1,156 karma · joined September 9, 2013
The purpose is not to discourage the buses. If a person wishes to live in San Francisco, and work at Google, that is their right (assuming they can pay the rent). No one has any moral basis for trying to stop them from exercising that right, any more than I have a right to stop people from paying high prices for caviar so, that I can afford it.
If we consider the actual words to be a latent variable, then we can use an n-gram model to compute the maximum likelihood estimate (sorry Bayesians) using dynamic programming.
There is also the Bayesian approach where you treat it as a Bayesian network and use belief propagation to compute the marginal posteriors over each letter.
EDIT: took a while to figure out the ML approach.
I give to charities that seem to be cost efficient, like those in givewell.com
>you're pretty fucking ignorant and stubborn and just dickish on the whole.
>no need to get your panties in a bunch over this.
>Could you kindly s tfu please?
Well the problem with debate is that everyone wants to "educate" the other side. So my idea is that you prove you are actually right, and then maybe people will accept your views.
It is true that economists have an unjustified preference for analytic solutions over numeric solutions.
However, the main reason to avoid simulations, is that the assumption of rational agents is not very amenable to the typical approach of simulation. Any simulation that imposed the assumption of rationality would look very different to the simulations that are usually done.
For example, rational agents make decisions based on future prices. I might decide to build a factory, because I expect positive profits given the future prices of inputs and outputs. But I can only know this if I have myself modeled the entire economy. Economists do this using backward induction. They solve for equilibrium in the future, and work backwards.
Another more basic example is that rational agents naturally form markets. Buying/selling of goods is much more accurately described by a perfect market, than by some random matching with random prices.
It might be a realistic simulation of professional poker players.
>However, it is true that women are targeted much more (especially when they are challenging mens sports).
You
>Give a link to said study or go back to /r/theredpill.
Hypocrite.
I'm really confused. Are we onto third or fourth wave feminism yet? I thought body shaming was bad and the modelling industry was evil.
Aren't we always being appealed to, as nerds, to empathize with groups that are underrepresented in tech, because we too, didn't fit in in high school?
Does that mean everyone should stop taking the vaccine?
What is actually happening is that every time a story promoting progressive views on race/gender (this story explicitly mentions gender), people post to disagree with the message of the story.
Perhaps their thinking is that if people who are born with the privilege of being White and male end up as losers, then those people must be objectively inferior and so there is nothing wrong with making fun of them. I have trouble following progressive thinking sometimes.
I haven't read enough to judge how beneficial the particular loans you broker are, but I think that just showing that it's possible to crowdsource investment this way is a great achievement.
Does the person/company who borrows money legally owe this debt to the investors? And which government bodies regulate these transactions?
>Yet however well people are taught, their abilities will remain unequal, and in a world which is increasingly polarised economically, many will find their job prospects dimmed and wages squeezed. The best way of helping them is not, as many on the left seem to think, to push up minimum wages. Jacking up the floor too far would accelerate the shift from human workers to computers. Better to top up low wages with public money so that anyone who works has a reasonable income, through a bold expansion of the tax credits that countries such as America and Britain use.
For basic income advocates, I would also like to point out that this policy is much closer to basic income than increasing the minimum wage.
I consider the responsibility of maximizing shareholder value to be a moral one primarily. If people invested their money in a company, it's not for the management to decide that actually they investors don't need that much return on their investment.
I couldn't understand that. One difficulty is that not only do Austrian economists use a different language to describe things, but it seems to be arguing against a traditional Keynesian viewpoint. Right now PhD programs don't teach any traditional Keynsian econ, (undergrad programs teach a bit), they skip straight to neo-Keynsianism, which only keeps a few ideas from the original Keynes (e.g. sticky prices). So I don't really understand what the article is arguing against.
I already gave a description of what I thought the sticky-prices based argument for cost-push inflation was. Can you explain in your own words how this particular argument is refuted?
Re the professor, I guess I'll just chalk that up to a bad professor.
Now how can it be that nurse practitioners don't produce that much value? It is because the relevant quantity is the marginal value of an additional nurse practitioner, not the average value. And why is it fair to pay people according to their marginal value, and not their average value? That is because it incentives the most efficient behavior. An additional software engineer is worth more to society than an additional nurse. The fact that getting rid of all nurses would be worse than getting rid of all software engineers (assuming this was true) is irrelevant, because as people quit the nursing profession, wages will rise.
So the problem is not capitalism, but people's inability to accept that the implications of economics theory: first, that there is no ethical reason to reward people for the average value of a person in their profession, as opposed to the marginal value, and second, that frivolous things like Twitter can be as valuable as medical services (if people are willing to pay as much for either).
Providing liquidity in all situations might be useful, but it is an added bonus. If you don't do this, you are still a market maker.
However, that doesn't generalize to the entire industry. People (especially men) like money and power because of the benefits they brings. It doesn't have to be an addiction. Furthermore, the idea that it would take an addiction to wealth not to see how immoral the finance industry is, is reliant on having very specific (and wrong, in my opinion) political views.
Forced saving, and cost-benefit analysis are both factors that should be taken into account. Your claim that a person is entirely incapable of saving unless they have a mortgage is a bit extreme.
When you take this modification into account, his investment might not look so bad.
But I agree with your general point. I was also taught the middle-class fuzzy thinking that paying rent is "throwing money away".
The reason people in the "lovable-work" camp make more money, is that their skills have lower supply and higher demand. This in turn is because these jobs tend to require more intellectual and creative skills.
This is wrong, and shows precisely the lack of understanding of conditional probability that I described. I am especially shocked by your use of lesbian intercourse as an example, since everyone knows the issue is men-who-have-sex-with-men. Lesbians are completely irrelevant to this debate.
Let us compare the probability of a man getting AIDS from having sex with a random man, vs a random woman. As you say, these are probably similar. However, it might be very hard for a man to convince another random man to have sex with him! So what we really want to calculate is the probability of getting AIDS from a random, actually occurring, sexual encounter (not with a prostitute) between a man and a woman, and a man and another man. This is what the statistic is intended to mean, and how people will interpret it, even if it is not always properly qualified. In this case, the probability of the man who has sex with a man getting AIDS is much higher, because gay men have a much higher incidence of AIDS than heterosexual women.
So we could add the following useless disclaimer to my earlier claim: if you are a man, sex with a randomly chosen man (including straight men) is not especially dangerous. It's only when you condition on that man being gay that it becomes statistically more dangerous.
Of course, this disclaimer would still be wrong since the sex with the man would probably be anal, which is inherently more likely to spread AIDS.
>What's more, the qualifier that it has to be with a white woman is important. That's why I included it :)
I can't comment on why AIDS is higher for heterosexuals in Africa than the US. I don't necessarily accept your claims about it. But that is not the issue here. I am talking about the probability of getting AIDS given the current situation, not any inherent link between being gay and AIDS. The actual cause is not relevant.
The best that you could say, is that the reason for these misleading statistics is not to promote gay rights, but to scare people into taking precautions that are good for society as a whole.
On your second point, perhaps your professor meant that he believed in free enterprise, but wanted to use the taxation system to make post-tax income much more equal? If so, there is no contradiction.
That is a big assumption. The Chinese government is very flawed, but you are wrong in assuming that they would define corruption in a completely arbitrary manner. They would most likely (as they have done already) make an example of the worst, most clear cut, cases.