The track record is pretty good, even including a bunch of small markets with few traders:
https://manifold.markets/calibration
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That's the mark of a weak mind.
If only we could shut down all contrary evidence to the expert consensus. That would totally lead to a better world.
The truth is really the opposite. Diversity of opinion, contrary arguments, and unusual new ideas are the engine of progress.
This article, and Substack in general, is a great example of how true progress is made. It could be wrong, maybe even it likely is wrong if it contradicts the consensus, but damn the consensus! This is not a safe space where we only discuss approved ideas! The point of research is to find flaws in the consensus. How is that possible if contrary ideas can never be discussed?
Think like a scientist! And have the decency to allow others to form their own opinion rather than forcing one on them.
Think: What has been gained by censorship versus what has been lost?
You are simply on the wrong side of history if you don't enthusiastically support free discussion, especially for the ideas that are marginalized. The better policy is affirmative action for disfavored ideas.
But a real heterodox environment can foster discussion on real ways the current consensus is lacking.
Like whether reopening schools last Fall was a good idea, as many Republican states did. (I think it was.)
Or whether challenge trials for the vaccines should be allowed. (Could have saved thousands of lives.)
Or discussion of how Covid originated. If you remember, this truly was undiscussable last year.
We should never be so confident that we hush up alternative ideas. We make a better society by seeking out how the status quo can be wrong.
Government only gets bigger over time. Even early 20th century America had a tiny fraction of our budget and regulations today.
This article and the responses show the worst of HN -- bad faith attacks, no attempt to give the benefit of the doubt, no engagement with the underlying vision, unwarranted pessimism.
Why not ask what niche this tech excels in, or what impact a refined version could have? Most projects fail -- that's obvious -- but how might this one succeed?
In short, why so much negativity? The more you default to these views, the likelier it is you and everyone around you will never accomplish anything.
This is the poison that is destroying Hacker News and likewise many startups before they have even been imagined.
I don't know why you are being downvoted, I think HN's flagging system is another way we are being censored.
Just this summer, I remember multiple articles with important, true contributions to our understanding of covid that got flagged.
We are losing the ability to consider multiple sides of an issue.
Funnily enough, it may actually harm the BLM movement. If there is no push back on protesters, they can keep escalating without fearing any consequences.
Ultimately, protests will get so big it will be impossible to censor them into a positive narrative.
In a couple months, say by Nov. 3rd, the protests could be so out of control as to tip the election. You're making your own bed.
In a surprising twist of history, AS3's ideas were rediscovered years later with a language called Typescript that among other things added classes and static typing...
Flash development's language and tools were surprisingly ahead of their time!
Millenials are young and so the appropriate comparison has to be to to other generations when they were the same age.
You can throw out half their graphs based in that point.
The remaining ones are cherry-picked to be misleading.
Growth in the overall economy, while good, does not indicate the absolute level of success. Would you have rather grown up in India where there's been much higher growth in the last few decades?
In general, real wages have only grown over time. Today, we benefit from all the growth of previous generations.
Median household income is not flat, but up steadily every decade. Yes, on the high end, it has grown even more (because a smart person can contribute more than in the past b/c less manual work, information tech).
But what no one says is that wages are up for lower incomes as well.
And, the safety net is bigger: government transfers for unemployment, food stamps, child tax credits, etc are WAY up compared to previous generations. Boomers barely got a dime.
Before the pandemic, the economy was absolutely the best it's ever been by a long shot. Why didn't they show an actual comparison of employment rates? Millennials would be dominating.
Millennials also dominate on education. Our lives are so much richer because we've more likely gone to college and can access so much information from our smart phones.
In the same way that news is mostly all the bad things happening around the world (another shooting, another disaster), journalism and politics is often about all things gone wrong in our society.
Consequently, nearly everything you read and hear about current times is exaggerated in a negative way. (Often for the good purpose of trying to improve it.)
This article is a perfect example.
Try to stay skeptical when everyone is saying our world is regressing to poverty and nastiness.
Because the truth is we have a vibrant and beautiful society that's damn near the best it's ever been. And the future holds even more promise.
-- A young millenial
The environment today is such that both journalists and readers just want to pile on and make their points speaking out against privacy intrusions and the greed of big companies.
No one's bothered to understand the actual proposals of Sidewalk Labs and give them a fair chance.
For example, in contrast to what this article says, Sidewalk Labs would not own and profit from resident's data -- instead they are trying to be as careful as possible and leaving it to an independent organization (https://www.sidewalklabs.com/blog/an-update-on-data-governan...).
Many cool ideas comprise Sidewalk Labs' vision, from the layout of a walkable community to convenient autonomous transport to pushing the leading edge of power conservation, waste management, and other eco-friendly tech.
In the age of dysfunctional cities like San Francisco, I had hope that a project bringing together a broad array of talented experts with real technical competence and letting them envision a model for cities of the future was a winning combination with huge potential for humanity.
Tragically, it has been doomed by the caprice of political fashion.
- Google or YouTube search history helps show me more relevant search results. Ditto for Chrome browser history.
- Google Android's location tracking means I can look back at my timeline and see where I've been on any day. I can see which countries and cities and restaurants I've been to. That's neat, kind of like an automatic diary.
- Facebook keeps track of my likes and interests and shows posts and ads that are more relevant to me. How is that worse than getting generic posts and ads?
The only bad effects I can think of are if Google or Facebook starts leaking all my data, and it being personally identifiable. Luckily, as a profit-seeking company, they have tremendous incentive not to do this (especially with so many privacy obsessed people keeping them honest).
It's popular right now to hate on big US companies, but this project always sounded promising to me, and I really hope they get to finish it. Maybe they would come up with technical innovations that could improve other cities.
I think a better model is that you are not likely to stray too far from your "true" ability, since even if you forgot (or missed) everything from previous years, you could still learn a certain amount in just one year (and probably you remember some things).
If you take the students who performed at the 10th-25th percentile in any school in one year, on average they would do better the next year because of reversion to the mean.
The way to understand it is that the population they chose did so poorly on their test last year, it is likely that they did worse than they usually do. They are more likely to have had an off year.
For example, the NYT article mentions the girl who missed 50 days of school the previous year. It's more likely she won't miss so many days this year. That's reversion to the mean.
IMO, that throws all the results into question, as you would expect them to do better already.
In general, there are no panaceas in education. Any school which is claiming really great results pretty much never holds up. We've had decades of these articles with experts trying to figure out how to achieve better educational outcomes, and very few can be isolated. Even Bill Gates tried for a while.
Anyone who studies this stuff seriously will tell you educational outcomes are mostly based on innate talent.
Is there anyone left who can do a neutral cost-benefit analysis?
From what I've read, it should be welcomed as a miracle that there happens to be a simple, cheap technique that will decrease global temperatures, which has already been tested naturally with volcanoes, has minimal effects other than reflecting sunlight, fades out on its own over time, and can be precisely regulated by the amount of particles injected.
I agree we need to be careful of other effects of deflecting the sunlight, but, come on! The results so far are quite amazing.
It's this human bias against modifying our world (similar to the bias against GMO's or improving IQ by tweaking genes) that has delayed geo-engineering science by decades already. It's finally turning into a real field, and the only mainstream articles are ones that report mostly negative results.
It's surprising that the effects of pre-k turn negative after some years, but I think it's legit science. If there's any bias, it's for researchers to publish the opposite conclusion.