Pils

> I think every ounce of moral outrage spent condemning those who associated with Epstein (and, in some cases, stripping them of their positions) is an ounce less to spend on uncovering how Epstein got off in the first place.

You've provided exactly zero evidence backing up this claim. Intuitively, looking into Epstein's associates would help uncover examples of his judicial malfeasance. Why is this not the case?

> Just because you can imagine that those things are unrelated doesn't make it so. Of course, that goes equally for me: just because I can imagine that they are connected doesn't make it so.

This is not a real argument. The burden of proof is on you, since you are the one claiming there is some sort of tradeoff.

> By using that term, you are claiming that there is no connection between the "moral outrage against Epstein associates" part and the "actually getting to the bottom of how Epstein got off" part.

This is not what "false dichotomy" means. "Dichotomy" implies that there is inherent tension, not that two things aren't connected.

Interesting experiment design. However, I wish the paper explored seasonal effects more. "# of deaths from extreme temperatures and wildfires worldwide" probably has large seasonal variance, and the graph in the paper suggests that mass shootings do as well.

The actual quote makes Peterson look worse? The whole "patriarchy is Western civilization" is an idea that can be traced through Christian theology, Monarchism up to more modern Conservative philosophers like Leo Strauss and Roger Scruton. The quote itself is a strawman/buzzword soup. He sounds completely unhinged.

So, ARMA/ARIMA? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoregressive%E2%80%93moving-...

I should've expanded on my example more, since Anglo-American history is not universally taught around the globe.

The Puritans were a more radical branch of the Church of England, famous for their early role in the American colonies. "Puritanical," according to Wiktionary, has two meanings: one referring to things related to the aforementioned group, and the other to "Precise in observance of legal or religious requirements; strict; overscrupulous; rigid (often used by way of reproach or contempt)."[0]

Of course, one could argue that this is an adequate synonym for the word "devout." However, saying the Pope is devout is very different from saying the Pope is puritanical (and, given the word's history, somewhat ironic). It is technically correct, similar to your definition.

> The only bait-and-switch here would be if I sometimes pejoratively referred to policies as "politically incorrect" which did not in fact meet the definition I provided

Why would you pejoratively refer to something as "politically incorrect," if you think political correctness is bad?

[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/puritanical

Okay, just clarifying.

You are in fact redefining the term. Which isn't an issue, it has been redefined many times before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness (Which I see you've edited to be included in your response). My problem with your definition is that it obscures the fact that "political correctness" is almost always used as a pejorative, whereas your definition gives it a more neutral, clinical meaning. If we were discussing religious dogmatism, it would be the difference between "devout" and "puritanical." Your definition obscures the normative usage of the phrase, and can lead to people talking past each other.

Did you just make up that definition? The only result on Google is your comment.

When hardware is increasingly becoming just a way to interface with a larger platform (IoT, game console subscription services, etc.), I think there will be a certain nostalgia for more static, tactile and analog hardware. I collect records, own a couple pocket operators, and buy physical books for similar reasons.

Single-purpose hardware has identity. It has explicit purpose. If it is well-designed, it has an interface that is intuitive while encouraging a limited amount of experimentation. I think a lot of good software emulates these properties, but often with the tradeoff of being less extensible/integrable/power user friendly.

When I saw this headline, my first reaction was that a salesperson in an org could download all customer contact info and immediately go to a competitor and start poaching customers extremely efficiently. How likely is this scenario? What sorts of recourse, legal or otherwise, would the org have? Non-competes are hard to enforce, and I don't know enough about trade secret laws to have a good opinion on this.

Is there a scenario similar to Facebook's in finance, right now or historically?

So lets see:

- Modernism isn't a collection a movements across different countries/mediums in the early 20th century, but a "movement" whose "heart" is making intellectuals feel better than regular folks.

- No space for differing aesthetic opinions, the only real art is what you feel in your gut.

- Modernists are actively trying to change the places you live in work, despite the fact that the height of the movement happening decades ago.

- Specifically call out Jazz/Atonal music, apropos nothing.

Look, I'm all for differing opinions, but yours are more political than aesthetic (proving the parent's point). Plenty of modern architecture is aesthetically pleasing to the untrained eye. Some of it is not, and some of it is just objectively bad. However, your particular point of view, which presupposes some elite cabal, pushing there modernist agenda/degenerate art on an unknowing and unwilling populace, deserves some more scrutiny.

My theory is relatively simple: skins/costumes are signals and signals are important. Fortnite has matchmaking, and the majority of players use the matchmaking function in the two-/four-player modes rather than with a premade group. The average player you are matched with will be Fortnite-matchmaking replacement level[1]. If that player doesn't have a skin, they are more likely to underperform, from your perspective, since the pool of "non-skinned" players also includes new players and marginally-invested players (i.e. players who rarely play). I think a lot of comparisons to fashion are trying to solve the symptom, rather than this deeper problem.

Youth sports has a similar phenomenon. If you show up to the first day of practice with "default" athletic gear (running shoes instead of cleats, cargo shorts instead of athletic shorts etc.) you would face a similar type of shunning. The reason why there isn't a push to ban expensive athletic equipment is due to 1) The equipment manufacturers have huge sway over youth sports organizations via sponsorship 2) kids like athletic equipment because its one of the few outlets of individual identity available to them. That's why you are more likely to see displays of individual or group altruism (e.g. what happened to your son) rather than questioning the ethics/fairness of this phenomenon.

That is also why I prefer Apex Legends' freemium model to Fortnite's. Yes, it does include loot boxes (which are intrinsically exploitative), but it also includes ways to signal gaming ability without paying money, such as opt-in game statistics (how many wins with a character, how many kills, etc). More explicit signals of competency make weaker secondary signals (having the right skin/kit/cleats) a lot less relevant, even counterproductive (being labelled a poser).

[1]https://www.baseball-reference.com/about/war_explained.shtml

I can't help to see similarities between this article and the recent phenomena of competitive battle royale games. Currently, Fortnite is in the midst of perhaps the largest open-entry tournaments in history[1], and seems to be establishing these sorts of norms very quickly. Although "teaming" (direct collusion, such as the event featured in this article) is explicitly prohibited with serious consequences, most players implicitly acknowledge that the competition isn't truly "winner takes all," at least at the individual match level, since there are incentives for placing in the top 5, top 25, etc.

As someone who does not play Fortnite but is interested in the social aspects of the game, one term I noticed being thrown around a lot in the competitive subreddit was "w-keying" and its impact on the competitive aspects of the game. "W-key" is a reference to the "W" on a QWERTY keyboard, or "forward" based on WASD movement, and refers to (overly-)aggressive players in Fortnite's competitive scene[2]. This term is derogatory; being called a "W-Keyer" implies a lack of tactical awareness and immaturity as well as a degree of unsportsmanlike behavior.

At first I thought this was sort of weird. "Aggression" in competitive games generally refers to a tactics-level decision, and is thus is generally accepted as part of the game, keeps other tactics in check and makes a better spectator sport by encouraging proactivity. Think zerg-rushing in Starcraft, Mono-red Aggro in Magic The Gathering or Serve-and-Volley in tennis. But most competitive games are zero-sum at the match level (one wins, one loses, or both tie), whereas Fortnite is not. In Fortnite's competitive mode, certain types of aggression is akin to "defecting" in the Prisoner's Dilemma, reducing the overall likelihood of both parties placing (due to one party being eliminated, both parties using up a significant amount of resources, and a reasonable likelihood that a third party swoops in).

I'm not going to go any deeper into the game theory aspects since I would quickly go beyond my comfort area. However, that it's essential that such phenomena are explored more deeply. E-Sports figures are the newest celebrity class, and "people famous for playing video games" has gone from a Wikipedia stub to an ecosystem that mirrors "traditional" star athlete culture. If W-Keying becomes an unwritten taboo, how will punishment for breaking this taboo be meted out? Will those who play the game The Right Way seek to ostracize these players or seek retribution inside/outside the game? Will exceptions be made for star players or would said players face even more scrutiny? What degree of governorship do the companies that put on these competitions have over this type of behavior?

[1]https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/22/18235132/fortnite-world-c... [2] I am not 100% sure if this term is specific to Fortnite, Battle Royale-style games or WASD-controlled games in general, I've just only encountered it in this context.

> The issue is not whether Facebook is breaking the law but whether philosophically the market leader in a category should get to decide who can use their product when their product category is fundamental to modern life. Saying "no one is owed a platform" brings us no closer to an answer.

By acceding to public pressure, doesn't that demonstrate that these "market leaders" don't actually get to decide what content they host? FB/YT/Twitter/Reddit have consistently dragged their feet on removing extremist content. I think the last couple years have been proof that a laissez-faire model of governing the online public sphere has been a spectacular failure.

This was also the primary reason the drinking age was (re-)raised to 21: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_...

I get the point you are trying to make, but it doesn't make sense in this case. For all it's problems, East Germany solved the housing problem [1], in fact, its probably one of the main contributors to Berlin's ability to grow while keeping housing prices "reasonable"[2]. Our current property system isn't really that great at handling rapid fluctuations in housing demand, as we are witnessing in real time in the Bay Area. If we don't find more efficient housing solutions, we essentially condemn all but the privileged class to impossible commutes, poor quality housing and homelessness.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plattenbau [2] https://www.citylab.com/design/2018/09/a-second-life-for-ber...

Stock trading is to wealth management as opiates/painkillers are to pain management. Both can be part of a larger strategy that leads to an optimal outcome while minimizing risk, but the average layperson might not be able to accurately gauge/understand how minimize this risk. The argument then is consumer-facing stock trading services create a moral hazard similar to the one created by unscrupulous doctors or your neighborhood drug dealer.

Wow, this is a horrible graph: https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/media-pg.... Forbes and CNBC are apparently liberal media and WSJ is conservative? Also from the article:

> There's no way to know whether a drop in search traffic is a result of changes in user behavior (i.e. fewer searches for a particular topic) or even the result of changes to the back or front end of a website (Google is reportedly cracking down on interstitial ads). Goldstein concedes at the end of his paper that the "PGSTN of individual domains is not sufficient for conclusions."

pseudo anonymity != pseudonymity. In laymans terms, "pseudonymity" means "fake name" whereas pseudo anonymity would mean "fake anonymity". shemnon42 is using the exact terminology you are referring to.

In this case, the conventional definition of anonymous is less useful than domain-specific definition of anonymity, since different currencies have different levels of anonymity. Recent HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14672691

That is a fairly ridiculous argument. Many people try to portray the Sokal Hoax as a broad indictment of the wide field of everything that is considered "pomo," when really it is at most the indictment of a single journal. To say all editors of all postmodern journals are unable to distinguish crock is an insane extrapolation.

I feel a more apt metaphor for the Sokal Hoax is a security researcher purposely submitting a backdoor to a random driver. If the commit gets accepted, the failure is not a result of code review being a flawed process or Linux itself being a failed project, but the driver maintainer who did not catch the vulnerability. Even then, mistakes happen.

One can also put some of the burden of responsibility on the security researcher herself, since code review/peer review is generally faulty when one acts in bad faith. Similarly, the Sokal Hoax is a great example of bad faith used to justify an ideological position through point scoring rather than legitimate criticism.

Whenever this is posted, I think this should be posted as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scholarly_publishing_h.... I feel there is a conspiratorial aspect to the anti-pomo movement, some sort of vanguardism regarding what is and what isn't a valid form of academic study. A conservative perspective on the values of postmodern thought http://reason.com/archives/1995/10/01/goodbye-true-world.

As a skier, being able to identify weaker skiers is very important. Collisions are extremely dangerous, I assume even more so for surfing. Knowing to give certain people a wider berth is generally mutually beneficial.

Well, the government already said you can be fired for being queer: https://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2017/08/f.... I feel like outrage from the right for firing someone for something they can actually choose (political ideology) would be intensely hypocritical.

One option that the company I currently work for does is to provide dinners in to-go that are either cold sandwiches or leftovers from lunch (which is free). That way, if one has to stay late, you aren't forced to have chips for dinner, while avoiding the signaling of having an actual dinner service.

But that's because new companies can't compete with the incredible amount of VC funding Uber (and Lyft) have received. Down here in Austin, after Uber and Lyft left, about a half dozen different competitors popped up in about a month. My favorite, Ride Austin, is a non-profit that takes a significantly smaller cut than Uber or Lyft and donates a ton of money to charity.

1Password's blog post responding to this incident: https://blog.agilebits.com/2017/02/23/three-layers-of-encryp...

I mean, most of her claims she explicitly mentions having a paper trail. There is probably many legal reasons why she couldn't directly posted the private email and Slack conversations to her personal blog. However, no one is stopping Uber from presenting evidence contrary to her narrative.

It's widely known that Facebook is worse than Google in terms of conversions. People go to search engines to find something, people go on to Facebook to browse Facebook. What Facebook offers over Adwords is fine-tuned demographic targeting. So it's good for brand awareness (think traditional TV ads) and products that require targeting very specific demographics where the few conversions are highly valuable(new CS grad hiring, women on dating websites).

Same with the artificial intelligence graph. "Deep" seems to be the most popular category of AI, even more popular than "artificial intelligence," up until 2014. Considering deep learning is a subset of machine learning (which only starts appearing in the graph in 2012), I'm confused what "deep" is supposed to represent. Is there another meaning to "deep" in an AI context?