Will_Parker

The trouble is that if the "we" who are doing something does not include China and the rest of the world in coordination, then it is just sacrificing local economics in vain.

The idea that the rest of the world is going to follow suit automatically based only on morals is far from obvious.

It doesn't seem that anyone in the mainstream has really found a way to come to grips with this, that at its core any solution is a global coordination problem. (Even putting aside that half the US has found it more politically useful to deny the problem entirely.)

I've never understood the fake shame one is supposed to feel at being productive, resourceful, and seeking to work with passion while removing speed limits. I'm reminded of this article about three personalities and different stages of a startup: https://blog.codinghorror.com/commandos-infantry-and-police/

There's no shame in being a Commando, or even a Rick. (https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/we-fired-our-top-talent-be...) And a business can certainly continue to get high value out of these personality types.

If you are one, though, there are many practical things you need to learn. First, you need to remove temper and emotions from your work personality. I really recommend regular meditation for this. Also take vacations even when you don't think you need it (stress is a sneaky beast). You need to let go of some work you did that you hold dear, and realize that you will need to hand off to people who will not do things as perfectly or with such attention to detail, and may need structure and guardrails and speed limits that will frustrate you to no end. (E.g. Scrum, story points, more rigidity around testing, mandatory code review around trivial commits, security reviews.) The commandos need to make way for those who are able to march in step.

My second piece of advice is, as a company grows you need to narrow your scope to a point where you can still be the most productive version of yourself, but you aren't carrying such a burden that you burn out. (Also my advice for managers who find themselves with a Rick kind character.) The main skills you need to learn for this are communication and diplomacy. If the company wants to get into a new area, full of unblazed trails, with a very high amount of risk and technical difficulty, as a commando this is perfect for you.

TLDR if you are a tiger, better to find an area where you thrive vs pretending to be a mediocre wolf.

> while you are underutilized

There's a kind of person who isn't able to be content without a certain amount of autonomy to do the best job possible, and just isn't able to accept being unproductive. I've been able to assert such a position several times in my career but I think the only way to do it is to earn it by proving I can accomplish large things that can make an impact by myself, without micromanagement. I probably need to work partly in my own time to do this.

Even simply for mental health, it's worth it.

So, a loop?

> If you ask why and how you will find hope.

Unless you conclude "dumb luck".

> Whereas if rich countries take the problem seriously, add carbon taxes and tariffs and whatever other measures needed, they have moral, economic, legal, and even military levers against those who don't sign on.

I think we're on the same page here. So an agreement between the USA and China would be an example of a great start, to get the rest of the world to follow suit. Let's frame the problem like that.

Realistically this is not going to happen in time to make serious global change by 2030. So in the mean time, we're also going to need real talk about the specific effects of climate change, and how to adapt and mitigate as much as we can.

We will be dealing with a global catastrophe, full stop. Pretending that isn't so isn't going to help the hundreds of millions of people now living near the margins of survival that will be tipped in the near future. Neither is framing the whole thing as a "choice" between the impossible and the inevitable.

The fate of our great-great grandchildren is very much at stake though.

> Right now the attitude is "If the US, with all its riches and pre-existing contributions to emissions, can't be bothered to do anything, why should we?"

Okay, now the attitude of China will be "We're still at half the CO2 emissions per capita as the US, and we haven't had our full modernization yet." Then there is India who presumably want to emerge from third world conditions for most of the country, then Africa and so on. People are really really good at morally justifying their best short term interests.

I'm just really skeptical that "moral authority" can ever work as a motivator when the actors are huge countries.

> It's totally possible to prevent an economic disadvantage vs China and the rest of the world: tariffs. Countries with carbon taxes can form a tariff bloc against countries without them.

Tariffs aren't working so well for Trump though, are they? Forming the large bloc is the tricky part. But I certainly agree, the main problem here is global cooperation, getting the whole world to make some short term economic sacrifices together.

Honestly, just getting an agreement on a framing that this (global cooperation) is the biggest problem, rather than moralizing against individuals for leaving lights on and driving too much (etc), would be a tremendous step toward progress imo.

First we need global cooperation and agreement on the issue and goals. Then laws that create better incentive structures. Supplement that with better clean energy tech and more acceptance of large scale nuclear energy research and development. Pump a whole bunch of research dollars into nuclear, fusion power, and geoengineering. (This is far far more important than LHC, LIGO, James Webb telescope, funding should be much higher than those.) Figure out what the heck to do about Middle Eastern oil and it being the primary economy of so many countries. Then we're getting somewhere, perhaps!

The far right seems mostly to be denying the science, at least publicly. The far left accepts the science, but is in denial about what an effective solution would be. (E.g. a carbon tax in the US would do essentially nothing in the big picture, except create an economic disadvantage vs China and the rest of the world. Mass adoption of veganism, even less.) Both sides seem to be trying to silence the center.

Another point many won't like: moralistic "nudges" are shown, scientifically, to _decrease_ support for climate policy. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333068802_Nudging_o...

Geoengineering deserves a few orders of magnitude more research than it gets, imo, probably some multiple of what NASA and the LHC get. If we actually want to solve the problem, this, and mass conversion of the grid to nuclear, are the best we've got right now.

One other point that is outside the Overton window of both sides: we may not be able to reduce oil consumption that much worldwide with cheap energy, because as that gets cheaper, rulers in the Middle East will simply lower oil prices, rather than have their entire economies bust. Without oil sales, there will also be (even more) misery for hundreds of millions of people.

> why isn’t some billionaire using subversive techniques to manipulate the population into doing something?

Maybe there is selection bias, where only borderline (at least) psychopaths seeking individual profit and power become billionaires.

Also, I think the steel-man of the conservative position isn't that AGW doesn't exist (it clearly does), but that economic damage from over-reaction is actually a bigger threat and cost than adaptation will be. They just focus on fuzzing over the science since that is much easier to sell than what they really believe, which I think is actually more like "We just don't care much about animals, and what we're doing is about comparable to effect to what our species did when we invented the automobile and air travel and paved the earth. This is progress, deal with it."

Oh yikes, the ice cream / cheesecake of human emotional expression, this will disturb me.

> Music is a matter of taste

I'm mostly with you with one exception. If there's one thing that may be objectively evolved, it is the power of the raw human singing voice. With all its expressivity, dynamics, range, colours, individualism, and overtones.

I claim that anyone who studies carefully the pure sound of the voice and what it is capable of will always hear synth vocals as superficial. (I don't care genre, whether it's opera, art song, jazz, blues, hip hop or vocal music from any culture).

Create some accountability to those who allow it?

> Bots pretending to be people wouldn't be of interest at this level if it was just criminals trying to scam people

How about foreign agents trying to influence elections at scale, or inciting civil unrest?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110 A Turing Complete 1-dimensional cellular automaton.

Also Conway's Game of Life is a rabbit hole you could literally spend your whole life studying.

> The tech is proprietary, and not that fun to work with.

That's a very kind way to say: everything in it appears deliberately engineered to ensure continued employment of consultants. :)

I'd say all of Shakespeare, Jimi Hendrix, LeBron James, Martin Luther King (keep on going if you like) have a form of extreme intelligence not measured well by IQ tests. The kinds of problems in IQ tests are one thing our brain can adapt to solve but humans are so incredibly neuroplastic that IQ is much too narrow a concept to be definitive.

Converted it all to unobtainium?

> Only wealthy people should have children, only wealthy people should have pets, etc.

I'd be happy if we could get an equal reproduction rate across all income demographics, i.e. more children for wealthy people. As it is we seem to be inadvertently running a selective breeding program against those most capable of thriving in our society. We should stop doing that.

I accidentally put mine through a wash cycle, the buds not the charging case, and amazingly they survived! The sound was muffled for a while. Would not recommend as a solution to your cleanliness problem them.

The snake oil part of it is also a huge industry. A simple statistical algorithm or set of heuristics can be sold for much more if you can pass it off as sophisticated ML.

Maybe chess isn't practical, but I'm getting a lot of entertainment in following the progress of Leela Chess Zero. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/lczero It's right at the critical point where it is essentially equal with the best tree search engine (Stockfish) on high end hardware, and new test results are posted daily in the discord server. Many games are commented on Youtube by Kingscrusher and others.

(And yes I know reality isn't a game with a small finite move set, simple deterministic rules, and perfect information.)

> Sounds like some pressure is being applied...

Maybe, rightly so? It doesn't matter if you like reading, you need to learn it. For a toddler in 2019, I think coding and some math is getting close to this level of importance.

Cargo culting Feynman's beliefs would be ironic indeed. :)

It's reasonable to think life is very common. It's also reasonable to think that life might be very rare in the universe, or that we could be alone. Science, so far, hasn't really narrowed down orders of magnitude on some of the potential Great Filters. So it doesn't have that much to say about this question, yet.

(And, if you are willing to invoke some form of the anthropic principle, maybe a universe that can support even one instance of intelligent life is itself incredibly rare in some landscape?)

A 0.05 p value very much does not mean there's a 95% likelihood of the result being true. It's a fallacy that is far too common.

Making a choice to raise a health baby capable of a self sufficient life, instead of one with Down's syndrome, does not seem like a tragedy to me.

Also a testament to the value of under-promising. :)

Dilemas are, who gatekeeps the gatekeepers, and how much do they want to act like a publisher vs a town square. If too much, maybe they'd become liable for the content they publish.

What's the budget towards fusion energy research? Given the political difficulties in funding fundamental research, would that be a better sideshow for making a positive difference in the world if we had to prioritize one or the other?

I would say it depends on whether you enjoy the data engineering part of data science. E.g. writing SQL queries, writing scripts to scrape data from APIs, tracking down edge cases and verifying correctness, designing clean and scalable pipelines, writing scripts to make messy data cleaner, automating report generation, data warehousing. This is very detail-oriented work and requires a certain kind of personality to excel at (imo). But if you build this skill set there is extreme demand for you that will be timeless. This is also the foundation for all data science.

If what you have in mind is feeding data into TensorFlow or PyTorch, and tuning parameters to get some magic out the other end, I don't think there's as much of a market (there are many juniors looking for work from bootcamp programs), and you risk yet another "AI Winter" backlash making companies go sour on these sorts of approaches.

I think you could also easily getting a job as a master of a particular analytics tool, like MixPanel or Google Analytics. But I'm not sure how timeless this will be: in my experience sooner rather than later you'll want deeper and more customized tools and run into the limitations of simple event-based analytics services.