elevatedastalt

I know shitting on FB is de rigueur. But honestly Facebook at its peak was really very useful in many ways that OpenAI hasn't ever been.

No, this is a status symbol because it's a signal that these people are above norms of conventional society.

What's worse is that there's a ready line of journalists talking about how capital letters promote inequality or shit like that providing coverfire for them.

Because people don't care who it is. If it's a Republican candidate, he will be portrayed as devil incarnate.

Mitt Romney was a smart guy who actually had plenty of on-ground experience. But no, deliberately interpreting everything he said in the worst light (anyone remember "Binders full of women"?) was more important.

You are confusing the "productivity" of labor with the market value of the labor.

Sounds like insider trading to me. The backorders your company has are material non-public information.

Dunno why you were downvoted. This is exactly it. Taylor and Musk would be okay if there was just an annual report saying "Taylor's jetsetting caused X tons of CO2 emissions". What is NOT OK is someone effectively able to put a tracker on her movements.

It probably made things worse, but the fact that they reached out to her to use her voice and she explicitly refused would be sufficient ammo I feel. (Not a lawyer of course).

Of course, Twitter continues to bring people with big egos to their own downfall.

Preparation helps for any test, simply because tests have a specific structure, format, expectations for how answers are to be given etc. That doesn't mean that test scores are indicators only of preparation.

Even a native speaker of English might not get a full score on the TOEFL or the IELTS if they are unaware of the format etc. That doesn't mean the TOEFL isn't fundamentally a strong test of the knowledge of English.

Another way of looking at it: Athletes need training and coaching, but that doesn't mean any random guy paired with a coach will become a top athlete.

Yeah, while things are much worse in India or South Korea due to the sheer number of students, the one benefit of entrance examinations is that they are meritocratic and allow everyone to focus on one common goal instead of this whackamole nonsense of activities where no matter how many you do there could be more.

You are free to live in the woods isolated from society. So are my kids, if that is a decision they make of their own volition once they are old enough to make a meaningful decision. Until then it's my job to make sure they are equipped for life to the most of their capability.

We are talking of different things. It's good that high-schoolers can make mobile apps. I am talking of the amount of extra work kids have to put in just to have an edge in their admissions profile.

It's bad if the avg college admission officer expects every high-schooler to have an open source project.

Both can be true. Entrance examinations are at least meritocratic in some sense. On the other hand, these open ended admissions means there's an arms race to the bottom to make your profile look stronger than someone else's, that's why the need to fill it with extra-curriculars and stuff.

Despite people wanting to pretend otherwise, the SAT correlates pretty well with general intelligence.

It is progress, but the progress doesn't come for free, as this article and associated discussion shows.

The progress now means that this is now a default expectation at the high school level, which means more work for high-schoolers to just stay afloat.

It's a coordination problem (prisoners dilemma). It's a winning move only if no one plays (aka everyone hits cooperates). If you are the only one who defects you will be worse off.

Competition is harder, kids are getting a head-start in every activity of life. What would have been an impressive final-year project when I was in university is something high schoolers are churning out as a bare minimum. How do we ready our kids (who are competitive) for this if not by ensuring that they don't miss out any opprtunities?

Note that this is specifically for kids who do show promise.

It's nicely itemized for your convenience.

There will be a charge for the facility itself. There will be a charge for the nurse that initially took you in and triaged you by looking at you and deciding you weren't immediately dying.

Then after sitting there for 4 hours, you might have gotten 10 minutes with a doctor who'd have said something like "You are ok, take a tylenol". This is not any run of the mill doctor, this is an ER doctor, so obviously their charges are in the thousands too.

Whenever this gets brought up someone replies with, "Well, it needs medical training to confirm that you are indeed ok", and I completely agree. And I won't be complaining if the whole visit costed a few hundred dollars. But a few thousand?

$10000 looks like he got off easy given he visited an ER. Some unfortunate ones have to pay close to that amount just for the privilege of sitting in an ER, without getting any meaningful treatment.

Looks like you are giving "Ackshually" technically correct points, when it's clear what others are trying to say. Please engage with what they are trying to convey instead of coming up with technical gotchas.

Every other day we see demos of AIs doing things that were thought of an impossible 6 months earlier, but sure, sounds like it's the "hype merchants" who are out of touch with reality.

It ultimately all happens due to news media. While there are many journalists who work hard to earn the high status that was accorded to the profession in the past, the news industry as it stands today, by and large, exists mostly to foment outrage and spread strife.

If the media stopped writing shrieking news articles about "X brand promoting Y evil", we could all move on collectively as a society.

The problem with pseudo-regulatory agencies like the CPS and the "think of the children" argument is, while they do of course do a lot of good, there is no meaningful way in the system for punishing them for false positives. So it's not a meaningful self-balancing system that reaches a meaningful equilibrium.

They are never punished for the horror stories they cause. There are of course super famous stories such as Mrs Chatterjee Vs Norway, but there are several others that never get talked about in the media but become nightmares for the people involved.

I personally know of a family who moved back to India after their children were taken away from them for some time based on some stupid scare about a bump on the head the child got from colliding with a table while running around the house.

The teacher noticed, shouted abuse, got the cops involved.

Of course not a single person in this self-righteous chain received any punishment or even a rap on the knuckle.

Engineers did not make this advertisement. Marketing and creative departments are dominated by business / liberal arts majors. You are really spouting all over the place.

It's true that they got disrupted, but tech also led to more democratization of the news / arts, which obviously entrenched players are not too fond of.

Also, the same embittered liberal arts majors had no problem telling rust belt coal miners that it was a good thing their livelihoods were being shredded.

If you fail to see that there's a massive culture war element to this, I have nothing more to say.

Wow. So the parent comment made exactly the same stupid generalization in the opposite direction, and it was all ok, but show a mirror to it and suddenly you get upset?

> Is the New York Times especially antagonistic towards the tech industry?

Yes

> Do you seriously believe there exists some us-versus-them division between "liberal arts" and "technologists"?

Not in real life among friends, but it's definitely a culture war flame that was started and is stoked by media.

What's the diff between heritability and inheritability?

Considering the NYT tells us every single day what the average liberal arts pursuit thinks about the average technologist, I won't worry too much about that.

This is very cultural. Eastern cultures, for eg. Indian, Asian etc. place a lot of respect in objects associated with learning or education or creation even if they are just objects.

Indians never touch books with their feet, it's considered very disrespectful to the idea of education / learning, since a book is an embodiment of that. Likewise for musical instruments.

Western cultural prides itself on its irreverence for conventions like these. And everything is viewed from a lens of individual freedom.

No it isn't. Here's it's not an individual that is being claimed to have heritability. It's their 'character', which is a trait, that is being claimed to be heritable.

For eg. if you have dark skinned parents, you are likely to be dark skinned yourself.

So 'skin color' is a trait that is being claimed to have heritability.

Yes, heritability is a population statistic for specific traits. I don't think anyone is arguing that individuals have heritability, just like individuals can't be "diverse".

> Knowing how much a trait varies, or fails to vary, with genes tells you nothing about whether its inherited.

I am not sure what this is trying to convey. Because I think there's clear cases where stuff is inheritable, and clear cases where stuff isn't, and that's a very meaningful distinction to make from a sociological perspective.

For eg. consider skin color and accent. The former is fully inheritable, the latter is completely uninhabitable.

A Scottish kid raised by Africa foster parents in Nigeria will still look like his biological parents and have their skin complexion, while he will sound entirely like how people sound in Nigeria.

One would be an idiot for trying to force him to have darker skin, or to have a Scottish accent, because we understand that one is genetically controlled, and the other is socially / culturally controlled.

Now in these cases it was as absolute as you can get with these things. But can we not imagine that there's an aspect of genetic influence on many other aspects that can also be somewhat affected culturally?

I don't care what we call it, but can we at least agree that this distinction can exist and might be sociologically salient?