ImSkeptical

If you are curious, I suggest you read my comments in this chain.

The scenario I'm describing doesn't involve any sort of violence or torture, which again, makes me think you're missing my point or conflating my position with something else.

Lines have to be drawn frequently. It's okay to use a tazer or even a gun in some circumstances, others, not. With the torture case, we'd have to see that the benefit vastly exceeds the harm, and that reasonable measures were exhausted first. Beating a car thief to save the life of a child strikes me as a case where reasonable measures were exhausted and where the benefit vastly exceeds the harm.

I think you're confusing my position, and the contents of my comments, with something else.

I hope my scenario has never happened, but nothing about it is implausible. The point though is to illustrate that there are moments where pragmatism must trump laws and values. If you look, there are many times throughout history where such tradeoffs have been made.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/torture/

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy lists a real life example along the lines of my hypothetical one. In this example, a child is stuck in a hot car that is parked in a spot known only to the in custody car thief who is refusing to talk. The police proceed to beat the thief until he talks and save the child's life. This is straightforward example of when pragmatism must overrule idealism.

I think that's a bit extreme and a black and white way of thinking.

For example, suppose you're heading an FBI group, and you've got a suicidal terrorist in custody who is part of a plot to detonate a nuclear bomb in LA. You have excellent evidence this guy is involved, and that the terrorists probably have a nuclear bomb in the country, and, if they realize their coconspirator has been captured, they are likely to detonate immediately.

The terrorist demands to see his lawyer. Your specialists say you should deny that request, because his lawyer may signal, intentionally or otherwise, the other terrorists. Should you allow the terrorist to meet with his lawyer?

Our society's laws say he should be able to see his lawyer. We value that kind of thing. And yet, if you would risk millions of lives to protect this right... Well, that seems perverse to me.

This is the great strength of capitalism. We might hear about the plot of South African and mourn their descent into dehydration as a dark future that awaits many. Or, the capitalists among us might realize that there is money to be made in providing water, and thereby resources are allocated to providing water, and that dark future is (hopefully) prevented.

Thanks for putting this together and sharing it. Really interesting read.

I know it's a bit personal, but would you mind attaching numbers to the notion of small scale profitability?

I'm surprised at the good reviews of the Roomba here. I got one a few years, and found it basically worthless. Everyday I'd come home and find the inventive way my Roomba had discovered to fail. Somedays it would get stuck on a chair leg, other times it would get trapped behind doors, or I'd just discover it dead somewhere without a clear explanation.

I had been hoping the Roomba would make my apartment and sweep it intelligently, but as near as I could tell, the Roomba just moved at random. I also found the power of the Roomba was weak. Inspecting my floor afterwards, I'd frequently find the same kind of lint, or detritus that made me want a Roomba in the first place.

Maybe I was just unlucky, or had a bad living space for a Roomba, but in my experience they aren't worth it at all.

The consequences of the error matter to the extent that the consequences of the error are predictably extreme.

I'll give an example. I work in an office building with many floors that have exact same layout. One day I was on a floor that wasn't mine, and went to where my desk should be, and tried to sit down. I was shocked, for a moment, to discover my coworkers had all been replaced by strangers. In this case, I made an absentminded mistake of not paying enough attention to my current location - but the consequences were trivial, so the mistake itself is no big deal. Now, on the other hand, suppose while driving down the road, I absentmindedly ignore a red light, plow through an intersection, and kill a family of five. This is also an absent minded mistake, but the predictable consequences of being absent minded while driving are a lot more extreme than being absent minded while walking about an office building.

To apply the logic of my example to the case at hand - imagine that in one scenario an employee is, during a boring moment, cleaning his keyboard with his chat application open. This results in that employee sending a nonsense message to a coworker. Silly mistake, and no big deal. Now, suppose that same employee has the "Missile Alert" app open and decides to clean their keyboard. This is a similar mistake, but with potentially bigger consequences. I think it's fair to treat these two actions differently.

I think a series of false alarms would have the effect you describe. However, based on some of the reactions I'm seeing online, I wonder if a one-off false alarm will cause a lot of people to figure out what they should be doing if the alarm were to go off again for real.

I'd say we just don't have enough information. It's possible someone deserves to be fired for this - e.g. if the alarm was intentional or negligent. It's also possible it was a misclick, confusing UI, etc, in which the person or people who should be fired are those who designed the system such that a simple mistake could set it off. There is a third possibility too - that some unpredictable alignment of factors means that ultimately nobody is too badly at fault, in which case the system should just be adapted and improved.

I generally agree with the sentiments of this thread - you shouldn't fire people for the kinds of mistakes that all humans frequently make. However, I also think that this was a severe and costly incident - a large number of people thought for a while they were in significant danger, and investigating who is responsible, and making corrections with regards to their employment, may be reasonable depending on the exact circumstances.

He's on tape saying that women will let you do anything when you're rich and famous. That's certainly a crude thing to say, and an unhelpful attitude toward women. However, you may not be aware of this, but both the Nazis and ISIS did, and said, things that were far worse.

Is it so much to ask that you restrict yourself to saying things that are true? If you said that "Donald Trump has repeatedly said things which are contrary to the ideal of treating men and women as equal" then you'd be stating a simple and defensible fact. When you go to extreme and perverse lengths, like equating the former with "Trump is like a Nazi" then you're just willfully engaging in empty partisan rhetoric which is obviously untrue. Ironically, that's a claim that could be made against Trump. The hysterical Trump critics aren't so far from Trump himself.

Are you suggesting Trump is like Nazis or ISIS? Can you point out Trump's most Nazi/ISIS like action?

Have you read his memo? It seemed very mild and grounded in reason to me.

Your claim that it was secretly anti-diversity is a bit infuriating as Damore goes to great pains to state he is in favor of diversity, and part of his memo is about how Google can do a better job of attracting women. Watching you, and others, twist this into "secretly he doesn't believe anything he wrote, but actually thinks the exact opposite" and not even bother offering evidence of this, let's be generous and call it an "interpretation", like I said - it's infuriating.

Damore's mistake was believing Google's PR, that it cared about diversity or rational discussion. Google doesn't care about diversity, they care about appearing to care about diversity. Thus, when Damore's memo is internal it can be discussed, but when made public he must be terminated.

Google is demonstrably insufficiently diverse, when an employee offers some thoughts based on modern science, to improve diversity, the press howls and Google terminates him. Google wants people to think it's a good corporation, and they are quite willing to abandon good principles to pursue that. It's a shame you've been fooled by their corporatist double speak and lazy media.

>in the summer of 1970, Newsweek ran a cover story titled “Is Privacy Dead?” detailing the “massive flanking attack” of computers on modern society. Growing awareness of that threat led to broad appeals that echo modern proposals to regulate A.I. “Eventually we have to set up an agency to regulate the computers,” Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina said in 1970.

>But instead of regulating all computers, the government sought a targeted approach tailored to specific problems, passing regulations like the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1974.

Thereby solving the problems of digital intrusions on privacy, and credit scores forever. Oh wait, no, I guess those both those things are incredibly broken. Digital privacy is notoriously non-existent, infringed on by the state, criminals, and business. Credit and financial information is impossible to keep safe and available to any cyber criminal who wants it.

It's odd that the author's two examples of when the government got something right by not preemptively intervening both turned out so poorly.

AI is fundamentally different from privacy, credit, or any other invention that has happened before. The implications of this technology are too vast for us not to spend time and money thinking about how to proceed safely. We may only get one shot at developing true AI correctly, and establishing a public office to help figure out how to do that seems like the least we could do.

If anyone finds themselves agreeing with this author, I highly recommend Nick Bostrum's book Super Intelligence. If you don't have the time for a whole book Sam Harris has a good TED talk on the subject.

I'm not sure why. My sister has an Instagram where she takes a couple of pictures of her kids a day, and has for the past five or six years, and I quite enjoy it. I know many of my family members do too. I visit a URL that just shows me her posts once a week or so, and just scroll to see what my niece and nephew have been up to.

I think people have a tendency to find meaning in things they've done after the fact. In this way, waiting on a boring conversation becomes a lesson in the difficulties of life. This is the root of "character building" activities as well. Is it really better to be bored than not bored? Will my children and I both be better off if they are bored, and my conversation is constrained by increasingly agitated children?

I'd prefer my children have something to do. A book, a phone, an iPad or Switch. Why shouldn't they be entertained while I am? Actually, forcing them to sit quietly while I have fun seems like a weird message to me.

Granted, being bored is a part of life. Undoubtedly then, they'll encounter many boring experiences without the need for me to artificially create them. And, if I know I'll have to wait for someone or something, I bring a book or phone. Why would I deny them the same pleasure?

I'm fairly sure that feature already exists. On Amazon tablets (and phone) it's called Free Time or child profiles. I'm confident there's an Android equivalent. If not, on a rooted Android phone you could just run your own shell script which could periodically check running or installed apps, and close or uninstall undesirables.

No problem. Thanks for clarifying. I fully agree that any instance where a refusal is not respected is a problem.

Their stock price was temporarily damaged, and they had to have an awkward hearing in front of congress - that seems light when compared to their negligence which handed over financial and personal information for most of the country to hackers unknown. On top of this, they delayed telling the public, they admitted they only encrypt "some" of their data at rest, and a few of their executives sold stock between the time the company knew about the attack and the public didn't.

Your argument is wise to consider the "let he who is without sin" perspective, but I don't find it that compelling. They had a hoard of valuable information which they carelessly stored and they paid essentially zero consequences. If I had to choose between this world, and the world where Equifax was just liquidated with the proceeds going to people affected, I'd prefer the latter. "Won't somebody think of the shareholders?" I have, but I've also contemplated the tens of millions harmed by their incompetence.

I can see how it would in some situations. From the article's description though it sounded like a lot of the women at the parties worked in different fields. So, while I fully agree it would be a problem for the CEO to be hitting on interns, as an extreme example, I don't see the power imbalance of a rich guy from one field hitting on a woman in a different field - provided there is no implication of coercion (e.g. it would be a problem if a powerful investor threatened to get a real estate agent fired if she didn't sleep with him, but it's not a problem if a rich investor hooks up with a real estate agent because they like each other for whatever reason, even if his reason is that she's pretty, and hers is that he's rich).

I'm fairly confident that consent is an adequate defense against the charge of rape.

I completely agree that consent can be revoked or modified and that nobody should be passed around like a joint against their will. That's not what the article is describing though, at least not in my reading. The young woman who went to the party did consent, the whole way through, and didn't revoke or modify her consent until she decided to leave, and when she did, she left, presumably unimpeded. Furthermore, neither the woman in question nor the author of the article called this rape, so for you to imply otherwise seems a bit inappropriate.

Can you explain further, please? Which events reported in the article were not consensual?

I agree that sex without consent is bad, a crime, rape, etc. I hope nothing I've written would ever be construed otherwise.

My point here is that there seems to be affirmative consent, as you say. The example with the young woman who made out with a founder in front of his wife, then took MDMA and then (I assume) had sex with him (possibly, maybe she just left) is one where she consented to go to the party, she consented to the kissing, even checking in with the wife first, she got an accurate description of what the drug would do when it was offered to her, it was clear that she was being offered a drug, she chose to take it, and then she left when she wanted.

I don't want to defend non-consensual activities, but I don't see any being described. Given that these are consensual acts between adults - my point is "What's the issue?"

I think if you consent to go to the sex party, you consent to physical romantic activity, you consent to taking the drug knowing your context and what the drug will do, and then you consent to sex throughout the experience, it's hard to see how it's anything but consensual.

If you have a colonoscopy done, the medication they give you will make it so you don't remember things or (I hope) feel things, but, my doctor told me, you will still respond to instructions like "roll on your side" etc. If I consent to go to the doctor's office, and have the IV after it's explained to me what the drug does, and then they give me the drug and I have the procedure, am I consenting to the procedure even though I'm very much impaired during the process? I'd say so.

I think the part that is keeping women down is the expectation that women will exercise this option you're describing.

This article makes me wonder, what, exactly, is wrong and what is supposed to be done about this. I get that it seems exploitative and probably does have consequences for social attitudes at work, but what I don't understand is what's to be done about this?

Surely there's nothing (drug use aside) that's legally actionable about this. The encounters seemed consensual in the sense that the women weren't threatened or forced and were told about what the drugs offered would do.

If there's not any legal wrong doing then is it social misconduct? Somehow it feels wrong for me to judge or condemn adults for their sexual conduct - even if it seems cheap, transactional, and gross to me. I understand different people have different values and preferences, so why should I apply mine to them? Furthermore, I can't imagine that finger wagging from the likes of Vanity Fair is going to make these rich young men give up on their drug fueled sex parties.

It's an interesting article, even though the author is decidedly biased and at times intentionally misleading (e.g. when she scorns the idea that there are some/many women interested in taking advantage of men, in the middle of an article about rich nerds finding themselves suddenly with a surfeit of women). I don't understand what is supposed to be done about this though or even if something should be aside from educating young women about the tradeoffs they may make in these environments.

>Sure, you can't publish your Harry Potter fanfiction

There is an enormous amount of Harry Potter fanfiction. You're restricted from selling it though. But, as an author of twilight fanfiction proved, when you're ready to sell you can just find and replace some names and be good to go.

Buffet's comments are just nonsense though. He doesn't pay a lower rate on capital gains tax than his secretary does. Buffet is comparing federal income tax rate to capital gains tax, that's comparing two different things, like if I said I paid more in sales tax than the coupon rate on your savings bonds - maybe that's true, but so what?

The reason why capital gains are taxes less includes things like you were already taxed on the money when you earned it before investing it so the capital gains tax is the second time you're getting taxed on that money, and that capital gains tax affect the risk to return ratio of investments. In other words, if you are taxed on capital gains more that diminishes the potential gains of your investments, while leaving your potential losses alone. If the balance of risk to reward shifts too much towards "risk" then investments will fall and the whole economy will suffer.

I agree with you that our taxes should be simpler.