Nothing. Why are you asking this here?
2,805 karma · joined May 1, 2017
However, top tier PhD programs are not and never will be highly discounted consulting shops. At places like CMU grad students have perhaps more academic freedom than even their advisors. And good thing.
The day CMUs of the world become "Accenture with cheap student labor" is the day basic research dies.
This is a partially direct democracy (for monetary policy) using digital voting with no paper trail! Unless there are crap load of formal methods backing this, it sounds like a recipe for disaster.
(Also, if this is the problem to be solved, why don't we just pass a constitutional amendment requiring a referendum for certain changes to monetary policy...)
> The government can likely create a lot of de novo wealth for its citizens in the process.
The thing that always confuses me: where is the fundamental value creation? I don't see much other than maybe saving on some inefficiencies in the current monetary/financial system. But that's not "de novo wealth"; that's "financial engineering".
How does a state-backed cryptocurrency generate "de novo wealth"?
The rhetorical trick is to paint the opponent as unreasonable, pretentious, impractical, etc. if they don't agree with your double-crux. In this case, the resolution of the double-crux is not the strong argument (your opponent would never willinging agree to the double-crux)! The rhetorical characterization of your opponent is the strong argument. Again, it's just something you should watch out for as an audience member.
Also, inexperienced debaters will often agree to double-cruxes when they shouldn't because they don't understand the strategy that's being deployed agains them and the double-crux is presented in a "friendly" tone. And once it's deployed they realie that was a stupid thing to agree to. The truth we've discovered is that one of the debaters is inexperienced; we haven't learned anything about the underlying topic.
In practice, debates (acdaemic or out in the real world) are almost never searches for truth.
Again, as an audience member in an obviously zero-sum debate, I'm extremely skeptical of the double-crux. It's usually a steup for a rhetorical argument or a way of easily beating down an inexperienced person. It's rarely a geniune assertion that this one thing really is the fundamental point of contention.
In a friendly, respectful argument designed to search for truth, double-cruxes can be a great tool.
I think parent's point is made later in the paragraph after the section on double-cruxing:
> High-level generators of disagreement are what remains when everyone understands exactly what’s being argued, and agrees on what all the evidence says, but have vague and hard-to-define reasons for disagreeing anyway. In retrospect, these are probably why the disagreement arose in the first place, with a lot of the more specific points being downstream of them and kind of made-up justifications. These are almost impossible to resolve even in principle.
I.e., many people who have strong opinions on gun control would never agree to this sort of double-crux. And even if they did agree to it in the context of one conversation, and then "lost" the argument on that basis, they wouldn't actually go on to change their mind. They would return to the "High-level generator" and everyone just wasted their time.
Doubele-cruxing can be useful in arguments, but the audience of a debate should approach any crux with incredulity. Anyone with half a mind toward "winning" a double-cruxed debate would choose an untenable position as their "crux". A practiced debater will find the scientific concensus and then work backwards to a crux. Not the other way around. Then they get the rhetorical benefits of acting "reasonable" without actually giving up anything useful to their opponent. In fact, if their opponent is clueless enough to accept the crux, they've just won the game. And if their opponent complains, well now the opponent is "meta-debating" which is apparently bad thing (and is a bad thing anyways because it makes you sound like an egghead).
So, double-cruxing is a great strategy for an argument between people who mutually respect one another. But audiences to a debate should be careful about whether they're being hood-winked by a rhetorical trick.
In short, a lot of this philosophizing about how to have a good argument really just boils down to "have the right argument with the right person". Two people who respect each other talking about something that both have fluid opinions on rarely devolves into a useless conversation.
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^1: A debate in which there's no third party present might be called "a waste of time".
I think the word 'archival' is the key word in this sentence:
>> A losslessly-encoded stream is near-worthless compared to a lossless rip, which is actually useful as archival material.
GP isn't comparing on the basis of quality; rather, GP is pointing out that streaming services don't function as an "archive".
It's a reasonable point. Modulo reasonable backup procedure, owning a copy of the track is a more robust as an "archive" than a streaming service that might stop serving the track at any moment.
However, I'm confused by the rest of GP's post. First, I'm not sure why pirating is necessary to get a lossless rip. Second, and perhaps tangentially, I've never understood collectors (of cards, or of coins, or of music tracks).
>Then it sounds like incentives are aligned here. Google needs to not allow users to abuse this ability so that businesses will trust and not block them.
But then they can't take bookings through google assistant, which is going to lose non-trvial amounts of business.
Seems far more likely that they'd pay Google to automatically handle duplex calls for them.
The worse this technology turns out for businesses, the more pressure there is to pay google money.
The development of a system of airports (+ new planes that could fly trans-oceanic flights without stop-overs in far-flung locations).
Most coins are 50/50, not 75/25.
Also, the answer entirely depends upon whether there's anyone out there who can do better than 50/50.
I think this word is now like "hacker" or "AI". It's not completely meaningless -- it does have a kinda-sorta fuzzy meaning. But that meaning is different from what techincal experts mean when using the term and is very much audience dependent.
If you sequentially attack a subpopulation (e.g., employees at a company, senior citizens) the eventually news about your attack will spread throughout that network (internal security alert, evening news+daily newspapers+AARP+...). If you attack the entire subpopulation in rapid succession over the course of days or even hours, educational countermeasures become much less effective.
That's extremely uncharitable. It's possible for people who disagree with you to have well-justified opinions. E.g., this comment:
I disagree.
To point out the obvious, the Santa Clara Principles are being published now. Not 20 years ago.
Going all the way back to BBSs, it was common for there to exist many forums with varying levels of moderator involvement. I never, ever saw the EFF complain about BBSs or web forums that moderated user content. Can you provide one example of EFF complaining about censorship on a private discussion website from the pre-Google/Facebook era? They were much more focused on the freedom to host one's own forum/BBS, and preventing the government from compelling a BBS/forum to go offline. They never took explicit issue with a forum owner's choice to censor.
So, actually, I think it's the other way around. Network effects in the eternal September have caused EFF et al. to adopt a new stance on censorship in very large communities. Actually, this is kind of obvious; otherwise, why weren't the Santa Clara Principles published 20 years ago and applied to BBS/forums/newgroups?
> It feels like a betrayal of the core principles of the US in particular and the hopes we had for the internet in general.
Again, I disagree. It was the eternal September that killed many hopes for the internet in general. Many were hopelessly optimistic about what it would mean to have "everyone" online. Everything else is just the natural progression from that initial disappointment.
A sound, centuries-old concept that pre-dates the modern justice system.
(Also, in most cases, you're wrong. Intent does not matter more. Which is why actions, not opinions, constitute the illegal activity. You can hate gay people as long as you make them their cakes. You can freely express Nazi ideologies as long as you don't plow your car into people. You can hate your wife as long as you don't murder her. You can hate your boss as long as you don't burn down the office building. Etc.)
> but you will surely hit some where many reasonable people strongly disagree after enough such cases.
Certainly. SCOTUS often passes down tests, but they can be very open-ended and sometimes even depend upon cultural context (e.g., Tinker). Also, those tests are sometimes updated as new cases are presented and the boundaries drawn by the previous test are judged insufficient (again, e.g., Tinker).
> This is bad because we're all biased in various ways and knowing about that bias actually tends to make it worse among the people who don't realize that simply knowing your biases doesn't make you immune to them, leading them to overconfidence.
How so? Judges understand that the law is full of grey area. When controversial issues of constitutional law come up, they often spend a great time deliberating. This is one reason why it's imperative to have a high-quality and independent judiciary. Our judges are not perfect, and some are even quite fallible. But this sort of self-assuredness in the outcome of dicey constitutional law cases is far more common from people off the bench than people on the bench.
Even on the problem at hand, it's pretty obvious that both of the "no grey area" positions are ridiculously untenable.
For the general case, what's your proposed solution? A system of laws with no grey area? I conjecture that this problem is even harder than AI-strong. Way harder.
We're just barely learning how to write bug-free device drivers in a formal language. What makes you so confident that we could solve all the problems of politics and philosophy, in a completely unambiguous way, in an informal language?
Under the gracious assumption that your agents are implementing a reasonable protocol for information exchange :)
...let x=2,y=1,z=1. Gotta be more specific on those quantifiers ;-)
More seriously, the issue is that "transitive causality", or whatever we want to call it, is sometimes not universally a good model of reality.
It's not really a fallacy. It's just a method of reasoning for which there exist errant applications, and therefore you should "use with caution".
Generally not.
I found this blog post pretty helpful: https://takecareblog.com/blog/neo-nazis-wedding-cakes-and-co...
(Nit: anyone can be sued/fined for anything. The question is whether the plaintiff/gov't will win the resulting lawsuit.)
Yes (at least in states where sexual orientation is a protected class).
> Further are you saying the baker could refuse to sell them the cake they wanted because it had some gay theme ( two girl names I think) so long as they offered to sell them a Superman cake at the same time?
AFAIK this is not a settled issue.
I imagine a reasonable test might boil down to "If you have a policy that you never put names on cakes then you can refuse to write 'Jane and Jill'. But if you will write 'Jack and Jill' when asked, then you also need to write 'Jane and Jill' when asked."
In other words, the store may not have a policy that is functionally indistinguishable from refusing service to a protected class.
Notice that Google banning videos about homosexuality would definitely not be equivalent to banning homosexuals from using its public service.
This gets hairy; e.g., religion is a protected class. Could a Satanist cult compel a cake-making business owner to write down a disavowal of his God (in frosting)? Evaluating hairy edge-cases on a case-by-case basis are why human judges exist.
IANAL.
The courts are endowed with common sense; e.g., you can find many examples of courts rejecting various attempts at "literally equivalent to <insert protected class> but I never said <insert protected class!>".
Both of those positions are completely unworkable.
If businesses may always select which people to serve, you can end up with de facto racial segregation. We know what that looks like. The illegality of this sort of discrimination by businesses is a direct outgrowth of that historical moment.
If businesses may never select which people to serve, you'll end up with protesters clogging everything from the meat aisle at Wal-Mart to the local church's bible group.
So we end up constantly revisiting how to resolve this fundamental tension between the owner's right to free speech and the customer's right to equal protection.
The line today, as I understand it, is that businesses may discriminate against people for what they say or believe, but not for explicitly enumerated aspects of their person (such as race, sex, age, and now(?) sexual orientation).
Our office has someone in charge of food. That person used to pay attention to what people would/would not eat and then purchase accordingly. LOTS of pizza/brownies, not a lot of salads. We (unanimously!) asked that person to just ignore our gluttonous choices and gather explicit preferences. We now eat more healthily. Of course, our preferences did not change -- we'd all totally opt for the pizza and brownie over the salad. But the choice is easier to make on a ballot than when both options are in front of you and you're salivating... needless to say, the person who just does what we explicitly ask them to isn't manipulating us into eating more healthy food.
Similarly, pure ratings-driven programming in an ad-driven business model almost necessarily means setting up others' lives (building viewing habits) to achieve what you want (selling ads)!
So, de-emphasizing ratings is NOT equivalent to manipulation! And emphasizing ratings can sometimes be in service to a manipulation!
Hm. I'd be far more likely to spend my basic income on booze if I were a cardiologist or highly-paid tech worker than if I were a parent barely scraping by.
Top-notch scotch and expensive wines instead of middling whiskeys and passable table wines. Of course, some amount might also be donated/saved/invested. But I'd probably spend a far larger percentage of that base UBI payout on luxuries/vices than your typical out-of-work joe.
> The parent's point was that it might subsidize behavior of certain groups more than others
Not quite. Parent asserts that those behaviors will happen anyways. And that therefore we are more than justified in pulling the carpet out from under those folks (because the money's not going to help anyway).
Playing out this same argument in the context of a cardiologist lets us cut to the heart of the ethical differences between typical pro-UBI and anti-UBI arguments.
Consider the cardiologist is an absent father who squirrels away his money to avoid supporting his family and then spends that money on various vices (luxuries wine collections, absurdly expensive cigars, etc). Is his employer justified in paying a lower salary? Are his customers/debters justified in not paying up? After all, we discontinued social services for the poor booze hound in the earlier scenario!
Most visceral UBI opponents would find that question absurd on face! The money was earned through hard work and education; the employer has no business prying into the employee's personal choices about how to spend his wages, and a customer or debtor refusing to pay is straight-up theft.
Conversely, many visceral UBI supporters point out that the work ethic on display in that reasoning becomes outmoded as work itself becomes outmoded.
If we don't choose some other metric for decision making, and stick to these ethical imperatives, the conversation more-or-less grounds out here.
As developing economies continue to develop and pick the lowest-hanging development fruit, it will be interesting to see what happens to these comparisons. I won't be surprised if, in 50 or 100 years, the poorest 5% of the United States is on par with developing countries. By some accounts, that's already kinda-sorta the case [1].
[1] https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/How-Poo...
Kick out a few key faculty members and the rest of the good ones will follow, Jew or not, because they are good and have the choice to leave. You don't need all your faculty to be Jewish in order to lose all your good ones by kicking out a single Jewish faculty member.
If you lose 4/16 of your academics but all 4 of those were the Giants, then you haven't decimated your department, but you have lost what made it good in the first place.
Even before the war reached the borders, German mathematics was decimated. Sometimes by numbers, but always by the numbers that mattered. Because anyone good knew someone effected, and everyone good had the option to leave.
Grown adults consistently reveal preferences that are different from their stated preferences.
In other words, people may lose what they really want by voting against it with their eyeballs and pocket books. Even when they woukd vote for it in an explicit ballot.
"I would prefer to eat healthy, but ice cream is just so much better tasting than broccoli."
One check on this is a regulator who imposes the choices for you based on your stated preferences, which is a check that grown adults often choose to add to their lives. Dieticians and personal trainers are popular for a reason.
Anecdote time: I grew up in an area with a good mix of blue collar and white collar families. Reunion season is coming up so I reconnected with some old friends. There's actually strong INVERSE correlation between "had a typical summer job" and "success in the marketplace". Most of the doctors/lawyers/engineers/software people didn't work typical teenager summer jobs and are now doing very well, both financially and in life (families, houses, health, hobbies). A depressing percentage of the people who did work summer jobs are still working those same jobs.
The people who are doing the best had a summer activity, but not a typical teenage job (or even a job). E.g., freelance programming, prestigious math/science camps/competition prep, volunteering and hospitals and in research labs, etc. Years later, you see the dividends paying on an early investment in increasing the value of one's labor.
IMO the blend of protestant work ethic and capitalism on display in the parent comment can be a dangerous one to teach kids. That fantasy is not how the world works. No one gives a damn how hard you work; what they care about is what you get done for them. Otherwise we'd all be digging trenches with spoons.