hammerzeit

You're clearly more of an expert than I am on this (although your tone seems unnecessarily condescending), but I was hoping you could articulate in a clearer way:

What's the accepted explanation behind the vast racial divide in scores? Is it a proxy for poverty? Is it a cultural issue? My understanding is that white + asian Americans, on PISA tests at least, perform at a level that would put them in the top 5 countries in the world, were they alone. I'm not interested in race-based theories -- those seem obviously wrong to me -- but that fact does seem to stick out. Can you explain what the prevailing theory is? Or should I be ignoring that data?

Also, do you have data to support your "rare American who speaks or reads any language besides English" gibe, or was it just offhand snark? The famous Arne Duncan bit cited people who speak more than one language in their home, and the only other data I could find was a gallup poll (suspect already) about people "able to have a conversation in a second language" -- about 25% of Americans.

EDIT: I should stress that my natural bias is irritation at arguments that try to layer European policies over American populations. Forget race -- I don't think it's interesting -- but it seems a lot easier to to design an education system for a culturally homogenous society than a culturally diverse one. This is akin to when people were exclusively blaming the American health care system for a higher mortality rate rather than, say, the massive obesity rate in this country.

I'm a little scared to post here, given how abusive HN has become over the past few days.

As someone who's been reading Aaron's writings for years, it's clear he was a student of civil disobedience. It seems like the JSTOR act was a deliberate act intended as a statement of civil disobedience, given the little I've read here. My facts may be wrong here.

But if that's the case, going to jail seems like a common component of civil disobedience as a way to demonstrate how unjust a law is. The men I'm certain Aaron admired -- MLK Jr, Gandhi, etc. -- all served time in jail as a mechanism of galvanizing society around the injustice of the laws they were fighting.

I ask this as a legitimate question: Did Aaron not expect to go to jail for an act of civil disobedience?

There have been rumblings for a while that advertising is one of Amazon's upcoming long-term bets like cloud services were 3-5 years ago.

I feel like this is a little bit outside of HN's normal areas of interest, but it's worth stressing that this seems like it has the potential to be a Big Deal.

That's for a few reasons:

1. The display advertising ecosystem has, for years, been talking about data-driven display. The truth of the matter is, though, that most of the data is indirectly inferred and extremely low-quality. Companies like Google and Facebook tread very lightly when it comes to offering data for targeting for fear of massive privacy backlash, but it seems like Amazon could sidestep that. If Amazon is allowing implicit/indirect access to Amazon purchase history, it will be far and away better than anything else out there. More importantly, the unevenness of the data and of performance has really held back broader adoption -- if they're smart they may be able to bring over many of the holdouts.

2. Advertisers and agencies have an extremely wary relationship with Google and are cautious about Facebook too. If they play it right, Amazon can be the major non-aligned player in the industry -- a technology without inventory.

It's also worth noting that I've recently noticed Amazon ramping up its own retargeting programs more aggressively. Assuming that retargeting performs for them like it does for virtually every other e-commerce site out there, I would not be surprised to see a significant jump in Amazon's revenue attributed to that over the next few quarters.

There should be some very interesting opportunities for startups to piggyback themselves on this when it comes out.

I guess a lot of this comes back to the fact that this was published in the New Yorker. The New Yorker stakes their brand on the quality of their fact-checking, which to me requires less upfront disclosure. If this story was in fact fabricated, the reality of the story would be the smaller controversy, I'd argue. The real controversy would be the immediate destruction of one of America's most prestigious journalism brands.

To wit, see http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/freelance-jour...

"[New Yorker Editor-in-Chief David] Remnick says he’s satisfied with the accuracy of the account. 'The sources spoke to our fact-checkers,' he said. 'I know who they are. Those are the rules of the road around here. We have the time to do this. There isn’t always time' for publications with shorter deadlines to do the same checking."

It's totally appropriate to raise questions about a story as detailed and important as this one, but this article seems more tendentious than the evidence suggests.

The claims against his character that the journalist makes at the beginning do not seem substantial enough to cast him as a liar.

Even more so, the parts of the story that do not add up, in the author's eyes, seem problematic but not totally unresolvable. For example, I don't think it's too farfetched to think that they may inventory the contents of the SEALs' pockets before departing on a mission.

The author of this piece also seems to imply that there is no good reason for the journalist not to reveal his sources, which is of course totally wrong, especially for something like this.

Lastly, the author totally ignores the fact that she is accusing of complicity a magazine known for the quality of its fact-checking. I would think it's safe to say the author's deception would have either have had to be astonishingly good or the new yorker to be particularly malicious for the accusations here to be true. One of those may be the case, but she should explicitly say that she is questioning the ability of the New Yorker's fact-checking team.

I guess at the end of the day, it's still worthy of questioning and investigating, but to me this article comes off as the argument of someone with an ax to grind more than an investigation.