microarchitect

I also don't understand why the green card backlog isn't being handled efficiently. Surely, if somebody is paying, say more than 20k in income taxes every year for, say 5 years in a row, there is reason to believe their contribution to the country is a net positive. Why not just give them citizenship and be done with it?

As an outsider, I feel like the US is the opposite of an "agile" government. It seems like there is a lot bickering and fear-mongering at every level and important decisions are being made based on populism and emotional appeals rather than rational decision making. I'm not sure if this is really the case because my news sources are the likes of Reddit and the so-called "liberal media", but unfortunately this is perception I get.

I think it's more likely that they do and we don't hear about it.

I'm pretty sure if Dennis Ritchie had climbed Everest or something, it would be all over the internet now.

Anyway, my point is that as humans we often make the mistake of seeing patterns where none exist. So, we should be wary of making claims that are unsupported by strong evidence.

I don't buy the argument that this has to be done by force, or that this necessarily results in a bloodbath. What are governments trying to do when they tweak laws, interests rates and the like but trying to "design" societies?

I'm just suggesting that we take more quantitative and model-based approach to this issue. We can start by simply involving more scientists and engineers in policy decisions, and ask them to use the tools we've developed to analyze complex systems to analyze the socio-economic system that we live in.

To a certain extent, we're already doing this. A hundred years ago, most political decisions were ad hoc based on what "seemed right" to the party in charge. Decisions today are much more data-based and rely on expert input.

Unintended consequences aren't the only reason you can't design society. The main reason is that society insists on designing itself. ...

These are dogmatic statements unsupported by citations. I'm not sure how to respond to them.

Societies are full of people who don't agree with other people's "designs" and won't voluntarily cooperate.

It would have inconceivable five hundred years that "most" people would agree on the following:

(1) large parts of the world would elect their own rulers. (2) women would have the same rights and privileges as men. (3) violence as a means of solving problems would be perceived as "wrong".

This perception changed because we see now that these were decisions that benefited society as a whole.

I'm not so sure about that. What was Dennis Ritchie's exceptional "other talent"? Sergey Brin? David Patterson? Yale Patt? Linux Torvalds?

I don't understand why we aren't doing this now. Our political mechanisms and were designed a few centuries ago by people who had the mathematical and scientific sophistication of a contemporary high school student. There is every reason to believe that we can do better if we put our best minds on this task.

Sure, but what prevents you from then measuring these unintended consequences, plugging them back into your model and asking the question "how should my system change?". Is there any reason to believe we can never reach a stable fixed point?

We do things sort of like this in microprocessor design for instance - where we need to deal with "unintended consequences" like parasitic capacitances and resistances that we cannot fully model until the design is complete, but we need to account for while designing the system.

Is there any reason to believe that such an economic system that also combines much of "good" properties of capitalism cannot exist?

Disciplines like game theory and mechanism design have made tremendous advances over the last few decades. Surely we can put these ideas to work in designing better political and economic systems.

As it becomes easier for people to find work, folks who could have done some work but were never given an opportunity to do so will get those opportunities. Basically the talent pool will expand.

Onto the article itself, I find it concerning that some people can break the law and get away with it while others can't.

If you remember back to 2000 or so, Intel had killed all their competitors, bought Alpha and then threw it way were trying two rather briandead architectures in the P4 and the Itanium. They were able to get away with it because essentially they had no competition. AMD saved us from this with the Greyhound and x86-64 and there's no guarantee that Intel would've done anything similar if not for them.

I think the reality is quite the contrary: if Intel hadn't done that (and BTW it wasn't just Intel), modern consumer-grade machines would be 1/10 as powerful, or less. The kind of power I now have in my laptop would be confined to $20k workstations.

The reason you have that kind of performance increase over the last 30 years or so is because of CMOS scaling and let's not kid ourselves into thinking that this is driven by Intel. CMOS scaling was predicted by IBM's Bob Dennard back in the 70s and all we've done since then is pretty much just follow his roadmap.

It's not like computers weren't getting cheaper and faster before Intel became the dominant monopoly.

Do we want to say that if a company A does something that's similar to company B's work, we shouldn't allow that to happen. Ever. I think breaks down pretty badly if you consider the case of, say, generic AIDS drugs. These "copied" drugs are saving lives and that to me is way more important than any IP-infringement issues.

In the Apple vs Google case, it seems like this copying has been a good thing - we now have a lot of really great smartphones trying to out-compete each other. So it's not clear to me that if this copying was banned, this would've been good for human society as a whole.

OTOH, if you consider something like Intel copying the RISC microarchitectures of the 90s and essentially driving the likes of Compaq, DEC and MIPS out of business, allowing those ideas to copied was almost definitely bad for consumers.

The point is that there isn't a clear-cut right-or-wrong answer on this one. It seems like whether copying is a good thing depends more on who is copying who, and how much money each of the participants have, than on exactly what is copied.

I'm ambivalent about (1), but I buy (2). Yes, we know that piracy might kill the music industry, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's a bad thing. Industries and jobs have been dying since the beginning of time. A hundred years ago in India, you could get a job as a "fan-operator" (loose translation from the Hindi term "pankha chalak" which literally means fan-driver.) The folks would sit outside govt offices and pull some mechanical levers which operated fans directed at the bigshots doing "real" work inside. I also remember reading some stories in my Hindi class lamenting the death of the fan-operator's profession. Oh the irony of a privileged middle-class writer complaining about an unskilled almost-demeaning job going out of existence!

On a unrelated note, I especially liked this part:

As a politician, I have other concerns than sound engineering and profitable businesses. It is my job — it is my damn responsibility — to take a larger view and look ahead, decades ahead, generations ahead.

It's a pity how few politicians we have today that actually work towards that goal.

Muslim and Hindu communities in the West are also trying to be insular and maintain their own cultural identities, but I guess they're not so effective because they don't have the financial success backing them up that the Jews have. It's a lot harder to deride someone when you know they're making way more money than you, I suppose.

those people are up to something

I don't mean this in any negative way, but they ARE up to something. This something is maintaining their levels of privilege. Is this wrong? I don't know. Probably not, I guess.

I come from an upper caste family in India and it's easy for me to see that this is game that we in India have been playing since independence. There's a lot of cultural and economic know-how that helps people succeed in life, and upper caste families have an abundance of this.

On the one hand, these folks succeed only because they ace the admission tests, have extraordinary academic records and are excellent communicators. On the other hand, the reason they have these qualities is because they were born with privilege. Is this wrong? Unfair? I really don't know. I can't help thinking it's the same situation as the Jews, though.

This non-compete sounds rather unenforceable to me.

I guess you can do whatever catches your fancy if you're Richard Feynman. For the rest of us mortals, the challenge is in finding interesting stuff to do within the constraints of the environment we're working in.

The lesson that I take from the quote is that you've got keep yourself interested in whatever you're doing. If getting up in the morning and turning up to the lab seems like a chore, then something needs to change until it isn't.

I said I'm against unsupported speculation, not against data. We have plenty of good reasons, supported by data, to believe that men make better professional footballers.

I am not aware of any peer-reviewed study that shows men are better suited to computer programming that women. What I said was that throwing around speculation in the absence of data was prejudice and I stand by this.

I also did not make the claim that men and women are equally suited to every type of activity. However, making the leap from "there might be some activities for which men are statistically better than women" to "computer programming is once such activity", especially in the absence of evidence in the form of rigorous peer-reviewed studies supporting your position, is sexism.

That is labeling something as an unacceptable thought.

You're free to think what you want. However, I suggest that you examine your thoughts closely and study whether there is any truth to them before posting them on a public forum. I'm asking for honesty not thought-policing.

But doing it for a living would alienate the vast majority of people

As I said before these are just unsupported claims. And even if these claims were true, this doesn't mean that there is any genetic predisposition of any sort. In short, there's a lot of data to be gathered and analyzed before one confidently make such claims. In the absence of this data, claims like these are also known by the word prejudice.

I reiterate that I believe that your statements perpetuate cultural stereotypes that discourage women from entering careers in science and engineering.

I'd rather you didn't throw these unsupported claims out that IMHO serve no constructive purpose and simply muddy the water with apparently sexist views.

Expressing false ideas is not without cost. We have generation after generation of young women who are socially and culturally conditioned into believing that they're are unsuited for careers in science and engineering. The grandfather is another example of one the many insidious ways in which this happens. As a result, I believe it's completely unacceptable to speculate on these matters, especially when all you have to offer are some sexist opinions unsupported by data.

Furthermore, the labeling of the post as sexist is not a "taboo thought-crime", it's a statement of fact. The OP is clearly claiming that young men are better suited to succeed at programming today than women. What is this if not "a chauvinistic belief in the inferiority of women?" [1]

[1] (sexist) male chauvinist: a man with a chauvinistic belief in the inferiority of women

Princeton's President Shirley Tilghman once said the following and I think it's a fitting quote that speaks directly to people like you.

"There are 25 years of good social science that demonstrate the many cultural practices that act collectively to discourage women from entering and continuing careers in science and engineering. The research is overwhelming, and it is there for anybody to see. On the other hand, the data that would suggest there are innate differences in the abilities of men and women to succeed in the natural sciences are nonexistent."

As I said below, I think he probably is a sexist, but I wouldn't go so far as calling him a dick. As someone who only recently became a feminist, I think it's easy to make the mistake of thinking that Watson was over-reacting. This is probably what Dawkins thought - which of course makes him a sexist, and unaware of his privileges, but all this, IMHO, still isn't enough to make him a dick.

You're right that the low-power ones probably have more accurate simulations than the high-end ones.

I'm not sure you do. I think Dawkins is essentially right about how religion is evil, and I think he's done a great deal for the atheist "movement". At the same, he came off looking like a sexist in the Rebecca Watson fiasco.

The point is, I think his message is correct and important, and yet I think he's probably a sexist. These two are orthogonal attributes.