

My take is that overall, he is anti-EU but has been forced into a publicly neutral or pro-EU (during the referendum) position because that is the position of the majority of his party. What are his precise motivations for this, I do not know.

Thus I read his whipping against no-deal and his new stance on a referendum as more of a forced concession to his party, and as a tool to beat the Tories over the head with, than as something arising out of his personal convictions. Especially because of how long it took him to arrive at those positions. But no one can know for sure.

Keep in mind "no no-deal", which was JC's only position for so long, is not really a position, as pjc50 pointed out. This was made painfully obvious during the series of indicative votes during the spring.

Yes, I've seen that slide. In fact, it was exactly what I had in mind when I said to pytester below that "Barnier has been crystal clear about what is required of the UK and what the options are". Certainly you are right about what has been the Tory negotiating strategy.

I meant, however, that she could have attempted to sell it to the hardliners in her party or, more likely, cross-party as described below. None of the red lines were inevitable, because no one knows why Leave won. Some say immigration, some say sovereignty, ECJ, payments that could "fund our NHS", and myriad other things. Some in Labour are even said to have supported it to get around state aid rules.

So there was a fundamental lack of clarity what the referendum had actually meant shortly after it passed. That was TM's window of opportunity to show some leadership and choose an interpretation of the referendum that could command majority support.

If she had presented a soft Brexit agreement to the house, yes, she would have thrown the DUP and ERG under the bus, but she also would have put Labour, LD, etc into an extremely difficult position. At the time, they all said "we should respect the referendum". If they had rejected a soft WA the blame would be all on them instead of, as it is now, on the Tories. She would have faced accusations of being a closet Remainer, but she got that anyway.

I am convinced everyone hates the DUP and very few like the ERG. Instead of tossing them, the Tories toss Ken Clarke and Nick Soames? Sounds like a bad plan.

> What do they actually want from the deal?

The conventional wisdom is that the party is split between Remainers and Leavers, and that Corbyn himself is a closet Leaver who wants to leave so he can get out from under EU rules on state aid and bring about a glorious socialist revolution.

If this is remotely true, then Corbyn's personal aim is to help the Tories to a no-deal Brexit, or even a hard Brexit under the WA, but in such a way that Labour does not get the blame. However, much of the party wants a soft Brexit or Remain so he cannot be seen to be doing this.

Hence why he does not want, and never has wanted, to obtain Government until Brexit has been sorted (badly) by the Tories, and to come along and pick up the pieces. The entire Labour strategy has been to completely disassociate themselves from Brexit and this latest non-proposal is just a continuation of that.

> What is the party's true desired outcome, being in the EU or not being in the EU?

In short, they do not know and are split. The only thing they agree on is not being blamed for either Remain, soft Leave, or hard Leave. And whoever is in power when the final decision is made most certainly will get blame for any decision taken.

> Their position is to negotiate another deal (if possible) and put it to a public vote, and put the existing deal to a vote if not.

Yes, but even this very unclear proposition is a recent invention (last 3 months IIRC). Before that they had nothing. For 2+ years.

> Unfortunately it isn't possible to make promises about what will be possible to negotiate with the EU.

True enough -- to a point. But he could say what the general outline of the UK's goals in the negotiations will be and how the strategy/objectives/redlines will differ from TM's and Boris's.

At this point without specifics, we can all be forgiven for assuming it is more unicorn horns and pixie dust. Does "I'm going to go to Brussels and get a deal, a great deal" sound at all familiar by now? I am surprised anyone buys it at this point.

He cannot say for certain how the EU will respond to any proposal, although honestly Barnier has been crystal clear about what is required of the UK and what the options are.

And does Corbyn even know the difference between the Single Market and Customs Union? I have seen no indication that he does.

> Unfortunately London forgetting that the rest of the country exists

Going for a soft Brexit would be a compromise between the rural areas of England and Wales, who want to leave the EU entirely at any cost, and Scotland and NI (and Gibraltar), who want to remain. I would say it is the strategy that takes most into account the rest of the country in its entirety.

Whether or not such a stance would be to Labour's electoral advantage is anyone's guess. They have apparently concluded it would not be.

In fact the EU has been essentially forcing England to listen to the rest of the country -- NI, specificially. Which is quite ironic.

I have found the best source of information about Brexit, although it certainly has its own bias, to be eureferendum.com . They have long advocated for Efta/EEA membership as the first move for the UK before gradually disentangling from EU directives.

IMV (I'm not British) the only sane option was some form of soft Brexit. Which was the only way to avoid most of the economic damage and also prevent hordes of Leavers with pitchforks. But the damage was done at Lancaster House which made immigration a red line. Theresa May concluded that Leavers wouldn't consider anything without immigration control to be a real Brexit, thus implicitly agreeing with the idea that the referendum passed because of immigration.

And now you have a neverending shitshow as a result. So I mostly agree, but there was a window of opportunity for TM to sell a soft Brexit. She opted not to.

I have watched Brexit avidly but comfortably from across the pond for the last two years. Every PMQs Corbyn has got up and, in the earlier days, ignored Brexit entirely, and now, he complains about lack of clarity and progress by the Government. While he and his party have never had any clear position on it, by design. The Tories' current position of hard Brexit or bust may be insane, but at least it is a position. The Lib Dems and SNP have one too. But not Labour.

So while this "talking point" may have been noticed by the Mail and Telegraph, it has been apparent to many of us for some time.

If Labour had kicked Corbyn out for, say, Starmer, and taken a clear soft Brexit or even Remain position, they could have long ago taken Government from the Tories, who have obviously badly screwed up everything in Brexit that it is possible to screw up.

On the other hand I am keeping my fingers crossed for the incredibly unlikely event of a unity government under Ken Clarke.

TL;DR: philpem is completely correct.

I appreciate this explanation and will try to meet you halfway although I don't agree with all your conclusions.

> Frankly, I value my safety over your convenience. That's what it comes down to.

That is quite natural, although with respect I must say it does illustrate my comments about an entitlement mentality, particularly since it is the cyclist who has voluntarily chosen to put themselves in such a dangerous situation. What many cyclists don't understand is that I value your safety as well, very much so.

That is why things like this:

> So why do cyclists not stop at stop signs? Because sitting at a stop sign is dangerous.

> Another common example is riding close to the middle of the road on shared roads.

...are incredibly frustrating. The reason why we have road laws at all is primarily to make driving behavior predictable. If people drive unpredictably, it raises the risk for everyone. On top of the inherent risks of driving a vehicle which does not have the speed and acceleration to be on the road in the first place.

Do cyclists care that cars might have to swerve into a ditch or another car to avoid them if they are cycling erratically? As far as I can see, they don't. Do they care if their cycling might delay commutes for dozens or hundreds of people? I commend you for being open about the fact that you seemingly do not.

Fundamentally, all of the arguments cyclists make would apply to someone walking on the road or riding a skateboard down it. Yes, it is incredibly dangerous. Fundamentally and inalterably so. It is indefensible when motorists invade bike lanes. They should be fined for that. That is the space for bikes. Sidewalks are the space for pedestrians. The road is the space for cars. (I am speaking from what I see as the logical perspective, not the legal perspective.)

I have been to places like India where there are basically no rules followed about who can be on the road, riding what, or how they are driving. It is total chaos and utterly terrifying. I am incredibly glad it is not like that in the US.

I agree with the need for bike lanes where bikes are heavily used (or if there is good evidence of latent demand for them if bike lanes existed). It often does not make financial sense to build them where they would be used infrequently, as that money could be used for other forms of public transit. Purely from a safety perspective, in my view, where bike lanes are not built it would be better policy for cyclists to cycle on the sidewalk rather than the road, because at least if a bicycle hits a pedestrian there is a low risk of fatality.

I really do appreciate your explaining this so calmly and neutrally however, as I find the self-righteous fury of so many cyclists very annoying as, from my perspective, they are the problem. For some reason this is a really charged issue for many people. Road rage all around, I suppose.

I am not saying this applies to you and GP, but there are those of us who absolutely hate cyclists on the road at all (bike lanes are fine) because many of them have an entitled mentality and indeed, don't seem to care about their own safety, let alone the rules of the road.

Just this morning I had two cyclists cut horizontally across at 40 MPH street in front of me and other drivers. Many of them weave between cars or treat traffic signals as suggestions. Basically they want to be treated like normal traffic when it suits them and ignore laws when they want to. The ones who signal, wear helmets and reflectors and bright clothing, and drive on the road correctly are merely annoying because they hold up traffic and disrupt speeds, which is dangerous in itself because it causes a lot of lane swapping, but I can tolerate them.

I guess what I am trying to say is, thank you and GP for not being among those cyclists who are stupid, reckless, and entitled. I just know that someday I am going to be cleaning what passes for the brains of some idiot cyclist off of my windshield and am not looking forward to it.

I have however driven a motorcycle and while it is very dangerous, it is less so than a bicycle because you have the acceleration and maneuverability to get out of many situations. And motorcycles can drive the same speeds as the rest of traffic. People underestimate how many collisions are caused by traffic disruptions and abrupt changes of speed.

The easy way around this is to find out what journal the article was published in and look at its impact factor. If the impact factor is below 2, ignore it. If it is between 3 and 10, it is probably legit although it may not be the majority viewpoint in the field. If it is above 10, then either the article is written by a very important person in the field, or it is considered to be potentially high-impact but may be wrong. Alternatively very massive consortium experiments are published in high-impact journals as a matter of course.

It is best to stick to the 3 to 10 range though until you know the ins and outs. Lots of Nature papers look exciting and turn out to be wrong. This is a rough guideline that varies by field.

PLoS One is a journal that publishes anything but has a decent impact factor so it is an exception to this rule. There are a few others but it generally holds true.

> if you can find a correlation, it's at least worth a try to treat that as causation. It's much better than picking a random answer.

No, it isn't. Or if it is, it's barely better, not much better. See my lengthier reply above.

The reason why this is false is because in biology, there is an enormous correlation structure in which, to a good approximation, everything is correlated with everything. If you take a random gene, its expression will be significantly correlated or anticorrelated with well over half of all other genes. Probably over 80% if I remember correctly. Depends on the number of samples, if you get into 10K+ samples it approaches 100%.

In an area like aging, skin wrinkling is correlated with sarcopenia is correlated with atherosclerosis is correlated with number of senescent cells is correlated with all kinds of gene and metabolite expression levels etc ... you get the idea.

In genetics a SNP will be correlated with hundreds of thousands of other SNPs.

I guess you can go so far as to say correlations can generate hypotheses. People certainly do this all the time. But "a correlation is tentative evidence of direct causation" is just wrong. Technically it is evidence, it's just that in my experience in biology it is such weak evidence as to be useless without other evidence.

> Review articles are good, but I still recommend starting with textbooks before moving on to reviews.

We are agreed on that. I shouldn't have said "out of date", which suggests what is in those books is invalid. What I should have said is "they don't really cover topics that are new or controversial and mostly only cover fundamentals".

In reality as you know each new edition of those books is 95% or more identical to the previous edition.

The only downside to this approach is that if people are interested in a particular topic like cell senescence, it's a bit harsh to say "go read these 5 textbooks that may have 2 pages on the subject before you even start looking into the topic you're interested in". And the Biology of Cancer? I'm published on several cell senescence papers and don't know jack about cancer. I own the book and skimmed it though. I think Hallmarks of Cancer review is a much better introduction than this tome. The other two are good fundamentals books though. For aging I recommend Handbook of the Biology of Aging.

FWIW, I do not know a single PhD student that read those books cover-to-cover. In most of my grad school classes you weren't even required to buy the textbook and they were barely used. Actually in grad school I never bought a single textbook for classes, although I did get some for personal use.

This is not bad advice, especially for people lacking the fundamentals, but these books are often way out of date and only cover topics that have been solidly established 20 years ago.

I would suggest, especially for people interested in a relatively niche field like aging, that a good compromise is to read review articles. You can go to PubMed and filter by review articles to find them.

But I wholeheartedly concur that for non-experts to read primary research articles will cause much more confusion than clarity. And doubly so for press releases on those articles.

> Am I the only one wondering if this person is confusing cause and effect?

No you are not. I work in this field and confusions of cause and effect are a daily occurrence. It is as dumfoundedd said, the reality is that aging is a complex causal network. I think everyone knows that but can't resist the temptation to pretend like the one edge they are working on in the network is the end-all.

It can get very ridiculous. At this year's aging meeting someone was actually proposing DNN predictions of age based on people's faces as a gold standard for biomarkers of aging. That is, they were suggesting people's faces were a better indicator of their internal biological state of aging than both their actual age and any internal biological marker.

Metagenomics is another one, although more debatable. I personally find it much more plausible that changes in the aging gut cause changes in the microbiome than the reverse (in general).

Horvath's epigenetic clock is another one, he presented a elastic net model that could predict age based on DNA methylation using a few hundred loci. For several years and even now, way too many investigators thought those loci were actually causal in aging because they don't understand how statistics work.

It annoys me. I have long considered writing a review to remind people what causality means. It is far too common for people to observe correlations and just straight to predicting causality without any additional evidence besides the correlation.

The interesting finding of this paper is that inhibition of nucleotide synthesis can induce senescence. But the (simplistic) definition of senescence is inability to replicate. You can't replicate without nucleotides, but this doesn't at all mean that the ordinary cause of senescence is lack of nucleotides. The common understanding is that it is G1 or G2 arrest due to DNA damage of one sort or another. Furthermore, the observation that senescent cells don't produce many nucleotides is kind of a duh. It is useful and important that they quantified it, but still it is hardly surprising.

But there is still hope. I just saw my chair in the hall, told him about this paper, and asked his opinion of the idea that "fixing nucleotide synthesis may help reduce cell senescence or help cells age more slowly". His response was to laugh, pat me on the shoulder, and walk away, if that says anything.

If the premise is that being a nice, team-oriented person and being a good programmer are not mutually exclusive, then of course I agree. And "Zuck was successful because he's an asshole" is something that seems like an obvious fallacy but the more I thought about it, the more I realized it isn't really. "Zuck was successful solely because he's an asshole" would be.

A distinction should be drawn between a "good programmer" and "person good at startups and greenfield projects". I would maintain that the latter requires a certain amount of assholery.

Really good products are not made by committee, at least not in the beginning stages. Committees and large groups of people also tend to slow things down, a lot. You have to be willing to be opinionated and self-assured to maintain a cohesive vision of where you want to go, and that necessarily means pissing people off. Steve Jobs, Linus Torvalds, and possibly Elon Musk are other examples.

So while 10xers in terms of pure programming skill will not be enriched in assholes, the famous ones will generally be, because they got in on the ground floor. The ground floor is where it helps to be an asshole. Most of us here are not dealing with such situations though, so I would agree to the extent that for 99% of employers in 99% of situations, considering assholery to be a positive trait is very unwise.

Assuming that behavioral targeting does not work, which I do not know, several possible reasons:

1. They started tracking when behavioral targeting seemed like a reasonable hypothesis, and keep doing it now to build a dataset in case it might work in the future.

2. Google does lots of things that are speculative and generate no revenue, and the general attitude in the industry is "why not collect all data we can because storage is cheap in case we can somehow use or sell it later". If we applied your overall logic to every part of Google, they would probably have 500 employees.

3. If Google can persuade advertisers that it works, they still make more money from them even if Google knows that it does not. Thus BT can generate value for Google without generating any for advertisers.

4. If everyone else in the industry also makes these claims about behavioral targeting working, any company not claiming to do it too would be at a competitive disadvantage.

Also, it is possible that BT "works", say, 1% better than CA. In that case it technically "works and generates value" but most reasonable people would say in that case that it does not justify the privacy tradeoffs or general hype.

Speaking as a PhD, I can assure you that just because PhDs research ways to make a thing work does not mean it does. Nor are they, or those hiring them, immune to presenting their results in the most optimistic possible way.

I am personally acquainted with several active fields that have been trying to make things work for 20+ years with very moderate success. They present their results which amount to "barely better than nothing" in order to keep funded. They also make the same arguments you do, "it stands to reason that it should work", to keep the money flowing.

There is the drug industry, which is chock full of new drugs that are barely better than placebo or generics, if they are at all. The results are hyped because it keeps the cash flowing. It would not be entirely true, but nor would it be too far off the mark, to say that almost the entire drug industry is based on fraud and exaggeration. And that industry is far more transparent WRT data and superficially altruistic than the advertising industry. This example is perfectly parallel because no one denies advertising works, just like no one denies antibiotics work, but the difference between new and old drugs, just like new and old advertising methods, seems to be greatly exaggerated.

Google built its entire empire based on contextual advertising, not behavioral targeting. With Facebook you may have an argument, but Facebook has a very special dataset not available anywhere else, and I would also add that Facebook makes the same amount of money whether behavioral targeting really works, or if they've just convinced their advertisers that it does.

I am neutral on the subject of whether it works because I have never looked into it, but "lots of self-interested people say that it does" is not convincing, and the fact that such an argument is so frequently made makes me think there is no actual proof.

What is wrong with what he said? I admit some parts were kind of silly, like the "worn out keys", but the overall theme was that he was basically just describing a somewhat romanticized version of a "Commando" from Atwood's "Commandos, Infantry, and Police". This is reinforced by his reply saying "They can be phenomenal in the early stage of the product cycle."

The overall picture is of someone who is technically competent but "moves fast and breaks things". The person who coined that phrase perfectly embodies the upsides and downsides of this type of person: Zuckerberg quickly threw together a PHP app, is a gigantic jerk, and he is a billionaire because his product was phenomenally successful. Then other, kinder, gentler and more team-oriented people came later to make the product performant and legible. If the team-oriented people had been involved from the beginning you would have gotten Google Plus.

It stands to reason that such a person would be more likely, on balance, to be abrasive and dislike meetings. I guess the only problem I see with his formulation is that a "10x" engineer is implied to be better than other engineers. Atwood's "you need all kinds" formulation is better.

> Each developer should be replaceable.

This attitude makes perfect sense from a managerial perspective. If workers are easily replaceable, they don't have negotiating leverage and you can pay them less, and you don't have to worry about risk to your company if one of them gets hit by a bus.

Conversely, it is in an employee's interest to be hard to replace if they can be. It gives job security and negotiating leverage. A "good" 10x engineer, the ideal stereotype, would be hard to replace because by definition, you'd have to hire 10 people to replace them, and even then, the 10 might not be able to accomplish certain hard tasks.

The bad stereotype of a 10x engineer is that they wrote a business-critical monstrosity only they can understand.

What they both have in common is that they are hard to replace. That is why, I think, that when big companies hire well-known 10x engineers, they put them on non-business-critical research type roles. And smaller companies would presumably be wise to avoid them altogether.

> we would need to: Determine how to measure real-world productivity [1]

I submit to you that we would be having the same arguments no matter what study was done, because it could always be argued that whatever small-scale thing would be measured, and whatever metric was used, doesn't reflect the full complexity of reality.

We all know that some programmers are better than others. But actually quantifying that would not be in anyone's interests. For programmers, it would mean hard metrics to rate our performance, and people would be paid differently based on these metrics. "Bad" programmers, as defined by this hypothetical metric, would lose money and career opportunities. "Good" programmers would earn the wrath and envy of their colleagues. From a manager's perspective, hard metrics would encourage gaming the system and would generally not encourage team play.

So it is better off where it is. People who write code slowly can argue that they are really more productive because they take time for testing and collaboration and making documentation and making things legible, and that people who write code quickly are making unmaintainable messes. And people who write quickly have a prima facie case.