gerland

What are we actually measuring though? Wealth is always relative, so we are trying to measure positions between different groups towards each other. If you give each of your kids 5$ and charge them 5 bucks for a pie and then one of them gets a raise of 10$ and the price of the pie raises to 7$ then the wealth of the other child effectively shrank. "Things should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler".

The reason why we cannot get the right balance between freedom of speech and the right to silence the "abusers" is that by trying to do that we are uncovering an inconvenient truth.

It would not be a problem to let the conspiracy theory people or ultra-left, ultra-right people speak freely if an average person would have healthy mechanism to counter the disinformation. Unfortunately those mechanisms were dismantled by the classical media in an conscious effort in the last 7+ decades.

Face it - the average person is taught how he should think not by the educational system, but by the media. Our current predicament is only due to information centers hoarding power that they should never get. Not saying that the educational system is great, I think it's even worse to some degree, but we have given up the control for convenience.

Instead of creating a basis from science, we created a system in which the buzzwords spat out from "journalists" mouths are underlying the whole social discourse.

We cannot get the balance in the "new media" right, because now everybody is granted the power that no one should have in the first place. We are trying to optimize the wrong parameters.

> YouTube's policies reflect mainstream social mores.

The real problem is that YT also influences those social mores. It's a snowballing effect that no one is able to stop. New social trend >> YT starts to promote it >> Becomes social norm >> YT starts to enforce it >> New social trends are able to spawn only from the previous trend.

You might want to keep up this situation as long as it fits your point of view, but you have to take into account that this process will warp this exact point of view in ways that you do not control.

20 years ago the left was synonymous with freedom of choice and individualism, now there are hardly any traces of those values left. Excuse the pun.

If YT always bends to the "popular opinion", then it actually means that it has knee-jerk reactions to the most emotional outbursts. What influences the norm is in reality the base instinct, dopamine fueled, thoughtless reactivity without any plan or purpose.

It does not matter if you will take left or right wing ideology. Platforms like YT are instrumental in making sure that in the end we will get the worst version of it.

How the hell did the left end up in a poistion where they represent the worst mixture of Orwell and Huxley? I have no doubt that it would be near impossible to end at this place without corps capitalising on social moods.

Is modularisation really an answer or is this another case of "A Hundred Authors Against Einstein"? The reason why many people are still driven to Amazon is that dealing with separate entities is just annoying as hell. Small business is definitely less reliable than Amazon and even if client service has been declining, it's still has a predictable baseline. Product search also seems to be working much better in Amazon than in web search engines. If I have to choose between one average retailer and 100 better-and-worse retailers, then I will still use Amazon.

Also - the long tail exists almost exclusively on Amazon.

Does it really matter? It sounds like a philosophical question without any real meaning to me. I can overtake the turtle even though he moves. I can tell that I should not trust this particular man from this point on. It's very easy to lose reputation and very hard to build it.

I mostly agree, but I think there was a bit of a difference in quality up until about 15 years ago.

This was due to the nature of the competition between news outlets. It you have only few suppliers in any domain, then a possibility of a "price war" is relatively small. It's much easier to predict how our counterparts will behave and dumping prices hurts all the participants. It forces the competition to move to different areas - like marketing and quality of service.

Once there were more competitors, due to the internet being a thing, all bets were off. No one could hold to their position just because he was considered more reliable by a marginal degree.

The point is that we often overlook the things that really shape our reality. What every ideological and/or political movement knows is that no one will fight the ideology if it's fed in very small increments. We will simply overlook it as insignificant. If you try to nitpick on small things then you're sure to become the laughing stock. It's the same mechanism, but for once it works in our favor.

I was a bit sad when I saw the initial downvotes, since this account was already 4 times below zero points in total and I don't think there was anything that broke the rules in that comment. I guess I was looking down on NYT, but at this point the collapse of journalism is not an opinion, but a measurable truth. You can just measure it by average salary in the domain. I don't think there are any sources lately that you can trust 100%.

Punishment is always the desired outcome in the journalist world. If something dramatic does not happen, then from the perspective of NY Times nothing has happened at all. There is no story, no people to smear that were the villains, no heroes to glorify that fought for GDPR. The reality is, that the mundane often impacts our lives much more than the exciting. Small incremental changes that we do not notice shape our reality. The same way that NY Times slowly became a parody of itself, the GDPR slowly changes the web. I still think that we need more time to put this into perspecive and we need more initiatives that build on top of GDPR really stands for.

It's a bit like that with every friend that you make. Most people lose contact with firends they made in school. Even family ties seems to be not that strong after all. It's all a matter of context.

That being said, what do you actully expect when spending time with work peers? It's supposed to be just relax after work. If it does not "spark joy" then just don't do it. If it does, then do not expect any other value. Friendship is not about how much you can get from others.

There will always be stupid kids in a world where intelligence levels vary.

In the 80s and 90s some attempts were made to try to escape this reality by changing the question. Multiple-factor intelligence models were proposed and widely accepted by pop-psychology, but most academics acknowledge now that there is some general intelligence level, a "g-factor".

Anecdotal - I always remember my aunt who was a literature teacher. She always stuck to those ideas and told me that it's obvious that there are different types of talents, because there are people that are good at maths, but do a lousy job in her classes. What she did acknowledge once though, was that people that were good at maths were also the ones that have been writing the best essays from all of her students. There was something that underpined their skills in both areas, but since they knew that they can achive something real in maths they probably did not try so hard to "pick the right key" in interpretive literature tasks. On the other hand for those students that were a bit slower literature was the only field that thay could perform well. Good literature students did not have any particular field in maths that they could perform well in. They stuck to literature, because they could memorize all the important answers and boast that they poses some innate talent.

Anecdotal 2 - Sure, there are some kids that could perform in one area better than in the other, but in my experience this variance is overshadowed by the difference between kids that can do ALL things well and kids that can do NO things well.

EDIT: A nice example of the multi-factor intelligence "scam" are the books from D. Goleman in "Emotional Intelligence" series. They were mostly targeted for middle management people and were very in line with the whole trend. The main motive is that emotional intelligence is a much bigger factor than general intelligence in the context of career progression and overall success in life. What was not made obvious is that the comparisons were done in environments of people that were already successful. If you take a group of people that have a high iq level, then it's very possible that the most successful will be the ones that can work with people a little better. Unfortunately it's not sufficient to be a peoples person to achieve high efficiency in such environments. The "hidden" conclusion was: GI + EI > GI; EI < GI; GI + GI < GI + EI (at least to some degree). There were also some unresolved questions - can you really possess EI without a sufficient level of GI? Isn't EI just a form of GI? In summary there was a lot more of nitpicking of definitions than actual science. It all felt like p-value hacking on language level.

I've never seen a bad programmer who starts to produce good code when project begins to fail.

Excusing toxic managers because the project is still rolling does not make sense, since we ignore how much better would it be with someone who can actually do their job.

Unless you're in sales there is no benefit to being the rotten apple.

People are more willing to acuse elites about some nefarious play, than to "believe" in vaccines. Our cranium has been shrinking for the last 10k years for a reason. We eliminated individual level natrual selection to a large degree. Instead, one idiot can bring down a whole population. In some way it all boils down to responsibility and proto-christianity in the form of humanism and progressivism. We are willing to risk the future of our species, just to not have to make hard decisions. It's make believe that the suffering does not exist if I can't see it and that I'm smarter than everybody else, therefore my actions cannot produce negative effects. I'm a part of the problem and so are you.

Central and easter Europe is also lacking in total number of performed tests. You also have to take into account that there were more severe shutdown policies introduced. Since there is significantly less international travel in the east than in the west it was possible to isolate before covid hit with full might. Assessing the R0 depends a lot on the environment and countermeasures used.

A devils advocate summary:

1. he is just changin one stock for another

2. second part of this "donation" is fuelling an openly sexist cause

3. third part goes toward something that is supposed to ease up the populace in the wake of growing wealth inequality, without really solving the issue

Let the downvotes roll in.

https://stronglyagainst.com/ I started writing speculative and opinionated pieces about anything that catches my attention. Also I translate P.Graham, just to pick up the mojo. Not sure how long I will keep this up, but if it's interesting to you, then please give some feedback.

Here is a puzzle for today - should we post links to articles that have significant content, but are behind a paywall? Should we post all links behind paywalls? Should we just say - it's ok, you can steal it by disabling JS? The slider has many positions here. I looked in faq, but could not find anything about it.

Or society can learn that a 12yo has a very poor judgement and treat seriously the thing that actually matters - that most people have no knowledge or common sense with regards to security. If a 12yo can distrupt your corporate meeting, then IMHO the problem is not that underage kids are prone to stupid pranks. This is nothing else than an outlash by people who feel humiliated. Maybe, just maybe, they should feels stupid for a bit.

I'm pretty sure that pretty much all of the people doing that will be using vpns. I mean come on, vpns are one of the most known services on the internet. In the wake of shadowbaning, global silencing by social networks and being penalized on the basis of anything that deviates at least a bit from the norm, anybody who wants to speak like a normal person on the internet has to use a vpn. You can bet that whoever goes way beyond what is considered normal on Zoom will be using a vpn.

Which makes a great point about how big Canada is compared to the US. We seem to misuse the term "America" to point only to one part of one of the Americas. Maybe it would be actually less confusing if we would refer to North America as the Canada continent? It would reduce the name conflicts by half and we would use as proxy the biggest country on the continent. There would also be the additional benefit of people not refering to Texas as "South America".

I was switching between gaming PC and console for the last 15 years and to be honest I had much more trouble with PC games. Just after I buy a PC everything runs very smoothly, but the performance declines very fast with new games. It's always an internal struggle between "I want it to look better" and "I cannot play on this framerate anymore". Console games for the most part run on the same level. It's not great, but in this case I'm grateful that someone took the choice from me. Obviously there are games that are just slower than the average, but everyone knows very fast about them. I would not buy a 3/10 game and I would not buy a game that has performance problems. With PC it's always a bit of a gambit.

"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents.

Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something."

It specifically says to make critical comments and to avoid only unrelated controversy.

That's exactly my point. Why would someone downvote because he finds an opinion controversial? Offensive, unrelevant, I can understand. Unpopular, controversial? That's pretty much how echo chambers are made. Is omeone wants to hear the same opinion fot the rest of his life, then he can write it in google calendar and send it as notification every day. No point in going in a public space and trolling.

Are we more of a "X is shit" crowd then? You cannot evaluate the health system based on the information management system itself. I would argue that you cannot evaluate HS on anything more than your anecdotal evidence. If you have a reliable model for HS then you pretty much have a model for the whole economy, since it's just so much intertwined. Last time I checked physics envy was still a thing. Deriving a functional model of HS from statistical data is a pipe dream since so much is based here on behaviour. I know that we have gone far with predicting behavours, but I would say that we are still not far enough. Also, I don't have any data to support it and I don't care.

IMHO the state of the restaurant industry is - why does it still exist? I would have expected it to move to a service oriented model a long time ago. Taking into account how underpaid are the workers comapred to how overpriced they usually are it's nothing short of a miracle. I guess there are SOME restaurants that are necessay, but there is a few of them on almost every street near the place I live in.

It's also funny that people are ready to downvote anything they do not agree with. Let me explain to you how it works - the downvote button is a tool that should serve to mark comments that are unnecessarily inflamatory or provide no value on their own. This is not a toy for you to remove opinions that you do not agree with. For this unique situation in which the whole world somehow does not agree with you, please use the hidden "reply" functionality. I know it's hard to imagine that something that you FEEL is wrong might be true, but it's just such a cruel cruel world that we live in.

Belive me - it's not. There are not that many countries that have better health systems. I'm not saying yours is good, but the majority of them suck. If you look at the countries that have "better" systems, then try looking holistically. All of them are pretty much in a state of constant stagnation. They just suck up technological advancements from the US and most of theri effort goes to keeping those oveblown social utopias. In the mean time they still have to rely on cheap labor from overboard, often times completely uninsured.

No it's not. You just FEEL different about this.

That may be true, but a lot of legit business was based around and on LB. A lot of good, honest people that would go down with it. How many of the people involved were really reaping the benefits and making the shots? We are in a similar scenario now. A few people made the wrong calls and did nothing to contain the disease. A lot of people will suffer. Why should we care this time?

That's some nice insight. Actually, I'm the author :) Would you mind if I cite the whole thing in the post section of the article?

A fragment of email that was sent to CERN emploees: We have therefore decided to remove the slides from Indico, in line with our Code of Conduct that does not tolerate personal attacks and insults. Diversity is a strong reality at CERN, and is also one of the core values underpinning our Code of Conduct. The Organization is fully committed to promoting diversity and equality at all levels.