Everything I'm not personally an expert in (which I can't verify myself with my own understanding, other than by trust), I assume is somehow deception and largely ignore (until I'm smarter and more well informed). Taking anything from an article like this is only going to muddle up your understanding of the world (which you'll eventually have to work to disentangle).
I guess the standard argument is that a governmental credit rating body would slow things down. If fintech startups needed some new feature from the credit rating agency, they might not be able to get it in a reasonable amount of time. Is that slowdown worth the tradeoff of occasional crises like this? I guess society has made its choice.
This is especially interesting to think about in light of the whole school of self-teaching Knuth has pushed out into the world in fragmented pieces here and there.
We can keep playing the "maybe there are other factors besides DNA that could explain small differences in IQ"-game until the cow comes home. The sad thing is that eventually we'll probably find some genuine correlation between genes and some measure of intelligence (controlling for every other conceivable factor). (Maybe we won't, but I wouldn't bet on it in a prediction market.) Not sure what'll happen once that day comes.
Taleb argues against R^2, and the author of this article seems to just ignore those points. I think Taleb has valid points, but the author here seems to be doing just the same conventional analysis that people writing psychology papers tend to do, which Taleb specifically argues is an invalid way of doing things (because assumptions built into linear correlation measures doesn't apply in this situation).
But Taleb is specifically arguing against simple linear correlation measures like R^2. (See figure 1 in Taleb's article.) Feels like you haven't grasped the specifics of his argument without taking that into consideration.
I genuinely don't understand how people stay together when they see themselves as "terrible fucking roommates". Feels like a completely different universe from the one I inhabit, where totally different properties of human relationships can exist which would never reach steady state in my filter bubble.
This is part of some cynical narrative on HN. Don't buy into it wholeheartedly. Plenty of couples stay together really long despite living in the same apartment. True love does exist, even though the internet loves to brainwash you into believing it doesn't.
Anyone know how a good book or three about history of the military-industrial complex?
I'm especially curious how various economic ups and downs in the military may have influenced venture capital. I'm also interested in tracing back those ups and downs to various presidential mandates. Seeing the whole chain from presidential biography to consequence on the investor landscape. (Other than that it's generally good to know the history, I think it could also act as a source of amplified imagination about how things that's going on right now might produce similar effects.)
Look at it this way: a lot of smart people contribute to common goods, e.g. scholarly progress. So in a way, it'll benefit everyone.
I understand the counter-argument. But isn't a bit of a strange feature of the world that people kinda don't want more people to be produced with a higher IQ than themselves?
Sometimes I get a bit conspiratorial about the fact that whenever people want to give an example of how terrible life was in the past, they always mention primitive or agrarian times. It's almost never comparing life today with 100 years ago. (It's like they're finding a straw-man period.) But as Eric Weinstein has mentioned in plenty of interviews (e.g. in his latest one with Peter Thiel), life for the boomers were actually arguably better on average than it is for millennials today (and we're not talking about engineering millennials here).
Life certainly isn't amazing for people in society at large. There are people on the other side of the code we're producing. Something us engineers love to forget about.
Interesting. But it's due to statements like "you’re either above the API or below the API" that I unfortunately can't get through many ribbonfarm articles. I mean, it's clearly not true that "everyone works for an algorithm" (take architects as a trivial example). I keep having to force myself find a strong-man interpretation of all the half-baked ideas, which makes it exhausting to get through without becoming a bit annoyed.
The most annoying part of everything changing so fast is how hard and slow it is to analyze, make sense of, and actually get to the bottom of things and what should be done about them. Like, even if we do figure out if Uber etc is good for the people in a utilitarian sense, then the next thing will come and make it our sense-making apparatuses all haywire again, getting us back to square one.
Yeah. Promises that "The future is going to be amazing" has been used time and time again throughout history to get people to accept going through troughs (of sorrows), waiting for futures that never come (or come only after they've entered retirement age). Can't believe we're falling for it again.
Not trying to make a judgement about the lack of output or anything. I appreciate the work he did and the ideas he published. Mostly making a comment on the observation that outsider researchers being bought by google doesn't seem to produce the greatest effect on the open source idea-sphere. But he's free to do whatever he wants of course.
At least in terms of public output. He hasn't published anything in particular in the last few years, whereas the years when his income came from the fellowship (judging by blog output, his twitter, and his academic CV). Can't say what he's doing inside google of course, but it's a shame it's not ideas and knowledge that can be enjoyed by us, the lowly outsiders.
The examples on the front page looks surprisingly good, which makes me suspect they were hand-picked. Kind of beats the purpose of the app if I'm just shown trends the author and me already know about, since we seem to inhabit the same subcultures.