onetwofiveten

Honestly, unless you have expensive hobbies you are passionate about, if you have enough money then you should shift your focus away from money and more towards finding happiness in your life.

There's nothing wrong with making lots of money, if you're also happy with what you're doing. But if you think you'd be happier doing something more worthwhile, then go for it. It doesn't have to be medical research. You could work on developing tools that support scientific development - things like programming tools or machine learning technology. You can still make a lot of money in those areas. You don't even have to focus on science, there is intrinsic value in politics, art, culture, education, communication, etc. Or sell everything, keep as much as you need to set yourself up doing something you enjoy and give the rest to cancer research.

Whatever you want to do, just making money for its own sake doesn't make any sense from a pragmatic point of view. Once you've ensured a stable modest lifestyle, extra money does not really increase your ability to enjoy life significantly. I am not very rich, but I have learned to cook, and I cook to my own tastes. So I get really great food every day. Alcohol is pretty cheap if that's your pleasure. Drugs less so - but spending a lot of money on drugs is bad for you in the long term. Having money helps attract sexual interest, but confidence and social skills work just as well. Money only helps get more frequent lower quality sex. High quality comes through deep mutual understanding and accommodation with you partner. You're way better off spending time investing in personal development so you can learn to build good quality relationships.

The one thing money can reliably buy you is status. It's very easy to cling to the notion that status has significant intrinsic value, but it doesn't. Status doesn't help you make friends or find love or solve your emotional problems or be happier. You might think having low status will make people ignore you or look down on you, but if you're confident, if you believe in yourself as a smart guy, that will never happen. True self-belief renders status obsolete.

Money based status is ultimately just a social competition that some people care about and some people don't. It's a shared obsession that means about as much as any other shared obsession. Your bank balance is like a high score on World of Warcraft. To some people it's the most important thing to them. But, to those on the outside, it's obvious that the obsession is unhealthy and adds little to the obsessed one's life.

There are two differences. The first is that you have to replace "preconceived notions of how the universe works" with "vast body of experimental data and scientific understanding of how the universe works". Our evidence for how physics works vastly outweighs current parapsychology research results. The second difference is that the evidence is not being ignored (at least by the author of the article), but is being taken to indicate a real effect, it just isn't the effect of psychic powers. Our knowledge of physics means that the existence of psychic powers is given a much lower prior probability than the possibility of widespread experimental error and bias. Since both explanations are likely to produce slight positive results, the existence of psychic powers is still unlikely once you take the evidence into account.

However, the important point in the article is that in order to make this inference in an intellectually honest way, you need to significantly increase your estimation for the probabilities of widespread experimental error in ALL scientific studies that use similar methods. Since the methods in parapsychology are pretty good, this has quite a far reaching effect.

In a sense, your question about "on what grounds can people claim one field to be nonsense but not others?" is exactly the same question asked by the author. Except the author isn't implying that parapsychology isn't nonsense, they are implying that many other fields are nonsense too. This makes sense because physics is almost certainly not nonsense.

The argument being made is that employers have a lot more market power in the employment market than potential employees. Employers have capital, they have inertia so they can absorb a lot more risk. There are fewer employers than employees so it is easy for them to form a cartel or engage in price fixing. This especially goes for low end jobs, where a small number of large corporations make up much of the retail and fast food market. Unemployed individuals are under a lot of pressure to find employment quickly, and they know there is a lot of competition. So, employers can set wages artificially low. This power is not absolute, which explains why not every job is at minimum wage. However, this is an observable effect. The gap between rich and poor is ever widening, the middle class is eroding away, yet all the while production has been increasing. Wages are being driven down artificially low.

I wanted to ask "where does it all end?" but then I realised from the rest of your comment, you actually seem okay with slavery. Which is odd really, because you argue about human rights, but the right to freedom of movement is actually a far more fundamental and clear cut human right than the right to form contracts and do trade. In fact, if your ideals about the right to form contracts result in other people losing their right to freedom of movement, then that's a clear sign that you have lost your way.

Slavery is immoral because it takes away freedom of movement (and is thus a form of imprisonment), not freedom to create contracts. There are no fundamentally fixed moral rights relating to trade because there is no universal objective notion of property. Property is an entirely social concept and can only exist through social contract. You only "own" an object to the extent that everyone else agrees you do.

Most people want there to be regulation of business, even if some of it is corrupt and inefficient. Most people want governments to collect taxes and control shared resources, even if this is inefficient and wasteful. These things are seen as a necessary evil. If it's what the public want, then it's not immoral, because the entire notion of property (and by extension trade) only exists as a social contract. To go into detail for your taxi example, the roads were built as part of a social contract where people pay taxes under the expectation that the government will execute some form of transport policy. Tax payers would have anticipated some form of taxi regulation to occur over future roads. For most people this is desirable because they want to be protected as consumers. If you take away taxi regulation, then you are not honouring the implicit contract that allowed for the creation of the roads.

You may personally disagree with this widespread desire for regulation. It is also reasonable to say that corrupt and inefficient regulation is immoral. However I think it is quite dangerous to argue that regulation itself is fundamentally immoral. The history of the industrial revolution shows what kinds of contracts ordinary people will willingly subject themselves to if they feel they have to.

It doesn't necessarily imply that the electorate is uneducated and easily swayed. I think it's more likely that most of the time these elections are a close call and campaigning sways people who are in the middle or motivates people who might not otherwise vote.

The argument basically just implies that advertising has some influence. Which is true - even for an educated and informed audience. Nothing you do to the electorate can make them immune to advertising. So money will always be a motivation for politicians. Especially since extra campaign money can always be spent on all kinds of fun expenses, and giving well paying jobs to friends and family.

Also, bear in mind that even the most well informed educated electorate has a very limited feedback mechanism. Many people care so strongly about particular issues that they will never change their vote. Which means people in the middle ground only really get to choose between the two main political parties. In practise, it works out a bit like a price fixing cartel. Basically both parties take turns screwing everyone over. Candidates only have to make the appearance of being better than the last guy during election time. During their last term they can do whatever they want, which sets the bar really low for the next guy. It's a race to the bottom.

As long as the influence of money is present, politicians will behave as corruptly as they can get away with. Improving the education level of the electorate reduces the amount politicians can get away with, but because of the two party system, they'll always be able to get away with a lot.

You mean restrict who can vote? The public wouldn't go for it. Which is good, because if people were okay with having their right to vote taken away, we'd be in a much bigger mess.

It's perfectly possible to learn to change your ideas and continue to learn and adapt over time well into adulthood. Not everyone does it, but I pursue personal growth and learning, and consequentially change quite a lot from year to year. I would happily commit to change and adaptation in order to live for thousands of years. I don't think I need death to give me urgency. If anything, thinking about my mortality tends to reduce my motivation.

I find the idea that an infinite living "me" would not be "me" very strange. It's like saying that if you keep adding fuel to a fire, once the original fuel has burned away it's no longer the same fire. My mind is a dynamic process, even if it changes state, it's still a continuation of the same process.

Ultimately, the ideas and urgency of ordinary human beings probably won't determine what happens to humanity in the long run. We're on course to develop powerful AI even with the technology and ideas we already have. Who knows what will happen then, but I think a stagnated immortal human race is a very unlikely outcome.

Let me paraphrase what is going on here:

nemesisj's comment - "Tesla is probably in the right here, but their response to threats tends be heavy handed and defensive."

your comment - "Tesla is in the right, you are trolling. Snark."

I guess maybe you missed the point that Tesla can be the good guy in a lawsuit and still act in a way that seems unprofessional and worrying to a potential future customer.

No, the financial sense of the word "investment" isn't the only meaning that matters here, because here we're discussing the behaviour and attitudes of contributors. Its unreasonable for anyone to expect them to ignore their emotional investment and only think of things financially. If they did that, they wouldn't have contributed in the first place, and Oculus would not have gone anywhere.

Oculus benefited greatly from selling itself as the future of VR gaming. That was the image they cultivated, that is why their Kickstarter was so successful. That is why people contributed. The Facebook deal most likely means a big shift of focus to social VR. There's a big difference between hoping a company will share your personal values when it gets successful, and being sold a particular plan which is then abandoned in favour of a big payoff.

You haven't really given me a reason as to why false advertising is a bad analogy. I think this is quite similar to a case of false advertising or a product defect. Here the product is the service of Oculus developing VR technology for gaming applications. Contributors feel they were mislead and I am sure many of them would want a refund if it was offered.

The article is about the possibility that the NSA could be bribing Huawei engineers or infiltrating Huawei with spies. Either way, it requires Huawei employees to be complicit, and for the Huawei support infrastructure to be compromised.

Nothing is assumed to be happening, that's why we're talking about probabilities. We are discussing the possibility that the NSA could be infiltrating and subverting the Huawei support infrastructure. That's what the article is about. We're not discussing whether or not the NSA directly hacked Huawei. While that is also a worrying piece of news, it isn't the same thing.

To give you an example, if I pick something up at random, the probability that it is a shoe is at least as big as the probability that it is a red shoe. That's because it can't be a red shoe without also being a shoe. Same thing with the A's and B's. If A and B happen, then that means A happens.

The article discusses the NSA embedding themselves in the Huawei support infrastructure. If true, Huawei's access is being abused by individuals who work for both Huawei and the NSA. So, in order for the NSA to abuse Huawei's access in the way discussed in the article, then that requires Huawei employees to abuse Huawei's access. Hence, P(NSA abuses H's access) <= P(H abuses H's access)

Sorry, no,

P(A) >= P(A n B)

Always holds whether or not A and B are independent. A contains (A n B) therefore is always bigger.

The assumption being made is that the NSA can't abuse the Huawei access without Huawei being complicit. I.e. if NSA pwn me, Huawei gave them access, so actually it's the NSA and Huawei pwning me together.

P(NSA pwn me) = P(NSA pwn me because Huawei pwned me and gave them access) <= P(Huawei pwn me)

No, that's not the point. The point is, when a company gets funding from Kickstarter, they are selling something more than just the Kickstarter rewards. They are selling an intangible good - a vision of the future. If that company fails to try to deliver that future, then it's a rip-off. Your attitude is like I tell you "hey I bought these trainers that were advertised as hard wearing but they fell apart after a week" and you reply "well you didn't buy a stake in the trainer company, so you've got no right to complain".

I was just saying that Kickstarter contributors are more personally invested than simple bystanders. If a company shifts focus away from the initial vision they used to attract funding, before that vision has been realised, then naturally the contributors feel betrayed. I think that's reasonable. If you sell someone a vision you don't believe in, then that's dishonest, even if it's not illegal.

That said, I personally don't know if Facebook is going to mess up Oculus. I imagine that what people are worried about is that Facebook will push for Oculus to be used for social VR and will largely ignore games. VR gaming requires high quality sensory experience in a dynamic environment with fast player movements. Social VR is probably going to be way, way more static, (but will have other demands like monitoring body position, face scanning, etc.)

I don't think that's stupid. Kickstarter contributions are investments, they just don't have financial payoffs. The payoff should be that, if successful, a certain desirable piece of technology or art is created. If a company shifts focus away from the aims and goals they used to attract Kickstarter funding, then they have essentially acted dishonestly. There is no legal recourse, so the best thing to do is complain and make them look bad. The behaviour you think of as stupid is really the only way contributors can put pressure on Kickstarter companies to act in good faith.

Oculus was funded by a kickstarter. I think Notch personally contributed. Having given money to help a company develop their core technology is a little different to "not even involved beyond having read about it".

Maybe future societies will condemn us for always being so opinionated on subjects that we don't know much about, instead of just accepting that no-one knows for sure yet.

That's kind of the point.

Right, so negative discrimination is not important at all, because it's possible to overcome it if you are sufficiently talented? Bullshit! Everyone has to prove themselves in life, but if you make it harder for one group of people to earn respect than another, then that isn't fair at all. If you've had to put up with an unfair life, that doesn't mean it's bad for other people to complain about unfairness.

Anti-discrimination laws only demand fair treatment. Nothing more. Positive discrimination only happens if organisations choose to follow such a policy. Most organisations actually don't want horribly unqualified people, so it's not as big a deal as you make out.

In political arenas having a percentage quota of women actually makes more sense, because political bodies are supposed to represent the people and 50% of people are women. This is predicated on the notion that everyone is more inclined and better able to represent their own gender's perspective. It doesn't seem too controversial to me, it just seems like an extension of the ideas of proportional representation. Where I've seen it, these quotas are on the list of candidates that political parties nominate, not on the list of elected politicians. It's not that people can't vote in who they like, it's about who the party puts up for election, which is something regular people never have a say in anyway.

Cultural expectations are self-fulfilling prophecies. A hundred years ago, a lot of people had very low expectations about what women (or black people) were capable of. They were wrong, but it took a lot of time and effort to make that change. That is what political correctness is about. Political correctness demands superficial changes to how cultural expectation are expressed. It's a case of "fake it 'til you make it". Even if people deep down feel differently, they are asked to suppress it and treat individuals fairly. That way, the next generation of children grow up with a different view of the world than their parents. With each generation we take a step closer to fairness and equality. People like you know just enough to see that political correctness is superficial, but not quite enough to understand why. So you call it out as hypocritical bullshit, even though it has real, practical, achievable aims. Children pick up on the superficial values of the world around them, and that has a deep effect on them. Check out the Clark experiment: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqvJp2gXJI0

Orwell was pointing to a very real phenomenon with "newspeak". For the best examples look to how political leaders talk about military conflicts. Language regarding conflict is very well chosen and quite misleading. Terms like "collateral damage", "area denial weaponry", "enhanced interrogation", "enemy combatants" are not exactly ironic, but they do have true meanings and implications very far from what they superficially sound like. Examples of true ironic "newspeak" can also be readily found. You may have heard leaders talk about various military, police, and spying agencies protecting your "freedom", despite the obvious roles they have in restricting your freedom. Talk about freedom often actually means "freedom to do what we want", which is, of course, the opposite of freedom.

To give a common example, an invasion will often be talked about by the invading power as a "liberation". Yet the act of liberation by a foreign power always ends with that foreign power having significant local political influence and access to natural resources (and may involve permanent occupation).

Or take the "war on terror" for example. Superficially, a "war on terror" should make people LESS afraid. Yet, in practise the politicians engaged in the "war on terror" have actively tried to encourage fear (in order to justify granting extraordinary powers). The irony is so blatant it's right there in the name. Being at war makes people more afraid, so declaring war on terror is automatically ironic. It's like having an orgy to promote abstinence.

The big problem with corporations (as far as I see it) is that they act as a dehumanising mechanism for representing shareholders. An individual who has tight control over a company (like Elon Musk) can shoot for long term goals in order to achieve their noble aspirations. However, in most cases, the legal obligation of the directors of a corporation to represent the interests of their shareholders seems to default to purely financial interests. A board of directors aren't really obligated to represent the humanitarian or altruistic interests of their shareholders. In fact, typically financial interests are only served in the short term.

This means the capital that a shareholder represents is only ever set to work to meet financial interests. It's up to the shareholder to then divert their profit from their own investments into charities. This seems very inefficient to me.

My solution is to include a much richer mechanism for representing shareholder interests locked into the company charter. Shareholders could vote on what things they valued, and on values that they assign to those things. Then, instead of a quarterly bottom line that represents monetary value, the bottom line would also include those externalities that the shareholders voted on.

For example, you could have a company where most investors were patriots who cared about the economy. They could vote to assign a value to every month of employment that the company provides to an American worker. So, when the bottom line was calculated, each full time worker was treated like an extra source of income. This means when the board of directors considers whether or not to close down a factor and outsource to Mexico, the reduction in costs has to justify the expense to the patriot virtues of the investors.

The obvious objection is that if you only valued jobs you might run a company into the ground. However, running the company into the ground also gets rid of all the jobs. So it's not something the board of directors would want to do. Balancing short term gains over long term company growth is something directors have to do anyway.

This example really illustrates the power of this approach. In our current system, a company can move a factory to Mexico even if all its shareholders want to keep jobs in the USA. Those shareholders could then earn a significant amount of dividends from the move, and then try to invest those dividends charitably in order to express their patriotic virtues. However, no charity is going to be able to replace all those lost jobs for the price of those dividends. Charities just aren't efficient and reliable enough.

A valuable addition to the charter would be to make it so that the votes and results were made public. People who claim themselves job-creators would be able to put their money where their mouth is - and called to account if they failed to do so.

What are you saying here? People who suffer from discrimination should just learn to understand why they get stereotyped and be more tolerant about it? That's extremely self serving and entitled. If you're in a position of privilege, it's up to you to make the effort to treat everyone as fairly as you can. It's up to you to help break down the unfair boundaries that benefit you. It's your responsibility to do that. Otherwise you're tacitly helping to perpetuate those boundaries, and are therefore complicit in their existence.

Most people don't meet so many people that they can't spare a few minutes politeness. Mostly prejudicial judgements are made out of laziness and incompetence, not because they are useful. Obviously I don't know your circumstances. I guess if you did meet a lot of people and were seeking certain types (e.g. direct sales looking for customers) it would make sense to improve your odds by profiling. However, even then, I can't see why you wouldn't want to be polite and tactful during actual interactions. Especially if you were about to make a snap judgement that the other person might find offensive.

How about we blame the individuals within the industry that participate in and perpetuate the culture that thinks it's okay to use female sexuality to sell software products. It's patronising to men within the industry, it's off-putting to women within the industry and it makes the industry as a whole look extremely unprofessional from the outside.

Do you really find it hard to understand why it would be frustrating for people to not take you seriously and constantly hit on you in a professional context?

And what exactly are you defending here? If you're in a professional situation (which includes work related social events) then you shouldn't make unwelcome sexual advances. That's how you avoid sexual harassment lawsuits. If you don't have the social awareness required to know whether or not someone else is attracted to you, then that's very sad, but it's your problem. You have to work on it in your own time. Don't flail around at work making everyone else uncomfortable, hoping to get lucky.

Also, I can't believe you're defending the right to make patronising snap judgements about people based on statistical correlations. You don't need to prejudge the people you meet in a professional context. Just be polite and pay attention.

I don't know, my dad is retired, used to work as an engineer and loves model trains. He doesn't know what bitcoin is. It really isn't that unusual for technical people to get out of touch with recent developments. A 64 year old Japanese immigrant with health problems almost certainly has very different sources of information to you and I. Also, the vehement denials are extremely consistent with Dorian Nakamoto being a grumpy old man who doesn't understand what is going on but doesn't like it and wants to be left alone. It just seems like he just wanted to get rid of the reporter and she heard what she wanted to hear.

You'd expect there to be at least one Satoshi Nakamoto with an engineering background. Dorian Nakamoto's career doesn't seem remarkable or unusual (or closely related to bitcoin). I would expect every single person on Hacker News to fit the profile for the founder of bitcoin as well or better than Dorian Nakamoto. The fact that he has the same name as Satoshi Nakamoto doesn't indicate anything, because you would expect Satoshi Nakamoto to be a pseudonym.

Yeah, well, in the case of Game of Thrones, it's quite an important work of art and it's priced out of reach for the vast majority of the public. Owning an important work of art could be argued to be a bit like having a monopoly on a utility. That might not sound compelling, but there the case for copyright protections isn't that compelling either. Copyright is supposed to be a beneficial exchange, where the public accept restrictions on their freedoms in order to encourage the creation of art. If the art created isn't being disseminated to the public, then what's the point? There's nothing moral about artificially propping up one particular business model.