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> they were mathematical models and not black box.

Wow... talk about changing the definition of something to fit your world view.

Point-free paths sound similar to cubical type theory from HoTT. Is there a relation?

Great work!

> Never mind the civil unrest, the entire world would bail out of China.

That is not clear.. at all. Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand -- the non-US western allies -- have all known exactly what China's end goal is and have down jack diddly squat to put pressure on them.

The only thing preventing China from taking out Taiwan is the United States. Europe and the rest of the world is too cowardly to even do anything, which is really unfortunate.

Frankly, a degree from Harvard is not that prestigious anymore, due to these kinds of shenanigans. A degree from most any top-notch west coast school is likely to be met with more respect not only in industry but also to the populace at large.

What about the poor asians like my parents who immigrated here, after facing rampant discrimination in their homeland, lived in a poorer neighborhood, because that's all they could afford as new transplants, were enslaved by their own family, but managed to break out of that, go to school again to get into their dream job, and who now want to send their two sons to the best schools in the country?

Why shouldn't those circumstances be taken into account? Perhaps it's because -- as a race -- most Asians are too proud to talk about this in their admissions essays, and moreover, their intellectual accumen would tend to indicate that these -- frankly minor -- issues are not important when considering what school to attend.

What we should really be talking about is why anyone -- Asian or black or whatever -- needs to elicit the sympathy of some old WASP to attend school. The whole 'write a sob story' trope is true because this appeals to popular white culture. It's time that ends, and we let adults run the show.

I thought the most interesting part was the commentary on non-Amish care in the past

> I asked my literal grandmother, a 95 year old former nurse, how health care worked in her day. She said it just wasn’t a problem. Hospitals were supported by wealthy philanthropists and religious organizations. Poor people got treated for free. Middle class people paid as much as they could afford, which was often the whole bill, because bills were cheap. Rich people paid extra for fancy hospital suites and helped subsidize everyone else.

In other words... allow rampant inequality in the healthcare system. The rich would pay for their designer surgeries, and let that subsidize the rest.

> Once they are in college, the impact of parents is quite minified

What an absolutely ridiculous thought. Literally our entire personality, our study habits, and our grit come from our parents.

> Do rich kids have more scholastic potential because they have better access to resources?

Do kids with involved parents have access to more scholastic potential because their parents cared? Almost certainly, and that's a good thing and we should harvest it, not attempt to force something that is not going to work.

There have been plenty of societies with strong marital bonds where women were not property. Even in England women were not property. That is a tired line that undersells reality. One could equally say men were property since under the law of coverture in england a wife could enter into debts on behalf of their husbands poteentially forcing them into servitude to pay that debt while men could not do the same to their wives.

Youre right you have dodged a bullet in not having to raise another mans child or being in a loveless marriage. However, societally speaking, there is an alternative.. Good enough marriages where men raise their own children.

> though there's no reason a man can't stay home to take care of the kids

Yes there is. Babies spend nine months in their mothers. When they are born they prefer their mothers more. Not out of hatred of their fathers but because that is who they are used to, due to simple facts of biology. More importantly, only mothers can breastfeed. While true that fathers can stay home with older children, there is an obvious advantage to mom staying home with babies, both for mom and baby. Keep in mind the WHO still recommends breastfeeding until age 2. Two years out of the workforce is a lot.

No one marries middle aged men. Well... that's hyperbole. Historically, most men would marry in their 20s. This article says that middle aged men have given up working. Those some men could have been ambitious (or ambitious enough) 20 somethings who -- due to cultural changes -- never quite married and settled down.

That is to say, it is not entirely clear that an apathy problem among old men is the cause of declining marriage rates, given that most people marry well before the age of the men in the article.

Scientists bear a public responsibility. Studies like these are used to justify public policy, opinion pieces, etc. If a civil engineer makes a mistake that impacts the public (say a malfunctioning building structure) that could have been prevented were it not for lack of controls, he or she would be investigated, and potentially be basically blacklisted in their field. If a doctor made a negligent mistake because he was unaware of how to use a tool and a patient injured, he would be held accountable.

In this case, social science analyses are used to answer questions of major public importance. Governments are constantly trying to reduce suicide rates, and make their populaces happier. Papers making claims that religion makes children selfish and unhappy are used to make public policy. In this case, if this paper were used as justification for legislation, we now know that the policies it would tend to suggest would be bad for the population. Someone, somewhere probably ought to be hold accountable in the same way as any other professional. I do hope that journals take appropriate precautions with this researcher in the future, and that the peer reviewers assigned to this case are duly sanctioned. This is a complete failure as professionals.

There are situations in which scientists can and do get things wrong through no fault of their own. For example, during the highly publicized EM drive tests a while back, an initial NASA report indicated that thrust was observed after careful evaluation. This is fine... they reported what they saw. However, after some additional engineering and measurement tuning and stronger sensors, the thrust was attributed to another source, so the claims were retracted. This is science. At every step the scientists demonstrated competence and professionalism. Nowhere did anyone say 'oops we forgot to use the sensor the right way that's why it didn't work, and in the meantime our paper was used to engineer other solutions'. There is a fundamental difference between being wrong and misrepresenting what you saw, whether through mistake or ignorance.

> especially women and couples.

You're making this seem misogynistic, but indeed, typically female monasteries were not (and are still not) open to men.

You're not wrong I was incomplete in my previous statement. Monasteries would often try to render assistance to the exceptionally needy, but have historically operated as regular inns only for those who could stay within the convent walls. This was basically restricted by sex. Even today, if you're going to do a retreat at a monastery, couples typically would have to stay away from the cloister (many monasteries - but not all - offering retreats typically have a separate house for these individuals, a short distance from the main cloister). Only single men would be permitted into a male monastery (behind the cloister for the night) and single women to a female one.

Re the paying stuff. As far as I'm aware (and I've researched a few monasteries in my area and know several monks), the payment is a suggested donation, not a requirement. Of course, that's my own anecdata. I would be interested in knowing if there is a monastery charging for the actual stay, because typically they're not supposed to.

Which us city lacks public transit in the city center?

Not trying to be thick but in all american cities ive lived in, there was sufficient transit in the urban core. I understand arguments that it doesnt extend satisfactorily to the suburbs but your claim is much more specific

I grew up in the burbs and am the exact opposite. After six months in London, I felt incredibly isolated when I returned to the burbs.

Record types are not a solution to the problem lens solves. Lens is a good library and a good concept. If we spent some time on it in programming class, most people would get it. When moving to non-Haskell languages, the lack of proper lenses is something I notice almost immediately.

> It took surgery a century to dig out of that hole, only thanks to the people who were dedicated enough to it.

Surgery wasn't valued because it was mostly a quack science at the time.

Wow. You've independently come up with a stronger version of the uncaused cause argument, one of the many arguments Aquinas gives for the Christian God. Congratulations!

> like matrilineal lines with strong social expectations of uncles participating in childcare, for example -- there's at least one hunter-gatherer example of this I'm forgetting the name of

There is one matrilineal society with a culture that some anthropologists describe in terms you describe -- the Mosou people. However, more recent anthropological data indicates that this too is not the whole truth. While the Mosou are undoubtedly matrilineal, they typically know who the father is and children with involved fathers (rather than just involved uncles) do better. Moreover, Mosou society is not spontaneous. It developed as the result of a lower class being subjugated by a very patrilineal upper class nobility. The lower class was socially engineered to be compliant, while the upper class taxed them. The upper class was eventually disbanded by communist china, and the Mosou are now mistakenly used as an example of a stable matriarchal society. Nevertheless, even this fails to stand to scrutiny as exposure to the patrilineal mainstream Chinese society means most men just leave for greener pastures in mainstream Chinese society. Were it not for gawking tourists to prop up their economy, it's unlikely they'd be around still.

I find myself completely nauseated when exposed to lavender, so I doubt it's anything to do with the chemicals being used.

For my family (since my aversion is familial), I attribute it to the relatively strong sinus reactions my dad's side has. Whenever exposed to certain strong smells, we start making mucus, and then it collects in the sinuses and causes a major pressure headache followed by mucus dripping out.

I'm guessing it's related to allergies? For us, it's nothing to do with modern times, since I have it, my dad has it, his family did, etc.

SF is incredibly diverse despite what you read about. The main issue (if you can even call it that) is that the 'minorities' live in separate enclaves

Your complaint about GNU was that it departed from the UNIX philosophy of one tool doing one thing, and then contrasted that philosophy with what 'real' computer scientists do. Last I checked, there is no 'rule' in computer science that tools must do one thing.

GNU is not Unix, as the name so clearly articulates, so other than your seeming complaint that 'real' computer scientists always write Unix-style utilities, I'm not sure how your criticism of GNU tools doing more than one thing is at all relevant.

FreeBSD was released in 1993, and NetBSD in the same year. BSD as a whole only went from a proprietary distribtuion to open source in that year. GNU was started in 1983, thus making even that criticism of GNU completely unfounded.

I prefer Mac to Windows. This is a subjective thing. Mac and Windows are optimized towards different use cases. Mac is optimized towards WYSIWYG display for desktop publishing. OS X displays fonts exactly as they'd appear on a page. Windows makes adjustments to character positions to align them to the pixel grid. This results in clearer text, but at the expense of things being slightly off as they'd appear in print.

Ultimately, different strokes for different folks. While you're not wrong that Cleartype is empirically better for most people for text content, it is objectively worse, by design, for those for whom positional precision matters.

> This occurs because Apple didn’t dare go near any ClearType patents that Microsoft got for their rendering techniques. For decades OS X remained a very ugly baby, until in 2015 they just gave us courage HiDPI in form of Retina. This was a bid to make all hinting technology obsolete and put everyone else to shame.

Is just wrong. Apple intentionally chooses to display fonts the way they do. This is quite the extraordinary claim -- that a company that is otherwise known for design would not focus on their fonts.

With regard to the freetype font size rendering. You claim that freetype doesn't scale the fonts smoothly, but then you also claim Windows does it correctly. Just FYI, Windows most certainly does not scale fonts linearly. OS X does of course, given its focus on publishing. Windows cleartype actually changes the font size in order to make text readable. If linearity of font scaling is a metric by which you measure font engines, then cleartype is a failure.

In case anyone doesn't believe the claim above, this article (https://damieng.com/blog/2007/06/13/font-rendering-philosoph...) goes into it in depth.

> How'd you get into the management consulting world? Is there a 500k/yr salary just waiting for me if I fake like I'm a Wall St guy from the 80s?

Straight from undergrad. I went to a tech-focused school, majored in math and CS, and did a financial course series as a requirement for a scholarship. That, and I guess I'm a good interviewer / have people skills?

> I can appreciate that you might need a wardrobe with nice suits, a respectable looking car, and a few stories about places you've been and things you've done. It doesn't seem like it would super hard to craft that image without spending a lot of money.

This is not difficult. I wore mostly hand me downs I had tailored. Worked in a big city, so lack of car was not a problem. I also had my fair share of 'stories' (mainly because being student body president at my college exposed me to a world of very rich people).

The difficult part is that you enter in 'classes'. You and thirty other people who just graduated start at the same time, and you are put through the grinder together. There is an expectation you do all your socializing in this group. For me, part of the problem was that I was engaged and planning our wedding, so I had to take time off to do that and not partake. The group would collectively decide to do things every single weekend. If you did not attend, you were ostracized. These were not things like playing board games together or even clubbing (although there was a lot of clubbing). These were things like, 'so and so has a birthday, let's go to Cabo!' or 'let's rent a boat' or 'let's rent a mansion'. These things cost a lot of money, and the company does not pay. However, if you do not invest in maintaining these relationships, you will face issues later on.

The company encourages this by throwing extravagant parties every few months. And I really mean extravagant.

For example, before we accepted the offer, we were all flown out for a weekend filled with free booze, clubs, etc. We were all 'beautiful people' so to speak (although, I personally think I was the ugliest person there). The company provides enough of an exposure to a lifestyle that it whets the appetites of status-seeking 22 year olds, who then seek to accomplish the same 'epicness' on the non-company-sponsored weekends.

> Is there a 500k/yr salary just waiting for me if I fake like I'm a Wall St guy from the 80s?

No. The salary is piss poor. Starting undergrads in 2014 made $75k/year in San Francisco at my firm. The big bucks only roll in after you've been there for many years (and thus have that large debt hanging on your neck).

As my first manager said, "you can wait until you're 30 to have a family and free time." She told me that the week before I quit.

Ding ding ding. In my brief foray in management consulting at a big three firm, both the company (helped by the credit card companies) sought to create a culture of excess. My colleagues were way overleveraged -- vacations weekly in Cancun, etc. This created dependence on the company, and ultimately intelligent workers who had no choice. By the time they made actual money (5-6 years), their expenses would way exceed their incomes. Thankfully, I got out and never really succumbed.

Nonsense. Acceptance of a realistic understanding does not preclude using that understanding to achieve your goals. It is certainly better then designing your policies based off a rejection of reality.

We would consider it. My mother was a public school teacher. I have seen the impossibility of change there and honestly have no desire to support the schools or teacher's unions. They are not set up to produce excellence.

I would consider sending my child to a catholic school, like the one I grew up in. However, most catholic schools these days are not like my elementary school. They lack discipline and are basically public school proxies.

Most non-parochial schools would be out of our price range.

Thus home schooling is the only option left.

> Yes, but what traits society allows men to express while still being considered "proper men" differs depending on culture, and mediates whatever biological imperatives might exist.

Having plasticity in societal expectations does not change the characteristics of 'typical male behavior' in those societies. All it does is require us to further abstract what constitutes 'male behavior'.

Studies on the effects of testosterone mainly show that it encourages men to display behaviors that gain them social status. In a violent society, this would be violence. In a peaceful society, this would be shows of benevolence. Either way, pursuing status-ful behavior is undoubtedly associated with testosterone. Violence, surprisingly, is not associated at all.

[1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/testostero...

> a flaw in society

All societies have flaws. The issue with the word 'toxic masculinity' is that it is ultimately lop-sided. When did you last hear the word 'toxic femininity'. I'd argue that it's more a propos to our day than ever. For example, anti-vaxxers are overwhelmingly women. My wife is about to give birth, and the number of mom's groups that act as if it is a personal failure on behalf of a woman to have a C-Section is astounding. Better yet, they blame men for the very existence of C-sections! Having lost our last baby, the last thing we need is more pressure on my wife. Where is the condemnation of this female 'macho' culture? It's nowhere. Feminists are completely absent on a major issue affecting women. If anything, men are still blamed for all these things, despite men being basically non-existent in the professions surrounding birth. How ridiculous.

> means that masculinity can be toxic

Almost anything can be toxic. The issue is when that label becomes a cultural meme that then gets used in ways it is not intended.

> persons like yourself to mean

Not the OP, but ad hominem attacks are considered poor form.

Finally,

> that masculine culture doesn't allow men to display emotions as openly as women, especially when those emotions betray a sense of physical or emotional vulnerability.

Feminism can sing this tune all day long, but it does not match my experience as a man. Went to an all boys high school too. Lots of male friends, I wouldn't say any of them bottle things up. They've cried on my shoulder. Told me their inner thoughts. I dunno what to tell you, other than that this is just a cultural meme that does nothing to actually help people.