DaUR

> The idea that the US is weak and needs to increase its military budget to achieve "Peace through Strength" is laughable.

Who are you arguing with? You haven't read my comment, clearly.

Where did I argue we have to rebuild the military? Are you even replying to the right comment? Is your first sentence projection?

He said since the beginning of the primaries that he believe in "Peace through Strength", and repeated it many times. If you believe he wants to invade the world, you may be a low-information voter, with all due respect. (note: I don't like military spending).

> The money you pay barely matters to USCIS

It's literally how they fund 99% of their expenses.

Attempting to frame opposition to lowest-common-denominator-politics as a equivalent to racism and other -isms with a word made up by sociologists is laughable. A Porsche costs more than a Toyota. 2-weeks processing costs more and uses more resources than 9-month processing, and you can pay for it if you wish. If everybody paid the premium fee, then USCIS could hire more, and everybody could get it done in 2 weeks. Couldn't be fairer. USCIS is entirely (99%) funded by applicant fees, so this is literally how it works.

You're arguing that AI will lead to much more nuanced discourse, and much more complex and detailed pros and cons rather than the ruffian binary polarization we have now, and I agree.

You're supposed to look at what an optimal currency area is, and see if it applies. Don't just take Wikipedia's opinion for it.

It's not. Cultural, language differences, asymmetric shocks, many reasons why. It would be the same catastrophe as the euro, where the euro is severely undervalued for Germany's economy, unfairly helping their exports, and severely overvalued for Greece, unfairly harming their exports.

It's better to have recourse. Either everybody waits a ton of time, or some people barely wait and some people wait a ton of time. Why drag everybody down to the lowest common denominator because of "fairness"?

This has nothing to do with Trump, or national threats. No F1B holder is superior to the others, but I'm glad that there's a way to jump the line if you have the means.

When the normal queue is 9 months, it would be immoral not to have any ways to jump to the front. Like the WWDC selling out in seconds, it might be "fair" but it's clearly not the optimal solution.

> would require things like common currencies

That would be a disaster, and would hurt the dollar and therefore US NatSec and power.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimum_currency_area

I really appreciate the transparency. This is something you don't usually see accompany government decisions. All government decisions, laws and regulations should be accompanied by a list of what the decision is supposed to accomplish, and then the media can check whether the decision was effective. Better for democracy.

> Why We Are Temporarily Suspending Premium Processing for H-1B Petitions

> This temporary suspension will help us to reduce overall H-1B processing times. By temporarily suspending premium processing, we will be able to:

> Process long-pending petitions, which we have currently been unable to process due to the high volume of incoming petitions and the significant surge in premium processing requests over the past few years; and

> Prioritize adjudication of H-1B extension of status cases that are nearing the 240 day mark.

> But that is what you're suggesting

No, it isn't. I've said repeatedly they'd be much more accurate than humans, and much less biased than humans.

You keep taking a black-and-white version of my arguments, arguing against that, and moving the goalposts. I'm not sure you're debating in good faith.

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum."

> In fact, in the US it's pretty clear that crime does not increase when refugees arrive; if anything it goes down: http://www.citylab.com/crime/2017/02/refugee-resettlement-v-....

The US isn't Sweden.

> I'm not aware of any similar research in Sweden, which is a pity.

They did it in 2005. Didn't do it again since. You can guess why.

> Homework assignment for tomorrow

For you: learn respect (and read the site guidelines).

On the contrary, there is no marketplace of ideas. These people are so insular that they'll hang on to their dogma no matter what criticism is leveled against them. They're fundamentally wrong, not just misguided. Case in point, the IAT.

> We're not asserting that there is one potential truth based on what a machine says.

Strawman.

Not sure how civil disobedience leads to authoritarianism rather than the opposite. Also, by your reasoning, civil disobedience is never justified. And does Trump being President change your reasoning at all?

As opposed to trusting biased, rushed, financially-motivated humans of average human intelligence to distill the world's knowledge? Or biased, rushed, career-driven sociologists, that live under publish-or-perish and don't use the scientific method? Why the hell is it acceptable to have political activists and ideologues influence public policy?

Again, that isn't the point. AI would be a step forward, and I'd gladly take journalists becoming unemployed if it causes a new AI-led era of Enlightenment.

You're missing the vision: AI, with its swathes of data, would be able to tell you precisely what percentage of blacks that have been put in prison over drug laws would never have committed violent crimes. People's perception that these laws are justified for "public safety" would recede. That's just an example.

You're arguing from a fundamentally obscurantist point of view, arguing that unless we know 100% of the facts, it's better to keep certain things quiet to prevent human bias, whereas you should be arguing that we'll never know 100% of the facts (obviously) and should just stop being so quick to judge. More facts are always better than less facts, period.

Exactly.

1. They have no obligation to law enforcement to make it easy to catch them. They're making it so that it's harder for LE to use their own service against them. Good investigators wouldn't investigate under their real name, or with their police-union-linked credit card, so it only seems fair.

2. Taxi and municipal transport are easy pandering-demographics for local government, creating monopolies. This isn't Uber vs. competitors, or vs. average citizens, this is Uber vs. the cartels. Everyone, in the long-run, benefits.

AI would allow us to form much more accurate etiologies than the current crop of sociologists, and better recommendations for solutions. There are simply no downsides to AI-journalism.

The more you understand the present, the more accurately you can predict the future. Big data increases your knowledge of the present, allowing you to understand what-causes-what much more precisely.

You argued that AI was biased. Now you're arguing that AI is too truthful, and that AIs uttering the truth would feed into a small minority's preexisting bias. This just proves my point that AIs are already less biased than humans as is.

You also seem to argue for blank slate dogma (that every group difference is caused by unfair government policy or societal "bias") and that provable facts must be silenced unless accompanied by their detailed etiology (which cannot be scientifically or factually verified, and therefore really just serves social purposes). I would argue that we should teach meditation in schools, every day, and that society should be more empathic and less judgmental. It should also be less afraid of truth, and less politically biased.

I'm arguing that none of the problems you bring up would be a problem with sufficiently advanced AI. They would move us towards the truth, not away from it.

Journalism's current credibility crisis stems solely from its attempts to be "socially useful" rather than truthful. I'm not sure why we should make AI copy us (again ironic since you're against AI taking on human biases).

> AI can and does have significant bias, as long as it learns from sources influenced by humans with bias

Sufficiently advanced AI would be aware of the bias of its data, much more than any human ever could.

By the way, the IAT has very little credibility, and isn't based on the scientific method but thought up by sociologists. Ironic to use flawed human-made tools to call AI biased. The whole presentation is a joke: she uses a sample size of just a few Trump tweets, and then complains that the output would be biased (duh! sample size!); treated Tay AI tweets that were not written by Tay AI as proof of how "problematic" things can be (Tay could be made to repeat tweets made @ her verbatim, so many of these "problematic tweets" had nothing to do with its AI). She's also arguing that society needs to be reengineered by benevolent """scientists""" (social psychologists) and that people be bombarded with carefully-designed stereotypes to counter the stereotypes we've supposedly internalized. Disappointing to see this from a Princeton grad.

> Additionally, you still need to be really careful to write in ways that avoid furthering existing human bias.

Usually that involves not using emotionally-loaded "hand grenade words" that bypass peoples' rational minds, and using clickbait headlines written by malicious editors. AI could be made to avoid both.

> Journalism is pretty much about about selection of data. The opposite is.. well, like a data viewer for a repository of stats.

Humans aren't good at dealing with data, especially on complex on nuanced subjects, or on topics where the data they need may seem unrelated and get disregarded by impatient humans, or data that doesn't fit their political narratives. Both humans and AI rely on heuristics and have false-positives and false-negatives, but it's intuitive that AI would be much more accurate overall.

> How would having makefiles for articles help things? Wouldn't it just make it more efficient/cheaper for biased editors to create articles using cherry-picked data?

Yes, but it would make it cheaper for them to be fact-checked.

The media "sticking to the facts" (laughable) isn't what causes mistrust. Them treating whole swaths of public debates as taboo, and ignoring some sets of inconvenient facts, is. If there's no problem, why the taboo?

Violent crime has fallen over decades, but has increased since the refugee crisis. This manipulation of facts by the media is what causes distrust, and is their own doing.

Check out the journalism Tim Pool (Vice Media) is doing, right now, over in Sweden. He's reported on the Middle East, on the ground, in the past. He said he would investigate if there was any link between crime and refugee migration in Sweden. Before he even left for that country, he got harassed on Twitter by many on the left including journalists. Once there, after some continued trying to create a scandal out of nothing, several of the Swedes he had set up interviews with outright cancelled, and more agreed to speak but not on the record, meaning he can't publish any of what they said.

If there's no problem there, why are people being terrorized into silence?

If there's no problem there, why groups of men with masks threaten Tim and his co-reporter in the streets, and why did the Swedish police force them to leave the area, instead of defending them? (check his Twitter)

1. Analogies don't contribute to a debate since they're not based in reason, but in confirmation bias. You're trying to transpose the emotional connotations from one situation to a completely unrelated one.

2. She admits herself that she knew she couldn't stay out of the country for 2 years. There was a law, which she was aware of, and chose not to follow.

Except she "knew that when I got indefinite leave to remain I can't stay outside of the country for more than two years". This is what she, herself, said.

The title seems almost cynical when she could have avoided this whole ordeal had she followed procedure, which she admits she was familiar with.

Also, blaming this on "Brexit UK" is transparently inflammatory since the requests for leave were made, and rejected, a decade before Brexit was even a question.

This is why the only profession that I'll actually be excited to see replaced by AI is journalism. A few tens of thousands of people out of their (pretty low-paying) jobs, but journalism is so utterly crucial to democracy and societal stability that that could only be celebrated.

AI-journalism would be much less expensive, so expect more non-profits delivering high-quality, unbiased journalism thanks to it. A media outlet is only as good as its most mediocre journalist.

Open-sourcing and reproducible builds (articles) based on that source code would fix the trust issue.

That would be principled but not in Snapchat's interest.

Their audience demographics would probably hate to see an NRA ad in a story about gun control, and it would hurt Snapchat's reputation, brand, and loyalty. You might even see hashtags trending about it, calling them "insensitive" and worse.

> That wasn't what I was trying to communicate at all. My intended meaning was that women—by wanting to look good, or to seem happy, or to put on one of the numerous other faces people expect women to present to the world—are forced to pay attention to their own bodies.

I misunderstood that, you're right.

About your wider point: you seem to put a lot of importance on societal roles ("expected to", "narratives"), and I don't think much of this (if at all) is caused by society rather than self-directed. You're arguing that women are more physically nurturing than men (which could well be true), I'm arguing that it's inconsequential as to how to make men more self-nurturing.

> I want to have someone in my life who plays the same role that a dental hygienist plays a dentist visit, but for my general physical health.

You better not expect doctors to be that. Most of them still believe cholesterol causes heart disease, for example, or that you need 50% carbs in your diet.

> I'm not sure if I disagree with you, or if my perspective is this same perspective from a different angle, but: I would say that it's more that men tend to (expect to) derive their self-esteem from things they do, rather than things they are—so they invest much more time in doing things, and much less time in being things.

I agree, but that seems tangential to the point. It's a gender difference that has been constant throughout history, and seems arbitrary to want to change. It also doesn't fix the main problem. Making men more feminine will not make them more self-nurturing.

To illustrate, putting on makeup isn't self-nurturing, anymore than getting a haircut. It's not something that depends on your self-esteem, everyone does it. Binge-dieting is self-neglectful (the opposite of nurturing), and so obviously doesn't come from a position of high self-esteem. Being more obsessed about your appearance doesn't make you more nurturing of yourself physically. Again, women don't nurture themselves more than men. You could chalk up wives' willingness to go to the doctor as higher fear of potential negative consequences, rather than self-nourishment.

The question is how do you get men to care more about their health, remember. And changing society or "gender roles" isn't the solution.

> In order to "be" beautiful or to "be" athletic, it's usually a pre-requisite to be healthy

The assumption here is that women nurture themselves because they want to look good, I don't believe that at all. You'll nurture yourself because you'll want to do it, instinctively, without needing any willpower. A necessary condition for that is high self-esteem.

Put another way: if you want to learn better eye contact, you have two ways. 1st: practice better eye contact. 2nd: increase your self-respect. The 1st won't work. The 2nd, will, because it addresses the actual cause. I'm arguing that the same is true for men's health.