2-tpg

> Nevertheless, freedom of speech is under continuous threat at many of America’s campuses, pushed aside in favor of politics, comfort, or simply a desire to avoid controversy. As a result, speech codes dictating what may or may not be said, “free speech zones” confining free speech to tiny areas of campus, and administrative attempts to punish or repress speech on a case-by-case basis are common today in academia. FIRE, as a free speech nonprofit organization, fights against this sort of censorship in academia.

> Liberty cannot exist when people are forced to conform their thoughts and expression to an official viewpoint. Differences of opinion are the natural byproducts of a vibrant, free society. At many of our nation’s colleges and universities, however, students are expected to share a single viewpoint on hotly debated matters like the meaning and significance of diversity, the definition of social justice, and the impermissibility of “hate speech.” Mandatory “diversity training,” in which students are instructed in an officially-approved ideology, is common. Some institutions have enacted policies that require students to speak and even share approved attitudes on these matters or face disciplinary charges.

https://www.thefire.org/about-us/mission/

Here is a FIRE survey of 1250 students on the topic of freedom of expression, sliced by field of study, race, and political leaning: https://www.thefire.org/research/publications/student-survey...

> I've never once come across someone who suggested that there are no such biological differences

It is the difference between equality and equivalence: not everybody is equal in quality, but everybody is equal in value. When this difference is not made, saying that female managers have, on average, different (some negative, some positive) qualities than male managers, then translates to saying: female managers are of lesser value than male managers. So talking of different (biological) qualities often leads to confrontation with the illiberal left, even if closely on their side with regards to equal value for all.

Suggesting there even are biological differences between genders which have causal effects -- "females, on average, have higher emotional intelligence and empathy, and thus prefer to work with people and children, and so are overrepresented in nursing and kindergarden teaching, this is not dominantly the result of male oppression or gender discrimination or lack of chances" -- already got multiple tenured professors fired. In industry, Damoore's facts on biological differences, in context of gender representation in job roles, was cause for firing: the difference between equality and equivalence was not made, and so "Damoore had made female colleagues feel like lesser value, and this is unacceptable".

> One thing that I did notice, however, is how many of my conservative friends were experiencing real anxiety around these topics, and stayed away from bringing them up as a result of the anxiety itself.

All study surveys confirm this. Left progressive socialist viewpoints are not speaking truth to power, this is already the ruling power. By field of study, in the humanities and education, many right-leaning people, especially if not from a minority/victimized group, rationally keep their mouth shut. Not underbelly anxiety, but legit fear of reprisal or spoiling the work place a la Damoore, until forced to speak up, because silence is violence, and two sides of the coin is a racism apology or denial.

> Let's not stoop to crying wolf while there's time.

Many are only just now realizing this is even a problem, and that the anti-racist or social equality movement can be very discriminatory on skin color or in favor of inequality (promoting employees to fill an ideal skin color quota, as if that is any merit). My conferences are now putting in place code of conducts, where "participants made uncomfortable or insulted by your scientific work or presentation warrants an investigation" or "anything you say on social media as a participants can be monitored and acted upon if it goes against the stated goals (diversity & inclusion) of the organization". People from American companies which take military funding are checking computer vision colleagues' work for ethical mentions of adverse use against Uyghurs. Part of my work as engineer is now being aware that whites benefit from a systemic racist society and can't be discriminated against, because they are in a position of power. It is here. No time to lose.

Can not get enough volatility. Compare a 5% chance of a 1000% return versus 95% chance of a 15% return. If you pick the latter, you pay a high price for your risk-avoidance.

> crypto tends to zig and zag unpredictably.

Crypto market incredibly inefficient and predictable manipulation happens on unregulated markets.

> 2. No options market with crypto.

Don't need to. Shorting badly is how beginning traders lose it all.

> 3. Too hard and cumbersome to deposit and withdrawal large sums of and crypto and or fiat.

Depends on your returns and when and where you made these. But right now, indeed cumbersome.

> 4. Too small of position sizes. On /r/wallstreetbets it is not uncommon to see traders in their 20s or 30s make bets of ten thousand dollars or more on a single option trade.

/wallstreetbets is degenerates and show-boating. You can easily divide all numbers there by 10 and get more reasonable estimates. Crypto traders don't post their trades on reddit, at most in a Telegram group with other traders forming a pump-and-dump group. These don't want attention.

> Stocks tend to ‘trend’ which means that past price movement predicts future direction.

Bitcoin follows a nice trend too, just look passed the variance. Opposed to stocks, crypto price actually still slightly predictable using simple trend features.

> 6. As discussed earlier, crypto is more like a commodity than a stock. [...] Inflation 2-5%.

Win 5% extra on your stocks, add 5% with buybacks and earnings. Still does not beat a 5% chance of a 10x.

> Where are the millionaires? Surely there must be some.

Just look at the wallets of early Ethereum investors (when the price was around 50 dollarcent). Look at transaction sizes. Then do the math. Regardless of fear of getting hacked, you really think these people are posting about their tendiez on wallstreet bets, or bragging about 50k+ trades on /r/crypto?

Bitcoin here is a wealth transfer from the older generation to the newer generation. The older generation owns and invests the real estate, and this keeps the prices high and exclusive. The newer generation (techn-savvy) can now use crypto profits to fund innovation and progress. Several people I know funded their own startups.

Of course the crypto market attracts tons of scum and shady people too. And the hype can be damaging (older generation buying in at all-time-highs, and panic selling, causing high variance).

Early adopters were far from the huddled masses. Can't really blame them for others jumping on the hype train, just like you can't judge someone holding gold, by all the criminals holding gold or states going to war over it. Forget energy usage for a second, and wonder, "how many people actually die yearly to keep the dollar valuation high?" I feel the "resource waste" is more a feature, than a bug. If you need the electricity of entire countries to attack the network, the network becomes more robust.

And then let the new rich generation use their profits on creating more green or nuclear energy, then keep on mining and holding. Tesla could perhaps help here. Industries where energy is a large part of the budget have the right economic incentives to make renewable energy more cost-effective. Older economies, industries, and hegemonies are married to oil, in aggregate pollute far more, and lack the right incentives.

Poker is a game of skill which will serve you well if trading. Don't judge the game by the drunk pot-splashing tourists, or the risk-averse spectators in the stands, or the regulators looking for a ban after being lobbied by the older generation.

Edit: I stopped bickering about and promoting bitcoin on HN when the price was around 4500$. The very sentiment then: This is a waste, and a hype, and a bubble, and only criminals use it, tulip mania, gambling addicts. All the nay-sayers back then should realize they actually lost people money! I got into Bitcoin and ETH early due to an enthusiastic post on HN. Please think back a few years, has your viewpoint changed? Do you allow yourself to keep commenting negatively, knowing how wrong you were for years now? Are you really doing the HN community a service with your expert hot takes?

Gebru is an absolutely toxic person, who can't keep her politics and racial justice activism outside of her profession or academic work (her work is cited so much, because she actively mails other scientists when they don't cite her work, threatening to call them marginalizing and ignorers of Black women in science -- pity cites).

She is bubbled in a network which supports her with tags suchs as "BelieveBlackWomen" when she publicly smears Google for being racists. No rationality, but stirred up angry feelings. Trust should not be assigned due to skin color or gender. Stop that racism and sexism, it has no place in business or academia.

> Margaret Mitchell, Google Research and Machine Intelligence

But I do think they can miss her, since there are already 8 people responsible for Ethics and Diversity, with 11 responsible for the actual organization of the conference.

Maybe they can update https://iclr.cc/ to reflect the fact that she is not representing Google anymore?

If your utility function is to remove all sense data, then a website with suicide techniques helps you predict future world states (if X then Death), and aligns with your utility function, so it is meaningful information for you.

But then you get into heterophenomenology territory: someone may state they are not hungry, while desperate for sustenance (or vice versa). People may temporarily act counter to their typical utility function. Do we want to allow such craziness to influence the formal value of semantic information?

> has nothing to do with keeping me alive, yet I find it informative.

Imagine having to read the exact same information every day. It won't allow you to adapt to a changing environment or be exposed to new ideas, so you can form new ideas yourself. You'd be stuck in a rut, and as good as non-alive. Soon you'll probably perish out of boredom.

They define semantic information as: Information which helps an object stay away from thermodynamic equilibrium (no different from entropic noise). Information then has meaning for a receiver if it helps them stay alive. The very same message may be completely "meaningless" to another receiver.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.08053 Semantic information, autonomous agency, and nonequilibrium statistical physics

> Shannon information theory provides various measures of so-called "syntactic information", which reflect the amount of statistical correlation between systems. In contrast, the concept of "semantic information" refers to those correlations which carry significance or "meaning" for a given system. Semantic information plays an important role in many fields, including biology, cognitive science, and philosophy, and there has been a long-standing interest in formulating a broadly applicable and formal theory of semantic information. In this paper we introduce such a theory. We define semantic information as the syntactic information that a physical system has about its environment which is causally necessary for the system to maintain its own existence. "Causal necessity" is defined in terms of counter-factual interventions which scramble correlations between the system and its environment, while "maintaining existence" is defined in terms of the system's ability to keep itself in a low entropy state. We also use recent results in nonequilibrium statistical physics to analyze semantic information from a thermodynamic point of view. Our framework is grounded in the intrinsic dynamics of a system coupled to an environment, and is applicable to any physical system, living or otherwise. It leads to formal definitions of several concepts that have been intuitively understood to be related to semantic information, including "value of information", "semantic content", and "agency".

Israel is specifically suited to treat COVID as a test-run for a biowarfare attack. A real War Effort, because it is one.

Better/faster we would not directly compare to humans, but to benchmarks and timed experiments.

LeCun is saying to treat "intelligence" the same as "flight" or "swimming". It is a matter of function, not a matter of a specific instantiation on a biological substrate. You don't need to recreate flapping wings to gain "flight", you can strap a combustion engine on a cylinder and beat all birds on earth in regards to speed. You don't say "we don't have flight yet", because an airplane is not able to land on a tree branch. Maybe we don't have yet all the components and aspects of "flight", but this is not a show stopper, and drones have come a long way.

Now the more interesting question becomes: What are the laws of aerodynamics for intelligence?

Aside: I think it is absolutely insane that a conference workshop with papers yet to go through peer-review, is highlighted as a popsci article on VentureBeat. That's such a narrow workshop, that even researchers in the field may be unaware of it. And now these get to read the paper summaries from a HN-story. "the centre cannot hold".

Aside II: Yann LeCun talk from 2019 about this subject (better to debate the source ;)):

> Clearly, Deep Learning research would greatly benefit from better theoretical understanding. DL is partly engineering science in which we create new artifacts through theoretical insight, intuition, biological inspiration, and empirical exploration. But understanding DL is a kind of "physical science" in which the general properties of this artifact is to be understood. The history of science and technology is replete with examples where the technological artifact preceded (not followed) the theoretical understanding: the theory of optics followed the invention of the lens, thermodynamics followed the steam engine, aerodynamics largely followed the airplane, information theory followed radio communication, and computer science followed the programmable calculator. My two main points are that (1) empiricism is a perfectly legitimate method of investigation, albeit an inefficient one, and (2) our challenge is to develop the equivalent of thermodynamics for learning and intelligence. While a theoretical underpinning, even if only conceptual, would greatly accelerate progress, one must be conscious of the limited practical implications of general theories. --- https://www.ias.edu/video/DeepLearningConf/2019-0222-YannLeC...

> U.S. President Donald Trump Monday said his "Chinese virus" statement for weeks was a counter-propaganda strategy to fight Chinese allegations that American soldiers brought coronavirus to Wuhan.

Given how China and Russia stepped up their muscle flexing in the past year, how China is against an international investigation into the origins, I am expecting more than not, that 2021 will reveal it was indeed a lab leak. If natural, China still has to answer why it sat on corona for at least 3 months before notifying international health agencies. All this research should see atomic-bomb grade inspections anyway, those are long overdue. I don't want Iran experimenting with SARS-3 without oversight, invading afterwards will be too late.

This article from the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is both critical of Trump, yet carefully supports the "leaked from a lab" theory: https://thebulletin.org/2020/06/did-the-sars-cov-2-virus-ari... worth a read.

This shows how you view me. You judged me as a racism denialist, for having an opposing interpretation. It is like I won't accept the Truth of your rendition of that scene, but maybe evil enough to be aware of it.

It would be absolutely horrible if a cop killed a civilian by maliciously kneeling on his neck arteries! That the cop did it, mainly because the civilian was Black and he was white! You sound like you want that horrible reality to be the truth! You already spray-painted his face on a banner with political talking points! Maybe you even got your company Twitter to pay their respects to Floyd.

> even after he said "I can't breathe" repeatedly

He was saying that when he got out of the car. He was under enormous stress from the arrest and prospect of possible jail, with a drug that already increases heart rate. The single cop had to restrain, because ambulance (not arrest car) was called, after it was clear from the "I can't breathe" that he needed medical attention for OD. The other cops did crowd control, because the frantic yelling of Floyd attracted attention. "Hey, man, let him go, he is just saying he can't breathe". Like Philando Castile, that single video footage then went viral, and the cop acquitted on ALL charges, after companies such as Google send out PR condemning police brutality and systemic racism, because capitalism is a tool which employees can play as well (ideally, aligned with -- not damaging -- the company mission!), and now we are here, with you suggesting I think cops are snowflakes.

Give me a court case, a light symbolic punishment to avoid a second protest/riot, while allowing for the possibility that racism exists, and did not play even a minor role in the case of the death of Floyd. That cop looked like a nonchalant fool enough to mess this up. Not foolish enough to kill a black man out of racist motives, while your Asian and Hispanic colleagues are keeping Social Media away from reality.

See how you can disagree or agree with my question, while your goal-post moving question can only be agreed to if you are a reasonable person? Just because racist-motivated murderers exist and are problematic, does not mean Floyd was murdered with racist motives.

You demand I defend the cop's actions, just for my interpretation of the case does not align with your interpretation. You call me a racist and a liar. You can't even direct quote me, so you put words in my mouth, and then call me disingenuous (I never said "died from an OD"). You are debating from very bad faith, and debating poorly at that. And I don't think you even realize that, nor the damage it does to the debate, working together to a solution, division, and growth of the "silent majority", who is starting to get fed up with this childish I-never-fell-off-a-skateboard Twitter-follower activism.

It is scary, right? "We can also punish" hides behind the "we", unclear if they mean "We, the people, the court system" or "We, the racial justice movement, public opinion". Then what is this "punishment"? A bad article in the NYT? Calling up your network and suppliers with a 100 people (with too much time and too much anger) to cancel you for being racist? Jail time or a fine for illegal activity?

They are power hungry, totalitarian, and evil. Other comments talk of "subconscious racism" or "white privilege". This comment demands responsibility for outcomes they perceive as unjust, where it is very unjust to demand demographic parity, when it is not possible to attain that, without severely dropping in quality (there are not enough Black people in tech to fill those positions with talent). So they demand you pay/invest to increase Black people in tech. But if too vocal or direct about it, they accuse you of "stating in general that Black people are less capable" as if reasoning from racist motives. So don't look to closely at the reason for not being able to hire as much Black people as society, activist, or the board wants you to.

This activism is a very strong and dangerous and toxic meme. It leads to Qanon levels of delusion, accusing criticism of racism, so it can't be attacked. Where Qanons see the deepstate and pedophiles when looking at government or big business, these activists see a racist society and neo-Nazi's when looking at government or big business. You can't change their minds. They've been in Whatsapp groups for years, pointing out targets for collective actions, and finding counters to often used criticism. It's why no activist would use the word "Identity Politics" even though that's the animal's name (evil Neo-Nazis use that term to attack our efforts!).

So that's why you hear: reverse racism is impossible! Racism has to do with power, and whites have all the power! When nearly every white person can recount cases of being discriminated against, and how terrible it made them feel. Accused of cultural appropriation for liking rap music. Challenged by Black men for having a Black girlfriend. Chosen as victim of robbery, because perceived weak and rich. Accused of getting your promotion, not due to hard work, but because your white old boys network favored your dumb white ass over a Black deserving queen.

If this NYT article was about over-representation of not white Libertarian crypto bros, but of over-representation of Jewish people in positions of power, you'd hear a different tune. Even suggesting that clear fact labels you as anti-Semitic. Apparently white people don't have enough shared culture, shared activism, to make racist anti-male anti-white anti-autist hit pieces like this controversial, even though we supposedly run the world, actively suppress entire races and genders, and create non-inclusive companies out of principle.

> Floyd was a career criminal unworthy of sainthood or role modeling.

Floyd was arrested for a home invasion, where a 1-year-old baby was present, and he threatened a woman to tell her where the money and drugs was hidden, by pressing a gun to her stomach. After that he was arrested and processed 8 times for crimes related to drugs and theft. The day of his arrest he tried to pay with a counterfeit bill. After his death, Floyd was witlessly treated as some martyr, killed at the hands of racist violent police, and portrayed as a role model for all black people and the struggles they go through, just trying to turn his life around.

> dying from a self-inflicted fentanyl overdose

Handwritten notes of a law enforcement interview with Dr. Andrew Baker, the Hennepin County Medical Examiner, say Floyd had 11 ng/mL of fentanyl in his system.

"If he were found dead at home alone and no other apparent causes, this could be acceptable to call an OD. Deaths have been certified with levels of 3," Baker told investigators.

> and resisting arrest

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/aug/4/george-floyd...

Offended that you brand me with racism for telling you an unpleasant truthful interpretation? No, I think me and my wife can live with that. But a little scared, yes. You can accuse me and others of deeply-racist sentiment, and that accusation seems enough to financially and socially damage me. At least give me a "fair" trial: Show me where I lied. Or these racist accusations hold as much water as those in the Coinbase article, and are exposed for the bloody clubs they really are.

Of course she said that. Big bad company silenced her co-suiters with money, after their spy devision learned that she was bringing suit. Now she has no recourse to go court herself, she absolutely needed those four other employees.

> The lack of a court case has nothing to do with the amount of evidence or the truthfulness of the accusations here.

It allows me to disqualify it as hearsay, and it allows you to think they offered severance payments, with the purpose to keep legit actual racism out of the courts.

Intent is of utmost importance for the law. Every lawyer and judge will agree to that. Punishment is increased for bad willful intent.

Are you under the impression that Coinbase makes Work-From-Home decisions based on the skin-color of their employees?

If yes (which it seems like to me), I'd like to learn more about that, and your reasoning. Am I oblivious to modern work-place racism? Imperceptive? Naive? Defending vile racists? I'd like to reconsider those questions on a more informed ground. My (and your) view kinda hinges on that impression and its truth.

I can understand why Black employees would have that impression, but if it's not true, then I also see that as problematic.

> I am under the impression that Coinbase demanded that the Black employees of the compliance group relocate to PDX so that the whole group could work out of the same office, and then exempted a white worker in the same group from that requirement.

Did it matter for this demand that one group was Black and the other was white? Or did this just happened to be the unfortunate outcome, which is bad optics if you focus on skin color attributes, and such bad optics should be avoided?

I am still not too sure. Can you remove "Black" and "white" from your impression and still say the same thing, or is it essential to your impression, and telling of a problematic work environment?

Don't do trial by (social) media. Especially when your accusations are incredibly heavy and damaging. Don't play judge when you are not capable of objectively looking at all the presented evidence.

Coinbase presented their side of the story: nothing went to court. No investigation found anything of substance. If the circumstantial evidence was so strong to hold up in court, why didn't it?

For the law, intent is of utmost importance. For (social) media, just "circumstantial evidence" of exhibiting patterns of discrimination is enough to act. It is not enough to act, if you are a decent person.

Did the editorial show that Coinbase is engaging in illegal discrimination practices? No, but they sure implied it.

Would it be problematic to encourage diverse representations to show up for company photos, if you did not ignore them for advancement? On its own, I think that's just common sense, and taking some PR advantage of the costly diversity programs.

A random/unplanned company photo I was in, was circulated online, to falsely claim that my company only hires white people. Felt really bad, especially for my multiracial colleagues present in that photo. Can you even give this movement what they want, without accusations of pandering/fake concern?

> Not specifically require Black employees to relocate to different cities while giving non-Black employees the opportunity to work out out whatever the nearest office is.

I refuse to believe that Coinbase based that decision on skin color, and I find it hard to believe anyone else sees that differently. As such, to follow this rule, you would have to overturn your decision -- based on rationale --, because it happens to negatively impact a person with a specific skin color. How is this a decent decision: "Sorry Chad, we can't let you work from home to care for your mother, because we just told some black-skinned support engineers to relocate, and we don't want to specifically require black people to relocate, and allow white people to work from home."? How is that fair? To who? It suddenly becomes justified if Chad was black, or if you allow everyone to work from home?

I don't believe that in the editing room they went: "Next item. The Coinbase controversy. Let's do an objective investigation of this and see what we find." But I won't accuse the NYT of bad faith, economic/journalistic incentives are sufficient to explain that angle, fishing for further controversy for a company with an already bad reputation (deserved or not).

Notice the NYT article even wrote negatively of Coinbase's diversity efforts: Supposedly, black people where shoed into photos, to make the company look good to the outside, but were never promoted or listened to (implying, because they were black, and white Libertarian autist tech bro's don't listen to or promote their black employees as a matter of principle). With such an angle about questionable motives, it is neigh impossible to do anything right. It is "we already determined you are wrong, now where is your apology?".

More likely: There is a activist political trend now, that has picked up a lot of steam. In that political view, society is racist, and whites at best profit from this, at worst contribute to this. Anything bad happening to a person of color is then used to accuse the racist system, or even individuals, of a heinous act, to force their hands to adopt your view, or deplatform them and their criticism as an obstacle to growth of your movement, for personal gain, as revenge for inequality, or as a coping mechanism.

Far easier to argue/reason/imagine that, than that Coinbase makes WFH exceptions due to skin color, or that black employee are correctly assessing skills and experience of co-workers and correctly identifying racism on skin color, when passed over for a promotion. And if you don't believe that racism is really a driver at Coinbase, the correct course seems to be to attack these allegations for what its actually doing, not to support it by falling victim to this poor-argument overload and resigning because it is too hard, or too sensitive, or too taboo, to call out this damaging and horrific behavior.

That's like scientists finding a negative result, and not getting it published. Skilled scientists don't let that happen often.

Let's not ignore that this exception is being positioned as being based on skin color (racist motives), not job role, tenure, exceeding expectations, caregiving responsibilities, or any other plausible reason for an exception. That's a laughable, yet dangerous take. Incredibly inflammatory and accusatory.

Either Coinbase is an incredibly racist and black-unfriendly company, or some people would like you to believe that, and these accusations can all be unravelled to crying wolf, accusing others of downright illegal acts, without even filing a formal complaint to help others not suffer the same fate.

That cuts both ways. Discrimination on neuro-diversity is also bad.

> And that it is a complete and utter insult to people with actual problems with racism when she blames “being Black” for missing a promotion?

The autism-jab was in bad faith, and it worked on you. You turned his inability/carefulness not to make split decisions into a poor-faith excuse for being a racist tech bro oblivious to the struggles of others.

You are entitled to political thoughts. If you can handle it, you are even allowed to share them with colleagues. But don't get upset if others have different political thoughts. And certainly not get upset enough to accuse them of racism.