Most people outside of SF have never heard of Y Combinator
82 karma · joined November 11, 2024
The solution is to land on what you want your audience to do in the affirmative. For the pink elephant you can say, “Don’t think of a pink elephant: put your mental energy into imagining Mikey mouse riding a surf board.”
Similarly, here we can say something like “If you’re feeling suicidal, do x.” I’m not sure what x should be. Maybe call a hotline. I would have to think more about it, but the point is that landing on an affirmative action in this manner will offset the “pink elephant” effect.
It’s possible aphantasia is something like deafness but there is no way anyone knows for sure either way.
People who think aphantasia is definitely similar to deafness probably are falling into the “efficient market hypothesis” trap. People assume scientific-sounding or clinical terms accepted by official sources are scientific. In reality, these official sounding (and even officially endorsed) terms materialize through domain-consensus which is different than the scientific process.
Domain-consensus allows for “magic words” that can’t be broken down into parts the same way something like deafness can be broken down into the material biological mechanisms that causes them. Psychology is a mind-field of these magic words because we have not yet unlocked mechanistic interpretability of the brain (the same way we are now trying for computer neural networks), and rather than breaking down categories of diagnoses into the behaviorisms we can observe (which many practitioners have had real-world success with), the academic and professional field has a culture of deferring to magic words/mechanisms that we can’t observe.
Regardless, nobody can know if aphantasia is a skill issue or immutable. My instinct is that most people probably blame having aphantasia when they don’t have it the same way people say they were born “not good at math.” However, it’s possible (although not necessarily true) a small portion of the population actually has it. There is no way to know for sure unless we understand the brain mechanistically which may be never.
What do I mean by a counterweight? For example, the MLB owners hold a monopsony over hiring pro baseball athletes, but the athletes have their own monopoly via the MLBPA. The result of this bilateral monopoly is that MLB players get better compensated than most other pro athletes. Of course the MLB is private, but I’m illustrating one type of counterweight.
You can have a similar system for public prisons requiring public unions, and Norway found a creative counterweight. Norway unionizes the prison correctional officers, but they also allow incarcerated people the right to organize; this allows them to negotiate wages, safety, and education programs. This provides a nice counterweight as prisoners have an incentive to advocate against correctional officer bloat/waste so those resources go to inmates, while correctional officers have a symmetric interest to keep prisoner bloat at bay. This is because they are ultimately competing for the same (finite) state budget.
Accordingly, giving prisoners more rights to advocate for themselves solves many problems of having a public union, while ensuring that budgets stay capped and tight. Conversely, the private sector tends to lobby aggressively to suppress prisoners' rights to maximize shareholder value, which permanently destroys this counterweight mechanism.
Premised on this counterweight system working, public prisons may not be sufficient to keep prisons humane, but they are likely necessary part of the solution.
But even by your unconventional definition, Norwegians have it easy compared to US citizens.
The US demands those renouncing their citizenship to “sell” (a deemed sale) their assets and pay capital gains. If you move abroad without renouncing your citizenship, you still have to pay income tax.
Trust but verify
However, Catcher in the Rye is banned not primarily for these nuanced misreadings, but instead primarily for its profanity. Meaning if we stripped the profanity out, this dangerous book would likely never have been banned in the first place. When you allow these bureaucratic institutions to ban books, they are not going to Socraticly reason through what should and should not be banned in a rigorous manner. They are going to ban books that vibe against their “sensibilities”.
Given that we do not have philosopher kings making these ban decisions, the least bad option is to not have any ban. Encourage kids to read broadly and get many different perspectives. More importantly, teach them to act as a scouts who should be proud/excited when they find a new opinion other than their own — and even more excited to find an opinion better than their own to adopt — rather than a warrior who is proud that their previous opinion was “right the whole time”. Sometimes your old opinion was proven right by new information, but that should not make you excited/proud. I’m confident that if all children are taught this scout-mindset that solving the intractable problem of banning books “correctly” would be completely unnecessary. Matter of fact, having children build immunity to bad ideas through learning how to be a “good scout” would be strictly better than making little bubble-boys who are safe from bad ideas only because the thin bubble the “philosopher kings” set up for them. The latter bubble makes children’s immune system unprepared for the real world while the scout mindset helps build hyper-capable, curious, and civically engaged adults.
I find most people will usually hyper optimize things like buying supplements and wrist trackers that have little p-size effects before optimizing things like muscle mass and macros/calories that the scientific literature actually says have sizable effect sizes.
Books it’s very obvious when it’s deteriorating or molding, hard drives and such are not to a laymen.
Have you considered for example if ball bearings wheels? Are gears and sprockets just notched wheels? Do cabinet doors count as doors? Do windows count as doors? Do microchip logic gates count as doors? What about pet flaps? Heart valves? Etc etc.. One’s definition of wheel/door can not account for these and countless other grey areas while still being useful.
Maybe one can strain oneself to find a definition that works like how people strain themselves to find a definition of sandwich that includes hoagies but disclude hotdogs, or one can just work backwards from one’s crude definitions and misclassify many objects.
Regardless, there is no right answer if there are more doors or more wheels. The question is too vague. Something that may be possible to answer is a more qualified question like “are there more human-sized doors or wheels for human transportation.” But again now the question is not our original question. And even if we were satisfied with just answering this more qualified question, we would have trouble answering it without a lot of money or making bad assumptions like the distributions of doors/wheels in a given house is uniform across all cities/towns/suburbs/houses etc..
Respectively, anyone who claims to know if the US or Europe is more diverse is making as fallacious of an argument as someone saying that they know if there exists more doors or wheels in the world. In both examples, they likely over-qualify their definitions. If they somehow aren’t overqualifying their definitions, they certainly do not have the necessary data to back up their claims.
Even on this AC issue where I would admit that there is less national variance compared to the EU. Yet still, about 90% of the US has AC but there are places like San Francisco where only 50% of buildings have AC. In Berkeley California only 20% of buildings have AC.
Again, on this AC issue I admit has less variance than Europe has, but that builds my point if anything. On other issues Americans can have much more variance than your premise implies. Have you considered the life of an Utah Mormon (who may use food rations in lieu of kitchen furniture) is drastically different than a kid growing up in the Bronx (who may have grew up playing on public outdoor courts and have radical independence since middle school because of the MTA)? Have you compared a rural Appalachian’s lifestyle and culture to that of a SF big tech worker? North New Jersey full of suburban white-collar workers who would have trouble understanding southern New Jersey full of farms who have annual festivities where they compare tractors and catch greased-pigs. I find that even “coastal elites” from SF and NYC — people groups who should be most ideologically/socially aligned due to their shared economic statuses, ability to travel, and many points of cross contamination/communication — don’t fully understand eachother’s drastic ideological and lifestyle philosophical differences very well. Moreover, within just one borough of one city there can be drastic diversity in between its townships: NYC Queens having much more diverse townships than any particular borough in Europe.
Europeans who rely of the premise that America is not diverse I find to be just as dumb as the average American.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48661506
From this limited sample, I’d imagine there was a groups of advocates arguing for anti-AC policies, but that this is now shifting with as climate change develops.
Questionable (albeit maybe defensible) degrowth policies are not unheard of in the EU. Most famously is Germany’s move away from nuclear which forced their dependence on Russian natural gas. So there is probably truth that people used to be somewhat anti-AC. But, I’d share your skepticism if there are large groups of people who still believe in anti-AC policies. The article I share would suggest many of these people have updated their priors.
Also most crypto companies are not good for laundering since the blockchains record that fraud forever and publicly. I could see some specific protocols where that may not be true — like monero or tornado cash — but these projects are not really startups. Most crypto startups pitch their products for enterprise customers and thus would be horrible for laundering money.
I like when people are open minded to people who are closed minded/attacking them. It’s an admirable and difficult trait to attain. But to expect that from others is foolish. Most people can’t stay objective/curious after being punched in the face.
Regardless, the “misinterpretation” of the parent comment is actually a plausible interpretation. I suspend my judgement on what the actual “correct” interpretation of the original comment is: there are too many plausible interpretations to deductively decide. But I do know that since they first comment brought up a contentious issue, they should have put more work into crafting their message so there aren’t so many plausible interpretations that are contradictory. Or alternatively, they should have specified more precisely who they were talking about without a shadow of a doubt. That is if the commenter cared to be properly interpreted, but that may not be their goal. There are many reasonable reasons why that wouldn’t be their goal.
To make the point further, the article states France’s right wing party advocated for installing air conditioning in schools and hospitals. Again, if a US politician did such a thing, they would be considered a Stalinist communist.
The article shows how US’s Overton window is completely disjoint from France’s. I don’t want to make a false equivalence between these two countries as I think France’s two extremes in this article both seem reasonable and the US’s right wing extreme of “we are going to cancel wind mill construction because they’re ugly” is not.
The appellate court ultimately decided that a ticket is a “revocable license” and that while MSG needs to be “open to the public,” they don’t need to provide unrestricted access. Essentially, since night clubs can disallow/allow entrance based on arbitrary (non-protected) reasons — such as dress code, status, celebrity etc — yet night clubs have precedent of being allowed to keep their liquor licenses, using similar reasoning MSG’s bans are permissible. This decision seems reasonable to me; however, I hope the NYC political apparatus does political maneuvering to make MSG implement less Orwellian policies. I do not hold my breath but have residues of hope.
Hard pivot and a hot take in the US of A, but since MSG is arguably a natural monopoly, it would be reasonable for NYC to “nationalize” MSG. NYC already has the expertise managing large and multifaceted infrastructure. The operation’s surplus value going back to NYC residents rather than unlikeable (and rent-seeking) James Dolan seems a politically defensible and attention-grabby position: the latter of which is increasingly important in our low-attention-span world. Lastly, James Dolan could be portrayed as a security threat to NYC constituents due to this facial recognition software: Americans and American economists tend to be more willing to nationalize things for the sake of national security.
I look forward to seeing myself on MSG’s next leaked ministry of truth list (;
Regardless, in any of these cases, the implementation for any of these above options may be vastly superior to the “naive” implementation for agents — but then the parent comment here is right that an engineer would need to justify their implementation to users, not just make a loud conjecture. It’s a non-trivial claim to say that a bespoke solution not present in tool-use training and accounting for context-rot would result in a better performing model. Moreover, justifying an agent-specific efficiency gain that humans wouldn’t benefit from makes the claim even more non-trivial. Using Sagan’s razor, it’s then reasonable for people to ask for a comparably non-trivial amount of evidence.
In such models where individuals in a market system can influence public/private institutions for their own interest (news organizations, private think tanks, lobbyists, public/private colleges, corporations, charities, nonprofits etc etc) will be able to reroute those institutional resources to gaming elections — which is unavoidable result over the market’s long run, similar to it being impossible to defend one’s currency against speculators over the long run — thus selection pressures force politicians and political institutions to either cater to these wealthy people’s whims and the institutions they control, or to somehow (and very unlikely) bare the selection pressures that are pushing them out of office.
Given the law of large numbers, you’d presume at any point the average legislator would be captured more by these maladaptive selection pressures rather than somehow existing in spite of them.
As democracy is eaten away, we will maintain a slow decay to a Russia-like sultan oligarchic system and the comforts the majority currently maintain will slowly go with them.
Even if I give into your premise — which I don’t — marginal price would differ for different careers, such as doctors who had to take on more education costs and opportunity cost and thus have a higher marginal price above bare sustenance.
Congratulations for using a heuristic that resulted in 9/11! Osama’s rationalization at least had a more accurate premise that the American people continued to be able to vote — unlike in Palestine. So congrats on having either a worse moral compass or worse reasoning skills than Bin Laden!