evancoop

On some level, this is the strongest argument in favor of Facebook's original position - that they oughtn't be responsible for distinguishing fact from fiction. Ask any entity to discern truth at scale and there will be errors and vociferous debates.

So, what's preferable? Unfettered venom and lies mixed with the best attempts at rationality or the discourse moderated by unseen arbiters and algorithms?

Ideally, there would be multiple forums. But given how technology scales and how network effects operate, we'd likely wind up with a few enormous entities.

Thus, I refer back to the choice above. Which will it be?

Seems to raise a couple profound questions: 1. Is there a credible alternative (comparable ease of access and implementation)? 2. Does the absence of such a tool hinder business operating efficiency?

If the answer to #1 is no, then any assertions that Google is not operating as a monopoly in the space are undercut. If the answer is #2 is no, then there are quite a few BI/Analytics/Strategy personnel who might find their value more difficult to justify!

Certainly, the upside is larger - cannot argue. The challenge, in my mind, with respect to software is the unforeseen, not-entirely-in-your-control challenge of integration, bug-fixing, etc. I'd much rather have delivered 95% of the scoped work, tell the client essentially, "we can do X, but it could require some non-trivial expenditure on your part or, since we've done a great job setting priorities to date, maybe that feature is not mission critical." Time and materials gives both parties some agency.

Of course, if your powers of predictions are infallible, then perhaps you're better off with fixed scope! (My powers of prediction are infallible too...until they aren't!)

I might add two amendments here:

The first is that "time and materials" is infinitely preferable to "fixed scope." In the former case, both client and consultant have an incentive to set priorities and make difficult, pragmatic choices. In the latter case, the potential for inadvertently over-promising is ever-present. Then comes either "fail and take the blame" or work through sunrise to deliver.

The second is that over-communication with the client throughout the engagement is often the difference between joyous interactions and the various horror stories that become commonplace.

Consulting can be spectacular IF the contracts are time and materials AND consultants over-communicate with clients.

A college friend wandered the dorm bleary-eyed. His aspirations were pre-med. In a moment of revelation, he noted that if he were so inclined, he could find enough material to spend every waking hour studying.

He also recognized that this was college, and he was planning to use at least some of those hours sleeping or socializing.

Therefore, he concluded, he wasn't going to "work as hard as he could" or any such phrase about maximizing one's output/accomplishment. All that remained was satisfying himself.

He went on to study music. He is a professor of musicology now. I never saw him comparably stressed thereafter.

"There was a time that engineers were willing to trade years of their lives for the lottery ticket of stock options. I find that, as more companies try this approach, and it becomes more common, more engineers are becoming literate as to the downsides. More bluntly: more people are starting to understand that stock options are frequently worthless."

What's interesting here is not the engineers becoming wise to the poor value proposition, but rather, the market's failure to respond with alternatives. In some cases, there is an inability to pay (e.g. "startup X cannot match FAANG company Y"). But in many others, perhaps the optimism of the person making the equity offer is blinding?

Next week, on "lifestyles of the rich and rent-seeking," we'll speak to the folks from Apple, who have discovered how to extract copious sums from captive app developers and their downstream customers! You won't want to miss this episode!

(Of course, if you do, you can livestream from another app whose access they probably control)

Firstly, I will resist the urge to quip about the culinary potential of the remainder of the pig or the moral implications of using animals for their organs (especially since we've already decided, at a societal level, that eating them is acceptable).

Secondly, this begs the question, "how many other high-risk, high-potential treatments deserve resources and experimentation?" Clearly, if this is successful, the potential for adding quality-adjusted-life-years to humans is enormous. Does this inform how we view other experimental treatment? Does this inform how cryonics is perceived more broadly (at its core, another experimental tool to extend life)?

Excess deaths will need to become the standard statistic used to compare nations. Otherwise, we'll be debating "deaths FROM vs. deaths WITH COVID" and the differing statistical definitions from nation to nation. Moreover, is a death from lack of access to medical care due to the collapse of a medical system a COVID death? Is a death of despair from isolation and unemployment a COVID death?

My sense is, when the pandemic is analyzed historically, "excess deaths" will be the only salient statistic in the literature.

It's not simply a matter of willpower to avoid procrastination. The "doom loops" emerge in the absence of a structure that returns awareness to a task (but does not require anxiety about the task BEFORE that return). We've all made to-do lists...then avoided looking at the list for some unhealthy period of time. That's the cognitive dissonance hell (don't look! don't acknowledge the problem!).

The answer presumably lies in habits, external structure, and patterns that allow items to be acted upon, quickly captured with minimal thought (e.g. "Getting Things Done" or some such system), and then, crucially, returning to that external structure early and often!

The reality is that no such projection is plausible. Could a human being living in 1903, before the Wright Brothers have predicted a moon landing only 66 years later? Could anyone in 1990 have predicted the smartphone, let alone 1922? Only one prediction is worthy of confidence - the world of technology will increase at an exponential rate...and the world will improve.

We lament progress, but few of us would choose 1922 over 2022 (I mean, the sanitation and medical care alone makes the decision trivial on my end). Even fewer would choose 2022 in 2122.

Though collusion between two tech giants is obviously distasteful and anticompetitive, how is this ultimately addressed? Sure, governments could force Google and Apple to break into smaller entities...but as long as humans still largely choose the best software, there will still be network effects that lead to dominant players emerging. In turn, there will be new giants.

So...either there are general paradigms/regulations/principles to apply, or we'll simply return to this state repeatedly, no?

The relevant detail, in my mind, is not whether Holmes deserves punishment, or even how much. The relevant detail is how the judge ultimately sentences Holmes, and more importantly, on what basis the judge selects the upper or lower range of possible sentencing outcomes. Considering that BS, stretching of capabilities, and so on are commonplace in the startup world, the point isn't whether Holmes crossed the line (she did), but rather, how exactly that line is repositioned by this precedent.

There's the easy story: "Young, ambitious wunderkind founder falls from grace." And the hard story: "Here's what might be relevant for future founders."

The strongest argument in favor of VC would be the ability to deliver capital where otherwise none would be available, the ability to generate above-market returns (at least circumstantial evidence of offering value), and the experience/insights that emerge from experience with other startups.

The counter-argument would be, as PG alludes, the best VCs don't act like most of the others, the massive capital their business model requires them to invest causes misaligned incentives with respect to founders (e.g. the founder is happy to sell for $15M, but the VC folks are not), and there's a fair bit of IP security concern.

The bottom-line suggests a revisiting of incentives from both parties. Founders need some access to the VCs broader returns (possibly even offering their insight into OTHER businesses under the VC's flag) and VCs need to assess their returns over much larger temporal horizons than most funds will consider.

If you had diamond hands when all around you Were selling shares and saying you should too If riding GameStop moonward made friends hound you And worry if the SEC would sue

...

If you addressed a virulent pandemic By grokking each new trend that had begun, Your wisdom was enriched and epistemic And you made bank in 2021.

This would suggest that we are not simply using the wrong dictionaries, but in fact, learning to deploy language inaptly from grade school onward. Students are examined on definitional understanding rather than the "hues" to which the author alludes. Command of language would necessarily include details of how one word is subtly different from another.

How should our system of teaching language be altered?

It seems like, in your case, the publication is evidence that the rabbit hole was at least original and interesting. Students in that category tend to graduate, have a few compelling results to their name, and simply expend a couple extra semesters relative to the average.

The real question is whether they learn to focus efforts on the relevant goal (in which case, these original thinkers with innate curiosity can be fantastic hires) or continue their rabbit-hole-exploring ways (in which case they generate publications as post-docs, but generally struggle in the private sector where folks want THEIR questions answers ASAP). Which are you?

(Fascinating discussion!)

The "lead or be led" trope is apt, and certainly became the paradigm of my doctoral years. I might, however, amend this slightly. There's another idea of going rogue too soon or too late (https://matt.might.net/articles/ways-to-fail-a-phd/).

Students, new employees, and other inexperienced folks need to be led initially, and then rapidly, transition into a self-directed paradigm. Success emerges if and only if the advisor and student recognize the need for this transition at a similar moment. The alternative is either the student who runs down rabbit holes repeatedly despite being guided elsewhere (those students tend to at least get SOMETHING done and while they take forever to graduate, do find some interesting results along the way) or the student who after a couple years is still just reading papers and waiting to be told what to do (these students often fail outright as advisors get fed up with the hand-holding).

Perhaps the next iteration of such tracking would be values for related series of objective measurements that should improve with the investment of time. Continued exercise should yield improvements in weight, speed, endurance, etc (at least for an individual as young as the OP).

Malcolm Gladwell often trumpeted "deliberate practice." Does the OP receive feedback regarding the quality of his musical practice or the form displayed during physical exercise? Does that yield greater gains per time?

More (most) importantly, what are the GOALS of these activities? The ultimate assessment would be the extent to which such data, discipline, and tracking actually spark progress in the desired direction.

With each new opportunity to learn to code without the expense of a four-year degree in Computer Science, don't we reach a point at which either: 1) The four-year degree in CS is actually seen as something of a negative indicator 2) We acknowledge the silent part out loud, e.g. "the college degree is a signal, not a delivery mechanism for professional skills." ?

Isn't the more fascinating element of this story the lack of medical understanding regarding what seems like a fairly well-understood body part (a fingertip)? How much knowledge could be gained simply be seeking seemingly minor examples beyond current understanding, even in the absence of financial incentive to explore?

Seems like there are multiple issues here. The first would be rather ineffective management that fails to notice or address a lack of productivity. The second would be a lack of interest in one's current role - most folks would probably do more work if only to alleviate day-to-day boredom, especially given the aptitude that the OP clearly possesses.

I worked at a company where someone like this was eventually unearthed, and the result was all manner of big-brother-esque counts of commits, etc.

Is the argument about morality or managerial structure?

It seems like this discussion should be raised up a level. We can debate the merits of the app itself, but then that leads to opposing, valid arguments. The app's creator can assert the numerous beneficial uses of the app. Detractors can note the potential for misuse/abuse. Neither is necessarily a winning argument in an objective sense. And thus, we need some arbiter. In this case, that arbiter is Apple, who in this case, must anger some subset of the people on this thread.

So really, the debate is "who is a valid arbiter?" On what basis should the authority to deny access to a platform/market be granted or revoked? It seems that discussion is, to date, wholly inadequate.

How does one distinguish between "marketing," a process that can be analytical with respect to consumer behavior, survey data, market testing, etc. and "hustling," which is less rigorous, and more ado about effort in generating exposure? It seems as though devs can get behind the former, once there's a product to sell, but the latter is somewhat antithetical to the general disposition (at least for me personally).

Is this really a plea to recognize that some of this isn't about a skillset as much as a temperament?

Let's consider that the question can be altered slightly to "how much private space can one single entity acquire?" Perhaps the current understanding of public/private is sufficient, e.g. "a private company can bar who it chooses, given that they do not violate some paradigm of protected classes, etc." The problem is that ONE entity owns a majority of a certain type of "space."

The redefinition would be to say, "once you own more than X% of something, it cannot be governed by existing rules about 'private' spaces?"

How much of the underlying issue reduces to incentive structures? Any large entity (Google being one) has plenty of monetary incentive to reduce the number of customer service professionals. Any algorithm that minimizes human interactions is profitable unless it actually costs the company its customers. Thus, since it's almost impossible for Google/Amazon/Facebook/Apple to lose a significant proportion of customers, it is almost inevitable that they'll avoid letting anyone speak to a human being when a dispute arises.

This might be a subtle anti-trust "cost" to consumers that is entirely overlooked in congress?

"Use a steering wheel lock, which will also work as a visual deterrent."

For years, my friends and spouse derided my use of "the Club." After all, there are so many more technically sophisticated mechanisms to deter and prevent theft. Now, the irony is that the technology is redeployed in the service of the criminal rather than the owner!

Does the pendulum swing back the other way? In a world where all mechanisms of security are digital and criminals look for digital surfaces to attack, the ultimate trump card is a physical obstacle?

A competition between the best neuroscience researchers on planet earth and data scientists is underway. We should all be watching.

Whether it's a scandal of this ilk, or the Lori Laughlin variant thereof, at some point, don't we need to consider the underlying incentive structure of the broader system rather than the specific behavior of the bad actors? If the dwindling path to social mobility runs through exams and a shrinking list of institutions, then there will be those who respond to these incentives unethically. How do we change the incentives?

This is one of numerous societal examples where the relevant detail is the ubiquity of the standard rather than the optimality. Once a given set of parameters is broadly-applied, any improvement requires too high a short-term cost to justify. To wit, consider the colors of a traffic light. Perhaps [red, yellow, green] is not optimal. However, we've all generally grown to understand the pattern, and if somewhere, that pattern changed, there would be numerous accidents for a non-trivial period until folks adjusted.

The goal shouldn't be a better keyboard, but rather, a better paradigm for conveying linguistic intention to a machine (e.g. BCI), which can then be constructed in a manner more reflective of what is CURRENTLY optimal.