throwaway22032

You can call it luck as many times as you like, I simply disagree.

If my dad builds me a shed it is no more lucky than if I build a shed.

We should leave this here, I feel that we just have different relationships with our parents :)

I agree that the words don't matter.

What it comes down to is that luck cannot be incentivised - a dice will always roll a 2, 1/6th of the time.

But good behaviour can be incentivised, e.g. people choosing their partners well and providing stable environments for their children.

We should incentivise good behaviour whilst also ensuring that luck doesn't result in unassailable leads e.g. a lottery win probably should not result in a 1000 year dynasty but a lottery win combined with intelligent estate planning, good mate selection, diversification etc probably should.

> if you were going to be born to someone random, where and when would you want to be born

I think that this is like asking, if 40 year old you were completely randomly spawned, whose life would you like to continue from. You can't. The lineage from your parents to you is the same as the lineage from you to you. It's a nonsense line of inquiry.

I just think this is a basic logical error.

39 year old me built a shed.

40 year old me then has a shed.

40 year old me did not influence or choose 39 year old me.

But 40 year old me does not have a shed due to luck.

It was causative.

Your parents and your past decisions are not luck based.

If you want to call that luck, then you need a different word for actual luck such as chance encounters, lottery wins, unexpected windfalls etc, because otherwise we are just misinterpreting each other.

Nonsense.

You posted this comment 7 hours ago. Current you has zero impact on whether you posted it.

Time flows forwards, not backwards.

Alright, I had previously been lazy but here's a proper response.

I'm confused because to me, everything you have posted backs up the idea that these things are in fact actions and not luck based.

Country of residence is not luck based, it's either pre-determined or chosen by parents.

27% self made is huge, I would have expected it to be lower.

Parental income having an effect on children's is also not an example of luck. If I work hard so that my children do well, that is not luck based.

Genes influence success, so choose good genes.

43% of marriages failing simply shows that many people don't take it as seriously as they used to due to things like no fault divorce. So choose well. Your partner, at least the type of person they are, should not be luck based. Your marriage definitely should not feel like a 4 in 10 dice roll, if it does you have really messed up.

I think you and I (really, me and most left wing media) have a different definition of luck. Luck is rolling a die and getting a number, these things are more like causative factors.

But still, there exist plenty of people who have been born into adversity and study and work hard, network and press the right buttons. That isn't luck, a lottery win is luck.

I dunno. It all just feels like a way to absolve one's self from responsibility to me. I did the washing up yesterday, so today I don't have to do it. Is today me lucky that yesterday me did it? Only in the colloquial sense.

Aside from the influence of money on politics almost all of what you have written is complete bollocks.

Many of us have been successful from nothing and know friends who have been more so. There is usually a luck element in the size of that success but it is blindingly obvious to someone who was in the crab bucket to see that actions work.

It sounds as if you have an emotional issue with the idea that people can change their own situation. I literally have a choice tomorrow whether I paint my wall, study, fix up the leak in my loft, etc, or just sit and play my Switch. People who do too much of the latter do not succeed.

And no, parents or grandparents or country or genetics or whatever are not luck either. Choosing a suitable mate is about as close to the meaning of life as we have.

This is not luck.

Your grandfather chose your grandmother and so too did your parents.

Your parents deciding to do something is not luck either.

I want my children to have an inheritance, the actions I take to ensure that are ongoing deliberate choices to build wealth over having fun.

This is a disingenuous comparison because the US dollar and most fiat currencies never increase in value medium to long term / "deflate" by design. The decreases in the value of the dollar are never offset, so if a basket of goods goes up 5% we bake that in forever.

In the UK I can't really think of a time when inflation has stopped or reversed for even a few months.

By contrast Monero goes both up and down. So sure, it's unstable, but it doesn't have "higher inflation", it's just more volatile.

It helped my career hugely.

I think people need to distinguish between problem betting and betting in general to be honest.

There are plenty of companies which purely bet in house like a hedge fund and don't try to suck idiots in.

The language used in the article seems political/inflammatory to me.

It's not a lack of "fairness", it's just a lack of accuracy.

Imagine that you train a model to find roofing issues or subsidence or something from aerial imagery. Maybe it performs better on Victorian terraces, because there are lots of those in the UK.

Would you call it unfair because it doesn't do so well on thatched roof properties? No, it's just inaccurate, calling it unfair is a value judgement.

Bias is better because it at least has a statistical basis but fairness is, well.. inaccurate...

Well that's a bit daft, as men and women are as different as green and blue.

It sounds to me like the population of HN all have swimming pools in their back garden and walk around with their iPhone in their trunks.

I don't consider this a real world position. Literally no-one I know, thousands of people at minimum, has this issue.

My argument is not that water resistance is not required but that it has always been present.

Older phones were already water resistant. You just couldn't chuck them in a pond.

It's a total non issue. If our Game Boys collectively survived our childhoods then a phone with far fewer ingress points is going to be fine.

You can't even use it in the rain because capacative touchscreens.

Waterproof phones are marketing.

> Now consider an algorithm that predicts whether loan applicants are likely to make all their payments. It’s not good enough to have an algorithm that predicts the correct general rate — the 40% chance of rain in our example above. It needs to predict the rate for specific individuals across different population groups in a way that’s both accurate and fair.

It's not clear to me what is meant by the term "fair" in this context. I would make the claim that an accurate prediction is fair by any reasonable definition.

If you're too strict with it you will immediately run into the problem that, say, someone with a well paying career is more likely to pay their loan back than someone who works behind a checkout, but that's "unfair" because it's correlated with family wealth, intelligence, lack of genetic disease, etc. Your algorithm can't be fair in the 'equality for all' sense because if it were it would have close to zero predictive value.

The way that people speak about Brexit reminds me of a couple that have a bad divorce and end up giving everything to the lawyers.

There exists a universe in which we did it properly, probably one in which Covid wasn't essentially simultaneous with it, one in which we had a more competent government at the helm, one in which we didn't end up with 600k/1% net annual immigration and maybe one in which we actually built houses and infrastructure rather than just sort of moving money about in spreadsheets.

We just aren't in that universe. It was never in and of itself some sort of horrendously negative idea and I think it's grasping at straws to pretend that it was.

It doesn't sound like discrimination, it is discrimination, tautologically.

The onus is on you to show that it is bad in this case. We discriminate routinely, children are exempt from working for example.

Counterpoint, no-one I know cares about water resistance.

The only time it matters is when using a phone in the rain. There are no other real situations in which I need a phone with me.

And a basic rubber seal is far more than enough unless you drop the thing in a pond.

The question I always have on these kinds of things is - what would we have done prior to cell phones?

What is stopping your mum from calling the school and having them pull you aside to let you know you are needed?

Am I that old that people have just forgotten what it was like when having a pager was like, a super rare thing for high end business folk?

People are in cars.

I get it, we like public transport. It's just daft to go all in the other direction and pretend that cars aren't useful or don't count or something, though.

Which has higher throughput?

Putting up a railing has no cost other than financial.

Narrowing a road makes it worse for its' primary purpose.

You would definitely not just narrow a footpath on a busy high street without considering the impact.

Ultramarathon runners are not normal people.

It's like saying that strength training is bad for you because Ronnie Coleman took a load of steroids and trained through a spinal injury.

The vast majority of people are never going to exercise even remotely hard enough to cause themselves issues in this way.

This feels like a distraction, though.

If car tyres cause unrecoverable pollution then we don't need to reduce that by half or something, we need to almost eliminate it.

That means that we need a type of car tyre which does not cause this pollution.

I no longer work as a software developer because I feel that technology is ruining normal human interactions by substituting them in incomplete ways and making everyone depressed.

I think we'd be better off making things for each other and being present and local rather than trying to hyperstimulate ourselves into oblivion.

I'm just some dude though. It's not making it to the headlines.

I think that what you're saying is that oldschool pornography jobs are different to how pornography works on OnlyFans.

They're both still porn and they're both definitely a lifestyle. One does not merely "do porn".

When I was younger porn was a properly seedy thing that people would consume but almost no-one knew anyone that 'did it'.

Nowadays you have OnlyFans models or similar basically all over every social media platform, businesses trying to sell it as a legit lifestyle, etc. It's completely different, because it's becoming much more bidirectional and open now.

Basically everything AWS is things we already have but more expensive because someone else does the easiest bit for you.

It's like the oldschool scam days on MMO's.

g3tfr33g0ld DOT сом

It's a good deal for you and I.

But half of the population are of below average intelligence.

Okay, so as a thought experiment, let's say we get a superintelligent LLM, capable of somehow connecting the dots and knowing more than us as humans.

How do we avoid interpreting its correct results as bias? I mean, what do we do when it tells us that (fake example) IQ is correlated with height and that people above 6ft are more intelligent?

I'm sure you can think of spicier examples. Will we try to "debias" it by encouraging it to spit out incorrect information or just ignore certain topics?