There's a non-moralistic reason to be concerned with adultery in the case of politicians and public servants, which is that knowledge of it can be used for extortion.
Populism is 'supporting the concerns of ordinary people', demagoguery is 'apealing to popular desires and prejudices at the expense of rational argument'. Distrust of populism itself is misplaced distrust, since while these two concepts do appear at the same time on occasion, I'm not sure of a causal or even correlated relationship.
Populism itself is not necessarily a bad thing if it is in the great American tradition of distrusting elitism and authority. However what we have instead is manufactured populism funded by very wealthy people.
What matters most is economic mobility, and my definition of that is what percent of poverty level 20 somethings end up in the top income (and savings) brackets by their 30s and 40s. Because it's kind of OK if the bottom fifth of earners is just college baristas and bartenders, or financially independent people just picking up side jobs. I'm pretty sure that's not what is occurring in the US though, because pensions are now nonexistent and our average savings rate has always been horrible.
I like that he is willing to offer generalized advice, even though that is his job. He has one failure, that's one more failure than most of the people listening to his advice, and counts as experience.
Where it gets difficult to answer the very real internal almost contemplative question of 'am I solving a hard problem?' is when one looks at the history of fluffy rhetoric used by companies solving seemingly easy problems, making it impossible to convince them or their supporters they aren't solving something hard. For example, a website with photo sharing and a forum like feature called a newsfeed claims to be connecting everyone. Can't fault them for having audacious goals, I guess, but then it makes it harder to know how to approach one's own hard problems. What's the MVP for a product that attacks world hunger, cancer, or energy scarcity, for example?
Pediatricians I know can basically immediately tell the difference between a kid raised by the TV/phone and one primarily read/spoken to. Obvious differences in verbal ability.
A light wave got sucked into a black hole, you won't believe what happened next! I predict a new meme theme of taboola/outbrain style headlines that are actually semi-accurate sciencey clickbait titles. Genius!
I think the anti-philosophy era you are referring to is actually more like an anti-intellectual, anti-science, and generally populist movement that seems to be picking up steam. The most irritating manifestation of which says that you can't learn anything from books, something I increasingly hear people saying. I'd say the progress in more recent philosophy has been the efforts of multidisciplinary types like those in neuroscience and philosophy (ie Sam Harris) to enable more useful and practical 'popularizations' like the realization that meditation has benefits. Unfortunately debates about what 'grue' and 'bleen' are, while actually fascinating when you dig into it, and potentially even having practical consequence, generated an anti-philosophy populist movement that resembles general anti-intellectualism, and isn't helpful.
This entire debate reminds me of this classic Milton Friedman video (I think the key difference with Uber, and where they are likely to get in trouble, is that they never made any estimate about how many lives their car experiment would cost that I am aware of): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYW5I96h-9w
I agree with Bill Gates' description of platforms as companies which provide tools which are used by other entities to generate more economic value than the value of the owners of those tools. How you measure said economic value is another story and one I am grappling with. And I think social media companies are ultimately aggregators, not platforms. What I think should come out of any regulation is an obligation for aggregators at a certain scale to 1) stop calling themselves neutral platforms, because that's not accurate, 2) be required to disclose in verifiable, auditable detail how they are prioritizing content from an algorithmic perspective, how they are compensating generators of both paid and organic content from a both monetary and "in app currency" perspective (likes, etc), and 3) when they do exercise their editorial judgment and kick 3rd party apps off their APIs, explain how and why they came to such a judgment, not in a storytelling kind of way, but in a parametric (they hit this number, so we took action) kind of way. And if there is a human in the loop, that human needs to have certain competencies, which would resemble professionalism like that of lawyers and doctors. These three requirements would have to be agreed upon like international standards of a sort. Now, I am aware that everything I am requesting is also likely to be infected by 'bureacracy' and that is something I'm not sure I have a way to solve for.
Please humor me this reductio ad absurdam question: So does that make a toothbrush company a platform? Because arguably lots of people are avoiding cavities, and that fact seems more economically valuable than the total dollar value of all the toothbrushes sold, or the net present value of all the toothbrush customers in the world. What am I missing here? (I don't think a toothbrush company is a platform company, for the record).
The tech platform companies are all competing for mindshare in the education market as well. In fact, a FB apologist once went so far as to suggest that the best antidote to FB is readily available FB in classrooms; this way students will learn to be less distracted by it. The problem with this is that even the mere availability of the resource is a source of distraction.
And now the best proxy for 'the complete truth' seems to be the entrepreneur who built the largest AI enabled platform with the most engaged users. As long as that person is benevolent, we are all OK?
I would argue that low interest rates in part caused this skyrocketing home value effect for the simple fact that low interest rates have convinced people over the last 30 or so years that borrowing is more profitable than saving (I'm grouping all interest rate regimes after 1981 into the low interest rate category). Would be nice if we could put to rest the notion of home ownership as a good forced savings plan, investment plan, etc.
"Impact" is the new buzzword of the creative class, aka the knowledge worker. Also, it might be noted, someone else cleans the toilets, that comment from the social good person was just argument by example, and a strange example coming from the person whose title kind of most closely resembles advocating for working people. Because the people who actually clean their toilets don't likely talk much about 'impact'. For folks who are worried about groupthink and feedback loops at FB look no further than comments like these.
Probably discrete, but a related question is what constitutes the discrete element? Science just discovered that it's not just neuron synapses as previously believed. Recent discoveries with snails show that reflexive 'memories' are transferrable from one snail to another via injection, so our synapse only model was likely incomplete for at least simpler organisms: https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/17/health/snail-memory-rna-scien...
Old philosophy is fun in the same way old science is fun. Watching someone from thousands of years ago use a process to determine a more accurate or valuable way of thinking about the world, with rudimentary tools, should inspire us to go use the tools we have now better.
To paraphrase The Simpsons: "In the future, computer programs will be built by labeled data sets. And our job will be to build and maintain those labeled data sets."
Both have good eyeball grabbing potential but for different reasons. They both fit into a storyline that captures our survivalistic imagination owing to our evolutionary roots. In the former it's "I'd better watch out for disasters like that one" and in the latter its "I'd better watch out for people like that." I don't think most people 'click the link' because they are in problem solving mode, that happens after they've read the shocking headline.
Positive cash flow is actually way more important than profit, although you should have both ideally. If you are running a positive cash flow business with good growth and accurate depreciation numbers on fixed assets, you are in a better position than a profitable microbusiness in a small market. Amazon's breakthrough wasn't realizing this, it was realizing how big the ecommerce market was and how to grow to be able to address the whole market using cash flow to invest. They also used a large pile of investment to get there along the way too. (Four negative cash flow years in their history according to this)): https://realmoney.thestreet.com/articles/08/12/2016/comparin...
This argument is funny to me mainly because I hear it all the time, about how different they are because they don't want to be profitable. The other thing management is supposed to do is manage cash flow and profit in such a way as to reduce risk (by piling up cash, not too much of course, but just enough...). They also survived the dot com crash because they were thrifty and always kind of cash flow break even.
I've met consultants who have described it as sort of 'addictive' for people with ADD, mainly because they get to feel like they are in the middle of some big drama, for a short time, too short usually to really own the problem, then the engagement is over and they go on to the next thing.
I understand the skepticism. I actually try to eat grassfed beef where budgetary constraints allow. In my opinion, grassfed beef today is the most sustainable land -based option given that the person consuming it is fat adapted. If eaten it in the traditional American diet of steak, potatoes, often beer, and bread, the result of this is a less efficient metabolism, the net result of which is more unsustainable agriculture because the person is going back to relying in part on intensive plant agriculture. I have an answer to the exhalation question, which I think is important to understand. The hydrocarbons generated by photosynthesis in the grass go into the cow, become protein and fat in the cow, and then go into the human, and become a hydrocarbon based store of energy. Most of the result of the use of this store is energy, heat, and two biproducts (H2O and CO2) (the efficiency ratios here matter and they are favorable in both healthy cows and humans). As long as we have a human/animal population on earth, we will have a system that produces energy (muscle movement and neurons firing), heat (waste from the inefficiency of our neuro-muscular-skeletal system) and CO2 and H20. The question, which I think grassfed beef addresses, is what is the most efficient way to take sunlight, water, and CO2, and convert that into energy for the human/animal population to use? To this I'd add in my optimal system we actually address the dual-threat type problems of overfishing and ocean acidification, and encourage sustainable harvesting of smaller fish with population management controls (ie sardines and anchovies).
Almost quit beef due to the info in Cowspiracy in which I believe they pointed out that if everyone were to switch to grass fed beef there would literally not be enough grassland to support it (this is probably true, with the assumption that various plant crops continue their unsustainable land footprint). However, having seen also "The Magic Pill" on Netflix, I've concluded the optimal solution is probably more, healthier beef, and less plant agriculture land. The real problem isn't the cows, it's what the cows eat, which is mostly corn, soy, grains etc. Put as simply as I can: if humans committed to eating fewer carbs, and eating grass fed fatty meat and high quality plant oils for the bulk of their calories, the resulting system would produce huge carbon capture because grassland in its 'growth phase' is a very efficient carbon sink, and is more supportive of healthy soil than fields of corn, soy, and grains.