spaceseaman

So? An equivalent line in such an article might say "Anti-vaxxers claim that vaccines contain poisonous amounts of the chemical mercury" then if we continue analogizing it to the article at hand, the NYT would go on to show how the amount is in fact not dangerous (like they've actually done).

It doesn't change the fact that they said it. You have to report on the facts, and the fact is they said it contains a dangerous amount. The report can then go on to show how that's a false premise, but newspaper writing purposely doesn't make bold claims like "ANTI-VAXXERS LIE ABOUT POISONOUS AMOUNTS OF MERCURY IN VACCINES" because people call that sensationalist and biased.

They assume their readers are smart enough to connect the dots. If the writer's intentions were truly "sinister" as you say, then they would manipulate the facts into an argument that supported the idea that vaccines have a dangerous amount.

The analogy also fails because it truly is a fact that this would increase the amount of pesticides used. Whether that is a bad thing or not is entirely up to the readers to decide.

Again you just seem to be spinning some narrative about the NYT having malicious intent here (especially by analogizing it to vaccines) without anything but a sly deferral to "poor writing". It's just an excuse for you and others to confirm your dislike of the NYT when they're writing in the same style every newspaper reporter is taught.

How is pointing out that fact poor writing? It's a fact. Environmentalists and weed scientists are worried that it will increase the use of pesticides...

The article then goes on to do just as you say, which allows the reader to make the conclusion about whether those environmentalists concerns are valid. Since this is a newspaper article, it would be improper style to directly make the implication on the part of the author over whether those concerns are valid. It's simply their job to report such concerns exist.

Some people just love to criticize the NYT.

If you truly think that the repeal of ACA won't affect you directly, I suppose there's nothing anyone can do to convince you that the news does matter.

> Try to strike up a conversation with the stranger you’ll be sitting next to for the next X hours.

I absolutely despise being spoken to when I'm on a plane (usually because I'm taking early morning flights and am utterly exhausted). Just keep in mind many people reallllly don't want to talk to anyone, so if they are curt or not very talkative don't take it personally. Some people just don't like talking to strangers.

By alone I meant "the attacks were planned by themselves".

And by in solitude I mean, "in isolation from society at large".

You use twitter to radicalize and indoctrinate - not plan attacks. Attacks are typically planned alone and in solitude after someone has already been radicalized.

I don't know. I think the phrase still has a quite a bit of usefulness. The point is to communicate to the public that many people whose job it is to research such a thing agree. I also disagree that consensus has any implication with democracy. It's a word used for general agreement, and in my experience democracies are rarely in agreement.

How else would you tell people that most scientists agree on a position? Also, even if a lone outsider challenged the new data, that's not something you communicate to the public yet. Policy and publicity would need to wait until consensus actually did occur because at that point, the legitimacy of the science would have been worked out.

This terminology is ancient and has been used long before climate change debate.

The high caffeine intake is still quite bad for your heart. And it's bad for your teeth. Just googling shows that the scientific results have been quite mixed. By that I mean that scientists have found some positive correlations, and some negative ones.

From my layman's perspective, I would think a doctor would say there isn't a consensus on whether coffee is holistically healthy. In other words, it's good for some things, bad for others.

Here's [1] a study from the Pew Research Center stating that 51% of Republicans believe the poor are poor due to "Lack of effort on his or her part" rather than "Circumstances beyond his or her control" (32%).

And here's some prominent Republicans saying similar things over the last couple years.

http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/article/2014/mar/14/cont...

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/03/jason-chaffetz-new-gop...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/03/31/th...

Typically, the point is framed as a "lack of work and effort" or a "problem with culture" rather than explicitly saying laziness is the cause of poverty. I would say the unifying thread here is that Republicans believe the poor are poor of their own volition and choices, whether that's laziness, poor decisions, or a "poor culture" (what does that even mean?).

So yes. I would say that in general, many Republicans have called the poor lazy, and while it isn't the specific verbiage they like to use in public, it is the opinion of their constituents.

[1] http://www.people-press.org/files/legacy-pdf/1-23-14%20Pover...

Agreed. Our field is still incredibly young, speaking as if we've tried everything that can be tried sounds a lot like when physicists were figuring out relativity. Many believed that the problems were simply unsolvable, that all of physics had been figured out in the late 1800s. Obviously they were wrong, and I think many of today's computer scientists will be wrong as well. Our field has a long way to go before it matures, in the meantime we need to find better abstractions.

Claiming that it's "all a cycle" is incredibly short sighted considering the time-scale.

You seem to have missed my argument so I'll try and rephrase it.

> that one employer would get all of these great women who are just as productive for a lower price and would take over their market. It only takes two such employers in a market who are competing for those women to get women up to income parity with men.

Yet companies will always want to hire someone for the least possible amount they can - regardless of the manager's personal views.

Two potential employees walk in the door at your hypothetical perfect company. They are perfectly equivalent. One was originally paid $40,000 while the other was paid $55,000 at their previous position. They each want a 10% raise to come to your company. One is a woman, the other is male.

Now you end up paying the woman less than the male, purely because her previous position paid her less. And the cycle continues until eventually you get to some sexist manager back at her first company that thought she wasn't as skilled for some reason or another (apparently).

That's the point I'm trying to make. Your hypothetical situation would not be the panacea to these problems because companies don't offer salaries like that. You're also making the astronomically huge assumption that every person wants to change positions in the first place. Some people like the job they have and stay there for much longer than would be competitively optimal for them.

Systemic sexism is the sexism that manifests in these cycles.

A) Women are overly criticized when they're doing anything that's a male-dominant activity. Videogames, Reddit, and HackerNews all have examples of this. Announce you're a woman, and you'll suddenly face more scrutiny for unknown reasons.

B) Yes. As it turns out, the behaviors we normalize in the workplace (like putting up scantily clad women) are part of a workplace culture.

They feel unwelcome, different, and unfairly questioned on the basis of being a woman and a woman alone. How do my examples not back up this point?

> we need more discrimination to correct for existing one

I like the following analogy. Your body has cancer. The cancer is bad, and you don't want it. Obviously killing your own cells is also a bad thing, but you choose chemotherapy because it's the best way to get rid of your cancer.

How do you quickly get rid of the cancer that is discrimination?

...

I know you're itching to say, "Make everything equal!". But hold on, how do you do that? Can you ever do that? In my opinion, the answer is no.

First let's suppose we do it through regulation. The logistics involved in such a thing would be astronomical and more importantly would involve massive governmental regulation of basically all employment.

The other option is that we deregulate everything and just let the free market handle it all - wait it out till all the racists and sexists are dead! It's so easy. But that doesn't work either - humans tend to cargo cult. We haven't had slavery in this country for a long time, yet the effects of it are widespread and evident everywhere you go here. It's in the way people talk, the movies they watch, and the music they listen to (or don't listen to). You can't just shut off the lights, pretend none of that bad stuff ever happened and move on. People still walk and talk with that knowledge in their head.

More or less, we can't easily eliminate discrimination without drastic actions, and it definitely can't be done immediately. One of these drastic actions is to counteract the discrimination. In other words our chemo.

In my view, this is fine morally and not really hypocritical. It's also one of the things that's less difficult to actually implement in practice. Let me spin just one more analogy to illustrate:

Say a dude beats your face in at a bar. Completely wrecks you. Puts you in the hospital. The whole thing. Three years later you've finally regained your ability to walk. It still hurts every once in awhile but here you are. So you go back to that bar, and that guy is still there. He's gotten a lot weaker, doesn't have as many friends, but he's still there. Then he tries to mess with you again, so you punch him in the face and move on.

Are you a hypocrite if you think he shouldn't have beaten you to a pulp even though you punched him later on?

The point is that the thing we're counteracting with policies like this is so astronomically bad ("Black people are more suited to physical labor" "Women can only handle childbirth" "Women can't vote") that the policies that correct them ("favoring some black kids with equivalent records as the white ones because in theory they might have had a harder life" "favoring a woman for a position because she might have had a harder time getting there and you want to encourage more women") aren't nearly as bad in comparison.

Sure if you take the "any decision based on [race/sex/religion] is bad and always bad" then yeah, I guess it would be hypocrisy. But I'm not sure I believe that myself. Until we actually hit that mythical day of equality, we're always gonna have imbalances like that. In my eyes, it's better to try and correct them (while not actively hurting anyone of course - there's a big difference between Johnny getting into Yale but not Harvard and sending Johnny to a work camp for the summer).

These are of course debatable points. Any one could be argued about through an entire undergraduate course, but they're still arguments. I highly recommend you become more familiar with the points you are debating and the merits / downfalls of those arguments. It's much more productive than creating straw-men to argue against.

bell hooks' books on feminism are especially good for someone new to the field and interested in such topics.

Huh?

It's not that the companies are sexist

Or the managers are sexist

Or the engineers are exist

Or you're sexist.

That's not what anyone has been saying this whole time - ever. You have completely misunderstood the point.

The system is sexist. Not the people in the system, but the system itself (similar arguments exist for police departments being racist - it's not the cops that are, but the system). In this case, the general consensus is that women are paid less than men in tech due to a variety of reasons.

A culture can also be sexist. While the people within it can harbor no ill will whatsoever, their behaviors and group dynamics can actively prevent a woman from being welcome. In this case, people are calling the tech "culture" sexist.

Here's a couple examples of a sexist culture I've seen in my own workplace. Note that none of the people here meant any harm, nor were there actions actively "sexist" in the common parlance, but they still did things that made people want to GTFO if they're a chick:

* I had a coworker who used to grill the woman on the team much more fiercely than the men. I never asked why this was - didn't have a great way to broach the topic. But it was always extremely obvious, and I have noticed it on HackerNews, Reddit, and pretty much every video game I've ever played. Men are very critical of women in jobs that men are already the predominant workers in. Female doctors and lawyers have had this issue for decades as well. It's not a sexist action. In my eyes it happens totally accidentally (My pet theory is that because we aren't used to seeing women in the field, we tend to be more involved when giving them criticism)

* My coworker had this anime poster in his cube with some half-naked bikini clad girl. Do I even have to mention why a girl might feel a little awkward here?

See how these things aren't actually bad in isolation? But over time, and in great numbers, they add up and make women feel like shit working at your company because they can never truly "fit in" with the guys. That's sexism in work culture and whether it's ever truly fixable is a great question.

I highly recommend you read some literature from across the aisle to become more familiar with the arguments you're facing, rather than the arguments you think you're facing. I highly recommend bell hooks' books on the subject. She's extremely clear and lucid and helped me grok a lot of the logic my first time around.

> I'd expect a lot of pro-diversity people suddenly stop complaining that there's a problem.

The fun thing about making a straw-man is you make yourself immune from criticism. I can't attack this point without having to completely define someone who is "pro-diversity" (what's that even mean?), and give evidence that no one in that group has the traits you claim of ("look at this feminist, see I was right!").

More importantly, what's even your point if this straw-man were true? I could just as easily say this about anything.

"Oh your life is shitty? Well I bet you wouldn't complain if things were working out well." It's an interesting case of vacuous truth!

The argument is to make things better for the people who have it worse at the moment, correcting for previous inertia. In this case, the inertia is that men were previously paid more or gained an initial advantage that allowed them to be paid more, and then that advantage has percolated across their various positions until the difference becomes more stark all because as you say "companies always want to pay the minimum amount that can keep the employee from leaving". If that's the case, then if companies could pay women less for the same work, why wouldn't they? Similar arguments apply to affirmative action and similar programs. That's the argument at least, whether I agree with it is an entirely different question.

What irks me is you dismissing the argument with your little straw-man and moving on to "the only alternative". You completely disregarded the points of everyone opposite the aisle of you in the most condescending way.

What do you think most of their donors watch, practically exclusively? Gotta make sure Johnny's not going to one of those SJW / safe space / PC / ... colleges like Yale!

They're trying to avoid being part of Fox's whole anti-University arc this season.

I may have gone to a similar talk when Kip was at my school, what a coincidence!

The most HackerNews of all comments.

"Well it was the engineers who did most of the work..."

Who do you think came up with some of those engineering advances? No need to play semantic scientist vs. engineer arguments. Some of the advances came from scientists and some came from engineers.

Thank you explaining my frustration in such a clear way. My original response was so feral because I interpreted his comment as a criticism of all scientists and a call to change the current University system to something more "libertarian" (because those are arguments I'm frequently exposed to, and the comment I responded to appeared to dog-whistle similar ideas).

I am perfectly happy to admit that institutional science is screwed up - really bad. Scientific texts are often un-readable, and the entire community has major systemic issues. But I react incredibly poorly to the opinion that scientists enjoy this system or even benefit from it. We hate the way academia is structured. It's just that no one can figure out anything better and the benefits for enough people are important enough that swaying them is incredibly difficult.

I suppose I sensed more malice than might have been there, and I agree with you. I also find many papers difficult to read and especially lacking important implementation details.

I've found that many researchers are very open to questions via email, however. Most of the time I'll get a response that can clarify a thing or two.

I personally feel that researchers just need to be better writers though. Most of the time, the writing is just plain bad. Perhaps there needs to be a way to enforce a bare minimum in writing quality. Personally I wouldn't be surprised to see more researchers employ editors for themselves.

It's almost as if most research doesn't go anywhere.

If I put you in a dark room, and ask you to find a way to light it, how many times will you fail to find the switch? Oh wait, I lied. There's not actually a switch, but there might be a candle in that general direction. Maybe.

That's how little we have to go off of. That's how empty any information on your study is. I don't think people really understand how hard this type of work is.

Research is a purely exploratory and creative work. Like art, science requires time, patience, and many many failures. You don't just get a bunch of eureka-Einsteins that come out of MIT day one knocking down Theorems and discovering new physical laws. That's just not humanly possible and it's ridiculous if you think it'll ever work that way

I am perfectly willing to admit that the vast majority of research and PhD's went nowhere and will continue to go nowhere for a long time. But that doesn't mean they're useless. Research requires exploration. It requires trial and error. It is highly inefficient and does not fit well in a consumerist society like ours, but this is the way that works best for us so far.

If you have some better idea, then why don't you go out and do it? How are you going to get a bunch of incredibly intelligent, creative, and independent people funded and provided for in a society that values immediate results over long term achievements?

I'm not arguing the academia system is perfect. Any one knows it's screwed up beyond belief. But it's not out of malice. We're not purposely trying to make the world worse, or something ridiculous like that. You have many people who care a lot about the science, who need to eat and sleep and need money to do that. Sometimes the money goes to their heads, sometimes their massive egos get the better of them, but do you seriously think we don't care about science? You'd have to be an idiot to do a PhD for the money or the fame. Why do you think we put 7+ years of our lives into stuff like this?

So most PhDs don't actually get tenured positions. What are you actually trying to say? Are you saying there aren't enough tenured positions? Or are you implying that these PhDs don't deserve tenured positions? Do you have any evidence for either of those claims? Because otherwise you're just participating in more armchair speculation.

The casual nature with which you dismiss thousands of people who have devoted their lives to the pursuit of academic knowledge is frustrating and incredibly childish.

Like seriously? Do you think all of us PhDs just sit around and laugh about how dumb the government is while planning how we can make more useless papers? Do you think grad students just train to become better bullshitters? Like what kind of hole do you live in where any of that even appears close to reality.

Seems to me you just tried reading a couple papers, got confused, and decided to justify your own intelligence by claiming their hard work and advancements in the field were pointless.

> but they don't actually need (nor often want) to produce any result

Stop talking out of your rear end. I want to produce a result. My advisor wants to produce a result. We all want to have meaning in our lives.

EDIT: As just a casual example of the importance of academia, look at the Deep Learning boom. First researched around 1960, only now becoming practical and useful. It's almost as if the things academics study need time and a lot of work to actually come to fruition. Research level study is highly expensive for very little real gains. This has always been the case. It takes a long-long time for the investments into research to make sense, but when they do, the advancements are completely game-changing.

It's likely being down-voted because it is brought up in the context of black Americans. In this context a quite frustrating argument familiar to black Americans often follows:

"If the Jews are okay, then how come you couldn't figure it out? HMMMMMM? That's what I thought." is heard often when bringing up the American Jewish within the context of this discussion. While I don't agree with down-voting a comment that smells similar to something toxic (I doubt the grand-parent intended this interpretation). The highly negative reaction is likely due to the frequency with which this argument is brought up, and its lack of any validity.

Comparing the American Jewish to African-Americans is an apples-to-oranges comparison. The time spans for the comparison are horribly different - When were Jews recently generationally slaved for centuries?

The thing that really annoys me about this comparison between Jews and African Americans is "because of their strong values of hard work, family, and creativity". In my opinion these values of Jewish Americans are obtained through the tightly ingrained religious and familial structures. Unlike the Jewish, however, African-Americans' culture was systematically annihilated when they were enslaved. There are few traces of African religions and customs that remained after slavery. Any shared values were destroyed by such an event. You can similarly say that the massive amounts of black males that have since been imprisoned for minor drug crimes in the U.S. has had a similar effect on the familial unit.

The plights of Jewish and Black Americans in the U.S. have been very different. This is likely why people reacted poorly to the subject being brought up.

> virtually never mentioned

I (anecdotally) hear this tidbit in every comments section relating to Russia's involvement in the U.S. election. Almost as if it's a common talking point.

Reminds me a lot of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

EDIT: ... And so a conversation was effectively derailed and nothing was gained. Arguing about the validity of Whataboutism or who is doing it isn't the point. It's a deflection technique that works in spite of you calling it out.

I think he was referring to the bit of the article where it said bicycles were "haphazardly along streets and public squares, snarling traffic and cluttering sidewalks" rather than bikes being ridden.

So when is this gonna blow up for someone?

Like are we gonna read about the U.S. power grid being shut down, or an entire state / nation wide election tampering?

It's absolutely terrifying how incompetent these folks are. Why is there no one marketing their skills to governments who have actual skills? Why aren't governments hiring employees with actual skills?

We used to have the most talented structural, mechanical, and industrial engineers in government positions or as government contractors. Is tech simply too young for that to have happened yet? Or are governments failing to adequately respond to their massive skills' gaps?

I think it's a great example of our governments' misunderstanding of modern technology and security. Our current governmental computer systems appear extremely fragile[1] and prone to tampering.

If governments were actually serious about electronic voting, they need dedicated committees and bureaucratic entities whose sole responsibility is the maintenance and security of these systems.

I expect the United State to be absolutely crippled by cyber-warfare in the coming decades. On a state level, our government is simply incapable of recognizing the many vulnerabilities their systems have and compensating for them.

While personally I think electronic voting is a trash idea (couldn't we instead still vote via paper, and then read the results via ML? This would give us a "margin of error" of votes, but we would always have the paper ballots to fall back on), I think that tightening IT security is a good thing for governments to do. Especially considering just how poor computer security is for government entities.

[1]. Just want to mention I'm not a security guru. This is just my interpretation after visiting many government websites, reading stories, etc

You should download the code today and try to build.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Developer_g...

It's just a ./mach build after checking out the code and running the bootstrap script.

You would be interested in this book

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_to_Reality

It is quite long and dense but explains the math from first princples like you want.

I can tell you're someone who has actually read the core objectives of branches of the military and has experience with their relationships with other countries.

If you're reading this and would like a concrete example of what the guy above me means, take a look at the U.S. history in major foreign bases like Okinawa. Okinawa does not exist so we can defend Japan. It serves as an Asian FOB, helps contain North Korea / China, secures our access to important shipping routes, and of course "projects force".

The "U.S. protects Europe and the rest of the world" is just some jingoist narrative with no factual basis.