wombatmobile

> His sell recommendations did not pan out so well. Even though they dropped in price the next day, over the next week and month, they returned inline or even better than his buy recommendations! Given that there is a counter-intuitive trend in the returns

That trend should be viewed in context.

The DJIA over the 5 years of the study went from 20,812 to 36,407, a rise of 75%.

Any pick of Cramer's (or anyone else) would have to rise by more than that rate to beat the market.

I see what you're saying from a human's subjective point of view.

If aliens from Tralfalmadore were to adopt the same values, they might choose to experiment on humans because

- humans don't live as long as Tralfalmadorians

- humans don't mourn each other the same way Tralfalmadorians do, and these humans couldn't anyway because they'll all be dead soon

- in nature, humans typically die violent deaths anyway, so lab humans aren't suffering worse than a wild human would

- humans don't get sick and suffer for as long as Tralfalmadorians do

- humans can't predict their expiry date like Tralfalmadorians can

> an exclusive club

The club is affordable. What makes it exclusive is the intellectual alignment required to unlock the value of the information. Not everyone has that. If you have it, consider joining the club while you are still alive so you can enjoy the benefits of membership and fraternity with people like you. After that brief period expires, the club will be truly exclusive for a long time.

Same with TV and film in Thailand.

> A hundred mice to save a human seems like a fair trade

What are you measuring or estimating in that calculus?

> we don't use mouse models because they're great models. They're just cheap, reproducible, and relatively quick to scale.

Mice models don't attract many rights protesters, the way other animals would, even though they are just as sentient and intelligent as humans, dogs, cats, horses, and whales.

Why don't animal rights protesters stick up for mice more? This experiment sounded like a horrific experience for the participants.

> it is impossible to avoid a diet in western society that relies on high quantities of sugar as a lynchpin for mass produced food.

I live in the western society you describe and enjoy a diet with no added sugar.

How?

I prepare my own food from fresh ingredients.

> Holmes was the poster child of Silicone Valley hubris

Holmes was convicted of fraud, which is a crime.

If hubris was a crime, the meek would inherit the earth, and Silicone Valley real estate would be affordable.

> At risk of being one of the nitpickers; I do quite enjoy reading caveats

Caveats are sometimes in order. Other times not.

It depends...

Awesome!

How do I embed this?

TFA is a comprehensive compendium of cliche tropes, skilfully crafted.

What could a similarly resourced effort produce written without tongue in cheek?

I’d like to read that.

> the key to unlocking evolutionary secrets about intelligence

Cuttlefish teach us that the "secret" about intelligence is that it is all around us. What blinds us to seeing it is that we only recognise it easily in things that look like us and act like us and appear to share our values.

Once you have spent enough time in cuttlefishes world to appreciate their intelligence, and beauty, you are a cross cultural explorer who can travel to all kinds of other worlds and see them for what they are - intelligent kingdoms as complex as ours, only different.

USA had more violence and strife in the 1960s, with the assassinations of a president, attorney general, and popular civil rights leaders, a bitter divisive futile war that killed tens of thousands of American youths, and a generation that was tuning out from their elders because the society was devoid of consensus and had no clear pathway to renewal.

Canada, on the other hand, has enjoyed the unbroken reign of Queen Elizabeth II the whole time.

Good question.

Before you consider the various answers offered here, consider that attention is the key executive function of consciousness, and the ability to marshall it is a core aspect of what we call “self”.

Everyone is different, in ways that we cannot always control, or even perceive.

When you consider other people’s methods, be aware that your attention mechanisms may work differently and respond differently, whether you like it and want it that way or not.

“Attention” is a hardware module that comes with no instruction booklet.

What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?

by Frederick Douglass

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/frederick-douglass...

"Upon finishing his speech to the six hundred or so mostly white abolitionists, Douglas was met with “a universal burst of applause” and seven hundred copies of the above-featured pamphlet were subscribed to on the spot."

> as it stands these continuous attempts to bring up race at every opportune moment

Listen to yourself. Your exaggerations and name-calling say more about your own internal state of mind then they do about the world.

What can you learn about yourself?

> Their implicit claim is that, other than in mid-eighteenth century Britain, save for a few short-lived cases, choosing innovation was simply just not worth it.

When I studied the industrial revolution at university, in a course on international trade, we began with the questions of why it occurred where it did, when it did.

Short answer: a series of strong agricultural decades created a surplus large enough to allow a pool of Labor to mobilise away from agriculture, which hitherto had occupied 98% of the workforce.

It’s not that those 98% of workers weren’t as imaginative and innovative as, for example, the people YCombinator funds today. It’s just that being serfs limited their opportunities for expression.

The limits of empathy.

I got into a situation with a friend who I now assume has ADHD. I’d not noticed before, because our circumstances didn’t reveal it. We were just dog owners, and our dogs were friends.

Then I invited her to stay at my beach house for a week, in gratitude for her minding my dog.

While there, she initiated significant renovations, ripping up the carpet, removing the vertical blinds.

But she didn’t finish most of the tasks! 3 weeks later the curtains were only half done and the place was unrentable.

Her response? Start new projects, also incomplete.

I tried to understand through empathy, but I realised I’m not able to imagine what’s going on in her thoughts.

Maybe that’s always the way. I’m thinking empathy is only really possible when you’re sure the other person thinks the same as you.

I’d never recognised the need to calibrate this.

Google: Don’t be evil

With similar objectives, Edward Tufte achieved contemporary fame in data viz with his approach to presentation that can be stated simply: less is more.

Tufte taught and demonstrated that in charts, anything other than the barest of axis and label - any ornamentation beyond basic data - detracts from the presentation through distraction and ambiguity.

https://stanfordmag.org/contents/intelligent-designs

https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...

Has Larry Page made any public comment about Google's surveillance capitalism at all since retiring?

Has any journalist asked him lately how he feels about "Don't be evil" in the context of his Alphabet stock holding?

I'm not commenting or judging on Page - just curious to hear his contemporary thoughts about the company he founded. I've heard nothing at all from him since he retired from the organization.

Wow. This article is practically a whole university course in graphical visual communications study.

Looks good.

Give me a few days…

The word you are looking for is 'patisserie'.

I had difficulty parsing the "Double Empathy Problem" because it's written with so much meta commentary and qualifiers.

So what is the Double Empathy Problem? I'm still not sure what the article says after reading it twice.

Is it something like this?

The limitation of empathy, for those who understand why it is useful to practice it, and who try to practice it, is that unless you know how the other person thinks, just putting yourself in their shoes won't help. You also have to be able to model how their thoughts will go - not how your thoughts would go if you were in their situation.

So, if you want to treat people with autism empathically, first, investigate and learn how to model how they think. Once you have some model of that, you can practice empathy with them. If you try to practice empathy before you have a model, it won't be empathy - it will be misunderstanding.

Microsoft's evolution into adtech is the natural evolution of industrial capitalism.

In the 19th century, mercantile giants evolved into banks, because after expanding to the limits of their trading turf, that's how they'd get secure, predictable Return On Capital (ROC).

In the 20th century, industrial giants evolved into fintech services, because after expanding to the limits of their markets that's how they'd get ROC.

In the 21st century, the largest software companies seek to evolve into adtech for the same reason.

> Because society. Literally. You need to "predict" behaviours around you,

But the models aren't valid e.g. astrology.

Does that matter?

It seems not really! Many folks still swear by astrology.

How can that work? In mainstream science, a bad heuristic is useless and fades to oblivion or ridicule.

But society is not science. When people use astrology or racism or any other inaccurate heuristic to anchor their beliefs, they create for themselves a role in society, and relationships with their community that are self-fulfilling.

Think everyone is out to get you? Treat them that way, and they'll think you're weird - someone to be avoided and not trusted.

Think tall people are attractive and short people are ugly? That makes you much more likely to partner with a tall person.

Think everyone deserves a smile first thing in the morning? People are going to smile back, and seek you out at the water cooler.

Think everyone deserves to be heard? People are going to talk to you.

Think black people, or brown people, or pink people, or white people, or tan people, or purple people are not worth listening to? You're going to miss out on their stories, food, culture, friendship, companionship and wisdom.

Society is a laboratory. It's also a mirror.

Ways to categorize other people's personalities, such as Myers-Briggs, Swedish Colors, The Zodiac, McCarthyism, devils advocacy, racial profiling, Stockholm Syndrome, and hero worship have always been popular.

Why? Because people need ways to feel like they understand and can predict other people's behavior.

Why? I don't know. It's just something I've observed.

Would you agree, and if so, why do you think that is?

> Email is our only reliable communication method between different organizations.

Actually, that’s snail mail.

> partners at top venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz, who have figured out ways to claim tens of millions of dollars in tax exemptions for themselves and relatives year after year, according to industry officials and lawyers.

Innovators yes, but not in technology, in acquisitiveness.

> Crisply articulate and build alignment around your decision-making criteria

Corporate-speak like that is a recipe for bad outcomes. What engineers need to learn is the same thing corporations need to learn but avoid - plain speaking.

See the Challenger O-ring disaster history for a case study.