A.I. And Big Data Could Power a New War on Poverty?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
1)https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/4x44dp/ai-could-r... & https://www.americanbanker.com/news/is-artificial-intelligen... 2)http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/economy/article/2112786/u... 3) https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessm...
This is some "we are going to invade your country and force you to be free" level Orwellian thinking.
I'm not sure how exactly that's Orwellian thinking, please explain.
Not sure what is your point.
Even when income, disposable or total, is set to zero, individuals still have to eat, to be sheltered, to take transportation.
Then, wherever there are multiple products for anything that would be considered a necessity, advertising can still have a positive return.
[0] https://saylordotorg.github.io/text_macroeconomics-theory-th...
A.I and Big Data are in themselves tools, but access to those tools is highly more likely if wealthy. So they will be used toward the self interest of the wealthiest, and, consequently against the interest of the poorest.
Cambridge Analytica and the Trump election comes to mind for example.
In order to bring about structural change of the scale needed to end poverty, we need to reach levels of technology, productivity and social organization that we have not yet reached today. We will not ascend to this level by analyzing some set of socio-economic data. We will reach this point by building machines that can do work for us and automating entire supply chains so that labor no longer impacts production costs.
I believe we have yet to fully appreciate the ability of a developed economy to produce jobs and work for people to do. Even if we automate the entirety of the food production, mining and energy generation industries, new forms of work will spring up to absorb anyone that may have been displaced by automation.
Whenever some work is automated, people insert themselves on top of that layer of production to form a new layer. This process continues ad infinitum. At least that's been the case for the entire history of organized human society.
If machines are doing everything, and I’m not taking resources away from anyone else, why should I work?
It's easy to just say machines will take care of everything. That is a long stretch from it actually happening and I think there are many fundamental problems you'd encounter trying to achieve that. Just looking for books, novels, whatever that might explore the idea a lot further.
For example, the total amount of wealth in the world is about 250 trillion USD according to Credit Suisse. There are about 7.5 billion people in the world today. 250T/7.5B = 33,333 USD per person. This really isn't that much wealth per person. So the total amount in existence still needs to increase dramatically.
Partially related to this, but my parents live in a village on the Lower Danube (the second largest river in Europe, after the Volga). I remember that when I was a kid (in the '80s) you had no problems catching enough fish during a day in order to feed a family of 3 or 4 if you wanted, and even sell something on the side for some extra cash (not much, but it mattered). I remember my uncle telling me that back when he was a kid (the '70s) the fish resources were even more plentiful, as in whenever the river was flooding the marshland-like areas he and his friends would go in there and catch the fish using their bare hands.
Nowadays you can barely catch a fish. Some former colleagues of mine spent an entire day trying to catch something in the Danube and at the end they hadn't catch anything (bare in mind, they were using more modern tools compared to what people were using back in the '70s and '80s). The struggle is real.
If everyone were a doctor that skill would be worthless. People are (mostly) paid according to the amount of value they bring to a company. That value is relative to others in the industry. Knowing how to competently use Microsoft Office (which puts you ahead of 99% of the world population) gets you nowhere in a AI focused startup because it doesn't make you more valuable to them.
>I'm not sure wealth per person is a great way to measure economic prosperity. If you have lots of wealth, does that necessarily translate to more income down the line?
I totally agree with you here. The metric I think matters more is relative wealth. Say you are a software developer making $120,000: in the Silicon Valley that is about average, but in Kentucky that is three times what the average person makes. So in SV you live a "normal" life, but in Kentucky you are decidedly upper class.
I am ambivalent about the relative wealth. I think it is fair and helps, up to a certain level, but globally, money attracts money, which means that certain people, with certain background and certain jobs would be deemed worth leaving in California. And this relative wealth-based system is already in place (e.g. designers in Cuppertino, IT in N. Dakota, assembler in Shenzhen).
The point you made was 100% correct, but that wasn't my meaning. I said right out of med school because I meant to focus on the problem in terms of cash flow - you can be in heaps of debt but still be well off. If the world were in huge amounts of debt (negative wealth) it seems like it could still be well off.
1st, you do realize that you include babies and elderly in that 7.5B?
2nd, you do realize that if we were living like touaregs instead of north americans we would all feel like f'ing rich with $30k?
3rd, and, spinning this back to social partnership, we could very well live in a world with no money, or at least a society in which money is not the only measure of contribution (i.e. where narcissistic douches like the donald wouldn't be seen as useful contributors).
(edited layout only)
I like my central heat and air conditioning, and Netflix, and Spotify, and my comfortable and spacious car, and my ability to use air transport, and the restaurants that exist to serve me delicious food, etc...
Come now, we're human beings! The world is our domain! We should be working to create more things for more people, not settling for less!
Living well and living sustainably are both important, we don't have to sacrifice one for the other.
And then you talk about living sustainable. Well buckle up, your lifestyle, and mine--I dunno for sure, since you mention Netflix and traveling I assume you are a relatively normal middle-class or upper-middle class westerner--are going bye bye. It simply does not scale to 7.5 billion people, so we are all are either going to have check out early without having kids or find a way to maintain our lifestyles using less energy, less food, less travel, and overall fewer goods, and then explain to our kids how they are going to have make do with even less than that.
The fantasy of a tech utopia run by machines on sustainable energy and the environment being all rosy like in the movies is just not going to happen. Unless we invent the Matrix--in which case, we'll all probably gladly enter it.
Pointless statement because you are anthropomorphizing the planet. The only way the plan ceases to exist is if we manage to blow it up. Otherwise it's fine. Be more precise in your words.
>the ocean is full of trash
Again, it's not full. Don't be hyperbolic when convincing someone of an argument.
>It simply does not scale to 7.5 billion people
There is no evidence of this. The lifestyle of a vegan westerner who does not travel frequently scales extremely well.
If by 'sustainably' you mean some hand-wavy 'no impact to anything on the planet' then no, we cannot. We will certainly need to farm a lot and that takes land which will displace something.
Also, the ecosystem of the planet itself is not sustainable because of the competitive and evolutionary nature of life. Even without humans, animals and plants continually go extinct and have mass extinction events and yet life continues.
The Earth isn't a being with a utility function, you can't have a beneficial or harmful impact on it, only on people who attach positive or negative value to certain conditions on the Earth.
And sure, you can make the argument that charts and graphs themselves will not end poverty. But your missing the point. You should be asking what arguments you can make with those charts. They are often made to help you make a decision. Like everything, finding small improvements will help us understand what is working and what isn't. And with that information we can build better systems with the goal of reducing poverty.
[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-i... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK2659/ [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/09/08/...
It's clear that analytics creates knowledge, but from what I've seen that knowledge isn't always helpful.
It really must be judged on a case by case basis, but analytics often just confirms what we've already known or suspected. We already know that mental illness is responsible for homelessness. The utility of additional analytics here is probably marginal. What is needed are treatments and cures for mental illness itself.
Accountants, corporate lawyers, clerks, receptionists, schedulers... so many jobs that will either be eliminated or made so that 1 person can do the work of 20, leading to outsourcing and consolidation.
'First they came for the accountants, but I did not speak out because they were paying me really well to design weak AI to replace the accountants...'
The 1 in 20 left - is so clearly going to happen to that profession - I suspect they'll be hit harder than truck drivers.
Once you get every symptom, every generic fingerprint, every prescription and every outcome for a decade in to a TensorFlow model - it's going to smash current results.
It won't be guessing at 100mg or 200mg, it will be prescribing 127mg/day for first week, and 122mg/day for the second - a year later it will bring that advice down to 126.
On the other hand a RL system that pokes and prods a living persons brain with electrified needles and uses a conv net to watch for feedback from the resulting facial expressions is completely possible -- with enough training experience anybody could convince me of anything using it. One 30 second session to ensure a lifetime of compliance and happiness -- the promotional material can have a guy drinking a glass Kool-Aid with a look of tranquil bliss on his face.
They been sayin' this since the wheel, methinks!
Jesus said, "The poor will always be with you." Not being a Christian, I still see the wisdom in this statement.
In wealth-oriented societies, rich people have been fighting a war to get rid of poor people since the beginning of time--throw them in jail, lock them in ghettos, deport them, wall them out. The structural change needed is in people's attitudes, society's values, not our technology.
It's getting worse, not better, and the more hopes we pin on our techno-fantasy, the harder the crash is going to be.
Would only quibble in that it's not getting rid of them that's the general goal, but leveraging them for their own benefit (which in some cases might involve the former).
This study was a 100 person survey with no experimental evidence to back up people's beliefs. I've been working with educators for a while, and they've said that "learning styles" are just a myth with no solid evidence. All this survey says is that people think they learn best via one method, but people are notoriously bad at knowing what is an effective way of learning. In surveys people overvalue the "intensity" of a learning experience [1], which makes them think things like a 3-week bootcamp are more effective, when really spaced repetition is a better use of time.
At least in the US, there are many easier ways we could improve our education methods before resorting to ML-driven customization.
> when really spaced repetition is a better use of time.
So, which is it?
The learning styles to which they refer is the notion that different people learn better through visual or audio or hands-on experience. Spaced repetition versus intensive study is a different question, one of practice and time use, that doesn't address the question or value of "style".
At least, that's how I understand it. As a casual interpreter of someone else's comment, I could of course be wildly wrong.
I use to write everything down, it was the only way to retain whatever little information that I was capable of retaining. I never had enough confidence to NOT write everything. Realizing that all my abilities were impaired because of improper cognitive development. I decided to start from scratch, having nothing developed and picking one area that I was suited to. I have been practicing reciting rap lyrics of Eminem and Nas(not really for any reason, it was just fun). What I realized is that now my ability to recall information was significantly improved at least from a verbal learning style perspective. And it only took a few months develop. While studying for my final I went back to my old habits of writing every single detail down and realizing I will never have enough time to write it all down. So I started reciting knowledge the same way I would recite rap lyrics and I retained EVERYTHING. I have never studied so little, yet I aced my exam got an A in the course and was proud.
Moral of the story is that people are different, and while most people may learn from one method, it doesn't mean they will have that capability developed at the time they need it. So they have to learn to adapt with what is available to them.
edit: I will add that again poverty is the source of all this. My parents grew up in severe poverty and never were able to develop these skills properly and I had to suffer because of that.
Interesting. Do you mean like depersonalization and/or derealization?
I've worked with educators too. They are and they aren't it depends on the level and time period you're taking. At the individual level how a math problem (for example) is presented can affect how quickly a student grasps the concept. When you're taking an entire school and more than a decade of schooling the effects of presentation aren't all that meaningful because people do the best job retaining the knowledge they use frequently.
It will be used as a tool by the rich to extract more money and increase poverty.
Who will wield these AI tools that is supposed to be used to fight poverty?
Corporations are for-profit and a corporate sociopath cannot be concerned about limiting profit to help the poor. They'll want to use AI as a new tool to increase profits. This will come at the expense of the human populace at large.
My government in the United States of America is rapidly falling to greed. Corporations only act nominally concerned about the poor as a PR act to prevent the rage of the populace from using government against them. Since my government is even further down the slide into plutocracy than ever before, this government will neither stop the greed-based corporate use of AI nor will it use it to help the poor, because there's no money for their rich patrons in helping the poor.
Even you want this magic AI tech to help the poor, who will do it? Where will you get the data in the first place to feed into this A.I. and Big Data magic machine? I argue the two sources above will not be a help in so far as they might threaten the greed they exhibit.
https://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/575/F01/lakoff.johnson...
There's a book from the same authors that contains a more expansive list of metaphors and examples.
In most other cultures people don't use the word war metaphorically because it's seen as a terrible thing.
Wow, and not in a good way. Reading that makes me apoplectic. My first instinct is to write something full of swear words and insults that wouldn't meet HN guidelines.
First, poverty is gendered. One of the things that drives poverty for women is the cultural expectation that we provide caregiving to our own children and other relatives essentially for free and that society owes us nothing for this imposition on our time and energy. There are other factors, but that's a big one.
The next thing that drives poverty is various intractable personal problems, such as health issues, learning disabilities and mental health issues. One thing society can do to reduce the degree to which such issues separate the Haves from the Have Nots is to provide universal health care.
Dependency on government services is driven in part by poor design of services such that getting on them actively cripples your ability to get off of them. This entire article sounds like a snide way to blame poor people for their problems rather than look for actual solutions.
I can't believe they say in the same article that a) jobs are outright going away and b) the solution for unemployed people is superior job matching services. If there are no jobs to get, you don't have a matching problem.
This is such utter drivel. Wow.
I'm a free market person and I believe if the government tried to legislate this, it would screw it up. Rather it should try to open the way for the private industry to create AI based health care solutions.
I'd also like to see character based communities with minimal basic income. Ie, your economic output is not relevant, but rather your character. How kind you are to others, how passionate you are about your talents, how independent you are about looking after yourself. I think this is the real solution to poverty in a world of increased automation.
I know some people want UBI without strings attached, but my feeling is that without some kind of purpose (even a non economic one) mental health issues will increase.
Datamining is likely to help detect and clarify negative patterns in large groups (like when stents don't actually reduce angina). But doing the same to find positive patterns to shape policy seems to be much harder due to the wild variation inherent in individual patient response to each therapy.
Existing therapy is refined via specific experiments which are not amenable to aggregation into large groups that can be 'mined' using AI or DM, thereby adding further value. It's not clear to me what AI can add to existing stat/prob methods here.
Inversely, when trying to characterize patients using their raw data, I've found individual patient data to be so horribly noisy and so often mislabeled as to be useless for more than trivial purposes of individual trend summary. This becomes especially woeful when aggregating digital health records, and is likely to remain so for decades to come (given their current glacial rate of improvement).
When it comes to the prospect of mining medical data to improve treatment, I can only say, "GIGO".
Agreed.
>Rather, [the government] should try to open the way for the private industry ...
Disagree, at least in part.
One source of personal frustration is the perception that rich techies who made their fortunes by writing programs without explicit government approval/legislation seem to spend a lot of time begging for government solutions (like UBI) or approvals for these problems without first attempting to use their money, brains, and tech with a little creativity to generate extra-governmental solutions.
You have a source for that? I would think that the wage gap would be a much more significant factor than cultural expectations. And I would hope that people would provide caregiving to their own children for free.
And I would hope that people would provide caregiving to their own children for free.
So would I. But why is it only women are expected to provide such care and are classified as gold digging whores if they think the father should provide for them while they do so and also provide some compensation into the future for the lost career building opportunities it costs them? Parents should both be responsible for the product of having gotten jiggy together, not just mothers.
Those stats are not current. Given the reactions I got from working women at a Fortune 500 company over the detail that my sons took over the cooking and cleaning, I have zero reason to believe we are anywhere near achieving parity.
How does that contribute to women being in poverty at a higher rate than men? If the parents are married, they share finances so they are either both in poverty, or neither are in poverty. If they are divorced, the primary caregiver will be compensated for their time through child support payments.
And I don't think stay at home mothers are generally classified as "gold digging whores", maybe my experience is different from yours though.
1) She got unexpectedly pregnant.
2) She got divorced.
3) Her spouse died.
Due to the fact that women live longer and men are, on average, about 4 years older than their wives, 90 percent if the time, when someone is burying their spouse it is a woman burying her husband. (for hetero couples, a stat that will change with same sex marriage)
I did the homemaker thing. I have 6 years of college. My post divorce life has been far less lush than that of my ex.
This may show my bias growing up in a traditionally christian environment, but for years the rub on the right has been to disregard two of those realities and handwave the other as: she got unexpectedly pregnant, because she lacks personal responsibility, and is therefore not entitled to the support of the state or society. When the Haves "get unexpectedly pregnant," it's an accident or a surprise, when the Have Nots do, it's a sin. Even some of the responses here dogwhistle the sentiment that the people in this position kind of deserve it, which disgusts me.
And to the other reply to your comment: Good thing this isn't a sympathy contest, and that humans do not have a finite capacity to care for their fellow humans, so we can feel bad for the dead people and still work for the benefit of the people left behind. "These are nice points, but wave of hand I'm not going to listen to them, honey." Of course they needed a throwaway account to say it here, too bad that attitude prevails in so many of our interactions every day.
At the societal level, attempting to hold people to a lofty standard of moral purity doesn't seem to be particularly effective considering even clergy have trouble remaining celibate.
The hope is that it prevents future unexpected pregnancies by making people pause and think before they act "Hmm, maybe if I do this unprotected thing I want to do that it will financially screw over the girl I want to do it with. Maybe I shouldn't do that thing without protection."
Personal responsibility is about incentivizing good choices, so society has to pick up the tab for fewer children born into poverty. Unfortunately, this probably doesn't work out in practice since people (particularly teenagers) are going to have unprotected sex regardless of consequences. So there is a point even if the point is broken.
There are 44 million people in poverty in the US. There are 10 million single mothers in the US, with 17 million children. Since the majority of single mothers are not in poverty, your statement is false.
My phrasing is fine if someone is engaging in good faith and trying to actually understand my points rather than looking for some trivial means to justify dismissing them.
You really seem to be reaching here. So I will likely not reply further.
EDIT: Others have independently expressed similar confusion as well.
EDIT2: I'm being throttled, but in response to Doreen:
Here's where you say women live longer (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16055356). I don't see how that can mean anything other than "men die younger". Again, no need to resort to "bad faith" when "miscommunication" suffices. Here's the full text for convenience/posterity:
> Most poor people in the US are women and their children. Most of those women were solidly middle class until one of three things happened: 1) She got unexpectedly pregnant. 2) She got divorced. 3) Her spouse died. Due to the fact that women live longer and men are, on average, about 4 years older than their wives, 90 percent if the time, when someone is burying their spouse it is a woman burying her husband. (for hetero couples, a stat that will change with same sex marriage)
Nowhere did I say that. That framing sounds incredibly bad faith.
What a strange statement. This would be true if, for example, poor people were 33% men, 33% women, and 33% children.
It would also be true that "most poor people in the US are men and their children."
Did you mean to say something specific about single mothers and the children who live with them? Or was the phrasing an attempt to import that image while saying something much less meaningful?
Here's something that is specific and true: The vast majority of homeless in America are men. There are many, many centers set up to help women and children in poverty exclusively, while resources just for men are rare-to-nonexistent.
Extreme poverty is massively gendered against men, and the resources to address it are massively gendered towards helping women.
My mother cheated on my father and he left her because of that.
He was required (by Texas law) to pay child-support to my mother up until we were 18 (I am 29) to my mother who cheated on him; he still owes back pay on that and refuses to pay until they put a warrant out for his arrest.
My mother demonized him to us by crying about not knowing why he left her; she never once mentioned until 5 months ago that she cheated on him.
Dad regrets leaving us (his kids, not my mother) because it put a rift between us. We never knew the truth until recently when my mom let it slip in a conversation.
At this point I feel like he has been punished enough by the state of Texas for leaving my cheating mother.
Recently my eldest brother had a girl and my father has been in her life as much as he can and I'm incredibly happy for that (not jealous one bit) because at least my niece will have something my brother and I never had because he was soured by her behavior.
We grew up poor because of my mother's infidelity...
In USA, while women are in poverty more than men, likely for the reasons you highlight, women receive more social services than men, for those same reasons. Homelessness disproportionately impacts men (by far), because woman and children have more access to social services.
Also, the American track record for alimony and child support is not great of late.
The instinct for pair-bonding--and, in humans, the cultural institution of marriage--evolved as behavioral adaptations to the unfairnesses inherent in having two sexes.
It would appear that equal outcomes demand equal commitment. As the biological commitment is a few kcal and a few minutes for one, versus years of time and many more kcal for the other, that leaves an awful lot of effort to make those scales balance.
Simple analysis suggests that females should cartelize and police each other's behavior with respect to males, embargoing reproduction from any male deemed too selfish in regard to child-rearing responsibilities. But cartels are tough to keep together, and males can counter with misogynistic and patriarchal strategies of their own.
The biological discrepancy will therefore likely never be resolved to anything even close to fairness.
It's never going to be free, either. There is always an opportunity cost. Providing resources to an existing child precludes using them yourself or applying them to a theoretical future child.
I'm inclined to believe this opinion runs diametrically opposite to the general consensus in Australia, insofar as legislation can be considered the general consensus.
I'll admit some men, and some women, may lean in the general direction of the opinion you've state, but I feel "gold digging whores" is overly strong.
But their opinions hardly matter as we have strong child support legislation, with a strong Child Support Agency to enforce the laws to direct an appropriate amount of money to the resident-parent to aid in funding the child. We also have a fairly well run welfare system.
In the US, full time moms tend to get viewed and treated like leeches, regardless of their socioeconomic class. I was a homemaker a long time. I have six years of college. I was a military wife and homeschooling mom. But America is pretty sucktastic about treating full-time wives like pariahs and non contributors.
If your land is more civilized than mine, I am very glad to hear it.
Edit: And I am not questioning it. I met an Australian friend for lunch/dinner with a group of friends in San Francisco years ago. He talked very differently about his full-time homemaker wife than is the cultural norm here.
When the Welfare People Come is great read on the the way the welfare system is stacked against those who need to use it that delves into this and OP's points in greater detail.
> 1) is known
If the woman doesn't know who the father is, who's choice was that?
> 2) is able
yes
> 3) is willing
The courts routinely assess child support on both willing and unwilling fathers. It's not an option for fathers.
In some cases, the man who raped her.
#2) Yes, your prison comment overwhelmingly impacts the poor, particularly minorities.
#3) The burden is on the woman, if the woman is poor she may not have the resources to force the father to pay.
Accidents are only accidental in intent, not in results.
He was required (by Texas law) to pay child-support to my mother up until we were 18 (I am 29) to my mother who cheated on him; he still owes back pay on that and refuses to pay until they put a warrant out for his arrest.
My mother demonized him to us by crying about not knowing why he left her; she never once mentioned until 5 months ago that she cheated on him.
Dad regrets leaving us (his kids, not my mother) because it put a rift between us. We never knew the truth until recently when my mom let it slip in a conversation.
At this point I feel like he has been punished enough by the state of Texas for leaving my cheating mother.
Recently my eldest brother had a girl and my father has been in her life as much as he can and I'm incredibly happy for that (not jealous one bit) because at least my niece will have something my brother and I never had because he was soured by her behavior.
We grew up poor because of my mother's infidelity...
EDIT: I can't reply ("I'm posting too fast"), but I'm genuinely asking for clarity--not making a point or impugning anyone's character.
Click on the time next to the post you want to reply to.
My wife was a finance director and made good coin. Given the cost of daycare and the difficulty of getting late childcare (we both have jobs where the day ends when it ends sometimes, daycare assumes your day ends at 4 everyday), it was a no brainer for her to stop working.
When she returns to the workforce, she’ll be on the bottom as an analyst or some other gig.
For people with less resources, it’s far worse.
Also daycare would be subventionized.
Even if you quit entirely, beyond straightforward maternity/paternity leave? I don't think I'd be in favor of that type of regulation. In my opinion, if you make the decision to quit (for whatever reason), you can come back to get whatever job your skills let you get. I also think "developed" isn't the adjective you're looking for, maybe "tightly-regulated".
Of course not. The point is that there shouldn't be any economical or work-related downside (other than slightly less pay during maternity/paternity leave) for having a child.
(Obviously raising a child costs money but I hope you get the idea)
Developed is quite apt for any society that values its members.
But I agree with you that when the real problem is a rising fundamental scarcity, a better breadcrumb detector is not the ultimate solution.
At least historically, what society gave in return was keeping women (for the most part) out of harms way when it came to wars.
Not does that alone justify keeping them in poverty.
The mainstream opinion today seems to be that the current "mix" is less favorable to women (I happen to disagree with this), but I think it is a good basis for a civil discussion, more so than the insistence on equality at all levels which seems unattainable to me. (EDIT: last few words added)
"On the average, half of the deaths caused by war happened to civilians, only some of whom were killed by famine associated with war...The civilian percentage share of war-related deaths remained at about 50% from century to century."
That implies roughly 3/4 of the deaths are men.
UNICEF et al cover this at length. https://www.unicef.org/graca/patterns.htm
Edit: Intersting discussion here, suggesting much of the difference comes down to how you measure and when you stop measuring. The longer you measure, the worse it is for civilians and in particular, women. https://files.prio.org/Publication_files/Prio/Armed%20Confli....
Where does the fact that more homeless in the U.S. are men than women fit into this for you?
Of course, that isn't something most people want to hear. I am a woman and I spent 5.7 years homeless. It helped me solve some of my intractable personal problems. I am newly off the street and recently applied for my dream job. I hope to soon have the life I always wanted and could not arrange. I got it in part by taking the whole deal involved in exercising agency like a man, a luxury many women lack.
But commenting on such things tends to not be well received. Men want to play their own victim card when it comes to that statistic and it is never acceptable to point out that there is an element of choice involved and the greater degree of agency generally exercised by men is a driving factor in higher rates of male homelessness. It sounds like victim blaming to a lot of people.
I am perfectly fine with accepting that there is an element of choice involved if that also explains why men are found in the top of society.
My experience is that many women will not agree on that but instead point to (if they are really stereotype feminists) patriarchal structures in society benefitting men.
I wonder still though if you agree that it also explains why men are found in the top.
I do think this is an element:
Generally speaking, women have an option men lack. They can marry well. Given this easy out, when things get challenging at work, some will walk, especially since they have vastly less reason to believe they can achieve stellar success and they also face sexual harassment to a degree that far exceeds what men face. So, with poorer odds of reward, a typically worse set of working conditions due to the element of harassment and another option on the table, this will lead a lot of women to give up where men have fewer disincentives to persist and no easy out.
Women need to "want" it a helluva lot worse for wanting it to have any hope of getting them as far as a man is likely to get. So it is a rather unfair question and it really comes across like it has a very polite facade, but dark agenda.
I will add that I have already previously indicated women make choices as well when they choose to put up with crappy situations to avoid being raped on the street. So I don't plan to engage you further.
Feminism includes criticism of the social dynamics that hurt men too. I think it's perfectly explained from a feminist framework why men can be on the bottom and also on the top of society. Most feminists support a solution to these problems as well as the ones that affect women since they are inherently connected.
There is masculinity but claiming it's toxic is an absurd form of shaming which rests on the assumption that there are masculine traits which are objectively toxic.
"Man up"
"Boys will be boys"
"You throw like a girl"/"[blank] is for girls"
"When men were men..."
"No means yes, yes means anal"
You can't deny there are some really terrible behaviours and expectations that have been normalised in our culture and they are considered as being inherent to masculinity.
I'm curious as to why you think this an "either-or" proposition? Can men make choices and benefit from a "patriarchal" society? In fact, might men have further incentive to make the choices that will convey the benefits that disproportionately await them?
Regarding your last comment, what do you mean by "greater degree of agency" and how do you measure it?
We don't live in Saudi Arabia. Women can make all the same choices men can.
Like what is stopping other women from doing what you did and how does that also not stop men?
It sounds like victim blaming because it is. In our society we tend towards believing people are not deserving of help if they are in bad situations due to their own choices.
I don't believe because I understand how hard it can be to make the right choices, and also because as far as I have seen that's true of almost everyone in a bad spot. That doesn't mean we shouldn't help them, because we should help everyone who suffers.
Of course not.
As the GP pointed out, homelessness is safer for men.
How about this fact: 21% of children live in poverty. How does that fit in for you?
(The official US number is 25%, but I feel like Canada and UK surveys pairing mental illness and homelessness at up to 70% is closer to the reality.)
Mental illness isn't always a 100% sort of thing. Most people I know have been diagnosed with some sort of mental illness at some point or another, most of them either temporary or minor. Most of these people are gainfully employed, most of the time. Some of these people have had some issues retaining employment due to a mental issue getting worse.
The more demand for your labor there is, the easier it is to get back on your feet after a temporary worsening of your condition is resolved, and that's super important, I think. Also, if you have chronic issues, the degree to which your employer will tolerate those chronic issues is determined largely by demand for your labor.
I mean, certainly, there are some who are completely disabled, and I imagine that if you took one of those people I know with minor issues that periodically got worse and better, they'd have a hell of a time trying to get better if they were homeless. Certainly, mental health treatment is important and would help a lot. I'm just saying that more demand for your labor is also something that helps a lot, even when you do have some other issues.
Many “mentally ill” people were formerly considered “sane” within the bounds of social norms, but even the best prepared can fall on hard times, and being homeless and socially isolated is really hard even for the mentally strongest.
Furthermore, women are probably more likely to get an offer (and accept an offer) for welfare assistance than men. Parents with children are probably far more likely to receive assistance than individuals.
I don't see how it cancels my argument other than highlighting even bigger wealth distribution imbalance in favor of women.
Courts favour giving custody to Women. The men who do get custody generally have to have more of their affairs in order (job, housing, stability). So its not surprise when a man gets custody he is in a better financial position.
She also demonized him to us as if it was his fault for leaving her.
Her cheating also made a head while she was both dating my current step-dad and another man who could also have ended up as my step-dad.
Needless to say, I have a hard time with relationships because my mother's have been extremely out of the norm.
I am very sorry for what you suffered.
For some years, I read as much scholarly info as I could on infidelity.
In a nutshell: Infidelity doesn't destroy a relationship. Instead, it grows out of serious problems within the relationship.
I hope you find a means to heal.
Yup, she was co-dependent on him and he was a workaholic mechanic.
There is more to the story than I have said:
My father had a serious cocaine addiction (he is clean now); that combined with his workaholic nature (at the time) caused him to not be around my mother as much as he should have.
She wished he would be around more with her and the cheating on him seems to be the side-effect of that issue.
Those were the starting points of the relationship problems and they only worsened from there.
My mother's mother ragged on her a lot about every mistake (big or small) she happened to make. I believe this caused her to have a hard time trusting her decisions and lowered her self-esteem.
The codependency with my father and his lack of being around due to working (to help provide for us) was definitely a factor in her cheating on him; it seems to be a common problem of those whose significant other isn't around as much as they should (or would like them) to be.
Thanks for the thoughts on healing, it's definitely a struggle.
It sucks that they did divorce however my brothers and I turned out just fine by her raising us.
I see a psychiatrist and have talked plenty with her about my childhood and growing up.
From my posts it may come off that my mother is a terrible person and that's so far from the truth. I love my mother and would do anything for her.
She had to play the role of mother and father (something any parent would struggle with). Sacrifices she made to raise us still amaze me to this day.
Mom involved us in Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts to be around male mentors (and it helped a lot). We had the support of Big Brother & Big Sisters for one-on-one interaction with male figures.
We never went without under the care of my mother, however we were in poverty and she constantly was trying to make ends meet every month. While we weren't homeless like in your situation, it was still very much a struggle.
I learned very early on the difference between wants and needs.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/05/31/187551135...
He's such a kind, caring and eloquent man despite his upbringing.
I'm watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xi_27bpIb30 now to learn more about his life.
Sometimes the "serious problems" are simply that one partner is a cheater. An ex of mine (who cheated on me) went on to cheat in their next relationship, and the one after that, and based on mutual friends' comments, a few more since. Some people just aren't wired for monogamy.
2 minutes of googling seems to show that adult women’s poverty rate is around 20-30% higher than men’s.
It is an overwhelmingly male forum. So not surprising that men generally are more aware of male reality than of female reality.
There have also been rebuttals of the worst and most inaccurate pro male comments.
Most people here seem to genuinely be interested in understanding and not merely looking to shoot me down.
It used to be a great deal more onesided and challenging, to the point where you couldn't say anything about the reality of women's lives without it being a flamewar or beatdown.
To be fair, I stopped reading that post at that point and moved on to the discussion chains. Only afterwards did I come back to it.
I have been saying something similar for a long time! The wage gap, in my opinion, is a result of choices made by women in a society that expects them to be primary caregivers.
I think that people should be paid to be caregivers for their own families. In fact, many new programs do exactly this. Still it is not reliably spread throughout the US federation.
However, my concern is that subsidizing child care actually leads to overpopulation. I am worried about the Malthusian trap.
The author suggests hard working middle class people are missing out on millions unfilled job openings ripe for the picking, because we don’t have good enough matching algorithms.
One insult is suggesting desperate out of work people may not already be taking the extraordinary measures necessary to find the best positions they can get. I question even the validity of the claim, that “matching” is alone is keeping any significant number people out of work. Another insult is not mentioning a lot of these jobs may not be filled simply because the salary and opportunity for career development are not that great.
Other topics like improving the educational system are grossly oversimplified given the competing interests of students, teachers, politics, and government. The biggest problem has been explained here on HN previously: Education doesn’t lack good ideas or innovation as much as it lacks funding to develop and implement the good ideas.
Other points about how AI will remove concerns of bias seem naive, or at least not in tune with recent work like that from Facebook, that has faced an uphill battle trying to convince people its easy to create objective policy systems.
I can see the benefit of articles that look at the current practical challenges of AI, and also more speculative articles that look at what the future may bring. This argument seems to be stuck in the middle, while not doing particularly well at either.
Utterly bizarre.
And that's not a crazy thing to be wrapped around the axle about, though it doesn't generally make for good debate.
From the very first picture that begins the article on-down, Elizabeth Mason advocates an absolutely frightening system that is made even more scary by how she comes through as genuinely/naively believing in it all.
> Big data promises something closer to an unbiased, ideology-free evaluation of the effectiveness of these social programs. We could come closer to the vision of a meritocratic, technocratic society that politicians from both parties at state and local levels — those closest to the practical problems their constituents face — have begun to embrace.
First, meritocracy was first brought up as a joke by the author who coined the term. Second, who is advocating for this “technocratic vision” short of Silicon Valley CEOs? This “vision” of centralized, unbiased analysis by top-notch planners was what we had in Vietnam or with GOSPLAN in the USSR, not what we need now.
Third, AI works fast, which means even if it’s 75% less “ideological” or whatever, it’s rate of speed is so fast that it will magnify any and all biases that might be lurking inside. To imagine that it is unbiased is crazy, let alone to think that it wouldn’t be used to some horrible malevolent end (cough China cough).
This article made me sick, but it was so uplifting and wonderful to see all the other negative reactions on here and that this is not representative of HN.
Not that it won't happen soon anyway, but why hasten it.
No. Offer actual affordable housing. New housing has more than doubled in size since the 1950s, plus we have largely eliminated small, cheap housing alternatives, such as SROs* and boarding houses. There is no end to how much we can grow houses and inflate the cost associated with not being homeless. If we don't deal with housing, no amount of raising wages fixes this problem.
Though I agree that we need to provide universal health care.
Additionally if the unemployment is 4% then raising it slightly isn't a problem. 0% unemployment is bad for an economy and the US has safely hovered between 4-6% which is needed to let businesses be able to hire when more workers are needed
Chris Stucchio writes about this in depth: https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/alien_intelligences_...
Texting someone that the police are watching them based solely on their associations seems both intentionally creepy and un-Constitutional. I suppose this is the Chicago PD though. Given their operation of "Black Sites" in contravention of the Constitution they apparently don't care too much for the Rule of Law.
Your second link is quite fascinating though.
So while this is less likely to become prevalent in criminal cases, this sets up a dual system. In the public sphere you can be affected in numerous deleterious ways because there is no presumption of innocence in the public sphere. Even if you're not on social media. You can be mistakenly doxxed and suffer the consequences.
We will need to come to terms with the implications of both these distinct phenomena which can result in injustice.
And the worst thing about the witch hunts to my mind is not that they are happening; it is the increasing amount of the population that sees them as a good thing. As long as they are targeted at the right people, of course, but the standards used for "right people" are growing quickly, too.
‘80’s: The Satanic Panic
‘90’s: Crack and Rap
‘00’s: Video Games
‘10’s: OMGZ Teh Internet!
Just for one example of how individuals were indeed singled out. Same with each example given, I’d recommend studying the history of this aspect of human behavior to get a grip on its present. Sure, Harvey Weinstein and his ilk did alright, but plenty of individuals went through the wringer. That’s not even looking at the impact of the crack panic on the prison population and various communities.
You just didn’t have a live feed informing you of their plight.
If you're cheering for guilt by association to make a comeback just because the evil establishment thinks it's a bad idea, I'm at a loss of words. Any other fundamental freedoms you'd like to abolish because smart people happened to think they are good ideas? Presumption of innocence? Habeas corpus? The 5th amendment? Suffrage?
I'm not cheering for anything. I'm pointing out that machines may have a distasteful view of the world and that this will be a stumbling block for using them effectively.
> Any other fundamental freedoms you'd like to abolish because smart people happened to think they are good ideas? Presumption of innocence? Habeas corpus? The 5th amendment? Suffrage?
I'd appreciate it if you could tone down the hysterical moral outrage, particularly when aimed in my direction.
You are misrepresenting the status quo when you're insinuating that some "establishment" conspiracy will be suppressing the usefulness of violating fundamental rights, such as assumption of innocence, in their quest to defend "political correctness".
This is obviously wrong. Such rights, and others like privacy or the right to a fair trial, only make sense under the assumption that their violation would in some ways benefit law enforcement. Otherwise there'd be no need to protect them.
While the argument that, for example, "torture doesn't work" is sometimes made, it is always secondary to "our civilisation is better than that, and it is strong enough to accept a (small) hit in effectiveness in the defence of fundamental rights".
So when you believe you've stumbled onto some greater truth, and that the world needs to hear some tough talk of realism, you've simply missed the essential message of enlightenment, and are reverting to 16th-century morals.
Would you care to enumerate the moral failings of mine which you have identified? Or is this just an indiscriminate attack?
> You are misrepresenting the status quo when you're insinuating that some "establishment" conspiracy will be suppressing the usefulness of violating fundamental rights, such as assumption of innocence, in their quest to defend "political correctness".
I have made no such statements nor insinuations. There is no conspiracy. If this is the only such intellectual failure of mine which you have (mis)identified, then I suggest you recalibrate your moral outrage meter and try a less scattershot approach to fighting ideas and messengers which make you uncomfortable.
As to the rest of your statements, I think I agree with them mostly. We should not violate fundamental rights including the presumption of innocence particularly. I agree with prohibitions on torture on moral grounds and not simply consequential grounds.
I have not missed the essential message of the Enlightenment and in fact uphold such ideals as a core part of my identity. So in summary, I reiterate my concern that your outrage is indiscriminate and scattershot, and you have misunderstood my position and statements.
Her main points are, while AI will put people out of jobs "big data" can help match people who lots jobs with all the unfilled positions we have (like picking fruits in a field or bathroom cleaning or something like that).
AI can help "tutor" our kids so teaching can be tailored to each child/person without lobbing us into classrooms with the same curriculum
and lastly, it will help distribute welfare services efficiently (or something)
(It is interesting, though, because who is qualified is a subjective thing; either to the whims of a human manager, or whatever hidden statistical correlation the ML algorithm found. Right now, my impression is that standards are much higher for new grads than when I broke into the industry, and much lower for the higher end jobs that I now compete for.)
Which isn't to say that the matchmaking problem isn't difficult or important or interesting, but it's certainly not the whole of the problem.
(Also, where I am, my employer pays a rather large cut of what I earn to the matchmaker. like 30% though it varies a lot, as far as I can tell. Rather more than I pay in rent. At my end of the market, my marginal dollars are devalued to the point where I'm still making a really good living on my 70%... but if I was making a lot less, that 30% could really matter. From that perspective, inserting a matchmaker into the low end might contribute to the further impoverishment of the poor.)
Using AI to attack the fundamental problem of human QoL vs. automation/efficiency/profits is just continuing to escalate a never-ending arms race.
Harken back to 2000 and let us read the business press...I will pick one article by example ( http://money.cnn.com/2000/05/05/economy/employ )...what does the article say?
"Joblessness at 30-year low...The U.S. unemployment rate tumbled to a 30-year low of 3.9 percent in April, the government reported Friday, as worker-starved companies raised wages and went on a hiring spree that created 340,000 new jobs. But the good news for workers on Main Street sparked fears on Wall Street"
What? Workers looking for a job being more easily able to get a job is something that sparks fear on Wall Street ?
"Still, the markets took the data in stride...The markets harbor no doubts of the Fed's concerns over labor market tightness."
Both "the markets" and "the Fed" are concerned that so many people are employed?
Basically this CNNfn article is saying, correctly, that Americans wanting a job being able to get a job is something that is feared by Wall Street, "markets", The Fed etc., not something that is desired.
As that is the way the system is set up, and this is not the only business press article or pronouncement of that time saying this, one has to be skeptical of the desire for a "war on poverty". Because as it says, Wall Street, "the markets", The Fed and most of the powers that be are deathly afraid of that happening. They are in the business of preserving poverty, and creating it when necessary.
Of course, this article was written by a corporation owned by people who feel this way. So this is about as blunt an explanation as you're going to get from them, or the mass media, which is completely owned and controlled by them. For a clearer explanation of all of this from a source independent of that, you might try consulting a source such as this - https://monthlyreview.org/2008/12/01/financial-implosion-and...
Poverty isn't something you war on. Poverty's something people are lifted out of.
Obvious answer: poor people.
Our societies have been constructed over a long period of time with gaping inefficiencies. Case in point: the automobile. Yes, back when the alternatives were capital-intensive railroads or poop-intensive stagecoaches, automobiles offered unprecedented mobility. Yet in our blind rush towards our perceived ideal of modernity, we built cities to satisfy the needs of the automobile first, and people second, or last (thanks GM!).
Self-driving cars could make transportation easier, faster, and more accessible, but it’s an awful lot of assumed progress that doesn’t factor in the inherent and damaging inefficiencies of the automobile:
-Cities are built for cars. Wide streets make walking worse. When I spent a month in Rome I never needed to use a car because everything was so much closer to my front door.
-Suburbs are unsustainable. They require a scale of infrastructure (water, electric, gas, pavement, internet, etc) that is far more expensive per mile than in dense cities, and anybody whose home street has been pulverized to dust can tell you that there is simply neither money nor will to pay forward our expensive past mistakes.
-More roads suck. Anybody from car-centric cities (LA, ATL) knows that with massive 8 lane highways comes equally massive amounts of drivers. LA has highways everywhere and they’re basically always packed. Is that a sign of a working or a breaking system?
-Cars are expensive. People who need cars to work get tied into expensive loans which hamper their economic potential. And Uber is not even on the same planet of being close enough in price to replace ownership with access. If poor people didn’t need cars, they would be less poor. Poor people in the developed world who spend a great deal of their paychecks on transportation are the first world equivalent of the third world villager who spends most of their productive time securing fresh water for their families (which we take for granted comes clean out of the tap).
If we really want the world to improve, we cannot simply tweak the edges of a broken system. Just the example of automobiles shows how fiddling with algorithms only serves to further bake-in our structural inefficiencies. We have to be willing to put anything and everything on the table for debate.
In short, we have to restructure all of our society to attain the lowest cost of living for all people. Otherwise we will keep developing radical technologies while scratching our heads and wondering why the poor keep getting poorer.
Human history has a long and fairly consistent set of precedents. More and more, the domestic U.S. from 1945 - circa 1980, appears to be the exception rather than the rule. (An exception not equally shared and also purchased at the price of some populations abroad, e.g. with respect to natural resource extraction.)
And I don't see how AI/machine learning + big data can decrease wealth inequality when a small few control the data and the AI.
Advertising, pricing, getting people to spend more time, etc.
Good things.
I am very sure many unemployed would love to work if they could be where the job is and be where it is I mean in the same town, something they could drive or bus to.
This comment of mine is probably going to get deprecated down to -1 and beyond, but it needs saying anyway:
We already have a perfectly good technology for combatting poverty. It's called socialism.
How many people read this article on the way to work, on their expensive new Christmas phones, absentmindedly stepping over homeless people they only semi-see.
It's not the tech that's the problem. It's us. All of us. Shape up and start giving your resources away. If you need specific recommendations, ask.
Hint: You might want to start looking in the mass graves.
(See also: The Scandinavian countries repeatedly having press conferences to say no, we are not socialist.)