DoctorZeus

I generally agree - we do want to give people space to privately struggle to reach their professed ideals without risk of public humiliation. But surely that must be balanced with some expectation that a person's actions not be in blatant, large-scale contradiction with those ideals. And if you're at the point where you're preaching asceticism while causing political revolts with your financial excesses, perhaps you've crossed that line.

This article has some interesting figures on pollution from gasoline vs electric cars: "There Are Places Where Electric Cars Pollute More Than Gas Guzzlers" http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/07/where-electri...

Presumably that's from rounding errors... for example, the distribution could be 4.7, 38.7, and 56.6 ... which adds up to 100, but when those numbers are rounded up they then add up to 101.

The #run directive addresses some major pain points for me. Is there anything analogous in other languages?

I encourage anyone who reads Pinker's book to also consider Nassim Taleb's critique http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/longpeace.pdf

You might be interested in the book 'The Righteous Mind' by Jonathan Haidt... he talks about that group psychology, and the importance of having social contexts where those energies can be expressed in a non-destructive way - such as college/city sports teams.

Also, do you have a reading recommendation for learning more about that aspect of Martin Luther King Jr. and his compatriots?

I admire your passion and dedication to having a positive impact on the world.

My challenge to you is this: What gives you confidence that the impact you'll have on the world will in fact be positive?

Engineering certainly gives us the ability to impact the world. Increasingly and since the first industrial revolution power goes to the greatest engineers. But are the skills that give us the ability to change the world really sufficient to decide what change is best? For that, I believe we need wisdom and understanding far outside our field of expertise, and in the evening and on the weekend we should be reading not just Javascript Ninja but also books on history, philosophy, political theory, literature, and psychology - if we want to optimize the chance that our impact will truly be positive.

And how does dismissing critics as "pc lynchmobs" advance the conversation?

Some people have oversimplified Paul Graham's perspective; doing the same to other people's perspectives will get no one anywhere.

Your right! I wouldn't want to diminish the value of spending time with one's family or enjoying one's hobbies. But the article doesn't mention those, just security and having a sweet paycheck.

This could be titled "Why I Am Content With A Mediocre Life and Why You (Probably) Are Too."

Fighting for a product I believe in. Developing a product I'm passionate about. Late nights of creative problem solving in my code that will directly effect our success. Owning what I build. The chance to win. And the risk, for me, is part of the thrill.

Compared to all this, the loss in terms of steady income from a corporate job is nothing.

Most of us on here have probably had, at some point in our lives, the fantasy to attain a batman-esque power while behaving heroically against some clearly defined evil.

And most us hopefully have gotten over it. The most difficult problems in this world can't be solved with weapons or MMA.

Still, the title speaks to the child in me who read superhero comics and imagined the good guys are definitely good guys and the bad guys are definitely bad guys, and killing them makes everything better.

A worthwhile take on the historical place of MOOCs.

The problem with these has always been not just that they are oversold, but sold from the wrong direction. Call them an alternative for the traditional college course, and we can see how cheap, watered-down, and mass-market they are compared to the real thing. Call them, instead, an alternative to the traditional textbook (or even traditional lecture) then the improvements are apparent, the possibilities open up before us.

The market selects for amorality; the structure of corporate governance (especially with publicly traded companies) ensures that everything hinting otherwise is really just particularly effective PR.

Good question. It would take some serious time studying history to have even a decent guess.

Not necessarily. Slavery might have indirectly assisted the north's industrialization in at least a couple ways. (1) Accumulation of financial capital in the hands of an investment class (2) Cheap cotton gave northern factories a competitive advantage.

Those who censor are not the only enemies of the internet. When being monitored by an unaccountable organization capable of all manner of violence, a threat is implied and speech is hindered.

Furthermore, why remove speech when you can just make sure no one ever finds it? Increasingly, most people only access content on the internet via a handful of giant corporations (google, facebook, etc). It is their algorithms that determine what speech we come across. These could easily be leveraged to shape public discourse.

You can't reduce economic growth to single factor. Oil itself wouldn't be worth much without technologies to exploit. And without the right human capital, those technologies wouldn't exist in the first place. And without the right socioeconomic institutions in place (stable government, judicial system, etc.), we wouldn't be able to do much with either the technology or the resource.

Sure, these are variables, so they correspond to different possibilities. X can be anything, and given X, the amount in the other envelope is one of two different possible values - 1/2X OR 2X.

So there are far more than three possible values, but only two actual values.

Well, that singer might succeed, they might make to the Top 10 charts, after all we hear bland generic pop on the radio all the time. I just wish we wouldn't celebrate it.

Taking out the specific dollar amount doesn't change the math at all. If X designates the amount in the envelope I've selected, than 50% chance the other envelope contains .5 * X and a 50% chance it contains 2 * X, so the expected value of the other envelope is .5 * .5 * X + .5 * 2 * X = 1.25 * X which is greater than X.