Excel_Wizard

There is more money saved up than there are good productive investments available for it, in comparison to the past.

This correlates with a few things: - Inflation of the value of investment assets (high P/E ratios) - Low interest rates on bonds - Secular stagnation

a savings glut is the thing that Krugman has suggested, and is the thing which makes sense to me.

Which stinks because I hate Krugman.

> Nevertheless, the composition of audiences can still tilt toward demographic groups such as men or younger workers, according to a study published today by researchers at Northeastern University and Upturn, a nonprofit group that focuses on digital inequities

>One reason for the persistent bias is that Facebook’s modified algorithm appears to rely on proxy characteristics that correlate with age or gender, said Alan Mislove, a Northeastern University professor of computer science and one of the study’s co-authors.

Hypothetically, let's say that the trucking company in the article used "people interested in cars" as a targeted group. It would come as no surprise to me if this group was > 80% male.

It may even be by another mechanism- facebook's algorithm may look at the profiles of individuals that clicked through on ads in order to determine who to show the ads to in the future. This is a good way to provide cost effective advertisement. This also may be done in a way such that a small fraction of these ads are still shown to $membersOfProtectedClassX, even in cases where said class is statistically unlikely to click on the ad. What small fraction is necessary to be legally unproblematic?

If Joe Schmoe creates a facebook ad to hire for a bricklaying job (a job which is 98% male), what percentage of those ads must be served to women to be legally compliant?

Why is education supposed to be about learning just for the sake of learning? It should be purpose-directed.

Different strokes for different folks. Some people like living in dense cities. No reason not to build for them if they apparently enjoy it.

Considering that the sources you cite and the source your debate openent cites disagree on the facts on the ground, y'all have some work to do if you ever want to understand eachother.

The source cited by your opponent claims that 80% of job losses in the recession were for men's jobs. If you analyze your sources, they disagree with this claim. Respond to that if you care to make any progress.

Living in a state that respects property rights has benefits. When you know that your state respects other individuals' property rights, you know it's less likely that they will trample your rights as well.

The case hinges on the previous landowner performing "public dedication" of the road by letting people use it. The concept of "public dedication" without the previous owners of the land creating any legal documentation, and possibly unaware of the legal consequences, that they are willingly performing public dedication of the road is absurd.

The chart shown at macrotrends does not show total return (dividends included and reinvested). The investor would have broken even much earlier. January 1929 to January 1960 shows ~25% real return without dividends reinvested and ~499% real return with dividends reinvested.

https://dqydj.com/dow-jones-return-calculator/

One other bit about the mechanics of it-

If the two trailer hitches are not exactly level with eachother, whichever truck has the higher hitch has a big advantage.

Does this viewpoint help explain anything in a useful way? I do not understand why you would think of wealth this way.

How big of a house do you need?

https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/14455-S-Muirwood-Cir-Herr...

Your explanation of the marshmallow test does not contradict the common interpretation of it. Your explanation proposes a mechanism for why the test subjects differ during the test. The common interpretation only explains that the tested difference is correlated with future outcomes.

I would have been glad to live in a boarding house earlier in my career.

I havent dove into evidence much during this discussion, but I agree that it is a good place to argue from. (I would tend to echo a good few Jordan Peterson-style points, such as gender employment ratios in scandinavian egalitarian countries, differences by gender in OCEAN personality factors, etc). I do think there is substantial evidence that personality trait differences between women and men correlate highly across the globe. This should add up to substantial (although not conclusive) evidence that preferences would also be different between genders. Conclusive evidence is impossible without having some hypothetical cultureless test case. I also believe that social science as practiced today is poorly equipped to conclusively answer these questions. Any individual must therefore decide for themselves what their predictions would be on a number of gender-related issues.

"Given an unbiased society, would I expect an equal number of male and female bricklayers?" I would not.

"Given an unbiased society, would I expect an equal number of male and female biologists?" I would not.

"Nurses?" I would not.

For almost any given profession, I would expect an unequal number of workers by gender. To the degree that the observed ratio differs from what I would predict, there lies the surprise. Computer programming is a strange activity, and shares enough in common with other male-dominated engineering fields that I wouldn't be surprised that it is equally male-dominated.

One of the reasons I think that programming is such a tilted activity is that it is a really weird activity. By what strange circumstance did monkeys descend from the trees to formalize logical constructions into software? Given how strange it is to adapt biological creatures to this task, you would expect outliers to participate in the task- it is not unusual to expect the personality differences between genders to dominate in who participates, when the outliers are the only individuals who participate to start with.

Regarding the warrior example- I would argue that even if we all fought wars with robots, such that physical stature was irrelevant, men would still self-select to become warriors (robot-pilots) more often than women. On the OCEAN model, men are less agreeable than women, and across the most cultures of the world, men are more agressive than women. This will likely remain true for millenia.

I'm presenting most of my arguments here amorally. I think the reason you moralize my arguments is that they are construed as justifying existing oppression by gender. I do my best to judge individuals as individuals. I cannot pretend to deny the existence of larger patterns while judging an individual, but I can understand that they will influence my judgement no matter how hard I try. To pretend otherwise is blinding myself. To the degree that I broadcast these opinions, I hope to do so in a way that leads people to only judge other groups in accordance with the predictive power such judgements can actually afford, to hold such judgements weakly, and to always understand that variation between individuals is critical more than anything else. My manner of thinking does risk failing to fight the good fight against oppression- however, I think most injustices in the world are cases of individual conflict, and tinting the daily conficts I resolve on a daily basis with overtones of wider societal struggle does more to confuse than clarify.

My main remaining question to you- if you take my last paragraph in good faith- is whether you think that my manner of thinking can yield good results.

Well, to create a well-enough formalized method of control for the AI-

As part of a 1,000,000 year long project, 1,000,000 groups of 1,000 human babies (with different groups having different gender ratios) are installed on remote habitable planets and raised from birth by genderless robots, tabula rasa. They grow up and form languages and societies that last for 1,000,000 years. Robots are used to observe their choices and outcomes. The distribution of cultural traits is gathered as data, and cultures which create good outcomes for individuals in accordance with their preferences and for society as a whole are noted as benefit-maximizing. Additionally, the degree to which each society deviates from mean gender-bias characteristics is noted, and the degree to which these gender-bias expectations mold the choices of each individual to a degree greater than mean gender-bias is noted. This data is used to train the "sorting hat" robot which will be used in the example in my original post.

It's interesting that this thread is still going today, and I'm glad that it is civil.

Thought experiments are relevant because they can tease out our moral intuitions. Calling it a preposterous hypothetical is not useful.

gbrown- I think that you have read my original post with a hostile interpretation. I left open the possibility of biological differences in preferences OR zero biological differences in preference. You act as if there is scientific consensus that biological difference in preference is impossible, and that all current differences in outcomes are based on culturally-imposed biases. This is not the case.

>You're also incorrect in your implication - the existence of minor (and as yet unsubstantiated) fundamental differences in propensity to pursue technology in no way precludes the (well established) social biases and inequities that result in the same.

I or other posters did not imply this. You are conflating my hypothetical case (where cultural bias was made irrelevant as much as possible) with real life. Real life does have bias. The reason the hypothetical was presented was for comparison.

I've got a couple (low-ball, civil) questions as a sanity check- 1. Would you agree that men have a stronger biological preference to be warriors than women? 2. Would you agree that there is a greater cultural expectation for men to be warriors than for women?

The detail "This is assuming a perfectly-trained AI judges the variable, and that it controls against the underlying variables of societal bias in order to ensure that long-term human resources are properly allocated, and that long-term biases, informed by people's interactions with eachother, trend toward actual biological differences" should address that concern.

It's really strange of you to admit this double-think. You are admitting to yourself that you hold two contradictory opinions simultaneously. I think the best thing to do (which you might be arguing for but cutting corners?) is to understand that population-level trends exist but to still judge individuals as individuals, not as members of their groups.

I also disagree about the quote below:

>That's because the issue of men vs women in programming really is an all-or-nothing topic. Either you believe that a female is capable of being an equivalently skilled programmer to a male, or you don't.

When populations are on bell curves, this statement is nonsensical. Imagining the statement "Either you believe that a female is capable of being an equivalently skilled competitive wrestler to a male, or you don't" would be similar.

Let's say that there is a population bell curve of the variable "propensity to enjoy being a programmer". One curve for men, and one curve for women. In some dystopian future, everyone takes a career aptitude test, and if an individual falls within the top 10% of the overall population, they get turned into a programmer by the government. This is assuming a perfectly-trained AI judges the variable, and that it controls against the underlying variables of societal bias in order to ensure that long-term human resources are properly allocated, and that long-term biases, informed by people's interactions with eachother, trend toward actual biological differences.

It may well be the case that the gender split is 80% / 20% male to female (as is roughly the case today). It may not. However, the left-leaning zeitgeist opinion would seem to be that this outcome is impossible, and current observed differences are only due to systematic oppression. The right-leaning zeitgeist opinion would seem to be that this outcome would make sense.

I tend to think that the left-leaning opinion on this is so wrapped up in double-think that it can't even understand itself- it tends to argue too much in favor of "biological differences would mean permanent, uncorrectable injustice, therefore it is impossible that biological differences exist."

GP may have been doing some strange one-upsmanship, but Russia sure did have a worse time than the U.S. in WWII. I also think that extant Russian culture still suffers from PTSD over the trauma of the entire 20th century.

Suicide rates and alcoholism are high over there. If you act cheerful, many Russians think you must be stupid. Not a happy place to be.

The shoes do not add any energy to the system. All energy is provided by the runner. I think they shouldn't be regulated.

IQ and income are correlated fairly strongly. It's obviously not a perfect correlation.

https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2008/02/06/correlation...

Write a bot that detects earthquake-related tweets, a la xkcd.

It's ironic but it's not untrue.

The connotation of alien used here is something that is foreign, unfamiliar, or culturally distinct to a person or nation. Nativeness isn't relevant.

(correlation isn't causation, but) fathers on average have a higher income than non-fathers. I can definitely imagine the increased urgency at work when you have more mouths to feed.

Statute of limitations should apply in situations like this. It's really weird that it doesn't.

It's really strange to me that a trans (or whatever) person would be offended at being called a standard pronoun. Seems like an easy mistake to make.

I feel like the idea of choosing your own pronoun is fine and happy within an insular LGBTQ+ forum or venue. When it tries to take over the language everyone else uses, it's gonna do more harm than good. People that push it just seem to be selfish to me.

If it's a private company (not publicly owned) we have zero ability to know, they would not have to publish any financials.

If it's a public U.S. company we can know with 100% certainty via GAAP accounting.

What's the company's overall margin?

Everything objective you stated sounds like it could describe either a good company or a bad company, all conditional upon whether the margins are huge or fair.

Any pharma company that spends on R&D will have to rake in profits from somewhere to subsidize R&D efforts. R&D is extremely risky (most drug R&D projects fail) and has a very long time period before payback if it succeeds.

I really appreciate the increasing levels of technical accuracy the further this thread grows. Hacker News draws in subject matter experts like moths to a flame.

Reminds me of the old futurama quote- technically correct is the best kind of correct.