wegs

People at the top are beholden to other people at the top. It's a cycle. If a CEO does not appease shareholders, board members, and executives, there will be a new CEO. That's structures.

And people at the top rarely understand implications of their actions. Organizational systems are HARD.

MIT students are a bit ahead of students at other schools. Faculty hiring is such that there are no substantial differences in faculty quality. The difference between an MIT professor and a state school professor is mostly random chance. Oh, and the MIT professor has a lower teaching load, a great brand stamp, and a huge PR department.

MIT overhead is roughly 2/3 of the money which comes into NSF. Perhaps this might not be a problem to raise (it's generally not), but that doesn't make it okay. The bigger problem is your tax payer dollar passing through overhead into graft. Your taxes are contributing to the MIT yacht club ("MIT Sailing"), million-dollar salaries, buildings costing a significant fraction of a billion dollars (MIT Stata Center), fancy faculty clubs, etc.

Is that good use of taxpayer dollars? Of tuition? Of donor dollars? That's ultimately where all this excess comes from.

No. Systems are not just people. I know many organizations which have really good people, but completely toxic cultures due to systems.

Systems are things like checks-and-balances, incentive structures, power structures, organizational design, and conflict resolution structures.

The US didn't work better than Soviet Russia because it had better people, much as Americans would like to believe themselves superior. It worked better because it had better institutions, starting with a very well-drafted Constitution.

Given a 2020 context, those structures are starting to function less well. You won't fix them by asking politicians to behave better; you need to address the structural issues.

It's been analyzed in much greater depth. Pfeffer's "Power" and de Mesquita's "Dictators Handbook" are treatments from a psychological and game-theoretic point of view, respectively. Both are well-researched scholarly tracts from top professors in the field. Pfeffer is controversial, while de Mesquita is pretty accepted organizational psychology.

Where we run into problems is that most people from any demographic are basically good, and people extrapolate from that. But power isn't a demographic; there's a selection process.

I didn't think what I posted was overly controversial, but as of now, it's a -3, with no one posting why they disagree. The only time that's happened before was the (now many times) I hit a nerve with the Google astroturf crowd. And I don't even dislike Google. But them's the taboos.

I feel less bad about MIT taking money from Epstein, than the cover-up around it. People and institutions make mistakes. That's okay. It's a question of what you do about them. MIT has a history of hiding stuff like this, and of intimidating anyone who would talk about it openly.

MIT shut down the entire CSAIL mailing list -- whose legacy dates back to the old AI Lab days -- because someone had the nerve to raise the question of Epstein, asking what MIT's attitude should be towards a faculty member who visited the island. The list had been through horrible flamewars, thick and thin, over it's many-decade existence, and it finally took the whole Epstein cover-up to shut it down. MIT did the equivalent of a shadowban, collecting all emails sent to the list, but not forwarding them to the community for two days, to see what people send BEFORE announcing it was shut down. A lot of people sent a lot of stuff they wanted to share with the community but not the leadership.

To give a slight bit more context, the question was about a faculty member who had visited Epstein's island. We were promised that'd be answered in MIT's so-called fact-finding report. Naturally, it wasn't. It got shut down before anyone publicly put 2 and 2 together.

The vast majority of people are doing the right thing.

The vast majority of people in highly-competitive positions are not doing the right thing.

* A statement like "all politicians are corrupt" is to a first order accurate. You can't get elected without money, and you can't get money without doing donor bidding.

* A statement like "all executives are psychopaths" is not accurate, but becomes pretty close to accurate as you look at organizations with more than 1000-people who are no longer led by founders. You don't make it to the top of the corporate ladder without outcompeting people fighting dirty. People who are clean don't make it to the top.

* Not all academics fabricate data, but a growing number of academics at elite schools do. MIT has 1000 applicants for each faculty slot at CSAIL. You don't make it through that level of competition without cheating at least a little bit, and that makes it into the culture.

* Not all universities are corrupt, but by similar logic, most universities with massive endowments are. Dirty money goes to institutions willing to accept it.

Same thing goes across the board. Most religious leaders are deeply ethical people. Televangelists tend to be corrupt. Most lawyers who make partner tend to be a little bit unethical. Etc.

Anytime you get high enough on the ladders, bad behavior goes up.

All schools do NOT do this. I went to MIT:

* MIT wouldn't be caught dead with JUST 64 students admitted on the basis of connections and donations.

* MIT wouldn't be caught dead letting external auditors look at this stuff.

* MIT wouldn't be caught. None of this would be public for MIT. That's what NDAs and non-disparage agreements are for.

I'm sorry, but all schools don't do this. Most are smart enough to stay out of this kind of trouble. For Harvard, it took a lawsuit and subpoenas to get in trouble over this.

Having external auditors, standards, and accountability is probably completely unique to UC/Berkeley. Admitting just 64 applicants based on graft and corruption is also unique within the top-20 schools.

I think you've made my point for me. If moral lines are easy enough to move that people will "shovel Jews into gas ovens and pull out people's fingernails," it's not hard to find people more than glad to cross class lines to enforce laws, whether those laws are just or corrupt (and most laws are in the middle).

At the core, there are few or no internal "Do Not Cross" moral lines. Moral lines are first culturally-situated, and second, individually-situated.

Incentive structures set by the ruling class drive a huge part of culture. Media does too. There are a lot of tools to manipulate culture, and they're actively (and increasingly scientifically) used. At the end of a Roman Triumph -- a big celebration -- captured war prisoners would be strangled in front of an audience. In that culture, that was okay.

From there, you need to find just a few people, either divided, disgruntled, or of low moral character. If I want to keep poor Southern whites in-line in 1870, I can find blacks who hate them. If I want to keep poor Southern blacks in-line, I find poor Southern whites. There, we had a nice 50/50 split, but there will always be a few.

The expectation that "it's the turncoats fault" isn't a productive one. You need to fix systems, not individuals (with incentive structures around individuals are part of systems, of course).

Hey, it puts food on the table, and my kids are hungry. And it keeps the debt collector at bay.

The implied expectation of class / race / ethnic / ... loyalty is fundamentally flawed, though. I'm friends with people of many groups who are unlike me, and conversely, there are many people in my demographic whom I dislike. Not all [insert race][insert socioeconomic class][insert religion][insert ethnicity][insert career] people are the same, and we don't want segregation.

This is a particularly nasty cross-class alliance, but at the core, we WANT cross-class alliances.

Untrained gig workers. Angry tenants.

I can't imagine what could go wrong here.

I mean, this sort of shit happens in our court systems all the time. This just raises the visibility to where we all see it.

Capitalist markets, even when thinking through the long term, don't work like that. A lot of costs of messing with employees are externalized. If I lay off my workforce after a product ships, issue stock options worth 10 cents, or otherwise, the result is a lack of trust in tech management as a whole.

The direct blowback on the individual company is pretty small. Would you ever find out if a manager you were interviewing with had done that? Or a startup?

The US was more efficient when companies treated employees better, and when companies were like a community who took care of each other. But, as an individual manager, and even more so as a company, I come out ahead if I treat employees more aggressively.

Better transparency would help. If employees could see company financials, it would solve a world of hurts. The information asymmetry is a lot of what leads to inefficient markets here.

And after you leave. They have nasty non-competes, and they do sue employees on the way out the door. Even when they're wrong, they're right; threat of cost of lawsuit is enough to deter 95% of their employees.

I didn't want to work for Amazon in part for that reason.

Last I looked, Microsoft's culture was toxic -- much more so than Amazon, Google, or most any other major tech organization. A ton of in-fighting, and decisions made for political reasons. They were working hard to clean it up, but I'm not sure how far they got.

Organizational design is a complex problem. It's like finding a great employee or a great spouse. They don't exist; it's a question of fit-to-function. Linus Torvalds would be a lousy doctor, and my doctor would be a lousy programmer. You really can't get everything. If you try, you fail. It's a question of aligning organizational structures to what you're trying to do. If you're running a sweatshop in India like a corporate R&D lab, or vice-versa, you're gonna fail.

I would argue Amazon has a great corporate structure which scales well for the purpose it's designed for. Amazon has been winning for alignment to profit/growth, for innovation, for customer-focus, and loses on the employee sweatshop front. That ain't bad. I think it's cracking a bit under COVID19, but at least for two decades, it's done really well for both customers and growth.

Google was a great org structure for its first decade, and then grew complacent in hiring, and when bad employees came in, it started failing in virtually everything else; I'm not sure it's coming back, but I hope it does. For now, it's been sailing on its (very significant) momentum, but that eventually wears off. It doesn't seem to have the right executive team in place anymore, though, so I'm not sure how it might come back.

I think one of the problems Amazon suffers -- and this is not a condemnation of the company as a whole -- is that it treats employees like garbage and runs a sweatshop. There is zero loyalty among Amazon employees I know. Some are very highly-compensated sweatshop workers, but sweatshop workers nonetheless (a lot of fintech and quant work the same way, and even more extreme -- you get a lot of money, but you have no work/life balance, are on call 24/7, and if your performance slips for a moment, even due to a family emergency, and you get the pink slip).

That sets a strong environment for corruption.

Why is this not a condemnation of Amazon? Turns out each corporate structure has problems. You pull on one lever, and you get a dozen unwanted consequences. But it's important to recognize the faults of such structures.

Yes. It was a long time ago. GoDaddy was where all the tech crowd went after Network Solutions circa the year 2000. They were great! Until they weren't.

Since then, I've gone through 2 more registrars which went down the same path. I'm gradually migrating to AWS since I'm hoping they have the same incentive structure to f- me over in a few years. The way I figure, if my DNS provider is also providing cloud servers, etc. they'll have more incentive to keep me as a customer.

As far as I can tell, the general business model in domains is:

* Be the good guy, and establish a customer base. Provide low prices, good customer service, etc. Lose money on the razor-thin margins.

* Once you've got a ton of customers, turn evil, and milk your customer-base for all they've got. Engage in every nasty sleazeball tactic.

I've seen this cycle many times, starting with Network Solutions.

People use GoDaddy because they were the good alternative for a while.

I find this not evil. If this is covertly used, that'd be evil.

I agree with the argument "If you do it to extract information from your user to which they would not consent, it’s evil."

However, we tend to get caught up in the right-now and not think through consequences. If this were widely used, browsers would implement the same sorts of privacy controls they do around 3rd party cookies, JS, etc.

This seems like a more semantic way to do tracking than many other techniques. It seems like it'd be easier for browsers to manage.

Yes. It's made THEM billions of dollars. If you've ever been on the other side of the pipeline, as an advertiser or a web site owner, you know you're treated as a statistic. Businesses suddenly disappear when Google delists them on either end. That's most visible on Youtube, where random Youtubers find themselves demonatized with no apparent rhyme, reason, or appeal, but it happens all over the Googleyweb.

If it's one of a dozen places you advertise, that's fine. If you're trying to run a business where it's a core platform, you quickly run into the limits there.

Only Google doesn't really do B2B. They're B2C. Oracle does B2B.

I am careful with conclusions about dehumanization. Be careful with what you write about whole groups of people.

The culture we're born into is NOT a choice. Whether you're in a red-state culture, a blue-state culture, a Chinese culture, a Middle Eastern Muslim culture, or a Peruvian culture is up to your parents. Religion, political ideology, beliefs about male-female relations, beliefs about parent-child relations, and a whole slew of things follow.

Most people from all major demographic groups are good people. You may disagree with them. But most people are basically good. Every major group has a psychopathic minority. That's common to ALL of humanity, at least as far as I've seen. In most cases, members of the in-group will say that someone is not a "real Christian/Muslim/feminist/etc." about those psychopathic elements. There are also toxic elements to any culture, and being on the inside, it's very hard to see them. It takes work and engagement with other cultures. It's easiest to see this historically. For example, look at how we treated [insert minority group] [insert number of decades ago].

Yes, there are toxic beliefs in red state cultures. Yes, there are toxic beliefs in blue state cultures. They're no worse or better than, for example, mainstream views in China on Tibet or Taiwan. As much as it might seem that way, neither side is Nazi Germany.

There is an old joke where a man is about to commit suicide, and another man tries to save him. They have a conversation, where they seem to be building empathy through a series of questions, coming to the conclusion that their both Christians, Protestants, Presbyterians, and so on. At the end, one asks the other if they're from the reformation in 1938 or the reformation of 1948. It ends with one being pushed off of the bridge with a scream of "Die heretic!" I recall it being funny when I was a little kid, but I can't find it with Google, and can't tell with a good punchline.

But that's sort of what's happening here. Most American liberals are pretty well able to engage with people from all around the world, despite the well-known toxic elements of those cultures. See the defense of Muslims post-9/11 (whom I mention because they share so much similarity to many red state cultures along the lines liberals care about). Somehow, that can't happen close to home. Empathy goes away. Hate comes. We can read and cite Chinese government media objectively when trying to understand that culture, but we're bad people if we do the same with US right-wing media.

Take care.

Sounds like you've got it all figured out. Read what you've written again. You've dehumanized half of America, and, well, subhumans ain't worth talkin' to. It'd be nice if someone saved them from themselves, but they can't be saved anyways, and besides, they wouldn't be worth saving if you tried.

Why, might a reasonable person ask?

Well, obviously, because they've dehumanized another part of America.

To quote you back: "Was that deliberately meta or just completely un-self-aware?"

> I talk to people almost every day in a completely uncensored environment who have nothing but the purest hatred and mockery for all liberal or leftist people and liberal or leftist ideologies.

And I live in one with the same feelings for the right! We're like brothers, I guess?

> They applaud the killing and beating and gassing of BLM protesters. Yes, "the left" has places where they mock the right unreasonably too, and they fire somebody sometimes for a stupid misunderstanding or for being too offensive, or they ban somebody from a web site for a not-good-enough reason - it's stupid and awful, but there is simply no comparison.

To be clear, I shared an institutional response from just about the most credible type of institution you might find on the left -- a university. This is not an individual response. Individual words are far, far worse. I'm not sure how you've gone from there to claiming the worst the left does is to "ban somebody from a web site."

Really? Are you willfully blind? You really need to tune into Fox News more. You're seeing the bad stuff on the right, and not the bad stuff on the left. For a lot of the stuff, they show real videos, so you know it's not fake! It might be rare -- in a country with 300 million people, just about anything happens somewhere -- but it's not fake.

> Each time somebody dies, the people "on their side" will hold it up alone as evidence of how evil the enemy is.

That's exactly what happens. Fox News cherry picks. You'll get the nights' selection of Worst Stuff on the Left.

The left goes back and cherry-picks too. The number Fox News constantly runs is that in 2018, a total of 18 unarmed black men were killed by police. We can quibble about statistical methods, but far more of the problems come from police brutality and from the extreme biases in our justice system end-to-end (The New Jim Crow is an excellent book) than the isolated police shooting. A lot of the stuff you see on smaller more left-leaning media designed to drive outrage (and especially the stuff that spreads virally on Facebook) is just fake too.

And you can be sure that Fox News careful takes apart the most fake news on the left, in the same way the left takes apart the most fake news on the right, so (rightfully) neither side believes the other.

And by the end of it, we live in a polarized nation with two very different perceptions of reality.

> and especially Fox News.

Watching Fox News doesn't mean you have to agree with it. Citing someone as saying something doesn't mean you need to agree with them either -- a citation means that you're pointing to what someone is saying. I read (and cite) everything from moderate sources to foreign state propaganda newspapers, to radical extremists from all sides (not just US red-blue).

Sun Tzu said: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

Fox News is the top-rated news show in America. It has about the same ratings as CNN and MSNBC combined. If you're not watching Fox News, you can't understand where half of America is coming from. If that's the basis you're starting from, good luck working productively towards change.

The reality is half of America is seeing police violence. Half of America is seeing protester violence. That's the reality of our media. The things they show are real, but cherry-picked. It's actual video footage half of America is seeing. You can't just ignore that, and claim to understand what's going on.

You can't read about it either. Primary sources. Articles about what other people are saying are about half-fabrications at this point (on all sides).

We do get to both-sides this. The thing Facebook did amazingly well is silo people who hold identical opinions, and drive inflammatory false content to them. This maximized clicks, while inflaming and radicalizing people on both sides.

Hatred doesn't last long when you talk to people. But Facebook doesn't let people talk to each other across boundaries. It's segregatory. See Brown v. Board. Now, there is no middle, and we have a mess to clean up.

This maximized clicks. Facebook weren't the only ones doing it, but Facebook is the giant in the room. Facebook could have connected people on the left and on the right, and facilitated civil discussions. It chose not to do that.

Do I blame them for it? I'm not sure. Market forces are powerful, and I suspect its hand may have been forced. Nevertheless, it's something we need to fix. Regulation is nice since it changes market forces.

To say the polarized left isn't harmful is false. I don't much care about terrorists or bombers. There aren't enough of them to matter. I care about racists on the right. I care about vigilante doxers on the left. I care about people losing their careers. I care about kids from some communities not learning. I care about people hating each other. That's as much of a problem on each side.

There was an article I ran into earlier today about how the far left which just caused a USC professor to be suspended from teaching for saying 那个 in a course on communications (which sounds a lot like an American racial slur). This stuff happens all the time in the far left. Watch the video. What he said is exactly what you'll hear in China all the time.

https://reason.com/2020/09/03/usc-greg-patton-chinese-word-o...

As a footnote, if you do want to see terrorists on the left, tune into Fox News. They play nonstop footage of BLM protesters beating people up, setting fires, and in one case, executing someone. You can't just close your eyes here; half of America is seeing one reality, and half is seeing another. To start closing the gaps, it's helpful to see both.

1. Free doesn't excuse harming students.

2. And it's not all that free. It's a growing business founded on hype and freemium. CS50 peddles it's wares on edX for $180 per "program," and it's being monetized quite a few other places.

3. Beginner-attractive isn't the same as beginner-friendly. Ice cream is beginner-attractive to kids first learning to eat, but vegetables are beginner-friendly. With CS50, you'll waste a ton of time to, ultimately, learn very little and be convinced you've learned a lot. You'll definitely learn the slogan "This is CS50" with an impressive video montage, though, and that you're part of an elite crowd which managed to master Scratch.

This is the bane of self-driven online education. People shop based on novice perception.

Or, guessing from your one-comment account, you're a David Malan cult member who signed up just to post this one comment. In which case, good job! You got out of CS50 what David was trying to teach you. Carry on. Bring your friends!

If you're not, have an objective look inside. Tell me it doesn't look like a "free" Scientology audit.

No. It would be a bad idea.

This course looks good. CS50 is overhyped dogshit.

The CS50 lecturer is an egoist, very good at selling you on it being THE GREATEST COURSE EVER, and convincing you that you're learning REALLY HARD THINGS. Oh, and you're truly brilliant for learning it, and he's truly brilliant for teaching it so well that you can understand it. Come join his cult! And all that time, he's doing a random, disjointed hodgepodge of very basic stuff.

You can totally do two programming languages simultaneously, but you might as well go with a good curriculum. Khan Academy is surprisingly excellent. MIT 6.001/SICP will run you over with a steam train, but boy will you learn a lot. Coursekata will teach you data science in R. There are a whole bunch of really excellent Python courses, web dev bootcamps, and, well, just really quite a lot of really good stuff out there.

The hard piece for a beginner is sorting out the wheat from the chaff. But I just gave you a bunch of pointers. Pick one. Pick five. Run with them. Or ask someone who is a serious computer scientist to help point you if none of those match your interests. Just don't ask a person straight out of a CS50 brainwashing; it takes a bit of expertise to be able to look back and see what's good and what's bad.

(CS50 cult members: Please downvote! And bring your friends.)

Welps, let's look over the evidence. You say:

"Because that disagrees not only with the common sense of seeing what is happening in front of us, but also with all the other evidence I've seen"

This statement suggests you haven't looked at (m)any scientific articles. I've read dozens of scientific articles about long COVID. If you posted a reasonable rebuttal to some of these, it'd be one thing. But simply stating you've never seen any evidence? That's a statement about your own level of knowledge, not about COVID19.

Aside from that, I do look at "that idiot's Twitter feed" from time to time. Your comments mirror the things he posts downplaying COVID19. Perhaps you look at secondary sources based on his Twitter feed? Or the same sources he does? I'm not quite sure.

As an aside, I'd advise everyone to read "that idiot's Twitter feed," much as I advise everyone to read international news source, left-wing news sources, and right-wing ones. You don't need to agree with someone to read what they write.

From your other comments in this thread, I assume the evidence you refer to is the President's twitter feed, rather than scientific journals?

Indeed. In that case, BMJ publishes myths.

https://www.bmj.com/content/370/bmj.m2815

Plus, there's common sense. I live in an area hit by COVID hard. About half of the people who I've heard of catching COVID19 through friend networks have some sort of long-term effects. Most are minor, but a few are not. I think the question is what happens a few years out.